Remember Me (9 page)

With each page he read, for he was reading court memoirs, he saw more clearly that Sophie had taken him in, not because she wished to do so, but because she was a woman of a certain time and place. The woman he would never trust. There remained that figment of his own desires, the Queen. Actors must be chosen to match their parts. He made a note to order Baron von Lütz, chief of the Royal Cabinet, to bring him the crown.

The next day, with Merk, the court jeweller, he went with it to his uncle’s house, so Sophie might try it on. It was still another way his subconscious had discovered in which to abolish her.

But outwardly he thought that if he could not have the reality, at least he might have the semblance of a queen. For his purposes that might well be enough. Reality was not so important a matter, nor experience, that he should be greedy and want all of it.

When they were ushered in, she was waiting. He was even pleased to see that she was capable of showing awe.

The box containing the crown was placed upon a table in the centre of the room. It lay in a blue leather box with
rounded corners. They all stared at the lid for a moment. There before them lay all that is holy in the nature of a queen. Even he had seen the female diadem only once. Merk stepped forward and raised the lid of the box, but Ludwig waved him away. The jewels with which it was encrusted twinkled slowly in the light, as though only half awake. They were full of dragon fire.

It looked more alive than she did. He snatched it up and placed it on her head. Despite his gesture, it settled reverently. There was a full-length mirror in the room, and he caught sight of her in it, before he had the courage to look at her directly. He burst out laughing. He could not help it.

For the crown had settled down on her like a snuffer over a candle. It completely obliterated her. She had not even the appearance of a queen. Whether from relief or from the chagrined look on her face he did not know. But laugh he did.

She half turned, saying nothing, and stared at him. She only stared, but it stopped his laughter instantly. He had never seen anyone look at him like that, except once or twice her sister Sisi. Incredibly, it was almost as though she felt sorry for him. He stood there.

Then she bit her lip and burst into tears. He strode out of the room, leaving Merk to gather up the crown. It was absurd to say he did not love her. It was not quite that. But she would not do as Queen. What would she do as? Something must still be salvageable.

There was only the visit to Wagner. Wagner was in Munich for a day or two. And Wagner had almost promised to come to Berg this May of the marriage.

The visit to Wagner was not a success.

The marriage came closer and closer. He began to feel that if his life was empty, then he might as well immolate
himself with Sophie as with anyone else. Whether he really believed that to be true is another matter. But he had some comfort. Since the fitting of the crown, she had drawn a little away from him. Since the meeting with
Wagner
, she had drawn farther away yet. He had a reprieve.

But it was a reprieve with certain intimations of his coming execution. One day he held the ceremonial of the wedding before him, on an engraved card fresh from the printers’. It left him alone not one moment of the day, but on the other hand it did not leave him alone with Sophie, either. The ceremonies ran from ten-thirty in the morning until ten at night, but he and Sophie were to be allowed to rest between three and six. It would be a rest in the same room, and he did not wish that they should ever be alone together in the same room. If their life together were to be a performance, then it must exist only in public. It is the knowledge that even an uncut
King
Lear
can last only three hours which makes that play endurable. The greater the tragedy, the shorter the play, as in Sophocles. Even a comedy is funniest between the acts. He was willing to go on with the performance. The rest of it he could not face.

He had retired once more to Berg. Each morning he would leave the
schloss
in the bright, cold sun, step aboard the yacht
Tristan
, and stand at the prow, facing towards Irlonde, with a bouquet of roses, while the waters parted towards Possenhofen. It was a Wagnerian voyage. The
Tristan
was a sleek, smooth boat with a sharp, pointed prow, slung low in the water. The boat must never dock, for he refused to meet Sophie at the other end of the voyage. It was Isolde he sought. The
destination
of our voyages should be more noble than reality, as in Böcklin’s painting.

There were so many islands of the dead, who govern
every haven of every archipelago, but with a rule so gentle that the governed still imagine they are free.

He had once read a story in which a doctor was
summoned
late at night. He went reluctantly, driving for miles in a carriage, until at last he reached a hooded castle. It was a night of storm. Torchbearers escorted him to his patient, whom he treated, but who died.
Downstairs
he told the waiting son the news, but the son only smiled and rewarded him liberally, for the man who died had been Death, and the son was now at last Death in his stead. Death was not a presence, but a dynasty, and the son was overjoyed to have attained to his inheritance. There were so many things, now, that he could do.

On rainy nights Ludwig drove to Possenhofen in a rumbling coach. Possenhofen was like that hooded castle in the story. The rain fell like tears. Footmen swarmed out of the deserted
schloss
,
carrying torches. Sophie and Aunt Ludovica, hastily dressed, came down the main stairs. They were a dynasty. It was wonderful theatre. Sardonically he acted out his part. He never noticed in their eyes how lamentable his performance was.

And late at night, from Berg, alone, he could see the lights of Death glimmering across the water, furtive through the trees. The story must be dramatized. He would commission the play.

Aunt Ludovica would not let him be private anywhere but when he hid at Berg. She, too, liked the glare of publicity. There could never be enough footmen in livery or enough lights to please her. He could not go on in this porcelain world much longer. It was too brittle and too mundane. He was bigger than this.

Why did they like him only when he pretended to be smaller?

Meanwhile, Sophie’s parents were insisting that the
date of the wedding be fixed. No matter how often he is reprieved, the condemned man will at last hear the
footfall
of the executioner coming down the corridor with the priest. As the time of his execution comes closer, he seems to hear those footfalls every night. At least the wedding must be put off until after May. Perhaps in the magic month of May something would happen to release him from it. He must have one more May alone. He returned to Munich, and with difficulty persuaded the relatives to postpone the wedding until August. It was a little more time.

It was one in the morning. He had not been in the wintergarden for some time. He had not been able to bring himself to go there, for it was a world which did not belong to the world he was forcing himself to live in from now on.

He slipped out the door to his apartments and stood on the cold parquet of the Residenz. There would be more women in the palace now, and even up here on the top floor it seemed to him that he could hear the echo of their laughter. Sophie, no doubt, would teach them to laugh at him. If she did not, her mother would. The halls would smell differently, too, with the sly and restless smell of women. For he knew now there would be a scandal and no heir. Apart from the horror of that much intimacy to beget one, if it were born, then it would come to be King in his stead, and so he would begin to die.

He had not remembered that story for nothing.

The palace was freezing. He moved quickly to the head of the stairs and started down. In the pale light the arches of the stair-well opened out like sullen, muffled arches in Piranesi’s
Carcere,
those prisons where nobody stirs, but everybody dies in torment or has just died so. Soon he would be a prisoner for good, stifled under these
arcades. He moved on. He could not rest. He could not sleep. He moved slowly, for the shadows were tangled underfoot and made his way difficult.

He went down towards the Reich Zimmer. Some of the double doors had only one wing open, some were all the way open, like the entrances to steel traps. Some were closed like the doors of private tombs. The moonlight caught ormulu and gilt, and blue and white paint, but indoors the night was colourless.

He passed into the state apartments. Once he was
married
he would be cooped up. They would take away his privacy, and he would exist only in these rooms. They were like the run of a dog who lives in a kennel and is never allowed in the house. He paused at the doorway and looked down the vast throne room. It seemed to him to be lined on either side with the empty, smiling,
merciless
faces of gratified courtiers, making a lane for him down which he could walk only one way: to the throne to dispense them favours. Once he had entered the dance would begin and it would never stop. Even when the crowds applauded, they liked him only for what he might give them. And no doubt Sophie, or any other friend he had ever had, was much the same. Wagner was a great man, but great men take only what they need for
themselves
, and Wagner needed only money. For the affection Ludwig wanted to give him he cared nothing. Nor did women like anybody. Women liked only things. They liked people only insofar as people embodied things or were in themselves things of value. He was a thing of value. He was a king without a queen. It did not seem to him of much value now.

Men always lost the battle between the sexes, because they saw it as a battle. They therefore gave their surplus energy to it, but no more. To them it was only a pleasant
offensive game. But women saw the matter far differently. For them it was not a game, but a struggle for survival. So they dared not lose, and terror made them cunning. They must make a better marriage than other women, or lose all self-respect. Sophie would never let him go.

Again he looked down the throne room, with its ghostly, shimmering parquet that shut out the soil beneath. He then climbed the stairs back to his own rooms. If he
married
, this was the circuit he would describe for the rest of his life. It was too narrow. He sat in a chair and fell asleep.

Meanwhile he expected Wagner. Wagner, he hoped, would smooth out everything and make life worthwhile again. He went to await Wagner at Berg. He did not want Sophie to sit beside him forever, waving a gloved hand at an applauding crowd that did not applaud for him.

He had thought it would be easy to be a social king and so to placate everyone and keep his mind free. Marriage had seemed an amusing, slightly contemptuous game. He had not realized that for her it might be easier still, for for her marriage was not a game, but the whole
meaning
of her existence. Vehemence frightened him. So did cunning. She would see to it that the applause would be for her, and not for him. She would take even that away from him. She would let it be known she was neglected, so that others would feel pity for her, for pity was a reflector women used to deflect the affection felt for others to themselves.

He looked across the lake in the gathering shadows, waiting for some impossible Lohengrin, but no swan appeared. They were late in returning this year. No swan, he knew, would ever come; for dimly he perceived that Wagner had tricked him. Wagner would never live by this lake again. The great Bechstein he had ordered to ease the Master’s labours was not sufficient bait. It would
stand silent forever, and it would mock. They would never write masterpieces together, he realized that now. Wagner was at Triebschen. As he wrote, no doubt Cosima leaned over him protectively. Wagner had been taken away from him.

Nor did Ludwig have any escape from Sophie. Perhaps it did not greatly matter. There are more ways of dying than by death, and living inside a marriage might be one of them. He looked out the window at the glitteringly silent mountains, which in the moonlight, as though aware that they were being stared at, seemed afraid to move. When he came here in the future, it would be like visiting his own grave, where she had killed him. He did not want to see her smile the quiet smile of domestic victory.

For the women had triumphed. Wagner had written to say he could not come. Cosima wrote to say that
perhaps
the Master would, but Ludwig saw through that promise easily. They were afraid of his anger, for the sake of their purses, but contemptuous of his belief, for the sake of their pride. To realize such things always made him sad.

And suddenly it was already May, and halfway through May; the Master had failed him, and marriage was not so very far away. He hated to watch the doors of freedom slowly closing in his face, for they faced on a world of which he had had nothing but a glimpse.

There was no sleep for him on the night he received Wagner’s letter. There would be no sleep for him any night from now on. He slept only as Venus, the morning star, began to sound in the green sky like a sonorous and distant chord, until the dawn shimmered with
sympathetic
sound. He did not hear it. He had no means of knowing, for he was at last unconscious, the exact
approach
of a never-to-be-forgotten day.

T
hat mid-May of 1867 he woke to sheets as tousled as the bedding of some Baroque saint, which felt filthy in the same way, as though soiled by some dream of ecstasy. He had abandoned all hope for May.

To be hopeless is to suffer a species of spiritual
claustrophobia
. He could bear the indoor world no longer, for it seemed to close down on him even at Berg. He ordered his carriage and then began to dress. For once he did not even feel the texture of the day, except to know it was one of the few left to him before his marriage closed on him like the door to a crypt.

After breakfast he went outside to wait for the familiar cavalcade attendant on his solitary rides.

The scene was brilliant, as was the light. First came the led horse. The groom handled it as Bellerophon would have handled Pegasus. Such grace was unusual and caught his eye at once. There were few people who understood the rhetoric of gesture, this young man did, and he was new to him. Behind came the carriage, in the care of two Royal footmen in blue and silver livery, their legs moving smoothly under tight white buckskins and flowing into short black riding boots.

The groom leading the horse was dressed differently. He wore a blue Eton jacket that rode across his enormous
chest, as he strained for the bit of the horse. The scene entered Ludwig’s mind in colour, and he saw at once that it was one of those views which for no apparent reason enter the mind complete, because they are symbolic of some spiritual condition, if only we can discover which. With a quick look at the groom, he stepped into the
carriage
, the groom stood back, and the carriage whirled away before anything else could happen.

Deliriously restless, Ludwig sat back in the carriage as it bounced through the woods and watched the back of the footman who was driving. He should have had the new groom drive. He watched the rump of the horse and scarcely saw the woods at all. The carriage turned
automatically
towards Possenhofen. He leaned forward and tapped the footman on the shoulder. He would not go there to-day. He needed to think. They headed instead farther into the dark green woods.

Why had he thought of Bellerophon? He remembered the story quite well. Bellerophon meant “slayer of
monsters
”. He was the son of Glaucus, King of Ephyre. Like Welsh saints, Greek heroes were always the sons of kings, and it was that that gave them a nobility of
bearing
. If this groom were truly Bellerophon, he would in his lifetime do certain things. It had not occurred to Ludwig that salvation would come from the Greek, for Wagner had so subtly distorted German legend, that women could survive in it.

Bellerophon was handsome. So was the groom. The King’s wife, Sthenoboea, fell in love with him, but he slighted her. Thereupon she denounced him to her
husband
, who sent him away with a letter stating that the carrier was to be murdered by the recipient. Therefore all letters of an unfavourable tendency were still referred to as the letters of Bellerophon. The King who received
the letter could not kill his guest. He could at most obediently cause his death. He sent Bellerophon to kill the Chimera. But Bellerophon, protected by Minerva, did kill the beast. Bellerophon conquered all those against whom he was sent, including the Amazons.

Ludwig sat abruptly forward in the carriage, which swayed and rattled on the road. Then, aware of the
footman
standing on the box behind him, he relaxed and gazed at the sky. Innocence was protected by the gods. That was what Bellerophon had proved to Iobates, King of Lycia, his host. The King, being without male issue, married Bellerophon to one of his daughters.

Who would the daughter be? Ludwig did not know. The name of Bellerophon’s wife was either Philonoë or Achemone. According to legend, Bellerophon attempted to reach the sun on Pegasus, but Jupiter cast him down, so that for the rest of his days he wandered the earth in greatest melancholy and dejection.

Ludwig opened his eyes. He felt oddly indecisive. He leaned forward and tapped the coachman once again. The carriage turned back towards Berg.

But when it swirled into the dusty drive, there was no sign of the coachman. The yard was deserted. Ludwig
descended
and went inside. All that afternoon he sat at the window of his study, watching the surface of the lake
wrinkled
with the little unborn waves, like the skin of a baby.

A servant knocked at the door. Wagner had
unexpectedly
arrived for lunch. Ludwig got up wearily and went downstairs to the Master, who still had about his clothes that tired and dusty smell which seemed to surround him like a personal signature. For the first time Ludwig
entered
the room to meet him with confidence. It did not matter what happened now, but there were some things he had to know.

It always infuriated him that the Wagner he saw before him was never the Wagner he wanted to know. The man’s table manners were far from perfect. That Wagner he wanted to know was as permanently invisible as the far side of the moon, as though Wagner were careful to circle around him in such a way as only to expose the one bland and familiar-featured face, but never his real one.

They sat in the dining-room, at a large circular table which was much too low. On the wall hung a painting by Schwind depicting Elsa saying farewell to Lohengrin. Out of the background Ortrud peered malevolently, and the water which supported the swan boat was too
shallow
. It could not be more than three inches deep. The detail fascinated Ludwig. He had not noticed it before. Ortrud looked remarkably like Aunt Ludovica.

As they reached the cheese, it occurred to him that it was not Cosima who shut him from the Master, but Wagner himself. He saw the one inviolable rule of the artist, that no one must ever be allowed into a
masterpiece
before it is finished, for if a stranger saw how it was made, it would be destroyed. If the larva is not alone in its cocoon, it will never emerge as a butterfly. It is
mortally
afraid of the parasite that will eat it while it grows. It was not a masterpiece he wanted from Wagner, but the secret of producing one. And that even Wagner did not know, for the process was instinctual.

He frowned, seeing that Wagner was being
patronizing
only because Wagner was afraid. What was the man afraid of? He watched as the Master slowly sliced his cheese and judiciously placed it upon a wafer. In the act he saw what Wagner was afraid of. Genius is operative only when trapped in a body, and if the body starves, then genius has no way to express itself. Wagner was afraid to lose his patronage. It showed now in the easy
way he contemplated his cheese. And yet the cheese itself was only a not very good Brie.

Wagner was not a man. Wagner was only a means, the miserable gross incarnation of his own spiritual talents. Let Cosima have him, then. She would never have him any more than Ludwig had. Together, from now on, their only service would be to be keepers of the flame. He did not need Wagner the man any more. That seemed to him to be the truth. But it also seemed to him that the truth was only a pack of lies, a universal process designed to level belief. He felt better, as do epileptics after a seizure. An intolerable tension had exploded and then ebbed away, all in the sight of a man eating a piece of Brie.

Suddenly a patch of sunlight came flooding across the room, and the sun was warm. He wanted Wagner to go. He wanted to be alone. He looked at the tablecloth, for the meal was as finished as that of Cana, in the room
upstairs
. He was now securely seated, like a man on a horse, in the saddle of another mythology. The valkyries whirled up around him, like dust caught in the rays of the sun, threw away their armour, changed their sex, and became Greek. The face that bobbed before him took on features, and the Medusa that usually haunted him
disappeared
. He was no longer stone. He went with Wagner to the door. It was the first time he had not felt
overwhelming
loss as the Great Friend drove away. The absence of that familiar emotion bothered him. Wagner was only his works. Nothing else of him remained. He would go on giving him money. Even the larva must spin its cocoon out of something. And butterflies and
masterpieces
are not only beautiful, but they also do not eat. We love them because they cannot hurt us or use us in any way.

He was waiting for something. He waited until late that
evening, still surprised that now Wagner left no sense of intolerable emptiness behind him. Actually he was
waiting
for the night. He had not much courage of his own. He could not perform any voluntary act, unless he first had the assistance of darkness.

At night it was as though he stepped through a door at the end of the hall and found himself standing, not on the same carpet, but free once more in space, with the stars beneath him and no one to hold him down.

He went for a walk down by the borders of the lake. The stars began to shine around him like a system of metaphysics which, as the night darkened, became more and more clear. They fixed in vast nets of meaning. He looked for Pegasus and found it, galloping timelessly across the sky. Only animals were honest and faithful, and above all animals, the horse. Securely seated, he could ride to his own salvation, up and up, in the smell of living leather, which was like the smell of flames. It was the special gesture of the groom this morning that had taught him that.

He felt as though he were filling in time, in order neither to be too early nor too late for an appointment. He had a sense of destination once again. He wandered a little way into the wood along the shore. As on that previous May, it seemed to stir and to grow for him. Angelic wings glittered in the shadows of the trees.

He seemed to be in a great formal park made of stone, where the allees of shrubbery rose in granite or basalt, high in the mountains, or at Sceaux or Versailles. Far ahead, at the top of the corridor, where it gave out on to space, he seemed to see a stranger. There was someone walking ahead of him in this wood, or walking towards him, he could not tell which.

Then, coming out into a little clearing like a chamber
halfway up some pyramid, he saw through the trees a distant figure and he stopped. The stars were brighter here.

As the figure walked towards him, its low polished boots snapping the bracken, he recognized it, not by any appearance, but by the way the close blue jacket rode upward on the chest. He moved forward. It was, of course, Bellerophon. The angels in the shadows drew away. He was not after all alone in this wood, and it was still May.