The Dedalus Book of German Decadence (13 page)

‘But does she write? Is she a poetess?’

The editor laughed aloud at the recumbent statues of philosophers which decorated the driveway to the library which they were just passing. ‘No, God knows, she isn’t that, she is a poem, rather […] And how old are you? Twenty-three? Very well, let me tell you this. He who keeps her after he’s twenty-five will remain a wretched cripple for the rest of his life, but woe to him who’s never possessed her!’

[…]

A small table with sandwiches, tea and fruit was standing in the round room with the tapestries, the overhead lighting and the gleaming parquet floor. The groom ushered in the visitors, told them to help themselves, waited in the doorway, then carried the table out. The two men were alone, and waited for the mistress of the house.

There was another table in the room, more of a large, oval ebony plate standing upon a dainty taboret base; on this table there were something in the region of twenty porcelain figures, milk-white and exceptionally dainty. There were gentlemen with elegant swords and elegant lace falling over their wrists, and ladies in enormous crinolines who were curtseying to each other or standing engrossed in porcelain conversations; others, young aristocrats by their appearance, were dancing a minuet in the corner to the strains of a small orchestra (one could hear the fine, glazed harmonies of fiddle, viola d’amore and flute); an aged roué, with tricorne under his arm, was looking through a lorgnette raised in a most affected manner at the young ladies before him who graciously bowed their heads with their enormous castles of hair and rested their thin arms on their crinolines; finally another beau with a wrinkled face and a jet black beauty-spot beneath the right-hand corner of his mouth, the only splash of colour in this milk-white world.

‘You wished to say something?’

‘No – no  …  Oh please, don’t say anything to me at this moment.’

Sebastian had stepped to the side and was standing against the Gobelins which portrayed the fountain of youth: he was standing next to the group of senile decrepits who were staggering with heads bowed down the steps. Strange  …  very strange  …  Had he not experienced all this before? The hours of this day had passed like a procession of veiled memories; now all was still, and he could look the last in the eye. And silently he grasped its insubstantial form. This name, Désirée; this room; no light and yet such lightness, no life and yet this long procession of elongated figures, moving in a circle, and then the tiny dance of white figurines, comical and serious, moving in a delicate dance, and he in the middle, with that name upon his lips, silent, slumbering, yet weaving a glittering, gossamer thread around it all, a web from which the soul called forth names, colours, movements, dimly at first, yet firmer in its plenitude, a rich cornucopia of dream-like seas, which the soul could drink, long, long, longer than from any other earthly pabulum  …  In a trance he compared the room in which he was now unquestionably standing with a room miles from here which he had glimpsed in a dream one July night, and piece by piece he recognised it all again and within this implausible reality there was that word
Desiderata,
a word he had seen the day before in a Latin textbook and from which, like a calyx in a dream, this whole miraculous world had blossomed. […] This is what it was! Sebastian had found it. He gently repeated the word: Desiderata  …  that which, after it had passed through the refining power of nocturnal dreams had lodged in the imagination of the sixteen-year-old as the expression and the essence of all that time might have in store for him, and all that, unclear at first, would crystallize as yearnings within him. For weeks he had wandered through the forests surrounding the castle, with this word as his only companion: it hovered high and erect beside him, a slender figure of supernatural solemnity, with earnest eyes, eyes which he could well imagine gazing from Lady Wilmoth’s countenance.

But he had seen, one night towards the end of August, a splendid rain of meteors through the tree tops, and as he watched the dying, falling stars (stars which he had woven as a diadem in the phantom’s hair) he remembered the Latin word ‘sidera’, and was darkly aware of the ambiguity of the name ‘Desiderata’ – the one who is desired, but also far! Very well, yes, a pun, a subtle word play of a young student, the febrile juggling with concepts of a boy in puberty, but a melancholy logic formed a bridge between synonyms and conclusion: that desire removes everything that it touches. This insight for a long time drove Sebastian to the point of despair. Now, indeed, he had to laugh at such childish notions, but it was poignant to feel their roots deep within his heart […]

He suddenly blushed to the roots of his hair, for it was only now that he noticed Désirée, who had entered some minutes before.

‘Dreamer!’ laughed Meinewelt, and Désirée was also smiling. But only for a second; she invited both to sit and took her place on a high armchair which was standing next to the table with the Nymphenburg figurines and across the back of which a length of purple cloth fell in folds to the floor. She had kept on her violet gown but was not wearing her cameo on her heart. She sat there, her chin resting in her left hand, her hand resting on the arm of the chair whilst her slim right hand, white, and concealed by the narrow sleeve to the base of her thumb, rested upon her lap.

[…]

They were riding, driving in a small, warm square of cosiness through the small windows of which, to left and right, they could look out at the alien, frosty world outside; they drove through streets and alleys, across a square, beneath an archway through all the changing images of the city, lulled by the gentle feeling of enclosure and remoteness and the drumming of the horse’s hooves upon the snow. It had begun to grow dark outside and the darkness in the coupé gathered even more tangibly between the two people. It stopped before the Imperial Library and the Ludwigskirche, that ‘piece of old Venice’. The groom jumped from the carriage to light the lanterns, and in the light Désirée could see a troubled expression on Sebastian’s face. It was at this spot that he had caught the first glimpse of her, in this same carriage, silently gliding away from him  …

[…]

The carriage turned into a side street and before them lay the English Garden with its gleaming masses of snow, white despite the darkness, and the glittering starkness of its ancient trees which, like half-frozen giants, were pulling the night from the skies to cover themselves. The horse’s hooves were muffled by the snow and, rocked in silence, they galloped along the paths of the English Garden. Melancholy overcame them both, and, taking her hand, Sebastian slid on to his knees and buried his face in her lap.

‘I am suffering, Désirée, I don’t know where to turn. The world does not treat me kindly, and an alien poison creeps through my veins, ceaselessly. There are so many good deeds that I could do, but fear to do them, as I might seem abject to myself. My heart is wounded and I can no longer create as once I could. I must  …  share you with other people, yes, I must, Désirée, and my breath is tainted with envy and bitterness.’

‘But, my little one, with whom must you share my heart?’

‘I used to write as I breathed – naturally, freely – but now I am oppressed. The verses that I once wrote were like a crystal edifice in which I saw myself as the centre: now all is dim, and I can no longer see myself in my work.’

‘My little one, with whom must you share my heart?’

‘I don’t know  …  with him, Sulzwasser, with everyone  …’

‘What foolishness! My little one, what do these people mean to me? Can you not see how limited they are in their expressions? And are there any boundaries between us?’ She let go of his hand and pressed her cheek to his head, speaking gently.

‘I love you. Why worry about the rest? If your poetry cannot satisfy you, then think of a more faithful beloved.’

‘No, no, you mustn’t ask me to do that, how base do you think I am, Désirée?’

‘I want you for myself, do you understand? You must belong to me and nobody else, for with me alone can you find what eludes you. You must deny everything that does not have my name on it  …  You must think of nothing but me, as long as I wish it. This is the secret!’

This last sentence she spoke loudly, solemnly, over his head, as though it were an incantation and then she added, gently, as though she were speaking to an invalid: ‘All your doubts will disappear when you surrender yourself to me.’

Her hands were gently stroking the top of his head; beneath the warmth of her fingers which had lightly dishevelled his hair Sebastian had the feeling that his thoughts, feelings and energies were spun together into one thread which gradually, and without his being able to say how it happened, enfolded the nerves of this woman like the strings of an instrument, so that they sounded fuller, stronger as he himself was sinking, limp and broken. She was still talking with her even, quiet voice whose comments were never overheard. Sebastian was overwhelmed by the yielding softness of resignation: he no longer sought to understand the sense of the words whose gentle music, fused into one, was passing over him. […]

He noticed a place in Désirée’s fur jacket where the fine hairs of the cloth opened and closed as her breast rose and fell. With wide-open nostrils he breathed the perfume with which her underclothes were always sprinkled and which swam in the warm atmosphere of the carriage like a damp cloud. The bevelled panes of the windows were also haunting with their frames which were of a reddish-brown colour, whilst outside the coupé was painted a dark green. You could see the snowy lawns outside the carriage refracted into rainbow colours through the bevelled glass edges, a delightful play of colours, a melting landscape, something to which he would love to sink, in oleaginous softness, expire, die  …

He dimly felt that he was starting to lose his reason beneath the caresses of these warm fingers which were paralysing him, sucking him dry, destroying him: a slackness had suffused him, making his joints liquid, his sinews limp  …  ‘Give me all that you have withheld from me, give me the last thing of all, I shall belong to you for ever’  …  the voice was singing, and when she had finished he felt her hands lifted from his head and, awoke.

[…]

With the first mild days of Spring the greyhound, Only, began to creep around the house in a sick, miserable manner, and he became so ill that the doctor had to put the faithful animal out of its misery in the garden in front of the villa. Désirée watched the execution from the window. Next day she sent the French maid to an animal dealer in Bogenhausen and she returned with a large, splendid cat with long black fur and a pink fleck between its eyes: Désirée gave it the name Pandora.

Pandora soon got used to her mistress, as Désirée did to her, and they were soon inseparable, the cat following her through all the rooms of the house, day and night. But towards Sebastian it nurtured a secret hatred.

Often, in the twilight, he would suddenly see two flames of phosphorous staring at him and which, without making the slightest sound, changed their place from a corner, a cupboard, or the folds of the curtain. He had always been a keen animal lover and tried to play with the animal (even though he had been startled, upset when he first caught sight of it): he stroked its fine, rustling fur, which crackled and sparked, rubbed the pink spot and the soft folds of its neck and put it on his shoulder, or let it sit purring on his knees, but he soon detected in the animal’s movements, as it accepted his caresses, a silent hatred and sometimes, indeed, an instinctive irony. When it felt his presence it arched its back, rubbing itself against the nearest object and only turning its head with the great yellow-green eyes to spy on his movements. He finally chased it from the room whenever he found it. But as a rule the creature only left its place when it saw the threatening hand descend or felt in advance the impending kick, and then only phlegmatically, without haste, with an almost rational compliance. Its favourite place was the conservatory, beneath a yucca tree where the maid (and there was something feline about her discreet and creeping gait, her slyly humble expression and her miaowing French) had made it a silky bed of cotton wool and padding, next to the opulent Roman couch on which Désirée liked to spend her afternoons.

The reason was obscure, but Sebastian felt hmself gradually overcome by a feeling of shame, of degradation and weakness. One morning he had watched, concealed, the two women and the cat during Désirée’s morning toilette and had tiptoed back to his room, overwhelmed by the tormenting awareness that there was a certain similarity between himself and the animal and that the animal displayed its affiliation to the house with a greater ease, indeed propriety than he did. Pandora was quite at home here, and quite uninhibited, and it was he, in comparison, who was behaving like an intruder.

Later on that day, when he saw the two eyes gleaming once more in the shadows he suddenly, enraged, flung a thick book at them, but missed and then began a frenzied hunt for Pandora. But it seemed to him that the creature’s movements were relaxed, composed, with a Stoic moderation and not the slightest symptoms of panic, whilst he was staggering through the room, gasping and flustered. When he finally caught the cat and had hurled it with all his strength through a half-opened window into the garden he heard it miaow for the first time: a single, sharp, minatory tone  …  A few minutes later he met it again, crouching on Désirée’s shoulder and gazing at him with steely, glittering eyes.

Spring had set in uncommonly early that year and the nerves of nature and of men were both badly affected by the abrupt change of seasons: it had rained incessantly for a week, snow and ice had melted within the space of hours and the river Isar had flooded and devastated the English Garden and the low-lying suburbs. A bridge had collapsed and one day the body of a baby had been washed against the gates of the park which stood upon a moderate rise. The labourers who had been building a dam in the park, together with the gardener who was inspecting it early one morning found the baby and reported it to Sebastian, who naturally concealed it from Désirée. But a prophecy that the mad Swede Esplund had made came forcibly to mind, and he was seized by a strange unease. Although the rain continued it seemed as though the waters were receding and the danger for park and villa was past. But the endless stream of tepid, monotonous rain which fell on the gravel path and window panes (the windows stood wide open even though the house was heated for the nights might still be cold) had such an enervating quality that arguments broke out in the servants’ quarters at the least instigation, and both cook and coachman, who were both infatuated by the maid, gave in their notice out of the blue. With disquiet Sebastian noticed that Désirée had started to initiate him into these domestic matters, matters about which he wished to remain ignorant and whose discussion wounded him. There was a short, but ugly, scene which at least brought the tension hanging over the house to a head and, in order to distract his irritability, Sebastian decided to pay a visit to a hamlet in the Isar valley where the floods had inundated the fields in a most picturesque manner.