Andreas (10 page)

He tells himself all this, though in morbid
self-reproaches
. “What kind of man am I for the first man of any distinction I meet to make such an impression on me?”

Beginning. The Knight catches him up on the Riva dei Schiavoni. “What a good thing I have met you.” (A vague impulse has sent Andreas there.) “I nearly sent for you. You are wanted …”

Secret about Maria. At Andreas’s first visit she makes a tiny, helpless gesture towards a dark
corner behind her sofa with a certain stiffness about her waist—and at that moment, Andreas has a presentiment that here is an insoluble mystery, that he will never know this woman, and feels that the infinite has wounded him more violently than any definite pain that he has ever known: he has three or four memories which all bear within them this
pointe acérée de l’infini
(the spearhead of the infinite) (the meeting with the old woman and the child on that first morning)—feels this unfelt pain without realizing that, at that very moment, he
loves
.

At his first visit, Maria says, “
Somebody
will write to you again.” Once he receives from Maria a letter that is passionate, almost cynical. He hurries to her; she is not at home. Later, he finds her. She is in great distress: “I have been told about the letter”—she has to bring herself to something like a confession—“my hand is bewitched: it acts against my will. I would like to cut it off, but the fifth commandment forbids that …” (Problem: how far am I responsible for my hand?)

Elegance and distinction, the phantoms Andreas has pursued, are embodied in Maria in their most perfect form, as nobility of the soul. He now sees the Viennese countesses as mere marionettes, worked by their breeding.

Sacramozo’s relationship to Maria is this: that he
wants to amuse her in order to keep her alive, because she alone makes life worth living for him (however little, for that matter, he demands or expects from her).

Sacramozo has for Maria “religion, not love” (Novalis).—The Knight: “I found her in Genoa. Wicked people declared they had a right to her. I protected her—and managed to bring her here. But I mean no more to her on that account than you do. I look upon every day as the last. Day by day, I think, ‘She will escape you!’”—Andreas: “Do you think she will enter a convent?”—Knight: “She nearly did. But she seems to have abandoned the idea. She told me she had received letters which dissuaded her.”

Maria married to a wicked man at thirteen. She is a widow: her husband was cruel. The religious crisis which caused the split in her. A prayer (Sacramozo tells Andreas this)—Maria regards it as a punishment for having implored Christ to be her accomplice in her love-affair, and thus having been guilty of blasphemy. Since then, Maria filled with disgust for the act itself: she feels the vague fatigue, has a physical knowledge of the thing which appals her.

At a remark, a mere piece of news, her astral body, consisting of her thoughts, fears, aspirations, is often, with immense sensibility, touched by a “silent fall of
distant stars”—she feels this whole as her “I”: this whole must become blessed, this whole would never have been capable of surrendering in love, this whole Andreas can never embrace, this whole is her burden and her suffering.

A midway aspect of Maria—in which the
lady
is uppermost: that all is not yet united in her, that she is neither resigned nor exhausted, that the possibilities of dying a martyr’s death or petrifying in aristocratic
morgue
still lie open to her.

Sacramozo knows from confidences that Maria at times loses her identity. Sacramozo surmises as to her condition.

T
HE LADY
(Maria) and the cocotte (Mariquita) are both Spanish: they are dissociated aspects of one and the same personality, which play
trucs
on each other. The cocotte writes Andreas the letters. The cocotte hates Sacramozo and all his sentimental fuss. Once, Andreas encounters the cocotte as he is taking leave of the lady: once, the kind lady is transformed before the mirror into the malicious cocotte. The cocotte fears Sacramozo, believes he has the evil eye (she fears, too, that he might kill her, and he actually pursues her with a knife).—The cocotte sleeps with him, this makes Andreas fall more deeply in love with the lady; he can no longer understand Sacramozo’s
Platonism. In the early morning the bed is empty, he hears moans, and, with gestures of appalling distress, the
other
takes flight. During this troubled time, he once finds in his valise the fichu of the Finazzer girl.—The cocotte declares that she has to go to a rich old man.

(Portrait of Maria and Mariquita in the journal) To be with Maria is to pursue the most subtle and profound conception of the individual: Maria’s religious aestheticism tends in this direction. Her chief concern is the unity, the uniqueness of the soul (but she is thwarted by the body). It would be impossible to pay her a compliment on her beauty or a detail of her figure. She declares that no tree, no cloud, has its like. She has a horror of love, whose instrument is the quid pro quo. (She brings to mind the Princess in Tasso.)

In Mariquita, it is each physical detail that seems unique and immortal—knee, hip, smile. Beyond that, she does not trouble her head much about uniqueness, she does not believe in the immortality of the soul. Her conversation, arguments, even her thoughts are all pantomime, all latent eroticism, not a word is meant for more than the moment—she perpetually courts caresses from everything around her.

The link between Maria and Mariquita is a small,
asthmatic King Charles’s spaniel, Fidèle by name, a suspicious and disdainful animal which, save on one occasion, is always hidden in Maria’s house—again the fundamental problem of
Gestern
(
Yesterday
): faith, constancy, and change—Maria dimly suspects the chaos within her; that is what she has in common with Mariquita. Thus they have the spaniel in common.

ad
Maria
et
Mariquita: the Franciscan father’s views on the case: the views of the physician, materialistic (La Mettrie, Condillac). The anecdote of the man who was driven mad by one accident and restored by another.—“What conclusion do you draw from that?” asked the Knight.

M
ARIA
always in mittens, hands always cold: Mariquita’s hands always as if suffused with liquid, gentle fire.

Unrestraint the essence of Mariquita: constraint the essence of the Countess. The Countess speaks of the hundred-weight-heavy chains with which heaven tries its own. We are responsible for more than ourselves. The constraint in the Countess’s love-letters.

With Maria, Andreas learns the value of inward freedom; with Mariquita, he feels a horror of absolute freedom. With Mariquita, he cannot but crave for the 
universal bond of union; with Maria, for the universal solvent: thus his nature must be revealed to him.

Maria is marvellously well dressed, Mariquita likes dirt and disorder.

Maria can hardly endure the scent of flowers; one day, Andreas finds her half fainting, surrounded by strongly scented flowers: Mariquita has bought the flowers at market that morning and sent them to Maria by a Friuli man.

Maria is a Christian, with mystic, Molinistic
leanings
; Sacramozo is indifferent; Mariquita is a pagan, she believes in the moment and in nothing else.

What Mariquita thinks of Maria (in letters or monologues, from time to time): she hates her, sees all her imperfections, thinks her a
coward
(just as Michelangelo thinks himself a coward in contrast to Savonarola), yet she is her most personal theme, the only one that interests her. She envies her her distinction, without being quite aware of what that distinction is, what it is that lends to Maria’s every action a royal, immaterial worth (like the horn on the brow of the unicorn, like a tower in the moon); she even tries to make Maria herself suspicious of this privilege, to submerge her in meanness (though she would be the one to suffer most by it)—she writes to her: “your dream of yesterday, that there is no such thing as the common, that it can all be overcome, that
life could be lived in a perpetual
élan
, with none of your crouching in a corner—is a projection of your fathomless vanity, of your stupid incapacity to face reality.”

Mariquita’s stories (of Maria): sometimes as if she were an old hag, then: “that must be taken metaphorically. People must always be taken metaphorically. She is quite a pretty woman, but a fiend all the same. That is why she wants people to think her an angel: but, no woman in the world is seen through as I see through her. My eyes go beneath the skin.”

M
ARIQUITA
: the various aspects of the demonic: mischievous, quick-witted, cynical, restless, godless. Shameless, libertine, dread of churches. Boundlessly inquisitive. Brilliant,
ingénue
. Utterly forgetful.

The element connecting all her phases—a kind of puppet-like activity. She must have something going on: she hates repose, meditation—for then she is afraid of being dissolved in the other.

Once Mariquita breaks out to the duenna (Andreas pretends to be asleep): “Curse her! She would like to lock me up in a convent because I am growing too much for her! I’ll have to set him at her a bit.”—Duenna: “Couldn’t you give her something to make her disappear for good?”—Mariquita: “She
has a hideous strength, not only when she is praying, but at other times—a kind of inward elevation which makes me feel as if I were going to be sick; I am quite weak compared to her.”—Duenna: “Couldn’t you contrive to make one of your best poses occur to her while she is praying?”—Mariquita: “Then she feels me coming and holds me down, those are my nastiest moments. Then I hate as the man in hell must hate God.”

(Mariquita only understands her relationship to Maria bit by bit; at first, she hopes quite soon to free herself.)

Scene where Mariquita, in great distress because Maria wants to enter a convent, tells Andreas to seduce Maria; her uncanny, cringing look in this scene. In Andreas’s suspicion that the old crone has something to do with experiments of the kind which led to the “Moreau horrors,” that she may be providing material for an experimenter of this kind.

In trying to awaken the soul in Mariquita, Andreas endangers Mariquita’s life (her separate existence): she hints anxiously at this. Thus she takes him into her arms and with tears in her eyes declares she is ready to sacrifice herself to the happiness he might find with another. He feels that she is really in earnest.

Mariquita demonic to the verge of sorcery.
Succubus. Once she sleeps with two men at the same time; she says: “Suppose I had slept with the one a day, six hours, two hours, half an hour, ten minutes after the other—well what then?”

Mariquita hates the idea of “truth.” “If only I never had to hear the silly word—if only you would leave me in peace with your philosophy—since the world is, after all, ‘consummable, so to speak.’”

Her gloomy image of the Knight. The pattern of his life fills her with horror. When she speaks of him, she turns pale.

Mariquita never writes, only sends messages by word of mouth; writing only exists to complicate and compromise everything.

Mariquita’s lodging: two rooms in a ramshackle palace, in the utmost disorder. The duenna, the old crone, lives in a large room behind. The bright room, as open as an aviary, where Mariquita bathes, takes her meals, and receives her guests. A little garden outside. The rich Jewish admirer, dalle Torre. Mariquita at first treats Andreas badly, but as soon as she notices that Maria likes to see him, invites him back with an invitation full of allusions to Maria. She hopes at last to seduce Maria by means of Andreas.

On the very day on which Andreas receives the invitation, Sacramozo receives a message full of
insults: she is tired of him and is going to look around for someone else.

Mariquita, on the first visit, though she treats him badly, fondles his hand, saying: “Pretty hand—a pity you belong to a cold and miserly master.”

She tells him why people love him: his gravity, his reserve, nobody can tell what he will be like, nobody can be sure of having him entirely.

Mariquita—a kind of vertigo of existence. One night she goes for a drive with Andreas in the mail-coach.
Embrouilleuse
: everything goes wrong, the desperate confusion of all things—a whole concatenation of ill-planned arrangements, nothing fits in. Café in Mestre, in the carriage she is another being. Treats him as if he were a Casanova, imputes meetings with the Countess to him (complete in all psychological and realistic details), then, in the end: “Forgive me!”—then, violently: “And why not? Why don’t you take her?” He tries to tear himself away from her, then she hints at a secret, promises she will soon reveal her soul.

An adventure with Mariquita in the night of storm. She tries to throw the unconscious gondolier—the gondolier stunned by a blow from Andreas—into the water.

The courtesan wants to seduce the wild man; an excursion into the country is made for the purpose.

A
NDREAS
’ opposing feelings in the presence of the two women: to be with Maria makes him happy, the world seems more beautiful; Mariquita makes him gloomy, tense, fierce—afterwards ill-tempered, fatigued.

It seems incomprehensible that Maria’s hand should ever be seen, felt in a sensual movement. Mariquita’s foot returns pressure like a hand, clings, presses, like a softer, blinder, still more sensual hand.

Andreas: his feeling for Maria growing, so that his head swims at the thought of an intimacy (—merely to lay his hand on her knee), when he thinks intensely of her womanliness. He even grows jealous of Sacramozo. By becoming very insistent, he makes it possible for Mariquita to appear.

Andreas and the idea of “elegance”: elegant people are to him what Savonarola or a very aloof young nobleman were to Michelangelo. The love of the fine lady: that is his first goal; he imagines that he will be changed by it, as his grandfather was changed by the favours of the archduchess. He says to himself: “If I were her lover …”—but he cannot really imagine himself in that situation; it seems to him that he would then be a different man (for a moment, he thinks that the Knight believes him to be her lover) … gradually it dawns upon him that for him, Maria dwells in the sphere of the unattainable; he has a premonition that his fate lies here, that this
is a wound whose sharpness he must always seek to allay. He suspects that Maria’s love must be directed to something in him which is unattainable to himself, utterly remote from his vanity, his restlessness, his consciousness.