July 5, 1982
The first student of the summer. Her name is Isabel Merton. She’s very young, but with a peculiar seriousness, which makes her seem older. Quite attractive, it must be admitted. She is tall, but there’s something delicate about her, and skittish, as if she were a small alert animal which has come out of the forest, but might at any moment retreat. Or as if she didn’t quite trust the world. Well, there is much about the world that ought not to be trusted. I should know.
I wasn’t anticipating much when she sat down at the piano. She didn’t look as if she had the necessary strength for the music. But the storm she unleashed with the Chopin Scherzo took me by surprise. Very fierce, almost wild. She needs to learn much more control. But she has the flair for emotional extremity that, if it is disciplined, may perhaps make her an interesting performer. She throws everything she has into each and every passage. Further study of composition is necessary, to show her the great laws of structure which enable the music to reveal itself. To be what it is.
At the end of the lesson, I asked what brought her to the Retreat; why she wanted to study music. She said it was the only element in which she feels she is fully alive. She then looked up at me with a certain timid surprise, as if she had not expected to say those words. Or to be understood. But I understood, of course. I understood her very well, although I could not tell her so. I do not want them to think that they will get confessions from me, or any
sharing
. Let them get that from their other, incontinent pedagogues. The very idea disgusts me. What I have to teach them is impersonal. Or, for those who can recognize it, more than personal. This must be made clear from the beginning.
The train is passing a perfectly picturesque village, moving past in Muybridge motion. A fragment of a rap song incongruously spikes up from some portable radio.
Baby, gimme what I want, all you gotta is your cunt
… At least that’s what she thinks the lyrics are unbelievably saying as the aggressive pounding rhythm comes nearer and then recedes. She cringes, feels oddly unprotected. Without Peter, without her shield … She sometimes folded herself into his tall frame like a child seeking succour; and she felt sometimes that he looked at her, from his measured distance,
as if she were a child, needing to be kindly understood. He took her measure, and enfolded all her agitations in his calm acceptance: her anxieties, her euphorias, her entranced states. Her Saint Teresa syndrome, as he called it.
When she told him she wanted to leave, there was no false emotion, or emotional blackmail of any kind. There was only that moment, the silent exchange. The door to his study was half open, and through it, she could see him, sitting at his desk with his feet up, uncharacteristically idle, seemingly just looking out the window, or into space. She came in behind him, softly. She knew he’d heard her, but he didn’t look round or move. She put her hands on his shoulders; still he said nothing. She pressed down slightly, and felt a kind of resignation in the way he submitted to her gesture, which he knew to be one of apology, and a kind of consolation. For what she was going to do; for what she apparently had to do. After a moment, he pressed his cheek against her hand, as though acknowledging that he’d been wounded, that consolation was needed. Neither of them said anything; after a few moments, she simply left the room.
“Aren’t you curious to know why I’m leaving?” she finally asked, in a kind of desperation. “Don’t you want to know?”
“The reasons you’d give me wouldn’t be the real ones anyway,” he said, evenly.
He was right; she hardly knew the reasons herself.
A few days before she was due to move out, he asked, “What do you want to do about the piano? Do you still want to use the practice room?” She nodded, humbled by his generosity, wrenched with ambivalence. But she did, in her utterly selfish way she wanted to use the room, which by now was filled with her musical karma like some ritual cave, not the philosopher’s cave from which one tries to see the truth, but one into which a warrior or a priest retreats to invoke and commune with the gods.
“I think you’re making a mistake,” Peter said then. It was the one statement of that kind he allowed himself. “I’m not trying to stop you, I’m just saying.” She quivered with a sort of fear at this, the fear of making a mistake; and, also, the sense that he understood more than he let on. That maybe he was seeing something about her that she couldn’t possibly see. They were standing in the hallway, and she wanted to go up to him and embrace him wordlessly, to express somehow the excruciation of the moment. But it was she who was leaving; it seemed wrong to be the one who was more upset; and he didn’t make the gesture of insistence, of last-minute persuasion, which might just have stopped her in her tracks after all.
But of course he wasn’t going to exert pressure, not even then. That was the basic principle. Did he let her go through sheer rectitude? Though there’s just a chance that he has some calculations of his own. What is she pursuing, anyway … She hardly knows, except that it’s something
more
, something for which contracts don’t apply, in which how much is given or taken doesn’t count, because one gives and takes everything. In which one relinquishes all power and thereby exercises it absolutely. Isn’t that the only possible contract? she mentally asks Peter; and she imagines him looking at her with his steady, intelligent eyes, and saying, no. The answer to that is no.
Lyons
In Lyons, a brief stop at the hotel, then the concert. A venerable nineteenth-century hall, a relaxed, attentive audience. She plays Bach’s First Partita to begin with. It seems fitting, somehow, in this dignified old town, to be contained within Bach’s serene symmetries. It is a deep satisfaction to progress through the
propellent,
perpetuum mobile
progressions, through the even, irrefutable logic which itself adds up to a kind of joy. The Schubert; some Brahms Capriccios and Intermezzos; and at the end, Bartók’s Suite. Another kind of propellent motion, more motoric, more fierce.
Dinner afterward with her local minders, at an unusually good restaurant. Unhurried conversation, connoisseurs’ remarks on the music and the food. She feels a mild glow of pleasure at the salubriousness of the arrangements, the starched white tablecloths, the mellow wine.
Back at the hotel, she stares at the room for a while, trying to fix her location, and herself within it. Her internal compass oscillates slightly. The spectre of the music threatens. Is that all, is this what she works for, strives for, yearns for? This mild satisfaction, this modest completion? Long drapes on the tall white-framed windows, a writing desk; a luxury of anaesthetic bathroom fittings. The new Europe, it seems, can provide comfort in all its corners. Well, that’s nice, isn’t it? Isn’t that what everyone wants, the culmination of decent, moderate wishes?
She puts on a terry-cloth robe, picks up Wolfe’s
Journal
.
July 6, 1982
I woke up this morning knowing I had been dreaming of that day in Berlin, when I had—no, received—the first intimation of my composition. All through the morning, I was back there, in the gray, drumming rain, even though, outside my window, it was sunny and fresh. Perhaps it was the phrase Isabel Merton uttered that brought the day back to awareness, from where it always lies, dormant. I was once again walking near the Wall, in a drizzle, trying to avoid the glum, low-lying rubble nearby. The last rubble in West Berlin. The city was cleaned up quickly. Not like Warsaw, which I had just visited and which was still lying in ruins. I felt the injustice of it with a bitterness that was almost bilious. I saw two men making some monetary exchange, with that peculiar, sensual expression that accompanies such transactions. One of them was counting the bills, licking his fingers to ease the sticking. I wanted to kick him in the shins. I wanted to scream at my countrymen, to spit at them, to take everything away from them, out of their bellies which were growing fat again, out of their pockets which they were again filling with lucre, with gluttonous, single-minded lust. Their Mercedes-Benzes and their sausages, that is all they cared about. Berlin, the betraying city. The shelter with its awful fear was still at the surface of my consciousness and the corpses on the streets, the anonymous bloodied, haphazardly splayed corpses. I had loved the city as a child. Now I hated it with the bitter hatred that grows from within the emptied husk of love.
Then the church. I walked in for the warmth. It was filthy cold that day, wind piercing to the bone. And there was the Requiem. I should write that in worshipful calligraphic letters, in special luminous ink. The sublime, the most profoundly moving of all compositions. Moving at such a depth as to create calm at the center of being. As to lay the heart prone under its divine moving hand. Movement, moving … Mozart. What exactly is it that touches his tonal sequences with the breath of divinity, when other composers’ sequences, made up of seemingly similar elements, do not possess it? This is the mystery.
I walked out of that church shivering with questions. How does one pierce the soul as Mozart did in our joyless, jagged, murderous age? I have spent twelve years trying to find a musical language that would do justice to that day, that would capture its double truth. The Angel of History was still hovering in the city, with its black, bat-like wings. Until you understand the Angel of History, you understand nothing. But then you must go beyond it, to some source or force from which the Angel emerges. I need a musical language so pure and distilled that it can bore to the dark core of menace and through it to its own kind of beauty. For when you get to the heart of things, you always come upon beauty. This I continue to believe. A requiem to catch the spirit of the age. It has to be condensed beyond anything Mozart imagined, to a dark mass from which one can only sense an emanation of light.
Paris
Back at the St. Regis, there is a message from Marcel. She feels a small fizz of surprise, of pleasure. She hasn’t seen Marcel in a long time; but he resurfaces once in a while, here and there; has done so, with reliable irregularity, since his year at Columbia, when he was in some classes with Peter, and they all met for long coffees at the Upper West Side Cafe, and inevitably ended up going to the movies afterward. How many movies did they manage to see in those days, how many hours did they spend in those dream caves?
She calls him, gets his precise
allo
. “It’s Isabel,” she says.
“Ah, our distinguished visitor,” he responds instantly. “Our practically unavoidable visitor.”
“So they’ve been doing some publicity,” she says.
“Publicity?” he repeats, with mock incredulity. “It’s more like a blitzkrieg. A musical
Anschluss
.”
She laughs. Marcel and she are in the habit of amusing each other, as he amused all of them that year at Columbia; but with the added frisson of eroticism, which neither of them, as far as she knows, has ever planned to take further; but which gives their talk the edge of playfulness.
“But as far as I can tell from the
Pariscope
, you’re not giving a concert tonight,” he says, and tells her he wants to invite her to a reception this evening, at the Foreign Ministry. “So I can see you, of course. But also a person I know has apparently attended your concert, and has practically begged me to bring you along.”
“How did this person discover you knew me?”
“Oh, by coincidence. You know how it is. It came up in conversation.”
“Sure,” she says. “Sure.” It will be nice to see Marcel; anyway, she has her free evening.
He says he’ll pick her up at the hotel, and she goes out into the afternoon, to shop and stare. She picks up a pleated skirt at the Samaritaine, then finds herself walking down a long narrow street off rue de Rivoli, a glissando into the further past. Urban quietness, punctuated by occasional sounds of a cart wheeled into a courtyard, or the steady beat of a hammer on wood. Work sounds and the chalky smell of the street, with its intimations of patient, orderly lives going on behind the membrane of walls and windows, seemingly unchanged; and behind it, behind her own mind’s membrane, she feels that heavier, stickier mood of long childhood days. This is where her mother brought her from Buenos Aires, for reasons which were not clear to the little girl; but which probably, Isabel understands now, had to do with her failing marriage. Her mother, an avant-garde nomad, experimenting with her own forms of restlessness. She comes upon a small neat square where Lena used to bring her to play, and sits
down on a bench as she did then. Nearby, the great metropolis spews its traffic and human masses; here all is calm and geometry even now. Through her porous skin, she can feel the past’s rustling return into the present. The deliciousness of the sun and the pointed shadows playing over the whitish pathways and well-shaved lawn, and a fluffy, ridiculously puffed-up poodle she used to pet, and its sharp, sudden yup. Toffee time, sweet and stretchy. There’s something else within the distended moment, a penumbra, a shadow; the shadow of Lena behind her, on the bench where she is now sitting, Lena reading a book and letting it fall open and inert in her lap. The little girl drawing lines with a stick in the resistant ground, her braids bobbing as she stooped, and sensing, through the sun, that her mother’s eyes are no longer on her, that her gaze has abandoned her … Isabel was already afraid of her mother’s lassitude, her hands falling useless, her eyes filming over. She didn’t look up or turn toward her mother, she didn’t have to. The change was as palpable as a shift of tonality, the deepening or lengthening of a shadow …
The wholeness of the past. She gets up, walks toward the Marais and into its warren of old, crooked streets. Andante. Dolce. She came for her first piano lessons here, with Mme Hortesz, a Hungarian émigré, who mostly taught children of fellow exiles to tide herself over her difficult time. Isabel recognizes the house, with its low, squared-off wooden doorway, standing at a slight diagonal just where the street angles toward its next jag. Mme Hortesz herself is probably long gone … Isabel remembers a poorer, shabbier version of the neighborhood, less whitewashed, less locked up. She thinks, all my madeleines have to do with shabbiness. Now the Marais is finished to a sheen, with polished wood and cute boutiques. She pushes the door, but it doesn’t give; the house now has an entrance code. Still, she remembers its protracted aged creak, as its heavy weight gave way to her child’s hand; the small echoing courtyard; the dark
staircase with its smooth wooden banister; and then Mme Hortesz, large and soft, beckoning her into the dusky flat, with its small rooms and frayed carpets and its melodiously curved baby grand. There it is, in its enchanted wholeness.