Remember Me (12 page)

He was beginning to realize the differences between them, which delimited what experience they might share. There seemed to be less and less left. And all the time, while he felt such thoughts, Richard sat silently before him, smoking and quietly watching him, as though he were housebreaking a dog. It was unnerving.

What gave Richard the right to believe he knew
anything
about princes?

He was a little wrong. He thought Richard a peasant, but Richard was not quite that. Peasants do not envy
those above them, for having lived for generations in one room, what would they do with twenty? A king may meet a peasant casually, for pleasure, in the stables or the Amalienberg. They are there to serve his necessity. But Richard was wilier and scrawnier than that.

The luxury of princes is to submit to the tyranny of someone else. So, at royal courts, you may catch a glimpse of the invincible slave owners, almost anonymous people no one dares to offend, because they have their finger on that part of majesty which adores to be whipped. That is what was beginning to happen between him and Richard.

Richard ceased to be the beloved friend as soon as they had moved to the Pagodenberg. He became instead the equivalent of Fräulein Meilhaus, the governess Ludwig had never forgotten. Now he had graduated to having a governor, that was all. Richard became the stern
executioner
who punishes us not for stealing the jam, but because from time to time it is good for us to be
punished
, since that pleases us, and because, though theft is amoral and meaningless, there are certain dangers
inherent
in too much jam.

As the Germans scrape their woods with an almost Japanese passion for
shibumi,
leaving here and there a twig or a fallen leaf, so was Richard the idea of a peasant, but neat, tidied, swept, and cleaned away from an
underbrush
of guile. For our ideals are also works of art. Year after year we perfect them. As one man paints a perfect picture once out of a hundred, so of the peasants with whom we seek oblivion, one may be the peasant who can give it to us. And in that case he is not a peasant, for no peasant can conceive of oblivion, since no man can ever really know the country in which he lives.

Ludwig should have been pleased. Such human
conjunctions
seldom occur. Yet the excitement was beginning
to ebb. Subconsciously he knew that, and it made him restive. The people we love can never satisfy us, because they leave us satisfied. So though Richard stood squarely astride his mind, closer than did Wagner, and more
satisfactory
than anyone else, something remained that was unsatisfactory. So it was necessary for them to use the two-story Pagodenberg. Dissatisfaction needs room to move around in.

There for a moment, but only for a moment, he got the thrill of the experience back again. It was not truth he wanted, but the self-forgetfulness of demeaning
himself
with a stranger. With Richard he could no longer do that. When he tried, he was filled with panic. Richard was too good. Richard never said anything, but he saw much and he watched. It was like trying to bribe a judge who was also a member of the family.

So in the white-tile fantasy of the Pagodenberg,
self-justification
clawed at the walls and found no hold. For when we are satisfied at last with others, it is not of them we tire, but of ourselves, and that was a truth Ludwig would never admit. The ghosts in his mind were flooding back again. They could never be held back for long. He was haunted always by the image of his own executioner. As they lay in bed, it seemed to him that he could sense the executioner waiting patiently in the next room. It was only to be expected, for the executioner is that side of the self that knows the loved one will always go away, either when he leaves us, or when we leave him. The
pretext
differs. The separation is the same.

In the host of shadows who waited for him just beyond the bottom of the bed, while Richard slept, there would always be one face missing. The face was his own. He could join that company only by dying, and he was afraid to die.

Sometimes in small country graveyards, under the black trees, you become aware of the doting dead, like guests at a party, chattering in groups, but actually
waiting
for their host to join them. He knew who that host was. And the measure of a successful party is the extent to which the guests ignore their host. He would have to join them alone.

For he realized something. There was a part of his mind Richard could not understand, and it was the
inmost
part. Richard was hale, healthy, and astute. He believed the hungers of the soul could be satisfied by smoking a pipe. He was not altogether wrong, but
Ludwig
did not like to smoke. So Richard could never join the ideal companions. You could not have people both in reality and in the ideal world as well. The one
cancelled
out the other. It was only people who pleased you for a night, and then disappointed you forever, the
well-loved
people you could not bear to be in the same room with again, who became ideal companions while they were still alive, because they died for you as soon as you had exhausted them.

The metaphysical honeymoon was over. But as the jewels of the crown are crown jewels only in their setting, perhaps Richard and he might get their lustre back at Berg. Ludwig decided to depart at once. They had known each other for a year, and yet already he began to feel alone again.

The years were passing. He was getting older. He must never age. He had to flee from time. For as fashions in the capital become novelties in the provinces a year later, so a well-loved king of twenty, if he is to remain twenty, flees to the provinces, where the people still remember him, not having seen him alter and change, as he was when he was a child among them. The only way to remain
young is to retreat farther and farther from the centre of life, where the light is merciless, into the shadow, where it is kind.

He would go on with Richard. There was no one else to go on with. Yet it was a pity that one could have joy only for a little while. It was as cruel as to introduce someone to a new vice, only to remove the drug supply that it had evoked a craving for. He began to keep a diary. He no longer trusted himself to speak. With Richard he had hoped that the world would open out. He found instead it opened like a trap in the floor, and dropped him deeper down into himself.

For time is the thirteenth labour of Herakles. There is no Atlas we may call back to carry that load. It is the test of strength we always fail. Try as we can, we
cannot
reverse the glass. Try as we may, it counts us out. We are alone. The clock ticks on. The landscape is desolate. The sands run out. And yet we try. There is beauty in that. It was only a pity that there was no one left to see it.

H
e had always known the outward forms of fear. Now he was beginning to learn its inner meaning as well. In 1869 he had been with Richard for three years. To be near him he stayed chiefly at Berg. The gossip about Sophie had long ago died down, but he wanted nothing to blow it into life again. He avoided Munich as much as he could. Yet he had to go there sometimes.

He tended to forget that he was not only a suffering animal, but also a king. As a king, he had certain duties to perform. They were not the duties he would have thought proper to a king, for by the nineteenth century kings had already shrunk in function to social secretaries and keepers of a rubber stamp. But whenever he forgot them, he was reminded of them soon enough, by the correspondence on his desk.

And among his correspondents, a certain Elizabeth Ney had recently become the most annoying. It was
impossible
to evade her. It was equally impossible to see her. Every time she wrote, it was like receiving a message from the Mafia in the morning’s mail.

When he did have to go to Munich these days, he took Richard with him whenever he could. Richard was with him now, as at his desk he idly pawed over the morning’s correspondence. He no longer had the energy to conceal
that sincere part of him that others took for eccentricity. And among these eccentricities was a growing terror of publicity. He could not bear to be seen by anyone. He had his reasons.

For there is nothing more disturbing than a mirror at the end of a shadowy corridor, for then the man walking towards you is the man you are walking toward, though because of the barrier which permits you to see each other, you are never allowed to meet. That was why he did not want portraits of himself either executed or displayed, and Fräulein Ney was a sculptress.

To judge from her letters, she sounded not so much like a great artist offering him physical immortality, as a fashionable tailor soliciting his trade. She sent a list of the eminent great whom she had turned to stone. It was not thus that the Medusa was wont to advertise her powers. Nor would he be set up for the public to gawk at, merely that this woman might earn her competence.

On the other hand she was extremely insistent.

He said to Richard: “What shall I do?”

It was not Richard’s sort of question. To answer that kind of question he merely took his pipe out of his mouth and left you to watch his silence. One went away with the same feeling one would have on leaving Delphos on a day when the oracle had refused to speak. The wisdom of horses, and Richard was a groom, is limited. They only know the world standing up. They cannot know that great weariness of the self which makes us long to sit down to rest for a while in the portrait or bust someone has made of us.

It was a turning point, but he did not know it.

He refused to see her. He was afraid to see her. A woman does not and cannot hold the keys to immortality, for it is her biological function to fill in the unknown.
Into the great hole of unconsciousness to which men erect monuments, she throws children of flesh and blood, as one throws earth into a bay, to make more land and so be safer from the sea. A woman exists to diminish what man would make more vast.

And Ludwig did not know that some women can be of neither sex, and so like Janus face both ways. He had built a cage for greatness once before, only to find that Wagner moved away, since greatness does not create in rooms, however beautiful, but in the mind.
Immortality
must be spun out of ourselves, if we are to pupate into eternity. Ludwig did not know that, either. Artists pass down to immortality only what they see of us, so that we arrive there incomplete, with our essential self long lost, and their essential self permanently imposed upon us.

“Who is this woman?”

Richard did not know.

Richard, he saw, would always try to limit him, not from evil intent, but out of his goodness, which could not conceive that goodness, far from being a unique virtue, was merely the smallest, if only humanly inhabitable, planet of a cosmos of vast extent. Goodness was not freedom. Freedom was far out there, where being
habitable
was not a virtue, but only the unique quality of a trivial and unimportant sphere; for suns burn where no worlds are, and who is to say their warmth is lost?

There are virtues of which we do not even know the name, attributes of the macrocosm of the self, where we are at last free in the world of the plus geography, only whose minus is visible to us, in the parable of our native hills and heights, but of whose actual value we can never be cognizant.

Yet he needed some new experience outside himself.
His own experience with Richard had been blocked. It is dreadful to cross several countries on the way to
freedom
, only to find the last border shut because of a technicality. He had wanted to lock Richard in with him, and now he found himself shut out. It had never occurred to him before that what was of paramount importance to him might inspire merely indifference in others. It was all very well for him to hide in the country outside the capital, but also it was terrible to live unknown, die, and leave nothing behind. Perhaps he could at least send his image down through time.

Perhaps the Ney was not a spider woman. Perhaps she was another saviour come to wake him up, and he was tired of sleeping. Perhaps she would give him the other thing he needed, that he could have with no one person and did not even know the name of.

“I will see her,” he said, gazing at the litter on his desk.

Richard looked up. “See who?” he asked, and smiled. The smile made Ludwig feel better. Try though he would to help it, if he no longer trusted Richard’s love, he still sought his approval.

“The Ney woman.”

All the same, he was uneasy. Portrait painters and sculptors, like diarists, smile at us and then do what they will to us, beyond our power to stop them. They send their personal opinion of us forward into time, without our permission, and though they assure us they have been flattering, who is to know what they have really said?

Certainly she addressed him fulsomely enough when she wrote. She called him “Thou King of the Realm of Ideas”. He decided to let her prove that he was. He ordered the Odysseus-Saal of the Residenz Palace set up
as a studio for her. Then, for a week, he worried and bit his nails. In the end he went to the sitting only because he was disgusted with his own indecision, and felt that he had to force himself to perform some public and determined act. Richard he left at Berg. He wanted to see if he could face her, and through her the world, alone.

When he came into the room she was already there, at her modelling stand. He was relieved. It meant he did not have to speak to her.

The room was lit from high up, and he sat under the converging rays of light, in a gilt arm-chair on a dais, and was glad he could not see her clearly. Yet he was curious. He had not met a stranger for some time.

He was vaguely aware of an efficient blur, moving in strange, long robes, which were certainly not ordinary clothes. He did not bother to look at people any more. It was safer not to do so. Instead he waited to be
summoned
out of himself by a voice, though he did not know what the tone of that voice would be.

The portrait was to be a bust, so he was at liberty to alter the position of his body as he pleased. Still she did not speak. He was aware instead of small creaks and whisperings in the room around him. Sophie was happily married now to the grandson of Louis Philippe. Gossip should be dead. Yet the palace seemed to be stirring. It knew he was there. Very faintly, and not altogether joyfully, he smiled.

Still the Ney woman did not speak. He began to be annoyed. Out there, flitting in and out of the borders of his sight, she was like the ghost of a moth, or something worse, and he longed to know what she was turning him into. The thought of a head slowly being built up in clay was for some reason more terrible to him than the thought of a skull. He shifted his knees.

The sounds in the room were louder and dangerous. He wanted very much to move his head. He did not like these public rooms. He should have brought Richard with him.

The lines came to him from nowhere. He half turned his head, afraid of an auditory hallucination. It was the voice of the sibyl, the voice he had been expecting to hear.

He realized the sound came from in front of him. Slowly Elizabeth Ney swayed into his field of vision, tall, with a handsome, sexless head like that of the sibyls of Michelangelo. It was a voice that should have come out of one of the Great Friend’s operas. The lines he recognized now. They were from Goethe’s
Iphigenie.
He settled himself in his arm-chair to listen. It was as though she were speaking to him from the safe distance of a theatre, a woman in a play, who comes to wake the
conscience
of the hero. Also he had heard she detested Cosima von Bülow, which could do no harm and did not displease him. She stopped reciting. He waited for a moment.

“I will see the bust now,” he said. He rose, as one would rise during an intermission, and walked towards
the modelling stand. Behind him the high light converged on his vacated chair. Elizabeth Ney stood aside. He looked at the bust. After all, the Wittelsbachs had always patronized the arts, from the days of Dürer down to Kaulbach and Wagner. It was the family thing to do. He stared at the bust for a long time.

“No,” he said. “I will not be like that.” He was
profoundly
shocked.

It was not his own face, but that of Otto, smooth, implacable, unreal, a little mad, someone two-
dimensional
enough to sidle out of time and become a shadow, a man in a mental iron mask peering at the present through fanatic and despairingly gentle eyes. He felt responsible for Otto. He had been afraid of him ever since that day when they were children, playing Maria Stuart near the greenhouse door. As he looked at the bust, he could hear time tick to the metre of his mind and life slow down. It was a face that never had and never would wear a crown, before which the flimsy
curtains
of insanity were drawing together like the curtains of an upstairs window in a transient hotel. Otto was sequestered. Reports on his brother were laid on his desk twice a month, and he hated to read them. To do so was like reading one’s own obit in the morning paper, at breakfast.

He turned to Elizabeth Ney abruptly.

“You will do me full length now, in the robes of St. Hubertus. You will see. I will be different.”

The bust had upset him profoundly. His resemblance to Otto was something he tried to keep at the back of his mind. He strode out of the room, without dismissing her. He had at last found someone to torture him. To pose for her was to be slapped awake, in a shower as cold as the marble she would turn him into.

The sittings went on.

“Your Majesty has no faith in humanity.”

“How can I, after so many disillusionments?”

They often talked like that, while he posed.

“Contact with reality draws ever farther away from your Majesty. Already it has, for you, almost escaped into formless distance.”

Why did she speak in that ridiculous way? Did she expect him to write it down, or did she write it down herself? But what she said was not quite true. He began to explain himself to her. It was a luxury to do so, for she had to listen. As a sculptor turns about the platform on which his armature rests, so slowly he turned his life about, revealing now Sophie, now Paul, now Richard and Fräulein Meilhaus, but never Otto. As the easel swung back, the shifting light changed them into Marie Antoinette, Louis XIV, the woodsman in the clearing, Maria Stuart, and the figure of his executioner. It did not matter. But about Otto he would not speak.

“Choose now,” she exhorted him, “before your Majesty has surrendered to the self-destroying tortures of solitude.”

Where did she find these phrases? And what could she know of solitude? The choice was already made. He was Prometheus, strapped to the Taurus of himself, and the eagle came and tore him open every night. It was cold on Caucasus.

“Is there any man in whose generosity and
high-mindedness
I dare to believe?” he asked her, thinking of Richard, in whom he did not dare to believe.

She was a clever woman, and also a little more than a woman. She had the instincts of a man. “Yes” she said. “Yourself.”

“I have no self.”

He watched her face eagerly, to see what she would say to that. She said nothing, but accepted the truth of it with an impatient nod. She was not Sappho now. She was Egeria. “God made you what you are. You did not create yourself. Therefore you may admit freely what you are.”

That he could never do, for God has also made critics, and critics, being unable to create anything, are
dangerous
to life. For though there may be those who will not betray us to others, they will still manage to betray us to ourselves.