Remember Me (3 page)

B
etween himself and his father there had been little sympathy. To Ludwig his father had always been a stern and unapproachable bureaucrat. When he heard he was dying he felt the wild jubilance an animal feels when its keeper disappears. But once inside the sickroom and he felt differently about the matter. He had never seen death before, and once the door closed behind him, he was alone with it and saw it plain.

King Max had been recuperating from an illness in Italy. That their monarch should take his sniffles abroad had so incensed the public press, and of all those who fear the public press, those who own it fear it most, that the cabinet had clamoured for his return. He came
unwillingly
. Once in the capital, and death had methodically prepared to gather him in, with the others of that day, as an unforeseen but valuable catch.

The sickroom was too high, too dusky, and too closed up. The state bed was very tall. And on the bed lay what was left of his father. It was curious how important that body had become, now that it had no importance
whatsoever
. A sound came from the bed. It wasn’t a pretty sound. It was the sound of an actor who has reached those lines he never had the time to rehearse. Ludwig moved towards the bed reluctantly.

It was the first time he had seen that expression which, like the features of the sleeping, seems to show the naked soul within. His father now looked vulnerable and human and curiously tired, for the face of the judicious public servant he had forced himself to become had dropped away, revealing the innocent face of a conscientious stoic underneath.

Ludwig was moved, and because he was moved, he was frightened. He did not want to see any more, and
desperately
waited for his father to die. It did not take long, but the process was far from comforting. In the hours just before death we look in the face and see for the first time how little age has been able to alter the ultimate self within. The dying in this are beyond mortality.

The King’s bedroom was shadowy. His father lay under the sheets of the state bed like an abandoned bundle. Not only his country, but his priest had finished with him, and he knew it. It did not make his death any easier.

Death for Ludwig had never been and never could be the hobbled old man of the Christians, rattling his scythe. Death for him would always be a cool, aloof, and
dangerous
young man, Hermes Psychopompos come for a stroll down into the sulphur shades.

Yet the young men of the gymnasia, summoned to their fathers’ couches in the atrium, must also have glimpsed the truth that smiling beauty is not a matter of the body, but of the spirit, so that Hermes is a youth to all ages, who comes laughing and friendly to the suicide, but it is grave and consoling to the state councillor. Age is mortal, for it is ugly, but youth is a fragment of eternity. To kings age is an occupational disease, and so is death. It is inherited. Each succeeding king is a little less alive, for the weight of the dead monarchs of his line, and
ancestors are vampires. They suck out our substance. They leave nothing but a shell. That is the way dynasties die. They silt up with themselves, until they grow useless, like abandoned ports which time leaves far inland.

Even as he watched, his father disappeared, leaving behind him no heritage but his mortality. Ludwig turned and fled the room, as one would flee contagion.

Outside the corridor he bumped into that silly old man, the Archbishop. The Archbishop cleared his throat.

“The Lord has taken a good King from us. Let us now pray that he may give us such another,” he said.

Ludwig merely stared at him. Did he really believe a good king was that empty, rattling shell in the bedroom? The Archbishop bowed down before him. It was
certainly
gracefully done. Your headsman on the block could have done it no better. For the first time he heard himself called “Your Majesty”.

He did not like the sound of it at all. It was as though the Archbishop had wielded a snuffer instead of a crozier. He did not want to be King. He wanted to be alive. He did not want to be extinguished by the leaden weight of a crown. He wanted to burn. He needed privacy to think, and now he was King there would be none.

*

That had been three days ago. And now, deferential and contemptuous as trained nurses, the servants had finished preparing him for immolation downstairs. He went out into the ante-rooms, to his suite, a collection of uniforms without faces. The little company moved
towards
the stairs and then went down. Ludwig felt locked up in himself. It was difficult to walk with the proper gravity. He went down the steps with the peculiar gait of a painted steel duck at a shooting gallery. The duck
has no volition. It can only hope the marksmanship is bad.

A king has no identity. As a man sitting for his
portrait
loses for an hour or so his identity, to become merely what the painter sees in him, so, too, a king, and in
particular
a constitutional king, is no more than the living model of the state portraits in his own halls. He is merely a number after a royal name. His only importance is to be a link in a chain. Ludwig shrank from that.

The party reached the state apartments, the Reich Zimmer, high-ceilinged and rococo. He felt slim and naked in his uniform. The throne room lay unavoidably ahead, with courtiers ranked on either side in order of precedence. He could not turn back, but neither would he look back. He walked instead into a maelstrom of swirling tulle, amongst which stood red trouser legs like the inimical legs of wading birds. He had entered upon that long corridor which has no doors, and the emptiness was vast.

And what did the courtiers see? No doubt they thought him more pliable than he was, for he was too beautiful to have a mind. People of that beauty appear but seldom and bloom only for a little while. The young king was a work of art, and people will worship a work of art the first time they see it, for it momentarily shocks them into awe. That might seem to give him a margin of time. He saw a sea of faces. They saw a beautiful boy who had a reputation for reading too much. They could not see his future or his mind. He was seventeen, very tall and very slim. His face was the face of a kitten who knows too much. The eyes had a tarsier brilliance, which concealed the fact that they opened on vast echoing caves. The lips were as perfect as any Cupid by Canova, and his teeth were small, pointed, and white. Angels must look like this, when completely preoccupied by the necessities of
their calling. But it was not so much the features, as the radiance that made him so unusual to see. It was a
disembodied
face. It did not belong to anybody. It was a silver death mask of someone a god had ruinously loved. And silver tarnishes.

He reached the dais and ascended the steps to stand before the throne. He glanced at the assembly, hedged in as he was by the Cabinet and officers of state, creaking around him like dead trees. From the walls of the room twelve statues of dead Wittelsbachs looked down at him. Thus would a captive animal look round the confines of his first decent cage. Thus Charles I must have gone to the scaffold, and Schiller’s Maria Stuart to the block. Thus the victim was made King.

He did not listen. As everyone knew, he read too much, and he had early developed the habit of consoling
himself
with legends. Lohengrin, Parsifal, and Tristan ruled his mind, and he was eager for their creator. Meanwhile he retold himself a story. The prime minister stepped
forward
, clutching the speech from the throne.

Ludwig changed the scene. Instead of himself, Elsa of Brabant looked into the distance. She was waiting for a champion to save her from those around her court. She had prayed and her prayer was about to be answered. Her eyes were tightly closed. For a moment Ludwig also closed his eyes. From the far end of the estuary a swan appeared, sailing calmly towards Antwerp, rising and falling over the flaccid water, drawing the small boat of Lohengrin. The swan reached the jetty of that town, the saddest of the Northern ports. Elsa of Brabant and her stomachered ladies moved slowly towards the foreshore, through a landscape by Tiepolo. Ludwig II Wittelsbach opened his eyes and took the oath to the constitution. It was noticed by the assembly that his voice, though firm,
was thin, and had in it some abstracted quality. It was almost as though he were calling on someone.

He was.

The prime minister read the speech from the throne, a speech Ludwig had not written and had not seen. To the prime minister, however, it was clearly a moment of great importance. He was neither a sensitive nor an
agreeable
man, but he seemed to feel the occasion. Ludwig wanted very much to laugh. But he did not dare to laugh. Very soon now he would be able to send for Lohengrin. For the moment he concentrated on something else.

He did not precisely have hallucinations, but his mind had the tricky ability of making mental experience actual. It was sometimes an enormous help, particularly when he felt lonely, or afraid and in need of friends.

So now on the steps of the dais, beside the throne, lay the warm, palpitating bulk of a black-haired Alsatian with yellow eyes. Ludwig took comfort in his sudden presence. His name was Doppelgänger. His pink tongue flicked in and out over white fangs. He, at least, was real, and lovable, and loving. His right paw hung
languidly
over the dais.

Imperturbably Prime Minister von Shrenk went on reading the speech from the throne, fully aware that he would be reproduced in the newspapers as a steel
engraving
by the end of the week. As a matter of fact, he rather looked like a steel engraving.

Meanwhile the dog Doppel offered some comfort, except that Ludwig did not really want to remember him. He had been shot accidentally many years ago, and since then Ludwig had disliked dogs. He did not know why.

I
n former ages, when royalty attained to the throne or a dictator turned out the party previously in power, the first new acts demanded of him were preordained: he rewarded favourites; raised cronies; debased his rivals; defeated the enemy; and destroyed the memory of his predecessor. Such was the ancient prerogative of kings. Ludwig was not concerned with any of that. Suddenly, after years of anxiety, he was King and there was nothing to do. It was like arriving at a much coveted country house for tea, only to discover that it had been removed by a bomb, for the parliamentary system made the
education
of politicians unnecessary, and that of princes futile.

They had decided to introduce him to politics, in the same spirit in which a man who would ride breaks in a horse. They had taken the saddle and bridle off King Max, and now they were ready to slip it over him. He felt quite clear-headed and watched his ministers warily. The ministers had funnelled down into the presence of Herr von Pfistermeister. For Herr von Pfistermeister Ludwig had prepared what he was sure would be a small, but disagreeable surprise.

At the moment however Herr Pfistermeister was delivering himself of one of those lectures upon politics which seemed to be his speciality. His approach to
politics
was that of a chef to food. He did not actually eat it himself, but he liked to prepare it. Ludwig did not intend to eat it either. Pfistermeister was a bumbling,
conscientious
, narrow-minded, black-eyed, and unredeemable idiot.

They stood in the small sitting-room of Ludwig’s old rooms on the top floor of the Residenz Palace, for he had refused to move into the now empty apartments of his father on the floor below. Herr Pfistermeister came to the end of a very long sentence and closed his mouth. The sunlight made what hair he had seem thin.

Ludwig cleared his throat uneasily. It was, after all, the first request he had ever made. He had never dared to ask for things before. Now he was about to command something for the first time.

“You will leave for Vienna to-morrow,” he said.

Herr Pfistermeister blinked.

“I want Wagner brought here.”

Herr Pfistermeister looked puzzled and then frightened. In those days Wagner was less a composer than a
revolutionary
. A princeling, clearly, might demand a mistress and be gratified, but a composer was another matter.

Herr Pfistermeister’s face was more plastic than it looked. It now showed the exasperated anger of a man confronted with the unknown. Ludwig smiled. “Find him,” he said. “This evening I will tell you what I want you to say to him.”

He felt on surer ground now. The thought of this tubby, perspiring substitute for Parsifal setting off on the train in quest of someone else’s Holy Grail was endlessly amusing. He could hardly wait. A great deal depended upon Wagner.

Suddenly he felt safe. He had been spied upon so long, by his tutors and his relatives, that he had forgotten that
nobody can read another man’s thoughts. In that lay security.

Herr Pfistermeister hesitated, and then left the room. He was almost too upset to bow.

Ludwig was very happy. He had something to look forward to now. In former ages the Wittelsbachs had patronized great men. Dürer and Orlandus Lassus had been attached to their court. Now he would patronize Wagner. Wagner, he felt, held the keys to his soul. Wagner would be his friend. Alone and friendless, one day at the house of his uncle, he had come upon one of Wagner’s books. He had felt friendless no longer. He felt that in Wagner he had found a kindred soul. In the book Wagner had asked where was the prince who would foster his works, and when he read that, it was to Ludwig as though he had heard a voice in the room, a voice he had always known, that always understood him and could help him with himself. No one else was there to help. Wagner must do. He waited anxiously.

A week later Pfistermeister unwillingly announced that he had found Wagner at Zurich. To Ludwig it was the beginning of everything. Wagner was his spiritual autobiography. Wagner had written Lohengrin, and from the windows of Hohenschwangau Ludwig had long watched the white swans bringing and taking away the seasons. Wagner had the power to animate all the legends of childhood, which Ludwig had never hoped to know except as dreams. To Wagner he would have much to say. As he had thought of Elsa of Brabant on the day of his coronation oath, so he thought of her now. It made no difference that the only thing Wagner could understand about his admirers was their admiration. Ludwig could offer more than admiration: he could offer power. With Wagner he would design new rooms for his own soul to
move in. He had once written in a school essay that one should take as a model a real man, good and energetic in every respect, and make him a guide for one’s own
conduct.
In order to reach the self, one had to follow
someone
else. Now his life would be fulfilled.

He sent Pfistermeister back to Zurich with a
photograph
, a verbal message to come to Munich, and a gold ring set with a ruby like a weeping eye.

*

To Wagner, at Zurich, Pfistermeister was no more real than he was to Ludwig. But as he listened, it was like a scene from one of his own operas, in which he preferred to live anyway. Once assured that the performance was genuine, and he knew exactly what to do. He could not sing his acceptance, but his spirit sang. It seemed
impossible
to him that this could at last have occurred to him, but that it should happen to somebody seemed
altogether
natural, for it was the plot of half his works. The hero suffers and is saved, usually by a loyal liegeman. In the cloudy metaphysics of his art, salvation was always possible, and now it was here. It was the closest he could ever come to glee. He agreed to entrain at once.

Herr Pfistermeister saw the matter differently. He had his duty to perform, but that did not mean that he liked it. To him Wagner was a dangerous radical, and a North German into the bargain. Also he used too much scent. With the exception of portrait painters, great artists lived only in the past. They had no business walking around in the world of the living, where they could be as
dangerous
as saints. He could scarcely get away from Wagner fast enough.

Once they reached Munich, he dropped Wagner at an hotel and scuttled off to report to the King, his forehead prickling with perspiration, as a dancer sweats most not
during the performance, but immediately after it, to think what he has done wrong. The King, of course, was delighted. Pfistermeister was soon dismissed, but not before he had seen the look of ecstasy on Ludwig’s face. That look disturbed him. Pleasure was not an emotion to be displayed before ministers, even by kings. It hinted at instability. Besides genius was expensive. It always demanded to be paid for what it would do next, rather than for what it had just done, and its fertility was apt to be inexhaustible. Previous Wittelsbachs had
exhausted
the treasury through a mania for architecture, but at least architecture served to keep out the rain and could be broken up into small livable rooms. An opera could not.

Once Pfistermeister had taken his fiscal tribulations away with him, Ludwig went back to bed. It was after midnight. The bed was badly rumpled. He went to the window and gazed across the square. Already in his life he had looked out of too many windows, for windows are mirrors which show us everything but ourselves. Seeing the square below him made him uneasy. On the opposite side of it rose the bland face of the Theatinerkirche, up whose steps had been carried the body of the king, his father, while his brother Otto and he had walked slowly behind, with the whole weight of Munich behind them.

There is a painting by Caspar David Friedrich called “The Ages of Man”. He had seen it once. On a low shore projecting into the distance is the family. Walking
towards
them is a man in a syndic’s cloak, carrying a cane and wearing a velvet beret such as Wagner wore in
photographs
. The father protects the family from the intruder, and is not pleased to see the man in the velvet cap.
Beyond
the family, far over the weak horizon, vanish a series of high-masted ships. It is impossible to tell
whether they are coming or going, but one is afraid they are coming, just as the man in the velvet cap approaches the family. It is a picture filled with fear, for our death lurks in anything we love. These ships are like the great creaking rotten barque that brought the vampire
Nosferatu
to Hamburg. The moment is evening, and the light beyond the horizon only provokes profound dis-ease.

Below the Theatinerkirche, in the whitewashed crypt, stood the lead coffins of almost half of the Wittelsbachs, tarnished by time, each with its coronet or crown, coffins in all sizes, to match the age of any man; and in the midst of that shifting darkness stood the bright new sarcophagus of his father, surmounted by a crown. In the blue shadows the door of the church might open, the coffin might appear in the square, and Wagner might die before morning. The weight of his family there in their crypt seemed to stifle him.

He closed the window, but he could not sleep. He had a white night, haunted by the closed doors of the
kirche,
by the thought of Wagner in his hotel, and by the “Ages of Man”, whose artist, like Wagner, was also a blond child of the sea with great searching eyes the colour of transparent nakedness. At last he slept a little while.

At his hotel Wagner was no more easy. Within himself he was already a great man, but not yet to the world. Thus must a statue wait anxiously to be unveiled, as though it could have no reality until others saw it. The sculptor knows better. So should the artist, too. The statue is not the maker. The statue is the thing made. Only that deserves our fame.

He wished that he were better dressed. It was difficult to carry matters off from time to time, and he had had fifty years to learn what the staff says in the pantry.

Alone in his bedroom, he tried to face the matter out.
It was a typical bedroom of the period, large, airy,
high-ceilinged
, but with wallpaper as maniacally fluctuant as an eye test for the colour-blind. He wondered about the
sincerity
of the King. The sincerity of princes can be as
transient
and as narrow as their intelligence. Still, the King was not yet twenty. It should not be difficult to dazzle him. He was still young enough to listen to the conjuror without watching his hands. If that were true, all would be well.

There were three operas unperformed in his drawer and six unwritten in his head. It would be pleasant not to worry about money any more. He would have to be
indulgent
. He had much to be indulgent for. After all, it would only be a stop-gap measure. Genius takes the easiest way out, and the easiest way out is to be dishonest about trifles. He would do whatever was expected of him. The interest of royalty, like the attention of birds, could not be held for long. It dissipated at the first cracking of an
incautious
twig. He would need patience only for a while.

He slept until wakened for his interview. At the
Residenz
he waited in the ante-room. The door was open, and he entered. In the room he saw two young men, for the King was with an aide-de-camp, Paul of Thurn and Taxis. In him, too, Ludwig had once hoped to find a true friend, but Wagner could not know that. Yet even so there was a togetherness about the two young men that did not belong to men, in Wagner’s opinion, but only to men accompanied by women. It was a peep into a world he was not meant to see, as a man leaning over a
staircase
in a country house he has visited before, sees far below him the mistress talking to the maid he had
previously
forgotten to tip. It worried him. So much
depended
on their meeting. To Wagner, Ludwig and Paul resembled those marvellous portraits by Philip Otto
Rünge in which the people are like dandified fruit. They seemed to stare at him with the same svelte, velvety, edible incuriosity. Ludwigmade a motion and Paul left the room.

Suddenly self-conscious, Wagner advanced. There was no denying that the King was ravishingly beautiful, with a silvery androgynous charm, but it was a
disturbing
beauty. It consisted of something besides beauty that he did not know the name of, but which made him feel soiled and ashamed. Then the King smiled. It was a radiant smile. Suddenly Wagner felt that everything would be all right.

Ludwig felt nothing of the sort. He had expected Siegfried and Lohengrin, or Merlin at the least. What he saw was a small man with short legs and a head that lurched on his shoulders like a burlap sack stuffed with eels. The vision lasted only a second, but it lodged in his mind, for the reality of his latest illusion might be useful later. After all, he had loved before. At least he had learned that much. But now, wanting only to see the ideal self, he rushed forward to embrace the man he regarded as the Master. Reality is thought: illusion resides in the senses and the fingertips. It was better to touch as soon as possible. Ugliness was one thing. The ugliness of a man who wanted something and was afraid he wouldn’t get it was quite another. That ugliness he had instantly to abolish, for if he saw it, he would see nothing else. He had not known before that the patron must be careful not to see too much.

Wagner was not conscious of being ugly at all. They talked for almost two hours. Ludwig had never talked with a great man before, and Wagner had never talked to a rich one, so there was much to say. It was like the
display
of the Amherst pheasant. They were both top-heavy
with the gorgeous weight of dreams fulfilled, the feathers ruffled out.

To Ludwig it was the correct length of time, for he longed to rush to his rooms to savour the experience alone. To Wagner it could not be long enough. He hated solitude. He could only live in public, surrounded by much human noise. Ludwig felt sorry. Wagner was so obviously terrified that the meeting might fail. Ludwig had to prove that it had not failed. He asked the composer to come to Berg in May.