Prodigies

by Angélica Gorodischer

  4. The House

  In about 1801 a merchant dealing in fabrics named Hoenke or Hencken ordered the house built. In that same year Baron von Hardenberg, also known as Novalis, died, and as a result the businessman began to lose what little patience he had for his second son. The house was always for the wealthy, although immediately after it was finished, it seemed austere rather than modest. At the time, much was said about the fat merchant, fat in the portrait by an unknown painter who left only two letters, L and R, as a signature and an uncertain date, 1802 or 1809, on a painting that in the times of other owners wandered from basement to attic until a dealer took it, saying he knew of an American millionaire infatuated with old portraits of long-dead old men. It was said throughout the city that he placed the construction of the house in the hands of a builder who had fled the revolutionary wars to the south with his head and soul full of dreams of a Cisalpine Republic that would never come to pass, according to the local notables who assiduously participated in the salon at Ancher Inn. The builder had a twin brother who had been a glassblower and suffered from a pulmonary illness, but had neither wife nor children, and the first sketches he made for the construction of the house moved the fabric merchant to indignation: he was no fop in the French court, he said; he did not need damascene columns or pretty little stained-glass windows or curved staircases; he was only a poor merchant who needed a solid, comfortable house with large rooms, square windows, wide doorways, a large kitchen, and above all a spacious and dry basement where he could store his merchandise, and if the builder who had fled Veneto was not capable of sketching something like that, he would have to find someone else. The builder needed the fat man’s money, so he promised to leave fantasies aside as ordered and consulted his brother, who lay in a bed that faced the morning sun in a home for contagious illnesses presided over by Magdalene nuns. Coughing, sunken-chested, with red rashes on his cheeks and white patches beneath his eyes, his brother told him that getting annoyed was a virtue and could say hardly anything more because he began to cough again. The builder wanted his money, the merchant wanted a suitable house, and the sick man wanted to stay alive. The Magdalene nuns prayed day and night for the reprobates, the dying, the lost, the thieves and traitors, and the sad and suffering. The sick man died gently in his sleep in the wee hours of the night when the house had just been finished. It looked somber, serious, sedate, with just a ground floor, basement, and upper floor, on the slope of Scheller Street, which was not yet called that nor was it paved: it was called Mill Alley because at its farthest end there had been a flour mill powered by a water wheel, a building that had been converted into a weaving workshop after the river’s course through the city changed, drying out the pond. In spite of the mud and the distance to the market and the church, the merchant followed his tightfisted dreams, his petty interests, and the little metal voice in his ears and often in his eyes and mouth that had spoken to him upon buying the land about the advantage of being so close to where his merchandise was made. Having understood that, he envisioned the comings and goings of his servants under the wind and the sun but not the rain which could ruin the fabric, getting help for occasional hard jobs from some vagabond or beggar content with old bread and rancid cheese, with no need to pay for carts or horses since he already had enough expenses with the family coach, a white-footed horse, two dark bays, and a pinto, while bolt after bolt of fabric accumulated in the basement. The merchant rubbed his hands together: from weft and warp to his shelves, from rollers to his cashbox, from heddle to his wallet, rachet raising and lowering the battens to his utter profit. The builder went back to his homeland, and the participants at the Ancher salon shook their heads not in grief but rather with the certainty of those who knew whereof they spoke because they had been saying such things for years and had seen just how many times their predictions had come true. On the other hand, for the merchant, the mud and dreams and sleepless nights and stinginess proved him right, and he lit the house with fine oil lamps, decorated it with tapestries and carved chairs, and heated the main rooms with deep fireplaces and the bedrooms with iron braziers over a tray for ashes decorated in its center with the face of the god of fire, with flames coming out of his ears, nose, and mouth. The marriageable daughter planted a garden, telling him it would surround the house with flowers of every color, and one of these plants, useless bug-harbors according to her father, grew up to her window, which she considered a good sign; but that plant and only that one never flowered. The younger son who had wept at the death of the poet Novalis wrote pamphlets against the emperor, and the elder son insisted that Europe was exhausted, undone, finished, impoverished, and the best thing to do would be to leave for the Americas, that new world where shovels-full of gold lay on the surface of the earth, where there was joy and riches for everyone, and where one year of work would yield a lifetime of luxurious relaxation. In spite of a rich husband found for his daughter, neither the emperor nor the flowers nor the Americas interested the master of the house on Mill Alley. It was not yet Scheller Street although, since he had bought the land, it had grown to stretch beyond the workshop, curving along the river, giving rise to spacious, sturdy, and square homes like the fabric merchant’s. No one was surprised in the salon at Ancher Inn, for they knew the younger son and had predicted something like that, since he was the brunt of jokes and poetic parodies: as the result of a poorly written and designed broadsheet stuck on a wall, blundering soldiers wrecked a neighbor’s door instead of knocking down the merchant’s and threw everyone there in jail. The soldiers, and worse, their commanders, were not keen intellects, rather the reverse; they listened, asked to be told again what they had just heard, thought about it, asked for clarifications, insisted that they had not been mistaken, and listened yet again and tried to understand; meanwhile the merchant had time to turn almost all his possessions into gold, haul his sons to the border disguised as coachmen, but first he delivered his marriageable daughter to the manager of the workshop with a nuptial contract stipulating that the house would always be hers and he could not sell it without her consent; and after that, no one was sure where he went. Later it was said he had gone to Cajamarca or Catamarca, one of those cities in South America in the middle of the Amazon where gold, diamonds, fevers, exotic fruits, grains and fibers, and slaves and fragrant wood appeared out of thin air. The girl was fourteen years old and the workshop manager sixty-three. She was as tightfisted as her father, but from her mother, who had died giving birth, she had been brought into the world with a bit of a taste for beauty intensified by her brother’s madly written odes imitating Novalis which he had read to her at night in secret, very late, by candlelight. She had not wanted to listen to them, she only wanted to slumber, warm under the covers, her head on the pillow, asleep, but the words crept in as she drowsed and perhaps her eyes saw them, ears heard them, fingertips touched them, and dreams held them captive, so she did not forget them—not only that, they burst forth the next day in plans and projects. Probably she was not happy but the workshop owner got richer and richer and had earlier been married to a woman who had died without producing children: now he had a young wife with a full belly and breasts and an imagination blind and deaf to impossibility. He planted trees in front of the south facade that faced the alley, added an extra floor for servants, and installed a garden for her and the children, seven of them, of whom four survived. The workshop owner did not meet his seventh child, one of the long-lived ones. He awoke one night with horrible pains in his chest and arms and was ill for four days, during which they bled him, gave him warm dressings and mustard plasters and salves, murmured incantations, prayed the Rosary, chilled his feet and warmed his abdomen, gave him strong drink and bauhinia extract, all useless because on the fourth day, to his sorrow, fighting to keep his soul, he gave it up to the Lord. The widow was still young, pink and plump, with a generous mouth, eyes like her visionary brother, and blond hair down to her belt which she tied in a wide bun at the back of her neck held by hairpins of fine
metal and stones. She bore her seventh child amid unwanted pity, nursed him and called him all the names that she had stopped calling the other children as they grew, careful not to use the names she had invented for the children no longer there, while she administered the workshops and counted the money that kept accumulating. Ancher Inn got new owners, and those who used to meet in its salon every night dispersed toward the neighborhoods surrounding the market: there was no one to shake his head predicting misfortune. The widow married again, to a young man this time, rich but not as rich as she was, who took her to live in Kiel. They loaded up everything they had, which was a lot—children, furniture, servants, clothing, animals—and they left. The house remained, which she did not wish to sell.

  The house stood empty for ten years until the city authorities decided to demolish it, but not without first publishing official notices calling for its owners or heirs. No one answered: perhaps no one found out; perhaps the heirs did not know, being as they were far away, that the house their grandfather had built so many years earlier when the Rheinischer Merkur was published, Novalis died, and the Peace of Lunéville was signed, was in danger. It remained standing nonetheless; in spite of conspiracies, desperation, the long dark night of the empire and the color of the horizon, it remained solidly, squarely standing, windows covered, blind and mute, with weeds snaking around it, stained by rain but upright, until the municipality thought better and decided to install its land and civil registry offices there. Mill Alley became Scheller Street, after someone whose memory had been revived, and paving stones covered the mud, for the world had begun to transform itself. They cleaned the house but did no more; no decorations, no plants that climbed to the balconies, no tapestries or curtains or fine furniture; just a waiting room, a place to spend time, to sit without speaking in drowsiness if not sleep without dreams, the useless activity of useless little men who looked at nothing and if they had looked would have seen nothing, hoping to capture, trap, and fool death.

  So when the municipality sold some of its properties, it was a naked, hard body, a stranger in the landscape that was changing, attentively echoing what had once and always happened, voices and footsteps, misfortunes, foolishness, cries of newborns, ambitions stained by the sublime, and even the heavy shadow of Novalis. It was bought by a magistrate known throughout the region for his wisdom and turn of phrase, his activities in the Progressive Party, and the beauty of his wife. Strangely, and against the grain of its history, the house took on French airs: overelaborate iron balconies, a mansard, terraces, gay gardens, and gaslights appeared; curtains and rugs, fringed embroidered tapestries, crystal, molding, and gilt vases to flank the doors. The bureaucratic furniture disappeared and what replaced it had slim arched feet and springy seats covered by silky fabric. The mirrors and paintings multiplied, and once a week music played and songs were sung in the salon, and twice a year guests arrived in sparkling coaches pulled by bright-maned horses with colored ribbons braided into their tails, horseshoes sparking on the stones of Scheller Street; women dressed in gauze and velvet danced with men in elaborate uniforms gleaming with medals, epaulettes, and braiding. No one was further from the fat Hoenke than this polished and smiling master of the house who quoted Blum and Ruge and supported Stephen Born and danced with the wife of a member of the Assembly without losing sight of the groups that continued to cluster in the salon and thought about the advantages he could take from the smiles and the conversations coming to life there. No one could have been more different from the cloth merchant than this rash polemicist, good Catholic, and member of the Grossdeutsche, who talked about federalism, the Volkgeist, and the Malmoe armistice with the men; about Pergolesi, George Sand, and Werther with the women. And yet, despite the differences, across the years and shadows, they would have understood each other, sympathized, and exchanged winks and gestures of recognition: they would have felt themselves accomplices in their appetites, determination, and certainty that they were going to achieve their plans. The fat merchant had been defeated by a crazed and melancholy son; the magistrate would be defeated by a financial crisis and marital misfortune. One of the daughters of the beautiful wife and the magistrate married a banker and remained in the house when her mother went to live in London and her brothers married and bought other houses. It did not matter to her that one winter day dawned with her father hanging from a beam in the mansard, his face violet, his feet bare, swinging, his neck held by his own belt, pushed by the wind blowing through the open windows; or perhaps she believed it was her duty to remain, or she felt closer to her childhood there, safekeeping the death of her father, or she wished to remember it every morning by holding it so near, or to forget it by keeping it too near to be seen. The daughter was named Hebe, a Greek name that meant precisely young daughter, the little girl of the house; and her husband, bearded and very rich, was named Heinrich-Marie-Joszef. She would have scorned the fat, greedy merchant who had built the house where she lived: she would not have honored him with a greeting if she had passed him in the avenue in the new park, he in a coach with a running board, she in a light calash, he dressed in dark clothing, cape, and wide-brimmed hat, she in white with sea-green ribbons, hat held with gold pins, and lace parasol. She would not even have looked at him, could not have been his accomplice in the shadows as her father could have been. But she knew nothing of all this. She knew her husband was one of the richest men in the city and because of that, she, her sons, her daughters, and her house had to be the handsomest in the city. She knew she liked to get up late, bathe and wear perfume, call on friends, play whist, go out with her sons and especially her daughters who looked so much like her, host dinners and parties, go to the theater, sit beneath the trees in the garden in summer and next to the fire in the hearth in winter, travel, listen to popular singers, and be accustomed to expensive dresses. Once she felt doubts, or a cloud, hiatus, or ice made her pause, overcome by a step into emptiness; once a question harried her or time betrayed her; the shadow of the young goddess laughed instead of her, the little girl of the house; the world swayed as her father had swayed in the wind hung on his own belt, and life lost its shape and became useless, without width, substance, destiny, something she could release without anyone realizing she no longer held it, and she asked: Am I dying now, is there nothing more, and if not, what mark, what trace, what clue, what vestige, what hint will remain, what can I do, who would remember me for just one day; and in this final moment what am I myself going to remember: travel, men, dances, dresses, parties, monsters, jungles, my father, earthquakes, or playing cards, wine, tears, beings with leathery wings who dance in a too-cold wind, bottomless abysms to fall into? And she said no, oh no, please no, but it was no more than a second, less then a second before taking another step down the staircase, getting into the coach, and leaving. That night she docilely let her husband take her and he thought that she seemed too complacent, so much that perhaps she had a lover and felt guilty; but he looked at her and as he did, he remembered so many of the things that he had said about her that it could not be, for she did not have the stuff for a sustained lie, she was stupid, very beautiful and very stupid, to his good luck. And the next morning as he left he spent a moment looking at the house and the street on which it stood and thought about his wife, about how submissive and delicate she had been, and, smiling, he gave an order to the groom. He rode proudly down Scheller Street next to the river with its white mansions and groves of trees and gardens traversed by coaches like his pulled by English or Arabic horses, and lit by gas streetlights at night. He thought he could spend his whole life there and die there, but that was not the case. They sold the house eighteen years later when their youngest daughter, the one who looked most like her mother, married, and they went to live in Berlin where Heinrich-Marie had interests in several new stock investment funds. They left the house sadly: for a moment before the move certain memories regathered strength but faded in the haste of preparations, broke into ever more pale pieces trapped in corners, on the roo
f, in the opening of a door, and the shadow of the transom, and died abandoned when the last coach left. The name of the new owner was Lundgren, of Swedish extraction, great-grandson of the poet Asa Lundgren and a distant relative, according to him, of the founder of Lund. His father had arrived in the city on a business trip and had never returned to Sweden: there he had stayed, there he had married, there he had worked and had amassed a discrete fortune; there he had had five children, had seen them grow and learn, marry and have children; and there he had died a few years previous, six months after his wife. The Lundgrens had a daughter whose name was also Greek but in no way resembled the banker’s wife, that little girl of the house always young, guardian of her father’s death, perhaps because launching a thousand ships is very different from remaining the same today as yesterday and the day before yesterday and the same tomorrow as today and yesterday. When the first telephones were installed and the electric locomotive began to propel itself and Maddox tested silver nitrate plates, when Das Kapital and On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection were published, when an anxious young man in Vienna composed his Letter about Graduation to Emile Baron Fluss, when the torpedo and reinforced concrete were invented, the parents of Helena Lundgren celebrated the wedding of their daughter with a party in the house on Scheller Street. The husband was an Austrian doctor, fifteen years older than she was, who took her to live in Linz. He had seen a serious and strong girl, decisive and discrete, dressed in light blue; a quiet and unexcitable girl who did not dance well or laugh hard but walked directly without waving her arms or hands, and he had thought she would be the best person to wait for him at home after he did his rounds or his shift in a hospital ward; she would be there, without questions or expecting too much from him; she would smile little and ask for little. She had seen him as a stranger, someone distant, as hidden as treasures buried by the corsairs on the beaches of Tortuga; a solid and unexpected man whom she would discover little by little until she reached the most precious gold at the bottom of a chest battered by time; someone who, reluctant at first but later agreeable, would let her share his dreams and desires; someone who would provide water for her fantasies so she could bathe in them and emerge as a different person, dressed in the most exquisite gold. Helena Lundgren thought she had lived just for that, for that moment when, at a gathering of young people, she had seen him talking with a friend’s father on the other side of the salon while she was dancing with someone more than forgettable. The married couple received magnificent gifts because Mr. Lundgren was well-connected to wealthy local families, and they left that same night by train. Mrs. Lundgren wept a little, but Mr. Lundgren told her, come now, come now; the guests went home and the servants washed the tablecloths and shook out the rugs.