Clara Mondschein's Melancholia

by Anne Raeff

  She didn’t tell me where we were going and didn’t ask me what I felt like doing. We drove around for a long time—up and down side streets slowly, ponderously slowly. She had the heater blasting and the music was still really loud. It was Celia Cruz. I closed my eyes, trying to pretend I was far away—Havana in the 1940s, sitting on a veranda facing the ocean, just watching people. I could almost feel a warm, salty breeze on my face.

  “Why are you closing your eyes?” Mercedes asked.

  “I’m tired.” I was embarrassed to tell her about Havana. “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know.” We drove around some more, but I kept my eyes open. “You can sleep if you feel like it,” Mercedes said.

  “That’s okay. I’m not tired anymore.”

  We were still driving really slowly, so slowly that I thought the cops were going to stop us for driving erratically, but I didn’t say anything. Mercedes headed up Clinton Avenue to 9W. She picked up speed a little, but not a lot. There was a line of cars behind us, but she didn’t seem to notice. We drove to one of the lookouts my father takes all his visiting professor friends to see. We go on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon after a big lunch and I always end up sitting in the backseat, feeling sick. We haven’t gone for a long time, though, or at least I haven’t. When my mother isn’t feeling well there are never any academic visitors.

  Mercedes parked the car really close to the edge (a little too close for my taste) so we wouldn’t have to get out to see the view. It was a clear night and we could see all the way down to the World Trade Center. She took out a bottle of rum and offered me a drink, which I accepted. “Warms you up, doesn’t it?” she said.

  “Actually alcohol lowers your body temperature.”

  “What about the St. Bernards and brandy?”

  “They don’t do that anymore.”

  “Well, we’re not going to get stuck in a snowstorm, so drink up.” Mercedes laughed and took a long swig. I tried not to think about how we were going to get home if we both got drunk and decided I would only pretend to take swigs so I could drive if I had to. But Mercedes caught me and then watched very carefully as I held the bottle to my lips. “That’s better,” she said. I decided to count how many swigs I took, but couldn’t figure out how many would be okay. Three, I thought, or maybe four would be fine, but then I lost track. If worse came to worst, we could sleep in the car.

  Then I thought we could drive to New York, go to the Eclair and eat Wienerschnitzel, and stay there until it closed. I thought Mercedes would like the atmosphere there even if it was quiet, and I almost suggested we go, but then we had some more rum and I got scared about driving all the way into the city in our condition. Now I wish we had gone and sat in a corner, ordered some wine, not coffee. It would have been nice to sit there like the old ladies.

  “I have a friend who’s an alcoholic,” I said, immediately feeling guilty for choosing George Liddy’s alcoholism as a way to introduce him. “He’s not only an alcoholic, though. He’s a poet, a prose poet.”

  “What school does he go to?” Mercedes asked, half-interested. It was the kind of question you could only ask if you really didn’t care. What does it matter what school someone goes to anyway, even if they do go to school?

  “He doesn’t go to school,” I said. I didn’t feel like getting into it anymore because that would have been too long a story and Mercedes had other things on her mind.

  “Leon wants me to go to Miami with him,” she said, as if she were asking for my approval.

  “Are you going to go?” I didn’t want to give her my opinion because I didn’t have enough information to formulate an opinion.

  “He hates the cold.” That didn’t seem like a good enough reason to leave one place to go to another, so I waited for more, but there was nothing more.

  “How about you? Do you hate the cold?”

  “I don’t really think about it,” Mercedes said. And there I was once again, stuck because what else can be said about the cold? I thought about saying that I really like the cold, especially when you come inside after being out in it and your cheeks are burning and you have an engrossing book to get back to, but that was not what we were talking about. And then it occurred to me that they must have had a fight or Mercedes wouldn’t have been sitting there with me, drinking rum and looking down onto the Hudson. She would be in a warm bed with Leon, not with me in a car. I saw them in her big double bed, or was it king-sized? Dark bodies on white sheets, long fingers resting on Leon’s hairless chest. Or maybe it wasn’t hairless; maybe he was hairy like Castro. I laughed and Mercedes asked me what was so funny. “Nothing,” I said. “So where’s Leon?” I couldn’t not ask her that question as much as I would have liked to say nothing, to sit there in the car with Mercedes and drink rum until the bottle was empty.

  “I don’t know. He gave me a number in New York, in case I change my mind about Miami. He’s leaving tomorrow.”

  “So why don’t you want to go?”

  “I do want to go, but what if . . .?”

  “What if what?”

  “What if everything gets fucked up?”

  “It won’t.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Mercedes turned up the music and took a long, celebratory swig. “To Miami,” she said and passed me the bottle.

  “To Miami,” I said as enthusiastically as possible because I knew my opinion was irrelevant. If she really wanted to go to Miami, she would go whether I thought it was a good idea or not, and I figured she might as well have a positive attitude about it from the start or things certainly would get all fucked up. At that moment I would have gone to Miami with them if Mercedes had offered, but of course she didn’t. Maybe it wouldn’t have been that bad. I could have spent all day walking on the beach or just exploring the city, and they could have done whatever they wanted to do without me bothering them. I could have gotten a job in one of the fancier hotels. I could have played the cello in the lobby or outside on the veranda, facing the ocean.

  On the way home Mercedes drove really fast. I don’t know which was worse—her slow driving or the speeding—but she floored it, and I thought for sure we were going to crash when she took the turn onto Engle Street. I was preparing myself for the worst, for the banal death of a late-twentieth-century teenager. As we raced down Engle Street, I was sure we were at least going to get stopped by the cops, and I even told her that if we got stopped, she definitely wasn’t going to Miami. Maybe she had changed her mind and didn’t want to go to Miami with Leon after all. Anyway, she kept on driving faster and faster, and then we were pulling into my driveway.

  “Well, thanks,” she said.

  “You’re welcome” was all I could think of saying. And then she leaned over and kissed me really hard on the lips, forcing her tongue way into my mouth. And I kissed her back. It wasn’t a very long kiss, but it wasn’t short either. I can’t remember which one of us pulled away first.

  “You have to get the fuck out of this town too, Deborah,” Mercedes said, looking into my eyes, but, of course, she didn’t ask me to come with her, and I’m glad she didn’t because I probably would have gone.

  At home I was faced with that nervous quiet that can only exist when you are not alone. It was a noxious silence, emanating like an odorless gas from my mother’s bedroom. I could feel it seeping out from the thin crack at the bottom of her closed door. I stood outside her room, half-hoping to hear crying or screaming or head-banging on the wall. Then I could have rushed in. And then what?

  The quiet made sleep impossible, so I closed the door to my room, took my cello carefully out of its case, rosining up the bow slowly, waiting to feel what piece I wanted to play, though I knew it would be Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suite no. 2 in D Minor. The music welled up in me, moving slowl
y and sadly around my breasts, circling my nipples, rubbing me as I drew the bow back and forth, back and forth over the strings.

  It doesn’t always happen, not every time I play one of the Unaccompanied Cello Suites, but, when it does, I can’t stop it, which scares me because I worry about losing control over my music, about sitting at orchestra practice, my eyes closed, the whole orchestra pounding around me and me crying out so that my voice carries above even the trumpets and timpani, so that everyone in the string section turns to look at me with my head back, screaming. I wonder if this happens to other musicians, too. Amy told me she had her first orgasm when she was riding her bicycle. She was nine, which is hard to believe, but she swears up and down it’s true. She was riding down to the tennis courts for her tennis lesson. She’s really bad at tennis, but she had a big crush on Jim Swenson, the tennis teacher. He is one of those tall, blond types with a square jaw and blond hair all over his legs. She loved Jim Swenson all the way through the seventh grade when he moved to Denver, and, as far as I know, that’s the last time she played tennis. Sometimes I wish I were more like Amy. I wish I could tell people things like they were no big deal. I wonder if the breathy staccato of a flute has the same effect on Mercedes as the cello does on me, but I can’t imagine that it does. There is something more distant about the flute. Maybe it’s because it’s metal. Anyway, Mercedes has Leon.

  I kept playing, hoping someone would emerge from the bedroom, scream at me that it was the middle of the night and what was I thinking. The more I played, the quieter it seemed and I swear I could smell my mother’s sickness in my room, though I know the odor wasn’t there. It was like when you are sleeping in a strange bed and you get the feeling that the sheets aren’t clean and you start imagining all kinds of unsavory odors. So I played and played because the last thing I wanted to do was lie in bed, imagining smells and trying to figure out why Mercedes kissed me and whether I should be angry about it, or just laugh because it was funny, thinking about Mercedes all freaked out in her room with the ceiling spinning, wondering why the hell she kissed me. And then I started thinking that maybe she wasn’t going to Miami to be with Leon, maybe she was going just to take off, go somewhere completely different. Maybe she was too scared to leave on her own and thought I would come with her, but then she was afraid to ask me. But ultimately people do what they want. If all she wanted was to get out of New Jersey, she didn’t need Leon or me, and if she had really wanted the kiss to mean something, it wouldn’t have ended there. Still, I wish Mercedes hadn’t kissed me because that just gave me one more thing that I couldn’t get out of my mind. It was like the smell of early spring. At first you want to breathe it in deeply because it means the winter is over and things are starting anew, but then it makes you sick, all that sweetness, and the pastel colors hurt your eyes.

  I almost wished that my mother were missing again like she had been in Madrid so that I would have an excuse to go out into the night looking for her. Instead of walking the crowded summer night streets of Madrid and pushing my way through people standing three rows deep in bars, faces wafting in and out of smoke, mouths busy shaping words or swallowing soft rings of squid, cold beer rushing down gullets dry from talk and a long day’s work, I would have to search the empty well-lit parking lots of the Grand Union and CVS or behind the well-pruned bushes of our neighbors. I might find her sitting at the counter of the Tenafly Diner, talking to the all-night waitress, sipping a cup of weak coffee. Would she start walking towards the city, or would she take a bus to another suburban town that we know about only from signs—Northvale, Harrington Park? How would she know where to get off? Perhaps she would ride the same bus all day long, back and forth from Northvale to the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal, and when the driver finally said it was over, would she be in New York or Northvale?

  In Madrid my father and I searched for my mother for two days, eating only one cold meal at night, poring over maps as if by looking at them my mother’s whereabouts would miraculously be revealed. Neither of us thought for even a moment that we would only find her when she was ready to be found, that otherwise Madrid’s old and narrow streets would hide her from us forever.

  At first we looked together. On the first day we set out early in the morning and combed Lavapíes. We went into every bar, every shop, asking if anyone had seen her. We even looked in all the dark corners of churches, thinking my mother might seek their cool shelter when she was tired from roaming. In the afternoon we made our way to the Puerta del Sol and covered each floor of the Corte Inglés department store, looking through every section equally carefully as if we thought my mother might have developed a sudden interest in towels and linens or electronic goods. We did not speak much while we were looking. We only spoke about our search—whether we should try another department store or move to cafés or museums or bookstores. By evening we were exhausted, but, though we no longer applied a systematic approach, we did not stop. We circled in and out of the same areas, passing the same bars and street corners over and over again. We no longer consulted the map and we talked even less, walking in a straight line until one of us felt the urge to turn. I think we thought that was what my mother was doing, walking in a dream of sorts, and that if we could imitate her mood and the randomness of her path, we would eventually find her.

  After our small dinner, my father said he wanted to try looking in the underground parking garages near the Plaza Mayor. All of a sudden he was sure that was where she would be and I followed him, though I was equally sure that she would not. We had been driven through these garages a few times on our infrequent outings to the movies by taxi drivers, who use them as shortcuts to avoid the traffic around the Puerta del Sol and the Plaza Mayor. It is true, my mother was fascinated by the heroin addicts who lined the narrow ramps of these garages. She said she understood what would drive someone to become like that and my father said that she couldn’t, that no one understood it, not even the addicts themselves. Some of the addicts in the garage were in the middle of shooting up while others were passed out, their arms and legs sticking out into the road so the taxi driver had to swerve to avoid hitting them. I walked with my father through that suffocating underground city. Every few steps a semi-lucid addict would lift himself up off the pavement just enough to ask us for money and at first my father was generous, handing out coins to all who asked, but after a while he ran out of change and then we walked by the addicts as quickly as possible. After we had been underground for over an hour, I started feeling dizzy from the exhaust and it was getting more and more difficult for me to make out anything in the dim light. I tried to convince my father to come up for air with me, promising that we could come back and look some more after we took a small break, had a cold drink and a bite to eat, but he would not leave the garage. He kept saying that he was sure she was there, that he could “feel her presence.” Then he stopped and grabbed onto both of my hands and squeezed them tightly. “You go home,” he said. Then he let go of my hands and walked away, leaving me standing there. Of course, I could have followed him, but I was tired and, just as he knew my mother was in the garage, I knew she wasn’t, so I left him underground and ran as fast as I could until I was outside in the air again.

  I didn’t go home, though. I kept searching, walking up and down the streets of Lavapíes until I found myself slowly climbing the worn stairs to our apartment. I don’t know when my father came home that night, but he woke me up at seven to tell me he was going out to look some more. I wanted to go with him, but I was too tired, so I told him that I would go out later and we made plans to meet at home around lunchtime. That night he went back to the garages and I went to the Barbieri. I thought that if my mother didn’t show up there, maybe George Liddy would and then I could sit with him for a while and forget about everything. But neither my mother nor George Liddy appeared that evening and I was too tired to keep looking. At around ten o’clock, after sitting in the Barbieri for over three hours without
reading or talking or writing, I went home.

  My mother returned that night at around midnight. My father and I were sitting in the living room with the lights off when we heard the key in the door. We stayed very still and when she called for us, we did not answer. She walked into the living room and felt for the light switch. The light blinded my eyes because we had been sitting in the dark for quite a long time.

  “What are you doing sitting in the dark?” she asked.

  “Waiting for you,” my father said.

  She told us that she had been in Cuenca, which may or may not have been true. We didn’t ask for proof, and she didn’t volunteer much information about the place except that the houses were all built into the cliffs, which everyone knows about Cuenca anyway. My father and I listened to her talking about Cuenca, and when she was finished, he told her that he was glad she was back. That’s when I left the room, said I was tired and was going to bed. But I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake listening to them talking quietly in the living room, trying to get up the nerve to jump out of bed and storm in there and just scream at them until my voice was hoarse, but I never did, and finally, long after I heard them go to bed, I fell asleep.

  After we found my mother, or rather, after my mother returned, I settled back into my old routine—class, then home for lunch, and then a movie or the Prado. I knew every painting in the Prado by heart by the end of that summer—even the ones I hated like the long, beefy El Greco Christs splayed on their crosses in ecstasy, lit up by a garish sky. I could spend an hour staring at Bosch’s Seven Deadly Sins or Velázquez’s El bufón. Yet Goya’s Pinturas negras were my favorites, especially the one of Saturn eating his child. You can really see how he is suffering over having to kill him. In the modern world murderers don’t have to feel their victims’ bones breaking or taste their blood or even hear them howling—just a nice clean shot or a nice big oven and they’re dead. If the Nazis had had to kill each of their victims with their own hands, bite off their heads like Saturn had to do, what happened might never have happened.