Clara Mondschein's Melancholia

by Anne Raeff

“‘You are asking me the same question with different words. After all this time, do you take me for an idiot?’ he said, showing anger for the first time.

  “‘No, I am asking myself these questions. Why would I want to bring the child of my enemy into this world?’

  “‘Am I really your enemy? I thought we were friends of sorts, strange friends, but still friends. And since my boyhood, I have shied away from friendship.’ His face was as close to mine as it had ever been. His breath smelled of cognac and cigarettes. I did not move away from him this time. I looked right into his eyes and breathed in his breath.

  “‘Perhaps, then, you have forgotten what it means.’

  “‘On the contrary. Only deprivation gives one an understanding of the value of what is missing.’

  “‘Then we Jews must be the wisest people in the world.’

  “‘There have been many persecuted peoples and there will be many more. And over and over there will be times when the persecuted will become the persecutors. Valuing what one does not have has nothing to do with wisdom. On the contrary, deprivation leads to cruelty and selfishness.’

  “Later, when Karl and I visited Israel, I remembered his words, and it made me seethe with anger to realize that he had predicted what I saw and I wanted to stand on a street corner and tell the world that the commandant was surely laughing in his grave because he was right, because we have turned out no better than he did.

  “The Commandant insisted that I sleep on his proposal, though I told him I didn’t even have to think for a second to arrive at my answer. But he insisted. He stood up, opened the door, called for the guard and I was dismissed. ‘Good night,’ I said as I walked out.

  “‘Good night, Ruth,’ he said. It was the only time he ever called me by my name.

  “When I went back to the barracks that night, I came up with a plan—I would kill him in his bed. I would kill him and take his gun and kill the guards, pounce on them all when they least expected it, when they were enjoying a cigarette. Then I would liberate the camp, so the world could see us—emaciated mutes wandering the countryside—and someone would give us shelter. But as I lay awake fantasizing, it was almost as if I could feel him laughing about my heroic little plan—sipping his cognac and laughing. Sometimes I think he was a soothsayer of sorts, that he knew I was pregnant, could smell it, could see the child growing inside my thinning frame. But how could he possibly have known when I myself had not even begun to suspect, and would not until my fourth month when I felt my belly becoming heavier despite my starvation diet? How different this second time was from the first, when I was overcome with that voracious hunger. How odd the human body and mind, that when I was practically starving, I had very little desire to eat.

  “When he called for me, I was shaking because I thought for sure my answer to his request would anger him, that something terrible would happen. I thought for sure he had been planning all along to rape me, that all this had been a perverse prelude for him and that in the end he would have his way. But that is not how it turned out. He just laughed and said, ‘I suppose that brings an end to our little friendship.’ Then he called the guards, and I was taken away. After that, I used to wonder if he had found someone else to entertain him on those long, cold nights. The only thing more I know about our commandant is that he committed suicide, put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger while the Russians were liberating us. At least that’s what they said. The Russian soldiers hung his body from the flagpole and, as I watched it swinging in the sun, I was sure that he—not my endurance, not fate—was the reason Clara had survived. What would Clara do if I called her up right this moment and told her that she owes her life to the commandant of Pribor? Would she say I should have killed her at birth rather than let him triumph over us?”

  That was when Tommy woke up. It was the middle of the night. The music had stopped. First his body was taken over by convulsions—his arms flailed, his legs shook, his head threw itself back and forth with such strength that I thought his neck would break. I tried to hold his hand, but instead I was jerked to the ground. I thought for sure this was the end—his last violent struggle with death. And this time I didn’t call the nurse. I spoke to him softly. “Tommy, it’s me, Ruth Mondschein. Please get a hold of yourself.” Why I said that, I cannot explain. It sounds absurd in retrospect, but it must have worked. After about two minutes, his body relaxed and his eyes looked at me, not the wall.

  “Who are you? Are you the devil? Have you finally come to take me home?” he said and laughed, so I thought he was teasing me.

  “Tommy, you’ve been in a coma; this is no time for jokes.”

  “Jokes? Ha. I love a good joke. What better time than now? Will you tell me one? I like dirty ones. Do you know any dirty ones?”

  “Tommy, please.”

  “I know an especially dirty one. Would you like to hear the story? It’s a little long. Am I sick? What is this place? Mint-green walls? I would never agree to mint-green walls, which leads me to believe that I am in a hospital, and you must be a nurse or a nun. Are you a nun? But you probably wouldn’t tell me if you were. Nuns are so sneaky these days. They should never have abandoned those uniforms—I liked the ones with white, winged headpieces. What order were they from? But you wouldn’t tell me that, either. Not if you’re the devil and not if you’re a nun. You’re not allowed to give yourself away, are you?”

  “Tommy, don’t you remember me? I’m Ruth Mondschein. This is the Christopher Street AIDS Hospice. I was telling you a story. Don’t you remember?”

  “A story? I’ve heard so many stories. AIDS hospice. What are we aiding? Why are you lying to me? I can tell a hospital when I see one!”

  “It is a hospital. You have AIDS. It’s a disease. Don’t you remember?”

  “Frankly, I don’t and, frankly, I don’t care. Am I very sick? I don’t feel any pain. No! Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know.”

  “You are very sick, Tommy. You were in a coma.”

  “I told you not to tell me.”

  Then I burst out crying. I couldn’t help it.

  “Are you crying because I am dying or because of something else?” he asked me.

  “Both.”

  “Well, it’s good to see you crying after all these years.”

  “Tommy, we’ve only known each other for a couple weeks.”

  “Actually, Mother, we don’t know each other at all.”

  “Mother?”

  “I know you would prefer Mom, Mother, but you have always been just Mother to me.”

  “Tommy, don’t you remember? I brought you music; I’ve been telling you about Vienna and Karl and Pribor.”

  “Music? You wouldn’t know what kind of music to bring me. You’d bring some horrible musical or Glenn Miller. Not all fags love musicals, you know. But you could never get that through your head.”

  And then for some reason I found myself saying, “I’m sorry, Tommy, I’m no expert on music. I did my best. You never told me you hated musicals.”

  “Never told you! Remember that time you took me to see Oliver! and I got so angry and said that Dickens would be outraged to see his work turned into such garbage? Don’t you remember that?”

  “I thought you enjoyed Oliver!”

  “Enjoyed it? No, you were the one who enjoyed it, not me. I never enjoyed anything.”

  “Nothing?”

  Tommy looked away from me and only then did I realize what I was doing. I don’t even know how I let it go so far.

  “Tommy.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “I am not your mother. You must believe me.”

  He turned towards me and squinted as if I were very far away. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then who are you?”

  “A friend.”

&n
bsp; He was still squinting, trying so hard to remember who I was. “I’m afraid I don’t know you,” he said sadly.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Let me put on some music. How about the St. Matthew Passion?”

  “You know the St. Matthew Passion?” he asked, his face lighting up.

  “Yes, I think it’s Bach’s greatest masterpiece.”

  I put on the St. Matthew Passion and we listened to the entire mass without speaking. When it came to the last chorus, Tommy conducted while I sang along softly. I had not known that I knew the words so well.

  Domestic Anxiety

  George Liddy, Marisol, and I ended up spending the whole night in Tirso de Molina square, and we finished off the night having hot chocolate as thick as porridge and churros in a little place where, according to Marisol, they had been making churros for three centuries. It was just before dawn when Marisol and I left George Liddy outside the churrería, which was getting so crowded there were people waiting outside to get in. I remember seeing the tip of his cigarette glowing when he turned to wave goodbye. He was tottering in his usual tall way down one of the hills of Lavapiés and his cigarette was glowing in the dark street. Marisol and I were quite a ways ahead of him, but he wasn’t calling for us to walk more slowly or to wait. He just let us disappear into the night, and the next thing I knew I was climbing the stairs to Marisol’s apartment, and George Liddy wasn’t following close behind and I wasn’t even thinking about where he was or if he was okay, tottering back to his room in the pensión operated by the unmarried brother and sister from Galicia. The sister had an unfixed harelip, which George Liddy said gave her a corpselike beauty, while the brother is what George Liddy calls brutally handsome. Apparently the brother used to be a sailor and that’s how he saved enough money to open up the pensión in Madrid. They didn’t talk much, except to discuss the damp grayness of Galicia.

  George Liddy loves to talk about rain and grayness and the Celtic soul and attributes all the macabre greatness of Spanish culture to the Celtic influence. I wonder if the sister would say that she sometimes wishes she were a dwarf. I wonder if a harelip is one of those deformities that isn’t quite bad enough to make people gawk or feel sorry for you. I wonder if she would rather be a dwarf or if a harelip is enough to make her miserable. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t get it operated on. No one would really want to be a dwarf when it came down to it. If the choice were a real possibility, no one would choose dwarfdom except someone who was even more deformed or disabled than a dwarf, like a paraplegic or someone who was dying of cancer. Marisol, on the other hand, is one of those people you notice, not because she has any obvious deformity, but because of her beauty. Maybe beauty is a type of deformity. If George Liddy were here right now, I would ask him what he thought. He would have something to say about it for sure even if it wasn’t really what he believed. That’s what I like about him; if you ask him his opinion, he always comes up with something.

  Marisol led me to an attic apartment very similar to the one we were living in, only instead of being filled with books and artifacts from all over the world and red and gold textiles, her place was hardly furnished at all. There was one big room with a kitchenette that looked like it had never been used, and a hallway, a rather long one with a closed door at the end of it. In the large room with the attached kitchenette was a nondescript bed. There were no books anywhere in sight and no adornments on the white walls. It was freezing in the apartment due to the noisy labors of an oversized air conditioner, which Marisol told me she kept going twenty-four hours a day, whether she was home or not. She had no tolerance for the heat. We had to raise our voices to hear each other over the air conditioner, which drowned out the usual urban sounds. It was strange being without Madrid’s noises after having them around almost constantly even in the middle of the night—leather shoes on the sidewalk, people walking home from the bars, stopping to discuss one last thing, to have one last cigarette underneath my window. But in Marisol’s apartment you couldn’t hear any of that. All you could hear was the droning of the air conditioner.

  I didn’t know what to say to her in all that quiet, so I said nothing while Marisol went to the kitchen to get us water. She brought a tray with a pitcher of water and two glasses and told me to sit on the floor. We sat on the floor drinking our water slowly as if we were drinking wine. It seemed as if it took us almost an hour of silence to finish drinking it. I kept trying to focus on a thought, on something to say to Marisol, something about my mother or Madrid or George Liddy, but there were just a bunch of disjointed words knocking about in my head. And she looked perfectly calm—as if she were meditating.

  After a while, when I was just getting up my nerve to tell her I was leaving, she started laughing, so I had to ask her what was so funny. I could have not asked her anything; I could have stood up and told her I had to get going, but normally when someone starts laughing and you have no idea why, you ask them what they’re laughing about. But she never told me what was funny. Instead she stopped abruptly and asked me how old I was. Now it was my turn to laugh; after all that sitting and water drinking and being uncomfortable, all she could ask me was how old I was.

  “Sixteen,” I said.

  “And your mother?” she asked.

  I wanted to tell her it was none of her business, but at least we were talking, so I answered. “Fifty.”

  “That means she was thirty-four when you were born.”

  “Yes,” I said. I should have asked her how old she was, just to finish up the conversation.

  “I don’t want children,” she said sadly as if she wished she really did want them, but just couldn’t bring herself to go ahead with it.

  “My mother didn’t either, but in those days abortion wasn’t really an option.” I hadn’t planned to say anything like that, but what’s said is said, so I had to stick to the story.

  “She told you that?” Marisol asked.

  I nodded because I felt nodding wasn’t exactly lying. “I think she’s relieved now. It’s much easier to have a child than to write poetry.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing really. That’s what happened. Anyway, why are you so interested in my mother?”

  “I wanted to do some portraits of her, but she refused. Usually people are flattered, no matter what they look like. The ugliest ones are the most cooperative.”

  “Why do you want to paint my mother?”

  “Do I have to have a reason?”

  “No, but I’m sure you do. Otherwise you wouldn’t care whether she agreed to it or not. You would just go out and find someone else, someone ugly.”

  Marisol ignored my question and asked, “Why do you think she refuses?”

  I ignored her question because I didn’t want to tell her that my mother was probably jealous of Marisol, especially if she were any good at painting. Either that or she thought Marisol’s art was garbage. My mother has very strong opinions about art—she’s not one of these people who believes in art as therapy. Maybe that’s why she stopped writing poetry. She either had to be a Yeats or nothing. So I asked Marisol if I could see her work.

  Marisol led me down the long hallway to the closed door at the end. She pushed the door open as if she were expecting to find a dead body, very slowly, almost holding her breath. She turned on the lights, which were so blindingly strong I felt as if I had entered a movie set or an interrogation room. The floor was splattered with paint and so were the walls, as if Marisol periodically got furious and threw paint all over the room. Otherwise, the room was bare—there were no works-in-progress in the room, no unframed canvases pinned to the walls. Marisol opened the door to a walk-in closet and began pulling out canvases.

  I liked the paintings. The predominant color in all of them was a kind of uriney yellow-brownish color, and I almost asked her if she actually painted wit
h urine, but when you got up close to the paintings, there was a thickness to the strokes that made it obvious she had used paint. Most of them were portraits of women doing domestic chores—Castillian-looking, old Madrid types hanging out the laundry, sewing, peeling potatoes. The backdrops were very old-fashioned—widows in black leaning on balconies, old courtyards, overstuffed furniture. But the figures were scary and seemed as if they were made of wax that had melted. Some of them were naked, some were wearing layers and layers of lace, some of the women’s faces were too young for their bodies and activities, while others had really young bodies, like those of thirteen-year-old girls, and old faces, not really old like an old woman’s, but middle-aged, I guess, like my mother’s.

  “Well, what do you think?” Marisol was standing right behind me. She smelled of smoke.

  “They’re cool,” I said. I don’t really like to go on and on analyzing stuff like art and music.

  She didn’t reply. She asked me if I had finished looking, and I said I had, so she turned off the lights and went back down the hallway to the living room.

  “Did my mother like your work?” I asked.

  “She said she did. What do you think? Do you think she liked it?”

  I tried to imagine my mother standing in that room with all that light, straining her neck the way she does at concerts, as if it were her neck, not her ears, that was listening. My mother has always been more focused on music and literature than the visual arts. We used to go to the Met a lot when I was younger, but she seemed to enjoy the Greek vases and Egyptian stuff more than the paintings. And then we had to spend practically an hour in front of every stupid rug. I remember always being whisked through the paintings. Actually, I didn’t really know much about painting at all until we went to Madrid and I spent all that time at the Prado. But I told Marisol that my mother probably really liked her paintings because she is not the sort to say she likes something when she doesn’t. That seemed to satisfy Marisol. Then I added, “My mother doesn’t like to encourage images of the human form. She feels they can too easily become graven images,” which isn’t true, especially since we always use my drawings for our ceremonies.