by J. D. Landis
“Depressed,” answered Dr. Portius.
“So what your machine is saying is that I am not depressed, merely hypochondriacal?”
“Merely,” said Dr. Portius.
“I am most relieved,” said Robert. “Lately I have thought myself depressed over the death of my little nephew, who was given my name, you see, and because I have been writing music that no one but this young lady here seems to appreciate. But what your Soul Machine is telling me is that my depression itself is merely a symptom of my hypochondria and is therefore not depression at all. Is that correct?”
Dr. Portius, looking at Robert as if he were quite genuinely and not hypochondriacally insane, found himself finally leached of all language and thus reduced to a puzzled shrug, following the delivery of which he pointed at the metal rod.
Robert grasped it once more, and this time the machine told him he was sensitive.
“True,” Robert said.
Emotional.
“Absolutely,” he said.
Stubborn.
“Alas,” he said.
Genial.
He nodded. “Ah, geniality.”
Quiet.
After a moment’s thought, he said, “Increasingly.”
Kindhearted.
“That is not for me to say,” he said.
“True,” provided Clara.
Shy.
“Oh, very!” he proclaimed.
“You?” She found him, or at least dreamed him, unreserved and confident in the love she secretly bestowed upon him.
“Oh, yes,” he answered.
“Then this machine knows you better than I do,” she said. “I want no part of it.”
“Enough,” said Dr. Portius.
“But we are not arguing,” said Robert, mistaking the doctor’s meaning.
“Enough,” he said again and moved Robert’s hand from the iron rod.
“It seems to be your turn,” Robert said to Clara. “Or else he wants more money.”
“Yes.” Dr. Portius held out his hand.
“You may have my turn,” she offered Robert.
Forgetting his initial goal, he attached himself once more to the Electromagnetic Soul Machine as it probed ever more deeply into his being until there seemed nothing left of him, or nothing left for her to learn except the truth. But if she was unwilling to allow a machine to prove them the double of each other, he became convinced that music would.
Dr. Portius’s psychometer filled Robert with hope for himself and for his future. It did not find him, as he had feared it would because he had thus been called by some of his intimates, covetous, sly, secretive, dissolute, dogmatic, irresolute. He felt he knew himself now and in that knowledge was more at ease with the mysterious and difficult music he was finally confident enough to set down. He wrote some études, complete with rigorous pedagogical aids, based upon the airy Caprices of Paganini, as much for Clara as for anyone, so successfully had she portrayed that demonic genius as generous, kind, and, most surprising of all, paterfamiliar. Robert also began his first sonatas and was intrigued more than frustrated over the fact that he himself could not play the music he composed. That is to say, he could not play it as he meant it to be played, at tempo and with the kind of passionate accuracy with which, he sometimes imagined as he composed his work inside the mantle of wine and sweat and tobacco smoke that sequestered his gift, the universe had been created. There were times, indeed, when he was not sure he would have been able to play his own music even had he not injured his hand. In this he took a strange delight and sometimes found himself laughing aloud when he devised a passage of such monumental difficulty that he could picture all the pianists in the world curling miserably from their benches, like the leaves from an artichoke, until only one, grasping the heart of his music, was left. Art was created to challenge and charm the best minds and the highest sensibilities, not merely to satisfy those simple souls who begged for something they would call beautiful because they had no notion of the torment in the heart of beauty. And because it was familiar. The artist’s job was to afford the unrecognizable, and to make that familiar. The success of any great work should be measured in how small an audience could understand and appreciate it most profoundly. Indeed, it was his desire to reach as few people as deeply as possible. In this he was, he felt, like Chopin, about whom Legouvé had written that he reserved his surpassing genius for an audience of five or six, which number struck Robert as quite a crowd when it came to his own work. He would settle for one, provided he was not required to fill that role himself. Or no one, for there was within a void an infinitude of possibility, and the reverse.
His most recently acquired doctor (for a man could no more have too many doctors than too many books), Franz Hartmann, actually promised Robert he could cure his hand, which Robert felt it was his duty to pursue, though he was not entirely disappointed when Dr. Hartmann proved to be so homeopathically obsessed that rather than tell Robert what he must do to cure his hand and what medicines he must ingest, he gave him nothing more than a powder made from hyssopus officinalis, which peasants had been using for centuries to harden their stools and steel their hearts, and otherwise told Robert what not to do and what not to consume: no smoking, no beer, no wine, no coffee, no meat, no eggs, no orgasms, no swimming.
“May I keep just one?” Robert asked him, immediately to discover from the sour shock upon Dr. Hartmann’s face that he shared with virtually every other physician on earth so complete an absence of humor that he appeared eager to amputate even a smile.
Robert’s hand remained beyond help, regardless of Dr. Hartmann’s regime, which, had Robert put it into practice, would have reduced him to such misery he would no longer have wanted to live, never mind play the piano. But then he gave Dr. Hartmann a more palpable affliction with which to earn his fee, for he came down with the malaria that was eating its way through Saxony with nearly the insatiety of the cholera several years before.
Quarantine was demanded of the disease’s many victims. Thus was Robert restricted to his new rooms on the quiet edge of town, across the Pleisse in the tranquility of Riedel’s Garden. There he lived in a fourth-floor apartment with Karl Günther, a law student, who, during their first nights together, when Robert had suffered from insomnia but could not compose at the piano for fear of waking their neighbors, had stayed awake himself and read to Robert and held his hand and head, until Robert contracted malaria and Karl moved out immediately while attempting to say good-bye without taking a breath.
So now he was alone, wasting away because he had no appetite, describing himself to Clara in a letter as something like the dried-up prickly heart of that leafless artichoke, but forcing himself to compose music at the piano and allowing himself to bang it out all night, with no fear of reprisal from his neighbors because of the sign on his door proclaiming his quarantine. He did not mind the solitude at first and took some comfort from the idea that grew daily larger within his mind that all men, doomed as they were and shut off from one another in their essential unknowableness, lived in quarantine. He saw himself, therefore, the very paradigm of modern man, shut away and shrinking. He realized that Dr. Portius’s Electromagnetic Soul Machine had proven unnecessarily prolix and need have but one word for any and all who grasped its iron rod: Quarantined.
But he found himself, as the days went by and he encountered no one but the brave Dr. Hartmann, longing for more than the knowledge that he had become the very symbol of the insularity of man. He found himself wanting to unite with another. To leave himself without abandoning himself. Find himself without uprooting himself. Give himself without surrendering himself. This was possible, he believed, only with one’s double. And one’s double, he had concluded, in moving beyond the simplicities of Jean Paul’s Siebankäs and Hoffmann’s Devil’s Elixirs, was not literally an invisible replica of oneself or even a sort of complex carnate imposter but was rather the one other human being on earth whose existence did not make one feel one’s own was futile.
Ha
ving no one else to whom to speak, Robert told Dr. Hartmann, who was with one hand spoon-feeding him tea made from white-willow bark and with the other pressing a cold cloth to his feverish forehead, that he felt an overwhelming longing to be with Clara Wieck and that he must go to her immediately.
“The young pianist?” the doctor asked.
“It’s not what you think,” replied Robert.
“I think nothing,” said the doctor.
“Spoken like a true physician,” Robert baited him.
“You are under quarantine, Herr Schumann. I could not permit you to visit the whore of Babylon if she stood on the other side of your door begging for Meister Iste.”
“How dare you!” But Robert found his outrage obscured by his laughter as he covered his groin with his large hands.
Dr. Hartmann was not laughing. “Your desire for this girl is not healthy.”
“It’s I who am not healthy.”
“Yearning for what cannot be can only weaken you.” Dr. Hartmann removed the cloth and placed the back of his hand against Robert’s brow. “Your fever worsens.”
“The fire you feel is my desire to be with her.”
Dr. Hartmann shook his head. “Children her age are dying everywhere. A girl’s strength is claimed by the woman fighting for her being. There’s precious little left to blow off this evil air. Go to her, and you’ll kill her.”
Robert asked Clara, therefore, in a letter Dr. Hartmann himself agreed to deliver, to play at exactly eleven o’clock the next morning the adagio from Chopin’s Variations, the piece she had played for Ludwig Spohr in Kassel. And while she played she must think about Robert, think about him and nothing else. He would, at that very moment, do the same—play the Chopin note for note with her and think of her as if she were the only person on earth. In that way, over St. Nicholas’s Church, where Bach himself had nearly worked himself to death after twenty-seven years at a job that all others had refused, equidistant between her room and his, their doubles would meet and their spirits would come together as one.
Clara was disappointed only in his insisting upon the spiritual nature of their relationship, for she found Robert troubled her somewhere deep and distant and thus far untouched within her body, and she carried this ache with her wherever she was, whatever she was doing, and if she thought for a moment that the pain might be going away, she drew it back into her by thinking of him.
She wrote him by return that day (the note carried to his room and slipped beneath his door by her faithful Nanny, who had raised her from the age of five while Clementine gossiped and tried to see her eyes in the polished leather of her boots) to say as much. But Clara was unable to state her feelings baldly, not because she feared the words or their possible effect upon either Robert or herself but because she knew her father was now reading her mail just as he had always read, not to mention written in, her diary. So she said to Robert only that her life was not the same now that his illness kept him from visiting her family. But, yes, she would meet him the next day over the portal of the church, wrapped in music.
Above his own signature, Robert had written, “My whole heart is in this letter.”
Below hers, insidiously and, he had to admit, excitingly, she wrote, “If this letter arrives without my seal intact, tell me.”
What was for him a lame seduction became for her a conspiracy, much the better use to which to put their furtive doubles, who the next morning at eleven o’clock above Bach’s old church met and listened and coupled secretly, carried heavenward by the music on which desire thrives.
Leipzig
NOVEMBER 1, 1833
I often drive self-torture to the point of
sinning against my entire existence.
Robert Schumann
Robert was spared by malaria, but his sister-in-law Rosalie was not. The mother of little Robert died at twenty-three, his own age almost to the day. Only when she was dead did he allow himself to realize how much he had loved her, that there could have been talk of real love had she not been married to his brother Carl and had Robert not been bound by the conventions of morality and family honor. He became haunted at night with images of her, not dream images, for he could not sleep for days on end, but images that were nonetheless involuntary. He saw her then as he had never seen her in life, naked, aroused, open.
At the same time, he once more withdrew his own body, as it were, from the world. His irregular couplings with Christel ceased entirely. He turned his eyes from prostitutes. He no longer crooned the name of Agnes Carus in the whorl of his bedclothes.
But such abstinence merely increased his anxiety and thus deepened his insomnia, which caused him to experience the sensation of death within eternal wakefulness.
He sought out, in his diploma-encrusted, leather-smelling, ground-hugging office on Marktschreierstrasse, his old friend Dr. Moritz Reuter. Robert confessed everything, for it seemed like a confession to him, the admission of sin, in that he did not know whether his desire to die might be stronger than his fear of death.
“The night I learned Rosalie was gone was the most terrible night of my life. I was seized by an idée fixe: the fear of going mad. It was the most terrible thought a person can have and with which God can punish you—the loss of one’s own mind. It’s as if you can see and feel yourself leaving yourself. There’s nothing left of you but suffering. The pain is real, but it’s mental pain. One’s mind literally aches. There is no thought, no idea, no concept that can bring you peace, except the very thought of death itself, which is what caused such suffering to begin with. I am caught in a circle of destruction. I want to die.”
“Good heavens!” said Dr. Reuter, whose customary expansiveness seemed to close in upon itself so that both he and Robert sat there shrinking further into their respective beings.
“There’s nothing good about Heaven when it’s the next stop on one’s train.”
“But if you truly wanted to die, you would not be here talking to me.”
“I have raised a hand against my own life.”
“But you have not brought it down.” Dr. Reuter allowed himself the tiny smile of one who has recovered from the failure to match one metaphor by rallying to the next.
“Oh, but I have,” answered Robert. “I threw myself out the window.”
Thinking his patient was concocting yet another literary image, Dr. Reuter answered, “And look where you have landed—safely with me.”
“I landed in a tree.”
“In a tree?”
“The big tree in Riedel’s Garden.”
“Is that not where you live?”
“No longer. I can’t go back to my rooms. They’re on the fourth floor. And I’m suddenly terrified of heights. I sometimes think were I to leap into the air, I’d die of fright before I came down. Not that I could get into my rooms even were I to go there—I have thrown away my key. The sight of any key now fills me with the most awful fear. It’s as if the only entry I might make would be the entry into the house of death. But death is everywhere, is it not?”
Dr. Reuter allowed his hand to reach halfway across his desk toward Robert. “Look around you. Life is everywhere.”
Robert surprised the doctor by leaning forward and grasping his hand, which he could not now very well withdraw without offending his clearly anxious, confused young patient, who seemed to have absorbed the romantic eccentricities that had caused an entire generation of otherwise intelligent youth to replace reason with emotion, love with concupiscence, health with debauchery, respect for the past with lust for the present, answers with questions, and, in his case certainly, reason with madness.
“When I die,” said Robert, “my fear of death will be so great that I shall be unable to attend even my own funeral.”
Now Dr. Reuter began to fear for himself. He attempted to remove his hand, but his patient’s proved too strong, notwithstanding the self-inflicted injury to one of them for which he had prescribed an animal dip some twenty months ago. He knew of cours
e that Robert played the piano, but he had thought that all pianists had delicate hands, the beauty of music being so fragile. In the clutch of Herr Schumann’s hands, he could hear only thunder and bedlam. Perhaps, he thought, one’s hands can be read as the tangible image of one’s mind, as some believe the nose forecasts the schwanz.
“You think I’m joking,” said Robert. “But you see, Moritz, I simply don’t go to funerals. I had to bury my own father while my mother was off in Karlsbad, and when she returned, though she was positively consumed with grief, I envied her. It was done, you see. He was gone, but for her he’d disappeared into thin air. She didn’t have to see him as I did when I found him, freshly dead, and to bury him as I did, coldly, stiffly, stinkingly, endlessly dead. She doesn’t know, as I know, that death changed him. He—”
“How did it change him?” Dr. Reuter hoped his interruption would cause Herr Schumann to become irritated and no longer want to hold his hand.
“He no longer existed.”
It was Dr. Reuter who became irritated, sufficiently so, in fact, to cause him to be tempted to slap some sense into his incoherent young friend. While he resisted the temptation, he was able to regain possession of the hand with which he would have carried out this discipline had he not, as always, confronted impatience with restraint.
“Of course he no longer existed!” he shouted. “He was dead!”
Robert smiled in perfect agreement. “Then you will understand why I did not attend the funeral of my brother Julius, though he was my favorite brother, who died of consumption not three months ago, nor of my sister-in-law Rosalie, who died of malaria not one month ago, even though by so doing, or not doing, I incurred the wrath of her husband, my brother Carl, who has said he will never forgive me for not coming to say good-bye to her. Carl accused me of not loving Rosalie, when in fact I loved her so much that I cannot rid my mind of the image of taking her.”
Dr. Reuter seemed to have awakened from a brief sleep. “Taking her? Taking her where?”
“Taking her.”