by J. D. Landis
“I meant what I said: that I would give it to you, wholly and without—”
“Am I losing my mind?” he asked.
“Are you not who you are?” She referred back to what he had said earlier, quite delighted to be able to show him how attentive she was not only to his many silences but to the daunting challenge that his speech, like his frequent silences, often presented to her.
“We are not here to discuss who I am not, if I recall, but specifically who you are not.”
“Who I am not?” she pondered. “I am not the princesse de Clèves, alas. I am not George Sand. I am not—”
“You’re making fun of me.” It made him adore her, for the first time, truly. “It’s not like you,” he said.
“Oh, but it is.” She put her head on his shoulder. The smell of him was in its customary sublime balance, half man, half cigar. “Remember, I am not who you think I am.”
“Whoever you may be,” he said, “I am fortunate to have you.”
She laughed. “I love your play on words. You are so good with words. You should use them more often.”
“The more I love music, the more I distrust words,” he said. “There’s a perfect example, for I made no play on words.”
“But you did.” She raised her head and looked at his lips. “You used the word ‘fortunate’ to describe yourself for having me, right after I had just told you that I have lost my fortune.”
“You have lost your fortune? You never said you lost your fortune.”
“I most certainly did.”
“What do you mean, you lost your fortune?” He looked at her from top to bottom. “You could not possibly mean…” He looked at her from bottom to top. “Wait! Oh, wait, dear Ernestine! Now I understand! Your fortune is yourself. You said it yourself. Your fortune is yourself. And you have lost your fortune. That can mean only one thing: You have given yourself to another man!”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“‘Don’t be ridiculous’ is what people say in response to an accusation they cannot deny. Now I understand the convoluted hesitance of your confession. You are not a virgin. You might have done me the courtesy of simply stating as much in the beginning.”
She brought her fists down upon his thighs. “But I am a virgin. I have always been a virgin.”
“As distinguished from a virgin who has not always been one?” he inquired calmly.
Tears came to her eyes. She seemed utterly defeated, this in itself upon so passionate a woman a mark of provocation. “I am merely a poor virgin.”
“‘Poor?’” he repeated. “But is not your virtue your fortune? You said as much yourself, and if indeed you retain your virtue, as you claim to, then you could never describe yourself as a ‘poor virgin,’ could you?”
She pulled her hands out from under his and wiped away her tears with her sleeves and looked him directly in the eye and said, “I have no money.”
“You needn’t bribe me,” he said.
“I am a bastard,” she said.
He laughed. “A harlot, maybe, but not—”
“I am not Ernestine von Fricken.”
“Who are you?” He laughed again. “George Sand?”
“I will tell you who I am.”
She was not, she said, Ernestine von Fricken, at least not by birth. She was the illegitimate daughter of the sister of Baron von Fricken’s wife. This woman, Christiane von Zedtwitz, had become pregnant some eighteen years ago by an unscrupulous married wire manufacturer (Ernestine shuddered as if she might forever be raveled by his wares) named Lindauer, who seduced her some several hundred times before his seed took root and never again once he was informed of his mistress’s gravidity—an interesting word for Ernestine to use, thought Robert, perhaps an echo of gravicembalo deliberately inserted into the conversation to deflect his mind from the horror of her words and direct it toward the supposedly safe confines of the musical. This Erdmann Lindauer, like someone who carves his initials into a tree and forever after avoids the forest, refused to bestow his name upon Ernestine or indeed to acknowledge her existence with so much as a single peep into her eye or cupping of her pudgy knee, not to mention bestowal of even the most minor of expenses. Her mother, far from feeling some special kinship with her daughter as a fellow female abandoned by the one person in the world who should at least have loved the younger of them, blamed Ernestine for her shame as well as for the loss of the one person in the world she would ever love. Thus it was that Ernestine, poor and virtually abandoned by a mother who literally could not bear the sight of her and therefore kept her veiled from head to toe and refused to attend to matters of bath and toilet, came to the attention of Baron von Fricken. Christiane von Zedtwitz asked her sister, the baron’s wife, to train the baby to make her ploppers in a pot and while the baroness was at it would she mind raising her until she was old enough to find a rich husband?
“But I am not rich,” interjected Robert, who inferred from the tenor of Ernestine’s sad tale that he was not about to get rich either.
So the baroness took Ernestine into her own home, over the objection of the baron, who had decided, since he and the baroness had proved unable to have children of their own, that he wanted no children and would devote his free time, rather than to the games of childhood and the dissemination of scholarly discipline, to his music. But the baroness prevailed, and in due course the baron adopted Ernestine as his own. Except, she hastened to point out to Robert, who seemed to have awakened from either a trance or a light sleep when he heard the word ‘adoption,’ the baron had insisted that Ernestine, who carried no true Fricken blood, would inherit no Fricken money. Even after the baroness had died, and Ernestine was the only person left in the baron’s home, he settled nothing upon her but his good will and his protection of her virtue and his ardent desire that she be married before that dreaded moment when a woman exited her teens without a husband and was thus as used up by time as by a hundred Erdmann Lindauers. He did not mind her holding out the unspoken promise of his vast wealth in order for her to become affianced, but before the marriage, as an honorable and honest man, he wanted it understood that none of his money would be coming to her and all of it would eventually settle upon the Ignaz von Fricken Institute of the Flute.
“So you see,” concluded Ernestine, who by this time had moved so far to one end of the canapé that the sharp edges of the carved acanthus leaves had nearly shredded the right sleeve of her dress, “I have no fortune. I have no property. I have only what you see before you.”
Robert laughed. “And a lot more clothes, if I remember correctly.”
For the first time since she had begun her rueful tale, Ernestine smiled. As she spoke, she began to move back toward Robert, her dress whispering against the velvet of the canapé. “I fear that I misled you. I know you thought I would come to you with money. It is not something we have ever discussed, but you did believe that, did you not?”
Robert said nothing. He was thinking.
“You did believe I was rich, did you not?”
Of course he had believed she was rich. Yet, now that this fortune had vanished, he found he didn’t care. He had a small inheritance from his father’s estate. He had a month’s supply of cigars, a fortuitous taste for plonk as well as for champagne, and the wherewithal to rent a piano if not the reputation to acquire one through endorsement. He was an artist. Artists, like everyone else, did their best work when their asses sat on bare wood and gristle made their meals. He did not need or want her money. Or her.
He felt himself dying, not into death but into another life. He might never have loved her, or loved her as much as he did at this moment, as poor as she was, as pretty as she was, as vulnerable as she had made herself in revealing a deceit that seemed to him as natural as the truth. What kind of world was it in which a woman felt she must come accompanied by material worth in order to be of value as a wife? What if the same were asked of men? She had never asked anything of him, except that he talk to her and f
ondle her and promise to be her husband. And what would he leave her? Music, perhaps,* and some memory he hoped would be better than her memory of this.
“I’m not worthy of you,” he said.
“Nor I of you,” she answered, throwing herself, for what she could not know was the last time, into his arms.**
Robert returned immediately to Leipzig, where he learned of Ludwig’s death. He prepared to attend the funeral, dressed in black even to his cravat and undershorts and spectacles so dark they made Paganini’s seem lensless. But when the time came for him to leave his room—or Ludwig’s room, actually, where Ludwig had lived but not, thank goodness, died, and into which Robert had wandered on the pretext of enumerating his late friend’s possessions, which he knew it would be his responsibility to allocate—Robert froze. He could no more attend this funeral than he had his nephew’s or his sister-in-law’s or his brother’s. Less. For he had loved Ludwig more than he had any of them, or anyone else in his life, except perhaps his father, whose funeral he had attended, the last he would ever, including his own, as he had once warned his physician.
He looked at Ludwig’s things. The books. The clothes. The soap. The blanket. The bed out of which he had been lifted and that Henriette had returned to make while Robert watched, and she confessed that it was the first bed she had ever made, that she had spent her whole life waiting for someone to serve. The music paper on which Ludwig had copied Robert’s compositions. The piano on which he had learned them. The floor. The ceiling. The walls. The utter absence.
He could bear it no longer. He felt Ludwig being buried deep within himself. He feared he would have no more memory of Ludwig than would the obdurate earth, which was at that very moment receiving the body of his friend. He went into the room between their rooms and knelt on the Turkish rug that had been his father’s and raked it with his fingers until some grimy dust flew up and, as if he were Achilles, fouled his handsome countenance.
As he lay in the settled dust, on his back, his fingers now pulling at his hair, he recited a poem by Horace taught him ten years before by Karl Richter at the Lyceum:
In dreams at night
I hold you in my arms,
or follow in your flight
across the Martian field,
or pursue through yielding waves
the boy who will not yield.
*Specifically, the piano pieces that comprise Carnaval, which Schumann originally called “Jokes on Four Notes” and amended to “Tender Scenes on Four Notes,” the four notes being A, S (E-flat in German notation), C, H (B in German notation), which form not only the name of Ernestine’s hometown but contribute significantly to Schumann’s surname (SCHumAnn). In this way, he was able, in a sense, to remain forever by her side even as he fled from her. He named one of Carnaval’s pieces for her, “Estrella,” as he named another for Clara, “Chiarina,” the latter much superior; which may or may not be the reason Clara omitted “Estrella” whenever she played Carnaval in public and in private sang along mockingly to it with the words, “How is your little Estrella?” leaving no doubt that a woman’s “estrella” was a part too private to be mentioned in such pedagoguish apparatus as this.
**Ernestine von Fricken recovered sufficiently from her rejection by Robert Schumann to marry Count Wilhelm von Zedtwitz, an elderly member of her mother’s family, who survived only eight months beyond their wedding. Ernestine herself, under siege from rickettsiae carried by body lice, died of typhus just short of her twenty-eighth birthday.
Leipzig
APRIL 15, 1835
Oh, I love no one as I love him,
and he did not even look at me!
Clara Wieck
As soon as the carriage had deposited Clara and her father at the door in the old Grimmaischestrasse, she went to her room to wash her face and change her clothes and then made her way down from the top of the house to say hello to her brothers and her stepmother. But before she could find them, she heard her father through the parlor door complaining about the piano in Magdeburg and the food in Halberstadt and the Jews in Schönebeck and the leaking chamber pot in Hanover and the men in Brunswick who had tried to seduce his daughter. She planned to wait for him to finish his tirade, a regular occurrence upon his return to Leipzig, which he never loved so much as when he had forgotten what he hated about it. But in the midst of his recitation, she heard him interrupted with a single word, and not by his wife, who would never dare deny him the satisfaction of letting her know what discomforts he had experienced in order to accompany his daughter while she earned the money that would provide him in old age the luxuries he was forced to sacrifice on her behalf right now, when he would most have enjoyed them.
“Seduce?” said the voice.
It was Robert, from whom she had been apart since before the New Year, their longest separation since she had been in Paris and more, she realized upon hearing his voice, than she should have been able to bear. Than she could bear, which is why, as interested as she was in overhearing her father’s version of the attempted seduction, she opened the doors into the room, stepped inside, and closed the doors behind her.
There stood Robert and her father, near the fire, each with a cup of coffee and a cigar, standing the way men stand when there are no women about, puffed out a bit in the chest, close enough to listen but not to touch, eyes peering anywhere but into each other’s eyes. Neither paid the least attention to her entry. Like peculiar twins, they simultaneously contemplated the ash on their respective cigars and, together, rained the excess down into the fire, looked again at the tips of the cigars, put the cigars into their mouths, drew in with decompressing cheeks, and through pursed lips released their smoke, which coalesced in the air above their heads into a private cloud.
With diminishing strips of smoke still unfolding from his mouth, her father said, “I did not say she was seduced. Only that there were many who made the effort. An entire string quartet! I had to bring in Banck as reinforcement.”
“Do you mean as a kind of reserve seducer?” Clara could not determine if Robert’s tone mocked her father, Karl Banck, or herself.
“As a reserve protector! Of course he did so fine a job that he has virtually asked for her hand.”
Clara was about to interrupt when Robert seemed to speak for her. “Virtually? What does that mean? He asked for a finger first, or a knuckle, or perhaps the wrist before the hand, since he himself is all wrist at the piano?”
“By hand I mean marriage,” replied her father. “It is a symbol of the thing. Can you never have heard the expression?”
“I would have thought,” said Robert, “that there would be other parts of the body one would ask for in marriage.”
If only he would look at her, she would laugh. He could be such a funny fellow, and was the funnier when he teased her father, who, for all his virtues as a teacher and promoter of her career and guardian of her reputation, had the sense of humor of a gargoyle.
“How dare you!” said her father, with a predictability that was as expected and disappointing as Robert’s ignoring of her was unexpected and disappointing.
She felt invisible, unwanted, desolate.
Robert, having imagined her somewhere in the house, felt her presence even before she came into the room. Thus he had assumed the posture of her father, a certain rigid insouciance he had noticed men adopted in their own homes before their own fires while smoking someone else’s cigars, a kind of pride of ownership that seemed to protect them from the world and the world’s judgment. He didn’t care to be seen as he saw himself: no longer to be married to a girl he should not have wanted to marry in the first place. So bereft with the disappearance of Ludwig that he had found himself unable to return to the rooms they shared and had tried to live alone on the Halleschestrasse near the Promenade and failed, so now he had moved yet again, with yet another companion, Wilhelm Ulex, near the university in the false hope that he would be inspired by its ferment and protected by its crowds and obliviated by its cou
ntless taverns. Burdened enough by the politics of the magazine that he had purchased control of it and fired Julius Knorr as its editor and become its sole editor himself, which left him sufficiently little time for writing his music that he was now forced to compose through the nights at a pitch of creativity so fervid that come morning he often felt a grandiosity and an emptiness that combined to cause him excruciating doubt.
Thus, when Robert heard the parlor door open, he saw her in his mind before he could possibly have seen her in the room, his little friend come to find him and to help him find himself, as if she might with her presence deliver back the time stolen from them in their absence from one another, bring Ludwig back to life, restore to him the pleasure of his Ernestine, allow to him the childishness he knew with her, with Clara, that place within his being in which, when he was judged, he was judged by her alone and only in accordance with her laughter and her visible delight.
Yet when she entered, and he glimpsed her as she turned to close the doors, he felt that she, like him, had taken on the pretense of another. She came into the room a woman, tall, rounded, full, the movement of her hand upon the doorknob gently wanton, the stretch of her arm languorous, the shifting of her shoulders quite incautious, and the slope of her back so very unexpected that he turned away his eyes. She was not so much a stranger as strange, so unfamiliar as to have been remade in an image that was drawn from his own desires but upon which he could not permit himself to gaze.
He could not bear to look at her, for fear of what his eyes would say.
Leipzig
SEPTEMBER 13, 1835
It always gave Mendelssohn pleasure to take
very lively tempi with Clara.
Robert Schumann
The first gifts Clara received for her sixteenth birthday came from Robert. They were delivered at six-thirty in the morning, by which time she had been long awake because of her excitement over the day and her desire to finish her practicing before the festivities began.