Compass

by Mathias Enard

  For Nietzsche, the Christianity rediscovered in Parsifal is unbearable. Percival’s Graal sounds almost like a personal insult. Seclusion in the self, in Catholic illusion.

  Wagner is a calamity for music, Nietzsche asserts. A disease, a neurosis. The remedy is Carmen, the Mediterranean and the Spanish Orient. The Gypsy. A myth of love much different from Tristan’s. Music must be bastardized, Nietzsche claims as much. Nietzsche attended about twenty performances of Carmen. Blood, violence, death, bulls; love as a blow of fate, like the flower thrown to you that condemns you to suffering. The flower that withers with you in prison without losing its perfume. A pagan love. Tragic. For Bizet, the Orient is Italy — it was in Sicily that the young Georges Bizet, winner of the Prix de Rome, discovered the traces of the Moors, the skies burning with passion, the lemon trees, the mosques turned into churches, the women dressed in black in Prosper Mérimée’s stories, that same Mérimée whom Nietzsche loved. In a letter (the letter called “from the flying fish,” where he declares he’s living “strangely on the crests of waves”), the mustachioed seer explains that the tragic coherence of Mérimée passes into Bizet’s opera.

  Bizet married a Jewish woman and invented a Gypsy lady. Bizet married the daughter of Halévy, the composer of La Juive, the most-performed opera at the Paris Opéra into the 1930s. They say that Bizet died while conducting Carmen, during the trio of the Tarots, at the very instant the three Gypsy card-readers uttered the word death! death! while turning over the fatal card. I wonder if that’s true. There’s a whole network of deadly Gypsies in literature and music, from Mignon, the androgyne in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, to Carmen, including the sulfurous Esmeralda of Victor Hugo — as a teenager I was terribly frightened by Isabella of Egypt, the novella by Ludwig Achim von Arnim, husband of Bettina Brentano; I can still remember the ominous beginning of the text, when the old Gypsy woman shows the young Bella a dot on the hill, telling her it’s a gibbet, near a stream; it’s your father who is hanged up there. Don’t cry, she tells her, tonight we’ll go throw his body into the river, so he’ll be brought back to Egypt; take this dish of meat and this glass of wine and go celebrate the funeral meal in his honor. And I pictured, under the implacable moon, the little girl contemplating the gallows in the distance where the corpse of her father was swaying; I could see Bella, alone, eating that meat and drinking that wine while thinking about the Duke of the Gypsies, that father whose corpse she would have to take down from the gallows to consign it to the torrent, a torrent so powerful it could bring bodies back to the other side of the Mediterranean, to Egypt, homeland of the Dead and of Gypsies, and in my still-childlike imagination, all the terrifying episodes in Bella’s adventures, the fabrication of the magic homunculus, the meeting with the young Charles V, all that was nothing compared to the horrible beginning, the remains of the Duke Michel creaking in the night on top of the gibbet, the child alone with her funeral meal. My own Gypsy is Bella, more than Carmen: the first time I was allowed to accompany my parents to the Vienna Opera, a rite of passage for every bourgeois son, it was for a performance of Carmen conducted by Carlos Kleiber — I had been fascinated by the orchestra, the sound of the orchestra, the number of musicians in it, by the singers’ fancy gowns and the burning eroticism of the dances, but terribly shocked by the horrible French pronunciation of those goddesses: alas, instead of an exciting Spanish accent, Carmen was Russian, and Micaëla German, she said to the soldiers “Non non, cheu refiendré” — “No no, ah vill re-toorn” — which seemed to me (how old was I, twelve maybe) absolutely hysterical. I was expecting a French opera set in wild Spain, and I couldn’t understand a word either of the spoken dialogue or the arias, uttered in a kind of Martian gobbledegook that I did not yet know was the lingua franca of today’s opera, unfortunately. On stage, it was a huge leaping hubbub, of Gypsies, soldiers, donkeys, horses, straw, knives — you expected to see emerging from the wings a real bull that Escamillo (also Russian) would have killed in situ; Kleiber was leaping on his podium, trying to make the orchestra play more loudly, more loudly, always more loudly, with such exaggerated accents that even the donkeys, the horses, the thighs under the gowns, and the breasts in their décolletés seemed like a tame village parade — the triangles were struck so hard it seemed they would dislocate shoulders, the brass instruments blew so powerfully they made the violinists’ hair and the cigar-making ladies’ petticoats fly up, the strings covered the voices of the singers, who were forced to bellow like donkeys or mares to make themselves heard, losing all nuance; only the children’s chorus, Avec la garde montante, etc., seemed to be amused by this overemphasis, shouting over each other while brandishing their wooden weapons. There were so many people on stage that one wondered how anyone could move without falling into the orchestra pit, hats, toques, bonnets, roses in their hair, parasols, rifles, a mass, a magma of life and music of a confusion that was constantly reinforced, as I remember it (but memory always exaggerates), by the diction of the actors, reducing the text to mumblings — fortunately my mother, patiently, had told me the sad love story of Don José for Carmen beforehand; I can remember my question perfectly, But why does he kill her? Why kill the object of his love? If he loves her, why stab her? And if he doesn’t love her anymore, if he married Micaëla, then how can he still feel enough hatred to kill her? This story seemed highly unlikely to me. It seemed very strange to me that Micaëla, alone, would manage to discover the smugglers’ hideout in the mountains, while the police didn’t succeed. Nor did I understand why, at the end of the first act, Don José let Carmen escape from prison, when he barely knew her. She had slashed a poor young girl with a knife, after all. Didn’t Don José have any sense of justice? Was he already a killer in the making? My mother sighed that I understood nothing of the force of love. Fortunately, Kleiber’s exuberance allowed me to forget the story and concentrate on the bodies of the women dancing on the stage, concentrate on their clothes and suggestive poses, on the sensual seductiveness of their dances. Gypsies are all about passion. Beginning with The Little Gypsy by Cervantes, Gypsies have represented in Europe an alterity of desire and violence, a myth of freedom and travel — even in music: by the characters they furnish operas, but also by their melodies and rhythms. In his On Gypsies and Their Music in Hungary, Franz Liszt describes, after a sinister anti-Semitic ninety-page introduction devoted to Jews in art and music (always the absurd Wagnerian arguments: dissimulation, cosmopolitanism, absence of creation, of genius, replaced by imitation and talent: Bach and Beethoven, geniuses, against Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, talented imitators), freedom as the first characteristic of “that strange” Gypsy race. Liszt’s brain, eaten away by the concept of race and anti-Semitism, struggles to save the Gypsies — if they are the opposite of the Jews, he argues, it’s because they don’t hide anything, they have no Bible or Testament unique to them; they are thieves, Gypsies, indeed, for they do not bend to any norm, like the love in Carmen, “which has never known any law.” The children of “Bohemia” run after “the electric glimmer of a sensation.” They are ready to do anything to feel, at any price, in communion with nature. The Gypsy is never so happy as when he falls asleep in a birch wood, Liszt tells us, when he breathes in the emanations of nature through all his pores. Freedom, nature, dream, passion: Liszt’s “Bohemians” are the romantic people par excellence. But where Liszt is most profound, most in love, probably, is when he forgets the limitations of race he has just placed on the Roma and turns his attention toward their contribution to Hungarian music, to the gypsy motifs that feed Hungarian music — the Bohemian epic feeds music, Liszt will make himself the rhapsodist of these musical adventures. The mixture with Tatar elements (according to the supposed origins, at that time, of the mysterious Hungarians) signals the birth of Hungarian music. Unlike Spain, where the Zingari produce nothing good (an old guitar with the sound of a saw in the laziness of a grotto in Sacromonte or the ruined palaces of the Alhambra cannot be regarded as music, he says), it’s in the immense pla
ins of Hungary that the gypsy fire will find its most beautiful expression, according to Liszt — I imagine Liszt in Spain, in the forgotten splendor of the Almohad remains, or in the mosque of Córdoba, looking passionately for Gypsies to hear their music; in Grenada, he read the Tales of the Alhambra by Washington Irving, he heard the heads of the Abencerrages falling under the executioners’ sabers, in the basin of the lion fountain — Washington Irving the American, friend of Mary Shelley and Walter Scott, the first writer to make the deeds of the Spanish Muslims live again, the first to rewrite the chronicle of the conquest of Grenada and to live for a time in the Alhambra. It’s strange Liszt didn’t hear, in the songs around that evil guitar, as he called it, anything but banalities: he did acknowledge, however, that he was dogged by bad luck. The lucky one was Domenico Scarlatti, who, during his long stay in Andalusia, at the little court of Seville, no doubt listened to many traces of lost Moorish music, transported by the Gypsies in the emergent flamenco; that air invigorated Baroque music and, through Scarlatti’s originality, contributed to the evolution of European music. Gypsy passion, at the edges of Europe, in Hungarian landscapes and Andalusian hillsides, transmitted its energy to so-called “Western” music — one more stone to add to Sarah’s idea of “common construction.” That, moreover, was Liszt’s contradiction: by isolating the Gypsies’ contribution in a Gobineau-like “race,” he distanced it, neutralized it; although he recognized that contribution, he could only conceive of it as an ancient stream, which flowed from “that people foreign as the Jews” into the earliest Hungarian music: Liszt’s rhapsodies are entitled Hungarian Rhapsodies, not Gypsy Rhapsodies . . . That great movement of “national” exclusion, the historical construction of “German,” “Italian,” “Hungarian” music as the expression of each nation, in perfect balance with it, is immediately contradicted, in reality, by its own theoreticians. The modal augmentations of some sonatas by Scarlatti, the alterations of the Gypsy scale (Liszt speaks of “very bizarre glints of offensive brilliance”) are so many knife-twists in classical harmony, the twist of Carmen’s knife, when she slashes the face of one of the cigar-making girls with a Saint Andrew’s cross. I could suggest to Sarah that she turn her attention to the Gypsies of the Orient, so little studied, the Turkish Çingane, the Syrian Nawar, the Iranian Lulis — nomads or sedentary people who could be found from India to Central Asia to the Maghreb since the Sassanid era and King Bahram Gūr. In classical Persian poetry, the Gypsies are free, joyful, music-loving; they are the beauty of the moon, they dance and seduce — they are objects of love and desire. I know nothing of their music, is it different from the music of Iran or, on the contrary, is it the substratum on which Iranian modes grow? Between India and the plains of Western Europe beats the free blood of their mysterious languages, of all they have carried with them in their movements — outlining another map, a secret map of an immense country that stretches from the Indus Valley to the Guadalquivir.

  I circle around love. I stir my little teaspoon in the empty cup. Do I want another herbal tea? I’m not sleepy at all, that’s for sure. What is Fate trying to tell me tonight? I could read the cards, if I had the slightest competence in the matter I’d throw myself on the Tarots. “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante . . . is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, with a wicked pack of cards.” Here’s my card, the Drowned Phoenician Sailor. The Oriental aquatic hanged man, basically. Fear death by drowning. Or, in Bizet:

  But if you must die,

  If the fearful word

  Is written by fate,

  Start over twenty times,

  The pitiless card

  Will repeat: Death!

  Again! Again!

  Always death!

  Again! Despair!

  Always death!

  To die by the hand of Carmen or Mme Sosostris, it all comes down to the same thing, it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other, or kif-kif bourricot as the French say. The announcement of imminent death, as in the beautiful soberness of the postscript to one of the last letters of Nietzsche, the giant with the mustaches of clay,

  P.S. This winter, I’ll stay in Nice. My summer address is: Sils-Maria, Haute-Engadine, Switzerland. I’ve stopped teaching at the university. I am three-quarters blind.

  which resounds like an epitaph. It’s hard to imagine there is a final night, that one could already be three-quarters blind. Sils in the Engadine is among the most beautiful mountain landscapes in Europe, they say. Sils Lake and Silvaplana Lake which Nietzsche was going to circumnavigate by foot. Nietzsche the Persian, Nietzsche the reader of the Avesta, last or first Zoroastrian of Europe, blinded by the light of the fire of Ahura Mazda the Great Brightness. Always these paths keep crossing and recrossing; Niezsche in love with Lou Salomé, that same Lou who would marry an Orientalist, Friedrich Carl Andreas, specialist in Iranian languages, who almost stabbed himself to death, since she refused him her body and made him mad with desire; Nietzsche met Annemarie Schwarzenbach in Sils-Maria, where the Schwarzenbachs owned a sumptuous chalet; Annemarie Schwarzenbach met the ghost of Nietzsche in Tehran, where she stayed several times; Annemarie Schwarzenbach met Thomas Mann and Bruno Walter through Erika and Klaus Mann, to whom she sent those distraught letters from Syria and Iran. Annemarie Schwarzenbach met Arthur de Gobineau without realizing it in the Lahr Valley, a few dozen kilometers north of Tehran. The compass is still pointing east. In Iran, Sarah took me to visit these places, one after the other: the villa in Farmaniyeh where Annemarie resided with her husband the young French diplomat Claude Clarac, a beautiful house with neo-Persian columns, with a magnificent garden, today the residence of the Italian ambassador, an affable man, delighted to show us around his home and to learn that the melancholy Swiss woman had lived there for a time — Sarah shone in the shadows of the trees, her hair was like those golden fish shimmering in brown water; her happiness at discovering that house was transformed into an endless smile; I myself was so happy with her childlike pleasure that I felt full of a springtime-like jubilation, powerful as the perfume of the countless roses in Tehran. The villa was sumptuous — the Qajar faïences on the walls told the stories of Persian heroes; the furniture, most of it antique, varied between old Europe and immortal Iran. The building was modified and enlarged in the 1940s, an inextricable mingling of Italian neo-Gothic architecture and nineteenth-century Persian, harmonious for the most part. The city around us, usually so harsh, softened by the vision of Sarah kneeling on the edge of a fountain, her white hand distorted by the water in a basin covered in water lilies. I found her again in Iran a few months after Paris and her thesis defense, many months after her marriage and my jealousy, after Damascus, Aleppo and the closed door of her room at the Baron Hotel, slammed in my face — the pain is vanishing little by little, all pains vanish, shame is a feeling that imagines the other in the self, that takes responsibility for the vision of the other, a dividing in two, and now, dragging my old slippers toward the living room and my desk, bumping as usual against the porcelain umbrella stand invisible in the dark, I tell myself that I was very shabby to have cold-shouldered him like that, and at the same time to scheme in every possible and imaginable way to see her again in Iran, looking for research subjects, fellowships, invitations to get me to Tehran, completely blinded by that idée fixe, to the point of upsetting my cherished university plans; everyone asked me, in Vienna, Why Tehran, why Persia? Istanbul and Damascus, OK, but Iran? and I had to invent tortuous rationalizations, investigations into “the meaning of musical tradition,” into classical Persian poetry and its echoes in European music, or else deliver myself of a very peremptory: “I have to go back to the sources,” which had the advantage of immediately shutting up the curious, sure as they were I had been touched by grace or, more often, by the wind of madness.

  Now look, I’ve unthinkingly awakened my computer, Franz, I know what you’re going to do, you’ll start searching through old stories, your Tehran notes, reread Sarah’s ema
ils and you know that’s not a good idea, you’d be better off making another cup of tea and going back to bed. Or else revise, revise that infernal paper on the Orientalist operas of Gluck.

  A puff of Iranian opium, a puff of memory, it’s a kind of forgetfulness, a forgetfulness of the advancing night, of encroaching illness, of the blindness that’s overtaking us. Maybe that’s what Sadegh Hedayat lacked when he turned the gas up high in Paris in April 1951, a pipe of opium and memory, a companion: the greatest Iranian prose writer of the twentieth century, the darkest, the funniest, the nastiest ended up giving in to death out of exhaustion; he let himself go, stopped resisting, his life didn’t seem worth pursuing, here or there — the prospect of going back to Tehran was as unbearable to him as that of staying in Paris, he was floating, floating in that studio he had so much trouble obtaining, on the rue Championnet in Paris, the City of Light, in which he saw so little. In Paris, he liked the brasseries, the cognac and hard-boiled eggs, since he’d been a vegetarian for a long time, ever since his travels in India; in Paris he liked the memory of the city he had known in the 1920s, and the tension between the Paris of his youth and the Paris of 1951 — between his youth and 1951 — was a daily source of suffering, in his walks through the Latin Quarter, in his long flâneries through the outskirts. He spent some time (that’s an overstatement) with a few Iranians, exiles like him; those Iranians found him a bit haughty, a bit scornful, which was probably true. He no longer wrote much. “I write only for my shadow, projected by the lamp onto the wall; I have to make it know me.” He would burn his final texts. No one loved and hated Iran as much as Hedayat, Sarah said. No one was as attentive to the language of the streets, to the characters in the streets, the zealots, the humble, the powerful. No one could construct as savage a critique or as immense a praise of Iran as Hedayat. He may have been a sad man, especially at the end of his life, both caustic and bitter, but he was not a bitter writer, far from it.