by Andre Brink
Towards the end of her school career, as her studies in Europe drew close, her life took on a calmer aspect. But another catastrophe was ready to break: Hitler’s Anschluss just when Louisa was due to leave for Vienna. She trusted no one, confided in no one; so it was impossible for anyone ever to know just how profoundly this affected her. The only remaining option was the Conservatory in Stellenbosch. Not quite Vienna; but better than nothing. Had it not been for the diaries Ouma Kristina discovered many years later we would have had no indication at all of what she went through during those years.
She did well at the Conservatory. Exceptionally well, though one wouldn’t have guessed that from her non-committal letters home. She could have become popular too: she was beautiful, there was no lack of admiring young men. But her response left them in no doubt: she either ignored them or bitched at them. That is, until the law student Ludwig Müller made his appearance. How can one ever explain that mysterious chemistry? Much later, in Louisa’s diaries, Ouma Kristina would discover all about it: how he’d shared her passion for music, how they’d gone to concerts together, how he’d even sung with her; how he’d accompanied her on the piano, once or twice at concerts with the Cape Town City Orchestra. No one except Louisa ever knew that Ludwig Müller could sing a note, let alone play the piano; and whoever might try to page through old newspapers or the archives of the Cape Town City Hall in search of a review or an advertisement of a concert in which the two of them appeared, either jointly or severally, would end up empty-handed, Ouma Kristina assured me; she’d tried. The diaries were, in every respect, another story.
But whatever the nature or the source of the attraction, it existed. And in a way it must have done Louisa some good, drawing her out of her hermetic world of music to expose her to a kind of existence she knew nothing about. Ludwig Müller was a scion of an impoverished but furiously patriotic Afrikaner family (his father was a tenant farmer in the Free State) whose rhythms had been marked by the great events of the rebellion of Slagtersnek, the Great Trek, the two Anglo-Boer Wars, up to and including the reactionary movement of the Ossewa-brandwag that tried to sabotage the Smuts government during the Second World War. In fact, soon after Ludwig had begun to court Louisa, his father was arrested and interned in a concentration camp, allegedly after he’d been involved in an attempt to blow up a post office. The details of the exploit never fully came to light and one can only hope that some of the unsavoury accounts of it were exaggerated. At any rate, he remained in the camp until the end of the war in 1945. The event had radically influenced Ludwig’s life. He was the oldest son, and when his father was interned he had to give up his law studies to support his mother and a number of younger brothers. As a result of his father’s political involvement he was refused a career in the civil service, which left him with a lifelong chip on the shoulder.
After a series of humiliating disappointments, he was finally offered a job on a farm near Stellenbosch. Not very well paid, but at least a refuge from disgrace; and the farmer’s family both understood and shared his nationalistic sentiments. The obstacles that faced him had strengthened the bond with Louisa; it is likely that the emotions bottled up in her during her isolation from her own family found some release in this relationship. There are indications (those diaries again) that they soon became intimate; if her account is to be trusted, it was ecstatic. There has always been this thirst for excess in the family.
Together they planned the future. As soon as the war was over they’d go overseas. He would complete his studies in Germany, following in the footsteps of a whole regiment of national heroes who had gone there in the Thirties; she would go to Vienna. The world would be at their feet. All that was required was for Germany to win the war.
Well!
At the end of 1945 Louisa completed her M. Mus. and took up a post at the Conservatory, teaching piano. Ludwig found work in a bottle store; he’d begun to study by correspondence. According to the diaries they attended concerts several times a week, meeting many international opera stars – among them, most notably, Amelita Gallicurci and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, both of whom were so impressed by Louisa’s voice that they offered her free lessons in the series of Master Classes they conducted. Unfortunately Ouma Kristina’s subsequent enquiries failed to reveal any sign of visits to South Africa by Gallicurci and Schwarzkopf in those years; in fact, she found that Gallicurci had already stopped singing before the war. In the diaries the couple appeared to have led a life of success and fulfilment; the regrettably insufficient facts at the family’s disposal tell a depressingly different story.
After the victory of the National Party at the polls in 1948, Ludwig was at last admitted to the civil service, in the Department of Justice. One would hate to sound disparaging, but it isn’t unlikely that his father’s war-time exploits at long last stood him in good stead, as his rise was meteoric. A year after the elections they were married. Soon afterwards Ludwig was transferred to a whole string of small villages in the deep interior, first to Calvinia, then to Carnarvon, later to Winburg, to Schweizer Reneke, to Lydenburg. In the diaries, according to Ouma, one could continue to read accounts of Louisa’s enthusiastic correspondence with Gigli, with Richard Tauber, with Renata Tebaldi; there were entries on amazing offers – first of bursaries and openings for further study, then of recitals. Unseen, unheard, acting purely on the recommendation of divas like Schumann or Tebaldi, the managements of the great opera houses in Linz and Graz, Covent Garden, invited Louisa; there were even letters from the Vienna State Opera, later from La Scala, then the Met. All of which, of course, had to be graciously declined. Still, without singing another note, the name of Louisa Müller became, said the diaries, a household word all over the civilised world.
In 1951, coinciding with the transfer to Carnarvon, Ludwig was promoted to his first magisterial post. In the same year Louisa miscarried, as a consequence of which she remained ailing for a long time (which resulted in the cancellation of bursaries from Salzburg and Milan); and in 1952 their first child, Anna, was born. Her illness persisted, necessitating the refusal of passionate entreaties from Stockholm, New York and Paris.
By that time Louisa no longer gave music lessons. While it had been a useful help in paying for Ludwig’s studies or complementing his initial meagre earnings, her contribution had been enthusiastically welcomed; but as he began to climb the social ladder he felt it no longer suited his status to have a wife who taught uninterested and uninteresting children to bang away at the piano. The diaries gave no indication of whether she resisted or quietly resigned herself to his wish; but there were persistent accounts of clandestine visits by Irmgard Seefried, Julius Patzak, Erna Berger and others, who were all so fired up by what they’d heard about her that they deemed it an honour and a privilege to offer her lessons. Some of them stayed over, Birgit Nilsson for three weeks. (An invitation to Marion Anderson had to be withdrawn at the last minute when Louisa discovered the singer was black.)
Fortunately Ludwig had no objection to his wife’s eagerness to continue singing. In the church choir, for instance; or solos at weddings, christenings or funerals; or on special request at meetings of the church’s women’s group, the Women’s Agricultural Association, or the Party.
As time went on Louisa began to accept the inevitable, although the diaries made it more than obvious that she deserved better than the small-town milieu to which her husband’s career had doomed her. Conflict, one presumes, was unavoidable – between an increasing urge to withdraw into her own world, and the need to fulfil her role as one of the first ladies in whatever village they happened to live in. One gets the impression, according to Ouma Kristina, that her spirit began to wilt; in 1959 she spent three months at a mental institution in Cape Town to improve a ‘nervous condition’.
It was soon after her discharge from the institution, while she and Ludwig were spending a week’s holiday in Cape Town (having left little Anna at Sinai with her grandmother) that Louisa one morning found herself walking al
ong the misty streets on her own. The mountain was invisible under its blanket, the air cool and damp, her breath puffed out in small white clouds. She was acutely depressed. In one of her rare confidences to her mother in those years she admitted that she’d begun to contemplate suicide. And then, quite suddenly, a young stranger turned up at her side. He didn’t introduce himself, he made no attempt to chat her up; he barely looked at her. He merely walked along with her, took her arm, and burst into song: Mozart, Papageno’s ‘Vogelfanger’, then ‘Dove sono’, then ‘La cì darem la mano’, gliding effortlessly from one aria to the next, improvising his own words when he forgot the original. A pleasant, joyful tenor, nothing remarkable, not exceptional at all; but contagious. Soon she was singing with him. Until, a few hundred yards further, at a corner, she wasn’t even sure of where they were, he let go of her arm, called ‘Ciao!’ and went off on his own, disappearing into the misty day. It had all happened so unexpectedly that she couldn’t even tell for sure whether it had been real.
The consequences were real enough. Louisa returned to the small German Gasthaus where she and Ludwig were lodging (he’d wanted to stay with relatives, but she’d refused), and confronted him with her decision: she was going on a trip to Europe. Life was passing her by; if she went on like this much longer she’d go mad. She would not deprive herself any longer of everything she’d given up for his sake. (Ludwig reported the whole episode, with righteous indignation, to Ouma Kristina, when he went there to arrange for Anna to stay on longer; surely it could not be expected of him to look after the child, his career was too important: and for once there is something more definite to rely on than the diaries.)
Louisa stayed away for three months, to sound out the possibilities; attending performances in London, Glyndebourne, Paris, Vienna, Bayreuth, Milan, recording each in great detail in her diary. Interestingly enough, says Ouma Kristina, there is no mention, during this period, of personal visits to any of the famous names who had become her intimate friends over the previous years. One gets the impression that she was relaxed, and happy; maybe it was no longer necessary to prove anything, not even to herself.
Upon her return she told Ludwig that she would stay at home until Anna was ten; then the child could be sent to boarding school, or to her grandmother (she refused to entrust her to Ludwig’s relatives): and Louisa would go to Europe to resume the music studies she’d been waiting for all her life. She was not getting any younger, but hopefully it was not yet too late. There was a possibility of getting a small bursary to Vienna – nothing like the lucrative offers the diaries had recorded earlier, but not to be sneezed at either.
‘On my salary –?’ Ludwig objected.
‘Your salary, and the shares you’ve been buying through your relatives and your friends and your contacts, have been quite enough to see us through so far.’
‘What do you know about my financial affairs?’
‘More than you think. I’ve worked it all out. With my bursary, and a small monthly contribution from you, and a loan from my mother – I’ll pay back every penny, don’t worry – I can manage. And this time nothing will stop me.’
Three months later she was pregnant.
Ludwig was ecstatic about the prospect, at long last, of a male heir. He couldn’t stop enthusing. He even had the name ready; he had no doubt at all that it would be a son.
On several occasions Louisa came close to losing the child. You may think what you like, says Ouma Kristina; but no one can prove anything. And in the end a healthy daughter was born, and named Kristien after her grandmother.
From that day, according to Ouma Kristina, the diaries once again began to expound at length on illustrious operatic visitors from abroad; throughout the apartheid years most of the greatest names – Victoria de los Angeles, Joan Sutherland, Janet Baker, Kiri Te Kanawa, even, once, Maria Callas – paid clandestine visits to the villages where Ludwig Müller was magistrate, lodging with the family and getting to know that disgracefully undervalued talent. In due course even journeys abroad were recorded, mainly to Vienna, which Louisa appeared to know intimately, but also to New York or Milan: mostly courtesy visits to friends and admirers, but occasionally, on the insistence of Von Karajan, or Solti, or Davies, for closed recitals to invited audiences.
If this were Ludwig Müller’s biography, those would have been eventful years; it would have been revealing to trace the interlinking of his personal career with the larger history of the country. First, in the Fifties, the gradual unfolding of a new system of legislation and the manifestation of a growing passive resistance: through trials involving passes or protesting women disturbing the public peace Ludwig acquired quite a reputation. There must have been the heady discovery that he was making a personal contribution by handing down verdicts in terms of an elaborate system based on nuances of skin colour or the texture of a human hair or the crescent on a thumb nail. Then the watershed of Sharpeville in 1960, the year before my birth: the increasing polarisation, the banning of the ANC and other liberation movements, the first signs of armed underground resistance – coinciding with Ludwig’s first political trials, sabotage trials, his growing popularity with the police for his ‘firmness’, for verdicts that left no doubt about the need for law and order. The Seventies: the rise of Black Power, the school boycotts and the eruption of Soweto, the murder of Biko, war on the borders, the escalation of resistance, stirrings of industrial unrest – while Ludwig issued fuel permits, sat as an assessor at terror trials, composed confidential reports to Pretoria on subversive action in the platteland. The successive states of emergency during the Eighties, increasing corruption, the arrogance of unchecked power: while Ludwig sentenced conscientious objectors to prison, acquired ever more shares and properties, following the informed hints of insiders and fellow campaigners within the grand system. Brother among brethren, rising to the position of chairman of his branch in the organisation of éminences grises that controlled the power, onward Christian soldiers. Clandestine meetings once a month, the hectic circulation of confidential documents to expose traitors and promote the cause of the volk … The fascination of power that can be shaped and fashioned in one’s hands the way one shaped clay oxen as a child (somewhere, somewhere hidden in the mind must lurk the barefoot boy jeered at by the superior English, by city-dwellers, humiliated for being a little Boer and a bywoner). The appointment of teachers, the calling of pastors, the manipulation of posts on city and school and church councils; the ingenious organisation of fêtes and bazaars and cultural actions and meetings on moral standards. The triumph of the man who as a student was forced to leave university for lack of money: now a key figure in chambers of commerce and among brokers and the organisers of Days of the Covenant and Heroes’ Days. The private grudge which coincides with memories of the suffering and humiliation of a people, the assiduous exploitation of the agony of mothers and children in British concentration camps, of barefoot women crossing the Drakensberg – all of this dutifully harnessed to the cause of the establishment.
Of all this there is no sign in Louisa’s story; it is as if she’s never been there, never looked over his shoulder. All she could leave behind was the diaries, and those were too private for the eyes of others, flights of the imagination described on the tablets of her secret resistance and suffering, worthless to outsiders. Only Ouma has read them, understanding (perhaps) more than Louisa could ever have expected.
Late in 1989 Ludwig died of a coronary, at the respectable age of sixty-nine, after devoting the last years of his life to full-time political campaigning. The grateful community (the Party, to be exact) arranged a memorial service, attended by officials from as far afield as Pretoria; afterwards his remains where laid to rest, for some inexplicable reason, in the family graveyard at Sinai; even ex-president Botha attended, trembling, in a collar much too large for him.
Louisa moved into the feather palace with Ouma. A strange decision, to say the least. Was it another demonstration of her urge for self-flagellation? Di
d she think it would heap fiery coals on her mother’s stubborn head? Or did blood in the end prove to be thicker than water anyway? There was another, more banal, possibility: the discovery that Ludwig’s political campaigns had financially ruined him to such an extent that he left her nothing but accumulated debts. So the only way to salvage her pride was to move to the farm. She became a recluse; people seldom saw her in town. Like two shadows she and Ouma Kristina continued to live alongside each other. She was a stickler for order and ceremony: one had to ‘dress for dinner’, taking turns with her two full-length evening gowns, even when she found herself alone at the head of the long mahogany table in the dining-room, with only a boiled egg for dinner, served by Jeremiah in livery. That, she explained when Ouma once dared to enquire, was how it was done in Europe. When she was at the State Opera, or Callas’s guest on the yacht of Ari Onassis, or with Rainier and Grace in the pink palace. One has one’s pride.
After Louisa’s death in a car accident – on that straight stretch of road in to town, says Ouma Kristina, with no tree in sight; no sign of a burst tyre or mechanical failure either – Ouma wound up the estate. That was when she first discovered the diaries. She thought of burning or burying them, out of consideration for her daughter’s memory; but then decided to keep them for me, confident that one day I would come home.
Now, regrettably, they have all been destroyed in the fire, together with everything else she had in her room.