Blue Self-Portrait

by Noémi Lefebvre

  Inside the Kaiser Café my sister left me to await the arrival of my fine company and gave me her parting tips, you are not intellect alone my sister, think of your body, think of straightening out your legs, try to untangle them and drop your shoulders, you have to relax, one day we’ll go to a Turkish bath, think of the Turkish bath, she left and I dived for the first time into the correspondence, Lieber Dr Adorno on one side, Lieber und verehrter Herr Dr Mann on the other, trying not to expect too much of our meeting, to expect as little as possible, preparing already to expect nothing ever again, staking everything on the correspondence, burying myself in it to the point of disappearing altogether, Lieber Dr Adorno on one hand, understanding nothing fundamentally but plunging, able only to drown to swim you have to have learned and to learn you have to have dived in, plunged in the correspondence, Lieber und verehrter Herr Dr Mann on the other hand, when the pianist made his entrance. I saw the pianist enter and I knew he wouldn’t save me from drowning but would press his pianist’s hand on my head and clap his lovely pianist’s hand over this mouth of a girl who’s said too much already but perseveres, not straight away no first he’d watch me struggle but then he’d do it, he’d help me to disappear, would press that hand down and apply that fine hand and would make me shut up, shut up the pianist would say pushing my head down his hand clapped over my mouth, shut up now don’t say a word stop talking, don’t say a single word either in German or French or in any language please shut up, you have to shut up now, there you go, silence, the sooner the better, I had very little time before the head pushed down and the hand clapped over, I didn’t know how long but very little. What was I really after, I wondered, why did I want to talk to this pianist, not to converse with the pianist or shoot the breeze but to go to the heart of the matter before being reduced to silence by the pianist’s two hands, go for broke, as if he’d asked me for the crux of it whereas obviously he hadn’t, had no interest in what mattered that particular day rather preferred to avoid it, was pursuing quite other ends, life is infested with matter what use is talking about it, he looks straight ahead, the strasse des 17 Juni leads to the Brandenburg Gate and behind it Pariserplatz, go round the roundabout, several times round for thinking time, could be anywhere but is here going round and round wondering how he can solve the problem of the Blue Self-Portrait, its musical composition like the painting’s composition, its composition a re-composition without imitation or plagiarism but aligned with the painting up until that end for the beginning is superb, truly superb, he’s sure of it, the best beginning he has ever come up with, he’s managed some decent ones and even some excellent but this beginning surpasses anything he’d ever thought possible, the crucial matter exposed right from the start, its inadequacy already in the first phrase, the bare essence, the black trees of Neuhardenberg figured by the entanglement of signifying lines, the interplay of timbres and the singularity of this polyphony whose further developments he’d been able to arrange like spiky branches, yes it’s the spitting image of the Blue Self-Portrait, my self-portrait like Schoenberg’s, you had to hear this opening of the Self-Portrait with full orchestra, at the piano already brand-new and already on the staves original yet still faithful to the first idea, faithful thus to the original without plagiarizing the original nor acting as an allegory or evocation or metaphor, its fidelity outside and beyond the original, and yet you could never dream up anything closer to the original, so much so that listening to this opening you are immediately in the presence of the painting, this the usual accompaniment had confirmed having seen the Blue Self-Portrait by Schoenberg then heard the opening of the Blue Self-Portrait by the pianist and compared the one to the other, had reassured him it’s a good opening, reassured a very good opening, but had not begun by calling it an excellent opening, only a good opening, the composer hadn’t believed her, this wasn’t a good opening or even a very good opening it was in point of fact an excellent opening, he knew it and wasn’t really relying on the accompaniment to confirm the truth about the opening being certain the opening was excellent but the finish still a limbo, the middle perfectly good, the middle in keeping with the black trees and the exhibition in the background, he had rendered that background by a violent turn to tonality, the twelve tones and then a sudden drop into tonality, got hold there of a genuine idea which nevertheless came only to partial conclusion amid the upper-octave distortions of the prepared piano, the usual accompaniment had heard the end but made no distinction, judged the end as she did the beginning, had reassured him about the end, it’s very good the accompaniment had said but obviously that wasn’t true, the accompaniment could easily have said excellent but he knew it wasn’t, had no illusions about the end’s weakness and could not leave the end as he’d first imagined it, so thinly imagined, an end that wasn’t really an end but a conclusion without urgency, a procedure whose end was, an expected end, in line with the audience’s expectations, forming a certain unity as it were but in fact a betrayal, a traitorous end, that’s what I’ve composed, an end imagined without imagination, imagination the power behind images, no power and no images in that end, no power hence no image, no image hence no power, the absence of imagination in this end would bother no one but myself, no one would be disturbed by this lack of imagination in the shape of image-forming power, no one if not myself, the end absorbed as easily by our audience of regular patrons as by the accompaniment, all applauding the end, no one challenging, no one taking a stand against this unworthy final procedure, this unheeded betrayal bothering absolutely no one apart from me who would betray myself with this ending.

  No one but myself may decide my end, breathed the composer slowly as he drove in the setting sun, crossing the bridge over the Spree, passing the Philharmonic and re-entering the underground car park, with this realization he felt in no way empowered, rather lost once more in the negative solitude that did him no good, no one but myself, lowering the window to take the ticket, he would have liked someone beside him in the car, a girl perhaps who would tell him what she thought of his end, thinking no one but myself alone in the car is not the same as saying no one but myself to someone, a girl like that girl who would cross and uncross, who’d twist her hair round her fingers and would of course know not to say anything about the end as she knew that no one but he, she would understand the end’s shortcomings without benevolence but as if by magic. Enclosed in the car with him on the third level below ground of the Sony Center’s car park, she would listen to that end, not the end by the painter-composer who finished his portrait having left out an ear, but the pianist-composer’s end who was finishing a piece that demanded full attention from both ears, she would understand straight away without a word about the end nor with any kind of comment the inadequacy of this end, of course, the girl would say, the end needs another go, not the very last notes the girl would have said but the finish, the finish rather than the very end, in fact it’s the scherzo the composer realizes, that provocative inversion into tragic mode in the scherzo demands a finish, not a conclusion, no one but I, her apart, that girl, knows better than anyone except me, mind if I smoke? asks the composer and the girl makes a rollie for him, they stay there smoking in the car and now perhaps he understands, teenage-parked in here with her and the contained curls of smoke, the idea he’d been missing, musical, for the finish, to finish the piece in that volatile, intangible way, drop that obvious rallentando that trips too naturally into the G-flat to B-F-D-flat triplet sequence, pick up the initial theme in the right hand but no brio at all here, from the D-flat the chord this time in inversion, sing the inversion to the girl, invert the girl, invite the girl to come back with him and invert her at his place, in his Berlin apartment while the accompaniment is out, not inverting the girl on the bed but running his fingers all over the girl like a teenager and letting her fingers touch first here and then there, touching first a bit then a lot then endlessly, waltzing endlessly in the apartment with the girl in a waltz that’s so slow no idea why so slow and losing his bala
nce with her and imagining her dancing with no one else ever again, alone with her dancing, no one else ever, squeezing the girl in his arms but without lifting the girl, letting himself spin floating turning slowly and floating slowly, letting himself go with her in that so-slow waltz, he knows the impossibility of romantic love, which has no resolution except in death that he knows of, let’s get out of here not stay where we are come to my place says the pianist gearing into reverse, come to my place another time, if you like, the next time you’re in Berlin you can stay at mine, there’s space here, my accompaniment’s offspring has a room here but she’s not around much, you could have the offspring’s room if you wanted, next time, when you’re back in Berlin. Thanks, I said to the pianist, that’s very kind but no, to take the accompaniment’s offspring’s room unmöglich, not something I can countenance, spending even one night in the offspring’s bed would mean dying in that bed, would mean quite simply killing myself in the bed, would obviously mean giving up all possibility of getting up again, I’ll never survive, said it not joking, of course I’m exaggerating and I’d have survived like the cow survives the disappearance of her calf, her last-born like the ones before, would have mooed for two or three days straight then survived and finally gone on living day after day and season after season, would have thought of it then not much then not at all, exaggeration along with not-caring my salient features, another way of putting two fingers up at the world, staying carefree in the offspring’s room is however much more imaginable than staying there and hoping to die, as if it were so important where a girl sleeps, here or there, one room or another in the end what difference does it make, thanks but, all in all, I prefer a little Polish B&B on Neue Kantsrasse to the accompaniment’s offspring’s bedroom in your apartment, I nevertheless replied with as much nonchalance as exaggeration, because the little Polish B&B is not objectively preferable, nonetheless among the shabbiest and sorriest, the black forest freeze emanating from the B&B staff, sleeping in a Polish forest or sleeping in the B&B on Neue Kantstrasse is six and half a dozen, the chill and the darkness and fear of wolves and the winter solitude, the tapestry in room 203, the deer in the tapestry, the Polish state of the electrical wiring, the Polish condition of the bed-linen, the Polish room service, I pictured the accompaniment’s face at having to put up with me in her offspring’s room so near the pianist and having to put up with me in fact everywhere in the apartment, I as always incapable of respecting hospitality’s limits and overstepping them at the first opportunity and at all those that follow, by my omnipresent presence destroying an environment propitious to well-conceived conjugality, the quiet and benevolent friendly complicity of conjugality when it’s genuinely shared, my big mouth talking too much from sparrow’s fart, even before breakfast I’m motoring on and without thinking to spread the marmalade on my Brötchen I plunge in, in my typical scholarly, passionate and extravagant fashion, like that from my first words of the day, from the moment I first open my mouth and as if to compensate the tooth I’m missing, already before morning coffee is done I’ll have talked too much, in my passionate and triumphal and candid, shameless fashion, Maman did not teach me modesty certainly not, I said to my sister, we can’t blame her you can’t think of everything, we’ll have to make the best of our education, I said, our education wasn’t the worst either, went on, still we can’t blame Maman nor Papa who followed Maman, peace be with him he went straight to heaven like a man of nature, of wild nature, not beautiful nature, of wild woods not of gardens à la française, we can’t blame either one or the other for this dreadful education, they did their best, didn’t educate us so badly in the end, I look at us and I know there’s worse, that day I was optimistic and said to my sister who wasn’t at her best since Papa was dead and she wasn’t yet, that yes, shamelessness is a basic handicap but not the worst, that of course shamelessness sabotages us, makes us misfits and more arm-bombs than arm candy, that of course education for collective happiness makes us unresistant and fundamentally influenceable by the best and much more often by the worst, but see, my sister, what nice girls we are, really very nice girls, Maman did not screw that up and Papa neither, dead his soul at peace having at least succeeded in making truly nice girls of us, very very nice. As nice as us is very rare, as fundamentally is exceptional, I said to my sister who didn’t see why, for my sister being nice is so natural she doesn’t see it, thinks everyone is like her, doesn’t know, doesn’t see the nasty on one side and nor the nice on the other, imagines everyone equally nice, no villainy or perversity but a universal niceness. Collective happiness, in my sister’s case, depends neither on satisfaction nor on abnegation but fundamentally on universal niceness, the one does not preclude the other, my sister said, it’s due to excessive niceness that I’ve found myself in the most immodest situations, stripped bare by niceness and soon fetched up in a strip from which I have only emerged thanks to the niceness of others, niceness has never prevented shamelessness in my case, to be honest my niceness has much more often fed my shamelessness such that for me niceness has always been a disaster. For me but not you, I replied because I’ve never believed in disaster striking my sister. Others may believe that, not I, I’ve heard tales about her, the acres burned down in her wake, the suicides and nervous breakdowns, the despair of artists who’ve painted her portrait, the demolitions of façades and crumblings of cliffs which speak volumes about my sister’s capacity to provoke, my sister’s provocations have been a feature of her whole career, although never catastrophic for her, my sister emerges a hero from all misadventures thanks to her non-stick character and to a stubbornness that I call perseverance, misfit and arm-bomb are compliments to my sister while both being appalling flaws in me, declining the pianist’s invitation is yet another symptom of my antisocial character, the pianist will of course have observed, the lack of elementary politeness in this categorical refusal is due to my unclub-bable character, saying I preferred a Polish B&B on Neue Kantstrasse to the offspring’s room in his apartment is proof if any required that misfit and arm-bomb are, right after carefree, the terms that best describe me, which the pianist will have noticed, no longer risking an invitation except to the cinema in the Sony Center, invitation to which I responded positively. If you like we could go to the cinema, the pianist said in French out of politeness and love of the language and I said ja warum nicht.

  You had to hear me say that warum nicht to the pianist, a warum nicht at the Kaiser Café is not a warum nicht at Brecht’s house, there is in that Kaiser Café warum nicht a readiness for suicide that the same warum nicht at Brecht’s house could never convey, Kurt Weill’s music and Helene Weigel’s food are essentially suicide inhibitors, the pianist had said to all who would listen, Weill fills us with life and Weigel’s food likewise, not with that lively, joyous life singing in the open air and collective life as life can be in a way, but with a life that resists collective, singing, joyous life, there are limits to the joyous life the pianist had said to all who would listen. If, in Brecht’s house, I had been invited by the pianist to sleep in the offspring’s bedroom I’d have said a warum nicht of resistance so nourished by Helene Weigel and by Kurt Weill, but nourished by nobody at the Kaiser Café I spoke that collaborationist and suicidal warum nicht, why I didn’t say to the pianist that I’d nevertheless prefer to sleep in the offspring’s room than go to the Sony Center’s cinema I don’t know, though actually I’d much much much rather have ended up in that tiny room or rather roomette with the pianist than in the Sony Center’s cinema, and would probably have preferred to find myself in the roomette even without the pianist than at the cinema with him, would’ve preferred the roomette to room 203 at the Polish B&B, yet I said no to the roomette and yes to the cinema, I’d really like to understand, I told my sister. You are able to say no for tomorrow but not today, you can say no to an uncertain future but not on the spot, no in general yes but no in particular no, that’s how you are, I know because you and I are the same, my sister said in the plane, identical educa
tions, saying yes is good but not no, you have to say yes Maman used to say having always said yes in general down the generations which made her say no in particular, used to say you mustn’t say this or that, no, above all don’t say that, used also to say you mustn’t do this or that, above all don’t do that so I’d say yes to Maman as a general yes while my sister who said yes was thinking no, I obedient but she disobedient, that’s how my sister has been from her very first yell, my sister’s waah still ringing in the maternal ears but my absence of yelling all the more, we can’t hear her, I would hear people saying about me, obedience doesn’t make a fuss, I thought in the plane, at the same time as my sister was remembering her yes that had nothing in common with any obedient yes, my own yes always so servile but my sister’s yes always free, she remembered she’d always say yes too soon, I always say yes and then regret it, sometimes I even regret it before I speak and knowing I’ll say it like the day I got married, my sister said, I can’t swear to it but I do think I started to regret it before I said it but said it anyway, because I’m contrary. I’ve also said it anyway, I told my sister, but I don’t know why, I’ve said no but too late, when the choice was irretrievably limited to no or no such that my no lost all meaning, choosing no or no is easy, as the guide said in the Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation, saying no in particular when the yes is general, yes, the guide was saying, the no of those names up there is a more resistant no than the no of the names that followed and which aren’t written up because they don’t deserve the name of Résistants, first-and second-wave are not the same, the guide explained, first-wave are the first and the second wasn’t too late but as good as, and as good as too late is well and truly too late. It isn’t always possible to say no, the guide said as we reached Déportation, sometimes no is quite simply impossible to say but possible to think and sometimes even impossible to think, but also not, either.