‘How quaint! Is it also your playground?’ she said, unaware that the tease was lost in his veil of panic.
‘In any event, Suzanne, the issue is not so much that of width. It has more to do with height. Once inside my door, it is impossible to stand up.’ This was an attempt to reclassify a hovel as an architectural misjudgement.
‘Erik, it is possible that we won’t stand up for the rest of the evening,’ she said, incredulous at his naiveté. ‘So come with me. It is my walls that I want you to see after all, and you may find my ceiling is far enough from the floor to suit your purpose.’
Just as Suzanne had promised, the ceiling in her third-floor apartment was beyond his reach, and the rooms spacious enough for the frock coat she slid from his shoulders to lie on the floor without being in anyone’s way. There was more light here than the fashionable gloom of the Clou, enough for Erik to appreciate the artwork on the walls. One of them, a painting of Suzanne and her former partner by the Catalan painter Santiago Rusiñol, gave him a shock of recognition. Two years before, Utrillo had borrowed Satie’s old infantryman’s uniform to wear for a sitting, and there it was in a portrait hanging on her wall.
‘You see, Erik?’ she said, pouring out wine. ‘You’ve been here before.’
There was also a self-portrait Suzanne had made ten years before that he could compare to the real thing, now that her face was finally more fully revealed by the generous lamplight. It was fascinating to see somebody in the past and the present for the first time. Her line with the crayon on paper was already assured, and the expression she captured was the wary arrogance of a teenager. A decade later, there was no trace of it as she clinked her glass against his. The wide-spaced blue eyes were more appraising, the generous lips more succulent than petulant.
‘Do you appreciate my skill as much as I appreciate yours?’ she asked.
‘I do. But your art says more about you than mine about me.’
‘You’re wrong. My images are just an approximation, but your music describes you completely. To hear it is to know you. That is why you are here. There is nothing more you need to say.’
Erik was unused to such compliments, and felt his mask slipping. ‘My Gymnopédies are absurd. They are simple crap. And they are short.’
‘Voilà. Simple, short, crap? That’s life. Do you want to see my older skills? I still have them.’
‘Such as?’ he said, his voice cracking slightly.
‘You know I was an acrobat in the circus? It was fun, because I was poor and it took me away from the boring life of selling hats and vegetables and carrying plates of food to ungrateful people. When you are fifteen, your body can do almost anything you want. But you have to do it perfectly every time, or else there are bad mistakes. One day I fell from the trapeze …’
‘Mon Dieu!’ cried Satie, in a brief reprise of a previous spiritual phase.
‘Nothing serious, but enough to tell me that my time as an acrobat was over,’ she said. ‘That was more than ten years ago. It’s funny. There are some things the body never forgets – at least, not yet. Sit on my bed, and I will show you. And please, take off your hat.’
Satie suspected that this would be unlike any circus routine he had ever seen, but did as he was told while assessing the suitability of Suzanne’s body for the announced performance. Rather than the gaunt figure of a hungry bohémienne, hers was voluptuous enough to make any Impressionist reach hungrily for the brush.
‘Strength and flexibility are paramount. Witness.’ At this, she bent herself back at the waist until her extended hands touched the floor behind her.
‘Handstand.’
First one leg, and then the other were kicked upward to point at the ceiling. Her wrists became her ankles, and her ankles were very much on display as her dress inverted completely and fell to the floor, covering her head and exposing her knickers. Here at last was a part of Suzanne yet to be committed to canvas. He wished he could have played it on the piano. One day, he would try. He could hear a waltz.
She swung her legs over to complete the circle and straightened up.
‘Now we will have a little trapeze,’ she announced.
Erik looked upwards, half-expecting a fly bar to swing from the top of her small armoire.
‘I am the flyer, you are the catcher, and we will attempt a shooting star. I will approach with my legs apart, and then you take my hands. Ready? Hup-hup!’
He felt that somehow he wasn’t ready – but what could he do? The circus had come to town.
She launched herself and became airborne after two or three bounds, lifting and separating her legs until they were parallel with her arms. He was aware of a forest of limbs hurtling towards him like javelins. When their bodies collided he was knocked backwards into a prone position on the bed while she straddled him from above, her legs still fully extended on either side. Strangely, he was more winded than she was.
She lowered herself to his side so that they were lying face to face.
‘That could have been fatal,’ she said with mock reproach. ‘You didn’t catch me. Now I am just a falling star.’
He grasped the copper-red hair that Renoir had painted.
‘My beautiful supple chérie,’ he said in a voice he did not recognise. ‘It is I who am falling.’
‘In that case, we had better remove your pince-nez before you land on something hard,’ she said.
So it was she who caught him, demonstrating that her body had indeed forgotten nothing, and that a reverse somersault was not required for her to execute the arch in her back.
‘I will never forget that this was Saturday, January fourteenth,’ he said immediately afterwards. ‘It is the day I proposed to you.’
She was confused. ‘Are you talking to me or making a diary entry, mon petit?’
‘Both,’ he said. ‘I want you to marry me. We should be together for the rest of our lives, because I do not think I will fall in love again.’
He began to hum a waltz tune, and then added words that had obviously been in his head long before this night:
We are far from moderation
And further yet from sadness
I long only for the precious moment
When we will be happy
I want you.
She was too transfixed by the melody and the absurdity of his impulse to refuse him then and there. Not until he slept did she whisper the sensible answer into his ear, hoping it would make its way into the place in his head where he kept all those poignant aimless tunes, to spill out between the notes when he was next at the keyboard in the Clou. It would not be the answer he wanted, but the susurration made him smile.
Two days later Suzanne came to see him in The Cupboard next door, ensuring her head never touched his low ceiling, and it was then their affair truly began. Each night she would wait at his table at the Clou until he had played the popular ballads, or accompanied another Utrillo puppet creation. Suzanne’s former suitor had noticed that Satie was the latest object of her attentions. He seemed not to mind.
Her enthusiasm for Erik’s music made him more ambitious. He composed a ballet about the conversion of a pagan to Christianity that was eventually staged at the Clou with a large cast of puppets. Satie presided at a harmonium, an instrument he thought more mystical in sound; the audience reacted by either shouting him a drink or shouting abuse. This was enough for the work to be offered to the Paris Opéra. When its director failed to respond in time, Satie challenged him to a duel. Excerpts from the work were published privately in a deluxe edition with Suzanne’s cover design featuring her lover in profile.
He inscribed music to her with sketches of the new bob in her hair, and she paid him the supreme compliment of painting his portrait, saving her brightest colours for his red cheeks and eyes bluer than her own. He made her portrait in return, but while she gave him hers, he decided to keep her likeness for himself. It was the only way she could be with him all the time.
Too soon, within weeks, she was
not at the Clou every night, and when he asked Utrillo where she might be the answers were too vague for comfort. Erik sat in his room by day, planning appointments and writing invitations to her on notepaper upon which he had inscribed a chicken as the coat of arms.
‘Dear little Biqui,’ he wrote. ‘Impossible to stop thinking about your whole being. You are in Me complete.’ Erik took another sip, being careful not to drink so much that the precision of his calligraphy would be spoiled, but enough to burst into self-pitying tears. ‘For Me there is only the icy solitude that fills my heart with sorrow.’ Could he not see her somehow? Could she not make herself available ‘1. This evening at 8.45 at my place; 2. Tomorrow morning again at my place; 3. Tomorrow evening …’
‘Erik, you must try to stop being so abject,’ she said several nights later, when they finally met again. ‘I have my work and my other friends.’
‘I am becoming terribly reasonable,’ he said, desperate to hide the intensity of his feelings under a mantle of noble resignation. ‘In spite of the happiness it gives me to see you, I am beginning to understand that you can’t always do what you want.’
‘You don’t know me as well as you think, Erik. I’ve been other people’s servant, their plaything, for too long. Now, I always do what I want. Our liaison gives me pleasure for now, but I don’t want it every day.’
‘Then I shall begin to understand that instead,’ he said. ‘You see, Biqui? There is a beginning to everything.’
‘This is not the beginning,’ she said.
‘How can this be the end?’ he sobbed.
It was three months later, during which time he had written letters daily, as much to himself as to her. He had found their maudlin tone so naked, so shocking, so unlike him that he resolved never to send them. They would only have elicited her pity.
The tree in the rear courtyard of Suzanne’s building was an explosion of green, and warm air drifted in through the open window where she stood. Summer had arrived in Montmartre, but while the neighbourhood was coming to life, something on the third floor of a building was dying.
‘There is someone else,’ she said, her voice more level than his.
‘We were together at my place only three nights ago!’ he said. ‘On Saturday. It was wonderful. Saturday is our weekly anniversary.’
‘I wanted you to have a happy anniversary. It is my farewell gift.’
‘Does this person know that you are gifting yourself around the neighbourhood?’
‘He understands me better than you do. Now he would like something more.’
Satie abruptly pushed his pince-nez back into position. ‘I offered you something more the first time I came here. You declined me, yet you are prepared to give him whatever he expects. What does he do?’
‘He is a banker,’ she said.
A banker? Erik could not believe it. He had spent five months beginning to understand Suzanne as someone totally immune to the corruption of commitment and the other trappings of an upper-class existence. ‘Fuck the rich,’ she used to say, echoing the artist’s mantra. Now she had.
His cheeks became redder than the ones in her painting.
‘Suzanne, you have taken all of me. I cannot let you get away with this,’ he cried, rushing at her.
‘You’re joking! Out the window?’ said an incredulous Picasso in a Paris café, twenty-three years later. The two were sharing a table with Jean Cocteau.
‘You can imagine how bad I felt after I pushed her,’ replied Satie, still recovering from the exertion of his daily walk from Arcueil. ‘It was three floors up above a paved courtyard.’
‘What did you do?’ asked Cocteau.
‘What any man of honour would have done: I left her apartment straight away, reported to the nearest police station, and turned myself in for having murdered my girlfriend. I was careful to explain it was a crime of passion.’
‘That is the best crime one can commit,’ said the Spaniard. ‘And then?’
‘I accompanied the police back to the rue Cortot where we searched for Suzanne’s body in the courtyard. That is when things became more complicated.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The body wasn’t there.’
‘Suzanne had disappeared? But how can this be?’
‘You know she was a circus acrobat in early life? The police decided she must have performed a triple pike on the way down, landed on her feet, and walked away.’
‘From a three-storey fall? Impossible!’ said Cocteau.
‘Erik, are you sure you pushed her?’ said the painter, with a smirk.
‘No,’ Satie admitted.
The trio ordered another round of Ricards to contemplate this miracle.
‘So, what do you think about love these days?’ asked Cocteau, retrieving his notebook.
‘I have avoided it ever since. Right afterwards, I considered it a sickness of the nerves. Look how sentimental Debussy has been about it! He used to be very good to me – those orchestrations he made of the first and third Gymnopédies pulled me out of a hole – until that love life of his made a mess of things. On the other hand, I am slightly more sentimental about love than, say, Ravel. Who knows what he has ever had to do with it? I find it very comical.’
‘I think it is time for another wine,’ said Picasso. ‘We have our ballet project Parade to discuss. Unless, of course, you would rather have a sandwich.’
‘A sandwich!’ said Satie, horrified. ‘Never touch the stuff.’
POSTSCRIPT
When Erik Satie died from cirrhosis of the liver in 1925 at the age of fifty-nine, he left behind a corpus of work that included titles such as Desiccated Embryos, Drivelling Preludes for a Dog, The Angora Ox, Unpleasant Glimpses, the Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear, and a song heavily indebted to his cabaret and music-hall days called ‘I Want You’ (‘Je te veux’).
He also left the contents of a rented apartment in the Parisian suburb of Arcueil that none of his friends had ever seen. When they entered the unknown inner sanctum they found a bed, a table and chair, newspapers, old hats, walking sticks, umbrellas and two pianos stuffed with papers that included two major musical compositions Satie thought he had left on a bus.
Deeper below the dust they found a bundle of letters that had obviously never been sent to Suzanne Valadon, who by now had married and divorced her banker, only to take up with a man twenty-two years her junior.
The late composer’s brother, Conrad, offered to deliver the sacred cache to its intended recipient. Erik would have no cause to be embarrassed by the contents now; he had new cafés to visit and perhaps even a deity to offend. At the burial vault, Conrad could swear he heard his brother’s voice saying to God: ‘Just give me time to put on a petticoat, and then I’m yours.’
Suzanne was clearly moved by the offer. She would have been made aware by mutual acquaintances and gossip that she had never been replaced in his life, and that their portraits had hung side by side in his apartment on otherwise bare walls for more than a quarter of a century. She wrote in reply that ‘so many memories are heart-rending indeed and yet very sweet to me’. Without realising, she signed her name twice.
The letters were duly placed in her care. Suzanne set aside several days to read and re-read them, being taken back to the Montmartre of 1893 and the story of two young, independent artists who found each other for less than half a year. With each letter she paused to let the memories follow: the sound of a piano playing, a man’s voice singing ‘I want you’ on a winter’s night.
She slowly placed each letter on coloured paper back in its envelope, making sure to preserve the integrity of the original folds.
Then she burned them.
LOVE MAKES WAR
Robert Schumann was the archetypal Romantic composer, and the young, beautiful Clara Wieck one of the most celebrated piano virtuosos in Europe. All they wanted was to make beautiful music together, but there was one huge obstacle to overcome: her father. The battle for Clara, escalating from subterfu
ge and forced separations to public slander and legal action, was as brutal and protracted as any war.
‘There is no more powerful stimulus to imagination than tensions and longing for something.’
Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
It was when they arrived at the bottom of the stairs, where the glow of the lamp she was holding cast a sheen over the front door, that Robert decided Clara just had to be kissed. The thought had been with him for some time, and now that she was sixteen it seemed as good a time as any.
She lifted the latch and was turning to wish him goodnight when he slid his arm around her waist and drew her towards him slowly enough to give her time to pull away. Instead, she came willingly to his mouth with all the resolution of a perfect cadence.
They kissed lightly at first, and then more hungrily as she followed his example with the precocity of a quick study. Robert remembered Romeo’s instruction to ‘let lips do what hands do’ and thought it was bad luck for the young Veronese that Juliet was not a virtuoso pianist. Clara’s mouth progressed from simple scales to arpeggios in no time at all, and as she moved to the cadenza her eyelids fluttered. The kiss settled into a clear A major final chord before a slow release of lips into post-performance silence. He half-expected the sound of applause.
There was still light around them, and he realised she had held the lamp aloft all the while with the self-possession of a seasoned performer.
‘Darkness all around, yet our first kiss bathed in light,’ he said, always looking for the most poetic spin.
‘Was it?’ she replied. ‘Everything went dark from where I was standing. I thought I was going to faint. Who did I kiss just now – Florestan, or Eusebius?’ She was referring to the names he had long since given to the opposing sides of his nature.
‘You kissed Robert the composer, who adores you,’ he said. ‘Chiarina, my music has known about this for a long time without telling the person who created it. And now I know.’ It felt right to say it, not as a confession, but as a summation of all the years of half-knowing.
Symphony of Seduction Page 2