Andreas (12 page)

M
ARIA’S
emotion over an old woman whose skin nobody seeks to touch.

Mariquita is greedy and an artist in cookery.
Maria enjoys good food too, but suppresses this tendency and knows nothing about cookery. Mariquita’s concupiscence of experience, boundless curiosity to set her foot everywhere, to enter every possible situation, to visit every place of ill repute. Everything that Andreas points out (the beauty of flowing water, etc.) she absorbs in intenser form. She hears all the talk of the town, knows where everything is going on, where this or anything is to be seen (the vegetable market towards morning, the fish market, fantastic episodes in cellars, stage-coach drives on the mainland, episode of the tight-rope-walkers).

Mariquita an utterly baffling person, lets herself be kissed, nothing more, hints that she is a respectable woman, but has a lover, of course.—He takes her to casinos, to other places of amusement; sometimes she stiffens convulsively, then suddenly looks at him with the face of Maria.—With the Countess, it seems to him a prodigy, not seriously to be thought of that she might give herself; with Mariquita, an absurdity that she does not. In both he goes too far, both are funnels through which he falls into an abyss. He longs to speak to the Knight about it; instead, he encounters the Duke, who is having a biting-match with the dogs.

Mariquita to Andreas: “I am infatuated with you because you were the first man I saw after I was free.
I know that you are nothing very special after all, but I still see you with rapture in my eyes—it’s all chance, after all.”—“On that day I had really got out for the first time I had already contrived to write letters.”—the power to enter into adventures because she is absolutely free.

Mariquita receives visitors in a strange lodging which she alleges to belong to her mistress, and has had lent to her on fraudulent pretexts: she pretends to be a
dame de compagnie
or something of the kind. The conflict in Andreas’s mind about marrying her, since he is aware of all her failings, however charming. Her random chatter at times—her dreaminess. “Shall I possess you entirely?” asks Andreas.—“Entirely, and another into the bargain.”

How Mariquita makes friends: presents herself as a governess, collecting for religious purposes. Perpetual outings, she has always discovered something. On their excursions, she takes Andreas into all kinds of society, where he has to suffer mockery and scorn, where he is bewildered, imposed on and put to shame: “You would like to become an official?”—Mariquita likes to hear the story of Uncle Leopold.—Among others she takes Andreas to see a lunatic, pretending to be his niece or housekeeper; he comes in, talks to himself without seeing those present.—Once she hits on the idea of enticing him into a strange house for
Andreas, then sending him home with the “other” in her confusion and shame. The other does not say a word, seems mortally ashamed and frightened, so that Andreas leaves her.

Her most beautiful moments: her power of perceiving elements of purity even amid apparent ugliness, at the fish market, at the vegetable market, buying provisions for a meal.—He wants to travel to the widow’s house with Mariquita; after protracted difficulties the plan falls through. She will never revisit any place they visited together the time before. Thus each time she unravels the web.—Andreas: “If only I knew something about your solitude. What are you like then?”

Mariquita likes to question Andreas about the Knight, it is almost as if she sometimes wavered between the two. “What would he say or do then? Ah, is he like that? Do you admire him very much? Would he like me?”

Mariquita sees the Knight speaking to Maria with loving urgency. She (what resists in her) prevents Maria from really loving the Knight.

Mariquita declares that she knows everything about the Countess, back into the first year of her life: she recounts part of her biography—never her own. Andreas asks, “And what about you when you were a child?”

Mariquita, having once fainted from fright, turns into Maria—during the adventure in the storm, on the quay, in a strange house to which he has carried her. On that day she was tired, had not had enough sleep: a beautiful sunset, then a thunderstorm.

M
ARIA’S
STORY
: abandoned after passionate love, marries a man she does not love, who only possesses her once: he falls very ill: she nurses him in a wayside inn—then the faithless lover comes to her window.—Maria’s fundamental idea: the infinite—how it is possible to take one man for another.

Her psychic malady dates from the day on which, nursing her unloved husband after the death of her child, she is unexpectedly confronted with the lover, the faithless one. “Life has rent me asunder, God in Heaven alone can put me together again.”

What happened: gradually she brings herself to answer some of the lover’s letters, agrees to meet him once. Here, she does not think beyond the delight of the meeting, but into that delight she plunges entirely: it is an utterly different thing for her from seeing him pass by often: for her the meeting is like the plastic compared with the visual—there is something added. In comparison, her husband loses relief more and more. Just before the meeting, she pauses, turns  round and goes home. She feels as though her husband
were sitting at her embroidery frame, waiting for her, as though his eyes were on her. As she is going home, she feels her lover behind her back, but does not turn round, has the strength to reach the threshold. She goes upstairs, opens the door; her husband is actually sitting at the embroidery frame, his eyes upon her, but he is dead.

In her marriage, temporary loss of sense of value. Sitting alone at her mirror, the Countess once sees how she changes after everything in her mind has taken on a different aspect. The torture in her face struggles with triumph—then Mariquita stands up and steals downstairs.

Once, when Maria is talking to Andreas and the Knight (about Spanish titles and successions, purposely, tediously, because she does not
want
to excite herself), she forgets herself: the other face appears, her tone changes completely, her eyes swim, a burning look meets Andreas—then it is over, she turns deathly pale, has difficulty in picking up the thread. During this glowing moment, Andreas says to himself, “I am possessed, my imagination has called up the other”—he turns red with shame and tears come into his eyes.—Andreas cannot bring himself to assent to the identity of the hands, he insists on finding a difference.

In Maria, subliminal horror of everything
happening in the street, increasing reluctance to drive out, which the Knight tries to overcome. Purification, the heart reduced to ashes, glorifies self-mortification, interest in Platonism, tendency to Molinism.

The sermon she has heard in the afternoon about the work of the worms in the human corpse, and at the same time how we are forgotten even by our nearest: how there is no salvation here save with God.

Confessor: Spaniard. Mariquita has a curious relationship to him; she writes to him too, she threatens to lead Maria into another way of life. She resists his look.—Strong desires felt by Mariquita are felt as impulses by Maria.

Mariquita on Maria: she refused to be a real woman—would not forget Christ.

Andreas—Maria: it comes to taking a room: his dread of possessing her—unconscious even to himself.—Maria feels a voice warning her, repeats tonelessly what she imagines the voice said to her: “Do not do it, do not do it.”

Her confessions when she is ill (apparently delirious, but she is not delirious)—how Mariquita has cut her feet from her body and hidden them. As she tells this, Andreas rushes from the room. He now receives incessant letters from both. Finally, the lady enters a convent.

T
HE KNIGHT
of Malta.—He moves in a time which is not quite the present, and in a place which is not completely here.—For him, Venice is the fusion of the classical world and the Orient, impossibility, in Venice, of relapsing into the trivial, the unmeaning. Morosin Peloponnesiaco his great-grandfather.
Possesses
some antiques, among them an early torso.

Several beings in him: when he is gardening, out on the Brenta, in shirt-sleeves, he anticipates the bourgeois of 1840: for Andreas the premonition of how his own grandchildren will live.

Relatedness. Alone with the child, the child looks up: “Out of the substance, which I may not seek—for I am that substance—all the heavens and hells of all religions are constructed—to cast them away would be gross darkness.—The child’s look: binds me, the words in my mouth, to these walls, to their protection, to what is simply there.”—
Impavidum ferient ruinae
—an interpretation, a consideration of inner powers, a mustering of resources: only the cataclysm reveals supreme ecstasy.

Sacramozo’s two dreams at the desk in the magistrate’s court at Bruneck: (i) He is living alone at the castle—a cock crows, then a second time; a bell rings. He stands up, barefoot: through the soles of his feet he feels everything, right down into the mountain. The miller’s daughter at the gate;
lights the fire, waters the cattle in the great hall—purely symbolic ceremonies. Then, in the arbour, he marries her to his son. From the mountain wall opposite there issue silver ancestors, so beautiful that he cries in his dream, “I am dreaming.”—(ii) Everything has two meanings: he is governor, but nobody must know it. In the entrance hall, a fire, maids, the prisoner chained to the wall. Denial. The prisoner: “Do you know me, then?” Every time in between, he flies through the landscape: brooks, graveyards—hither, thither. Already weary of his fight, he believes that he must discover who the other is—it is like a mislaid key.—The cock crows. He knows that it is for the third time, and knows that he has betrayed his Saviour.—The real governor comes up to him: “I have the strangest news for you: the Count of Welsberg has returned from the Turkish war”—he was believed to have been captured and beheaded by the Janissaries.

His hypochondria (indescribable dependence on the quality of the air): his pride with regard to these things, reticence.—Antipathy to raucous shouts, barking of dogs.

A man must become devout in the struggle for perfection. His explanation of what has taught him to despise the sensuously perfect—although he is sensitive to it (the sensuous perfection expressed in
Veronese in the relation of a perfect white to a bare throat, the same in Correggio)—the dilapidated condition of Venice has taught him the vanity of all things.

Perfectomania: to plan sumptuous festivals ends in the belief that no festival is perfect but the funeral of a Carthusian monk.

His key, that he can see through the motives of others, their nature: just as, for a devout man, everything is over when he realizes that the other is godless, incapable of seeking God; so, for him, everything is over when he feels no disinterested and steady striving upwards: he clings to what he calls the human, he is quick to divine the merely partial.—“What is the use of a confused striving, an isolated good quality? I will have nothing to do with the sieve of the Danaides, the rock of Sisyphus.”

Sacramozo’s interpretation of the Gospel saying: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you” (here, in created beings, he seeks the Kingdom of God). “The
ergon
,” says the Fama, “is the sanctification of the inner man, alchemy is the
parergon.” Solve et coagula
. The universal binding agent—gluten; his universal solvent—alkahest; in love, both are present. In love, always sublimate, etherealize, sacrifice life, the moment, to the higher, purer thing which is to be
distilled from them—seek to fix this higher, purer thing.

The Knight: a motto:
Le plus grand plaisir de tous les plaisirs est de sortir de soi-même,
in
Amours d’Eumène et de Flora
(in von Waldberg,
Geschichte des Romans
). The evil mood that precedes his crises: he is then actually unpleasant, or rather insufferable, even discourteous. The look of contempt for everybody, even for Andreas. His crushing mockery of Andreas: he literally annihilates him (and himself too). The consuming irony and tormenting restlessness that drive him. In this condition, one of his crises coincides with a momentous crisis in Maria: Mariquita suddenly speaks to him, mocks him. He runs away, passes through a crisis of deepest self-abasement, from which he rises to supreme purity and joyful victory. Before this, he hurries to various places (to Nina too) where he suffers rebuffs and humiliations.—“How,” he wonders, “can the worthy substance arise from the worthless, the eagle from the chameleon, the jewel from dirt?”

Knight: the complete collapse of the man of forty. He can no longer expect further illumination, redeeming revelations, and cannot imagine that those older than he should have resources that are withheld from him: he can approach nobody with entreaty, in confiding discipleship: what is capable of
redemption is his
work
(the young man there before him)—He himself is his own last resort: he no longer looks on life with curiosity, very many relationships are no longer possible. He has realized all this, his morbidity intensifies it: he cannot really reconcile himself to his actual age. With the Countess he is like a schoolboy: that is a task beyond his powers: everything he does to her is a pretence. Appalling doubts at this point: every time they arise, he has the decency to put a stop to them and go on
doing
.—That is the most heroic of all human conditions (see Frederick the Great).