Journey by Moonlight (19 page)

The meal was barely over when Waldheim looked at his watch and muttered excitedly:

“Holy heavens, I’ve got some really urgent business with a woman, just nearby. Please, if you’ve nothing better to do, it would be very kind if you would come along and wait for me. It really won’t take long. Then we can find a little hostelry and continue our really interesting dialogue … ” (“He obviously hasn’t noticed that I’ve not said a single word yet,” thought Mihály.)

“I’d be delighted to go with you,” he said.

“I’m extremely fond of women,” Waldheim announced as they walked along. “Perhaps excessively. You know, when I was young I didn’t get my share of women as I wanted to, and as I should have, partly because when you’re young you’re so stupid, and partly because my strict upbringing forbade it. I was brought up by my mother, who was the daughter of a
pfarrer
, a real Imperial
German parish priest. As a child I was once with them and for some reason I asked the old man who Mozart was. ‘
Der war ein
Scheunepurzler
,’ he said, which means, more or less, someone who does somersaults in a barn to amuse the yokels. For the old man all artists fell into that category. So nowadays I feel that I can never do enough to make up for what I missed in the way of women when I was twenty-five. But here we are. Hang on a moment, won’t you. I shan’t be long.”

He disappeared through a dark doorway. Mihály walked up and down, thoughtfully but in good spirits. After a while he heard an odd, amused coughing. He looked up. Waldheim had thrust his bright round head out of a window.

“Ahem. I’m on my way.”

“A very nice lady,” he said as he emerged. “Breasts hang down a bit, but it’s not a problem. You have to get used to that here. I met her in the Forum and made a conquest of her by telling her that the Black Stone was probably a phallic symbol. You really can’t imagine how useful religious history can be for getting around women. They eat it out of my hand. Mind you, I fear you could probably do the same with differential calculus or double-entry book-keeping, so long as you talked about it with the proper
intensity
. They never listen to what you actually say. Or if they do listen, they never understand. All the same they can sometimes have you on. Sometimes they really are almost human. Never mind. I love them. And they love me, that’s the main thing. So, let’s go in here.”

Mihály made an involuntary grimace when he saw the place Waldheim proposed entering.

“I’m not saying it’s pretty, but it’s very cheap. But I see, you’re still the fussy little boy you were as a student. Never mind. For once we’ll go somewhere better, for your sake.”

Again came the smile that spoke consciousness of great
generosity
, as he added that, also as a favour to Mihály, he would be quite happy to pay for his own drinks in the more expensive place.

They went into an establishment that was possibly a shade or two better. Waldheim again held forth for a while, then seemed to become rather tired. For a few moments he seemed lost in thought, then turned with alarming suddenness towards Mihály:

“But what have you been doing all these years?”

Mihály smiled.

“I learnt the trade, and worked in my father’s firm.”

“You worked? In the past tense? And now?”

“At the moment, nothing. I ran away from home. I loaf around here and try to think about what I should be doing with myself.”

“What you should be doing? How can there be a question? Take up religious history. Believe me, it’s the most topical subject today.”

“But why do you think I should become a student? What have I to do with the academic life?”

“Because anyone who isn’t actually stupid ought to study, in the interests of his soul’s salvation. It’s the only thing worth doing. I don’t know, perhaps also art and music … but to spend your time doing anything else, like working in a commercial company, for a man who isn’t totally stupid … I’ll tell you what that is:
affectation
.”

“Affectation? How do you mean?”

“Look. I remember you started off as a pretty decent religious historian. I’m not saying … well, you were a bit slow on the uptake but hard work can make up for a lot of things and people with far less talent than you have gone on to become excellent scholars, in fact … And then, I don’t know the facts but I can imagine what went on in your middle-class soul. You found that the academic path doesn’t guarantee a living, that you didn’t want the boring routine of school-teaching, and this and that, so really you had to go for something practical, considering all the supposed necessities of a wealthy person. This is what I call affectation. Because even you realise that these supposed necessities aren’t real. The
practical
career is a myth, a humbug, invented to cheer themselves up by people who aren’t capable of doing anything intellectual. But you’ve got too much sense to be taken in by them. With you it’s just an affectation. And it’s high time you gave up this pose, and got back where you belong, in the academic life.”

“And what do I live on?”

“My God, it’s not a problem. You see, even I manage.”

“Yes, on your salary as a university teacher.”

“True. But I could equally live without it. People shouldn’t throw
money about. I’ll teach you how to live on tea and salami. Very healthy. You people don’t know how to economise, that’s the trouble.”

“But Rudi, there’s another problem. I’m not very sure that a life of scholarship would be as satisfying for me as it is for you … I don’t have the enthusiasm … I can’t really believe in the importance of these things … ”

“What sort of things are you talking about?”

“Well, for example, the factual basis of religious history. What I’m saying … sometimes I think … does it really matter exactly why the wolf reared Romulus and Remus? … ”

“How the hell could it not matter? You’re utterly crazy. No, it’s just affectation. But that’s enough talk for now. It’s time to go back and work.”

“Now? But it’s past midnight!”

“Yes, that’s when I’m able to work: no interruptions, and for some reason I don’t even think about women then. I’ll work now until four, and then run for an hour.”

“You’ll do what?”

“Run. Otherwise I can’t sleep. I go to the river bank and run up and down beside the Tiber. The police know me and they leave me alone. It’s just like at home. Come. On the way I’ll tell you what I’m working on at present. It’s really sensational. You remember that Sophron fragment that came to light a little while ago … ”

By the time he had finished his exposition they were standing outside the Falconieri building.

“But going back to the question of what you should do,” he said unexpectedly. “The only difficulty is starting. You know what? Tomorrow I’ll get up a bit earlier for your sake. Come for me, let’s say, at eleven-thirty. No, twelve. I’ll take you to the Villa Giulia. I bet you haven’t been to the Etruscan Museum, right? Well, if that doesn’t give you the urge to take up the old threads, then you really are a lost man. Then you better had go back to your father’s
factory
. So, God be with you.”

And he hurried into the darkened building.

T
HE NEXT DAY
they did indeed visit the Villa Giulia. They looked at the graves and the sarcophagi, with their lids supporting terracotta statues of the old Etruscan dead enjoying their lives—eating, drinking, embracing their spouses, and
proclaiming
the Etruscan philosophy. This, being wise enough not to have developed literature in the evolution of their cultural life, they never committed to writing, though of course it can be read unmistakably on the faces of their statues: only the present
matters
, and moments of beauty are eternal.

Waldheim pointed out some broad drinking bowls. These were for wine, as the inscription proclaimed:
Foied vinom pipafo, cra carefo
.

“Enjoy the wine today, tomorrow there will be none,” Waldheim translated. “Tell me, could it be expressed more succinctly or truly? That statement, in its archaic splendour, is as definitive and unshakeable as any polygonic city-walls or cyclopean buildings.
Foied vinom pipafo, cra carefo
.”

Whole sets of figurines were displayed in a glass case:
dreamy-eyed
men, being led onwards by women, and dreamy-eyed women led, or clutched at, by satyrs.

“What are these?” Mihály asked in amazement.

“That’s death,” said Waldheim, and his voice took on an edge, as it always did when some serious academic issue arose. “That’s death. Or rather, dying. They’re not the same thing. Those women luring the men on, and those satyrs clutching at the women, are death-demons. Are you with me? The male demons take the women, and the female demons the men. Those Etruscans were perfectly aware that dying is an erotic act.”

A strange frisson shot through Mihály. Could it be that others had known this, and not just himself and Tamás Ulpius? Was it possible that this most basic element in his own sense of life was once something that, for the Etruscans, could be expressed in art, a self-evident spiritual truth, and that Waldheim’s brilliant
scholarly
intuition had been able to understand that truth, just as he had so many of the mysteries and horrors of ancient belief?

The question so troubled him that he said not a word, neither in the museum nor on the tram going back afterwards. But that evening, when he again called on Waldheim, and had been lent courage by the red wine, he managed to ask, taking care not to let his voice tremble: “But tell me, how did you mean ‘dying is an erotic act’?”

“I meant it just as I stated it. I’m not a symbolist poet. Dying is an erotic process, or if you like, a form of sexual pleasure. At least in the perception of ancient cultures like the Etruscans, the Homeric Greeks, the Celts.”

“I don’t understand,” said Mihály disingenuously. “I always thought that the Greeks had a horror of death. Surely the afterlife had no consolations for the Homeric Greeks, if I remember my Rodhe correctly. And the Etruscans, who lived for the fleeting moment, would have feared it even more.”

“That’s all true. These peoples probably feared death even more than we do. Our civilisation presents us with a marvellous
mental
machinery designed to help us forget, for most of our lives, that one day we too will die. In time we manage to push death out of our consciousness, just as we have done with the
existence
of God. That’s what civilisation does. But for these archaic peoples nothing was more immediately apparent than death and the dead, I mean actual dead people, whose mysterious
para-existence
, fate, and vengeful fury constantly preoccupied them. They had a tremendous horror of death and the dead. But then of course in their minds everything was more ambiguous than it is for us. Opposites sat much closer. The fear of death and the desire for death were intimately juxtaposed in their minds, and the fear was often a form of desire, the desire a form of fear.”

“My God, the death-wish isn’t some archaic thing, but eternally human,” said Mihály, fending off his real innermost thoughts. “There always were and always will be people worn out and weary of life, who long for the release of death.”

“Don’t talk rubbish, and don’t pretend you don’t understand me. I’m not talking about the death-wish of the weary and the sick, or potential suicides, but about people in the fullness of their life, people who in fact because their lives are so fulfilled yearn for death as for the greatest ecstasy, as in the common phrase, mortal
passion. Either you understand this or you don’t. I can’t explain it. But for those ancient people it was self-evident. That’s why I say that dying is an erotic act. Because they yearned after it, and in the final analysis every desire is sexual at base, or rather what we call erotic, in which the god Eros, that is to say, yearning or desire, exists. A man always yearns after woman, according to our friends the Etruscans, so death, dying, must be a woman. For a man it was a woman, but for a woman an importunate male satyr. That’s what those figures tell us, the ones we saw this afternoon. But I could show you other things too: portraits of the death-hetaira on various ancient reliefs. Death is a harlot tempting young men, and she is depicted with a hideously vast vagina. And this vagina probably means something more again. We come from it and we return to it, that’s what they are telling us. We are born as the result of an erotic act and through a woman, and we have to die through an erotic act involving a woman, the death-hetaira, the great inseparable and contrary aspect of the Earth Mother … So when we die we are born again … do you follow? Actually this is what I was saying the other day, in my lecture at the Accademia Reale entitled
Aspetti della morte
. It was a great success with the Italian newspapers. It just so happens I have a copy with me. Hang on a moment … ”

Mihály looked around with a shiver at the cheerful chaos of Waldheims’s room. It reminded him subtly of that other room, in the Ulpius house. He was looking for a sign, something specific to focus … perhaps the near-presence of Tamás, Tamás whose inner thoughts Waldheim, with his brilliant scholarly objectivity and clarity, had expressed here, this summer night. Waldheim’s voice was again edged with that sharp, inspired quality it always took on when he talked about the ‘divine essence’. Mihály rapidly downed a glass of wine and went over to the window for a breath of air. Something oppressed him deeply.

“The death-yearning was one of the strongest sources of myth,” Waldheim continued, talking now rather to himself than to Mihály in his excitement. “If we read
The Odyssey
aright, it speaks of nothing else. There are the death-hetaira, Circe, Calypso, who from their caves lured men on to the journey towards the happy islands and never let them go; the whole empire of death, the
Lotus-Eaters, the land of the Phaia. And who knows, perhaps the land of the dead was Ithaca itself? Far to the west … the dead are always sailing by day into the west … and Ulysses’s nostalgia for and his journey back to Ithaca perhaps represents the nostalgia for non-being, signifying rebirth … Perhaps the name Penelope actually carries its latent meaning of ‘duck’, and originally was the spirit-bird, but for the time being I can’t be sure of that. You see this is the sort of idea that really should be looked into without delay. And you … You could do the groundwork for a section, so that you can get into the professional way of doing things. For example, it would be really interesting if you wrote something about Penelope as the spirit-duck.”

Mihály politely declined this commission. For the moment it did not much interest him.

“But why was it only the ancient Greeks who were so aware of this death symbolism?” he asked.

“Because the nature of civilisation everywhere was such that, even with the Greeks, it diverted people’s minds away from the reality of death, and compensated for the yearning for death just when the basic appetite for life was declining. It was Christian civilisation that did this. But perhaps those peoples Christianity had to subdue brought with them an even greater death-cult than existed among the Greeks. The Greeks were not in fact a
particularly
death-centred race. It was just that they were able to express everything so much better than other people. The real
death-cultists
were the races of the north, the Germans, woodsmen of the long nights, and the Celts. Especially the Celts. The Celtic legends are full of the islands of the dead. These islands later Christian observers, in their usual fashion, transformed to islands of the blessed, or happy isles, and simple-minded folklore-collectors
generally
followed them in this error. But tell me, was that an island of the ‘blessed’ that sent its fairy envoy to Prince Bran with such overwhelming constraint? Or was it, I ask, from ‘happiness’ that a man was turned to dust and ashes the moment he left the island? And why do you think they laughed, those people on the island, the ‘other island’? Because they were happy? Like hell they were. They were laughing because they were dead, and their grins were nothing more than the hideous leer of a corpse, like those you see
on the faces of Indian masks and Peruvian mummies. Sadly it isn’t my field, the Celts. But you should take them up. You would have to learn, quickly and without fail, Irish and Welsh, there’s no other way. And you would have to go to Dublin.”

“Fine,” said Mihály. “But say a bit more, if you would. You’ve no idea how much this interests me. Why did it come to an end, this human yearning for the islands of the dead? Or perhaps the feeling is still with us? In a word, where does the story end?”

“I can only answer with a bit of home-made Spenglerism. When the people of the north came into the community of Christendom, in other words European civilisation, one of the first consequences was, if you remember, that for two hundred years everything revolved around death. I’m referring to the tenth and eleventh centuries, the centuries of the monastic reforms begun at Cluny. In early Roman times Christianity lived under constant physical threat, so that it became the darkest of death-cults, rather like the religion of the Mexican Indians. Later of course it took on its truly Mediterranean and humane character. What happened? The Mediterraneans succeeded in sublimating and rationalising the yearning for death, or, in plain language, they watered down the desire for death into desire for the next world, they translated the terrifying sex-appeal of the death-sirens into the heavenly choirs and rows of angels singing praises. Nowadays you can yearn
comfortably
after the glorious death that awaits the believer: not the dying pagan’s yearning for erotic pleasure, but the civilised and respectable longing for heaven. The raw, ancestral pagan
death-desire
has gone into exile, into the dark
under-strata
of religion. Superstition, witchcraft, Satanism, are among its manifestations. The stronger civilisation becomes, the more our yearning for death thrives in the subconscious.

“Think about it. In civilised society death is the most absolute of all taboo-subjects. It isn’t done to mention it. We use
circumlocutions
to name it in writing, as if it were some sort of
ridiculous
solecism, so that the dead person, the corpse, becomes the ‘deceased’, the ‘dear departed’, the ‘late’, in the same way as we euphemise the acts of digestion. And what you don’t talk about, it isn’t done to think about either. This is civilisation’s defence against the potential danger of a contrary instinct working in man
against the instinct for life, an instinct which is really cunning, calling man towards annihilation with a sweet and strong
enticement
. To the civilised mind this instinct is all the more
dangerous
because in civilised man the raw appetite for life is so much weaker. Which is why it has to suppress the other instinct with every weapon available. But this suppression isn’t always
successful
. The counter-instinct breaks surface in times of decadence, and manages to overrun the territory of the mind to a surprising degree. Sometimes whole classes of society almost consciously dig their own graves, like the French aristocracy before the Revolution. And, I’m afraid, the most current example today are the Hungarians of Transdanubia …

“I don’t know if you’re still following me? People usually get me spectacularly wrong whenever I talk on this subject. But I can do a little test. Do you recognise this feeling? A man is walking on a wet pavement and slips. His one leg collapses under him, and he starts to fall backwards. At the precise moment when I lose my balance, I am filled with a sudden ecstasy. Of course it lasts only a second, then I automatically jerk back my leg, recover my balance, and rejoice in the fact that I didn’t fall. But that one moment! For just one moment I was suddenly released from the oppressive laws of equilibrium. I was free. I began to fly off into annihilating
freedom
… Do you recognise this feeling?”

“I know rather more about this whole business than you think,” Mihály said quietly.

Waldheim suddenly looked at him in surprise.

“Eh, you say that in a strange voice, old chap! And you’ve gone so pale! What’s wrong with you? Come out on to the balcony.”

Out on the balcony Mihály recovered himself in an instant.

“What is this, damn you?” said Waldheim. “Are you hot? Or hysterical? You should consider that if you were to commit suicide under the influence of what I’ve said I shall deny that I ever knew you. What I am saying is of a completely theoretical significance. I really detest those people who like to draw practical conclusions from scholarly truths, who ‘apply learning to real life’, like engineers who turn the propositions of chemistry into insecticides for bedbugs. It translates, in Goethe’s words, as: ‘life is grey, but the golden tree of theory is always green’. Especially when the theory
itself is still as green as this is. Now I hope I’ve restored your
equilibrium
. Here’s a general rule … don’t try to live the life of the soul. I think that’s your problem. An intelligent person doesn’t have a spiritual life. And tomorrow you must come with me to the garden party at the American Institute of Archaeology. You’ll have a bit of fun. Now go to hell, I’ve still got work to do.”