Remember Me (10 page)

I
n August, when Wagner’s work was done for the time being and he could afford to please his patron, he came to the Starnbergsee and waited to be summoned across the lake to Berg. The summons did not come. Much
worried
, Wagner returned to Triebschen. Perhaps this time he had gone too far.

Ludwig was in Munich. He was too distressed to see anybody. The time of the marriage was almost upon him. It gave him a bad conscience to think about it. He felt safe only when he had locked himself into the
wintergarden.
The boat rocked on the captive lake. He must have it taken away. He went uncertainly down the little path and into the hermitage. There he sat down to watch the flaccid water. Instead he found himself peering anxiously into the shadows of the rustling undusted ferns. He could feel the palace seething with gossip beneath him. He did not know what to do.

But not knowing what to do is not the same as not knowing what we will do. When it comes down to
fundamentals
the self has no conscience. It only feels it should have one, and that is the source of our agony. Ludwig was in agony now. Even the sternest samurai must reach a point at which saving his neck becomes more important to him than saving his face.

It was not the consequences of the truth which he shrank from, but the truth itself. He could face no limitation in himself. His limitations locked him in. He had somehow to convert them into merits, before he could accept them. He had formulated excuses about Sophie, but they were not genuine. It was the physical contact he shrank from. And to others he knew that would appear ludicrous. Others would laugh at him. He did not have the strength to withstand laughter. Once the truth were out all the women in the country would begin to boo.

He tried to pretend to himself that it was only a matter of putting the wedding off for a few more months. But the pretence would not work. Though he shrank from the truth, neither could he lie to himself. The truth was that he could not touch her; smell her, see her. The smell of people was not their own smell, but the odour of the bacteria that fed on them, and which migrated from body to body at the touch. He had not the capacity to touch her. That part of him was left out. Besides, he had got hope back unexpectedly. With hope for the future, he could not face her any more, for she had been part of the hopeless future that now lay dead behind him.

More than that, he thought any woman would swallow him as a serpent swallows a mongoose, quietly edging it down with the muscular walls of her throat. Women understand nothing but the making of children. Women would be a dynasty in their own lifetime. He was afraid of being engulfed in that womb, like Marius, and the ground smooth without a trace. The father of a child, once his work is done, can do nothing. He can only flit from flower to flower. Creative people can escape. They are bisexual, and can fertilize themselves. But otherwise there was only one way to remain young, and that was
not to grow old. He must never grow old. Once a man begets a child, his function is over, and he begins to die. Women know this, and it pleases them. It would be better to be a Wagner, using women as flowers have learned to use bees, than merely to become the father of an heir.

It was silent around him. He could not bear it. He had no one to turn to. He thought of Fräulein Meilhaus, his schooltime governess. She might understand. He must speak to someone, even if it was just on paper, in a letter. He wanted Bellerophon. Bellerophon seemed the answer. He could not know that he was condemned to be
everyone
to whom he was attracted, for the ego is an endless corridor of mirrors, for only thus can it reproduce itself. Shatter the mirror, and the ego dies.

He did not think of the stormy session that afternoon, in which his Uncle had demanded that the engagement be terminated for good, and had said many other things besides. During that interview he had only thought that he need never see Sophie again. It made him feel like a convalescent, recovering from a dangerous illness, high in the Alps. It was easy enough to convince himself that Sophie would be happier without him.

Yet, though he would never have to see her again, he could not quite let the matter rest there. Writing to Fräulein Meilhaus did not help as much as he had hoped it would. She was not Fräulein Meilhaus now. She was Frau Baroness von Leonrod. That would automatically put her on Sophie’s side. She had moved away from his childhood into the ranks of the opposition. He gave her credit. She would not laugh at him. But she would frown.

Of course Uncle Max would never speak to him again, but then he had never been intimate with Uncle Max anyhow. To be free of the marriage made him
light-headed
with happiness. It made him kind. To Sophie he
wrote that if she remembered him with sorrow and bitterness, it would cause him deep grief. It would not cause him grief at all, but it did no harm to be gracious. Graciousness was proper to a king. It was a long letter. When we have to justify ourselves, we always find much to say. He did not trouble himself to consider that she was disgraced, and that another marriage would be difficult for her to make.

“I must say again”, he added, “that the interference of your mother in our affairs as they were last winter was very unfortunate.” He must have someone else to blame beside himself, and he had never liked Aunt Ludovica anyway. But he was sad, all the same. They would never applaud him in Munich again. He put the letter in an envelope. He could not be the king the Munichers wanted, and he would not be forgiven for that. He sealed the letter, left it to be delivered, and slipped down his private stairs to the hofgarden behind the palace. There he had a carriage waiting. He was not exactly fleeing the capital. He did not see the matter quite that way. But he did not want to come back to it, either, until the gossip had died down. He got into the carriage, which drove through the quiet streets.
Everyone
was asleep. No one knew that he was leaving. It was proper the streets should be quiet, for he would never be cheered again. And what sound can be more muffled by time than the echo of applause? It soon loses its vibrancy. He was distressed. They had driven his grandfather into exile for falling in love with a cheap Spanish dancer. What would they do to him? He thought that exile must sound very like the echo of a carriage over empty streets. It had a tired and futile sound.

The carriage left the cobblestones of the city, while it slept, gathering energy to explode in his face next day.
The wheels turned on the mud ruts of the road
reluctantly
, as the horses pointed toward Nymphenberg. The ghosts of women seemed to snap about his heels, like ghost foxes.

In the starlight the great circle of Nymphenberg came into view, with its abandoned shuttered look. The
carriage
drove along beside the canal and swept up to the entrance, where it advanced towards the left-hand wing, where the stables were. He had had messengers sent ahead, but he had no intention of telling anyone what he was really doing. He must feel what it was like to be on a horse again. He must see if he could ride to his
salvation
, and if Richard could keep up with him. Richard was Bellerophon.

The carriage stopped. He jumped out and ran across the yard into the shelter of the stables. The ring had been dusted, as he had ordered. He had announced that he was departing for the Austrian frontier, and that he was going via Kufstein. The town was of no importance. The explanation was. He would rather be thought eccentric, than explain the actual purpose of his ride to those who could not be expected to understand. A groom held his horse. It was not Richard. Richard was at Berg. But it did not matter who was there, for this was only an experiment.

He leaped into the saddle, peering into the shadows of the room. He might almost be outdoors. The arena had the stable smell. After all, he was practising for the ride that he might be taking for the rest of his life.

He looked at the stupid, flaxen faces of his grooms. They were waiting for him to ride out through the open door. He stood up in his stirrups and ordered that the doors be closed. Above his head candles dripped in a primitive, circular chandelier.

He spurred his horse. Round and round the ring he
went. It seemed to him as he rode that he was caught up into the rhythm of the horse. This was indeed the way to liberation, following the circuit of the mind. The riding ring seemed to vanish and he rode into the sky itself, with the groom not far behind him. He vanished into the experience and found it real.

In that case Richard was also real. He felt the horse beneath him and glanced at its neck. The horse was obedient to him as no swan could ever be. Somewhere, as he rode by, he heard church bells ring out. Later he heard them again, he did not know how much later. He leaped from his horse. They were high in the Alps and Richard was with him. It was time for lunch. They had a picnic. They had reached Kufstein, and beyond
Kufstein
rose the peaks themselves. He was on Pegasus and rode him well.

He leaped back on the horse and went on until dawn. He had arrived. The groom asked where they were. Ludwig looked at him for a moment, and then
remembered
the pretext of this all-night experiment. He said they were at Innsbruck. The groom seemed satisfied. Give people something to gossip about, and you divert them from the truth. The method was simple, once grasped.

He was very tired. He stroked his horse’s neck. He had found a meaning for his life. The sense of relief was wonderful.

He had the doors of the riding ring unlocked and went out to his carriage. It was almost daylight. He would not return to Munich, but go straight to Berg.

No doubt his ride would be thought mad. It was not mad. Nor was he. He had only to walk through madness a little way, because his destination lay that way, over the ridge, on the other side. He knew that now. He had proved it in the ring.

Nonetheless, he stood in the carriage and gazed through the trees towards Munich, saying a sad good-bye to the city he was losing. He would never feel the way he felt now again. And in that there was sadness. He hated to say farewell to any segment of himself. But the horses’ heads were pointed up the other way. Below him twinkled the comfortable lights of normalcy, down in the
darkened
city, but he had a long way to go. He sat back in the carriage and closed his eyes.

He could not know that when Sophie read his letter, she smiled indulgently. She had been confronted with something both bigger and smaller than she was, and it had frightened her. Her talents were too domestic for a throne. She felt very sorry for him, but in the collapse of her parents’ ambitions she could see that her own
happiness
might have room to grow. That hers should grow and his diminish made her sad. Like many people whose only talent is for human relations, she saw more than she cared to see, and much more than she dared to state.

I
n the following months he avoided Munich as much as possible, for it was true: when he did not give them what they wanted, they turned on him, as he had known they would. The knowledge made Richard that much the more valuable, for now Richard was his only possible guide. He hoped he was a dependable one.

He had tried many things, but had overlooked the one thing he had always known to be true. He had tried women, the city, the small social world of the court. He had tried music and the theatre. He had even tried
greatness
. But he had overlooked the one group that would always be loyal to him, the peasantry. The native soil alone throbbed with life, and it stopped short at the first paved streets of the capital.

He stood on the edge of a clearing, in a sudden gust of warm wind. He watched the well-loved approach of Bellerophon, who reached up to touch the bough of a tree, with the same movement he had used on that decisive morning to hold the bit of Ludwig’s horse.

Ludwig was myopic. He did not want to walk on, and he was almost afraid to have the figure approach him, for as people walked towards him through the veils of sight, they lost some of their magic. Bellerophon came out of the tangled shadows. Ludwig wanted him to stop there.
He did not want to see the ideal face fade into
nothingness.
It wounded him that what he really wanted, what he really saw in people, should be there only at a distance of ten paces, too far off for him to touch. Yet thus, on an Easter morning, must Dante have met Virgil, at the edge of that shrouded wood near Lake Albano, at the entrance to an underworld it was time for him to enter, while out of the corner of his eye heraldic beasts gambolled in the shadows of the mind.

So they met.

His name was Richard Hornig, and he was master in the Berg stables. He was a little older than Ludwig. He was a married man. His eyes were blue, his hair inclined towards the blond. That someone he had conjured up out of personal necessity should have an actual identity surprised Ludwig more than would have the solidification of any djinn out of any bottle. He did not quite know what to make of it. Suddenly there were things to do again, many things.

All his life he had been travelling, by coach, by
carriage
, and by horse. Such travels were means of escape. That now he should have met the person in whose charge lay the means of that escape unduly excited him. It seemed to him to be poetry. Now he caught himself watching the movements of horses, as though there was a clue to freedom in the way they irritably twitched their docked tails. What he had wanted, now he had.

Often it seemed to him, as he lay in darkness, that he had seen night riders plunging down the sky on horses whose manes were on fire. Formerly he had allowed
himself
ignominiously to be pulled from place to place. Now they would ride together, upward, out of the self towards meadows he had only glimpsed before.

He could not believe that he would ever be safe in any
one place. It was more than he could expect to be left alone with Richard, and Richard had a wife. Therefore he decided to take him upon a journey. He explained it as a journey. To himself he thought of it as a pilgrimage.

What Richard thought of all this we have no way of knowing. He was a tacit man. He left no records, none at any rate that he did not mean to leave. But he was also a loyal man. He smoked a pipe, got married, did his work, and begot children, because that was the thing to do. But he must have loved Ludwig after some fashion, for he was loyal to him, and true loyalty can only be based on love. The world’s great emotions come to us one-sided and incomplete. If we have ever loved deeply, we know why. Of all those to whom Ludwig appealed only Richard answered him. Nor should this make us impatient with the nature of the emotion involved, for Don Juan was less a philanderer, than a man who never quite gave up hope. At any rate it is impossible to tell what Richard felt. We can only know that whatever it was, he felt it deeply, which is not the same as understanding, but
perhaps
better.

Nor did Ludwig care. It was enough for him to be able to feel at all. As long ago as childhood he had learned better than to expect feeling in return, for he had spent his life among those whose lives were so empty that they had no time left for anyone else.

So out of gratitude, he planned his pilgrimage. They were to take horse and ride to Eisenach. He was a little wary. Too many people had failed him, for him not to be. But he was happy, too. He had a reason for this trip.

For by the time we are fourteen we have met all the people we shall ever meet again, so when we meet new examples of them, we take them back to those places where we were happiest with their prototypes, to see if
they fit. As women match goods, we match people to the texture of our lives, looking for the ravelling or
unravelling
of secret threads. If we are to succeed in replacing one person with another, then the fit must be snug.

So he went to Eisenach, to the Wartberg. Even with Wagner he had never been there. In a very real way the Wartberg was Monsalvasch, the castle of the grail. It was the invisible spiritual castle from which Lohengrin had entered upon the salvation of Elsa, only to fail, as Wagner had failed him.

The journey was agreeable. It was like riding through a painting, on the way to meet the artist. They rode through a slim forest so clean-swept that its floor might have been of stone. For the Germans have picked their woods down to the bone, which is what they like to see. The horses were restive, seeming to stumble together.

They drew rein on the brink of a hill where, as theatre curtains do, the trees parted massively and slowly with a velvet whoosh. There, across the gorge, shrouded in ground mist, on its prow of rock, they saw the Wartberg sailing out of the fog and into time, like Isolde’s ship headed for Britanny.

Ludwig glanced at Richard, who said nothing. Wagner had talked incessantly, destroying illusions with the very words he used to create them. For an instant, as the mist cleared, Ludwig and Richard communed wordlessly. Ludwig felt the great ease of being able for an instant to shift the weight of the inexpressible within him to someone else’s shoulders. It was the pause he needed, that made the rest of the journey possible. It was for this he had taken that experimental ride to Kufstein in the locked stable.

They went slowly through the forest and over the cobbles of a stone bridge, through the throat of the castle
tower, into the courtyard within, and there dismounted.

He felt safe here in the small, high-ceilinged monastic rooms and winding corridors of German consciousness, perched high on the edge of the cliff. Through rounded arches, like the sockets of a skull, they could look back into the past to see the flesh and bones of how this present world should look. Always before Ludwig had come here with a sense of loss. Wagner had written the
Meister
singer
with this setting in mind, yet there was something else here that he knew and that Wagner did not. With Richard, who was malely quiet, he could realize that knowledge. He hurried through the rooms, eager to enter the Sangersaal. This was a world long familiar to him from the soft paintings of Schwind; but always before he had explored it alone.

The stones were damp. The sunlight here was not warm. Together they went down the four steps between the three arches that led from the royal apartments to the hall, and stood there in the half-gloom. He waited eagerly. There settled over him the Oriental silks of
twelfth-century
princes, and on his head the iron circlet of their power. He peered into the shadows, and saw Richard standing by one of the windows, in the glittering incised armour Heinrich IV von Hohenstaufen and Walther von der Vogelweide had worn when they moved freely through these courts. For Walther von der Vogelweide, like Richard, had been of humble birth. He had risen to royal courts only because his personal attainments had purified his blood, and made him the peer of princes.

Standing there, he thought of the love cult of the Minnesingers, who did not sing in order to be loved, but out of longing for the unattainable, which, if it is to
survive
, must never be attained. For a moment he felt the horror of those who, searching all their lives for
understanding
,
find the meaning of their existence crumbles precisely when they are at last understood. He wanted to say “Sing”. He did not. Instead he closed his eyes and heard a melody unlike any of Wagner’s composition.

With his eyes shut, the special glint of light on Richard’s armour was the glint of sunlight on high snow, as it floats above the granite. This was the visible
Monsalvasch
, promise in itself that there
was
a Monsalvasch beyond, of which the Wartberg was only the model. They would ride there in time.

He opened his eyes and left the Sangersaal, with Richard behind him. He vaulted eagerly into the saddle. Richard had passed the first test. Now it was time for the second.

*

The second test was Paris. He had spent the first eighteen years of his life reading. Now he was trying to match life to what he had read. He had not dared to see Paris before. Now that he seemed to have someone to go there with, he felt differently. He was looking for an answer to the nature of kingship, and France was the fountainhead of kings, in the person of Louis XIV. He had meditated on Louis XIV for a long time. They would go by train, journey into the past, and find an answer.

For trains are not merely vehicles with wheels, so specialized they can live only on their own track. Like horses, trains and other powerful machines give us the power we need to travel beyond ourselves. They carry us triumphantly into a country we could never reach on foot. A journey by train is a safe journey through time. It reverses the normal direction of our activities, so that the past is abruptly ahead of us, at the destination of our voyage. The train takes us relentlessly and safely through
the present and the future towards yesterday, which is also now.

If Richard objected to being moved about the
countryside
like a parcel, he did not say so. He was protected from what happened to him by a stolid silent inner calm. Indifference can also be firm as rock. Those six years between their ages made all the difference. He behaved like an uncle with a favourite nephew. He agreed to go.

As they left the Germanies and crossed the border into France, while they slept, the steam-frosted the
windows
of the
wagon-lit
;
the steam formed great heaving clouds, like that cloud in which Ixion planted the seed which would become Bellerophon. Ludwig lay on his side in his berth and watched the patterns of the false frost. It was like watching an allegorical ceiling. The whole large-kneed sky family glowed with a singular
luminescence
, rising higher and higher into the sky, until it lost all semblance to the allegorical ceilings at Nymphenberg, and became the apotheosis of royalty itself, in the person of the Sun King, Louis XIV, riding high on clouds of majesty. The train moved smoothly into St. Lazare.

Eighteen sixty-seven was the year of the Paris
Exposition.
He would see that, too. The Comte de Berg had arrived at last in Paris, bringing with him Bellerophon. They drove at once to an hotel. The hotel was in the Place Vendôme, from whose theatrical wings almost anyone might be expected to appear, from the
dressmaker
Worth to Louis XIV, with his poodle look and the scowl of Volpone. About greatness there is always something a little mean and pinched.

It was not Louis XIV who appeared, but Louis Napoléon III. Ludwig detested him. He was like the usher in a mortuary, placidly displaying the beautiful embalmment he had achieved of his illustrious uncle, on
whose weary features he had superimposed the simper of the times. With his moustache and pendent beard, he resembled not imperial greatness, but a powdered Belgian gryphon, that fashionable lapdog which scented women were already learning to carry about with them like wriggly muffs. No wonder the Empress Eugénie could not learn the tune of “Partant pour la Syrie”. It was not that she was tuneless. It was that she lacked a sense of humour. They were not real royalty: when they sat down they always looked behind them to see if their chairs were still there. Louis Napoléon was merely a conjurer asked in to divert the nation.

Ludwig was equal to Louis Napoléon. There are
certain
advantages to anonymity. As Comte de Berg, he could switch hats, so that when Napoléon reached for a rabbit of alliance, it was not there. Ludwig avoided him and turned to face Paris instead. It shimmered all around him.

Who can ever tell what Paris means to a German? For Paris is not the capital of France. It is the capital of an idea. In the history of the West, five cities have been capitals not of countries, but of the spirit: Athens, Alexandria, Constantinople, Paris, and Rome. They are gone forever, but still we walk enchanted through their streets. So the fabulous cities of the Arabian nights are only a memory of Timgad, Baalbec, and the cities of the Sahara, empty, deserted, majestic, silted up with soft hissing sand pouring through the valve of time, yet always real.

Of all these only Rome survives, for Rome is the
epitome
of order, that most ravishing idea within the grasp of Man. Truly she is
caput
mundi.
The idea of order stands above all other ideas, indestructible, severe, and sad, its features worn by time. For order is the governess
of reason. Only she can school the childhood of our thoughts.

But as the train slopes down through the undulating hills, and Paris slowly rises to the climax of arrival, like a great hermaphrodite it lies over its soft green couch of hills, the ravishingly asexual presence which otherwise is only with us in a dream, helpless and absorbingly elusive as the reveries of detumescence, or the long slanting sunlight of the afternoon.

The ostensible grandeur of Paris is tarnished, flat, skimped, tinny, and pathetic, like a toy procession under well-disciplined trees too clipped to breathe, a Lilliput of power, pleased in itself, that scurries away to nothing at the first glimpse of any Brobdignag, full of the paranoic grandeur of Racine, the distant, fretful stirring of Bellay. But the dream of Paris is an endless sleep, as though the soul of man were silk that ripples through the fingers and then snags, as a pair of silk stockings is the echo of an ideal pair of legs.