Remember Me (6 page)

He took the actor Rohde with him only because Rohde had the external face that hung like a magic mirror in his dreams, now close, now far away, and with strange skin, the texture of barley soap, which could wash away care. The person he sought seemed never to be behind the face he found.

As he boarded the train for Switzerland, he had the sensation of doing something he would do again, so that it did not matter whether the trip were a failure this time or not. It was only a reconnaisance.

But he knew, even before they reached the border, that the excursion was to fail. Rohde, like Wagner, but for different reasons, turned out to be unattainable. He was too cool, where Wagner was too warm. They
followed
the route of Tell. He had Rohde recite the
immortal
speeches as they reached each site, and forgot the man in the evocative glory of the voice. He did not look at the man. He looked at the mountains instead.

There, across waters merging into mist, not far from Geneva, lay the true mountain blue, purple only in its intensity, while he walked along the shore. Up there among the ice and the rocks Rohde was nothing but a blond voice, and that was as it should be. Still, one
cannot
live with a voice. When he became impatient, he left Rohde snoring at the hotel, slipped out into the
transfigured
night, and watched the Alpinglow. Tell had no use for the endless poppy of Tristan, nor for the chypre of the Venusberg. Tell smelled of pine boughs, cold water, and his wife was a round-faced necessity in a faded dirndl. Freedom lay the mountain way.

The night was full of little surreptitious noises, as water shifted its position to something more comfortable, and small rocks redistributed themselves along the shore. Why was it that he could find in nature that union that was denied him in any human face? He faced out over the billowing emptiness of black and grey mist, and saw above the clouds the Eiger, the Mönch, and the
Jüngfrau
, glittering white truths which were always there for him because they were places he could never reach. A cloud passed over the moon and broke in two.

The double cloud, touched round the edges by
moonlight
, was like a pair of dark eyes not so much looking down, as out into space. He stood in the skull of the world, looking out through the eyes of the cloud. He had
had experiences like that before. They were the only experiences worth having.

He could see himself standing naked on a sharp rock, above the clouds, with here and there other rocks also topping the cumulus, but those empty or abandoned. He had come out at the top, into a perpetual cold day. His eyes were closed. His lips were full. A small wind tousled his frozen hair. His tall body had the length of
adolescence
. His hands met just below his chest in a horizontal gesture, to show the light the way in. Nothing existed up there, yet something existed that came to nourish him. He could see himself quite clearly. It was a vision of how his life should always be. From now on he would live only at night, for it is only at night, solitary in the
watching
hours, that the lonely find themselves in company.

He went back to the hotel, having seen that Rohde did not matter, that none of the Rohdes would ever matter. They were only a means.

Yet no matter how high we may climb, we must always come down, and it is then we crave company. When he got back to Munich it was to discover that the ministers had succeeded in removing Wagner. For the man’s own good, he must send him away. But once he had gone, there was a void that nothing could seem to fill up. He had seen through Wagner. Priests see through their gods long before the pilgrims do. But he had seen through to the works on the other side, and for their sake he would continue to make the man an allowance. Besides he never totally abolished those whom he had loved. There was always the chance that they might come back. He liked to leave a way open, just in case. But the way to Wagner was paved not with love or with understanding, but only with gold.

None the less there was the void. It had to be filled up.

H
e filled it up by sending for Paul again. Paul was the winner only by Ludwig’s losses. It was a process that enriched neither of them.

He forgot that the face of the saviour which haunted his nights was an ideal face, and that therefore it would match no body. But he had not the strength to withstand the abnegation of himself. If the spirit has no friends, then it grows restless, and there is no number of private worlds it needs to be alone to pace up and down in. Our solitude cannot survive in little rooms.

It seemed so little a time since he had become King and had made his first mistakes. But it was two years, which meant he had two less years in which to find
himself
. It was 1866. The years went by in single file, always walking more rapidly, and each one in passing took
something
away from him. He waited for something whose identity he could not know, but might recognize in the procession. Like a spider of patience, he wove his web. He remodelled his apartments in the Residenz. Even Philip II took some trouble with the Escurial, before he walled himself up in it for good.

It was the bedroom that gave him most pleasure. Every time he had to satisfy the desires of his body, he would satisfy them in some anonymous place where nothing
could touch him. His bedroom was to be his retreat into purity. He had felt much freer to indulge himself once he had discovered that the Kings of France always slept in a state bed, guarded from the world by a railing and balustrade, taking their pleasures elsewhere. It was like sleeping behind the altar in a church. No matter what people might demand of him, they could come no closer than the balustrade which divided the public part of his bedroom from the choir.

The bedroom was high and dark, but the darkness was relieved by the heavy gold of cornices and picture frames. Safe under the baldachin, above which two angels
supported
the crown, as they do in certain pictures of the Nativity, he was inviolable even to himself. In those moments when he could forget the sacredness of his own person, when drowsily he woke up in bed under the canopy on a cold morning, he felt deliciously safe and cradled within himself, protected from the world by his balusters. No one could get in at him, so long as the gate was closed; and should it be opened, he would hear the click. No matter what he might do anywhere else, here there was no danger that he might defile himself. Here he would always be ready for Lohengrin.

Yet to tell the truth he found the bedroom unpleasant. The private world he walked in was in the garden on the roof.

At Hohenschwangau, he had had a fountain put in his bedroom, so that he should never be out of sound of running water, which was purity itself. A clockwork moon waned and waxed across the ceiling. There he had had the forest just outside, so there a fountain was enough. At the Residenz Palace in Munich he put the forest in the roof.

Others might nod and frown at his eccentricity. To
him it did not seem eccentric. He had that capacity for direct action which to some people seems madness. But in him it was not madness yet. It was only the logic of a fairytale.

In the fairytales remembered from his childhood, when a man was cornered, he found always a tiny door
somewhere
, hidden from view, through which he might
suddenly
escape into a big and propitious world, if he but had the key. Ludwig kept the key to the wintergarden with him always.

Pacing at night alone, by the flickering light of a candle, he had only to lift a curtain in his study, unlock the door, and step back into the only reality he knew. He had only to lock the door behind him, and he was free.

Beyond the door was an enormous garden forest, lit by paper lamps. The temperature was warm. A skiff rode rocking at its rope on the captive lagoon. Sometimes it was a gondola. Sometimes it seemed like a swan. Palm trees scraped against the ceiling. A peacock looked out from behind a bunch of dates. A parrot said good
evening.
He crossed a little bridge and sat under a chestnut tree in the middle of a mock Indian village. Tiny castles peeped through the humbled trees. An artificial moon was reflected in the water, which at will could be made to turn blue. That was the influence of his grandfather’s love for Italy. Water lilies exploded among their leaves. A fountain played in the middle of a Moorish pavilion. When he tired of it, he could always wander down into the hermit’s stalactite grotto, stooping his gigantic body to pass down the narrow paths. Water played there, too.

And it was there, late at night, almost on towards dawn, while the night sky contended with the artificial moon until he had to turn the latter off, that he sat and thought about that miserable creature, Paul.

For now Paul was important again. He had realized a truth about him. At least he hoped it was a truth. For if Wagner now had, as reports said he had, the woman Cosima von Bülow to protect him, might he, Ludwig, not have Paul to be a Cosima to him? He decided to write to Paul at once. And when the answer to his note arrived, ecstatic and sycophantic, he decided that he had done the right thing, for if we do the only thing we can do, then how can it be wrong? We have no choice.

They were to meet in the wintergarden. He awaited the meeting eagerly, for he had seen almost no one for a month. He was sitting in the grotto when a footman announced Paul’s arrival. He did not stir. He wanted to hear those footsteps come eagerly over the rustic bridge. He shifted enough to have a view of the path. Paul would only come in expectation of patronage, but to be able to dispense patronage was better than to have no attractions at all.

From a distance, for Ludwig was short sighted, it was clearly Lohengrin who approached him. He rose to meet him. He had decided to take him back into favour.

Like so many dandies, Paul had always the air of
having
a permanent nose cold. At a distance of ten paces, obscured by rustling ferns, this did not show. At a
distance
of ten paces the face of Lohengrin dissolved into the wheaten face of the woodsman they had seen
together
, the face Ludwig had always sought and would always seek, open, affectionate, yet abstracted, the eternal face of the sleeping, who are more innocent and
vulnerable
and wiser than we are, and yet who have no faces of their own.

Ludwig stopped, not wanting to be disillusioned. But Paul went on advancing, smiling sycophantically. For an instant Ludwig felt a pang of disappointment. The ideal
face faded. The face that remained, however, was at least familiar and affectionate, even kindly, and it was good to meet someone again. He had, besides, only to remove him in order to make him ideal again. Lohengrin lived always at the misty limits of the eye.

For a moment he thrilled to the beauty of an actual face, before he pushed reality away.

Spiritually the elegant are all of the same period. Paul’s was the face of 1824, that last year in
the modern world when beauty in a man was not culpable, but the goal of a society. In those days to possess the face of an ephebe was in itself an act of character, in the years before the rise of the cravat divorced the head from the body utterly, in the years before morals rose up and smote ethics dead. In those days the face was not a public mask, but the highest form of self-expression of which the body was capable, so that the beauty of the head was the
epitome
of the beauty of the body, not something alien to it. There is something elegiac about the faces of the 1820’s, something withdrawn and sad, like the best parts of the Greek Anthology. Ludwig often read the Greek Anthology, but the year had changed, 1866 was no time for dandies. The world was a little ashamed of itself by then.

Ludwig and Paul had this in common, that they were both beautiful, and beautiful people share a vocabulary of gesture no one else may know. Within this vocabulary, understanding is possible. Love is not. So long as they remain strangers, they may know each other well enough.

So for an instant there was understanding between them. Wagner was right. Paul had the head and manner of a painting by Phillip Otto Rünge, that sweet, troubled, rueful face. The mouth, too, trembled with a sensitivity
possible only to art, and the neck supported pride like a pedestal. About the skin of such people there is always a faintly floured quality, like that of sweet cake dough, perfumed and naked on a baker’s tray, the translucent quality of a glowing lamp. Ludwig gave in to desire, and stepped on to the familiar treadmill again. Sycophants have always the power to gratify our desires, and Ludwig had the power to have them gratified. But for our
emotions
sycophants can do nothing. You need two mirrors before you can see your own back. A sycophant offers us but one.

Perhaps a mania for the stage can be infectious. Like Wagner, Paul had learned to act, and since the perimeter of his accomplishment was slight enough to fit a stage, he acted, on the whole, quite well. His true ambition was to marry an actress and manage a theatre. He responded to Ludwig well enough. Not even Schiller in the midst of an enthusiasm could have done so well with the material given him. Love, to Paul, was pure, altruistic gratitude for being admired. It was not his fault that he had reached that age when men of his type begin to be admired by women, or that, like most matinée idols and all cats, he must have his evening on the tiles.

Besides, he found it fun to be in favour once again. It was not Paul’s fault if he wanted to please so much, that he did not care whom he pleased. Why should he not be so? He was a creature of pleasure. Pleasure was his natural element, on the surface of which he skimmed like a water-scooter in search of food, held up by the surface tension of its own environment.

Meanwhile, Ludwig did not have to know and did not yet know that Paul kept an actress up the back stairs. It was almost the magic month of May again, and they both intended to make the most of it. Like most people who
long to experience an ecstasy, Ludwig had convinced himself of the genuineness of the next best thing.
Already
he felt May breaking over him like a flood. He had never prepared for May before in quite this way. Last year the pink month had solaced him for the absence of the Great Friend. This year the works of the Great Friend solaced him for what he lacked in having Paul. It was a kindly month, but inwardly he walked alone in it, as always, against the blue sky. Beauty in a man was the eternal promise of something else. Did not Schiller say that that which appeared as beauty on earth would meet us on the other side as truth? All people were alembics. Given warmth, they could distil anything.

That was the value of Paul. It was a German
friendship
, coming to a boil. The only condition of their
indissolvable
and soon to be dissolved friendship was that they should not touch, or even meet except in the fever garden on the roof. For Schwärmerei is an emotion not known to other races. The Germans believe in
immanence,
and at the same time hold that the immanent is the transcendent. That which is holy is not in everything, but only to be found in particular stones, rocks, trees, and combinations of words. The everyday world, to them, is out of focus. Heighten the focus and the blurred edges of what we call reality become sharply transfigured. And this is true of German emotions, too. Find the right words, and they then contain something that they did not contain otherwise. The whole husky German language is saturated with this sudden, cooling cologne. Their words may often be meaningless, but they have the smell of heaven. That is what Paul and Ludwig did. They sharpened the focus.

They lived in a perpetual condition of belladonna, until their eyes ached. Indeed the failing of the House of
Wittelsbach was not something so genetic as the
Hapsburg
Jaw, the Romanov haemophilia, but that their eyes ached with too much light, as a fast film will granulate too coarsely.

Ludwig was at a fever pitch to carry this emotion safely with him into May. With Paul he felt almost safe. He could do without Wagner. For that reason he
commanded
a performance of one of the operas, to prove to the Master that though the work was immortal, the
Master
himself was no longer necessary. It was as though the congregation was at last sufficiently holy to serve the Mass itself.

And then he ruined everything. On the last day of April he was alone with Paul and failed himself. He could not help it, but it ruined everything. The body should not have the power to force upon us its necessity.

He was horrified.

Paul did not understand. His performance had been admired so much, that he had only had the desire to please still more. He was clearly terrified to lose favour, for he lived by pleasing princes. That was the vocation hereditary in his family. He did not know what he had done, but he tried to roof over the misunderstanding with words. Not being able to think of anything else to do, he rushed back to his own apartments and wrote Ludwig an impassionedly apologetic letter.

It was delivered that night. Alone in the wintergarden, Ludwig persuaded himself to believe the letter. So, too, did Elsa of Brabant believe that she had never asked the fatal question, once Lohengrin was gone forever. Dawn seeped over the city and through the glass of the roof, contending with the artificial and mechanical night
inside
. Ludwig, his eyelids hurting him, strained for a last look after Lohengrin, but could see no one.

All the same, like Elsa, he would pretend he had not asked the fatal question. For the world of the daytime is not the same as the world of the night, nor are the people who live in it the same people they are by dusk. Therefore from dawn until late evening he could still have Lohengrin in the person of Paul. Only in the lonely barracks of the night would he realize their relationship had become impossible. We can never forgive others for their participation in our own sins. It was something he did not dare to do.

Meanwhile, in order to retain something of the magic of May, he went to Switzerland incognito, as Count Berg, with Paul, on a visit to Triebschen, where Wagner had established himself.