Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read online

  Bland, a room, bed bureau TV desk and chair, floor to ceiling window with the smoky gray day outside, quasi-industrial the view, the long asphalt ribbon of Karl-Marx Allee stretching into the dark of the oncoming evening, East, perdition. The man in the chair, a big man, an older man, back to us, in a good suit, looking out the window. Swiveling to face us, Lamb, the man, ballooning at the belly, the waist, eyes smiling, sinister, benevolent, completely bald, slightly ashamed. Looking up under lidded eyes, standing now, smile widening. Lamb shuts the door. With his left hand reaching into his jacket pocket and thumbing them out, the photographs. Fanning them on the bed where the man can step forward to see. Looking down, takes them in. The smile fades, changes, comes back. Look at him. Look at his human face. He is a big man in his seventies, imposing, huge even, and well bruised. Spreading his hands.

  You’ve found her.

  Dear Elsa,

  What I never told you, what I kept from you. What if it doesn’t exist? Because you hate me, perhaps with cause, but will always be my daughter, and always be my Elsa, no matter what you choose to call yourself. And so it’s almost time for me to tell you about your father, and my father, and this awful world that fathers have made. But not yet. Before I do that I want you to picture me as I was this morning, before the letter arrived. I was at peace then. Or if not at peace, at quiet, settled, at rest in the way an object is at rest, like a stone at the bottom of a puddle that does not know that puddles evaporate, that things can change again after so much change has already gone by. Husband gone, the old life gone, America most of all gone into memory. And me in this strange old city, here on the edge of Italy where I thought I could be reasonably confident of never or at least rarely seeing another American. A city more German than Italian, more Slavic than German, written into and out again of the margins of history, a city that crossed national borders almost routinely, as eastern as it is western, an excellent place to disappear because it was always itself in the act of disappearing like a magician’s mute and beautiful assistant. Alone but for a few distant friends, I had found a pattern for my days. I walked the streets, I worked in the shop, I read again the same poems I’d loved when I was young, Rilke most of all, taking strength if not comfort from those lines I’m sure you’ve also never forgotten, lines whose advice I follow now:

  Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.

  Wer jetzt allein ist, wird Es lang bleiben,

  wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben

  und wird in den Alleen hin und her

  unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

  Such beautiful words make loneliness bearable. And this is becoming a very long letter indeed, and isn’t it strange that the German for “long letter” sounds like “long brief”? But it was not a long letter that came to break my peace this morning, that I could hear even from upstairs by the creak of the mail slot, a slip of paper that slid between the brass lips of my locked door and came crashing down on this life, my afterlife. I went down the creaking stairs which have always served to warn me in the past of my neighbors’ comings and goings, and now they—the old Signora on the second floor, the young Signora on the third—might have heard me go down and then come back up again, as if I were indecisive about leaving. I went inside, I closed the door, I picked up the old ivory letter opener your Papa had brought back from a long-ago trip to South Africa, I opened the envelope. And what did I find? A blank page. A blank page confirming what I knew already in my heart: that he who now has no house will not build him one. That he who is alone now will continue to be alone, will write and read long letters, will wander the streets and alleys as the leaves fall, remembering. Remembering in this case my own death, that is to say, my life. Who sent it to me, this page, the page on which I write this, that you may or may not read? Was it your father? Was it you?

  In this life I do not expect pity, Elsa, from you or anyone else. I expect no response. I don’t expect you do anything but to read this page, and I know that I cannot even really expect that. I do not know what you will feel or what you will want to do. I’m writing to tell you simply what you must already know, that I am going, or gone. So if you have anything to tell me, even in your mind, you might as well tell me now. I have come to rest. Each day I walk. Sometimes I walk very far, all out along the coast road to Miramare. Have you heard of it? It is a castle, the second famous castle on this coast. The first of course is Duino, I’ve been there too, to listen for Rilke’s angels, but I heard nothing except tourists snapping pictures of each other. Miramare is different. A hundred and fifty years ago it was caused to be built by Maximilian, the sailor, future Emperor of Mexico, younger brother to Franz Joseph who was then midway through his endless reign. It’s a strange blocky gray building, more house than castle, dramatically situated on a promontory thrust out into the water. I’ve heard the tour guides speak about it so frequently I could be a guide myself. The story is that when Maximilian was serving in the meager naval forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his ship was blown by a storm into the Gulf of Trieste and nearly sank within sight of that promontory. As a way of giving thanks, perhaps, or just struck by the beauty of the spot, he returned there in after years and had the castle built. He was never happier than when he was at sea, so he had his rooms in the castle done up to look just like the cabin of his ship, the Novara, in which he had sailed around the world in the years before the castle was built and which would carry himself and his wife to Vera Cruz a few years later, in 1864, where they became Emperor and Empress. On the instigation of Napoleon III a picked delegation of Mexican aristocrats had come to visit him at the castle, persuading him that an election had expressed the will of the Mexican people that they join a new empire in thrall to the interests of France and Austria. He must have loved the idea: that in one stroke he could step out of his minor role in a minor empire and into a more paradoxical empire denominated by democracy. Once in Mexico he alienated every constituency: the liberals wanted nothing to do with a monarchy, while the conservatives who had dreamed up the empire were displeased with Maximilian’s progressive ideas, which included a limited monarchy and the elimination of a system of serfdom that had virtually enslaved his native Mexican subjects. Three years later he was dead, a benevolent but naïve imperialist executed by republicans outraged at the very idea of an Emperor of Mexico, let alone a bewhiskered adventuring Habsburg who spoke not a word of Spanish. They say his last words before the firing squad were “Viva, Mexico!”—which shows a kind of touching, stubborn loyalty to the fiction that had overtaken his life. His poor wife, Charlotte—the Mexicans called her Carlota—went mad afterward; she had returned to Europe seeking help for her beleaguered husband when the republicans were at the gates: no one would help or could help and she spent a few years after Maximilian’s execution in seclusion here, in this impossibly lonely and isolated castle surrounded by the sea, surrounded by artifacts of the couple’s brief reign over the land of the Aztecs. Her own quarters were on the second floor, but perhaps often she wandered into her dead husband’s nauticalized chambers to stare out the porthole-shaped window at the Adriatic, the castle almost shaking in the strong wind, imagining herself once again on the voyage to Vera Cruz, or more pathetically on the voyage home, in a womblike wooden room that must have all but smelled and tasted of the body of Maximilian, whom she had truly loved. Eventually she was too much of an embarrassment for the Habsburgs and was shipped back to the country of her birth, Belgium, where she wasted away as the Empress Dowager in another castle for long decades, outliving not just her husband but his empire, while her cousin Leopold used her money to pillage the Congo.

  It is a strange, haunted place, redolent not just of the nineteenth century but of how the nineteenth century imagined itself; a kind of mirror like its name, a funhouse reflection of mingled idealism, strategically ineffectual politics, and cruelty. I wander from room to room, I walk the grounds, which are extensive and beautifully landscaped, and the sunshine all but banishes the gho
sts that walk alongside me. On the very tip of the promontory, before the great windows of the castle, one can indeed feel as though on a prow of a ship, thrusting forward through the water toward a sublime or ridiculous destiny—it hardly matters which, the illusion of motion is the point. I persist, you see, in thinking I’m alive. Don’t you do the same?

  If you will not meet me in this place, this margin, what will I do? What I have been doing. I will wander the reduced and palpable streets of my former life. I will read. I will write to you. I will imagine that I have a grandchild who knows my name, who knows what I look like, who can recognize my voice. I will imagine, without expecting or deserving, your forgiveness.

  3.

  Pavement

  Perched on a mannequin head, coolly observing them both, the white wig, heavy as a swan. Gustave shoots a glance at it, then rises to stand with his arms at his side, to face the intruder with his level, curious gaze.

  Why have you found me again?

  Not how. We’re past that now. On the verge of story. Lamb looks at him.

  Because you know something about her.

  Who?

  Don’t play games. Lamb lifts, pinched between thumb and forefinger, a photograph. The heavy man’s face, as though struck, reaches for it, wondering. The gesture is all he needs. Lamb pulls the photo away and tucks it into his pocket.

  You were involved with her.

  Involved is a good word, the other man says at last in his nearly accentless English. Devoted is a better one. In the religious sense.

  Then tell me about your devotions to her.

  We are speaking of the same woman? The woman, as Sherlock Holmes might say? Of M?

  The American shrugs.

  I wish you would tell me something of your client. I have no rights there, I suppose.

  None. Let’s get on with it. Your story.

  My confession, do you mean?

  Your side of things. Do you mind if I use this? Holding up a small black oblong. A digital voice recorder. And this? A camera.

  Do you know Gertrude Stein?

  Who, the writer?

  The writer. She was an American, like you.

  I’ve never read her.

  You don’t read Stein, not really, the man says. It’s pure grammar. Like pictures of sentences. You spend time with them. I’ve improved my English a good deal spending time with Miss Stein.

  What’s your point?

  “Fathers are depressing.” An observation of hers. A warning.

  Let’s get on with it.

  Very well. Are you recording now?

  Yes.

  This won’t take long, the man says. He steeples his fingers, closes his eyes for a moment, opens them. Looks right into the camera, unsmiling. The camera cradles his face as you, reader, demand this story.

  In 1967 I came to Paris as an art student. Naturally I submitted to the mania of the times, felt that simply to look out the window was to have my eyes peeled open as though I were being born, and this happened dozens, even hundreds of times every day. We all felt it, all the beautiful young men and women, plus me, a coarse unlovely youth from the provinces, whose accent was mocked by the professors and bureaucrats of the university where I was one of the students, plus one. I had come up in the fall of ‘67 from the little village on the Rhine where I grew up, where from an early age my drawings had won me a degree of infamy, for I drew what I could see, and, universally ignored except for the occasional good-natured offhand beating, I saw everything: drunkards beating their wives, wives who took in boarders and fucked them while their husbands were at work, the field west of town where with a dog’s help you could turn up bones they said had belonged to collaborators executed by partisans during the war. Once I climbed a mound of coal outside the window of the house of LaFleur the barber and saw him sitting at his dining table with the business end of a revolver in his mouth. Startled, I slipped and fell, scattering the coal and marking my clothes, feet and hands with black dust. He came out the door a moment later but I had already made my getaway, down to the riverside where I tried in vain to scrub my sooty clothes clean. I let them go, they drifted blackly downstream toward the Mediterranean, and walked naked in my shoes back home, where my mother bent over me sorrowfully, scrubbing at my shoulders and cheeks with a rough towel until I howled. LaFleur hanged himself a week later; he never fired a shot, I don’t know why. I drew the things I saw on foolscap stolen from my father’s office—he was a kind of country barrister, originally from Lyon, who’d met and married my mother right before the war, gone to the Line and been captured and spent the next five years in a prison camp, then came drifting home again in ‘44 to find me, just four years old, his son. It was known to all without needing to be said that I was German, that my mother had accepted or given comfort to one or more of the Wehrmacht passing through. Or had it been a fellow citizen, reclaiming temporarily his pure Germanness in the bastard’s brew that was Alsace-Lorraine, his pride in the thousand-year Reich leading him to my mother’s bed, and then carried away again by duty or defeat back to Germany, or back into frightened Frenchness, silence, anonymity. He must have been a large man for I was large, even at birth, more than four and a half kilos, an astonishing size in that time of universal malnourishment. My father, a slightly built man, accepted my existence dutifully, as though in the spirit of a legally binding agreement to which he’d stipulated, though by all rights he could have walked away from my mother and me, returned to Lyon, regained his dignity and lived a different life. Instead he stayed on in that little town, the butt of jokes, the hairs on the back his neck bristling every time he left a room as though he could feel by static electricity the sign of horns that some yokel—his own client, like as not—was even then making to the sniggers of others. Pitiable, really, even in his rages, taking me behind the outhouse no matter what the weather to beat me with a bit of rope he hung there for the purpose, so that the neighbors might listen to me squirm and scream, though in fact even by the age of eight I was large enough to put up a stiff resistance if I so chose. He was good at least for paper, and high-quality inks and pencils, for he loved to write by hand and had the most elegant script, which I only later learned was a mark of his own provinciality and lower-class origins, for the aristocrats, the grande ecole types, have always prided themselves on their sloppy handwriting. I was considered slow, and a bastard besides, but I was in this one way only fortunate in my size, and the other boys learned not to pick on me, if only because their kicks and punches went nowhere, it was impossible to do me visible damage, I stood and panted with the excitement of violent contact and covered their faces with my breath until, embarrassed, they dropped their fists and stepped away. Besides, my drawings were in demand, especially the lewd ones that for a couple of coins I’d draw inside of your notebook—I was careful, you see, but I got caught anyway, only I was lucky enough to be caught by Father Juneau, what you’d call the principal of our only school. He was a little like my father, a stranger in our little provincial town, having been exiled from the capital for some indiscretion or other. He was a sallow, slightly built man, bald on top, with a pot belly poking through his black robe, and long fingers that he drummed unhappily on his desk when we were brought before him for the usual transgressions: shouting, cursing, fighting, stealing, defacing school property, maybe a bit of buggery in the toilets. I’d been caught doing something a little rarer, giving half my earnings to Genevieve, a lanky blonde dairyman’s daughter with protruding ears and gap teeth and a long braid she said had never been cut, who in exchange for my few coins in her father’s barn would slip out of her coarse cotton dress and pose naked for me, the blades of sunlight that shone through the slats in the walls cutting across her white belly and breasts, blinding me. How well I remember those afternoons after school when I would come by and find her at the milking stool, her hands firm on the udders, and without more than glancing at me she’d lean back, take a pewter ladle off the wall, dip it in the pail, and hand it to me, and I’d d
rink the sweetest milk I’d ever tasted or will ever taste. Then she’d stand up from the milking stool, much taller than I was, and look me full in the eye and—what’s the English? not scowl, smirk, she smirked at me, and in a single motion bend down and pick up the hem of her dress and pull it over her head, and the smell of milk and cowshit and straw and rust, the cows lowing softly, chickens scratching just through the walls—they were paper thin, you could hear everything, her mother Madame Toux clucking just like the chickens as she scattered the feed—and in response to my nod, as I produced my writing tablet and pencil from my knapsack, she’d move to where the bands of light were striping the strawpile and stand there, arms at her sides, awaiting my directions. Then I would think always of the saints and martyrs in stained glass I’d seen in the church and they would tell me to tell her what pose to strike—left arm outstretched, right arm bent at the elbow, eyes toward the roofbeams, or sitting on a crate with a bit of sacking on top to protect from splinters, cradling a broomhandle like the bony body of Christ, or as Mary, holding to her breast one of the puppies that were always underfoot (her father owned three big bloodhound bitches that were always having litters, all of which he drowned, but he’d take his time getting round to it). Sometimes afterward, dressed again, she’d sit with me in the sun-drenched corner and leaf through the drawings and giggle, and I would paw her a little, out of politeness mostly, for her pale raw body was in no way erotic, or at least I didn’t find it so. But it was in our favorite pose, Mary and the infant Jesus, in which we were caught one warm September afternoon, when I’d been laboring to transform not the dog into Jesus but Mary into Genevieve, a Genevieve with the intelligent and queenly eyes and head of a bloodhound, and so intense was my concentration, and hers too perhaps, that I didn’t hear her mother cease to cluck, or the noiseless hinges of the door (little did we know that they’d been oiled in anticipation of haytime), and only looking up, eyes squinting at the sudden light bathing Genevieve’s whole body, and her little ecstatic cry of shame, and I remember particularly the blonde blaze of the fine hairs on her arms as she lifted her hands to cover her face (how strange, I thought at the time, that she didn’t cover her pubis, which with its darker hairs was like a little coalfire, bright at the edges and ashed at the center), dropping the dog which squealed as it tumbled to the straw washing up like sand around Genevieve’s blunt dirty feet. Her mother was a sober woman and didn’t scream, in fact she had her wits about her and quickly shut the door, for her husband was about and his rage would have been terrible. She told Genevieve to get dressed, and then she turned toward me. I don’t remember what happened next, but somehow I was outside, my shirt torn, running pellmell for home. It must have been the loose board in the wall that I could just barely squeeze through if I sucked in my gut. I began to breathe easier and walked the rest of the way, was able to elude my own mother and get upstairs to change my clothes in time for supper, and it wasn’t until that night, lying in my bed, that I reached for my drawing tablet under the mattress and realized that I had dropped it in my flight. A nameless horror gripped me for a long moment; then, I relaxed. What can they do to me? I asked myself. I’m already a whoreson, a freak. In a way, I was glad that finally my drawings were going to come to light. I had a larger audience coming than that of the dirty boys who paid me a few sou for sketches of half-naked nuns to beat off to. I closed my eyes and went to sleep with a light heart. The next day, all was normal as before, until I looked out the window, daydreaming, while Father Juneau was teaching us algebra, and saw Genevieve’s mother striving purposefully down the dirt road, my tablet in both of her hands like a hymnal. Then the panic seized me again: I began to sweat, my mouth was dry, my palms went cold. She came in through the front door—all eyes turned curiously toward her—and strode up to the priest, who was stiff with surprise at the blackboard, chalk dust on his soutane. He asked her what she wanted, and she turned and pointed at me. Gustave? Father Juneau said blankly. Then the spell broke and he put down his piece of chalk, put Felix the head boy in charge, and whisked the madame into the little closet off the main room that served as his office. Of course Felix and his odious confederates flocked to the door, jostling each other in silence trying to overhear what was said, leaving just me and a few of the slower and weaker boys at our desks, staring down at unsolvable proofs. All was quiet save for the low vibration of Father Juneau’s voice (felt in the floor) and the higher vibration made by Madame Toux (felt in the light globes). Then Felix’s jaw dropped and he turned toward me and pointed. Pervert! he announced, with just a shade of admiration. The class snickered and hooted. I kept my head down. Then suddenly the knot of boys at the door exploded like sparrows after a gunshot, and Father Juneau was standing in the doorway, beckoning to me. In his office Madame Toux stood by the priest’s desk, composed as a nun in her town clothes; the tablet lay shut on the desktop. Father Juneau ushered me in, with a certain respect I thought, and then continued to hold the door open. He looked at Madame Toux. When she didn’t get the hint he coughed slightly, and again, louder.