* * *
Δ Your head rolled to the left until it leaned on Franz’s shoulder. He looked away from the road and glanced at you. The ash-gray hair that you color afresh each night using a lacquer dye, not a real dye, and an atomizer; you could wash the gray out any time you cared to and make your hair a different color. Your half-open mouth, wide, the lips full. Your plucked eyebrows. Your large, aquiline nose, the nostrils dilated a little. Your closed eyes. Gray eyes, Elizabeth, that change colors as the hours of the day change. Your broad strong hands. Your arms, crossed beneath the black shawl. Your white blouse, your tamarind-colored skirt, the glistening stockings, the low-heeled shoes. Franz looked at you and you opened your eyes and his head turned back to his driving.
“By repeated crime, even a queen survives her little time.”
* * *
Δ Your times with Franz have all been like this twilight in Cholula. When he looked at you in the car this morning, you opened your eyes and returned his look but rather than seeing him you were remembering him, as though to you his present moment were, because of your memories, a kind of longing for the past that Franz himself once explained by reading aloud a beautiful letter of Freud’s you showed him in a biography: “Strange and secret desires emerge inside me — perhaps from my ancestral heritage — toward the Orient and the Mediterranean and a very different life; desires from the close of infancy that will never be fulfilled, that do not conform to reality.” Well, Elizabeth, what do you know about this man who awakens in you strange and secret desires? That he came to Mexico after the war, that for some time he worked as a mechanic, that today he is a salesman in an agency that sells European cars. You met him little more than a year ago. You arrived alone at a Cuevas show where Javier had agreed to meet you. You were looking at and admiring a sepia drawing of the Marquis de Sade and his family, an obscene, peaceful intimacy of the sort we can be rescued from only by the devil or a clown, and Sade as Cuevas had depicted him was both: the devil-clown, as though Chaplin and Mephistopheles had joined hands to create a new being, a saintly criminal, an erotic ascetic, an assassin who gives birth, a liberator who tyrannizes. You shuffled names — the famous who constitute your kudos — and with Cuevas repeated Buster Keaton and Boris Karloff, Tod Browning and Jean Genet, George Grosz and Al Capone. You were not attempting to justify yourself or to become one with the age; you were merely taking pleasure in the awareness that incompatibles no longer exist, that the old Manichaeism which has led us by the split nose since the time of Plato, obliging us always to make choices, always to create blacks and whites, has taken a step that cannot be reversed toward the only position that matters today: a position not midway between external good and evil, objective, clearly separated, but between the moral options that are found only in subjective unity: the evil, he said, is not to be a thief but to be a petty pickpocket; not to be a murderer but to be an incompetent murderer.
“And if they capture you?” you asked, opening your eyes wide.
“That makes no difference. Every murderer wants to be captured, even compels his capture. But the bad murderer lets himself be captured merely through negligence. He is a good murderer if he is discovered despite his professional competence, knowing that he must be judged because that is part of the dialectic of the myth, required in order to fulfill the legendary beauty of redemption. Raskolnikov. And then his every act becomes important and meaningful.”
“Like Monsieur Verdoux.”
“Exactly. There you have the clown-criminal, the juggler-murderer whose being is a fusion of opposites.”
And Franz, beside you, merely said: “We can commune only with our opposites.”
* * *
Δ Franz lay beside you on the thin hard mattress in the hotel in Cholula, whistled the Merry Widow Waltz, and from time to time spoke, coldly, distantly, almost curtly, a word at a time, now and then whistling again to space out his narrative:
“We were students of architecture. But music was our passion. Those were good days. Youth. Mugs of beer. Talk, talk, talk until dawn. Schultzie. How we used to laugh with Schultzie, the waitress in the rathskeller. We’d pinch her behind. We’d laugh. She wore no panties. In our honor, she said. So that we could pinch her as we pleased. That was what she said. She served us beer. Beer, beer. And we were studying architecture but our love was music. Cantata 106. Actus Tragicus. Ein Deutsches Requiem. Tristan. That was happiness. More beer. A round for the whole house. White sausages with yellow mustard. The Dreigroschenoper came to Munich. Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne. Ulrich suggested we go to Albertstrasse. Heinrich didn’t want to. He finally confessed he had the clap. We laughed and laughed, but Heinrich cried. Schultzie rubbed his head. She told him to pinch her and cheer up. We ate marinated herring. Den man Mackie Messer nennt. We went to the theater, the three of us. The shark has teeth. Heinrich stomped out before the third act ended. We found him in a nearby beer hall. He was furious. Brecht was an anarchist. An enemy. We saw Schultzie walk by without her cap and apron. She didn’t greet us.”
He turned the knob of his transistor radio. Stately, solemn music. “Hah,” He chuckled. “Brahms in Holy Week.” You listened, lying naked beside him while night fell over Cholula. You looked at him questioningly, dubiously. “Of course I recognize it,” he said, answering your eyes. “I’ve heard it a dozen times in the garden of the Wallenstein Palace. In the evening. Sitting on a folding chair. Almost darkness. Looking without much attention toward the baroque portico. Between the columns, very slender columns, Elizabeth, were the orchestra, the soloists, the chorus. Figures that in a certain way complemented the architecture. An eighteenth-century palace. At the beginning, each time, maybe I wasn’t really listening. Just remembering what I had been taught. Brahms found his title in an old notebook of his teacher, Schumann. That sort of thing. Thinking more than listening. And not noticing that something else, a girl’s hair, had caught and was holding my attention. Then afterward, everything flowed together. The darkness. The graveled path crunching beneath my feet. The bells of the Mala Strana…”
In the darkness of Prague’s night, the bells of the Mala Strana are tolling. One, two, strongly. Three, softly. Four, five, the deep penetrating response. He ascends through a tunnel of light to a garden higher than the level of the street. Another baroque palace, long abandoned. Decapitated statues and black cherubin scattered without order, sacks of lime and heaps of coal piled against them. Brahms found his title in 1856, he repeats to himself. Then he worked on the Requiem for ten years. He knows that there are passageways from courtyard to courtyard, palace to palace, and if he hears footsteps behind him on the gravel, he is no more frightened today that he was at the age of seven when he first began to discover this city, a city that like no other seems to have been built by the lightest and most mysterious of fantasies. He knows that when he reaches the end of the maze of walks and corridors, Prague will lie before him, and he feels himself master of the old palaces, of the spacious darkness; he walks along humming the first movement. Each movement has three parts: a masterpiece of balance and tripartite symmetry. He comes out on a terrace with stone balustrades from which he sees rows and rows of houses and also the Vltava, a strip of silver fixed between its bridges; and farther, beyond the green cupolas and the brown towers, is the forest. Yes, there are steps behind him. In the white summer night he stares at the lamps on the roof of Czerny Palace. And if Mozart holds to the Latin of the liturgy, Brahms writes his Requiem in German. The balustrades of the Church of Loreto show a dance of cherubim who sustain the holy shields above the entrance. The angels are cupids with halos of black iron. The cloister has a chapel with the remains of old frescoes and a golden altar among the sunflowers and the dry grass. The gravel paths have baroque statues: centurions, angels, a dancing Christ. Is he aware of the shadow that follows him? He will not stop, will not turn. Standing in the churchyard, in the warm darkness, in a rich moment into which is fused everything he loves, the city, the music, the old buildings, the darkness itself, he hums and does not look back. It is disorderly order that permits an infinity of approaches. Yet the classical element limits the levels of comprehension and makes them rational. A musical prayer that now is not for the dead threatened with the horrors of final judgment, but for the living who must accept suffering and death. The steps behind follow him to the greenhouses beyond the churchyard, greenhouses no higher than the earth itself. Then a street, the street lamps black iron columns with the lamps grouped around them. He walks slowly past wooden gates and white passageways with small asymmetrical doors; he slows still more and the steps behind him stop, a girl’s steps, her heels tapping the paving stones of Loretanzka Street. He turns, looking about him at the painted façade of the Museum of Arms, the stone gladiators with their maces and daggers, the dripping mouths of the gargoyles, the covered stairs and the iron railings, the motionless hanging clothes, the great walls, the Christ which serves as a drain for the water flying on the tower. He goes on, down toward the river and the bridge, humming, looking at the paving stones under his feet, thinking that in 1639 Heinrich Schütz composed the first Mass for the dead to have a German text, a Teutsche Begräbniss-Missa; Bach’s Cantata 106 unites old hymns, biblical texts, and texts by the composer himself; but where Bach writes of the charity and help of a Redeemer who guides dead souls to a better world, Brahms avoids the name of Christ entirely. Brahms’s German Requiem ends as it begins: the first movement and the seventh are identical; the content of the second movement reappears, more vigorously organized, in the sixth: in the second, the dance of death gives way to a hymn of happiness, while in the sixth, the mourning uncertainty opens upon a serene vision of the Last Judgment, and the movement ends with a powerful, glorious Handelian double fugue. Only the third and fifth movements begin with solo voices. In the third the voice is that of desperate, suffering man; in the fifth it is the consoling voice of a woman. He stopped, in sight of the bridge. The steps following him had already become something familiar and accustomed. He stopped in the square before the bridge and saw a blind man with a white cane waiting for the last trolley and turned around until he saw her, stopped also. She walked forward into the dim greenish light of the lamps on the bridge. He waited. She made a gesture that was partly fearful, partly shy. A dark beret. Lustrous dark bobbed hair. A short jacket, a skirt belted around her thighs. A handbag of glossy beads which she was carrying near her breasts. The third movement begins with the words “He passed by like a shadow” and the orchestration is light and the melody is passed from instrument to instrument …