The Absolute, page 4
“Seye eros rof thgis a tahw”—or—“Uoy ees ot eroseye na tahw.”
Although she occasionally wielded her humor against foreign words, she never did so against the ones who had spoken the phrase. She seemed to consider the rest of human existence a complement to her own happiness, and seemed not to need anyone. She confessed without any sense of shame (or lied like a Cossack) that she remained a virgin at an age when a woman is already considered to be old. She was an accomplished performer. Every one of her shows was guaranteed a full house. Her repertoire was awful, which highlighted her talent. Her voice created gems of enduring beauty, using horse manure as their base. Frantisek, used to treating the female sex as livestock, didn’t even dare strike up a conversation with the diva. He waited for her after shows, and sent her bouquets of flowers with no dedication card. Of course, Sofia knew who her anonymous admirer was. It amused her to have such a shy suitor. She was suspicious of him too: there was a risk that all this prowling about was a simulacrum, a charade of seduction carried out by a good-looking but inexperienced composer, its sole purpose to wrangle her commitment to acting in some future monstrosity of his authorship.
At last, the meeting took place. And it was she who took the initiative:
“What should we do with what we feel?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” replied Frantisek, and fled.
Later there were concerts, social gatherings, friends in common. At a party in the conservatory, they ended up side by side; Frantisek hid behind a glass of champagne.
“Are you a mouse, a man of few words or a half idiot?” she provoked him.
“I can talk about music, travels, mysticism, ice, solitude. I can also talk about orgies and deceptions,” replied my great-great-grandfather.
“That is, nothing’s ever happened to you,” laughed Quatrocci. Then she grew serious: “When singing, I have the impression that my voice occupies more space than I do, which isn’t physically true, because my voice comes from my throat, which is itself a small part of my body. This confusion, this error, produces an effect of intensity I call ‘art,’ and I’ve always believed that it’s enough to fill my life. But for a while now, I’ve been feeling something new expanding within me, transforming me into a different woman. I believe it’s something that belongs to the order of the emotions. When are we getting married? Em evol uoy od? Uoy evol i.”
His composer colleagues decided to pull out all the stops when organizing his bachelor party. After examining and discarding a series of celebratory possibilities (driving a troika along the Nevsky Prospect with Frantisek dressed as a woman, and throwing him naked into a fountain; hiring Tzigane gypsy dancers from a little hut on the outskirts; shutting him away all night in the morgue; et cetera), they opted for the classic formula: a dinner party for the men. There they all were—that is, Constantine Balakov, Nikolai Grigorievich, Kashkin, Broluv, Leonid Katz, Voroszlav Pashulski, Anatol Schneider, Iosef Ostropov, and other greats of the time whose names are today worth less than dust. Vodka, cigar smoke, laughter. Balakov kicked off:
“There’s no doubt that by marrying a singer of world renown, poor Frantisek will play a pitiful role.” Affectionate fist bump to the back of the one mentioned. “Forced to trail her through Europe playing the contemptible role of the kept husband, he’ll lose all passion for work, and before long become incapable of even contemplating a musical stave. Prosit!”
“The description is incomplete and even merciful,” picked up Kashkin. “As soon as Sofia wearies of her new toy, instead of recognizing that such boredom is in the nature of every human bond, she will unleash a zealous tirade against our friend. Have you ever heard words like ‘layabout,’ ‘idler,’ ‘wretch’?”
“I think, with complete affection, of ‘cuckold.’ My wife says it to me every day,” joked Balakirev.
The friends gently laughed. Kashkin went on:
“The use of words like these will only mark the beginning of a season in sentimental purgatory. And knowing Frantisek’s noble heart, I take it as a given that instead of admitting he’s married a shrew, he’ll end up blaming himself for what’s happened.”
“How long do you think it will take her to be unfaithful?” chipped in Broluv.
“Months? Weeks? Days? This very night, during her own bachelorette party? In any case, very soon,” added Pashulski.
“Where is Ilya Petrov?” said Deliuskin, uneasy. “He was the one who organized all this, and . . .”
“Petrov can’t be relied upon. He arranges meetings and scraps them without any warning. He always leaves you high and dry . . .” said Ostropov. “But let’s keep going. All these tragedies could be avoided if she showed an interest in the pathetic living conditions that our friend can offer her.”
“I’m not poor,” my great-great-grandfather defended himself.
“True. But she’s extremely rich,” said Ostropov. “Used to luxury and comforts, do you think that Sofia will forgo everything just for your love? Do you imagine that she’ll willingly tolerate the charms of the aurea mediocritas? There’s not a chance that she’s going to turn into your maid, so most likely she’ll find a way to make you her lackey. You’ll have to follow her wherever she goes, you’ll have to make do with composing your little works when she leaves you a second free; socially, you’ll find yourself exercising at most the role of companion, a decorative figure, the stole on her mink coat that she drags along, picking up the filth of red carpets. Soon Sofia won’t even notice your presence. ‘Who is that gentleman accompanying you, madame?’ ‘This one? Ah. Nobody. Only my husband . . .’”
“Is it necessary to continue the joke?” asked Frantisek.
“Joke?” Schneider was scandalized. “Wake up, Deliuskin! Like every prima donna who adores showing her face in sublime realms because what she truly loves is to revel like a swine in the wastelands of abjection, as soon as you’re distracted for a second she’ll submit herself with absolute pleasure to the aberrant sexual tastes of stagehands, luthiers, hairdressers and singing teachers, marked by their use of all kinds of devices . . .”
“For this class of women, the members of the lumpenproletariat playing bit parts in the operatic subworld most completely represent the primal forces of masculinity,” added Grigorievich.
“It’s already three in the morning and we haven’t talked about matrimonial taedium vitae . . .” yawned Nikita Ziemkovich. “My experience, which I’ll describe for the benefit of our dear Deliuskin, shows that boredom . . .”
While the talks were taking place, Ilya Petrov was conscientiously carrying out the secret task that the group had entrusted to him. Dressed in his best formal wear, an expression of sympathy painted on his face, he had presented himself at the petit hotel where Sofia Quatrocci resided, to confide to her “certain very particular particularities in good Frantisek, which make your engagement ceremony inadvisable if you wish to fully realize yourself as a woman, not to mention a mother.” Petrov was efficient, persuasive (“Even I, on more than one occasion, have had to brush aside his hand . . .”). While listening to him, the singer went silent, turned pale, denied it and asked for proof, which with the happy ease of the cynic, her visitor invented on the spot, from the names of men to the dates, words, intensities and positions. Sofia broke into sobs, and at dawn, without thinking for even a moment that she had been victim to the cruelest practical joke, she fled Saint Petersburg. A year later, she married a metalworker from Rostow.2
Since he never saw Quatrocci again, my great-great-grandfather never found out the reason for this desertion on the verge of the altar, let alone that the cause had been his peers, motivated by envy of his talent.
The abandonment pushed him to take refuge in his work; this loss had opened new seams, new veins from which a superior music bled. In this period, Sofia Quatrocci transformed into a muse, an inspiring saint in a purely imaginary alcove, a figure whose eventual return (in flesh and blood) would have achieved nothing more than duplication and confusion. As is logical, Deliuskin’s moral scrupulosity did not bear well with these transitions of his psychic nature, so that in the midst of his compositional vertigo he wept, imagining versions of an impossible reencounter, sublime interpretations of still unwritten works starring the woman who, strictly speaking, he had already begun to forget. Sofia Quatrocci disappeared completely only when my great-great-grandfather finished composing his first opera, The March of the White Russian Heart, and had to occupy himself with the directing, staging, dramatization, production . . .
Due to his education and habits (when it came down to it, his father had raised him like a prince), Frantisek was far from imagining what a true descent into the inferno of details involves. The budgetary discussions with the hall’s artistic committee, the whims of the singers who always try to tailor each score to their vocal limitations or corrupt aesthetic superstitions, the delays of the makeup artists, the contagious diseases of the instrumentalists . . . The recitals grew exasperating. A week before the premiere, the tenor suffered from an attack of boils and fainted into the arms of the soprano halfway through a love duet; the chorus refused to sing the triplets and the orchestra conductor demanded a change in the arrangement of wind instrumentalists, because the trumpet players were in general too tall and covered up the trombonists.
The day of the general recital . . .
Strident sounds, warm-up of strings, muffled coughs, groans, stifled gases, tuning checks; a double bassist leans over and burps as he smooths the silk stocking over his calf. Deliuskin’s peers and colleagues wait in the box seats. “Catastrophe is imminent,” predicts Schneider. Nervous whack, the sharp tock tock of the little Grim Reaper’s staff, the director’s baton on the music stand. A flute solo, the main theme. With the chord of wood instruments, the call of trumpets sounds, then the harp arpeggios. The atmosphere of the Russian steppe, the iridescent splendor of its snows, comes to us in all its trembling beauty. The song of the flute comes back, reflective. Soon another sensual melody is heard; now it’s the oboe. A penetrating chord, followed by a wild explosion of orchestral sound . . . “Decadent,” opines Ziemkovich. “Morbid, you mean,” says Ungarev. “Technically this should be the overture. But what I’m hearing is a prelude!” marvels Balakov. “Yes, to my nap,” laughs Grigorievich. “I don’t know whether this exemplifies a new concept of nihilism or spinelessness,” says Kashkin. Leonid Katz chimes in: “Without a doubt, Deliuskin is the most eccentric composer of our generation . . . and the most mediocre.” “Shhh . . . Shhhh. The stage is collapsing,” says Anatol Pashulski. “No, they’re moving one of the sets. What happens is they’re mounted on wheels of different sizes. So that between . . . But is that a boyar, a member of the nobility?!” says Anatol Zinovievk. “I’m afraid it’s Merenchokova.” “But this woman grows horizontally! From the back I thought she was the incarnation of our longed-for Peter the Great.” “Didn’t you know that the mother, or perhaps grandmother of Merenchokova, and the dead Tsar . . . ?” “I don’t believe you!” “Yes. She was the only one who could swallow his drunken binges.” “What a throat!” “Rather. And from that same school, or sequel, we’ll now suffer a few indescribable falsettos.”
Even though the critics didn’t give the work a warm reception, the public made up for it, taking The March of the White Russian Heart as its own and turning it into such a success it became an essential part of the next season’s programming. Beyond its intrinsic merits, The March . . ., in the history of classical music, was the most serious predecessor to the reclaiming of Russian national sentiment that Glinka would later bring to its peak in his opera A Life for the Tsar.
A couple of days after the premiere, Deliuskin decided to consult Avrosim Roittenburg, the fashionable doctor of the moment in the music world: he’d felt slight stabbing pains in his chest.
“Stop smoking,” the doctor warned him.
“I’ve never touched a cigarette,” Deliuskin said.
“Ah. Then take off your shirt.”
Roittenburg pressed his head against his back and remained silent for a few seconds. Then he said:
“Oy oy oy.”
“What’s wrong?” Deliuskin nervously asked.
“I wanted to hear how my voice echoed. Get dressed. Nothing’s the matter, although the climate of this city isn’t good for you.”
The doctor’s advice fit perfectly with his longings. Frantisek returned to Crasneborsk. There, without knowing it, a special form of tranquility was waiting for him. Not long after his arrival, a knock came at the door of the farm: a Finnish painter. With a sense of vocation, and not lacking in sensibility, Jenka Roszl specialized in the portraits of celebrities. “I have no thought of paying,” said Deliuskin. And she said: “I have no thought of charging you.” My great-great-grandfather didn’t care about the perpetuation of his image, but the idea of sitting quietly for several hours each day tempted him; it seemed like a good chance to concentrate on figuring out certain problems of counterpoint; he also liked this woman’s smile, so he accepted. And the moment that Jenka Roszl gave the last brushstrokes to the portrait, he asked her to become his wife.
* * *
2 A note at the margin: God, who doesn’t exist—if he did, as my son discovered, it was in the form of a wavelength throbbing at the center of the dense, extremely heavy mass that exploded in a tide of fire at the moment of creation—this God punished Ilya Petrov for his wickedness, envy and resentment. One day, getting out of the bathtub, poor Petrov tripped and broke his spine. A man of solitary habits, he didn’t have anyone to come help him. With nothing else to eat, Lila, his Persian cat, had already polished off a sizeable chunk of his body by the time it was found.
4
The marriage of my great-great-grandparents was perfect in every way. Both were mature adults, two beautiful examples of the spiritual progress favored by the cultivation of the arts. It’s obvious that given his new civil status, Frantisek now found himself prevented from continuing the procedures of compositional research he’d drawn upon in times of bachelorhood. But this didn’t entail a loss. On the contrary. These very restrictions on the life of a married man rescued him at last from his anxiety without object, from the challenges of his desperation. Or at least they gave him a new kind of meaning. After a brief honeymoon, my great-great-grandfather surrendered to the charms of domestic life. Everything became repetition: from the morning trickle of honey over butter, spread on dense, crunchy rye bread, to his nocturnal glass of kvass, sitting in his favorite chair. This repetition, which could have worked disastrous influences, weakening his character or ruining his creative impulse, fit Frantisek like the ring on his finger: he started to compose with an unsuspected fluidity and began to transform into a superior musician, approaching ever more closely to his essence.
“Marriage,” he wrote to his friend Volodia Dutchansky, “has a religious quality. At some moments (not all, luckily) the rule of abstinence, understood as the fidelity that I owe to my beloved wife, makes me burn and consume myself like a monk in the cloister.”
From that moment on, music became his only orgy. Since he was an artist fully conscious of the materials he was using, he saw himself confronted with aesthetic challenges of the first magnitude. Sometimes he chatted about these apprehensions with his wife Jenka:
“What concerns me has nothing to do with pianissimos or fortissimos,” he told her, “but with the fate of the series of procedures I’ve used up to now.”
Jenka, who at night swapped out her paintbrushes for knitting needles, threaded another stitch, gave a sigh and smiled lovingly at her husband. Frantisek went on:
“In my case, the most obvious temptation is to squeeze as much as possible from the diversity and combination of sounds I’ve previously handled, until by means of pure repetition, I obtain the elixir of singularity. To take this temptation to an extreme would mean always writing the same note. The other temptation is its opposite, and thus provokes me even more. It means annihilating myself as an author to become a pure source of absorption, a kind of receptor god: one who does not create worlds, but devours them. Or, to put it less pompously, to become a kind of perfect stenographer.”
“. . .”
“Did you say something? No. I thought you did . . . A third possibility exists, derived from the second, but fuller and more encompassing. This is to do everything and become everyone, turning into a fully inchoate musical being, the most perfect inconsistency, someone or something that comprises what has been done and what hasn’t been done, the work of others and anything it occurs to me to write, as well as, in addition, the entire sound of the Universe. What do you think, Jenkele, my love?”
Here, Jenka lifted her head:
“When I paint, I paint.”
“Does that mean you don’t worry beforehand about even the frame, the canvas, the colors, the palette . . . ? Not to speak of the technique of the brushstrokes, the preceding styles, the objects to portray . . .”
“Let’s go to sleep, Frantisek? It’s already very late . . .”
“Not yet! There is a problem. If I choose to surrender myself to the third temptation, then soon I will have to admit (as in fact I am already doing now) that the audible totality of what exists is so vast no single being could encompass it (much less perform it) without some kind of formal reduction. Just imagine, the register of only a very tiny portion of the full universal wealth of sound—for instance, what is heard at this precise moment we are exchanging words—would suppose an unlimited quantity of staved paper and copyists, dedicated without rest to automatically and swiftly taking down what they hear . . . ! Which at heart would be no more than to pass a delicate net through fleeting time, and we haven’t even begun to talk about the subsequent conversion into an aesthetic product . . .”
