Antonietta, page 20
He clapped his hands and said, “Bravo! You understand everything.”
As if I were a clever child.
RAMUZ
Stravinsky told me, when I was alone with him the other day, that Federovsky is one of the few people on this earth that he trusts. (He did not take the trouble to add that I am another.) He says the violinist is like a priceless leather boot that has been carefully oiled for years—evidently thinking of those handsome, shiny Russian boots that are so flexible that they wrinkle down the wearer’s legs like loose stockings. “He exactly fits my foot,” Stravinsky said. This seems to mean that that old boot Federovsky is pliable and useful to Stravinsky—a sound basis for trust, I suppose. Before long, however, there is a modulation, and soon we are singing in the key of Anna. Stravinsky speaks of the mystery that lurks in a woman who is stupid, shrewd, gentle, bold, and stunningly beautiful. “Federovsky is a good fiddler because he is always reaching for his wife’s mystery on that instrument of his.”
I realize that Stravinsky often talks foolishly, and that sometimes he is rude and hurtful (doesn’t he trust me after all this time?), and that he seems selfish and boastful, and even, sometimes, ruthless. But I have known for a long time that he has a skin as thin as the surface tension of water, and that he constantly and desperately needs warmth and comfort and support. His scars itch all the time. Federovsky told me the other day about his friend’s deepest wound, which he suffered at the first performance of The Rite of Spring, five years ago, in Paris, at the inauguration of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Pierre Monteux had put the orchestra and dancers through sixteen careful rehearsals. Federovsky was Diaghilev’s concertmaster, and he says that the musicians were fascinated—overwhelmed—by the complex music. But at the very first measures of the prelude on the opening night there came hoots from the cheap seats in the balcony. The shouts of outrage soon spread throughout the house. Stravinsky fled from the hall and ran backstage in an agony of chagrin. There was soon an uproar as defenders began to bawl at the hecklers, who redoubled their protests. Part of the trouble came from the choreography—Nijinsky’s first effort in that line. The great dancer not only knew nothing about music, he could only count with his legs. The full fury of the hurricane came with the “Dance of the Adolescents.” The audience remembered Nijinsky’s pornography of the year before, when the faun fucked on stage, and now the pubescent dancers in this scene began to hop like lascivious toads. I imagine that Stravinsky must still hear, ringing in his ears, the screams of hatred of that audience. He makes a partial payment every day of his life, I suppose, on the tax that this world levies on those who are blessed and cursed with merciless originality.
STRAVINSKY
There came a moment while Federovsky was playing so winningly those many quotations from my work, and showing how superior they were to crude Russian folk tunes, that something clicked in my mind. Violin…Violin…And then I had it! Afanasyev’s story of the soldier who trades his fiddle with the Devil for a magic book that will bring him riches. The soldier gets his fiddle back in a card game with the Devil when he gives the Devil too much wine to drink. And then he wins a Princess with its music. All three of us are excited about this idea of mine. Ramuz will write the narration, I will write music that will feature violin solos, and Federovsky will charm the world with my music on that instrument of his—which I think the Devil may indeed have owned at one time. Oh, yes, I shall write music that will rouse a Princess from her stupor!
RAMUZ
We were at work in the blue room. We have agreed to call our piece The Soldier’s Tale. I showed him my verses for the narrator’s first reading, beginning:
Entre Denges et Denezy,
un soldat qui rentre chez lui.
Quinze jours de congé qu’il a,
marche depuis longtemps déjà.
This called, Stravinsky said, for the march of a weary man, and he was composing it. He had settled on a skeletal orchestra, over which Pavel’s violin could have sway. He had chosen from the four orchestral families—strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion—two spokesmen each, treble and bass, a kind of octet. Violin and double bass; clarinet and bassoon; trumpet and trombone; and drums, high and low.
Federovsky told me later of his astonishment at how slowly Stravinsky worked. I was used to it, from our labors together on Renard and The Wedding. It seemed as if every note, every chord, every movement of sound had to be heard, weighed, discussed, given unanimous approval, and praised to the skies—or at least to the blue ceiling that was the upper limit of the universe in which we worked. It was a great concession on Stravinsky’s part to allow others in the room with him as he composed; he usually insisted on total absorption in solitude. But this, he generously kept saying, is a collaboration. We were all drinking Armagnac; as the day wore on, the praise began to sound like gargling. Stravinsky would try everything on his piano, which was muted with pads of felt so that no barbaric ears outside the room could hear what was going on; then he would have Federovsky play the solo phrases on Antonietta, and he would listen with his head tilted, his big ears cocked. Sometimes he whacked a few thumps on one of the several drums that huddled around him as servants of his love of emphasis. Sometimes he stopped to listen to his four children chirping and squealing at play in the garden below, for although he scowled or even screamed at most noises that penetrated into his workroom while he composed—dishes clattering in the kitchen, the cawing of a picket line of jackdaws, or, alas, Katya’s coughing—these sounds of the jubilant young energy of the fruit of his semen seemed to act on him as a psychic caffeine.
In this starting-and-stopping way he wrote a few measures, and then suddenly, to our amazement, it was time for afternoon tea.
FEDEROVSKY
Precision has a high price. With Stravinsky it is the energy that is spent on neatness. The rest of the house was cluttered with the trash of Katya’s and his acquisitiveness. Ramuz had warned me. Stravinsky, he said, is a man of prey. I must keep my packet of cigarettes in my pocket. Otherwise, it would soon belong to him. Never put a box of good Swedish wooden safety matches down on a table. In fact, if you value it, hold on to your hat in his house. All the tables and sideboards in other rooms were crowded with the booty of a predatory life. I had seen the jumble. Glass paperweights from Murano. An ashtray from Maxim’s in Geneva. Two old quill pens. A tiny bronze Sphinx. A miniature cuckoo clock…
But his desk! It was like a military parade ground. Everything had to fall in, dressed right. There was the row of colored inks, red, green, blue, yellow, and two blacks—India ink and a Chinese tablet. Different erasers of various sizes for various sorts of obliteration and amnesia of what was rejected. Shiny steel instruments, as orderly as the scalpels on a surgeon’s tray: two rulers, a compass, a penknife, a metal scraper for erasing ink. And, set apart but lined up like everything else, three of the little five-wheeled rollers he had invented himself to draw staves with.
And his score! He drew all the stems of chords and the lines marking the bars with a ruler in rigid verticalities. The notes themselves were small and round, perfect grapes to make a brandy of sound. The title “Marche du Soldat”; the designations of instruments, at the left of the staves on the opening page; the clef and rest marks; the instructions and signs for tempo and volume—all were set down with a calligrapher’s fastidiousness. The tempo was indicated by an exact numerical setting of a metronome. Various colored inks made these things extra clear.
There was a paradox here. On the one hand, this excessive neatness. On the other, the seismic, chaotic power of the music that the tidy notes held in their spell. Even with this thin little orchestra, the music he was putting down hinted at the huge demonic force that the tired soldier would soon encounter. Music can establish the order of devilish things.
In the ninth measure, in midmorning, he made a tiny smudge in the trombone stave. He cursed and took a new sheet and started over again, laboriously copying out all the parts, while Ramuz and I twiddled our thumbs.
STRAVINSKY
I don’t know what got into me. I said to Federovsky, “I suppose you think your wife is the Princess of our piece. She’s all right, but she is unable to pee in a straight line. Did you know that, Pavlochka? Her water describes a curve as it goes down into the pot. Don’t worry, I haven’t seen this with my own eyes. I deduce it. She is the sort of woman who pees in an arc. That is to say, everything she does, every move she makes, is a little bit on the elegant side, a bit too grand. Do you follow me?”
Whereupon Federovsky said, and I can hardly blame him, “And you, Igor Fedorovich, are the Devil of our piece.” But I noticed that he wasn’t really angry.
I said, “The Devil takes many forms. Sometimes He is a blacksmith’s apprentice, sometimes He is the ticket taker who charges money for permission to kiss a virgin, sometimes a woman will knead Him into the dough of the bread she is making. And sometimes, Pavlochka—be careful, Pavlochka—sometimes He lives right in the belly of a violin. He is what gives the fiddle that awful soul you talk about.”
He looked down at his violin, which he was holding under his arm, and he raised it up and tapped on its back with a knuckle, and put his ear down to it. “Not at home,” he said. “I think He has gone to make a visit to your brain.”
I said, “My brain has no room for visitors. It is jammed to capacity with just two things: intervals and rhythms. No, Pavlochka. He is certainly at home in that box of yours when you play. I can smell the resin burning.”
FEDEROVSKY
I forgive him. He is fragile. His petulance is the glue that holds him together. I remember his confiding in me long ago in St. Petersburg about his terrifying father. He told me that on a day when the great basso was to perform, he was always in a rage. Nervousness. Sometimes the temper would erupt in public. Guima spoke of one time out in a street in Bad Homburg. He thinks he was eleven. He did some small thing that tripped off his father’s temper. Perhaps he spat in a gutter. His father commanded him to get out of his sight—go back to their hotel. Igor did not march right off like a good soldier. He grumbled. Then his father exploded in a street scene of bad language that gathered a large crowd of passersby.
“To one who cannot possibly win,” Guima said to me when he told me this, “winning becomes important.”
But what is it he wants to win?
RAMUZ
Tea came to pacify. Tea came à la Russe, in glasses nestled in silver holders with handles. Never a cup of tea in this house; stakan chai—a glass of tea. Weak enough to see a sailboat on the lake right through it. Stravinsky, who is fascinated by the power of small words, remarked that the one for this drink is a rare bird. What other word, he asked, is virtually the same all over the world? From the Mandarin Chinese, cha, or, at Amoy, tuh, where the dialect changes the ch to t. Russian, chai. French, thé. Italian, tè. German, der Tee. Portuguese, chá. Spanish, tè. English tea. Even in Hungarian, that island of language, Stravinsky said, the word is tea, pronounced tay’-ah.
From there I moved to the tantalizing problem of how to make what one writes universal, for we had said that we wanted to find a way, in shaping our soldier’s story, not just to be “international” but to reach into mankind’s ear. Quite beyond using a word like tea that anyone anywhere would be able to make sense of, how could we find words—or actions—or music—all three, really—that would reverberate in everyone’s mind everywhere?
“What we have to do,” Stravinsky said, perhaps thinking of Federovsky’s remark about a visitor in his head, “is to work back down from the cerebrum to the brain stem, and depend on what we find there that may be useful. The urges, I mean. Instincts. The basic needs and desires that were in us long before we reached the stage of even wanting a culture. Those are what I reached for, you know, in the Sacre.”
“Folk tales,” Federovsky said. “The stuff in folk tales. Of any country, you know. Many things in them are interchangeable.”
“My brain stem can’t spell,” I said.
“Ah. Alors. After we’ve drawn from down deep, we have to put our wits to work. We have to mark staves on a page and put in the notes—in the right places. For me, that is the supreme pleasure in life. The work of making sense of the wild sounds in my dreams. Imposing the order of music on the threat of chaos. I live for that. Nothing else matters. Performances always disappoint me. By that time I have long since heard the music in my mind as I made it. The work itself was and is my greatest joy.”
FEDEROVSKY
This must be true. I remember that after every performance of his work in the Paris days, he was furious. It didn’t matter how the music was received. He boiled with his father’s anger. Something was always wrong. He had heard the oboist flat a note that was supposed to be natural. The conductor had imposed his personality on the music. He wanted to assassinate someone in the audience who had a bad cough. There was no pleasure for him in success; he had had his pleasure long before.
Today as we were working you could see the fun he was having. Once, he struck a very strange chord on the piano, one that he was trying out. He turned to us with ecstatic eyes. “Did you feel those vibrations?” Then he said, “When Beethoven had lost his hearing, he used to hold a stick between his teeth, and as he played he would lean forward and touch the stick to the wood of the piano, so he could feel the vibrations of his originality in his head.”
Guima struck his strange chord once again, fortissimo.
RAMUZ
He calls his work “the supreme pleasure” of his life. Most of us would put a different thrill from that at the top of the list, and we would surely agree which one it should be. He appears to have women on his mind all the time, yet the sex act evidently gives his senses a lower order of delight than does the joyful task of setting down a few bars full of untamed chords. He put the alternatives to us vividly one day, speaking of the varieties of the creative urge in his family: “My ancient great-grandfather,” he said, “used to create by having sex. I write music.” I have noticed that in the presence of women the focus of his interest always comes to rest sooner or later on the shapely reservoirs of their mother milk; on the nurture, I suppose, that he knows those beautiful vessels can give to infants—that they still can give, in fantasy if in no other way, to the sentient, creative infant that lives on in him.
STRAVINSKY
Federovsky’s violin has the most sensuous tone. I asked him to run over some of my draft material this morning, and I felt bewitched. I began to think back on last night, and the violin made my mind run free in the meadows of our missed opportunities. Ramuz took us to Lausanne, and we had a fine dinner at the Grappe d’Or. Then Ramuz led us through many back streets to a little café in the suburbs, where there were no other customers besides a couple of old mole trappers warming their insides in preparation for their dawn round of their traps in the vineyards. They wore rabbit-fur hats indoors, and they held in their unshaven jaws the stubby-stemmed pipes that Ramuz says are called “mouth burners.” The many nips of brandy that they had taken made them cordial, and they invited us to join them. So it was brandy for us, too, on top of a great deal of red wine we’d had with dinner. In our wooziness, Federovsky and I could understand very little of the slangy dialect these men spoke with Ramuz, but we did gather, after some time, that we were all five headed out from there to a friendly whorehouse the trappers knew about.
We entered a dimly lit room in which shabby satin covered everything—except the half-dozen girls, who were naked from the waist up. The madam was a shrewd hussy with a black mustache; she saw that we were drunk, and that money could be extracted from us without subjecting her girls to anything more drastic than sitting on our laps from time to time. We bought wine for everyone. We sat around and had a hilarious hour. All of us, women and men, laughed until we cried.
At one point the madam, already tipsy herself, and perhaps carried away by what must have seemed to her our willingness by then to believe anything, said, “Messieurs, I didn’t always look the way you see me now. I was beautiful once. And I was rich, too. I was invited everywhere. Poets from all over Europe sang of the parts of my body in great detail.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I have held in my arms the Kaiser of all Germany. The Crown Prince of Liechtenstein. The Prince’s adolescent son. Grand Dukes…”
We howled with laughter.
So I stirred myself this morning from the enchantment of listening to Pavel’s violin and of daydreaming about the slender, not yet spoiled figure of a particular one of those grisettes last night, and I suddenly heard myself saying, “Look here! Why should the Devil always be pictured as a man? Ramuz, in one of our scenes He should be a She. Let’s have Her appear as the madam of a brothel. That woman last night—model the Devil on her. I could have killed you two for agreeing to pay what she charged—for what? For nothing! She was a demon. I could see the flames in her eyeballs.”
RAMUZ
I have taken some days away from the others to finish the narration. I followed and did not follow Afanasyev. The tale will go like this:
A poor soldier has two weeks’ leave, and he is on his way home. On the banks of a stream he meets an old lepidopterist, chasing butterflies with a net. They get talking. The old man (we suspect who He is) persuades the soldier to trade his fiddle for a magic book, and to spend three days with Him….
As the soldier straggles into his native village—not much more than a crossroads in the country, a frontier post, with a church tower in the distance—he realizes that three years, not three days, have passed. A cattle merchant comes along (we can guess about Him!) and, seeing the magic book, tells the soldier how to use it to make a fortune….
