“We shall having nothing to say in regard to our own death.”
It was a wager, and he had always been a betting man. Once he had left the poverty of Marseilles behind, and once he had decided to reject wealth without glory, and power without greatness, so as to devote himself to a vocation with true power, music, his life had provided him with the solid pedestal of self-confidence. But all these things that made him
him
depended on something that did
not
depend on him: life and death. The wager was that this object, so bound up with his life, would resist death, and that in some mysterious, perhaps supernatural way the seal would maintain the tactile warmth, the sharp sense of smell, the sweet savor, the fantastic sound, and the inflamed vision of its owner’s life.
Wager: the crystal seal would break before he did. Certainty—oh yes!—dream, prediction, nightmare, diverted desire, unutterable love: they would die together, the talisman and its owner …
The old man smiled. No. This was no scrap of the skin of a wild ass that shrank with each wish granted for and because of its owner. The crystal seal neither grew nor diminished. It was always the same, but its possessor knew that without its changing shape or dimensions all of a lifetime’s memories fit miraculously within it, perhaps revealing a mystery. Memory was not an accumulation of matter that eventually, because of sheer quantity, would burst the seal’s fragile confines. Memory fit within the object because its dimensions were identical. Memory was not something that overflowed or was shoehorned into the shape of the object; it was something that was distilled,
transformed,
with each new experience. The original memory recognized each new-come memory, offering it a welcome to the place whence, unknowingly, the new memory had originated, believing itself in
the future only to discover that it would always be in the past. What was yet to come would also be a memory.
An image—equally obvious—was different. An image has to be exhibited. Only the most wretched miser hides away a Goya, because he fears not robbers but Goya. Because he fears that the painting, displayed—not even on the wall of a museum, but on a wall in the hoarder’s own home—might be seen by others and, worse, might see them. To cut off that communication, to steal from the artist all possibility of seeing and being seen, to interrupt forever his vital outpouring: ah, nothing could be more satisfying to the consummate miser, nothing so near the pleasure of a dry fuck. With every viewing, something of the painting is stolen.
The old man had never, not even when young, wanted to withhold. His arrogance, his isolation, his cruelty, his conceit, his sadistic pleasure—all the defects attributed to him throughout his career—did not include spiritual constipation or a refusal to share his creation with a live audience. It was legend that he refused to give his art to an audience that wasn’t present. That decision was definitive. Zero records. Zero films. Zero radio or, horror of horrors, television broadcasts. He was, also legendarily, anti-Karajan, a man he considered a clown to whom the gods’ only gift had been the fascination of vanity.
Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara? No, he never wanted that … His “art object”—which was how the crystalline seal was presented to society—was in full view. It had become the property of the maestro only recently, having before that passed through other hands; its opacity had been converted into a transparency penetrated by many old, old gazes, which perhaps survived only within the crystal, paradoxically alive because they were captive.
Was it an act of generosity to exhibit the
objet d’art,
as some
said? Was it a seigneurial emblem, a seal for a coat of arms, a simple but mysterious cipher engraved on crystal? Was it a heraldic charge? Had it closed a wound? Or was it nothing more or less than the seal of Solomon, imaginable as the matrix of the great Hebrew monarch’s royal authority but also identifiable, more modestly, as a rhizomatous plant with pedunculate, drooping greenish-and-white flowers and clusters of red berries: Solomon’s seal?
It was none of these. He knew that, but he had no way to confirm its provenance. He was convinced, from what he did know, that this object had been not crafted but
found.
That it had not
been
conceived, but had
itself conceived.
That it had no price because it had absolutely no value.
That it was something transmitted. Yes, transmitted. His experience confirmed that. It came from the past. It had come to him.
But finally, the reason why the crystal seal was exhibited there, near the window looking out over the beautiful Austrian city, had little to do with either memory or image.
It had everything to do—the old man approached the object—with sensuality.
There it was, near at hand, precisely so the hand could touch it, caress it, feeling with every nerve ending the perfect and exciting smoothness of that incorruptible skin, as if it were a woman’s shoulder, the beloved’s cheek, a lithe waist, or an immortal fruit.
More than sumptuous cloth, more that a perishable flower, more than a hard jewel, the crystal seal was not affected by wear or tear or time. It was something integral, beautiful, forever pleasing to the eye and to the touch when fingers tried to be as delicate as their object.
The old man was a paper ghost, yet his grasp was as strong as
forceps. He closed his eyes and picked up the seal in one hand.
This was his greatest temptation. The temptation to love the crystal seal so much that he would destroy it forever with the power of his fist.
This magnetic and virile fist, which conducted Mozart, Bach, Berlioz like no other—what did it leave but a memory, fragile as a crystal seal, of an interpretation, judged in the moment to be genius and unrepeatable. For the maestro never allowed any of his performances to be recorded. He refused, he said, to be “canned like a sardine.” His musical ceremonies would be live, only live, and would be unique, unrepeatable, as profound as the experience of those who heard them, as volatile as the memory those same audiences kept of them. In that way, he
demanded
that if they wanted it they would
remember
it.
The crystal seal was like that, like the great orchestral ritual presided over by the high priest that gave and took away with an incandescent mixture of will, imagination, and caprice. The interpretation of the work is, at the moment of its execution, the work itself. Berlioz’s
The Damnation of Faust,
interpreted,
is
the Berlioz work. Similarly, the image is the same as the thing. The crystal seal was thing and it was image and both were identical.
He looked at himself in the mirror and searched in vain for some trace of the young French orchestra conductor renowned throughout Europe, who when the war began broke with the fascist seductions of his occupied country and left to conduct in London, risking the Luftwaffe bombs, a kind of challenge from the ancestral culture of Europe to the beast of the Apocalypse, the lurking and sordid barbaric creature that could fly but not walk, except crawling with its belly flat to the ground and its tits slathered with blood and shit.
Then came the main reason to keep the object in an old man’s retreat in the city of Salzburg. He admitted it with an excited and shameful trembling. He wanted to have the crystal seal in his hand so that he could hold it and squeeze it until he destroyed it; hold it the way he wanted to hold her, tighter, tighter, until she choked, communicating a fiery urgency, making her feel that in love—his for her, hers for him, theirs for each other—there was a latent violence, a destructive danger, that was the final homage of passion to beauty. To love Inez, to love her to death.
He dropped the seal, heedless yet fearful. For an instant it rolled across the table. The old man picked it up again, feeling a blend of fear and fondness as vivid as that aroused by the adrenaline rush of watching people jump without a parachute in the Arizona desert, a circus he had sometimes watched with fascination on the television he detested, the passive shame of his aging years. He set the seal back on the little tripod. This was not Columbus’s egg, which, like the world itself, could sit on a slightly flattened base. Without support, the crystal seal would roll, fall, shatter …
He stared at it until Frau Ulrike—Dicke—appeared, holding his overcoat.
She wasn’t really fat, merely clumsy in walking, as if she was dragging, more than wearing, her ample traditional clothing (skirts layered over skirts, apron, thick wool stockings, shawl upon shawl, as if she was never warm). Her hair was white, and it was impossible to guess what color it had been when she was a girl. Everything about her—her bearing, her halting walk, her bowed head—made one forget that Ulrike had once been young.
“Professor, you are going to be late for the performance. Remember, it is in your honor.”
“I don’t need an overcoat. It’s summer.”
“Herr Professor, from now on you will
always
need an overcoat.”
“You’re a tyrant, Ulrike.”
“Don’t stand on ceremony. Call me Dicke, like everyone else.”
“You know, Dicke? Growing old is a crime. You can end up with no identity and no dignity, sitting around in a nursing home with other old people as stupid and disinherited as you.” He looked at her affectionately. “Thank you for taking care of me, my dear Dumpling.”
“Haven’t I said it many times? You are a sentimental and ridiculous old man.” The housekeeper feigned a little hop, making sure the coat fell correctly over the shoulders of her eminent professor.
“Bah, what does it matter how I dress to go to a theater that was once the court stables?”
“It is in your honor.”
“What am I going to hear?”
“What do you mean, maestro?”
“What are they playing in my honor, devil take it!”
“The Damnation of Faust.
That’s what it says in the program.”
“You see how forgetful I’ve become.”
“No, no. We all get distracted, especially all you geniuses.” She laughed.
The old man took one last look at the crystal sphere before going out into the dusk along the Salzach River. He was going to walk, his step still steady, needing no cane, to the concert hall, the Festspielhaus, and in his head buzzed a self-willed memory: status is measured by the number of Indians under the chief’s command. And he was a chief, he should not forget that, not for a
single instant, a proud and solitary chief who was dependent on no one—which was why he had refused, ninety-three years and all, to have someone come pick him up at his home. He would walk, alone and without a cane, thanks but no thanks; he was the chief, not “director,” not “conductor,” but
chef d’orchestre,
the French expression was the one he really liked—
chef.
He hoped Dicke wouldn’t hear; she’d think he was crazy if in his old age he devoted himself to the kitchen. And he? How could he explain to his own housekeeper that directing an orchestra was walking on a knife blade—exploiting the need that some men have to belong to a group, to be members of an ensemble, feeling free because they follow orders and don’t have to give them, to others or to themselves? How many do you command? Is status measured by the number of people we command?
Still, he thought as he set out for the Festspielhaus, Montaigne was right: no matter how high you may be seated, you are never higher than your own ass. There were forces that no one, at least no one human, could dominate. He was headed for a performance of Berlioz’s
Faust,
and he had always known that the work had escaped both its composer, Hector Berlioz, and its
chef d’orchestre,
Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, and had installed itself in a territory where it defined itself as the “beautiful, strange, savage, convulsive, and harrowing” master of its own universe and its own meaning, victorious over the composer and the interpreter.
Did the seal, which was his alone, take the place of the fascinating and disturbing independence of the choral symphony?
Maestro Atlan-Ferrara looked at it before leaving for the homage being paid him at the Salzburg Festival.
The seal, so crystalline until now, was suddenly fouled with some excrescence.
An opaque form, dirty, pyramidal, similar to a brown obelisk,
began to spread from its center, which only moments before had been perfectly transparent.
That was the last thing he noticed before leaving for the performance, in his honor, of
The Damnation of Faust
by Hector Berlioz.
It was, perhaps, an error of perception, a perverse mirage in the desert of his old age.
When he came home that darkness had disappeared.
Like a cloud.
Like a bad dream.
As if divining her master’s thoughts, Ulrike watched him walk down the street along the riverbank and did not move from her post at the window until she saw the figure of the professor, still noble and upright though cloaked in a heavy overcoat in midsummer, reach what she calculated to be the point where he would not turn back and interrupt the secret plan of his faithful servant.
Ulrike picked up the crystal seal and placed it in the center of her held-out apron. She made sure, forming a fist around it, that the object was carefully wrapped in the cloth, and then she whipped off the apron with a couple of efficient, professional tugs.