In the autumn when Maman died, the Chamberlain's wife shut herself off completely in her rooms, with Sophie Oxe, and broke off all relations with us. Not even her son was admitted. It is true that the death came at a most inconvenient time. The rooms were cold, the stoves smoked, and mice had got into the house; you were not safe from them anywhere. But it was more than all this. Mistress Margarete Brigge was outraged that Maman was dying; that there was an item on the agenda which she refused to speak of; that the young wife should presume to take precedence over her – she who intended to die some day herself, though she had not yet by any means decided when. For she did often reflect that she would have to die. She refused, however, to be hurried. She would die, certainly she would die, when it pleased her to do so, and then they could all go ahead and die as well, after her, if they were in such a hurry.
She never quite forgave us Maman's death. In any case, she herself aged swiftly during the winter that followed. She still bore herself tall when she walked, but in her armchair she slumped; and she grew ever harder of hearing. You could sit and stare straight at her for hours and she would be unaware of your scrutiny. She was somewhere within; she returned only at rare intervals, and for brief moments, to her vacated senses, which she no longer inhabited. Then she would say something to the Countess, as the latter was adjusting my grandmother's mantilla, and with her large and freshly washed hands she would gather her dress about her, as if water had been spilled, or we were not quite clean.
She died as spring was approaching, in town. It was in the night; Sophie Oxe, whose door was open, heard nothing; and when my grandmother was found the following morning, she was cold as glass.
It was immediately after this that the Chamberlain's great and terrible illness began. It was as if he had waited for her end, that he might die as unheedful a death as he must.
[37] It was in the year after Maman's death that I noticed Abelone for the first time. Abelone was always there. That militated against her. And then, Abelone was not likeable, as I had realized much earlier on some occasion or other, and I had never seriously reviewed that opinion. Hitherto, it would have struck me as almost ridiculous to wonder what Abelone's story was. Abelone was there, and one made use of her in whatever way one could. But all at once I wondered: Why is Abelone here? Every one of us had a particular reason to be there, even if it was by no means always as apparent as the practical utility, say, of Miss Oxe. But why was Abelone there? For a while there had been talk of her needing some sort of diversion. But that was all forgotten. No one did anything for Abelone's diversion. Nor did she give the smallest impression of being diverted.
There was one good thing about Abelone, mind you: she sang. That is to say, there were times when she sang. There was a strong, unerring music in her. If it is true that angels are male, you might well say that there was something male in her voice: a radiant, celestial maleness. I, who even as a child had been so distrustful of music (not because it took me out of myself more powerfully than anything else, but because I had noticed that it did not put me back where it had found me, but left me deeper down, somewhere in the heart of things unfinished), I endured that music, on which you could rise upright higher and higher till you imagined that this must already have been pretty much heaven for some time. I had no suspicion that Abelone was to open still other heavens to me.
At first our relationship consisted in her telling me stories of Maman's girlhood. She was anxious to convince me how courageous and youthful Maman had been. In those days, she assured me, no one could compare with her in dancing or horse-riding. ‘She was the most daring of them all, and quite tireless. And then suddenly she got married,’ said Abelone, still astonished after so many years. ‘It was so unexpected; no one could really take it in.’
I was interested to know why Abelone had never married. She struck me as relatively old, and it did not occur to me that she still might.
‘There wasn't anyone,’ she answered simply, and as she said it she became really beautiful. Is Abelone beautiful, I wondered in surprise. Then I left home to go to the Academy for Sons of the Nobility, and an invidious, unpleasant time in my life began. But when I was at Sorö and stood at the window, apart from the others, and they left me in peace for a little, I would look out at the trees, and at such moments, and at night, the certainty grew upon me that Abelone was beautiful. And I started to write all those letters to her, long ones and short ones, a great many secret letters, in which I supposed I was talking about Ulsgaard, and my unhappiness. But I see now that they must in fact have been love letters. For at long last the holidays began, just when it seemed they never would, and it was as if we had arranged that we would not meet again in the presence of others.
Nothing at all had been agreed between us, but when the carriage turned in to the park I could not help getting out, perhaps only because I did not want to drive up as any stranger might. Summer was already at its height. I turned down one of the paths and walked towards a laburnum tree. And there was Abelone. Beautiful, beautiful Abelone.
I hope I may never forget how it felt when you looked at me. How you wore your look, holding it on your back-tilted face as if it were not firmly attached.
Ah, has the climate not changed at all? Did it not grow milder around Ulsgaard, with all our warmth? Do not stray roses flower longer in the park nowadays, till right into December?
I shall not tell anything about you, Abelone. Not because we deceived each other – since even then there was one man you loved and never forgot, dear loving woman, and since I loved all women – but because only wrong is done in the telling.
[38] There are tapestries here,27 Abelone, on the walls. I am imagining you are here; there are six tapestries – come, let us walk slowly past them. But first take a step back and look at them all together. Are they not peaceful? There is little variety in them. There is always that oval blue island, floating on a background of subdued red bedecked with flowers and inhabited by little animals busy about their own affairs. Only there, in the last tapestry, the island rises a little, as if it had grown lighter. There is always a figure on it, a woman, wearing various costumes but always the same person. Sometimes there is a smaller figure beside her, a maidservant, and the heraldic animals are always there too, present on the island and involved in the action. On the left a lion, and on the right, lightly coloured, the unicorn; they are bearing the same pennants, which display high above them three silver moons, rising, in a blue band on a red field. – Have you looked? Will you begin with the first?
She is feeding a falcon. How magnificent her garments are. Perched on her gloved hand, the bird stirs. She is watching it and at the same time reaching into the bowl that the maidservant has brought, to feed it something. At the bottom right, a little silken-haired dog is couched on the train of her dress, looking up and hoping it won't be forgotten. And did you notice the low rose trellis that marks the end of the island to the rear? The animals are up on their hind legs, in attitudes of heraldic hauteur. The coat of arms reappears in the cloak that enfolds them. The cloak is fastened by a handsome clasp, and is billowing out.
Do we not involuntarily approach the next tapestry more softly, once we have realized how absorbed she is, weaving a garland, a small circlet of flowers? In pensive mood, she selects the colour of the next carnation from the flat basin the maidservant is holding out to her, as she binds the last one she chose into the garland. To the rear on a bench, unused, is a basket full of roses, which a monkey has discovered. This time it has to be carnations. The lion no longer has any involvement; but the unicorn, to the right, understands.
Should music not enter into this silence? Is it not already there, softly? Wearing a grave and quiet adornment, she has walked (how slowly, do you see?) to that portable organ and now stands playing it, separated by the pipes from her maidservant, who is working the bellows on the other side. Never before has she been so beautiful. Her hair has been wondrously taken forward in two plaits and fastened over the head-dress
in such a way that the ends rise out of the knot like a short helmet plume. Out of humour, the lion reluctantly endures the sounds, swallowing a howl. But the unicorn is beautiful, as if moving in waves.
The island opens out broadly. A tent has been put up. Of blue damask and flames of gold. The animals gather it up, and, almost achieving simplicity in her majestic raiment, she steps forward. What, after all, are her pearls compared with herself? The maidservant has opened a small casket, and now the lady lifts out a chain, a heavy, magnificent treasure that has always been locked away. The little dog sits beside her, on a high place prepared for it, watching. Did you see the motto on the upper edge of the tent? It reads: ‘A mon seul désir’.
What has happened, why is the little rabbit down there running, why can you see right away that it is running? Everything is awry. The lion has nothing to do. The lady is holding the pennant herself. Or is she holding on to it? With her other hand she has taken hold of the unicorn's horn. Is this mourning, can mourning stand up so straight, can a mourning dress be so muted as this green-black velvet with its faded patches?
But there is one more festivity to come. No one has been invited to it. What people might expect is neither here nor there. Everything is provided. Everything, for ever. The lion looks around, almost threatening: he won't tolerate anyone coming. We have never seen her tired; is she tired, or has she merely sat down because she is holding something heavy? You might take it for a monstrance. But she is inclining her other arm towards the unicorn, and the gratified animal rears and rises up and leans upon her lap. What she is holding is a mirror. Do you see? – She is showing the unicorn its own likeness.
Abelone, I am imagining you are here. Do you understand, Abelone? I think you must understand.
[39] Now even the tapestries of the Dame à la licorne are no longer in the old château of Boussac. The time has come when everything is being removed from the houses; they are not allowed to keep anything any more. Times of danger are safer now than times of safety. No member of the Delle Viste family walks at your side and has it all in his blood. They have all passed on. No one speaks your name, Pierre d'Aubusson, great grand master from an ancient house,28 at whose behest it may have been that these images were woven that exalt all things and divulge none. (Ah, to think that poets should ever have written differently of women, more literally, or so they thought. It is certain that this was all we were meant to know.) Now one merely happens to stand before them, among others who merely happen to be there, and one is almost alarmed to be there uninvited. But there are others present, though never many, and they move on. Young people barely spare a moment, unless to have seen these things once, to have studied this or that characteristic they possess, is a requirement of their subject.
You do find young girls before them on occasion, though. In the museums there are a good many young girls who have left those houses, somewhere or other, those houses that can keep nothing any more. They find themselves before these tapestries and forget themselves for a while. They always had a feeling that it existed, this kind of soft life of slow and never wholly elucidated gestures, and they darkly remember that for a time they even imagined that life would be their own. But then they hurriedly take out a sketchbook and begin to draw, anything at all, one of the flowers or a small, contented animal. It does not matter what it is, someone has told them. And it really does not matter. The main thing is simply to draw; for that was why they left home one day, rather impetuously. They are of good family. But when they raise their arms as they are drawing, it turns out that their dress has not been buttoned up at the back, or not completely. There are one or two buttons that they cannot reach. For when the dress was made, there was not yet any talk of their going away, suddenly, on their own. At home in the family there is always someone who will help with such buttons. But here, dear God, who will bother with such things in such a big city? The thing would be to have a girl friend; but girl friends are in the same situation, and they would end up fastening each other's dresses. That would be ridiculous, and would remind them of their families, which they do not want to be reminded of.
It is unavoidable that at times, while they are sketching, they wonder whether it would not have been possible to stay at home after all. If they could only have been religious, with all their heart, in step with the others. But it seemed so nonsensical to attempt it together. Somehow the path has grown straiter: families cannot get to God any more. So all that remained were various other things that could be shared, at a pinch. But if these were shared out fairly, each family member received so little that it was a crying shame. And if they cheated in the sharing, arguments ensued. No, it really is better to be drawing, anything at all. In time the likeness will become apparent. And art, gradually acquired in this way, is an enviable accomplishment, after all.
And in their intense absorption in the work they have undertaken, these young girls, they never have a moment to look up. They do not realize that all their drawing serves only to suppress within themselves the immutable life revealed before them, radiant and infinitely inexpressible, in these woven pictures. They refuse to believe it. Now that so many things are different, they too want to change. They are on the verge of giving themselves up, and of thinking about themselves as men might speak of them in their absence. This they take for progress they have made. They are already almost convinced that one seeks pleasure, and then more, and then an even more powerful pleasure: that this is what life consists in, if one is not to throw it away foolishly. They have already started looking round, seeking, they whose strength always lay in being found.
It comes, I believe, of their weariness. For centuries they have performed all of love; they have always played the entire dialogue, both parts. For man merely repeated what they said, and did it badly. And made it difficult for them to learn, with his inattention, his neglect, his jealousy, which was itself a form of neglect. And nonetheless they persevered day and night, and grew in love and misery. And from among them, under the pressure of endless privations, have come forth those powerful women in love, who were greater than their man even as they called to him, who grew beyond him when he did not return, like Gaspara Stampa or the Portuguese woman,29 who never ceased until their torment abruptly became an austere and icy and illimitable splendour. We know of these women from letters that have been preserved, as if by a miracle, or books containing poems of accusation or lament, or portraits in a gallery that look at us through a sort of weeping that the painter caught because he did not know what it was. But there were countless others: those who burned their letters, and others who no longer had the strength to write them. Ancient women who had hardened, with a kernel of exquisiteness which they kept concealed. Formless women who had grown strong, strong from sheer exhaustion, who let themselves grow to resemble their husbands but remained entirely different within, where their love had been working away in the dark. Childbearing women who never wanted to give birth and, when at last they died in bringing the eighth child into the world, had all the manner and lightness of girls looking forward to love. And those who stayed with bullies and drunks because they had discovered a way of being further away from them, inside themselves, than they could be anywhere else; and whenever they were among people, they could not disguise the fact, but were radiant, as if they spent their lives with the blessèd. Who knows how many there were, or who they were? It is as if they had destroyed beforehand the words into which they might be put.
[40] But now that so much is changing, is it not up to us to change? Could we not try to evolve just a little, and gradually take upon ourselves our share in the labour of love? We have been spared all of its toil, and so it has slipped in among our amusements, as a scrap of genuine lace will occasionally fall into a child's toy-box, and give pleasure, and cease to give pleasure, and at length lie there among broken and dismembered things, worse than all the rest. We have been spoiled by easy gratification, like all dilettantes, and are held to be masters. But what if we despised our successe
s? What if we began to learn, from the very start, the labour of love that has always been done for us? What if we were to go and become beginners, now that so much is changing?
[41] Now I know too what it meant when Maman unrolled the little pieces of lace. For she had started to use just one of the drawers in Ingeborg's secretaire.
‘Let us have a look at them, Malte,’ she would say, as thrilled as if she were about to be made a present of everything in the small, yellow-lacquered drawer. And then in sheer anticipation she couldn't unfold the tissue-paper. I had to do it every time. But I too was greatly excited when the pieces of lace appeared. They were wound on a wooden bobbin, which was quite invisible for lace. So we would unwind them slowly, watching the patterns as they unrolled, a little startled whenever one came to an end. They stopped so suddenly.
First came strips of Italian work, robust pieces with drawn threads, in which everything was repeated over and again, as obviously as in a peasant's garden. Then all at once our gaze was confined, time and again, by a latticework of Venetian needlepoint, as though we were in cloisters or dungeons. But presently we could see freely again, far out into gardens that grew more and more artificial, till all was dense and warm to the eyes, as in a hothouse: luxuriant plants unfamiliar to us spread out their immense leaves, tendrils reached for each other as if they were dizzy, and the great open blossoms of points d'Alençon misted everything with their pollen. Suddenly, all weary and bewildered, we stepped out on to the long bolt of Valenciennes, and it was early on a winter morning of hoarfrost. And we squeezed through the snowy thicket of Binche30 and arrived at places where no one had been before; the branches hung down so strangely, there might well be a grave beneath them, but this thought we kept from each other. The cold affected us more and more closely, till at length, when we came to the tiny, exquisite pillow lace, Maman said: ‘Oh, now we shall get frost-flowers on our eyes’ – which indeed we did, for we were very warm inside.