Slowly I followed the group of people with whom she moved away. But I remained behind by a high door, allowing the rest to mill about and find their places. I leaned against the black, reflecting inner side of the door and waited. Someone asked me what was happening, whether there was going to be singing. I pretended not to know. Even as I told the lie, the girl had already started to sing.
I could not see her. Gradually the space around her was defined as she sang one of those Italian songs that foreigners suppose to be particularly authentic because they are so manifestly conventional. She did not believe what she sang. It cost her an effort to present it; she made too heavy going of it. One knew from the applause at the front when the song was over. I was downcast and embarrassed. People began to move about, and I decided that as soon as someone left I would join them.
But all at once there was silence. It was a silence which, a moment before, no one would have imagined possible; it lasted, it grew tense, and now the voice rose from within it. (Abelone, I thought. Abelone.) This time it was strong, full and yet not heavy; it was of a piece, without a break, seamless. It was an unknown German song. She sang it with remarkable simplicity, as if it were inevitable. This was what she sang:
You whom I do not tell that at night
I lie and weep,
whose nature leaves me ready to sleep
as a cradle might –
you who say nought when you lie awake
for my sake,
how would it be if we bore
this glory and more
in our heart?
(A brief pause, and then, hesitantly):
Consider the lovers: see, when they start
confessing what they have done,
what liars they become!
The silence once again. God knows who made it. Then people stirred, jostled each other and apologized, coughed. They were on the point of lapsing into a universal murmur that would wipe everything away when suddenly the voice burst forth, resolute, broad and intense:
You render me lonely. I find you in other things.
For a while it is you, and then it is the wings
of the breeze, or a fragrance that comes to me whole.
In their arms I lost them, body and soul,
but you, you only, are born ever anew:
because I never held you, now I hold you.
No one had expected this. They all stood as if bowed beneath that voice. And in the end there was so great an assurance in her, it was as if she had known for years that she would be called upon at that moment.
[70] At times I had wondered why Abelone did not direct towards God the calorific energy of her magnificent emotion. I know she longed to strip her love of all that was transitive; but could her truthful heart fail to recognize that God is only a direction love takes, and not an object of love? Did she not know she need not fear that He would love her in return? Was she not aware of the restraint practised by this superior lover, who quietly holds back His own pleasure so that we, slow as we are, may come to all our hearts are capable of? Or was she trying to avoid Christ? Was she afraid that He would detain her halfway and make her His beloved? Was that why she did not like to think of Julie Reventlow?
I almost believe it, when I consider how loving women as simple as Mechthild, as passionate as Teresa of Avila, as wounded as the Blessed Rose of Lima,71 could lie back, compliant, and loved, into God's succour. Ah, He who was a helper for the weak does these strong souls an injustice; when they were anticipating nothing but the never-ending road, once again a palpable form appears before them in that tense place at the gates of heaven, and spoils them with shelter, and troubles them with manhood. His heart's powerful lens concentrates the parallel rays of their hearts once more, and they, whom the angels were hoping to preserve for God intact, go up in a blaze in the drought of their desire.
*(To be loved means to be consumed by fire. To love is to glow bright with an inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to endure.)
Even so, it is possible that in later years Abelone tried to think with her heart, to achieve an unostentatious and direct communion with God. I could imagine there might be letters from her recalling the attentive inward contemplation of Princess Amalie Galitzin;72 but if those letters were addressed to someone she had been close to for years, how must he have suffered because of the change in her. And as for herself, I suspect she feared nothing other than that uncanny transformation that goes unnoticed because all of the evidence for it seems entirely alien to us, and we put it aside.
[71] It would be difficult to persuade me that the story of the Prodigal Son73 is not the legend of one who did not want to be loved. When he was a child, everyone in the house loved him. He grew up not knowing anything else, and, being a child, grew accustomed to their tenderness of heart.
But once he was a youth, his aim was to shed his habitual ways. He could not have put it into words, but when he went out roaming all day long, and did not even want the dogs for company, it was because they too loved him; because in their eyes there was attentiveness and sympathy, expectation and concern; and because in their presence, too, he could not do anything without giving pleasure or pain. What he wanted in those days, however, was that deeply felt indifference of heart which at times, out in the fields of an early morning, would overcome him in so unalloyed a form that he broke into a run, that he might have neither time nor breath to be more than a weightless moment when the morning becomes conscious of itself.
The mystery of his life, which had never yet been, lay outspread before him. Without knowing what he was doing, he quit the footpath and walked on across the fields, his arms out wide, as if by that encompassing reach he could be master of several directions at once. And then he flung himself down behind a hedge, and no one cared what became of him. He stripped a branch to make a flute, he threw a stone at some small beast of prey, he stooped to the ground and obliged a beetle to turn around: none of this added up to Fate, and the heavens passed over as if merely passing over Nature. At length the afternoon arrived, bringing its fancies – that he was a buccaneer on the island of Tortuga, but with no obligation to pursue that life; that he besieged Campêche, or took Vera Cruz; that he was indeed an entire army, or a leader on horseback, or a ship at sea – it all depended on his whim. But if it entered his head to kneel, he was promptly Deodatus of Gozon74 and had slain the dragon and, in the heat of it, was given to understand that this heroism was arrogant, performed in disobedience. For he spared himself nothing that was crucial to what he was imagining. But no matter how much he fantasized, there were always intervals when he could merely be a bird, albeit without being sure which kind. Then, though, it was time to go home.
Dear God, how much there was to cast off and forget – for what was needed now was really to forget; otherwise he would give himself away when they pressed him for answers. No matter how much he lingered and looked about, in the end the gable of the house did come into view. The topmost window kept an eye on him; no doubt someone was up there. The dogs, in whom the expectation had been rising all day, rushed through the bushes and drove him together into the one man they had in their heads. And the house did the rest. He had only to enter into the fullness of its odour and almost everything was settled. The odd detail might yet be altered, but all in all he was already the one they took him for; the one for whom they had long since made up a life, out of his little past and their own wishful thinking; that creature known to them all who was under the influence of their love day and night, the object of their hope and their distrust, their disapproval or applause.
It is useless for such a man to mount the steps with inexpressible caution – they will all be in the sitting room, and the door has only to open for them to see him. He remains in the dark, biding their questions. But then the worst happens. They take him by the hands, lead him to the table, and all of them, every last one of them, line up in front of the lamp, all curiosity. It's all very well for them – they keep in the s
hadow, while on him alone falls the light, all the disgrace of having a face.
Will he stay and avow with lies that more-or-less life they declare to be his, and grow to resemble them with the whole of his face? Will he divide himself between the delicate truthfulness of his will and the crude deceit that spoils it for him? Will he abandon the attempt to become what the weak of heart in his family might not be able to take?
No, he will go away. For example, when they are all busy setting out on his birthday table those ill-chosen gifts that are meant yet again to make up for everything. He will go away for good. Not until long after will he realize how very determined he was at the time never to love, that he might never place anyone in that terrible position of being loved. Years later he will remember, and this resolution, like all the others, will have proved impossible to keep. For in his loneliness he has loved time and again, on every occasion giving his whole nature in spendthrift fashion and fearing inexpressibly for the other one's freedom. Little by little, he has learned to shine the rays of his emotion through the loved one, rather than consuming her. And what lavish delight it gave him to recognize, through the ever more transparent form of the beloved, the vast expanses that she opened up to his boundless desire to possess.
How he could weep for whole nights, longing to be so shone through himself! But a loved woman who yields is by no means a woman who loves. Oh, those nights of desolation, when the gifts that had flowed from him were returned to him in pieces, heavy with transience. How often he thought then of the troubadours, who feared nothing more than to have their wishes granted. All the money he had earned and increased he gave away, so that he should not experience that on top of everything else. He hurt the women with the coarseness of his payment, wary with every day that came that they might try to return his love. For he no longer had any hope of meeting the lover who would break him apart.
Even during the time when poverty was alarming him with new hardships daily, when his head was the favourite plaything of misery and quite worn out, when ulcers were opening all over his body like emergency eyes against the blackness of tribulation, when he was horrified by the filth in which he had been abandoned as a thing just as filthy – even then, if he thought about it, his greatest horror was that his love might have been returned. What were all the dark hours he had been through since, compared to the deep sadness of those embraces in which all was lost? Did he not wake with a sense that he had no future? Did he not go about meaninglessly, with no right to the slightest of dangers? Had he not had to promise a hundred times not to die? Perhaps it was the obduracy of that bitter memory, which returned to him again and again and insisted on its place, that kept him alive amid the refuse. In the end, he was found again. And not until then, not until his years as a shepherd, did his teeming past come to rest.
Who can describe what happened to him then? What writer has the persuasive powers to reconcile the length of his days at that time with the brevity of life? What art has a large enough compass to evoke both his slender, cloaked form and the vast space of his immense nights?
That was the time that began with him feeling a general thing, anonymous, like a convalescent making a slow recovery. He did not love, except in so far as he loved existing. The lowly love of his sheep did not burden him; like light falling through clouds, it was shed all about him and gleamed softly on the meadows. Following the blameless trail of their hunger, he strode in silence across the pastures of the world. Strangers saw him on the Acropolis; and perhaps he was for a long time one of the shepherds at Les Baux, and witnessed the petrified ages outlasting a noble dynasty which, for all its acquisitions in multiples of seven and three, was unable to subdue the sixteen rays of its own star. Or should I imagine him at Orange, leaning against the rustic triumphal arch? Should I picture him in the soul-haunted shade of Alyscamps, among the tombs open as the tombs of the resurrected,75 his gaze following a dragonfly?
It does not matter. What I see is more than him. I see his entire being, which was then embarking on the long, silent, aimless labour of loving God. For he who had wanted to hold himself back for ever was overwhelmed once again by his heart's growing compulsion. And this time he did hope that his wish might be granted. His whole nature, which during his long solitude was grown prescient and unerring, promised him that He to whom his thinking now tended was capable of loving, with a penetrating, radiant love. But even as he longed to be loved at last with such mastery, his sensibility, accustomed to distances, apprehended the great remoteness of God. There were nights when he imagined he hurled himself into space, and to God; hours filled with discovery, when he felt strong enough to dive for the earth, and pull it up on the storm tide of his heart. He was like a man who hears a magnificent language and feverishly resolves to write in it. The dismay of realizing how difficult the language was still lay before him; at first he was reluctant to believe that a whole life might be spent constructing the first short sentences of pointless exercises. He threw himself into the learning like a runner starting a race; but the density of what had to be mastered slowed his pace. Nothing more humiliating was imaginable than being a beginner in this way. He had found the philosopher's stone, and now he was being compelled ceaselessly to transmute the quickly made gold of his happiness into the crude lead of patience. He, who had made himself at home in infinite space, now wriggled his tortuous way like a worm, with neither direction nor exit. Now that he was learning to love, with such effort and such pain, he was shown how unthinking and unworthy all the love he had thought he had given had been; how nothing could have come of that love, because he had not even started to work upon it and give it a reality.
During those years, great changes occurred within him. Through the hard work of approaching God, he well nigh forgot Him, and all that he hoped to achieve from Him, in time, was ‘sa patience de supporter une âme’.76 The accidents of fate, which humankind sets such store by, had long since fallen away from him, but now even the essentials of pleasure and pain lost their spicy savour, and he found them pure and nourishing. From the roots of his being grew the sturdy, evergreen plant of a fertile joy. He was altogether engrossed in mastering what constituted his inner life; he wanted to leave nothing out, for he had no doubt that his love was in all of this, and throve there. Indeed, his inner composure was so great that he decided to take up once again the most important of those things that he had been unable to accomplish in earlier days, those things he had simply sat out. In particular he thought of his childhood: the more calmly he pondered it, the less fulfilled it seemed to him; all his memories of it had the vagueness of premonitions, and the fact that they were considered past gave them almost a quality of the future. To take up all of that once more, and to do it genuinely, was the reason why this man who was grown a stranger returned to his home. We do not know whether he stayed; we know only that he returned.
Those who have told the story try at this point to recall to our minds the house as it then was; for only a little time has passed there, a short spell of reckoned time: everyone in the house knows exactly how much. The dogs have grown old, but they are still alive. Report has it that one of them howled. All the day's tasks are interrupted. Faces appear at the windows, faces grown older or grown up but bearing a touching resemblance to the faces remembered. And in one ancient face, suddenly pale, recognition shows through. Really recognition? No more than recognition? – Forgiveness. Forgiveness for what? – Love. My God: love.
He, the man who had been recognized, was no longer thinking, preoccupied as he was, that love might still exist. It is understandable that, of all that happened then, the only thing that was handed down to later times was his gesture, that unprecedented gesture that no one had ever seen before, that gesture of supplication with which he threw himself at their feet, imploring them not to show love. Reeling with shock, they raised him up. They interpreted his outburst in their own way, and forgave. It must have been indescribably liberating to find they all misunderstood him despite the desperate unambi
guity of his attitude. In all likelihood he found it possible to stay. For he realized, more clearly with every day that passed, that the love they were so vain of, which they privily encouraged in each other, was not meant for him. He almost had to smile at the lengths they went to; and it became apparent just how little they could have him in mind.
What notion could they have of who he was? He was fearfully difficult to love now, and he sensed that there was only One who was capable of it. But He was not yet willing.
End of the notebooks
Notes
These notes do not gloss individuals such as Charles Baudelaire, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Friedrich Schiller, Walter Scott or Emanuel Swedenborg, who are assumed to be either familiar or easily identified. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of quoted passages are by the translator of this book.
1. rue Toullier… Asyle de nuit: The rue Toullier was Rilke's own address when he first stayed in Paris in 1902. The maternity hospital (Maison d'Accouchement), the Val-de-Grâce military hospital and a night shelter (asyle de nuit) were all nearby. Much of the detail in the early pages of the novel was first recorded by Rilke in letters to his wife, Clara, which he later consulted as he wrote.
2. the cathedral of Paris: i.e. Notre-Dame.
3. King Clovis: Malte exaggerates, though only a little. Clovis, founder of the Frankish Empire, died in 511; the Hôtel-Dieu was originally established in 660. Malte and Rilke would have seen a modern building dating from 1868 to 1878.
4. Anna Sophie… hundred and fifty years: Anna Sophie Reventlow (1693–1743) was married in 1721, after the death of his first queen, to Frederick IV (1671–1730), King of Denmark and Norway from 1699 until his death. Members of the Danish royal family were interred in the cathedral of Roskilde.
5. a poet: The poet Malte is reading in these pages is Francis Jammes (1868–1938).
6. untouchables: Rilke writes of ‘die Fortgeworfenen’ (literally, ‘those who have been thrown away’), i.e. the clochards of Paris, the city poor. His anxiety to feel different from them, despite his own poverty, is eloquently expressed in his letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé of 18 July 1903 (see Introduction), a letter which preserved many of his impressions and feelings during his earliest acquaintance with Paris.