Clara Mondschein's Melancholia Read online

  “I know. It’s not you; it’s me, so don’t worry about my neuroses. Please, the last thing I want you to do is worry about my neuroses. They’re so completely uninteresting. Please continue.”

  “Well, when I returned from Italy, my father was dying, although we didn’t know he was dying then; we just thought he was sick. I walked in the door and there were half a dozen neighbor women and my two sisters in attendance. My father was the only one who was happy to see me. The rest of them said they had not expected me back so soon, as if they had all been hoping that I would never return. So I went to my room and waited until the neighbors went home and my sisters went to sleep, and then I sat with my father and held his hand while he came in and out of sleep. Every time he opened his eyes, he smiled, and he didn’t ask me any questions.

  “Karl was the young doctor who came to see my father every two or three days. And every time, he examined my father’s heart and liver and pressed his abdomen and made him take deep breaths. And every time, he said there was nothing wrong with him. At first, he would try to convince my father he had rested enough, that it was time to get back to work. It was only after Mr. Kaufman, Senior of Kaufman and Kaufman came to our apartment to beg my father to return to work and after Kaufman and Kaufman was finally forced to hire another bookkeeper, a tall, thin, young man who could add a column of seventy figures in his head, that Karl decided my father was suffering from melancholia.

  “But, you know, I think my father was at his happiest during his melancholia. He smiled like a child when we brought him his favorite food, and he told us about the junk man who used to let him ride in the back of his cart when he was a boy in Poland, and about how he would come home covered with dust and his mother would scold him gently and feed him a heavy stew dinner. Karl would shake his head and say, ‘Your father is not an old man.’ But I had always known him as an old man sitting in a frayed armchair, turning the pages of a newspaper with his fingers blue from ink.

  “Then my father’s mood changed. That was when he started talking about time, about how there wasn’t that much time left. He asked for a clock, and he would stare at the clock for hours, holding it in his lap, his ear bent towards it so he could hear the ticking. Karl took this as a hopeful sign because he thought it meant he was afraid of dying. I tried to explain that perhaps it just meant he knew he was going to die and was waiting for it to happen.

  “It was during this last stage that Karl started coming around every day, and I knew it wasn’t because of my father. Sometimes I would catch him staring at my stomach, which was getting bigger and bigger. I could feel the baby kicking as I waited for Karl to say something, but he said nothing, so I would have to offer him a cup of coffee, anything to keep him from staring. After a while, I told him there was no need for him anymore, that my father was dying because he wanted to die, and there was nothing a doctor could do. But Karl kept up his doctorly visits—every day without fail. Sometimes we talked about books we had both read, and he told me about his patients. Once, while he told me about a boy, a very gifted young pianist who had died of scarlet fever, I noticed tears in his eyes. I didn’t say anything, but I could tell I was helping him by listening.

  “At night, I roamed the city thinking about telling the young doctor about my first husband and my soon-to-be-born child. And all night long my father lay in his bed, wide awake, watching his clock. Never once did my father call for a rabbi. Perhaps he knew what he would say: ‘Go back to work; God did not make you to think so much. Thinking requires years and years of study and knowledge.’ I walked along the outer districts of Vienna, staying away from the boulevards, from official buildings, and from the opera, where I had once waited for my mother night after night. Strange how I can’t even remember what she looks like now. I looked into dimly lit first-floor apartments and saw families eating together at heavy tables. I saw women knitting under the lights of floor lamps and men reading and smoking. In one room, I saw an old woman leafing through a photo album, and I wanted to rap on the window, go in and sit with her for a while, ask her about the people in the photographs. I never heard voices coming out of those apartments; only every now and then, there was the muffled sound of a radio playing opera or waltzes.

  “Once, a drunk, fat man who had just come out of a wine cellar followed me all the way home, screaming for me to come into his arms, to warm his bed. I didn’t run or even quicken my pace. I just kept walking slowly, never looking back, and I could tell he was afraid of me. He could have caught up so easily.

  “My days consisted of sitting with my father and sisters, watching my sisters knit, watching my father stare. My sisters spoke to each other in hushed whispers so I couldn’t hear and addressed me only to speak about budgeting. Every week, they worked out the expenses and were proud to be able to keep the four of us going on my father’s savings and the neighbors’ stingy charity. They bragged about their thrift, which I praised, wondering if they ever worried about what they would do when the savings ran out. Of course, I had already turned over what was left from my gloomy trip to the sea. Sometimes I wanted to kiss my sisters when I thought about how meaningless their lives would become if, all of a sudden, we had plenty of money. But they would have thought something was wrong if I had kissed them after all those years of distance.

  “I always felt inspired after Karl left, even if he had only had time for a cup of coffee or to leave me another book. After his visits, I took long walks without looking into windows. I walked fast and was filled with a great desire to do something. I thought of him rushing from patient to patient, checking charts, giving orders to nurses, chatting a little with other doctors over a never-relaxed cup of coffee. I admired his eyes, which were ringed from too many night shifts. And I walked and walked the streets, dreaming of doing something but never able to figure out what I could do. I thought of the child that was coming and how it would keep me up at night and how I would have to feed it and carry it, but such activities didn’t excite me. So I tried not to think of the child. I wanted to be tired, tired from work, physically exhausted and hungry. I wanted to be able to fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. So I walked, walked until my fingers were swollen, walked until I could hardly climb the stairs from tiredness. But still I would lie awake at night, unable to sleep. Sometimes I put on my nicest dress and sat in a café waiting for someone to notice me, to sit down beside me and ask what I was reading, to ask me what I was doing, growing big, sitting alone in a café. But when someone did glance my way, I would jump up, pay my bill, and leave with my head bowed. I often passed my ex-husband’s house and thought of ringing the doorbell, but I never did. I found myself thinking more and more about the doctor, wondering why he never asked me to go for a walk or to one of the operas he was always talking about.

  “Sometimes I had horrible dreams. I dreamt that I was giving birth to a thin, naked, hairless, old man with brittle talons curving inward from his fingers and toes. I dreamt of smiling nurses handing me a long, wrinkled body that I would rock until it stopped crying, but then when I would try to wake it up, it was always dead. Many times I wanted to ask Karl if he could help me find someone who would perform an abortion. But I was afraid.”

  “When I told my mother that I was a homosexual, she said that she should have had an abortion,” Tommy broke in. “They had never even told me that theirs was a shotgun wedding. They’d even lied about their wedding day and everyone went along with it.”

  “What did you say?”

  “What could I say? I said nothing. I left the house and I’ve seen them perhaps twenty times in twenty years. Even those twenty times have been too much for them.”

  “Do they know you’re sick?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you think you should tell them? What if they go on for years thinking you’re still alive?”

  “That would give me great pleasure.”

  Old P
hotos and a Friend

  Summer 1995

  I was thrilled my parents invited me to go to Spain with them. Usually, when they went on their trips, they left me with my grandparents. My parents always said that Morocco and Iran were not for children, and when I was really little I thought there were no children in those places—just adults. Our summer in Spain was my first trip abroad, and I don’t think I had ever been so excited as the moment we boarded the plane at Kennedy Airport.

  We were going to spend the summer in Madrid because my father was doing research on manuscripts he had found in the Biblioteca Nacional—some correspondence between Muslim and Jewish clerics from just before the Expulsion that demonstrated how well Jews and Muslims got along in those days. My father was extremely excited about the documents. It was as if he believed they contained some hidden secret, which, if he could only discover it, would put an end to the bitter war in the Middle East. My mother was excited too because she was going to roam through the hot, narrow streets of Madrid and work on her poetry late into the night. She had a poem of epic proportions in mind, something about a woman who kills her husband in bed like a modern-day Judith, hero of the Jews who was sent to seduce Holofernes, the general of the Assyrian army, so she could murder him in his sleep.

  She read me lines from a leather-bound notebook on the airplane, but they were just lines—disjointed images, which I don’t remember now except that the protagonist had a swan’s neck, just like her. And I had plans, too. I had my cello with me, of course, and I was already enrolled in intensive Spanish classes.

  We were renting the apartment of one of my father’s colleagues, Professor Vásquez, who was an expert on the judíos conversos or the marranos, the term he preferred because he felt one should not underplay the disgust the Spanish Crown had felt for the Jews. Professor Vásquez claimed to be of marrano blood himself—I say claimed because apparently being of marrano extraction is very fashionable in Spain these days. He told us several times on the drive home from the airport how honored he was to have such an esteemed Jewish scholar safeguarding his apartment. Then, allowing us only fifteen minutes to deposit our bags and brush our teeth, he took us on a whirlwind tour of our new neighborhood’s bars. My mother was in a great mood. She ate everything and announced to Mr. Vásquez that she was going to take a break from the dietary laws. Her fingers were sticky from peeling the skins off the grilled shrimp and she flung the skins on the floor happily, like a child throwing her food from her high chair. At the last bar, she insisted on ordering a plate of jamón serrano. After my first glass of beer, my father suggested that I have a soda or tea and Mr. Vásquez told him that he was being very American, very puritanical, which he isn’t. On the contrary, he is always talking about how teenagers wouldn’t end up drunk behind the wheel of a car if their parents introduced them to drinking at an early age, but he didn’t explain all that to Mr. Vásquez. He just laughed and let him order me another beer. By seven o’clock we finally convinced him that we needed some rest, that we had been up all night, that we were jet-lagged, so he walked us back to the apartment and, once we were safely inside, disappeared back into the city. In the morning a taxi picked him up to take him to the airport. He was off to a summer in Thailand, where he spent all his summers, and we had the place to ourselves.

  I loved our apartment. Even after everything that happened there, I still love it—the way you could feel the age in the stairs, the dormer windows and sloped ceilings, the walls that were cool no matter how blazing the sun, the bookshelves crammed with books, the smell of olive oil and sun at noon. I had my own room that faced the street, and my parents used Mr. Vásquez’s bedroom because it had a double bed. After the first night, my mother suggested we switch bedrooms because she disliked the skylight in their bedroom; when she closed her eyes at night, she always felt as if someone were watching her from above like she was in a play. But, luckily, after a few days she stopped talking about it, and I was able to keep my room with the slanted ceilings and the window that looked out over the tile roofs and onto the street below.

  The living room was like nothing I had ever seen before. It was furnished with gilded Thai couches and Persian rugs and on the walls were old maps of Madrid, also in gilded frames. My father, although he planned to spend most of his time in the library, had a study to work in too, complete with a computer, which he never touched. He encouraged my mother to use the study instead, but she announced that the cafés of Madrid would be better suited to her kind of work, and, sure enough, at lunchtime when I came home from my classes, I could always find her at the Barbieri, in the back next to the window, staring off into space, a half-drunk glass of sherry on her table, and I would stop in and we would talk for a while. I would drink lemonade and tell her about my class. She would help drill me on my irregular verbs, and then we would walk home together.

  I was happiest in the apartment when I had it to myself. At first I didn’t want to disturb anything and felt that even playing a CD was an invasion of the professor’s privacy, but he had told us to use absolutely everything—to drink his wine, read his books, break his dishes—so slowly I grew braver. I would pour myself a glass of red wine and make a sandwich and put on some music. I really loved Carmina Burana that summer. Somehow it fit my mood—the tipsiness of drinking wine alone in the afternoon. I dozed a lot, thinking up melodies, which I jotted down in a music notebook I bought at a music store on the Gran Vía.

  One day I discovered the professor’s photo albums on the bottom shelf of a bookcase in his study with the art books. The first few times I looked at them, I flipped through them quickly, as if I expected the professor himself to walk in on me, catch me red-handed, but then they started pulling me in. It got so that I couldn’t concentrate on my homework. Every afternoon after class I gobbled down my sandwich and took my glass of wine to the living room, got myself comfortable on the heavily carved Thai couch, and settled in with the photographs. The photos were in leather-bound albums with gold embossing indicating the dates and places where the pictures were taken—Morocco, 1959; Italy, 1967; Thailand, Thailand, Thailand. The albums smelled of new shoes and rain. There were no photos of the professor’s childhood, no one resembling a mother or father, no spinster aunts or grandparents. Instead there was a small album, much thinner than the others, which contained portraits of people long dead—browned daguerreotypes mostly, of young men at the beach in those one-piece bathing suits that men wore in the early twentieth century, arms around each other, laughing or looking very seriously into the camera. There were men in those old caps like London taxi drivers wear. Some of them had such long, beautiful fingers, like piano players have, only you could tell by their caps that they were neither artists nor wealthy. My favorite was of a burly, fully bearded man in his forties dressed up like Queen Victoria and a much younger man sporting a handlebar mustache standing side by side and holding hands very formally.

  In one of the albums marked Thailand there was a shot of a much younger Professor Vásquez wearing a Hawaiian grass skirt and hoop earrings with an entourage of young Thai men in similar garb. They were all leaning on a veranda railing in front of the sea. Many photos were of naked men lying on beds, standing in windows, some smiling proudly, others somewhat shy. I tried not to look at those too much because they made me feel strange, distant somehow, as if I were a doctor examining a patient.

  I liked the daguerreotypes better, so I concentrated on them one at a time, closing my eyes, trying to remember every detail, endowing the men with names, jobs, secrets. The man dressed up like Queen Victoria was William. He was a bank clerk with a tubercular wife and six children. His friend was a sailor who brought home exotic gifts like quivers with poison-tipped arrows from Borneo, which William kept in a hat box in a trunk containing his dead mother’s wedding gown, her Bible, and her favorite linens.

  Besides listening to Professor Vásquez’s music and looking at his photo albums, my favorite after-clas
s activity was meeting my mother at the Barbieri. For the first couple of weeks she always seemed happy to see me, glad to set aside her pencil, but slowly I started getting the impression that she wanted to be alone with her thoughts. I would look at her through the window and see her scribbling or staring off into space, watching the ceiling fan turn and turn and turn. Then, as much as I liked the clatter of the place with its sullen old waiters and pierced and tattooed Spaniards having loud, guttural arguments, I would move on. And if I didn’t feel like going back to the apartment that day, I would start walking.

  On one such day I walked down the Calle de Segovia and across the Manzanares to the Casa de Campo, where there was a small zoo. I always have found zoos depressing, even when I was really little. Amy’s mother took us to Van Saun Park once and we had to go on a llama ride, which consisted of this guy leading the llamas with us on them round and round a small corral. I remember asking him if the llamas often spit at him, and he said they never did, which I didn’t believe. That night I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking of those poor llamas spending their whole lives walking around in circles with kids on their backs. But somehow the zoo fit my mood that day. I spent a long time watching the gorillas imitating the visitors, who kept trying to get them to laugh. Then I sat in the shade and watched the couples rowing out on the lake. There were about twenty rowboats out there, each with a young couple in it, and in every single boat the guy was the one doing the rowing. I watched them for a long time to see if maybe any of them would switch off, but they never did.

  That night my mother was in a rare, wonderful mood. She made a huge salad with olives and eggs and tuna and asparagus and we ate two loaves of bread between the three of us and drank two bottles of wine, and we sat at the table until well after eleven, practicing our Spanish. Then my mother set forth with her notebook under her arm. I could tell my father felt bad that she didn’t want to work in the study near us so that he could sit in the living room reading with the knowledge that she was working in the other room. He would have liked that, after a nice long dinner, after the wine and a successful day at the library. But, of course, he didn’t say anything.