She was a princess, Louise by name, the daughter of a king who was one of the richest and most hated men in Europe.
Her lover, Géza Mattachich, a second lieutenant in the 13th regiment of uhlans, was the stepson of a backwoods Croatian count, who had lived for many years in a ménage à trois with Géza’s mother and father.
And then there was Maria Stöger, the keeper of a canteen inside the prison in which Mattachich was confined for several years.
Both the princess* and her lover (who improperly assumed his stepfather’s title)† wrote books about their lives. In these they describe their chaste, honourable, self-sacrificing love for one another and the exorbitant price they were made to pay for it. Not everything they write is to be trusted. In neither book, for example, is Maria Stöger’s part in the story acknowledged; nor is any reference made to Mattachich’s illegitimate son, whom Maria managed to conceive and produce during his imprisonment.‡
Also involved in the story were Prince Philipp of Saxe-Coburg, Princess Louise’s husband, known to her and to some of his friends as ‘Fatso’ (der Dicke); the prince’s lawyer, Dr Adolf Bachrach, described by a socialist deputy in the Austrian parliament as ‘a little Jew with feudal pretensions’ (ein kleine Jude mit feudalen Allüren); and the king-emperor of Austria-Hungary, Franz Joseph, last but one of the Hapsburg monarchs, of whom Louise wrote that ‘he could have been taken for a head waiter, had it not been for his uniforms and retinue’.* Professor Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the heavily bearded author of Psychopathia Sexualis, a book that before his death and after it gave guilty pleasure to schoolboys in many parts of the world, contributed to the proceedings too.
So did a half-trained black stallion whose plunging and kicking led to the first encounter between Géza Mattachich and Princess Louise. This was on a late spring morning, in 1895, in the Prater Gardens, in Vienna. She looked on from her coach while he struggled to control the beast. A glance passed between them. Years afterwards Mattachich wrote: ‘I felt as if I had experienced an electric shock. Something had happened to me, but I did not know what it was.’† How could he possibly have known ‘what it was’? That exchange of glances changed his life. Ahead of them lay assignations, adultery, flight, the squandering of a fortune (not his; nor hers either, as things worked out), a duel, imprisonment, bankruptcy, morphine, madness (or alleged madness). Mattachich chose to write as if the consequences of their meeting had been fated from that first moment. Yet he had to work hard, though blindly too, in order to bring those consequences about.
Later the princess took up the running – and the writing. Later still it was the turn of the humbly born Stöger, who made sure that she too played a significant role in some of what followed, but who left no book behind her.
Each of them – the princess, the hussar and the canteen-worker – was thrilled by the apparent remoteness of the others’ circumstances from his or her own. The improbability of their association was one of the closest bonds between them.
People are what they do. They are what they say. They are what they want. They are what they remember and what they have forgotten; the motives they reveal and the motives they try to hide. They are their bodies, their voices, the movements of their eyes and hands. Beneath these and other such manifestations of selfhood, it is impossible to go. The ‘reasons’ why people are as they are will always remain hidden not only from outsiders but from themselves too.
Can you give wings to the peacock and feathers to the ostrich? Does the hawk fly by your wisdom?*
Exactly.
Imagine, then, that first exchange of glances between the princess and the hussar. A fine May morning in the Prater: sun, trees, shadows, grass; carefully nurtured gardens and extended avenues in every direction; human voices rising and falling; a brass band shaking the air in the distance; carriage wheels grinding on gravel roadways and hoofbeats falling dully on churned-up sand; the sharp smell of horse dung mingling with the deeper, darker aroma of horse sweat – a smell heady to horse-lovers and rancid to others. Imagine, in the midst of this leisured throng, a pair of brown eyes meeting a pair of blue eyes, and the passage of an ‘electric shock’ between them…
No. Go back twenty years. Imagine a very different garden on the outskirts of another city: Brussels this time, and at a different season. From a distance this one looks less like a garden than a palace or small city of glass. There are buildings like basilicas and cathedrals, their domed or pitched roofs scattered among others no bigger than suburban villas and small cottages. Their walls are of glass and so are their roofs; all are sustained by squared-off or concentric iron frames. Between the buildings are driveways and pathways, open squares, flights of stone steps, rows of upreared stone lions grasping heraldic shields to their breasts. Fountains send spray hissing into the air and the water falls back into star-shaped or shell-shaped urns and stone basins, from which terracotta demi-monsters peer out.
Within the buildings, a heavy, steamy, breathing growth. Palms of all heights and dimensions. Trees festooned with creepers or swathed in what looks like decaying fur. Multi-leaved ferns much taller than a man and many yards in circumference. Blooms of every colour flaunting their dark cavities and shameless pistils. Leaves of all shapes, some drooping of their own weight, others as light as feathers. A hundred shades of green mixed with improbable hues of silver, custard, purple, scarlet. Textures ranging from silken to something like crocodile skin; from gossamer to cartilage and muscle. Above all this and seemingly intertwined with it hang cast-iron gantries and spiral staircases that look as if they too have taken root and sprouted, emulating the growth around them. Black, hot-water pipes of cannon-like bore, ticking irregularly, run around the walls at floor level.
Each house is a miniature jungle, an imitation Congo: the recreation by the dreadful Leopold II of the Belgians of that huge tract of Africa that he is already scheming to own outright. Any hour now scores of gardeners, painters and builders will be arriving to continue their toil on this make-believe kingdom of glass and jungle. But for the moment all is a blur. It is early morning. Winter. The coming dawn is a dilution of night’s shadow, nothing more. Alone in one of the buildings sits Leopold’s daughter, the Princess Louise. She is young, not yet a woman, though her figure is full. She wears a silver wrap tied with a cord around her waist. Her hair is covered by a white lace shawl and on her feet are slippers lined with white fur. She is Leopold’s eldest child, but he has never cared for her. She is not a boy; she will never replace the king-to-be, the only son whom he cherished and lost (pneumonia) a decade before. For this loss he finds it impossible to forgive her. (Her two younger sisters are abominated for the same reason.) She is merely a female whom he has at last succeeded in bargaining away in marriage to a wealthy, undistinguished kinsman.
Imagine now that a shudder of silver shows the child-woman to have moved. She has opened her wrap. She looks down at the nightdress beneath it. The dark stain on it is not large, but it is enough to keep her occupied. She stares at it, holding it away from her body for a few minutes. Her head does not move. Her face is expressionless. ‘I am surely not,’ she was to write years later, ‘the first woman who has lived in the clouds during her engagement, only to be suddenly thrown to earth on her marriage night…
‘I am not the first victim of an excessive pudeur, based perhaps on the hope that a husband’s delicacy, together with the guidance of nature, would make up for her ignorance of what awaits her in the marriage-bed.
‘However that might be, at the end of the reception at the palace of Laeken, and while all Brussels was dancing in the specially illuminated streets and buildings, I fell from heaven on to a bed of thorns, a heap of boulders. Psyche, who was more guilty than I, was better treated.
‘The day had hardly broken when I took the chance of a moment’s solitude in the bedroom to put on my slippers, and with a cloak pulled over my nightgown I ran to the Orangery, looking to hide my shame there. I found refuge among the camellias, and to their pallor, sweetness and purity I spoke of my despair and the suffering I had been through. Their comforting sweetness and silence, like the chill light of the winter dawn, gave back to me something of the innocence in which I had lived and which I had now for ever lost.’*
That was her version of her wedding night, anyway. By the time Louise wrote that account of it she had had decades in which to perfect it; she had rehearsed it for the benefit of a variety of listeners. Among them were Mattachich, lovers who had preceded him, her ladies-in-waiting, and many of the doctors and psychiatrists who examined her both inside and outside the various institutions in which she had been confined. Not to speak of guards and maids. And herself of course, for she had a habit – an indulgence that was also a compulsion – of speaking to herself, passionately and at length.
Naturally her husband, the prince, Fatso, told a different tale. He never wrote down his version of events, but he talked about that nuptial night almost as indiscreetly as his spouse did. He was a gregarious man; he had a naturally trusting disposition; he felt ill-used. He had rank, money and a cosseting mama; he lived with her, his brother and various other members of his family in the Saxe-Coburg palace in Vienna – a huge, bleak, high-ceilinged place, abounding in oversized rooms, faded wallpapers, dusty cornices, musty drapes tied by cords thick enough to keep a yacht moored, oil paintings encased in tormented, gilded, ton-weight frames where more dust accumulated. Paintings of long-dead Saxe-Coburgs they were, chiefly, and of stags with ravening dogs at their necks, to whom kindly death would never come.* Yes, he had all these advantages, and servants in livery, a stable of horses, several carriages, many preposterous uniforms and sets of day clothes and evening dress. Also an extensive collection of pornographic statuettes in china and bronze, acquired in his travels to the Far East.
Yet nobody took him seriously. Not even his servants. How could they, when he barely seemed to take himself seriously? Oh, he suffered all right; he felt pain; he was conscious of his insufficiencies; embarrassed, even humiliated by his inelegant figure, his high-pitched voice and myopic eyes. And the grander the cloaks he was obliged to wear, the more hung about they were with orders, stars, sashes and tassels, the larger the hats of fur or astrakhan, brass, leather or velvet he donned for important occasions, so the more doubtful he felt about the figure he cut. Especially in comparison with his best friend, his favourite drinking, whoring and hunting companion, Franz Joseph’s only son, the doomed Crown Prince Rudolph. The imperial beard he had cultivated, Philipp knew, had not given his circular face the triangular severity he wished it to have; his oval, rimless pince-nez and their dangling black ribbon he regarded as another humiliation, but was too short-sighted to do without; his gait was a waddle. In short, he was one of those people who suffer and yet are absurd – and know it; and who for that reason seem to turn their grievances into absurdity and their absurdity into yet another grievance.
Is it done deliberately? How is it done? Why is it done? It is a mystery.
Imagine him, then, fixing you or some other interlocutor with his steady, injured stare, his pince-nez trembling slightly, while he again tells the story of that wedding night, when his and Louise’s marital misfortunes had begun. Imagine him insisting with his solemn face close to yours, in a high, almost treble voice at odds with his girth, that everything up to a certain point had really gone off all right, according to plan: they’d been declared husband and wife at a solemn Mass in the palace and driven in an open carriage across Brussels, with thousands of people looking on. Then they had gone on to the palace at Laeken, on the city’s outskirts, where there had been any amount of feasting and drinking to get through.
He and Louise hardly exchanged a word through it all; but so what? They’d never had much to say to one another even when they’d been courting. Or what passed for courtship between them. Each knew the other to be a suitable match, and so did their respective sets of parents. Given that they were cousins about six times over, Saxe-Coburgs both, it could hardly be otherwise. His branch of the family was not poor; hers, as a result of Leopold’s depredations of the Congo and its peoples, was on its way to becoming rich beyond calculation. (Yet Leopold never ceased calculating, plotting, driving harder those beneath him, demanding more from every possible source of income.) So who could have raised objections on either side? Not even the long-faced lawyers who had drawn up the papers could manage that.
Still, he knew there would be…problems. He wasn’t a fool. He wasn’t a bully. Or a beginner. He’d had his first real taste of women at the age of thirteen, fourteen, something like that; before then, well, he couldn’t even remember at what age he’d started fooling about with nannies, chambermaids, kitchen-girls, anyone of the kind a boy could get his hands on. Squeeze, chase, smack, pinch, press, grab, rub, push into cupboards, that sort of thing. With the serious business starting just a few years later. And since then –! (An eyebrow goes up briefly and something like a smile moves within his beard.) Whereas she, his bride, knew nothing about men. Would he have married her if she had? During their previous days together all that had passed between them had been a few kisses and holding of hands. Chaste schoolgirl stuff. With her mother constantly hanging about, for her own reasons. So much so that he could remember wondering if the mother thought she had to keep an eye on him, to stop him having a go at the girl before the wedding night. Also perhaps that she was hoping he would have a go at her, his chère belle-mère-to-be. Among that miserable set anything was possible.*
Anyway he’d done his best not to frighten or disgust her. He really did try. He didn’t want to hurt her – why should he? Poets can babble as much as they like, but everyone who’s ever done it knows that getting in there for the first time is always an awkward business. Ungainly. And not only the first time either. There’s always some…manoeuvring involved. Not so? But then (his half-hidden lips again stir within his beard) where would any of us be without it?
He was entitled! That was the main point. He knew it, she knew it, so what the hell was going on? All right, you have to make allowances, but was it so unreasonable for a newly married husband to expect some willingness from his bride? Curiosity at least. Or a sense of duty, a wish to become a real woman, to leave her childhood behind? To start off on the right footing?
Hah! Not a chance of it. Not with this one. Never. It took years before he’d understood that he, Philipp, fourteen years older than she was, was the real innocent in that fiasco. Her whole performance – and it was a performance! – had nothing to do with girlish modesty or stage fright. It was all obstinacy, selfishness, perversity…
When it came to other men, afterwards, she seemed to manage well enough.
Her father’s daughter – that’s what she was, in every respect. That was why she and her darling papa hated each other so much. They knew what they were dealing with, on both sides: Louise with her brown eyes and fair hair and round cheeks, and him, the old goat, the girl-chaser, with his axe of a nose sticking out in front of him, a nose you could chop logs with, take out a man’s eyes with, use to tap rubber with from those trees of his in the Congo. With his great beard hanging down from his chin like a feedbag on a horse. And skinny legs, each one like a carpenter’s measuring rod, you know the kind, with brass joints, opening up, always stretching out further than you’d ever expect them to go…
That was him. A grotesque. And without conscience. Everyone knows now what his people did to those miserable blacks in the Congo! Chop their hands off, rape, thieve, swindle, kill, anything as long as it made his moneybags grow.
And his daughter, also a grotesque, though a handsome one, if you like them fleshy and somehow…off. Yes, that’s the word. Tainted, like food – not so that you could smell it, but not right either. Also without conscience, just like the old man. Crazy for money, just like him again. But who would have known it to look at her at the age of sixteen or seventeen? The only difference between the father and the daughter was that he was a great miser, except when he spent money on himself and the teenage tarts he was always chasing, and she was a spendthrift, especially when the money she spent was her husband’s. That was always a double pleasure for her.
‘First, it made her feel rich. Second, it made me poor.’
His lips quivered, a deep vertical frown appeared, he took off his pince-nez, revealing his mild, brown, short-sighted eyes and curiously truncated eyebrows. His eyes brimmed with moisture. A man was only human, after all.
Now take another twenty-year leap, forward this time. Imagine that the girl – who was then already tall, round-armed, large-bodied, big-bosomed, with plenty of hair, neck and chin – has acquired more of all these: a bigger bust, thicker hair (with that of other, anonymous women tied into it), a larger chin, a wider neck. Her complexion has lost its gleam and elasticity; the skin itself looks as if it has been flattened against the tissue accumulated beneath it. She has developed a knowing eye, a loud laugh and a taste for spending money on luxuries of all kinds that is extravagant even by the elaborate, bejewelled standards of her period and her caste. She has had two children by der Dicke, a boy and a girl, the girl now almost as old as her mother was on her infamous marriage night, and the son, her first-born, who has just begun his army service in an artillery regiment attached to the king-emperor’s household.
Within a dozen years this son of hers will die in a way so frightful that in her autobiography she will write that ‘it cannot be mentioned’.* As she sets out for a drive in her carriage along the avenues of the Prater this fine spring morning, towards her first encounter with Mattachich and his rebellious stallion, she has no inkling that her son’s life will end in this manner. Nor does she know that she will scarcely mourn him when he is gone. But she does know, has known for years, that something is wrong, missing, blank, unfilled, worse than unsatisfactory in her life and in her relationships with everyone around her, her son and daughter included. What feels like a stone of disappointment and resentment seems to be lodged inside her, just above her diaphragm; at moments of anxiety or anger she presses on that place with both beringed fists, as if to push deeper into herself this indigestible thing she is condemned to carry about with her. It feels as hard as the diamonds and sapphires that hang from her neck or earlobes, but much larger than any of them. She even has a kind of picture of it in her mind: on the outside it is incised with an obscure pattern of whorls, like a peach stone or a fingerprint or the illustrations she has seen of the human brain.
But as for getting rid of it, how is that to be done? She cannot ask her dresser to unclasp it at night, like a real jewel. If only she could! She has consulted various doctors and healers about it (fearing a cancer), as she has about all the other unforgiving complaints she suffers from: irregular and painful periods; patches of inflamed, psoriasis-like skin that appear on the backs of her knees and between her fingers; troubles with her digestion – cramps in the stomach; constipation; the opposite of constipation. She has pressed the spot to show the doctors and quacks where this stone-like thing is lodged, and they have palpated her stomach, drawn her blood, put their ears to this spot and to others, peered down her throat, invited her to breathe in and out, stuck their fingers into her most private places, asked questions about her intimate relations with her husband, scribbled prescriptions on pieces of paper or sent her to other quacks like themselves who have told her to take the waters, sleep on an east–west axis, eat bran, wear rubber belts around her stomach and magnets around her wrists…
One of these doctors, or so-called doctors, a self-confident, charlatanic Volksdeutscher from Bukovina, with long, clammy-looking hair, loose joints, thin fingers, a sallow skin and a man’s head attached to a boy’s slight figure, had insisted – for strictly medical reasons of course – that what she needed was ‘internal massage’ of a kind he had been trained to administer while on a protracted visit to India. During his sessions with her he did in fact come closer to temporarily dissolving that stone inside her than had any of the other men who had also ‘massaged’ her in much the same fashion. (From the way in which she writes about them it can be assumed that her husband’s brother, Prince Ferdinand – also a fatty, as well as a necromancer and a wearer of crazy uniforms, who was later to become king of Bulgaria – was among her lovers, and that so was her sister’s husband-to-be, the imperial archduke Rudolph.*) However, when her Bukovinian healer made the mistake of demanding ever larger sums of money from her for his treatments and finally threatened to ‘expose’ her if she did not pay up, she had him physically thrown out of the Saxe-Coburg mansion and nothing more was ever heard from him again.
Which didn’t stop her, for weeks after he had gone, from walking up and down her private chamber, fists clenched into her midriff, enacting and revising everything that had passed between them, and imagining what she would say to him if they were ever to meet again. She gestured, whispered, scowled, threw her head back angrily; she even composed lengthy narratives dealing with their relationship, as if dictating them to an interviewer or to a bosom friend she did not have.
The habit of going through secret, creative performances of this sort had grown stronger as the years passed. The pleasure they gave her was always painful; it was like surrendering to the spasms of scratching at inflamed patches of her skin she also sometimes went in for, or tugging at hanks of her hair. Occasionally the vividness of these imaginary dialogues and monologues frightened her; she would devise schemes to stop them in their tracks: by counting up to a hundred slowly, with a mind empty of all but the accumulating numbers, say, or reconstructing in the fullest possible detail a favourite path through the woods which she used to follow as a child, when holidaying on her grandmother’s estate. But she would lose count of her numbers, or abandon the path, and find herself first drifting and then rushing once more into these compulsive, exhausting, strangely rewarding bouts of sotto voce reverie.
Still, the habit came in useful when she finally settled down to compose her memoirs.
‘The stallion had to give way to my will,’ Mattachich writes proudly about the first encounter between himself and Louise on the Prater, on that unforgettable spring morning, ‘and thus it came about that I rode past the Princess several times that day.’*
You bet he did. You can imagine the ardour of his glances and how briskly his gloved hand flew to the gleaming black peak of his cap each time he passed by. And how he surreptitiously drove his spurs into the flanks of the stallion, to make it start and rear and throw its head about, so that she would have yet another opportunity to admire his horsemanship.
Did she know what he was up to? Of course. Was she impressed by it? Amused, rather, that this dapper little fellow, this Lieutenant Nobody in an uhlan’s cap and shiny boots, should have had the nerve to put on such a performance before her. And to stare nakedly at her while he went about it. She had no doubt that he knew who she was: on the lacquered door of her coach, which was even blacker and shinier than the peak of his cap, there was a coat of arms he would have recognized; and in any case he would certainly have seen her seated in carriages much more ornate than the open, boat-shaped affair in which she was then sitting, or on reviewing stands with be-hatted females like herself, alongside their cockaded and uniformed menfolk. Moreover the knowledge of his own impudence shone in his wide brown eyes and the gleam of white teeth showing under his moustache. Not to speak of the tilt of his head. Possibly she had seen him before on parades and state occasions; but how could she tell? He would then have been one among hundreds of others like himself, whose duty was to be nothing more than a single, decorative element in the spectacle unfolding before her. Their whole point was to disappear as individuals, to be divorced from their separate lives for the sake of the whole of which they were a part. So who cared if this one’s eyes moved as she caught his gaze, or that one had a swarthier skin than those around him, or another had a face comically like that of his own horse?
Yet this particular nobody, this assemblage of cap and leggings, bright buttons and horseflesh, who she decided was at least ten years younger than herself, dared to cut a figure in front of her! Now he cantered ahead so that he could turn around and come trotting sedately back; now he ambled along just in front or just behind her carriage, where the wide riding-course ran parallel to the carriage drive, before dashing forward to go ahead and return once more. Had he been less handsome than he was, she would have been less amused. Less tolerant too. But he was a good-looking fellow – and he knew it, and knew also that she had noticed it. Clearly he’d had plenty of practice in drawing and dealing with admiring glances from women of various ages and classes. His tunic and breeches fitted him closely, and so, somehow, did his features. Smooth, high-coloured cheeks; neat brows and dark eyes innocently open like a child’s, yet appraising, like a man’s; sharp, shapely nose; firm, cropped chestnut hair that fitted his skull almost like a cap, under the smaller round cap he was wearing, with its black peak and black strap passing under his chin; soft, lustrous moustache that nestled promisingly on his upper lip. Yet an irrepressible, unyielding part of herself noticed also that his ears, sticking out on both sides of his cap, were too large and had a squashed, rumpled, somehow inferior look.
For Mattachich it was enough, on that first morning, that she had not turned her head ostentatiously away from him or fallen into conversation with the lady-companion seated alongside her or told her top-hatted roly-poly of a coachman to bring this outing to an end – and with it, his antics. Nor, he realized, as succeeding days went by, had she used her connections or her husband’s to let the commander of Mattachich’s regiment know how offensively a junior officer was behaving before a woman recognized to be of royal rank, though not precisely regarded as a member of the Hapsburg family. Astonished at his own nerve, looking at his own impudence as if it were a performance by a stranger, he had a single thought in his mind. If she dared, then he dared! She would never out-dare him! Every direct exchange of glances between them he regarded as a success in itself and an incitement to bring about the next.
‘For weeks on end I rode daily in the Prater,’ he wrote later, ‘and often encountered the princess. It belonged to my life, so to speak, that I should see her. With anxiety to know whether we would meet I would ride out in the morning; when I had succeeded I rode home happily, my heart filled with the thought: “If only I shall see her again tomorrow.”
‘This went on for months. I made great progress with the training of my stallion, and I had the feeling that Her Highness the Princess looked on us as old acquaintances. Though there was no other connection between us, it nevertheless seemed self-evident that these meetings should take place. It sometimes happened that I went to the opera without knowing what was driving me there, and I would see her. I waited on street corners filled with the conviction that she was bound to ride by – and I was not disappointed. And when I heard the song “I know a heart to which I pray, and in that heart I find my solace” I understood just what it meant.’*
Ah, for the mystic bond that draws true lovers together, the telepathic understanding that guides them towards one another, the sense of a common destiny that confounds the laws of chance, or uses its laws to bring about the ends they both half-consciously yearn for…Only it wasn’t quite like that. He had carefully reconnoitred the Coburg palace: a pompous, unbeautiful building like a cross between a department store and a major government office, with a row of pillars on each of its two tall floors and balustrading and allegorical figures along its roofline. And a great concave shield in the middle. The size and appearance of the palace impressed him but depressed him too – how would he ever be able to penetrate it? Make any kind of mark on it? Yet every time his eyes and the princess’s silently acknowledged one another’s presence, whether in the Prater or elsewhere in Vienna, he knew a breach in that fortress had already been made. All he had to do now was to take advantage of it. Though as yet he had no idea how it might be done, he comforted himself with the thought that the moment before he had looked up from his struggle with the stallion and seen the princess looking at him, he had had no idea that she was there. And look how things had changed for him since.
He needed a go-between, and set about getting one with a ruthlessness that contrasted strangely with the vacancy in his mind as to what he would do if he succeeded. Across the road from the palace was a small park where handfuls of Saxe-Coburg servants spent some of their leisure time; and it was there, not on random street corners in the fashionable quarters of the city, that Mattachich actually did most of his purely speculative hanging about. There was a kind of kiosk or café at the far end of the park, with little iron tables scattered about, some in the open, some under cover, and he went there as often as he could. Imagine him dressed in civilian clothes (which he wore with a military neatness), smoking, studying a newspaper, taking his time over a cup of coffee – and, finally, on his fourth or fifth visit, getting into conversation with one of the maids, Fiorenza by name, who worked in the private chambers of Prince Philipp and his wife. She was small, plump, gullible, dark-haired (soft hair it was, with a wave, and worn shorter than was fashionable); she explained to him that her father was an Italian from Venetia, which accounted for the name as well as for what she spoke of as her ‘romantic temperament’. (With a delayed, sideways glance up at him.) She also told him that she had a young man back in her village near Graz, and intended going back to marry him in due course. The tip of her small, pale, arched nose moved up and down in sympathy with her lips when she spoke: a peculiarity Mattachich had never come across before. It amused and roused him, yet he knew it to be the sort of thing a man might soon grow tired of; might soon find positively objectionable.
Two years later Mattachich was to be described by the Lord Marshal of the imperial court, in the course of his inquiries into the whole affair, as a man who had been ‘corrupt in his sexual inclinations since his schooldays’ (schon als Mittelschüler in sexueller Richtung verdorben).* Should you consider it a mitigation of those ‘inclinations’ – or a manifestation of them – that from adolescence onwards he had always been much moved by his own conquests? (He certainly thought the better of himself for the emotion he felt each time.) The more modest the girl, the more timid she was, the more haunted by the teachings of her priest or the fear of unwanted consequences, so the more affected he was by her eventual surrender to him. To the point of tears sometimes. As he saw it, the poor creatures wanted to be led astray, they wanted to be put into danger, to have their hearts broken. Why else would they permit him to do with them what he did? That was what made their malleability so touching. The same was true of their helplessness later, their unavailing incredulity, when they realized that it (whatever it had been) was all over now.
It does not take long, in his judgement, before the time for conversation and coffee at the kiosk with Fiorenza, and for sentimental strolls around the Stadtpark, interrupted by pauses for passionate kisses behind trees, has come to an end. The restaurant he chooses for the celebration of its ending displays plenty of red velvet upholstery, white napery, blue and gold drapery, waiters eyeing Mattachich like a confederate and Fiorenza like a whore. Upstairs a chambre séparée awaits them, with its table set for two and a couch against the wall opposite. The couch has cruelly curved legs, like a bandy dwarf’s, and it too is swathed in red velvet. Fiorenza is in a cream-coloured, inoffensive dress, which shows off her pale neck and immature arms. For the first time in her company he is wearing one of his walking-out uniforms – not the full parade dress but a dark blue outfit with braid and gold buttons on the tunic and claret-coloured stripes down the sides of his trousers. Once they are seated Fiorenza’s little straw hat comes off. Plenty of wine and conversation accompany the meal. She talks about the princess (one of her favourite topics): she is so lazy, she is so rich, she is too fat, she looks beautiful in her new gown, she has a foul temper sometimes, she can be so sweet at others. To these confidences Mattachich listens without much interest, certain that at his distance from Louise he already knows more about her than Fiorenza, from her servant’s propinquity, ever will. The talk on his side is mostly about his gambling, his horses, and his previous conquests. He knows from experience that the last of these topics will make her feel both jealous and emulous. After brandy and coffee the buttons at the back of her dress are undone; later a long, soft band of cloth, tied tightly around her ribcage and knotted at the side in order to push her breasts forward, is unwound. It lies in loops on the floor, like a flattened snake. She has told him that she is a virgin, but when the moment finally arrives that problem is dealt with effectively.
Afterwards, more words and kisses and a few tears on both sides. Before they leave the restaurant he tells her that he has a favour to ask. He wants her to provide him with information about the princess’s movements. He’s doing it, he reveals, on behalf of a friend who is of such high rank he cannot reveal his name. But there’s nothing political about this man’s interest in the princess, he assures Fiorenza. Nobody wants to assassinate her employer. (Joke.)
‘The man is lovesick, that’s all, just from seeing her. It happens all the time. Look what’s happened to us.’
The idea of taking part in two intrigues at once excites Fiorenza. She promises to help him and to keep it secret from everyone in the palace. As a reward for her gullibility, Mattachich gently kisses her once, twice, three times, on her eyelids. His heart softens to feel their delicate fluttering under his lips, and the resilience of the unseen and unseeing eyeballs beneath. Who would dare to say to him that he does not love her at that moment? It has been raining outside; the streets are now drying gently, unevenly, in the warm summer air. From a distance they hear the slither and grind of one of the electric tramcars recently introduced to Vienna. They walk arm in arm for a few blocks before he puts her in a cab. He continues on foot, slowly making his way through the restless, slumbering mass of the city. All its darkness and light, silence and noise, roadways and buildings, its great outer and inner rings, seem to arrange themselves around him as he walks, so that he always feels that he is at their centre, in whatever direction he turns. This grandiose, axial notion of himself had come to him during his very first visit to Vienna; though he knew it to be a delusion he had loved it then and loves it still.
Hence the knack he had developed, with Fiorenza’s clandestine help, of waiting for Louise on appropriate street corners at the appropriate times, or of going to the opera on the same evenings as herself. Street corners were cheaper, which was not a small consideration, but visits to the opera or to theatres were more effective. Sometimes he saw her two or three times a week, either in the Prater or in town; once she disappeared for several weeks, and when he saw her again he knew at once from her expression that he was not the only one who had been afraid that her absence (in the country, as he learned later) may have brought these silent encounters of theirs to an end.
What lover does not know that look of searching in the beloved’s eyes, and the relief registered there when it is answered?
Imagine the two of them, so close physically even then and so distant in circumstances. She was a Belgian princess, a dozen years older than himself, a member by blood and marriage of a family that was busy peopling the thrones of Europe, a woman of great wealth and of inconceivable wealth yet to come (once her father and her mad, childless aunt, Charlotte, relict of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, had been buried with the pomp their rank would demand). She was also, through both her sister’s and her husband’s connections, a frequent visitor at the Hofburg, the royal and imperial palace of the Hapsburg dynasty, and the occupant of an honoured place at all major occasions of state. He was an unknown, undistinguished, unmoneyed 28-year-old subaltern of dubious origin; a gambler, an idler, a spendthrift; a man repeatedly in trouble with his superiors for absenting himself from his duties and for being careless with other people’s money and wives. What connection could there be between the two of them? What could he hope to get from her? Or she from him? It was grotesque for him to dream of her as his friend or patroness, let alone as his beloved, his mistress, an older woman who would lie naked in his arms, listening to his tales of army life.
Yet such waking and sleeping dreams seldom left his mind. He looked for her name in newspapers and magazines; he went to libraries and tried to trace her family connections through encyclopaedias and the Almanach de Gotha. The life she had led since her childhood was unimaginable to him; but as he went about his ‘researches’, picturing her as a cherished, cosseted child, cheered and admired by all who saw her (he was to be amazed to learn from her how harsh, how empty of comfort and affection, her childhood had actually been), his thoughts constantly went back, as if in rebound, to his memories of the bleak, secretive house of his childhood in Tomasevich, among the stones and tree-laden hills of north-eastern Croatia. The three adults there, his mother and the two men, his drunken father and her lover, the Count Keglevich, sharing their obscure connubiality; the uncouth glances and gestures of the servants in his direction and the sniggering talk he heard from them about his ‘two fathers’; the sense he had of something that was both shameless and shameful in their circumstances and his; the conviction that there was nothing at home for him to be proud of – all this had been a part of his consciousness from an early age. And outside the home? So much useless space given over to random, bristling trees, each one at an unneighbourly distance from the next, with boulder-broken slopes leading up or down to more of the same; a view around the house that was viewless, in effect, in revealing nothing but more and more of what had already been seen. He could remember how, like a little madman, he had put a coin under a loose, flat, grey stone lying near the wooden gate to the backyard of the house, where the cattle went by, and how, when he came back from boarding school at the end of his first term three months later, he had found the same coin still lying under the same stone – and what a bizarre and degraded sense of vindication he had felt at the sight of it. You see what the place was like! You see how nothing changed! You see how nothing would ever change – neither him, nor the place, nor the people. And if they died others would merely take over and the whole thing go on in the same way as before.
Subsequently the inspection of the coin under its stone became a ritual he had to perform each time he left the house and returned to it. That’s what his home was. That’s what it made of him. That was what drove him, now that he was far from it, to swagger and take risks of all kinds, sometimes privately, where no one would know of them; more often in public. Show them! Show them! He was not a gifted man, and he knew it; even his horsemanship, of which he was proud, had been described by his superiors in the army as ‘good’ merely, not as ‘very good’ or ‘outstanding’, the grades he had hoped to receive. Yet he was ambitious and always had been. He burned to show them, the vacant-eyed yawners and belchers and scratchers at home, his bored fellow officers in the 13th regiment, officers in grander regiments than his own, the native Germans and Austrians who recognized Croatia in his speech and instinctively patronized him for that reason, the shifting, anonymous, multiracial crowds in Vienna, drawn there from all quarters of the ramshackle empire he had sworn to defend: Croatians like himself, Hungarians, Serbians, Galicians, Italians, Poles, Czechs, Slovenes, Ruthenians, Jews, gypsies, even Turks and Albanians. Show them!
No, if he didn’t raise the stakes now, he would be finished, he would never do anything worth while. And what reason would he then be able to give himself for not even having tried to follow up the wordless acquaintance with the princess that an incomprehensible chance had thrown in his way? What defeat, what humiliation, could he suffer that would be worse than the humiliation of never having tried? He alone would remain as judge of himself, and his finding would be that he was a nothing – for ever. A coward. A short-arse. The son of an idle, drunken cuckold who had lived for years off the largesse of his wife’s lover. Yes, that’s what his father was, and his son now found himself staring into the possibility that he would turn out no better. A man who would spend the rest of his life knowing he was exactly what he deserved to be, a failure who had been too timid to make a grab at the most implausible prize anyone of his rank had ever dreamed of winning.
So he wrote a letter to the princess, to be transmitted to her by the faithful Fiorenza. In order to conceal the fact that the fictitious admirer of the princess for whom he claimed to be acting had much the same handwriting as himself, he wrote the princess’s name on the envelope in block capitals (IHRE KÖNIGLICHE HOHEIT PRINZESSIN LOUISE VON SACHSEN-COBURG UND GOTHA) and used a different pen and ink of a different colour from those he had used when writing to Fiorenza herself. She suspected nothing. Full of excitement and self-importance she carried the sealed note to her royal mistress.
‘What happened?’ he asked when they next met. (Imagine being Fiorenza, claiming to be in love with him and not seeing the fierceness of his eyes, not attending to the thickness of his voice.)
‘She took the letter.’
‘And then?’
‘She asked who’d given it to me.’
‘I gave the princess your name. You told me I could. I said the letter wasn’t from you, it was from someone else.’
‘And then?’
‘She read it right away.’
‘And then?’ (Almost screaming by now.)
‘She said, “I understand” and put the letter away.’