Spring: -I- -II- -III-
The Stamp Album: -IV- -V- -VI- -VII- -VIII- -IX- -X- -XI- -XII-
In the Municipal Park: -XIII- -XIV- -XV- -XVI-
Springtime Twilight: -XVII-
The Villa: -XVIII- -XIX- -XX- -XXI- -XXII- -XXIII- -XXIV- -XXV- -XXVI- -XXVII-
Bianka’s Lineage: -XXVIII- (XXIX) -XXX- -XXXI- -XXXII- -XXXIII-
Hiatus: -XXXIV- -XXXV- -XXXVI- -XXXVII-
Finale: -XXXVIII- -XXXIX- -XL-
XXIX
THERE IS a great deal to suggest that Franz Joseph I was in fact a sad and powerful demiurge. His narrow eyes, as blank as buttons and seated in triangular deltas of wrinkles, were no human eyes. His face, bushy with sideburns, as white as milk and brushed back like those of Japanese demons, was the face of an old, dejected fox. At a distance, from the heights of the terrace of Schönbrunn, his face appeared to smile, thanks to the particular arrangement of his wrinkles. At close quarters that smile was unmasked as a grimace of bitterness and worldly-minded objectivity, not brightened by even a flicker of an idea. At the moment when he emerged in the world’s arena, stooping a little and saluting, in his general’s green plumage and turquoise overcoat that reached to the ground, the world had arrived at a happy juncture in its development. All forms now hung loosely upon affairs, their content exhausted in endless metamorphoses, half shelled and ready to fall away. The world was vehemently pupating, hatching out in young, chirruping and stupendous colours, joyously relieved of all ties and joints. It would have taken little for the map of the world, that sheet, full of years and colours, full of inspiration, to billow and fly into the air. Franz Joseph I felt this as a personal danger. His element was a world enclosed by the regulations of prose, the pragmatism of tediousness. His spirit was the spirit of chancelleries and police stations. And strangely enough, that dry and dull old man, having nothing whatsoever prepossessing in his being, was able to tempt most poor wretches to his side. Along with him, all loyal and far-seeing heads of families felt threatened, and they heaved a sigh of relief when that powerful demon settled his weight upon things, and curbed the ascent of the world. Franz Joseph I drew orderly rows and columns onto the world; he regulated its course with the aid of patents; he brought it under procedural control, and insured it against derailment into the unforeseen, into the rash or in any way irresponsible.
Franz Joseph I was not inimical to wholesome and pious joys. He was the one who had contrived, with a certain calculating benevolence, the Imperial & Royal people’s lottery, Egyptian dream books, illustrated calendars, and the Imperial & Royal tobacco shops. He standardised the servants of heaven, dressed them in symbolic blue uniforms, and set that personnel loose upon the world, divided into ranks and sections of angelic detachments in the form of postmen, conductors and bankers. Even the meanest of those heavenly errand boys had a gleam of primeval wisdom in has face, borrowed from his Creator, a jovial smile of goodwill set in a frame of sideburns, notwithstanding that, at the end of his day’s considerable earthly wanderings, his feet had a sweaty smell.
But have you ever heard about the thwarted conspiracy at the very foot of the throne? The great palace revolution, nipped in the bud at the very beginning of the glorious rule of the Omnipotent? Thrones unreplenished by blood will wither. Their vitality grows only with that mass of injury and denied life, that perpetually other whom they have unseated and renounced. Here, I shall lay bare secret and forbidden things. I shall touch on state secrets, secured behind a thousand locks and stamped with a thousand seals of silence. The Demiurgus had a younger brother, of a different spirit and with an entirely different cause. Who indeed does not have him, in some form or another? Whom does he not accompany like a shadow, an antithesis, the counterpart in an eternal dialogue? According to one version, he was merely a cousin. According to another, he had never even been born, but was merely spun out of the misgivings, the deliriums of the Demiurge, overheard in his sleep. It could be that somehow or other he had feigned him, or substituted him for another, merely in order to replay symbolically that drama, to repeat once again, ceremoniously and ritualistically, and no one knows how many times, that prelegal and awful deed, which could not be exhausted by thousandfold repetitions. That conditionally born, unfortunate, and professionally wronged protagonist bore in honour of his role the name Archduke Maximilian. That very name, uttered in a whisper, now revives the blood in our veins, renders it brighter and redder, pounding rapidly with the bright colour of enthusiasm, the red of a wax seal, of a red pencil, the colour in which timely telegrams from afar are printed. He had pink cheeks and radiant azure eyes. He made every heart race. Swallows cut across his path, screeching with joy, and enclosed him over and over again in twitters, in vibrating quotation marks — a happy citation, written in a festive, flowing hand. Even the Demiurgus secretly loved him, even as he was plotting his undoing. Firstly, he appointed him commander of the Levantine fleet in the hope that he would drown wretchedly, adventuring on the South Seas. But shortly afterwards, he made a secret pact with Napoleon III, who craftilly drew him into the Mexican mêlée. It was all planned. That youth, full of fantasy and imaginativeness, enticed by the hope of constituting a new and happy world on the Pacific, relinquished all of his rights as an agnate of the crown and an heir to the Habsburgs. On the French battleship Le Cid, he sailed straight into the ambush prepared for him. The documents of that secret conspiracy have never glimpsed of the light of day.
Thus faded the last hope of the malcontents. After his tragic death, Franz Joseph I, under the guise of court mourning, forbade the colour red. The black yellow of mourning became the official colour. From that time onward, the colour of the amaranth, the billowing standard of enthusiasm, was waved only in secret, in the breasts of his disciples. But the Demiurgus could not eraditace it entirely from nature. Why, sunlight potentially contains it. It is enough to close one’s eyes in the springtime sunshine in order to soak it up beneath one’s eyelids, hotly, wave after wave. Photographic paper is burned with that same red in the spring glare, overflowing beyond all limits. Bulls led along the sunny streets of the town with rags on their horns see it in bright patches, and lower their heads, ready to charge at imaginary toreadors fleeing in panic in fiery arenas.
Sometimes, a whole bright day passes in explosions of the sun, accumulations of clouds hanging luminously and chromatically at the fringes, their redness breaking off at every edge. People go about stupefied by the light, their closed eyes exploding inside with rockets, Roman candles and powder-kegs. Later, toward evening, that hurricane fire of light softens. Like a glass ball in a garden with its miniature and illuminated panorama of the world, the horizon has grown rotund, beautiful and full of azure, in a happily ordered composition, above which the clouds are arranged, its conclusive toppings, unfolding in a long row like rouleaus of golden medals, or the pealing of bells, combining in rosy litanies.
People are gathering in the market square, remaining silent beneath that enormous, illuminated cupola. They gather involuntarily, and combine in a great motionless finale, a poised scenario of waiting. The clouds accumulate pinkly, ever more pinkly, and profound calm and a reflection of the illuminated distance rests at the back of every eye. And suddenly, whilst they are waiting, the world reaches its zenith. It ripens in two or three final pulses to its supreme perfection. The gardens are now conclusively arranged on the crystal bowl of the horizon; the May greenery foams and froths with glistening wine, ready to spill over the brim at any moment. The hills assume the forms of clouds, and the world’s beauty, having surpassed the highest summit, becomes detached and soars into the air. Its enormous aroma crosses the threshold of eternity.
And whilst the people are still standing motionless, with their heads bowed, still full of bright and enormous visions, spellbound by that great illuminated ascent of the world, then that errand boy who has been unconsciously awaited — out of breath, all pink in beautiful raspberry tricots, bedecked with tiny bells, medals and orders — darts out unexpectedly from the crowd. He runs through the empty market square — still ready to fly away, still full of heralding, and fringed by the hushed crowd — a surplus, a net profit put aside by that day, which from all of its splendour it has auspiciously kept in reserve. Six or seven times he encircles the market square in beautiful, mythological edgings, beautifully pleated and bowed. He runs slowly in the sight of all, his eyelids lowered, as if in shame, his hands on his hips and his somewhat heavy stomach drooping, shaken by his rhythmical stride. His face, scarlet with exertion behind his black, Bosnian moustache, shines with sweat, and his medals, orders and tiny bells jump in time on his bronze décolletage, like a wedding harness. He is seen at a distance as he approaches, turning a corner in a taut, parabolic line, the Janissary choir of his little bells jangling — as beautiful as God, improbably pink, and with a rigidly upright torso, driving away, with cracks of a riding whip and a sideways flash of his eye, a pack of dogs that is barking at him.
Franz Joseph I, disarmed by the general harmony, then proclaimed a reticent amnesty. He conceded the colour red — conceded it for that one May evening, in a diluted, sweet and treacly form. He stood in the open window of Schönbrunn, reconciled with the world and his antithesis. And at that moment he was seen all over the world, on all horizons under which pink sprinters run, in all market squares, empty and fringed by silent crowds. He was seen against a backdrop of clouds like an enormous Imperial & Royal apotheosis, in a turquoise overcoat and wearing the ribbon of a Commander of the Order of Malta, resting his gloved hands on the balustrade; and his eyes — blue buttons without kindness or goodwill, set in the deltas of their wrinkles — narrowed as if with laughter. There he stood, an acrimonious fox, his snowy, brushed-back sideburns made up as kindliness. And from a distance, his humourless and graceless face made its mimicry of a smile.
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