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, seated in triangular deltas of wrinkles, were not human eyes. His face, bushy with sideburns white as milk, 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, thanks to the particular arrangement of his wrinkles, his face appeared to smile. At close quarters that smile was unmasked as a grimace of bitterness and worldly-minded objectivity, lit by not even the flicker of an idea. At the moment when he emerged in the world’s arena, in his general’s green plumage and his turquoise overcoat which reached to the ground, stooping a little and saluting, the world had arrived at a happy juncture in its development. All forms, having exhausted their content in endless metamorphoses, now hung loosely upon affairs, 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 considered this 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 prepossessing in his being, was to a great extent able to tempt a poor wretch to his side. All loyal and far-seeing heads of families felt threatened along with him, 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 on the world, regulated its course with the aid of patents, brought it under procedural control, and insured against its derailment into the unforeseen, the rash or in any way irresponsible.
Franz Joseph I was not inimical to wholesome and pious joys. He it was who contrived for the good of the people, with a particular kind of calculating benevolence, the Imperial & Royal 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 this 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 on has face a gleam of primeval wisdom, borrowed from his Creator, and a jovial smile of goodwill set in a frame of sideburns, even when his feet, at the end of his day’s considerable earthly wanderings, smelled badly of sweat.
But have you heard anything 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 wither, unreplenished with blood; their vitality grows only with that mass of injury and denied life, that perpetually other that they have dislodged and renounced. Here we lay bare secret and forbidden things, touch on state secrets locked away a thousandfold and stamped with a thousand seals of silence. The Demiurgus had a younger brother, with a different spirit and a different cause entirely. Who indeed does not have him, in one form or another? Whom does he not accompany like a shadow, an antithesis, their partner in some eternal dialogue? According to one version, this was merely a cousin; according to another, he had never even been born. He had merely been spun from the misgivings, the deliriums of the Demiurge, overheard in his sleep. It could be that, somehow or other, he had feigned him, substituted for him another, merely in order to replay symbolically that drama, to repeat once again, ceremoniously and ritualistically — and after no one knows how many times — that prelegal and fatal act that could not be exhausted by thousandfold repetitions. That conditionally born, professionally wronged, as it were, unfortunate antagonist 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 in that bright colour of enthusiasm, of a wax seal, of a red pencil, in which timely telegrams from afar are printed. He had pink cheeks and radiant azure eyes; he made all hearts race; swallows, screeching with joy, cut across his path, enclosed him over and over again in trembling quotation marks — a happy citation written in a festive flowing hand and in twitters. Even the Demiurgus secretly loved him, even as he was plotting his undoing. First, 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 the last hope of the malcontents faded. After his tragic death, Franz Joseph I, under the guise of court mourning, forbade the colour red. A black yellow of mourning became the official colour. From that time onward the colour of the amaranth, the waving standard of enthusiasm, fluttered only in secret, in the breasts of 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 to soak it up, hotly, wave after wave beneath the eyelids. 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 they 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; the horizon has grown rotund, beautiful and full of azure — like a glass ball in a garden with its miniature and illuminated panorama of the world — in a happily ordered composition above which, forming its conclusive toppings, the clouds are arranged, unfolding in a long row, like rouleaus of golden medals, or peals of bells combining in rosy litanies.
People gather 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 in pink — ever more pinkly — and profound calm and a reflection of the illuminated distances rests at the back of every eye. And suddenly, as they wait, 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 in a 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 then, while the people are still standing motionless, their heads bowed, still full of bright and enormous visions, spellbound by that great illuminated ascent of the world, then that breathless errand boy darts out unexpectedly from the crowd — who has been unconsciously awaited, all pink, in beautiful raspberry tricots and bedecked with tiny bells, medals and orders. He runs through the empty market square, which is fringed by the crowd, hushed and still full of flight and proclamation — an additional surplus, a net profit cast aside by that day, which, of all of its splendour, has been keeping him auspiciously in reserve. Six or seven times he encircles the market square in beautiful, mythological edgings, 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. His rather heavy stomach droops, shaken by his rhythmical stride. His face, scarlet with exertion, shines with sweat behind his black, Bosnian moustache, while his medals, orders and tiny bells jump in time like a wedding harness on his bronze décolletage. He is seen at a distance, turning a corner in a taut, parabolic line as he draws near with the Janissary choir of his little bells — 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 which is barking at him.
Then Franz Joseph I, disarmed by the general harmony, proclaimed a reticent amnesty, and conceded the colour red, conceded it for that one May evening in a diluted and sweet, treacly form — and, reconciled with the world and his antithesis, he stands in the open window of Schönbrunn, and, at that moment, he is seen all over the world, on all horizons under which pink sprinters run, in empty market squares fringed by silent crowds. He is seen like an enormous Imperial & Royal apotheosis against a backdrop of clouds, in a turquoise overcoat and wearing the ribbon of Commander of the Order of Malta, his gloved hands resting on the balustrade of the window, and his narrow eyes — blue buttons without kindness or goodwill — set into deltas of wrinkles, calling a smile to mind. Thus he stands, an acrimonious fox, his snowy, brushed-back sideburns made up as kindliness, and at a distance his face mimics a smile, without humour or grace.
> -XXX >