Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

In the darkness of Prague’s night, the bells of the Mala Strana are tolling. One, two, strongly. Three, softly. Four, five, the deep penetrating response. He ascends through a tunnel of light to a garden higher than the level of the street. Another baroque palace, long abandoned. Decapitated statues and black cherubin scattered without order, sacks of lime and heaps of coal piled against them. Brahms found his title in 1856, he repeats to himself. Then he worked on the Requiem for ten years. He knows that there are passageways from courtyard to courtyard, palace to palace, and if he hears footsteps behind him on the gravel, he is no more frightened today that he was at the age of seven when he first began to discover this city, a city that like no other seems to have been built by the lightest and most mysterious of fantasies. He knows that when he reaches the end of the maze of walks and corridors, Prague will lie before him, and he feels himself master of the old palaces, of the spacious darkness; he walks along humming the first movement. Each movement has three parts: a masterpiece of balance and tripartite symmetry. He comes out on a terrace with stone balustrades from which he sees rows and rows of houses and also the Vltava, a strip of silver fixed between its bridges; and farther, beyond the green cupolas and the brown towers, is the forest. Yes, there are steps behind him. In the white summer night he stares at the lamps on the roof of Czerny Palace. And if Mozart holds to the Latin of the liturgy, Brahms writes his Requiem in German. The balustrades of the Church of Loreto show a dance of cherubim who sustain the holy shields above the entrance. The angels are cupids with halos of black iron. The cloister has a chapel with the remains of old frescoes and a golden altar among the sunflowers and the dry grass. The gravel paths have baroque statues: centurions, angels, a dancing Christ. Is he aware of the shadow that follows him? He will not stop, will not turn. Standing in the churchyard, in the warm darkness, in a rich moment into which is fused everything he loves, the city, the music, the old buildings, the darkness itself, he hums and does not look back. It is disorderly order that permits an infinity of approaches. Yet the classical element limits the levels of comprehension and makes them rational. A musical prayer that now is not for the dead threatened with the horrors of final judgment, but for the living who must accept suffering and death. The steps behind follow him to the greenhouses beyond the churchyard, greenhouses no higher than the earth itself. Then a street, the street lamps black iron columns with the lamps grouped around them. He walks slowly past wooden gates and white passageways with small asymmetrical doors; he slows still more and the steps behind him stop, a girl’s steps, her heels tapping the paving stones of Loretanzka Street. He turns, looking about him at the painted façade of the Museum of Arms, the stone gladiators with their maces and daggers, the dripping mouths of the gargoyles, the covered stairs and the iron railings, the motionless hanging clothes, the great walls, the Christ which serves as a drain for the water flying on the tower. He goes on, down toward the river and the bridge, humming, looking at the paving stones under his feet, thinking that in 1639 Heinrich Schütz composed the first Mass for the dead to have a German text, a Teutsche Begräbniss-Missa; Bach’s Cantata 106 unites old hymns, biblical texts, and texts by the composer himself; but where Bach writes of the charity and help of a Redeemer who guides dead souls to a better world, Brahms avoids the name of Christ entirely. Brahms’s German Requiem ends as it begins: the first movement and the seventh are identical; the content of the second movement reappears, more vigorously organized, in the sixth: in the second, the dance of death gives way to a hymn of happiness, while in the sixth, the mourning uncertainty opens upon a serene vision of the Last Judgment, and the movement ends with a powerful, glorious Handelian double fugue. Only the third and fifth movements begin with solo voices. In the third the voice is that of desperate, suffering man; in the fifth it is the consoling voice of a woman. He stopped, in sight of the bridge. The steps following him had already become something familiar and accustomed. He stopped in the square before the bridge and saw a blind man with a white cane waiting for the last trolley and turned around until he saw her, stopped also. She walked forward into the dim greenish light of the lamps on the bridge. He waited. She made a gesture that was partly fearful, partly shy. A dark beret. Lustrous dark bobbed hair. A short jacket, a skirt belted around her thighs. A handbag of glossy beads which she was carrying near her breasts. The third movement begins with the words “He passed by like a shadow” and the orchestration is light and the melody is passed from instrument to instrument …

She smiled shyly and at last spoke: “It’s … it’s that I’ve seen you every time there’s been a concert in the Wallenstein gardens.” She hesitated, then continued haltingly, “Do you … do you have a season ticket?”

He laughed and said yes, he did, but she was already going on: “It’s … Well, I saw you always alone and I realized that after the concert you would walk the streets and … Forgive me … I never know what to do after the concert and I thought … you seem so … so immersed in the music, and I…”

“You thought that…”

“Yes. Yes, that maybe if I walked the streets too, like you…”

“The music might be prolonged a little?”

“Yes, that too. And…”

“And we could walk together?”

She blushed and smiled and timidly extended her hand.

“Hanna. Hanna Werner.”

“Franz Jellinek. Would you like me to walk you home?”

“No, please, that would be too much trouble. I’m going to the other side, to the old city.”

“That’s where I live too.”

The Karlsbrücke is long and beautiful. In the summer night its lamps are less luminous than the sky and succeed only in creating shadows from the columns of clouds and cherubim, the great baroque dance of sultans with scimitars, of dogs and horses and monks and souls from purgatory stirring behind a spiked fence guarded by pagans. St. George, St. Anthony, and St. Francis gaze upon the golden crowns of the Virgin and the Holy Child. Gold on black. St. Sigismund and St. Wenceslaus and the Patriarch Norbert observe the crowned skeleton that lies on a cushion and holds a metal scepter.

They walked on, slowly.

“What do you study, Hanna?”

“Music. Composition. And you?”

“Some day I want to be an architect.”

“Good! Now we have something to talk about.”

She laughed and with both hands caressed her black shining hair. The bridge seemed to float on the summer mist. Out of the mist rose Mary and her Child with a kneeling monk. Happy cherubim climbed the cross, converting its seriousness into graceful gaiety. Which, Franz reflected, was the very soul of the baroque. Now lives of the saints in black and the central statues of the Crucifixion and the Pietà, facing each other. Franz and Hanna looked over the balustrade. Fishermen, as always, the younger men standing in boats, the older sitting bundled up on the green barges.

They said goodbye to each other under the arch of the bridge tower. Hanna took a deep breath and looked toward an avenue of fragile trees.

“Will you be at the concert next Friday?”

“Yes, but I’d like to see you sooner than that.”

“I take my lessons in Professor Maher’s studio. We passed by it. Write it down. Loretanzka 12.”

“Thank you. I’ll come one afternoon.”

“Yes, I’ll be so happy … I mean, I’ll be very pleased to … Goodbye.”