Joana Case. The Auersbergers had always been, at least ostensibly, what are called
good hosts ;they were uniquely and uninhibitedly liberal in their mania for throwing parties and in their endless zeal for things artistic and cultural, and so they were forever hunting down celebrities. It has to be admitted that, dreadful and distasteful though they were, they had a fair measure of what is called
Austrian charm. But the fact that I accepted their invitation wasn’t due to their
Austrian charm ,I thought as I sat in the wing chair, but to the insolent way they issued it without warning that day in the Graben; and I watched Auersberger sitting at the Steinway, leaning forward because of his shortsightedness and leafing through some music, which I eventually recognized as the
Anton von Webern Album I knew so well. He was sorting out the music for a short recital to be given by his wife. Curiously enough, I’ve managed to keep my sight up to now, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, though I’ve reached an age when many people rapidly become farsighted; a lot of people begin to lose their sight in their mid-forties, suddenly finding that they have to hold the newspaper a couple of feet away from them in order to read it. I was still spared any such impairment of vision; I could now see better than ever, I thought, more sharply and ruthlessly than ever, with London eyes, it would seem. The champagne the Auersbergers are serving this evening isn’t absolutely the best in the world, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, but all the same it’s one of the three or four most expensive — no doubt what they deem appropriate to mark the visit of an actor from the Burgtheater. Naturally I had sweated a good deal at Joana’s funeral, and, not wishing to change for this
artistic dinner , I had sprayed cologne on my clothes — rather too freely, it now occurred to me. I have always found it unpardonable to turn up stinking of cologne, but this evening the stench was not noticeable: to judge by the atmosphere in the Auersbergers’ apartment, they had all splashed too much scent on their clothes. Every now and then I saw the cook appear from the kitchen and stick her head around the door of the music room to find out whether she could start serving supper, but the actor had still not arrived. Auersberger’s wife was now sitting in one of those slender Empire chairs whose backs consist simply of a lyre carved out of walnut, doing her best to keep the guests happy. Most of them were smoking and, like me, drinking champagne, while at the same time nibbling at the snacks that the hostess had disposed all around the apartment in little dishes made of fine Herend porcelain. There was one next to me, but having always had an equal dislike for Herend porcelain and pre-dinner snacks, I did not eat any. I have never been partial to savory snacks, and certainly not to the Japanese variety that it has recently become fashionable to serve at all Viennese receptions. It really is an impertinence, I said to myself, to make us all wait for the actor, to demean all the guests, including myself, by turning us into a stage set for this man from the Burgtheater. At one point Auersberger remarked that he detested the theater. Whenever he had had more to drink than his wife permitted, he would suddenly reveal his innermost self, and on this occasion he suddenly started inveighing against the actor, who had not even arrived, calling the Burgtheater a
pigsty (admittedly not without justification) and the actor himself a
megalomaniac cliché-monger , but his wife immediately rebuked him, rolling her eyes and telling him to go back to the piano where he belonged and keep quiet. They haven’t changed, I said to myself, sitting in the wing chair: she’s anxious to preserve the harmony of her
artistic dinner , and he’s threatening to destroy it. They’re both committed to the same ends, the same social ends, I thought, but late in the evening he puts on a show of wanting to escape, remembering what he owes himself, so to speak, as an artistic personality. Essentially they’re both completely taken up with society, I thought, without which they couldn’t exist — the higher reaches of society of course, because they’ve never been able to make it to the highest — while on the other hand they’ve never abandoned their artistic pretensions, their links with Webern, Berg, Schönberg and the rest, which they’ve always felt obliged to harp on at every opportunity in their craze for social recognition. Joana wasn’t Auersberger’s best friend, as people often said, but she certainly was the
one artistic friend he had, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, and it was through him, as I have said, that I first met her at the studio in the Sebastiansplatz. Joana was a country girl who had been spoiled by her mother, the wife of a railroad worker in Kilb; her parents anticipated her every wish, and if possible fulfilled it. This was certainly
one of the reasons for her suicide, it now struck me — this continual
pampering which goes on in the families of small country tradesmen, especially in Lower Austria. What a beautiful village Kilb is! I thought. I’ve spent many afternoons and evenings there, and sometimes even stayed the night; the Slukals, Joana’s parents, often could not put me up in their little one-story house, which, though damp, was always cozy, and so on those occasions I would stay at the local inn, which was called the
Iron Hand. I would spend hours walking with Joana, discussing the art of dance and the so-called
movement studio she ran in Vienna. From her very earliest childhood, when she was still at the elementary school in Kilb, Joana had wanted to become famous either as an actress or as a ballerina — she was never sure which. Finally she decided to call herself a
choreographer , and arranged appearances for herself in a number of plays based on fairy tales, which were staged in various small Viennese theaters. She got extremely favorable press notices and finally succeeded in putting on a
deportment class at the Burgtheater. It was utterly futile, of course, to imagine that she could teach deportment to the actors at the Burgtheater: they could no more be taught how to deport themselves than they could be taught how to speak. In the mid-fifties, however, through the good offices of a senior official in the Burgtheater management, she was engaged to coach the actors in the art of deportment. This was a failure because the actors showed absolutely no interest and because in the end she lost interest too. Yet for a whole year she got a decent fee for her efforts. Basically she could never make up her mind whether she wanted to be an actress or a ballerina; and so she had danced and acted throughout her childhood, and when she went to Vienna she actually studied drama at the Reinhardt Seminar, where she finally qualified, though no theater ever engaged her. At the height of her indecision, which she constantly referred to as her
artistic crisis , she married the carpet designer, the
tapestry artist as she used to call him, I recalled, sitting in the wing chair. For over ten years Joana and her tapestry artist lived in the Third District, in a patrician house in the Sebastiansplatz that had been built in 1880. Here they occupied a penthouse studio with a thousand square feet of floor space under three enormous glass domes. It was beneath these domes that he wove the tapestries that made him famous — and not just in Europe. Coming from an old Jewish family and having started out as a painter, he always averred that the art of weaving, in other words tapestry making, had been the
saving of him. He ran into Joana at just the right moment, for it was her freshness and beauty that very soon turned the studio in the Sebastiansplatz into one of the artistic centers of Viennese society. He wove the tapestries and she sold them. It was Joana’s charm that made the works of her tapestry artist famous, first in Vienna, then in Europe, and finally in America, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, and at once I recalled that it was at the height of his fame (which he undoubtedly owed to Joana!) that he bolted, as they say, with his wife’s best friend and ended up in Mexico. They married in Mexico City, but he divorced his new wife only a year later to marry a Mexican (the daughter of a Mexican minister!), to whom he is still married. Joana really was an
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