It was the third time this week I'd awoke at 4:30 by Ignazia having sex upstairs with a seminary student.
Ignazia is my landlady. She was the daughter of a lay theology professor in Trieste before coming to Vienna to be a painter's model. She makes a side living by tutoring seminary students struggling with theology: then she fucks them.
Is she paid? Well, she's paid for the tutelage, but I doubt she charges for the rest as I doubt the students know her intentions when they first come to her, but once they find out her practice, they stay in her tutelage, and I suppose they get better grades in seminary.
As I have long since renounced my belief in Hashem, I do my best to resign myself to no similar treatment, but similar treatment is not why I'm here. I'm here to be the next Wagner, and fucking whomever that takes is what I would do.
Not that any person of influence would look at my short, beefy frame, my Jewish nose and Habsburg-like underbite, my heavy handed ambitions, my holier than thou belief in ars gratia artis and think: "Yes. That." But I came to Vienna to be the greatest composer since Wagner, the greatest playwright, the greatest artist, and even if no one else believes I can do it, I believe I can.
My time will come. Ignazia looks the other way on my pounding her piano, my hoarse moaning of unending melodies to my own libretto, and I look the other way at her dooming the future's saints to perdition. I'm not in the apartment most of the time. Rather, I'm in the coffeehouses writing my melodies and words, humming the melodies as I write them so all cultural Vienna knows me as an institution of the coffeehouses: 'the composer,'
The only problem is that they know me otherwise. When I'm not humming my melodies at tables, getting them embedded in Wien's unconscious, I'm playing violin in the corner: backup violinist in a cabaret band, and, to my shame, I'm good at it. I'm known as 'the fiddler', not the composer, and after it's done, every half drunk herr doktor and herr professor wants to bore me with their memories of gypsy fiddlers from their youths, while the beautiful girls always speak to my aging band leader: the 'legendary' Tamas Novak who's been Vienna's great upcoming cabaret singer-songwriter for thirty years. Everyone in Vienna knows Tamas Novak and his songs: so well do they know him that a dozen cafes pay us hunger wages to play our hits.
Then, for one year, I started my own cabaret project. To my astonishment, I was good at it, and at least the ugly girls went home with me. But if cabaret is my destiny then Vienna is my nightmare. I am here for opera, not cabaret, and to opera shall I devote every dreaming hour of my muse. For opera did I, Avraham Ticoczki-ben-Rebbe Yaakov, became Istvan Tauber. For opera do I go to mass every day at St. Stephan's. Between you and me, dear melomane, I'm no Christian, nor am I even baptized, but there are many rich Catholics who may underwrite a genius like I suspect I am, but no one would underwrite me out of simple artistic passion, they need know me as one of them. Rich Jews would underwrite a Catholic well before rich Catholics would underwrite a Jew, and so much of being Jewish in this world is assessing risk.
Nights are for work, but there is no opera in the daytime. There is no family or women of which to speak or come home to. There is only the opera, and there is only the coffeehouses. At six forty every morning a stagehand sneaks me into the Staatsoper, I go hide in the toilet, then at quarter of nine scurry over to section 1 of the parterre like a rat--close enough that I can hear Mahler's commentary, far enough away that neither he nor singers can see me. Doubtless do some orchestra members and minor-roled singers, but I'm one of a few who regularly indulges this practice: all of whom are would be geniuses of the voice, the baton, the set design, but of course, I don't think any of them are particularly talented but me, and of course, they all think the same of the rest of us against themselves.
Then when the rehearsal is over, I go to the coffeehouses to write. My work is usually done at Cafe Central: it's large, it's loud, it's where everyone goes to be seen, it's where everyone pontificates their work and comes armed with witticisms formed in the carriage ride over. Usually there is a great second-tier intellectual in the corner opining: the older generation of writers used to be seen there: Hofmannsthal, Bahr, Freud and Rudolf Steiner used to be its denizens but now they're too big to be seen anywhere but the Grand Restaurant. The only one who still makes an appearance at Central is Petr Altenberg, and Altenberg is so hopeless at anything but writing that he lives quite literally within the cafes. It's said that he sleeps in the office of Cafe Museum and uses the place as his mailing address. The rest are long since too busy with actual work to be seen, but a series of younger intellectual flaneurs like Kraus, Zweig, Polgar, Friedell, even young men name Musil and Broch whom everyone finds much too serious for such frivolities as coffee: one day they'll write novels to put us to sleep. Chief of them all is a poet named Rilke, but he does not pontificate, he simply writes as others pontificate for him: to say anything out loud would be not to save the best material for the page, and the greatest writers always preserve their material for point of maximum impact.
But the mediocrities beneath him and Musil are almost better: more fun, more entertaining, more comprehensible, and they distribute their witticisms like Jesus does miracles.
Now, one should specify, I cannot repeat them, because they would utterly lose their cleverness outside the tabletalk of the cafes, and I am so busy trying to compose in my corner that I doubt I even remember much of that which is said. But I take it on faith that I laugh for a reason, and everyone makes a great show of laughing at the articulacy of these exceptionally articulate men, who clearly practice their witticisms in a mirror for months before they unleash them amid a conversational repartee which twenty to eighty people hover above to overhear. Everyone makes a great show of laughing: particularly the ones who don't hear what was said.
But it was to the far newer Cafe Museum to which I retreated that night as Ignazia stripped yet another boy of the cloth on a journey to heaven. Like Cafe Sacher, Cafe Museum has these gorgeously comfy interconnected red booths which are perfect to sleep on, and such is the veneration they hold to our young artists that any artist between homes is allowed a space of couch once a week for a night's sleep: except Altenberg of course who can even get his mail sent there.
I went to the very far back, near to the bookshelves, where the light is dim, the couches are red and especially comfortable. I tried to fall asleep and couldn't, so I pulled a book down and lit a lamp.
It was then I heard a peevish voice in an accent of upper class Vienna that was clearly affected by someone whose natural speaking voice was lower class: "Turn out that light, we're here to sleep not read!"
And that is how I met Ioana.
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