Sophie and the Sibyl Read Free Page A

Klesmer inclined slightly, a man smaller than Max with a mass of white hair, full lips, an unlined face and arresting grey eyes. He surveyed Max with sceptical contempt as they were introduced, then addressed himself entirely to the great lady, whose magnificent eyes held the two men in the same frame, an ominous image of Ugolino and his remaining son. Klesmer certainly took no prisoners. The discussion turned on the several merits of two different sculptures depicting the same subject: the abandoned Ariadne. One of the two had been misnamed Cleopatra and lurked in the Vatican Galleries in Rome, but the other, created by Johann Heinrich Dannecker, representing the unfortunate Ariadne stark naked, life-size, and seated on a panther, proved famous enough to have been viewed by both Duncker brothers, whilst in Frankfurt to attend the trade fair. They had visited both the Goethehaus in Großer Hirschgraben, draped with garlands on the poet’s birthday, and the famous statue. Max simply acknowledged that he had set eyes upon the thing. He remembered prettier girls, just as naked, but with larger breasts and a good deal more friendly, in the closed rooms at Hettie’s Keller, and had some difficulty comprehending this ecstatic appreciation of cold marble when warm flesh was to be had at the right price. The Sibyl and Klesmer, however, debated Nature and Art as if the two were in conflict, but closely related.
    ‘Sculpture, like poetry,’ the Sibyl declared, ‘must generate the elements that engage its audience – tension and emotion. I maintain that Dannecker’s Ariadne possesses both. Her head is lifted towards the horizon; she is gazing after her lost love. But she has been surprised while resting. The moment is clear. She has been unexpectedly awoken, one leg is so casually placed beneath the other, perhaps this is the very moment of her awakening consciousness? He is gone, and she finds herself alone. She knows that she is no longer loved. She has been abandoned.’
    Max wondered how anybody managed to snooze on the back of a panther, but was too discreet to voice his literal-mindedness.
    ‘Madame,’ Herr Klesmer leaned towards the Sibyl and dared to contradict her. ‘You spin a narrative from a gesture and a name. Now, the Ariadne to be found in the Vatican at Rome was originally known as the Cleopatra. Would your interpretation still be valid if the statue were simply to be renamed?’
    ‘But it is not then the same statue. The name alone transforms the meanings of every fold in the marble!’ The Sibyl demonstrated a pedantic streak. ‘Cleopatra was the victim of her own folly. She was a queen who could love whom she chose. And she appears to have invested all her passion in the losing side. She is valued for her Oriental eroticism and her sexual power, not for the pathos of her fidelity to the man who betrayed her trust. Dannecker created his Ariadne in full knowledge of her identity and her fate. She represents the woman abandoned. He is interpreting her story.’
    ‘Yet you loved the Roman Ariadne best, did you not?’ Herr Klesmer raised one beautiful hand. His fingers were clean and tapered, the nails unbroken, as if he had never worked. He recited an English text unknown to Max. ‘“The hall where the reclining Ariadne, then called the Cleopatra, lies in the marble voluptuousness of her beauty, the drapery folding around her with a petal-like ease and tenderness.”’
    The Sibyl’s eyes widened and glowed as if he had handed her a vast bouquet of roses. Max gazed at the illuminated lady, baffled. Klesmer suddenly poked him with one of his gorgeous fingers. Max lurched on his heels, a marionette whose strings vibrated into motion.
    ‘And will you be publishing the English version in Berlin, sir? Or merely the translation?’
    The unknown text clearly sprang from the Great Work, which the Count’s wife and daughters were even then wolfing down in English. Max had no idea how far negotiations had