Free The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch Page B

Vienna: Mahler had problems. He was suffering from impotence and could no longer make love to his wife, Alma—who was later also to turn the heads of Franz Werfel, Walter Gropius, and Oskar Kokoschka. He needed immediate help. Mahler took the train to Leiden, where he met Freud in a hotel. They walked around the town for four hours, and Mahler was subjected to a sort of emergency analysis, which indeed seems to have had some effect.
    A little girl ties a rope to a lamppost, starts turning the rope; a second girl moves her upper body forward and backward a couple of times in the same rhythm, jumps into the imaginary egg, and begins skipping. And as they walked along, Onno responded with the same suppleness to the anecdote.
    "Well, well, Herr Obermusikdirekor, you are suffering from overpotency. In my psychoanalysis I have coined the term astronomical satyriasis for this. It is a disease that inspires the greatest possible disgust, even in specialists, despite their being familiar with the dark side of human nature."
    "But what if I like it," whined Max. "Cure me, Herr Professor. I want to stop liking it. I want to be monogamous, like you, or impotent—whatever you are. I'll double your fee."
    "The fact that you immediately bring up money points to an anal-erotic fixation, which conjures up scenes before my inner eye from which even Dante would shrink. Did I hear you say you like it? Surely it can't be true?"
    "It is!"
    "Occasionally, even experienced mountaineers are faced with precipices that force them to say, 'This is too much.' When I tell my friend Ferenczi about this, he'll say, 'You can convince me of lots of things, Sigi, but this is impossible.' "
    "But I'm possible!"
    "The fact that you are possible is certainly the ultimate mysterium tremendum ac fascinans. I have experienced a lot in the course of my practice—Little Hans, the Wolfman, all complete lunatics—but a phenomenon like you robs me of my last vestige of faith in mankind. I conclude from your revolting way of life that in your Sexualhysterie you would actually like to mount every woman that ever was but that your lewd priapic frenzy finds itself limited to the living. Those from the past have escaped your extraordinary appetite and those from the future will escape it. What you would prefer would be to possess every woman in space and time in one fell swoop, in the shape of the supreme woman: the primeval woman. Am I right in assuming, mein Lieber, that your mother's first name is Eva?"
    "Donnerwetter!" laughed Max. "That hit home! Now I understand why my Nervenarzt recommended that I consult you." He had once told Onno his mother's name, but the slant Onno had put on it gave him a slight jolt.
    "I can see right through you, Herr Generalkapellmeister."
    "But if Eve is my mother, verehrter Herr Doctor, am I Cain or Abel?"
    Now Onno seemed to be thrown, but not for long. He stopped and shouted: "The Lord will not see your sacrifice, seven times accursed one! Only mine shall be seen!"
    As he said this, with the aplomb of which only he had the secret, Max's eye lighted on a cover in the window of a secondhand bookshop. They were in a narrow street behind the Pieterskerk, which rose like the Jungfrau above the low houses of the old town center.
    "Look at that. Talk of the devil." He pointed to a copy of Alma Mahler's Mein Leben.
    "Come on," he said, putting his hand on the door handle. "I'll buy it for you, as a fee for your analysis."
    In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what—apart from the eternal innocence of animals—offers an image of hope? A mother with a newborn child in her arms? The child may end up as a murderer, or a murder victim, so that the hopeful image is a prefiguration of a pieta: a mother with her newly dead child on her lap. No, the image of hope is someone passing with a musical instrument in a case. It is not contributing to oppression, or to liberation either, but to something that continues below the