I have real reservations about Vienna because the German-speaking tourists I encounter in Italy and Paris are fat, loud, ugly and rude. Plus, I don't like the sound of the German language itself and never have any luck at all learning it myself. Plus, these German-speakers seem often to have an air of vague superiority and entitlement that I don't like at all.
3:10 p.m. Two hours outside Venice on the moving train. Wow! Italian Alps! We're going through tunnels now from time to time and seem to be climbing. The mountains are huge!
4:00 p.m. We are now officially in Austria. The signs I see whizzing by are written in German. Logging. A-frame houses and chalets that look like houses on a cuckoo clock.
5:00 p.m. We are all the way into Austria now. The signs have all changed to German and the architecture is no longer like in Italy. Everything is very green. We traveled across a bridge over a lake. Seems too cold to me, but people were swimming. Conductor says train is running fast and we will arrive early at Wien Sudbanhof -- at just after 9:00 p.m.
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So. Vienna. It is cold and drizzly outside: frankly, miserable. I have all the wrong clothes, having just come from sunny Italy. I am sitting in the famous Loos American Bar. I am smoking a cigarette and drinking a kaffée mèlange in what must be one of the earliest examples of Modernist Chic in the known world. It's Paris-dark, tiny, with tiny tables with lighted tops and metal edges and a checkered wood parquet floor. I think the door said it's open from noon until 4:00 a.m. There is tortoise stained glass in blocks in the bar's front and a burled wood ceiling with rectangular inserts. There is a big sign on the door that says ABSOLUTELY NO PHOTOGRAPHS.
I am alone in Loos American Bar except for the thin, chic, black-clothes-wearing female bartender. There are seven bentwood bar stools, two L-shaped black leather couches, one tiny, high table in the front window, et c'est ça! The telephone and toilets seem to be located down a few narrow winding steps; I will check them out before I leave.
Last night when I arrived at Sudbanhof it was like being lost in a De Chirico painting. I walked what felt like miles down empty tracks before arriving in the huge, empty concrete station with its inscrutible German signs. I immediately felt my spirits plummet. Graffitti-vandalized banks of telephones and the gritty, urban setting jarred me after having just been in Venice.
But soon I got a cab at the taxi stand and arrived at the small townhouse near the zoo which I am to share a modernized apartment with one of our graduate students for the few days I'll be here.
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Yesterday I went with the student group to the famous summer palace one arrives at by walking through the famous tree-lined park -- or is it a tiergarten? -- like in The Third Man. Can you tell I have a profound mental block against everything having to do with the German language? The people here are all very polite and all seem to speak English, but the place lacks soul, for want of a better word.
Felix was an incredibly gracious and welcoming host. We took off on foot on a tour that began with lunch at a street market and didn't end until long after midnight when I, exhausted, took a taxi back to the townhouse and fell into my bed. I saw the outside of everything in Vienna. I'm so ignorant of the historical significance of everything I see and I so dislike Baroque style that much is lost on me. I am an idiot. But at mid-afternoon, at least, I was able to treat Felix to kaffée and Sachertorte at Hotel Sacher. I am so on a Third Man mission. Piano music trickled in from somewhere. Felix and I had a million great conversations as we strolled, but I am visually and mentally over-loaded now. I can't even recount all I saw. A pulpit with naturalistic busts in the cathedral. Horse-drawn fiacres. Brick streets. A Turkish pixie statue, the size of a child, with an earring and pointed slippers holding a cup of coffee on the second story of a building with a sign in gold numerals, 1886. A famous chocolate shop with exquisite, tiny paper boxes. Freud's home. The Art Nouveau apartments. Loos tailors' building. Punks. The scent of glue. An Italian church with ex-votos dating back to WWII: "He died for his country." Kaffee Central, the cathedral of coffee houses. A dozen Third Man settings which make visible the impossible, surreal geography of Vienna portrayed in the film. The spire of a cathedral lit up at night like the vertebrae of some fabulous slain dragon. Baroque fountains bathed in white lights. Theatres and opera houses, including the one where Alida Valli's character in The Third Man performed. The balcony where Hitler announced the Aunschlöss. I can't possibly remember it all.
Our academic program is quartered at a private palace, Palazzo Cabelli -- some Italian army officer built it and his great-great-great granddaughter still lives in one wing and rents out the rest to make her taxes and pay for its upkeep.
In the Schloss Schönbrunn we learned all about Franz Josef, Sisi, Napoleon II and his lark, Mozart's performances for Marie-Therese and little Marie-Antoinette and various anecdotes about tragic Rudolf and the murder-suicide at the hunting lodge at Mayerling, which has since been given over to nuns.
It's sad. All I know about Vienna is due entirely to the movie The Third Man. Hard to picture such a Baroque place bombed out and in rubble. There is a kind of radical hippie Green thing going on here now. It must be a city of profound contradictions, but I'm just not getting into the vibe of it. It's not my visual cup of tea. I can't figure out the layout and I don't much trust the U-bahn because I don't read German. I feel much more secure above ground, hoofing it. I doubt I will ever return again to Vienna. I'm not a Mozart freak, and it's just not very interesting to me here. But I do want to see the Secession House before I leave. That I am looking forward to!
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Another cold, windy, rainy day in Vienna. Yesterday Felix and I went to the Technisches Museum to see the train car of Sisi, an elegant, black train car, tricked out dark and Goth inside. And gramaphones, electric pianos, antique computers, turbines, glass and water calculators, glass eyes from Venice, a Parisian feathered fan like the one my mother inherited...
Then another long, philosophical conversation with Felix over a mélange and a marbled pastry that starts with the letter "E," named for Hayden's benefactor. These many long conversations with Felix have been nothing short of miracles in their leaps and sharings and imaginings and I will miss them when I leave Vienna. We had lunch today (white asparagus soup!) at a restaurant next door to the house where the poet Auden spent his final years. This now makes sense: the poem about Icarus falling and the Breughel painting. I had the best intentions of making it to the Secession House today but the dreary, cold rain and my clothes being all wrong make it too dismal. Maybe tomorrow the weather will ease up, and if it doesn't, I will just force myself to go, anyway. But no more churches! Basta!
My old shoulder injury hurts like a toothache in this cold damp.
Today in his class Felix played a video of The Magic Flute for his students. It occurs to me that The Magic Flute has been the leitmotif of this trip, just as images of Don Quixote were during my 1995 trip to Europe. I can picture my mother as a kind of Queen of the Night, and me as Pamina. Then I started thinking about my marriage to Mark and how it was a total misalliance, as absurd as a coupling between Papageno and Pamina. Our marriage didn't work because Mark needed his Papagena. But where is my Tamino?
After class I took the opportunity to explore the Pallazo Cabelli, which I had been dying to do. There is a grand ballroom, and all the many rooms are painted or papered in different colors and have their own fireplaces in differing styles. I examined all the unoccupied rooms at my leisure, without witnesses. I sniffed the air. I touched the window sills. I imagined.
I have now learned that Cabelli's descendant who lives here is an ancient, mean little woman. I hoped to catch a glimpse of her, and today I did. She wore a red loden coat, a red figured headscarf and sensible shoes -- a woman now in her eighties. She went out in the rain with her umbrella and little wheeled wire grocery cart. I wish she were simpatico because I would love to coax stories out of her about the palace. Imagine what she must know or remember from her childhood about how life was once lived in this space! There is a room on the second floor that must once have been a sun room or greenhouse room: it has illusionistic trellises painted on its walls and ceiling, and plants, all in light green. It's so hard for me as an American to grasp the fact that a building of this size and magnificence could once have been a private residence. It would be like living in an opera house to me.
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Last whirlwind tour of Vienna, still in the cold, miserable driving rain.
Yellow paint
Ceramic fireplaces, like huge tea pots
Crows cawing
Huge, nasty chocolate colored slugs in the garden
Kunsthistoriches Museum -- crashed in front of Caravaggio to rest feet
Antique store windows
Rabbis
Schubert's third story apartment
Schubert Winterreise and the hurdy-gurdy man
Knize perfumery, where Rudolf got his cologne
The Casanova Club from The Third Man
Art Nouveau restrooms
Mad dash for the Anker Clock at noon
Loos American Bar again beforehand
Secession Building finally
Mozart impersonators carrying their wigs in hat boxes on the U-bahn on their way to work
Dinner with Felix in a restaurant in a stone basement, like cloisters, supposedly a famous one -- delicious bread on a plank, boiled potatoes at bottom of salad
but I never got to go on the tour that would have taken me into the Vienna sewers, the Third Man zither theme ringing in my ears.
