After a year of silence, I finally heard from my friend Gustav Bauenstadt. I know he travels a lot and finds solace in isolation to write his music essays. But his recent vanishing struck me as odd. During the confinement, I invited him to an impromptu zoom meeting.
He looked radiant and dapper, as I know him, but he proceeded to tell me that he had had a very bad year. It all started with an aborted suicide attempt that led him to a two-week hospitalization in a psychic ward near Salzburg. (I suspected he is prone to depression, like most creative people.) After long therapy sessions and medication, Gustav recovered—slowly. Little by little he started writing again, taking walks along the nearby lake —a bit like his homophonic Gustav Mahler— and enjoying all his habitual pleasures.
I couldn’t be more happy, not only for having reconnected with him but knowing he is well and safe now. Living alone is not easy, specially when you are blue. Add a pandemic to it and the result could be catastrophic. I briefly thought —perhaps in a burst of selfishness while I was trying to adjust the volume during the zoom call— that if this happened to me, I have a wonderful husband to come home to, who would be supportive, protective, and forever loving. And a cuddly Calico cat that would welcome me after a hiatus in therapeutic limbo. Thankfully that thought left my head when Gustav shared with me some of the occupational therapy he had to undergo while in seclusion at the hospital: “Gestalt macramé,” he said in his sarcastic, accented English. I knew then, that he was back to normal.
—New York City, 4/14/2020
Illustration: Luis Pereyra, Le instante fatale…, 2007, crayon on paper. Rodriguez-Gibson Collection
* The title of the second song in Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (1908-09)