Carl von Cosel the greatest love song Tom Waits never wrote - Far Out Magazine

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Carl von Cosel’s corpse and the greatest love song Tom Waits never wrote

(Credits: Far Out / J.B. Mondino)

Tue 26 December 2023 23:00, UK

Certain artists have an uncanny knack for creating a realm of their own, a cultural cranny feted with their distinct miasma. They say God created the universe in seven days. Well, it only took Tom Waits three years to arrive at Closing Time, and he had to sweep sick off the floor in The Troubadour as he went along trying to get signed. And you’d have to say that bar the Amalfi coast and a few other pristine spots, Waits’ world eclipses the Almighty’s.

Waits’ music is an Edward Hopper painting with a quirky backstory. Like a news reporter gone AWOL long ago in the peripheries of our crooked civility, he scurries about making notes, then pops the pad back in his trilby and scribbles down the page nine stories later that night, a few more sheets than three to the wind. From ‘Alice’, the tale of a man so besotted he skates his lover’s name into a frozen lake endlessly until it cracks and the hapless hero plunges to an icy death, to ‘Underground’, the story of a grovelling man who has alarmingly discovered a subterranean village, Waits has weaved many Grimm tales into song.

Thus, I am forever coming across stories from the real page nines of reality that seem perfect for him to immortalise in his waltzing melodies. None more so than the grisly tale of Carl von Cosel. In his childhood, the young German would be visited by a dead ancestor who bestowed upon him a picture of his one true love. She was beautiful—they always are. Since the dawn of romanticism – a literary revolution where poets were suddenly able to travel further than their steed could take them thanks to new-fangled steam engines – people haven’t been content with falling for unremarkable Bob from down the road or Claire in the Chippy. But Cosel’s is no Disney tale.

Naturally, one day in his lonely adulthood, after moving to Florida in the 1930s, he sees the very face his premonition presented all those years ago. Unfortunately, this is while he’s working as a doctor, and Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos is entering the hospital to be treated for tuberculosis. This was long before streptomycin was developed in 1943, and the mortality rate for the disease was damning. At this stage of the song, Waits may well toss in a trademark dissonant note of despair.

Unperturbed, the German doctor knew how to save his belle. Via a hitherto unknown procedure, grounded by a total of zero hours of research, and contrary to his rational mind, he would construct his own X-ray machine in her home, then adorn her with jewels, and though a combination of love and intermittent bursts of unregimented electromagnetic radiation, he would heal her.

She died soon after. It’s a punchline Waits would deliver well. But like all classic tracks from the troubadour, there’s a quirky postscript that subverts any platitudes about love and loss. At this stage, the distraught 50-odd-year-old doctor makes a death mask of the 22-year-old cadaver and pays for the funeral, burying his imagined bride in an above-ground mausoleum. The coffin itself has a container of formaldehyde to prevent decay. Two years later, this desire for preservation becomes clear as he rocks up to the grave site with a toy wagon, cracks open the mausoleum, rushes Elena home, and then makes her into a cadaverous marionette using piano wire when he gets there.

This medical physician, no less, a man sworn to the greatest professional responsibility of all, lives and sleeps with his macabre creation for seven years. It’s not quite an ode of undying love like ‘Martha’, but his endless perfume purchases, the suspicion surrounding his sudden reluctance to visit her grave, and the rather one-sided waltz a young boy witnesses between Cosel and a very pale woman through his window deserves to be somewhere in Waits’ discography.

Especially when Cosel’s debacle nearly approaches the final upswelling verse, the ones Waits likes to present with a flourishing key change. The sister of the deceased decides to investigate the rumours she has heard and storms to his house, where Cosel casually presents her with what remains of her sister. In the ensuing investigation, he is charged with desecrating her grave and nothing more. In fact, he’s so buoyed by the sympathy he receives from the public and the powers that be that he actually has the gall to ask for her corpse back.

The authorities think better of it, and in true Waits style, there is one final postscript that turns the tale from the surreal to the rather inexplicable. Whether peeved by the fact she has now been buried in a secret location unbeknownst to the medically sane doctor or because he’s already been charged for the crime anyway, he decides to bomb her previous grave. Then, the story fizzles out.

But during his enchanting live concerts, Waits could grumble in his storytelling manner, the postscript: 12 years of nothing much would follow for the demented doctor. Until a smell from his apartment signified his own end. When the authorities entered to take his corpse away, they found an effigy of Elena sitting opposite the deceased physician, with his final diary entry open nearby: “Human jealousy has robbed me of the body of my Elena, yet divine happiness is flowing through me for she has survived death. Forever and ever, she is with me.”

In true Waits fashion, the track espousing this macabre tale would likely only be titled ‘Elena’, and he would sing over broken piano strings and some fitting Oom-pah folk:

“Human jealousy has robbed me of the body Elena,
With wanton hands the authorities have slain her,
But it’s nothing a death mask and undying love can’t fix,
I’ll clasp what remains like a nun with a crucifix,
Then with tears in my eyes I’ll build me a bomb,
And show the bastards what grave desecration can truly be done.”

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