by Anna Vaught
Oh yes: that lottiest daughterpearl. She was me. Then and now.
Did you guess, oh did you now? I am one Miss Lucia Joyce, unmarried, once engaged, big barney with Mother, name of Nora Barnacle (hereafter, ‘the barnacle’—lower case for disrespect; she was dried up as a nun’s tit—and the old crustacean never came to see me at any of my establishments, you know) and brother Giorgio; spat brewing with my nephew, the executor of the Joyce estate, if I ever get out of here. Violet says she’s heard that, for whatever reasons (Shame, dear!) my letters have been immolated (not burned: she loves the old words and I say she’s a fine one to say that my daddy was ever wordy). She says I’ve been immolated, too. She’s mad as hell for that, she tells me. Some fellows are not gentlemanly like us, she tells me.
Violet keeps herself to herself, mostly. She’s the Honourable and has never dropped the title. She reads all the time: books, papers, journals, pamphlets. This is not a house of intellect, you know. But with her, as long as she’s quiet, they let her off the wretched jigsaws and she reads while the old biddies dribble over a picturesque cardboard scene. Of Gibraltar. Or Barmouth. Place called Rhyl, which looks like death to me. So, she’s made her own house of intellect, God love her. Oh, my father would have loved her. Sam Beckett would have said she was arresting, perhaps put her in a play.
This place. It’s a stately home for loonies who can pay, but it’s also the ditch in Waiting for Godot, she says. And a bloody awful play, too, though he must be an interesting boy, your Sam, so I can kind of see how you could, little Syracusa, God love you.
Violet reads her religious texts, scripture, about painting and prayer. She’s devout. I’d like to be, I think. She wants me to be; tells me so. Violet is a good girl and a cunning one, who knows the moods of this place, so, when she’s been able, she sneaks to my room or whispers at the walls, the sour old door. I hate it. The door, not her. Oh God and the snotgreen sea, she tells of such things and people: mad women of the past. Talks about them as if she knows them and says she can, through thirty years of rattling through her tale and their tale and reading about them—I told you: she reads everything!—well, she can drum up these women. Voices of mad women, junked up to dance for men at the Salpêtrière in Paris or coin a talking cure under a pseudonym. Charcot, Breuer and Freud. Their subjects, the eight thousand harpies in Paris; the woman with snakes for hair when she was mad; the dog barker; sea-shanty-with-a-bottle-of-rum girl. Hysterics they were called. Blanche Wittmann and Anna O.
Oh dear little Lucy Light, she says, mocking a baby voice, pulling me or someone like me out from Finnegans Wake (such cheek! The barnacle might have called her a bog mutten). I believe you need to meet these women somehow. And, dear girl, you and I have work to do.
Now, don’t you wonder what she means, cuckoo old bird? Ha!
She goes on: Do you have a lovely pen for notes, and reams of paper?
I feel like I am entering into something with her and it is... thrilling. But should I be unnerved? She did, after all, learn to use a revolver. She shot Mussolini. In her prison, in Rome, Lady Gibson would not use a chamber pot while a guard was looking. Oh no no no. So she threw it at him. Injured him gravely. I heard she lunged at a maid, back in Mayfair posh of her younger years—and with a knife too, her Bible left open on the sacrifice of Isaac for days. Mad and bad? Here, she went for old Miss Drool (don’t know her real name; the drool put me off an introduction) with a mop. Right on the head. Why did she do such a thing, she was asked. Because, (set this down someone) a gentleman does not strike below the waist. Blank looks and only confusion from Dr Griffith. One said: Ah, she’s mad, mad; doesn’t know a dachshund from a doily.
No, thought I. They are wrong.
She knows exactly what is happening. Her imagination is diamond brilliant and Holy Mary, that was just a joke. That’s why she laughed.
Because she made a joke.
When we are walled up, forced to knit a monotone blanket when we would chart a blowsy, expensive galleon across the Irish Sea and back again before dinner, then look what happens! We will come to this again. And to Miss Lucia Joyce. And others. I feel it and she makes me know it.
I don’t think Violet will last much longer, but how glad I am that we have this time. She’s been here nearly thirty years; just a few for me, although I can tell you I’ve done the rounds. And you’ll see. I’ll walk you through the drugs and confinements. Straitjackets.
For now, picture a small gravelled corner and an old lady thinking hard. She’d stood out there, still hours, for many days, being a good girl.
Violet Gibson, the Honourable, the mad. She’s been walled up. It’s what you do for those with delusions of grandeur, who have assumed holy insight (which adds up to psychosis), bashing a prison warder over the head with a chamber pot and a dear old crazy with a mop; lunging with a knife, a flower press, whatever weaponry is to hand! She’s a frigid; she’s a clever; a rustling old bird; capable of absconding, self-harm, homicide and jokes at the wrong juncture.
Can’t tell a hawk from a handsaw, probably.
That’s what they say.
They’re wrong.
3
You’ll want to know why she did it. Why she shot. You’ll need a proper story arc, won’t you now? In our talks, this is what I learned.
Violet believed Mussolini was a monster and that others would continue to be fooled by him. Wasn’t she right? I might argue that if she’d managed the final shot, in Rome 1926, then the world might never have known what he’d got up to; his crimes, at that point, were not beheld by statesmen. He was yet to be revealed for what he was; Churchill yet to change his mind; the mob yet to run on him. Don’t you think that would be self-sacrifice of the highest order on her part? She’d kill him and the horrors he had made might not be known, while she’d just be a locked-up mental case.
Violet thought that there was a place for a lawful, just killing and that she would, in her Christian faith, martyr herself. She recounted this to me: Psalms 55: 23. But thou, O God, shalt bring them down into the pit of destruction: bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days; but I shall trust in thee. And I, my dear, shall help.
And the evidence was there, if only they had looked. Violet had written in her notebook during her time in the Regina Coeli prison, Rome, awaiting trial, that she had been following God’s orders; that she was compelled to do what she did. Taunted by another inmate in the prison—Viva Mussolini ha ha ha!—scraps of paper pushed under her door or waved under her nose—Violet attacked, pushed beyond bounds, giving her victim, one Ida Ciccolini, a trip to the infirmary with concussion following a lunge with the flower pressing equipment they’d been using.
No, she told me: It was against the will of God that Mussolini should continue to exist!
The lunge with the flower press at poor old Ida (Not so! said Violet: She was what they call in Italy a cagne intrigante; a scheming bitch who nonetheless played nicely for the guards, while my crime took on the gloss of madness!) did not serve her well. Meanwhile, she told me, Austen Chamberlain continued to praise the monster.
Violet said: Can you imagine, my Lucy Light? Oh, he was the saviour of Italy. I heard that when Lady Chamberlain accompanied her husband to sojourns with the monster she wore her fascist brooch on her summer-weight cloche hat, or on the fox fur collar she added in winter. And news greeted me that Ronald Graham, our ambassador, merrily called me a lunatic in his special audiences with Mussolini; saying, moreover, that himself was too great, too fine a man to countenance violence or ill treatment of me. Ha! Did they not know of clubs and ditches and the brutal fascist boot in the face? Who was mad here? But I must say I was not entirely innocent: I hammed it up, now and then, the insanity. It was a form of righteous power. I’d been too long a prisoner!
It was disturbing to hear—of course, of course—but I understood rage and also that Violet had purpose with some logic and grace, if o
nly they had listened.
Her world, also, was grown dark. Father dead after a slip in the park, a bang on the head: such a dull way to go for an eminent man. Mother too; Violet’s fiancé, unnamed, hidden and gone: the nurses themselves whispered about this. I heard them, for she was a favourite of theirs. They said her illness and the shots were connected to disappointments in love: the most painful kinds of lovers’ tiffs. These things had made her reckless, they thought; she was animated by pain as well as zeal. In the first part of 1926, she had an aim in sight but if it killed her, then so be it. Nurse Archer, from County Roscommon. And her two sisters. Yes, Violet was a great favourite of theirs. I heard that too.
All of this, what I thought, the whispers of the nurses, and Violet’s own accounts, we spoke of.
Yes, said Violet when we talked it out: A fair summation. Also, somebody had to kill Mussolini and I got closer than anyone else, don’t you think?
As she has commented, who was certifiable here? Why did they consider her mad, and not him? Oh, poor lonely Lady Gibson.
So, I had begun to tell you about the birds. There was a little place in the grounds at St Andrew’s which she had made her own. Looking outward, she’d be jostling her fingers gently to make the little birds come. Her passerines recognised her immediately and alighted. She would go there, twice a day, little pouches on her clothes filled with crumbs and some bird seed Dr Griffith procured for her. He’d said procured as if it were Beluga or opium, off the medical record. These fellows! Do they think they are indispensable?
At night, she told me, she reached and reached until she saw the swallows of summer and in the swallow, she told me, there is such magic. I didn’t understand that, at first.
The little corner that Violet monopolised was just in front of the main hospital building, on the gravelled drive but in sight of verdant tree, grass and bush, and Violet would stand there, stock still, for a long time. Of course, they had had to observe her, but in this time she remained trouble free, though mute, or sometimes mumbling (or so it seemed to an inattentive observer) and distant, seemingly locked into her faraway land. Or perhaps still, in her sorry state, contemplating how she was part of history: the woman who failed to kill herself, for sure, but also Mussolini. Locked away, unjustly, so she thought, poor old crone.
I would listen to her mutterings, and scribe best I could, and they were fascinating. And the point was, they weren’t the mutterings of a crack-brain. She was telling a story and coming to terms, in her last days. And I do think, looking back, that being outside freed her, though she was never not captive.
Thus it went, from Violet:
A woman! Fancy, a woman! were Il Duce’s words on understanding who shot him. The Fascist magazine L’Assalto—a dirty rag; I would not dignify its name with anything else!— mocked such creatures: women of the third sex. Old repulsive women… How dare they? They do not know what we suffer and how we are scorned!
That rag, raged Violet, muttering privately to herself (well, I was there, I was there! She’d invited me as witness). Its own filthy words I wanted to wipe off the face of the earth in one skirmish. Ah! Women like me! Horrid; a pollution; damaging menfolk, the beauty of Italian skies, our fathers: ugly women, like suffragettes or Sinn-Feiners; dirty nihilists who might come from Russia or Ireland. Who would want women such as these? What could these women know?
I knew men—Lucia, dear girl, are you listening and scribing? You did too: I know it!—the touch on my skin and a camellia at dusk; once, jasmine and something lingering, something so fine. I have known eyes and sighs and tears and love in darkened rooms on damask. It was my fiancé and I can never tell. Mother never knew, nor my sister Constance, brothers Willie and poor, poor Victor. An artist: not like Fra Angelico, no: bold and modern like the man who painted us: Violet—I; me: us—sisters—on the boat on a lake in Compiègne, Willie’s house in France: Roy de Maistre: that was him. My brother Willie’s painter guest, bold-splashed like Gauguin in Tahiti. And as for my own poor dead artist boy: I cannot say his name, but at night I consider his bold lines of charcoal at dawn; the things he could do. Oils on canvas, but where are they now? And maybe his colours were one with the saints: green, gold, pomegranate, that salmon pink which is flushed love and devotion. Oh, I have known love.
Decent love. As delicate as the linnet’s wings at dusk.
Mussolini said to Clara Petacci—and I hate him still, bold monster—he said, Oh Clara, your kisses stun me and kill me! in dull amatory cant. Ugh! And she writing to him as a fourteen-year-old girl, back then, Lungo Tevere Cenci, Rome, 1926, just after I shot him and when I was making history: Oh Duce, I offer my life to you! My beautiful, glistening Duce! She said I was a wicked soul, my crone hands trying to take a beautiful destiny from a glittering Italy. But oh: glittering, indeed. Strung up with him, dead meat, on the scaffolding at the Esso station and nothing glittered, nothing was beautiful then. Dirty, not decent.
And Violet raged on. I mean, she’s hard work to listen to, but she’s captivating, don’t you think? Sam Beckett might have been proud of what she said next: Mad. Wholly? Mad but north north-west. Am I? Knowing the difference between a hawk and a handsaw. Or not knowing it at all? Or not mad at all?
It was here that the old girl took a breath.
But no-one hears Violet, do they? Her soul rumbles on.
Mussolini was untroubled by such. I think, and Violet agrees, that he was all appetite and want. A hawk looking, always, for his dinner.
Sotto voce, Violet. But you know, at least, that I was noting.
She is a consumer of books, magazines, whispered stories and conversation; always has been, will be to her dying day. Perennially far more aware than her captors of current affairs. Do they know this, those who care for her?
Her sister, Constance, came last year and it was a good visit, Constance told the staff. She brought with her a story book from childhood, with Violet‘s name in it, which Mother used to read to her daughter, to all her daughters, at their house on Merrion Square in Dublin, sometimes on their carriage rides along the lanes of Dalkey, where Violet remembered a patch of damp moss, a dropping briar, and that once a dormouse peeped from a hole in the lovely high walls; sometimes at the summer estate her father, Lord Ashbourne, had taken at Boulogne-Sur-Mer. Violet loved it, the story book, and dear Constance remembered. Fairy stories of Hans Christian Andersen and, in particular, The Nightingale, oh, sweet, serene, enchanted passerine.
Violet is thinking about The Nightingale now. She remembers it, word for word, and now mouths its ending as the emperor promises to break the artificial bird into a thousand pieces and cries to the real bird: You shall sing whenever you like!
I know it too, from Daddy when he read; from the barnacle, too. I read it to Giorgio when we were little, in a different country—and I don’t just mean the past or, you know, beyond our prison. Let me continue. Here’s Violet, again, as I note her, telling the story of this sweet bird, consoling the emperor: I will sing to cheer you and to make you thoughtful too; I will sing to you of the happy ones, and of those that suffer too. I will sing about the good and the evil, which are kept hidden from you. One thing I ask you. Tell no-one that you have a little bird who tells you everything; it will be better so.
Then the nightingale flew away.
And:
Good morning little birds, says Violet now.
Still and for a long time, hands outstretched against the rime and the cold breeze; an azure morning: the birds come to her. So still.
He, Dr Griffith, remarks (I am still listening in!) that days ago, when she came in from the cold, she said this. She said, The passerines, Dr Griffith, just so, hollow-eyed but clear, like a sage, like she is. And he had thought, I bet, That is a beautiful word. I saw the look in his eyes. Then he said (they think I’ve gone to dust, but oh no, I get about and listen in) Nurse Archer, you were aware of her letters to her sister in law, Marianne?
Lady Gibson wished her to contact the Home Secretary and petition for release.
And?
Well, and nothing. Marianne had not forgiven her for past wrong—and of course she’s a source of shame and embarrassment to the family—so her letters were forwarded to Constance and now they are in the filing cabinet here, should you wish to look more. The Home Secretary was never told. Lady Gibson was clever and included the photographs we took of her with the birds; to prove her sanity and that she is peaceful, I should think. I doubt she realises, though, that she has been thwarted. That none of her campaign or request letters got out. I think she has given up trying to escape and of course she’s been ill for some time. I thought she was going at several points, so it is as if she has a last lease on life here. She insisted on going outside to feed them again and we let her, though she is still very frail.
That was kind of you, Doctor. Poor old thing.
But Dr Griffith, though convinced of the need, always, for Violet to be detained here, though sure of his work and of her delusions, is purpled under his eyes because the case of this murderous aristocrat troubles him. Of that I am sure. And now he says to Nurse Archer, She reminds me of someone. She is exalted; her pose is like that of Giotto’s St Francis. Do you know this work? And I think she speaks to those little creatures, tells them stories. She is feeding the birds with her words; English countryside become the Predella at Pisa. Poor withered old thing.
And Nurse Archer says to him, Yes, I do know the work, Doctor. Ah, but Napoleon looted that, the Predella, didn’t he? My dear man, (they have been friends and confidantes a long time, so such is their relative informality) it has been in the Louvre since 1813. Not in its home—displaced, like poor old Lady Gibson.
