by Anna Vaught
We are listening in, poor sod. They’ve yet to bolt our doors. We have been so compliant, so ready to engage that there must have been some latitude for us, we think.
Says Nurse Archer: They are in their rooms, Doctor, and night medicines administered. Both seemed agitated; we have given extra, as per notes.
Dr Griffith finds he cannot concentrate, takes up his Bible. Remembers birds of childhood.
Let him see.
Remembers.
As a boy, turn of the century thereabouts, his father made him go to scripture memory competitions. Welsh Baptist family. Now his eyes are moist. Iesu Mawr! He was good at scripture. Father made him do it in English, but the boy’s Welsh was tidy, too.
Psalms.
Even the sparrow finds a home and the swallow a nest.
Proverbs.
Like a sparrow in its flitting, like a swallow in its flying, an undeserved curse goes nowhere.
Oh how he misses those days, in the green unconfined hills; and fishing in the Tywi. The Tawe, as his father taught him, poshing him up. One day that son would sedate an aristocrat, mind, and there’s posh.
Down the corridors of the asylum echoes a turbulent commotion and alarms fly. This was the bit the staff heard. With our song, we held a beautiful rebellion on the way to bed and we trilled, into the past, to Blanche and Bertha, to the present and to others and ourselves of the future: Women untie your voices—look up and out!
Then, our carers, some fine, some tardy or tristy, heard us. But oh, they’d missed the whispers, glissando of the winged helpers no louder than a heartbeat through a greatcoat; rustles of paper and scratches of soft pencil. A tremendous thing. Nothing could stop it now.
That night Violet whispered to me, before they locked the doors and mopped us down with sedatives, hypnotics and the like—and she said: You’ve got a hell of a story to get down tomorrow, dear girl. Clarify your thought as best you can. Get some rest.
And I suppose I need to remind you, reader, of something because you might, depending on your provenance, ask whether what happens next really does happen. What, even, of some of the previous? True? Did you too feel your cheek caressed by the wings of birds when it was our bedtime? You are going, I think, to be asking a how. Well, we are not time travellers and this is not science fiction. Violet is not the author of The Chrysalids or Earthlight—and in case you are wondering, these are titles from last year, 1955, sitting dusty in a corner of the day room here. We both glanced at them, Violet spat them out. No, as I was saying. How does it happen? Well remember what I had written down earlier. That Violet 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, says she can drum up these women. She’s researched; she’s rehearsed. Voices of mad women junked up to dance for men at the Salpêtrière in Paris. Humiliated in myriad ways. And there’s your answer. She’s had time, and her desire to remember lost women and to have an adventure are urgent; so too her wish to help me. And whatever adventure she has, whatever she says, I, my dears, will be entering fully into it too.
I have made a decision. I am going to aid and abet and I cannot wait!
Only this. If I ask you whether any of this really happened, later on, I mean, I don’t want you to be sure and, reader, I want your answer to rest on a generous ambiguity. Because I’d argue that life—and sanity—do, too.
4
We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken and we have escaped!
Psalm 124.
This is the story of the robin.
Violet pictured her in this way. Plump, inquisitive little bird. Yes, it is Blanche’s story; she was a hysteric, Violet told me, at the enormous hospital in Paris, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Blanche, Violet says, was born eighteen years, or thereabouts, before her; she died when I, Lucia, was six. I wonder if, as I grew and knew Paris, I had heard of her. Did I even see her? Because of the muddling things that have happened to me, there are memories which erupt and in which I swim, but of their veracity I cannot always be sure, though I’ve come to wonder if that matters so much. You know—that empirical truth. Yes, Blanche. Sometimes, it may have been that she lived, died or was buried not far away from us, the Joyces, in Paris, when we were there. She was famous, too, as a sort of glamorous defective. Violet said it made her mad as hell, the way Blanche got painted: blouse glossy and voluminous, like a gorgeous thing, but that she’d set this to rights so we could hear her voice too. And I remembered: somewhere in Paris I saw a little copy of this painting of this fine woman, Blanche, on display, and even then I understood, in myself, the anger that would be nursed by Violet. There she was, so pretty, buxom and velveteen, not all skew-eyed and jutting jaw like me. But she was not free: she was a subject and she was an object.
These memories. They tugged at me as Violet began to tell me Blanche’s story, as she understood it. And I began to write it all down as Violet spoke. I could not believe what came out of her mouth, how full and real a story—but, like I said, those who are confined have the best imaginations. Thus it was as if Blanche were suddenly vibrantly in the room and Violet, auteur, began the story of The Queen of the Hysterics. Someone else to take on this adventure that Violet had conceived. Someone to save and liberate.
The Salpêtrière
Paris,
1887.
Here I am! exhales Blanche.
Oh, I should add that Blanche speaks in French, so this is the translation. I speak all kinds from my raggedy exotic childhood. It was that exotic, sometimes we sat round a big pot gnawing on chicken bones, like savages, in a borrowed apartment, on borrowed time, and on raggedy hessian lay. Violet’s French is good, too, but it’s a little too polished, too small a vernacular, so I’ve done my best, with a plain speaking miraculous girl. I’ve helped Violet along.
And Violet speaks, in French, as Blanche, for Blanche, and it is irresistible:
When I was a child I heard a story about Cock Robin. A song, or a poem? It frightened me. Stuck and echoed. It was creepy and dark, but it had a sort of order and even then I sensed it was important to me, but how I could not express. I loved little birds, songbirds. And I remembered it, the whole thing.
Who killed Cock Robin?
I, said the Sparrow, with my bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin.
Who saw him die?
I, said the Fly, with my little eye!
It goes on, this strange ditty. Sometimes I wish I could not remember it, but you see my days, when I am not required to perform, are filled with a head world. Memories; snatches of song and poem.
Who’ll dig his grave?
I, said the Owl, with my little trowel,
I’ll dig his grave.
Who’ll be the parson?
I, said the Rook, with my little book.
Who would mourn for me and where should I be buried? I’ll not have a stone, with a carving. Women like me, well, we don’t, do we?
Who’ll carry the coffin?
I, said the Kite, if it’s not through the night,
I’ll carry the coffin.
Was it made by my mad father? Out in his workshop, he turned them out and, when he was drunk and his loathing for me too great, he’d bang me up in one. Only coffin I’ll ever have! Women like us, now we have our brains examined downstairs, sliced and diced. To see what stains insanity and in particular hysteria has planted on this miraculous organ. Once we are dead I mean! Ha! Then off we go in the wagon and into the communal pit. That’s what I heard. But this odd little story.
All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,
when they heard the bell toll for poor Cock Robin.
Yes, I’d like to think I’d be mourned
and that a song thrush would sing for me.
Do you know that there is a different ending, yes? The sparrow who killed Cock Robin is hanged for what he has done. A sparrow is a pretty round bird, stripe and mottles, but here a villain and he is not ashamed and the birds of the air, they see him kill and yet he is not ashamed. Justice is done and not; it is not pretty. Sometimes, at night, I would cry for both the birds. For the dead bird and for the monster who was not sorry. And, I suppose, for all the dead and wasted. For the eight thousand femmes en colère at the Salpêtrière hospital.
Sometimes I thought too long and hard and I woke, eyes wet, into the cruel draught at the window, above the furriers where I worked, and I knew I had been dreaming about my family, long gone; my father, at the asylum, held and stilled into the night. I did not yet know what was to come, what brutality.
You know, he was a showman in a dark felt coat. He loved to drip with acclaim; it wasn’t all for the ready health of our minds when he said: Come in, come in!
He was Charcot. One of the world’s greatest doctors. I hear them talk. A neurologist who mapped a continent; a stubborn observer of the brains in the corpses downstairs, too. But I hear them say he doesn’t always find what he is looking for.
They said, the whispering spectators, that my breast was milk white when my loose shirts fetched up and I fell, under his power as he compressed and spoke of what I suffered. But I was not his lover. That was whispered alright, but I am no-one’s lover. I have given too much already and there is no more. Not yet.
And Charcot, pacing the floor for pitch and build-up, slows to a halt and begins to declaim:
This, ladies and gentleman, is hysteria.
This is Blanche, a willing subject for you today!
She has fallen under the hypnotism and you see, ladies and gentleman, what I see, but not so much, not so much: so let me explain. She cannot tell her story, so let me, as I teach and as you learn. It is a marvel. Attend!
Monsieur Brouillet came to paint me; I was quite the thing against the stygian black of the doctors, don’t you think? The tendrils of my hair escaping down my neck. I had poise and gravitas in the picture. Brouillet did not paint the days I crawled and slavered like a dog from la grande hystérie, although, somewhere in Charcot’s offices, there are thick folders of photographs of the others; of us: prone; upright; startled; reclining: teeth bared; down, girl. His, his spectators: come the night, to their salon they went: artists, doctors, le tout Paris, and back I went: locked up, of course. In my imagination, though, I flew, sang like a nightingale and my song flew out from the window, jug jug. In society, though: absinthe, done prettily, that is, and lovely crystal; the tinkling piano, and the sweet savoury smell of pâté and pes.
Here, stew. Boiled to destruction. And grey blankets, boiled up. For the lice—because we were legion.
There were other women, but I was the best. Marie, I was the queen of the hysterics, except, of course, he made my name Blanche and I was milky white, my breast milky white, as I said, as he compressed and as he showed me to his distinguished guests. He hypnotised me; these moments I don’t remember, but it is said I was a fine thing. I must be fair: people wanted to know, did they not? Interest was high and he sought to teach. Galen; Hippocrates, the Greeks saw hysteria in women and thus was born the wandering womb, cause of hysteria.
Aretaeus, he wrote on the subject: I learned about it, though I could not read, because here in the hospital, beside the whores and the beggars, there were clever women, who knew about all science, about books and journals. Clever women who had been forbidden by their men from knowing about all kinds, so why do you suppose they were here? I should add that there were also clever whores and clever beggars! But as I was saying, I learned about Aretaeus because I was trying to understand what he, Charcot, had read, so: In the middle of the flanks of women lies the womb, a female viscus, closely resembling an animal; for it is moved of itself hither and thither in the flanks, also upwards in a direct line to below the cartilage of the thorax, and also obliquely to the right or to the left, either to the liver or the spleen, and it likewise is subject to prolapsus downwards, and in a word, it is altogether erratic. It delights also in fragrant smells, and advances towards them; and it has an aversion to foetid smells, and flees from them; and, on the whole, the womb is like an animal within an animal.
And what do you think about all that?
Dear Charcot, do you know, Charcot, do you know know—no? I knew about the bodies and brains, downstairs. He would look and look to see what he could find, what illness there. If not a wandering womb, if not now days of Galen’s humours all awry, what then? Such skill in pathology and all he had to do was wait. Not that we died from madness; it’s just they, his women, eight thousand, never left, gasped their last in the sallow corridors of this place. He thought we might be cured; those who could dance, under his magic, showman. He was dedicated; I think that he was kind. Famous neurologist, he could have gone anywhere. Instead, he stayed here, on and on, watched and watching: Freud, he came, the young Janet: I watched them all. And le tout Paris, just to see the show. Hysteria grew and grew, under his hands. Do you suppose that he had created it? I worry that I helped. Made madness into a show and circus or made hysteria become, forgive me, more hysterical. When he died, it stopped because I did not think of it anymore and, obviously, neither did he.
I came to the Salpêtrière as a nurse and my life had been hard. I had seen madness cage up my father and then he saw me not. Mother was gone. My siblings, too. The world pressed in on me and language failed and when I tried, it flooded out in jags and rags and it was no good and it hurt: I stopped talking. Outside my window, I saw the songbirds skittering against the jalousies and a whisper from the future said Fly!
Then. One morning, as I woke, I was cold and hard in bed. I often cried, as I said, into the cold night of my room. This time it was different. I felt palsy in my face; what smile I tried to make at the new day, it fought with me and my lip quivered and dropped pathetically. I felt the slobber on my pillow and I was ashamed, though there was no-one to see. And sometimes they saw me rotten and convulsed. I don’t remember how, each time, it started, but I would wake, I thought, in a road, on a grey pavement, sometimes streaked with blood, and they said, she is mad, she is mad. But all I felt was this: the great granite block of sadness and it would not, before I woke, before I slept, ever dislodge. And Charcot saw me in a new way and he took notice of me and I was changed and I was patient not nurse, this time, and so it began.
Charcot. One of the most famous doctors in the world and he could look at you alive or dead; he had the skills of intricacy. Downstairs, he would look at the brains of those who had died mad, seeking the signs of damage caused by the hysteric’s excess of imagination. It was said that he did not find what he was looking for. The ischaemic (I heard him use that word: it was quite new, apparently) jags and lines of ageing and of a life ill-lived, perhaps, but nothing more. Yet still he was convinced. For such maladies, for the hysterics, he would and must find an organic cause. He would. Neurology: such detail—and he swam in its glory and down its pathways; he thought hysteria had a logic of the body.
Hmmm.
I don’t recall that he studied it in men, did he? I saw no scabrous man swoon and fall to the floor in the hospital salon. No loon was jabbed or pressed there and I don’t think he imported any males for, you know, the downstairs room where he was, so I overheard, to look for lesions on their dead but once-overheated brains!
Oh, Monsieur had poise and beauty in his beautiful embroidered felt coat. In my head, my father would say, Oh Monsieur Charcot, he is so clever and so elegant! His demonstrations are the talk of Paris!—as if we were part of any society that mattered—but Father, he... Father was elsewhere. I do not know how they held him, at his worst, in his madness, and I did not see. Still it was torture to me. He was not a good man, as such, but I was not without feelings for him, so
I would wake in the hospital and wonder where he was confined: if he were dead, or alive, but in a living death in an asylum. At ours, the Salpêtrière, Charcot noticed me; in my world, things changed: I made the road from nurse to patient. Then, I was interesting; I inhaled, he pressed magnets upon me, compressed on my ovaries and it was not delicate and then the hypnosis. And oh! I was good. I was spectacular, in fact. Madness can be so tender, the erotic tempting you to look, when your sense of shame, your tidy sense of decorum says, no: you should not.
You have seen the Brouillet painting of me, as I fall back, louche and beautiful? There were doctors there, as perhaps you realised? Students, but also the great and good of Paris society and, after I had performed, a party at his house. Piano; crème de menthe; a world I did not know but which I scented.
What did I know, and what had I known? I wonder if, in years to come, ideas and imaginings will be written down as facts and what I did not intend or become will be transfigured into untruth. That could happen to someone like me. I think this: I am unknown and yet, I am painted and seen and exhibited to many, many. Charcot’s lover! Look how she responds to his touch and his press upon her. I was special, you see. I knew about Augustine, Queen of the Hysterics before me. Some said she could see only in black and white; this was her curious affliction and her histrionics were exceptional. There were whispers that she was his favourite, or his lover, but only that. Whispers went all day and all night! And as for black and white, well now, that I had seen, from time to time, because sometimes all the colour was drained from the world for I was alone, though observed. And if Augustine were here, if she had not gone out, escaped as she did in the garb of a man, I think she would understand me.
When I was a little girl, and Father was mad, he would take me to his workshop where he made the coffins and he would shut me up in one to punish me and I would hear him laugh and cry and beat his head. Then it was black, inside. Like death, as you would expect; Father did not use thin splints but only made the best because he had standards. And when I came out, breathless, soiled, the light was white and nothing else. Upstairs was Mother, nervous attack, not interceding; we were nine, then we were four, consumptive, dirty, but survived. I was the eldest, sometimes their mother. Too much. When he raged, Father put me in the coffin again: I saw in black and white, like Augustine, and I felt that everything I had ever held in my hand fell down. For whom could I care, and who would protect me? I broke, I think, I broke: and Charcot: he was not a bad man. People whispered, from outside, tens of thousands maybe, that it was show and mimicry—but he believed. He just had not found the cause. I think.
