by Morris West
“Oh yes. I always say the same thing: Thanks and, with a thousand regrets, goodbye.”
“That must really bring tears to their eyes.”
“No.” He laughed and waved a croissant at me. “But it leaves the situation fluid. One doesn’t make an enemy. One may be lucky enough to keep a friend for a cold winter night.”
I didn’t want to keep my girl-woman. I withdrew without waking her and left money on the pillow. I crept out into the grey of the false dawn and hailed a fiacre to drive me back to the pension. The driver was surly, the horse too spavined to raise a trot; but over the slow clip-clop of his hooves on the cobbles, I could hear Lily singing the bedtime song of my childhood.
Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross
To see a fine lady upon a white horse,
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes
She shall have music wherever she goes.
JUNG
Zurich
I am committed now to a voyage more dangerous than any made by the ancient navigators – a voyage to the centre of myself. I must discover who I am, why I am. I must make terms with the daimon who lives inside my skin. I must reason with my father, long dead, about the God he preached and I rejected. I must talk with my mother, gone too, whom I never learned to love. I must encounter the man who raped me when I was a boy and the dark gods who haunt my adult dreams. I must cut the cords that bind me to Freud and that, believe me, is no easy bill of divorcement! I must push out from the last known shore into the wild ocean of my own subconscious.
There is a terror in this. I wrestle with it in the small dark hours after midnight. I am like a mariner staring at an ancient map where, just beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the cartographer has drawn terrible fire-breathing beasts and the legend: “Sailor, beware! Here be monsters and the edge of the world.” I am familiar with monsters. I have dreamed a whole menagerie of them: the giant one-eyed phallus in the cave, the dove that speaks with a human voice, the living corpses of Alyscamps, the black scarab and the rocks that spurt blood! One or another of these beauties always keeps watch by my pillow.
I reach out in the dark to touch Emma, draw her close to me for comfort and reassurance. She gives a little moan of displeasure and rolls away from me, clasping her hand over her pubis. This defensive gesture angers me. I have never forced myself upon her. I understand that, two months pregnant, she may be disinclined for sex; but she does not know how solitary I feel in this marriage bed, how naked to all my ghostly enemies. If I had not Toni in my life at this moment I might well be reduced to impotence.
Of course there is more involved than a seasonal aversion to sex. Emma has always been somewhat auto-erotic. Indeed she confessed as much to Freud in her last correspondence with him. So, she has less physical need of me than I of her. My illness has changed me and changed my role in the family. I have become a liability and not an asset. I am no longer working at the clinic. I have given up lecturing, because I cannot concentrate on the simplest text. My list of private patients is pitifully small. I am no longer the breadwinner and we are subsisting on Emma’s inheritance. She has become “matrona victrix”, the victorious matron, secure in her role as childbearer, safe in her self-respect, while mine is diminished by illness and financial dependence. Thus, she is able to exact, at last, a subtle vengeance for my infidelities, real and imagined.
I make no claims to sexual virtue. I am not promiscuous; but I am not by nature monogamous either. I think the Greeks had the right combination: a wife for the house and the children, the courtesan or the boy comrade for companionship, and the bawdy house for rough-and-tumble fun if you wanted it. Our stolid Swiss Calvinist society imposes intolerable restraints on men and women. In a good marriage one needs a licence to wander a little.
Of course, Emma doesn’t see it that way and I try not to make an issue of it. We are already having scenes about Toni, and Emma does not hesitate to rehearse, very loudly, certain of my indiscretions in the past – like the Spielrein woman who wanted at all costs to bear my child!
This business of analytic psychology is strewn with temptations. Even if you are as virtuous as a hermit in a hair shirt you cannot resist them all. When a woman bares her soul to you, she is much more dangerous than when she simply slips off her blouse and skirt. The ones you reject spread scandal. The ones to whom you yield so much as a gesture of affection become as voracious as maenads.
So, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. And your wife compounds the problem by turning away from you in bed and covering her sex with her hand like a Botticelli virgin. To hell with it! Better to be up and working than lying here in the dark, nursing old fears and an itch in the crotch.
The study is cold and quiet as the grave. I wish Toni were here to put warmth and fire into it. I am tempted to telephone her; but even I am not selfish enough to wake her at two in the morning! I pour myself a large measure of brandy. I load my pipe. I open, on the lectern, the black book in which I record each step of my pilgrimage to what I pray will be a final illumination. I set down on my desk the file of dream analyses which Toni and I have worked up together. Beside it I place a notepad, a sketch book, my pencils and my coloured crayons. I light my pipe. I inhale the first smoke gratefully. I take a long, slow sip of brandy. “Now,” I tell myself. “Now,” I tell my dark Doppelgänger. “Let’s begin. Let’s see if we can make sense to one another.”
I pick up the black pencil – the soft one – and try to write. Immediately I am blocked. I simply cannot translate my fantasies into linear script. It is only with the greatest effort that I can write down the simple ritual questions: “Who am I? Where do I live? What is my profession?”
After a few minutes I abandon the pointless exercise. I drink. I inhale the sedative smoke. I fall into reverie. I pick up the pencil again and begin to draw my dreaming. As I draw, I lapse into a wonderful calm. The walls of my study fall away. My clothes disappear. I am standing naked in front of a great cliff of ochre rock, drawing on it with a charred stick.
I make first a great circle, confident and perfect as Giotto’s “O”. Inside the circle I draw a girl and a man. She is young, just matured to womanhood. He is old and venerable, with long white hair and a flowing beard. He carries a staff. He has an air of serene authority. I emphasise the smile that twitches at the corners of his mouth. Behind me a deep voice utters a commendation: “Better! Much better!”
I whirl to face the speaker. There, standing before me, are the old man and the girl. I am dumb with wonderment. I look from the drawing to the reality. The girl laughs at my discomfiture. The old man smiles and says:
“It is really very simple. I am Elijah. This is Salome. You dream us and paint us on a wall. But who are you?”
I cannot answer him. I look down at my nakedness and am ashamed. I shake my head.
“I do not know who I am.”
The old man says, “It does not matter. We know who you are.”
The girl stretches out her hand. I take it, diffidently. She draws me close to her and to the old man. I am calm again. I remember that my name is Carl Gustav Jung and I am proud to tell it to them. We sit down together on a flat rock. I ask, respectfully:
“Elijah, sir, is this young lady your daughter?”
“Tell him, child.” The old man is amused by the question, but he does not answer it directly. “Tell him what you are to me.”
“I am everything – daughter, wife, lover and protector.”
“Are you satisfied, Carl Gustav Jung?”
“I am amazed. I am not satisfied.”
“You have no claim to be satisfied. Face the wall again and finish the drawing.”
When I turn, I am back in my study. My pipe is smoking in the ashtray. The brandy is spilled and I wipe it up with my handkerchief. But there is indeed a drawing in my sketch book. The circle is perfect as Giotto’s “O”. The old man and the girl are just as I have dreamed them and drawn them on the rock wall. What does it mean? How can I come t
o terms with this phenomenon?
Then I remember something. I spend an hour scrabbling through my bookshelves. I write notes furiously. No difficulty now with linear script. By four in the morning I have come up with three small snippets of history. Simon the Magician, one of the early Gnostics, travelled with a girl from a bawdy house. Lao Tzu, the Chinese sage, fell in love with a dancing girl. Paul the Apostle, so says the legend, was tenderly attached to the virgin Thecla . . .
Ancient tales all of them! But what cosmic magic planted them in my subconscious? Elijah and Salome are as present to me now as if I could reach out and touch them. If they were not real – in some special mode of reality! – how could I have dreamed them? Is all our history thus buried within us, forgotten but available, waiting only to be conjured up like will o’ the wisps from dark bog water?
I cannot face the question now. I close the sketch book. I walk out into the misty grey of the false dawn. I stand on the beach tossing pebbles into the lake and crying over and over:
“Elijah! Elijah! Salome, my love!”
My only answer is a flutter of wings as a moorhen skitters through the shallows.
MAGDA
Paris
This morning I saw a sad and silly spectacle. I was strolling down the Champs-Élysées, thinking about my night at Dorian’s and looking for a suitable cafe to take my morning coffee. A fruit vendor – one of those who serve the local restaurants – crossed in front of me, carrying a basket of oranges on his head.
He stubbed his toe on a paving stone and lurched forward. The basket slipped off his head and the oranges went rolling in all directions. Some of them split; some were gathered up on the run by a trio of schoolboys; some were kicked into the gutter by passing pedestrians.
For a moment the vendor stood, hypnotised and helpless, staring at the cascade of golden fruit. Then, since I was the nearest witness, he whirled on me in fury and shouted in Italian:
“It’s all your fault! Your fault!”
He raised his hand and made the sign of the horns at me, tossed the basket at my feet and stalked off. His rage was so childish, his accusation so ridiculous that I burst out laughing. But, when I sat down to coffee, I found that I was trembling. The incident was no longer comical, but magical and sinister. Suddenly I was back in the landscape of my dream. The oranges were balls of glass and a naked Magda was sealed inside each one, and none of the Magdas could talk to the others.
It was a moment of pure horror: the same horror that seized me the day my best hunter went berserk under me and I had to thrash and gallop him into exhaustion. There was the same eerie prickle of evil that I had felt when I found Alexander, my wolf hound, dead outside my door, with a bloody foam around his muzzle – and three days later, my rose-arbour devastated by some vandal with an axe!
The gesture of the horns, the primitive sign of exorcism, was no mere vulgarity. Did I look like a witch? Had I indeed the evil eye? Was there the mark of Cain on my forehead? I fumbled in my reticule for a mirror and peered into it. The mirror told me only that I was pale and that the man at the table behind me was trying to decide whether I was an early working whore or an indiscreet lady out for an airing.
That didn’t help either. It convinced me that there was only a very bleak future for a middle-aged widow crying into her coffee on the Champs-Élysées and making midnight love with strangers in houses of appointment. I felt as if a trapdoor had opened under my feet and I was falling over and over into darkness.
The man at my back stood up and approached me. He asked, politely enough:
“Madame is unwell? Perhaps I can help?”
“Thank you, but I am perfectly well.”
“If Madame is sure?”
I was perfectly sure. I was equally sure that I needed help from someone. The problem was where to go and what to say when I got there. I speak six languages, including Hungarian, but none of them is adequate to express the life I have led since I was a little girl.
Sex is easy to talk about. No matter how bizarre your tastes, you can always find an attentive audience. But the rest of it – my childhood in the enchanted castle, the primitive but strangely beautiful rites of my initiation into womanhood, my years at the university and in hospital residence – these are tales from a far country, from another planet even! I am not sure I can make them intelligible to anyone else.
Besides, the same shadow falls across them all – the shadow of a gallows tree – and there is no way to explain that over coffee and croissants! Even Papa, who could shrug off most human aberrations, would never discuss this subject with me. He knew what I had done and why; but the nearest he ever came to an admission of his knowledge was a single dry comment:
“I hope, dear daughter, you don’t talk in your sleep!”
Since Papa died and the husband I adored was snatched away before his time, I have slept in many strange beds, with a whole gallery of men and women. Several of them have been quite capable of blackmail; but none has ever hinted that I tell secrets in my sleep.
So far, so good; but, as Dorian warned me, my endurance is wearing thin. I cannot tolerate for ever these wild swings from manic debauchery to deepest depression. I need a steady lover, a friend, a confidant – perhaps even a confessor . . .
The thought intrigues me. It represents the oddest of all solutions for a woman who has never had any religious convictions at all. Papa was an old fashioned rationalist who taught me that life begins and ends here and that we have to reach out and grab the best of it. He used to say:
“I’ve cut ‘em living and I’ve carved ‘em dead; and I’ve never caught any glimpse of God or of a soul.”
I loved Papa so much it would never have occurred to me to question any one of his opinions. I do not question them now; but I toy with the idea that it might be pleasant to turn Roman Catholic and then be able to walk into a little box every Saturday, recite my sins and come out clean as a new handkerchief.
It’s an idle thought and, of course, quite illogical. If you don’t believe in God and you don’t believe in sin, why worry? The fact is that you do worry. You blanch at the sign of the horns and you make doll magic out of fallen oranges.
I feel guilty – no, I feel ridiculous and ashamed – because I am tossing myself away, piece by little piece, like confetti at a wedding. Even a whore has better sense than that. She sells what she has. The funny thing is that part of me is very careful indeed. Peasant-frugal was Papa’s word for it.
I run my estate like any business. My accounts are meticulously kept; and they always show a profit! I buy the best clothes – but I get them at discount because I wear them well and in fashionable places. When I trade bloodstock, I drive hard bargains. At an auction I can smell a bidding ring a hundred paces away.
In polite society I am demure and discreet. Most of my friends would be shocked if they knew how profligate I am in my pleasures, how foul tongued in my pillow talk. Time was when this double life seemed a heady and exciting game. Now it is a perilous experience: a night walk down a foetid alley full of menacing shadows.
I paid for my coffee and set off for the banking house of Ysambard Frères to draw money against my letter of credit. I hoped that Joachim Ysambard, the elder of the two brothers, would invite me to luncheon. Joachim is in his sixties now, white haired, witty and wise in women’s ways. Ten years ago we had a sum mer loving in Amalfi. Then he came back to marry his second wife – a marriage of great convenience – a dynastic alliance with an old Alsatian banking family. Miraculously we remained friends, probably because, even in bed, he reminded me very much of Papa.
He was in conference when I arrived, but his secretary brought me a message begging me to wait and have luncheon with him. Meantime, brother Manfred would like a few words with me. Manfred is in his early fifties, dapper as a mannequin, impeccably polite but oddly bloodless. He has never married. He has, at least to my knowledge, no permanent lover, male or female. There is a monkish aura about him which I find disconcerting and someti
mes repellent. On the other hand, Joachim speaks of him with awe and admiration:
“Manfred is a genius. He understands trade in a way no one else does. You can start him with a mountain of tea bricks in Tibet and very soon he will deliver you wool in Bradford, gold in Florence, pig iron in the Ruhr and a profit in our books in Paris.”
With all of which I am forced to agree. Manfred’s management of my French funds has made me a second fortune; but he shrugs off my thanks with fastidious disdain:
“There’s no magic in it, Madame. It’s simply barter on a slightly larger scale than the town market. The real skill is in the timing. Which brings me to your affairs. Joachim and I advise that you now invest at least half your capital outside Europe.”
“For any special reason?”
“A spread of risk. There is fighting in the Balkans. The rest of Europe will be at war within a year.”
“How can you be so certain?”
He permitted himself a faint patronising smile.
“The ancient augurs studied the entrails of birds. We’re much more evolved. We watch the movements of coal and ore and chemicals and money. For example, at this moment, every cavalry regiment in Europe is looking for remounts and places to stable them. It’s a madness, of course – a folly of senile generals. One year of modern warfare and the horse will be as obsolete as the broadsword. However, this would be an excellent time to sell your stud.” He paused and then added a barbed comment: “Your reputation, as a breeder, is still high. The property is in prime condition. Our advice would be to sell now at the top of the market and invest the proceeds with Morgan in New York. This would give you a secure base in the New World, should circumstances ever force you to leave Europe.”
I told him I could not imagine any circumstances that would force me to leave Europe. He chided me:
“Dear lady, war is a most unseemly affair. It rouses man’s basest passions and provides excuses and opportunity to indulge them. You are – how shall I say it? – well known, but not everywhere well regarded, in society. You are vulnerable to gossip and to manipulation.”
