The World Is Made of Glass

by Morris West

  “Then Papa bought me a swordstick and a small pocket pistol which he called a derringer. I never used the swordstick; Lily kept that by her for protection in the apartment. The pistol came in useful on a few occasions – once with a very drunken Englishman on a boat ride down the Brenta!

  “Apart from that, Papa provided me with certain male privileges: a member’s card for the Club della Caccia where Lily and I could always hire a mount, an entree to a gambling salon in Venice, which was also a place of rendezvous for lovers or lonely hearts, and a comfortable credit arrangement with the local office of the Banco Padovano. As for other entertainment, Papa told me: ‘You’ll have to find your own. If you’re ever stupid enough to get pregnant, come straight home to me. At least you’ll get a clean job and no reproaches!’”

  “A clean job and no reproaches.” I seize on the phrase and try to force her to examine it with me. “Doesn’t that strike you as terribly cold blooded from a father to a daughter – or even to a son! Didn’t he teach you any morality at all?”

  She ponders the question for a few seconds, then answers with a shrug:

  “Some, I suppose; but it was all very simple and pragmatic. Don’t lie, because you’ll trip yourself up in the end. Why steal? You have more than you can use – and besides you lose friends and end up in gaol. As for sex, it’s a game until you want to marry and have children; but if you play in the mud, you’ll get dirty. That was about the size of it.”

  “Does that still satisfy you?”

  “No; but it’s all I have. I have no religious sense at all. Apparently you have. That’s why Gianni recommended you.”

  “Gianni?” The name eludes me for an instant. Then I remember: “Oh yes! Our Italian colleague. What’s his name?”

  “Di Malvasia. Your wife remembers him quite well. They were dinner companions at Weimar. He’s a Roman Catholic. He’s also homosexual and he let his family talk him into marriage. He’s very unhappy; but he claims that his religion has helped him to come to terms with the situation. Do you believe that’s possible?”

  “Most certainly it’s possible.”

  “I wish you’d explain how. Gianni tried, but I felt he was a rather biased witness. With him the important thing was that you could confess your sins to a priest and be sure you were forgiven by God. It’s very comforting; but how can anyone believe a thing like that?”

  We have touched on this matter before, but briefly and tentatively. Now she has brought me back to it. I am not sure whether she wants to create a diversion, or whether she is genuinely seeking enlightenment. In either case, I must offer her a reasonable answer. I begin on a light note.

  “Let’s see how well they trained you in Padua. Let’s define the terms. What is religion? Give it to me simply and plainly, as you understand it.”

  She ponders a moment and then with more than a hint of mischief in her smile accepts the challenge.

  “Very well, doctor. Incominciamo . . . let’s begin! Religio: a Latin noun. Generic meaning: a bond, a duty, an obligation to reverence. Religion: a system of belief and worship. Examples: Christianity, animism, Islam. Enough?”

  “You’re doing very well, dear colleague.”

  “Then will you give me a definition in return?”

  “If I can.”

  “What is insanity?”

  “Again a word of Latin derivation. Sanus, healthy. Insanus, unhealthy. Generic meaning: not of sound mind, mentally deranged. However, in common speech, the word is loosely used to cover a whole variety of symptoms, from simple hysteria to fixed delusional states or violent dementia. May I now ask the point of the question?”

  “Let’s put the two definitions together: religion and insanity. Let’s take a concrete example to test our logic. Gianni di Malvasia believes in God, the Roman Catholic Church, auricular confession – the whole book! You believe in a god. You don’t know who or what he is; but you carve your belief over the lintel of your door. ‘Called or uncalled, the god will be present.’ Me? I believe none of that: no god, no Church, nothing but what I see, smell, hear and touch. Now we can’t all be right. One of us, at least, has to be insane by definition: victim of a fixed delusional state. Which one is it? Gianni, me or you?”

  “The answer, dear colleague, is simple. None of us is insane. The definitions are inadequate and the logic is defective.”

  The words are hardly out of my mouth when I realise that I have made a ghastly mistake. I have let her trap me into an academic argument for which I am in no wise prepared. If I allow it to continue in these scholastic terms, we shall both end with our heads against a brick wall – and she will be the one still laughing. For once, it seems, I am forced into an act of humility. I have to admit my own ignorance. I am, however, still vain enough to dress it up as wisdom. I get out my sketch pad and a heavy black pencil. I have her stand behind my chair. As she leans over my shoulder, her perfume envelops me, the nearness of her body excites me. I draw a semicircle. Then, I draw three little stick figures – man, woman and child – standing on the straight line of the diameter. I explain the illustration.

  “This is man’s simplest and most primitive concept of himself and his habitat. He lives on a flat earth under a domed sky. The earth is full of creatures, great and small. The sky has the sun by day, the moon and stars by night and an ever-changing pattern of clouds out of which come thunder and lightning and rain. Between the earth and the sky, the winds blow, balmy or blustery, according to the season. Man and his partner, woman, are animals who dream, animals who ask questions. Who lives up there beyond the clouds? If we walk far enough, will we fall off the edge of the land? Who made us? What happens when we die? What makes the thunder and lightning? Man and woman have no answers; so they invent them. They make fairy tales, myths which they pass on to their children. On the myths, their children build religions, systems of belief; they construct rituals, constitute authorities. They make images of their gods, build temples to enshrine them and symbolise their presence in human affairs. And everything fits nicely, everything works, until the system is overworked or overburdened by events. If the king becomes a tyrant, his people revolt and kill him. If pestilence strikes the land and the god is blind to all the offerings laid at his feet, then he is tumbled from his pedestal, his shrine is laid waste and the puzzled tribe looks for a new protector.”

  Suddenly she draws very close to me. Her hands touch my cheeks, then cover my eyes. Her lips brush my ear as she whispers:

  “You’re a very clever man, Doctor Jung. I wonder if you believe the half of it?”

  A moment later she is back in her chair, demure as a schoolgirl waiting for praise or reproof. I decline to offer either. I finish my little homily, though a little less rhetorically than I began it.

  “And that’s the state you find yourself in now. The ethics of Eden don’t work in the big world. The song birds have disappeared; now there are only vultures and carrion crows. Papa isn’t there any more, and the other men you meet don’t want to take his place. For that matter, neither do I!”

  Instantly she is in a fury. I half expect her to leap from the chair and strike me. I note with clinical concern how swiftly the change occurs, how hard she has to battle to control herself. I smile and try to placate her.

  “Don’t be angry, please! I’m not mocking you. I like to be caressed – especially by a beautiful woman. But it wasn’t me you were playing peekaboo with; you were re-enacting a scene: happy days in Padua with Papa.”

  She jerks up her head, in that now familiar gesture of defiance.

  “Not all of them were happy! Don’t believe that! In the end Lily and I were glad to see the back of him.”

  “Why?”

  “For the first time in my life I saw him drunk and violent. It shocked me. What shocked me more was that Lily could handle him and I couldn’t. He wouldn’t let me near him; he threatened to kill me if I touched him.”

  “Don’t you think we should talk about that?”

  She gives me a pale,
unsteady smile and points to my sketch.

  “It isn’t a pretty story like yours.”

  I dare not tell her now that my story is a fairy tale, a myth. It never happened. Man is a fierce and dangerous animal, ugly in rage, brutal in rut, desperate in death. The only hopeful thing about him is the angel-spirit that peeps sometimes from his savage eyes, that teaches, all too rarely, a gentleness to his lethal hand.

  MAGDA

  Zurich

  I have to admire this man. For all his weaknesses – and there was no doubt at all about his response when I stood close to him and fondled him! – he is both sympathetic and skilful. He accepted my request for anonymity – yet already I have told him more than I intended. Still, no matter! I admire his subtlety. He has run me like a balky horse, now coaxing, now cutting at me with the whip, to make me face the first big hurdle: my strange mixed-up relationship with Papa. I am ready to take the jump now. I can feel him nursing me between his knees, giving me my head, waiting for the moment when I need him for the last lift over the bars. Well, if we get this one behind us, the others won’t look quite so formidable. So, here we go, doctor dear! Here we go!

  “We were installed in the apartment – the one with the Tiepolo on the ceiling and bathrooms as big as the Terme di Caracalla. Lily was breaking in the servants. I was disputing with the decorator over the matching of draperies and bedcovers. Papa had been restless for days. ‘Like a prowling hound!’ Lily said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised to come out one night and find him baying the moon!’ Then, at breakfast, he announced that he had done his duty to us and was now about to divert himself. If we needed him – God forbid that we should! – we might find him at the Danieli. Failing that, his old friend Morosini would know where to find him. Lily snorted disdainfully: ‘Morosini, fiddlesticks! He’s found a new woman. Oh well, at least we’ll have some peace for a while!’ I too was glad to have him out of the house. I was stuffed full of Paduan history: Harvey and Linacre and Dante Alighieri and the ‘nations’ and ‘tongues’ who made up the foreign population of the university. I had bought all my texts. Now I wanted to nestle into the apartment that was to be home for Lily and me for the next five years. It was my first experience of housekeeping and I was enjoying it; but Papa treated the place like a post house, where the serving maids were either virtuous or boring.”

  I break off, because Jung does not seem to be listening to what I am saying. He is writing assiduously in his notebook. I am irritated because I am trying hard to make the story interesting. He looks up, frowning, and demands to know why I have stopped.

  “Because I seem to be boring you.”

  “Nonsense!” He is brusque and irritable. “You’re not an actress. I’m not an audience. This is a clinical interview. Just go on, for God’s sake!”

  I have to compose myself again. This time I give him the story, flat and plain.

  “Three days later Papa came home. It was nearly midnight. Lily and I were in our night clothes, reading in the salone. We heard a battering on the front door and Papa’s voice shouting obscenities. We rushed to let him in. He was drunk and filthy. He pushed his way past us and staggered upstairs to his room. Lily and I followed. When he saw us standing in the doorway he flung his valise at us and ordered us out. I went to him. He seemed not to know who I was. When I reached out to touch him he slapped me, very hard across the face, so that I staggered and almost fell. Then he began to abuse me with every foul word he could lay his tongue to. The next instant I saw Lily running at him across the room. She had the skirt of her nightdress hoisted above her knees and she was wearing embroidered Turkish slippers with pointed metal toes. I remember thinking she looked like an angry hen defending her chicks. She said one word, ‘Bastard!’ then kicked Papa very hard in the crotch. He retched, doubled up with pain and fell writhing on the floor. Lily hustled me out of the room, locked the door on him and left him. She took me to her room, made me get into bed, fed me a large brandy and a dose of chloral hydrate and stayed with me until I fell asleep. That’s a potent mixture, as you know. I didn’t wake until noon the next day.”

  “And that’s the end of the story?”

  “That’s my part of it. The next is Lily’s; so it’s secondhand. While I was sleeping she went back to Papa. He was sprawled on the floor, snoring in his own mess. She stripped him, washed him, dragged him into bed, then cleaned the room and got rid of all the soiled clothes. She let him sleep until nine, then woke him, fed him breakfast, told him what he had done to me, heard what had happened to him and sent him out to visit the barber and the Turkish baths. After that, apparently, he hired a horse and went on a wild ride through the campagna towards the Euganean hills. When he came home, just before sunset, he took me in his arms and cried like a baby. He begged me to forgive him. I did, of course. I could never refuse him anything. But after that nothing was ever quite the same. Two days later he left for Silbersee. We were both glad to have him gone.”

  Jung cocks his head on one side like a quizzical parrot and asks:

  “Now may I know the reason for all these drunken dramatics?”

  “It seems Papa had taken his new lady love to the Fenice theatre for a performance of Don Giovanni. There, facing him from the opposite box, was my mother, her English husband and a youth who was clearly their son. Papa left his companion in the box, went back to the Danieli, packed his valise and, in company with the boatman, who took him across to Mestre, embarked on a forty-eight hour drinking bout that landed him, by some miracle, home on our doorstep. When he saw me, he thought I was my mother – apparently I am very like her – and he heaped on me every scrap of abuse he had stored up for twenty years. So, you see it was really very simple – and terribly sad!”

  “My dear woman,” Jung chides me gently, “I think it is not half so simple as you would like to make it. You’ve never completely forgiven your father for that night, have you?”

  “No.”

  “What exactly was it that you couldn’t forget or forgive?”

  The words stick like a fish bone in my throat. They will choke me before I can utter them. Jung snaps at me:

  “Say it, girl! Say it, for Christ’s sake!”

  “He was talking to my mother, not to me.”

  “I know that! Go on!”

  “But he was talking about me. There was a – a horrible kind of triumph in his voice. He said, ‘You got away; but I’ve got Magda! She’s your daughter, but she’s better at the game than you’ll ever be! She’ll be the best whore in the business when I’m finished with her. Your daughter! Your goddamned beautiful daughter! Maybe we’ll mate her with that little colt who was with you in the box, eh?’”

  I am crying now. I can’t stop. I hate to be like this. Why has he forced me to humiliate myself so? Why doesn’t he say something? I feel as if I am back in my glass ball, rolling over and over in the empty desert. Now, thank God, he has come to me. He squats in front of me, unclenches my fists and puts a handkerchief between them. Then he tilts up my chin so that I am forced to meet his eyes. They are kind and full of compassion. He gives me a funny little grin, kisses the tips of his fingers and transfers the kiss to my lips.

  “Good girl! It’s rough, I know; but now we can begin to make sense together. Dry your eyes. Stand up and walk around for a few minutes.”

  He helps me to my feet, holds me until I am steady and then leads me to his bookshelves to show me his collection of works on alchemy. It is a simple stratagem; but it works. I begin to calm down. He sits at his desk, makes notes, and, while I am still moving about, begins to chat quite casually about Papa and me.

  “For you, of course, it is a terrible shock. The fairy tale has reversed itself. Your prince has turned into a toad. The words of love have changed to obscenities; the gestures of love have become acts of violence. You are no longer the object of your Papa’s affection. You are the instrument of his vengeance on the woman who left him. It’s all very ugly, the more so because commonsense tells you that the ugliness has been f
estering in his mind for years. You feel dirtied, humiliated, corrupted. Eve is cast out of Eden. She tries to cover her shame with fig leaves . . . and she begins to hate the man who shamed her. She has never been wholly sure of him. Prince though he was, she has known a long time that he was spoiled, selfish and perverted. Now she is totally disillusioned. Where does she turn? To Lily? She, poor woman, is herself caught between the millstones, at once a conspirator and a victim. No, our disillusioned princess turns to her mother, the Snow Queen, with the heart of ice. Mother was right to abandon this monster. Mother’s cruelty was totally justified because it had made her invincible and invulnerable. Am I making sense to you?”

  Yes, he is making sense; but I wish it were as simple as it sounds. He tells me I should reflect on what he has said. I should ask myself whether the pattern he has described fits all my behaviour. I, too, must begin to take an active part in the analysis. He looks at his watch. He tells me my two hours are up. We have made good progress. We will pick up the story at the same point in our next interview. Tomorrow perhaps, at the same time? Fräulein Wolff will make the appointment. Tomorrow? The word puts me in a blind panic. I hurry across the room. I plead with him desperately.

  “If I leave now, I know I won’t have the courage to come back. Don’t you understand? It’s like the big jump at the puissance trials. Once you’re set for it, you have to go. If you check, ever so little, the horse will balk and you’re kaput. Please, let’s keep going!”

  He does not like the idea at all. Already I am showing signs of strain. It is difficult for him as well. This is not like physical diagnosis. The indicators are often concealed in some simple phrase or gesture. If the analyst is not alert, he may miss them. I argue with him strenuously. Finally we compromise. I will go back to the hotel, have lunch and return at three. We will work until five-thirty at the latest. There is, however, a condition. By that time, I must complete what he calls my biography: the outline sketch of my works and days. The analysis will come later; but I must be prepared to put all the facts at his disposal today.