by Morris West
“Not so strange.” I feel very gentle towards her at this moment. She is working with me and not against me as so many patients do in the early stages of analysis. So, I try to share with her some observations and insights. “Religion, sex and suffering make, perhaps, the most constant trinity of human experiences. Think about it for a moment. Religion, which we have already defined together, treats of mystery, the mystery of our origins, our ends, our relationship with the cosmos, with the mystery of pain itself. What is the symbol that confronts you in every Christian church? The crucifix: the body of a tortured man nailed to a wooden cross. Sex is an act both godlike and animal. It is the beginning of life. It is also the little death. The fury of lovers is not far from the fury of rape and slaughter. The first impulse of the disappointed lover is to inflict pain upon the once beloved. Look at the pictures of Hieronymus Bosch and you will see the pleasure-pain principle contorted into a sexual vision of hell.”
“That’s exactly how I have felt lately: as if hell is a madhouse and I’m locked up in it.”
It is the simplest and most poignant admission she has made since we began our session. I decide to continue this way for a little while, setting conversational lures and watching how she responds to them.
“Let me ask you a question. It may sound insulting. It is not meant to be so. You’ve spoken several times, quite calmly and openly, of your sexual attachments to women. They are non-violent. You find great satisfaction in them. Your relations with men on the other hand are aggressive and violent. Do you feel split between the two sexes? Do you feel yourself part woman, part man?”
“No I don’t.” She is emphatic but quite calm. “I perceive myself as a whole person, a woman. My tastes are not everybody’s; but they are mine and I am me.”
“Are you satisfied with yourself?”
“You know I’m not. I’m deathly afraid.”
“Of what?”
“That this me is an incurable accident. You’ve seen monster births. We all have in medicine. There is no hope for them at all. They are beyond reason, beyond love, even beyond care. I feel like that about myself.”
“And this is why you are grasping at various religious ideas, because admission into any religious society is associated with rebirth. Put off the old Adam, put on the new Christ. Eve, who brought about man’s downfall, is now Mary, the mother of God, who carried the Saviour in her womb.”
There is a long moment of silence, then she gets up from her chair, comes to me and kisses me on the forehead. I touch her cheek in acknowledgment and ask:
“What was that for?”
“To thank you for being so understanding. I’m sorry I’ve been rude to you.”
A little cautionary bell begins to chime in my head. I tell her that I understand some of it but not all. We have still a long way to go. Neither of us can afford to be complacent.
“For instance, this sculptress with whom you shared the flagellation scene and then embarked on a love affair, could you tell me more about her?”
“Her name was Alma de Angelis. She was twenty-five. She came from the South – Capua if I remember rightly. She was small and dark with long, lustrous black hair and wonderful eyes that seemed too big for her face. Sculpture, you know, is the most laborious of the arts. You’re working either in stone or wood or bronze, and the sheer physical labour is enormous. One vivid memory I have is of her hands. They were hard and chapped like a labourer’s. I remember asking Alma why she wanted to do such work. She told me her father was a stone carver who worked in marble for funerary monuments. She was the only child. He desperately wanted a son to whom he could pass on his skill and see him do something better than carve crying angels on gravestones. So he scraped together enough money to send Alma to Padua for study. In that respect she was very much like me; except that, a true Southerner, she was desperately afraid of having to go home and confess that she had lost her virginity. So she was ripe for the kind of affair we had; and I promised that, before she went home, I would do the traditional surgical restoration of her maidenhead! However, we broke up long before that and lost touch with each other.”
“Were you happy, while the affair lasted?”
“I think so. It was one of those things that went by fits and starts: high drama one day, boredom the next. Great scenes of jealousy. Much pouting and sulking. Very Italian! There were elements of calculation for both of us. She took me into the bohemia of painters, sculptors and craftsmen of all kinds. I gave her a taste of luxury she had never known and could never have afforded. Lily coddled her and – I found later – used to send her money long after our affair was over.”
“I notice, if you’ll forgive my saying so, that you seem to be telling all this with considerable detachment. It’s not at all like your narratives about your childhood. Why is that?”
“Because I do feel differently – very differently – about this period. After that terrible scene with Papa, I was resolved that nobody, ever again, would be able to manipulate me through my emotions. So, in a sense I became an actress. I could laugh, cry, make love, enjoy myself in every conceivable way; but the only time I took off the make-up and became the real me was at home with Lily. I knew everything about her; she knew everything about me; and we still loved each other. If ever I had any doubts, they were always stilled by that vision of Lily with her nightdress hauled up, rushing across the floor to kick Papa in the balls!”
The word comes out with such singular relish that we both laugh. I take advantage of this relaxed moment to feed in another suggestion.
“Has it ever occurred to you that in Padua you were trying to live exactly the same life as you had enjoyed at Schloss Silbersee? Your apartment was still a private Eden where very few outsiders were allowed to penetrate. True or not?”
“True, of course.” She makes no demur; she goes even further. “You see, children who grow up in a big family and go to school with their peers are very lucky. By the time they’re adults they’re accepted as part of the group. Even their follies are open and shared; their adventures are part of tribal folklore. For me it was totally different. I was the odd girl out. I knew very early, because Lily and Papa so taught me, that all my privileges depended on secrecy. I began with one guilty secret; a Mamma who ran away and never came back. Later, of course, I had many: my sexual relations at home, my adventures at school and the whole hothouse life that I felt more and more guilty about because I couldn’t share it with anyone.”
It is on the tip of my tongue to remind her that in our morning session, she was most emphatic that she had never experienced guilt, could not define the sentiment. Fortunately I remain silent. She reverts to our earlier discussion of faith and forgiveness. She asks flatly:
“Do you think there is any possibility of a religious solution for me?”
“If you want one, there probably is.”
“I don’t understand that.”
“Let me try to explain. You can go to any one of the religious groups in the world – Muslim, Buddhist, Calvinist, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Quaker; the list is endless. You present yourself to a minister, as people came to my father, for instance. You say, ‘Please, I am lost and in darkness. I am told you have the light. Will you share it with me? I am unclean, I wish to be cleansed.’ The answer will be the same from everyone: “Yes, we have the light. We are willing to share it. There is always forgiveness and a new life for the penitent. Come in! Let us instruct you. Then, when you are ready and disposed to grace, we will receive you into the community of the elect.’”
“But which community do I choose? Which way is the right one? Whose god is the true one?”
“If any.”
“Exactly! If any. But I have seen people calm and happy and totally at peace in religious convictions.”
“I’d like to hear about the ones who impressed you most.”
“Are you laughing at me?”
“God forbid! But in this kind of analysis the small facts are very important.”
“Lily and I would always have these two in for coffee and apple cake. They were glad to rest their feet after a long tramp round the city; so we got to know them quite well. The elder one was exactly what she looked like, the daughter of a peasant farmer near Ferrara. The other was the daughter of a judge from Siena. Her name in religion was Sister Damiana. She was highly educated, spoke English, French and German, and played the piano beautifully.
“When I asked what had made her enter the convent, she gave me a very strange answer. ‘I was called. I answered.’ When I asked her how she was called – by voice or trumpet or heavenly post horn – she laughed and said: ‘It’s like falling in love. There are no words to describe it.’ When I asked her if she’d ever fallen in love, she said yes, she had even become engaged, but her fiance had died a month before the wedding.
“She used to call me Dottoressa, and when the big typhoid epidemic hit Padua, she asked Lily and me to help with nursing the children in the institute. All of us senior medical students were recruited for public health duty; so by the time I got to the orphanage, I had often been on my feet for eight or ten hours. But the devotion of those women, especially my young friend, shamed me and kept me going. Come to think of it, she was the only one who ever could shame me, without saying a word!”
“Did you ever share any confidences with her?”
“About my own life? Never. Damiana never asked; and what I had to tell was hardly convent talk. However, there was one strange day, just before the epidemic began to subside. I was sitting on a bed in one of the dormitories, trying to spoon liquid into a frail little mite who I knew was terminal. I was raging inside about the stupidity and ignorance that caused this kind of outbreak to happen. Damiana came and laid her hand on my forehead and said softly: ‘Such stormy thoughts! So much anger! Such a hungry heart! Be calm! Love will come to you in his own time.’ I burst into tears. She held me against her until I was quiet again. I remember thinking that I couldn’t feel her breasts through the coarse cloth of her habit.”
“Did you keep in touch with her afterwards?”
“She died the year before I left Padua. She had T.B. but she could have been saved. I’ve hated those primitive conventual orders ever since. They may be better now; but in Italy in those days they’d set out to save the poor and ignorant for Christ – and kill off their own people with malnutrition, overwork and sheer inhuman neglect.”
It is the first time I have seen her angry about anyone but herself. I content myself with a quiet comment.
“It’s plain you were very fond of her.”
“I loved her. I loved her in a way I’ve never known before or since. Thank God she never knew the kind of woman I was!”
“Perhaps she did.”
“She couldn’t have. She died too soon. I should be glad of that, I suppose.”
She is very near to tears. I note how hard she tries to hold them back. Finally she manages an unsteady smile and demands to change the subject.
“Very well. What else can you tell me that was significant about your life in Padua?”
“Significant? That’s a loaded word if ever I heard one. Significant. Let me think. Well, for one thing I became a good physician. I understood what the trade was about. I was deft in surgery and accurate in diagnosis. Professor Lello used to say I had everything a great doctor needs – except heart. He was right. I was always plagued by the idea that medicine is a profession dedicated to futility. All our patients die in the end. We bury our successes and our failures in the same grave.”
There is something odd about the last phrase, but I cannot for the life of me think what it is. It is like hearing a distant bell with a tiny crack in it. I ask one of the questions I have on my list.
“Why did you finally give up medicine?”
She looks at me in mild surprise.
“Oh! I thought I’d explained that. I nursed my husband during his final illness. That was one failure too many. I quit the game for good.”
I am still interested in how she buried successes and failures in the same grave; but no matter, I make a note and hope that it will clarify itself later. I ask whether there is any more useful material to be mined out of the Padua period.
“What else? Oh yes! Lily had a big, big love affair. It lasted only a year – less than that even! – but it was the most extraordinary thing that had ever happened to her. One weekend Lily and I were riding in the hills when we came to a tiny village called Arqua. Lily, who carried a Baedeker even to bed, announced that this was the place where Petrarch had lived during the last years of his life and that the signatures of Lord Byron and Teresa Guiccioli were to be found in the visitors’ book.
“We found Petrarch’s house, perched high on a hilltop with the poet’s cat, mummified, in a glass case over the lintel. We found Byron’s signature – and Teresa’s, too. We strolled in the tiny garden overlooking the hills and the vineyards. Then, just as we were mounting up for the ride home, Lily’s great love came ambling up the road on a big bay hunter.”
She is obviously enjoying this part of the story, so I let her savour the drama of it.
“A beautiful horse and a most extraordinary rider! He was not young. We discovered later that he was in his late sixties; but he carried himself like a prince in the saddle, ramrod straight, with his great arrogant head held high, like Donatello’s Gattamelata outside the duomo in Padua. His face was lean, with a long beard and heavy drooping moustache. He had a great hooked nose like an eagle’s beak, a pair of dark piercing eyes and a thin slash of a mouth which rarely smiled and always carried a hint of cruelty. He reined in and saluted us in Italian. Lily gaped at him for a moment, then in purest Lancashire announced:
“‘My God! I know you!’
“The stranger grinned – and the dark eyes softened into a boyish twinkle.
“‘You do Madame? Then for the love of God tell me who I am. I should hate to perish in ignorance.’
“‘You’re – you’re that explorer fellow. Richard . . . I’m sorry, Sir Richard Burton. I’ve seen your picture in The Times.’
“He swept off his hat and made extravagant thanks.
“‘Madame, you have saved my day from utter disaster! I am indeed the explorer fellow, presently Her Britannic Majesty’s consul in Trieste. You find me on vacation from my post, unchained from my desk and mercifully on leave from a wife I love dearly but cannot tolerate for more than a month at a stretch. That’s not her fault. I am myself a quite intolerable spouse.’
“After that Lily made a breathless introduction of herself and of me. We did a second tour of Petrarch’s house and garden, stood respectfully under the fig trees while our new acquaintance declaimed two of the Sonnets to Laura and then rode back with him to the club to return our horses and pick up our coachman. The obvious move was to invite Burton to dinner. He accepted. Over the meal, he was charming and outrageous and full of splendid stories about his early days in the Sind, his ill fated exploration with Speke and so much more that by the time he left, Lily and I were floating all over the map.
“On the next visit – only forty-eight hours later – he was taken ill with a violent attack of malaria. We put him to bed in Papa’s room. I examined him. It was clearly a chronic case. His liver and spleen were grossly enlarged. I prescribed for him; Lily nursed him. By the time he was well enough to travel again they were lovers. When I remonstrated with Lily, she retorted: ‘What did you ex
pect? He’s an urgent man. I’m a ready woman. As for his lady wife, she must have had a lot worse competition than me. He’s done everything and seen everything – and thank God I was practised enough to be ready for him!’
“Then – this was tender and rather sad – she took my hands and held them against her breast and begged me, ‘Please, Magda, love! You won’t try to steal him from me, will you?’ I swore I wouldn’t and I meant it. He was too old for-me and – I know this will sound strange – he frightened me. He knew too much about everything. He had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, disguised as an Arab doctor. He had entered the forbidden city of Harar in Ethiopia. He had spied for Napier in the Sind, and written a scandalous account of male and female prostitution in Karachi which dogged him for the rest of his career. He had no morals to speak of. He had killed men. He was engaged in translating the two erotic classics of the Arab world, The Thousand and One Nights and The Scented Garden. I always had the feeling that he was looking into my head and laughing at what he saw.
“His attitude to Lily was quite different. He loved her earthiness and her spit-in-the-eye vulgarities. When he got too boisterous or too angry drunk, she could scold him into submission. He came at all hours and went away without warning; but his pockets were always full of odd gifts: a bracelet of elephant hair, an amulet of carved amber, a bezel ring from some Balkan goldsmith.
“One day he arrived just before noon. Lily was out with the maid buying fruit and vegetables. I sat down with him to have coffee. He took me by the shoulders and turned me to face him. His grip was like iron. His dark eyes were hypnotic. He spoke very quietly, almost in a whisper, ‘You’re a wild one, Magda. I used to tame falcons in India, so I know what you need. The only reason I haven’t touched you is because I’m too tired to care. Lily’s just right for me. She knows what I want and when I want it and when I just need to curl up and sleep. Problem is I’m not going to be around much longer. You know it. You were punching around at my liver during that last malaria attack. I’ve got all sorts of other bugs that I’ve picked up from Salt Lake in Utah to Jeddah in Arabia. I’d like to leave something for Lily; but I’m a poor man and whatever I have goes to my wife Elizabeth. She’s a good woman, with the heart of a lion; but I’ve always needed a string of fillies and sometimes a colt or two for a change. So I’ve brought something I want you to hold for Lily and give to her when I’m gone. She’ll get a laugh out of it. And if I leave it to Elizabeth, I know she’ll burn it.’
