“How do you do?” I said nervously. “You are very welcome to our abode.” Marlborough’s sister growled. Later on I learnt a few intelligent phonetic phrases of Wolvery but at that time I found the conversation embarrassing.
“Anubeth asks if you would like to see inside the Ark,” said Marlborough. “She is very house-proud and I must say she has arranged everything with great taste.”
“Enchanted,” I replied with a stiff bow. I found one was apt to address Anubeth with a certain ceremony, she was very imposing.
The interior of the Ark was like the opium dream of a gypsy. There were embroidered hangings of wonderful design, perfume sprays shaped like exotic feathered birds, lamps like praying mantises with moveable eyes, velvet cushions in the form of gigantic fruits, and sofas mounted on prostrate were women beautifully sculptured in rare woods and ivory. All sorts of mummified creatures hung from the roof, molded in such skillful gestures that they seemed alive.
“Anubeth likes to embalm anything she finds dead,” said Marlborough. “This is her hobby. She uses a very ancient Egyptian technique. All our family are artistic.”
Anubeth growled and reached up to get a very strange animal from the ceiling for my inspection. It was a tortoise with a baby’s wizened face and long thin legs which were frozen in a gallop. “Anubeth says that this is a kind of collage she made for fun when the keeper of the principal morgues in Venice gave her the present of a dead baby. The legs originally belonged to some storks that died of the cold. It really is very clever. I sometimes wonder if she ought to paint. I am sure she has talent.”
Here Anubeth and Marlborough exchanged several growls and we all sat down around a small jade table which was balanced on top of a reared cobra in amethyst.
“I must say you have made everything very comfortable and original,” I told Marlborough. “This must really be the ideal form of travel.” Anubeth served us some jasmine tea and small glasses of a French liqueur whose name was fine champagne although it tasted nothing at all like champagne.
“Yes,” said Marlborough who was comfortably settled on some velvet nectarine-shaped cushions. “Our family have always been addicted to travel. In the past you even compared me to a swallow with my comings and goings. I believe I also inherit characteristics of Great Uncle Imrés, a Hungarian nobleman whose mother was a well-known Transylvanian Vampire. For various reasons I have never told you my entire family history, as I was sworn to secrecy during the Communist persecution of Hungary. Now, sadly enough, the only remaining members of our family are Anubeth and myself. As I suggested before, I had a somewhat tense relationship with my other sisters, Audrey, Anastasia and Annabelle. They all suffered from a common mania, namely that when I crossed half the world to visit them in their respective castles, that my journeys were made with the object of stealing an early model vacuum cleaner which they were in the habit of hiring to each other at exorbitant prices. They all perished during the cataclysm. Audrey was found congealed upside-down in a small iceberg that invaded her bedroom. She was still holding an empty bottle of champagne to her lips. Very tragic, but not altogether without poetic justice. Physically speaking Anubeth was the only one of us to inherit characteristics of Great Uncle Imrés. He was a werewolf.”
“Of course I understand that Communists must have objected very strongly to a werewolf, especially as he came from such a noble family,” I said. Anubeth looked pleased and passed a long pink tongue over her jaws.
“Our property in Hungary was confiscated,” continued Marlborough. “Uncle Imrés was caught and exhibited in a cage in St. Petersburg until he died of shame, then they had him stuffed and put in the Natural History Museum. All this had a devastating effect on our family pride. I published a short and rather bitter elegy to the memory of Great Uncle Imrés. You understand that the wolf blood in our family was something of a secret, although personally I consider it a distinction.”
“It would be a great pity if werewolves died out altogether,” I said. “After all animal-headed Goddesses and Gods have inspired us all through history.”
Marlborough sipped his jasmine tea delicately and stroked his incredibly long beard. “As a matter of fact it was rather to prevent such a calamity that we initiated our journey,” he said. “You see Anubeth is now nearly eighty and we decided she should marry before it was too late to propagate the species. This is why we had to journey through Canada to find the Wolf King, Pontefact, who was happy to make the match.”
“I beg your pardon?” I said, feeling astonished. “You mean?”
“Yes indeed,” said Marlborough. “Anubeth is now happily married to King Pontefact whom you have already met. They are expecting a litter very soon. The whole wolf pack are Pontefact’s subjects, so of course they accompany us everywhere.”
I remained silent a while in order to digest this startling news. Would one refer to the litter as babies? werelets? or puppies? I decided not to mention anything until Marlborough gave me a lead. In some things he was extremely conventional.
“I must offer you my hearty congratulations,” I said to Anubeth. “We will all be happy to have young ones amongst us.”
Marlborough told me that his sister and he would continue to live in the Ark because the presence of the wolves might upset the goats, and no doubt also because the comfort they enjoyed in the Ark was superior to the bare cavern where we lived, although he was too polite to say so. I asked them to dispose of any service we could offer and left them in a mist of white ginger perfume which issued from the beak of an embalmed cuckoo.
The wolves watched me as I picked my way cautiously out of their circle, I did not want to offend anybody, and wolves have notoriously quick tempers.
Below in the cavern I heard the sound of Christabel’s drum which announced the return of Majong and the postman Taliessin. They had successfully broken into a collapsed pharmacy, where the required ingredients were found after some difficulty. The china pot containing the stramonium was somewhat chipped but the contents were still intact. After performing certain ablutions over us all Christabel emptied the contents of the three jars into the boiling cauldron.
Moonwise the dance began, and we were quickly lashed into a frenzy by the rhythm of Christabel’s drum and the powerful vapours from the stramonium, vervain, and musk boiling in the pot. The goats pranced around us in an outer circle, bleating. Taliessin and Majong had retired to the upperworld, as men were not allowed to see this magic ceremony.
“Belzi Ra Ha-Ha Hekate Come!
Descend upon us, the sound of my drum.
Inkalá Iktum my bird is a mole
Up goes the Equator and down the North Pole!
Eptàlum Zam Pollum the power to increase
Here come the North Lights and a flight of wild Bees.”
The air was filled with a humming and a drumming of wings, and millions of bumble bees gathered over our heads and formed a great female figure over the boiling cauldron. The swarm shimmered and shook in the formation of the giantess.
“Speak Zam Pollum!” cried Christabel. “Zam Pollum speak! Open your heart of wild honey and tell us how to capture your most Holy Grail that Earth shall not die on her axis! Speak Zam Pollum!”
The figure buzzed and shimmered, then somewhere from the depths of the body made from so many millions of bees came a voice so unbearably sweet that we felt drowned in honey.
“Bees shall nest again in the Lion’s carcass. So my cup will be filled with honey and I shall drink again with the Horned God Sephira the Pole Star, my husband and my son. Follow the swarm.”
The circle of goats now dispersed in alarm as Anubeth joined our circle, walking majestically and bearing a lighted taper of incense.
“I am Anubeth, High Queen of the Wolves. My people wish to offer themselves to recover your most Holy Cup, Great Goddess Hekate Zam Pollum!” she said in Wolvery. The Goddess hummed with a million voices and drops of
honey fell like manna from the roof of the cavern. We were covered with a most delicious perfumed stickiness and were obliged to lick ourselves clean.
The swarm now dispersed, breaking the body of the Goddess into millions of shining fragments flying up the steps. “Follow!” called Christabel, and still dancing, we were drawn in the wake of the bees.
Then, spurred by a long howl from Anubeth the whole pack of wolves trailed behind us, and Marlborough’s Ark left with all the bells tinkling wildly in chorus with the bees.
This is how the Goddess reclaimed her Holy Cup with an army of bees, wolves, seven old women, a postman, a Chinaman, a poet, an atom-driven Ark, and a were woman. The strangest army, perhaps, ever seen on this planet.
The Marquise, who was in charge of the military organization of the invasion, ordered the wolves to surround the palace of the Archbishop where the Grail was captive. In the meantime we would all start screaming that we were being attacked by wolves. As soon as the door opened the swarm of bees would rush into the palace and take the Cup from wherever it lay hidden.
All worked according to plan. The Archbishop himself ran downstairs to open the door as soon as we all started shrieking. Propelled by a supernatural intelligence, the swarm of bees whirled into the house and returned in a few moments carrying the Holy Grail, which they bore off to some secret part of our cavern, leaving a trail of honey in their wake which glittered like gold on the snow.
In a matter of seconds the Archbishop aroused the household, and soon a stream of infuriated ecclesiastics and secret police chased out into the garden. They were beaten back by the wolves and we made good our escape, with the pack bringing up the rear.
This is the end of my tale. I have set it all down faithfully and without exaggeration either poetic or otherwise.
Soon after the capture of the Grail, Anubeth was delivered of a litter of six young werewolf cubs which improved in appearance after their fur grew. Custom being a wonderful thing in its way, the cubs were soon playing happily with the kittens, while King Pontefact smiled wolfishly at his merry brood.
Ice ages pass, and although the world is frozen over we suppose someday grass and flowers will grow again. In the meantime I keep a daily record on three wax tablets.
After I die Anubeth’s werecubs will continue the document, till the planet is peopled with cats, werewolves, bees and goats. We all fervently hope that this will be an improvement on humanity, which deliberately renounced the Pneuma of the Goddess.
According to Carmella’s planisphere we are now somewhere in the region where Lapland used to be and this makes me smile.
A shewolf in the pack gave birth the same day as Anubeth to six white woolly puppies. We are thinking of training them to draw a sledge.
If the old woman can’t go to Lapland, then Lapland must come to the Old Woman.
AFTERWORD
THE FIRST time I read The Hearing Trumpet, I knew nothing about its author, so I had the incredible experience of coming to this short novel in a state of innocence. I was wholly unaware, for instance, that Leonora Carrington had been a painter, that she spent most of her life as an expat in Mexico, and that in her youth she had been in a relationship with Max Ernst, one of the greatest surrealists. But the anarchic tone and perverse nature of this little book made a powerful impression, one that has never left me.
There are two qualities in fiction that I find particularly astonishing and moving: open-endedness and wild metaphysics.
The first quality is structural. Open-ended books intentionally leave themes and ideas unrestricted, rendering them a little blurred. They grant us wonderful space for making our own surmises, for seeking associations, for thinking and interpreting. This interpretive process is a source of great intellectual pleasure, and it also acts as a friendly nudge toward further prospecting. Books of this sort have no theses, but they arouse questions that would not have occurred to us otherwise.
To my mind, the second quality, wild metaphysics, touches on a very serious question: Why do we read novels in the first place? Inevitably among the many true responses will be: We read novels to gain a broader perspective on everything that happens to people on Earth. Our own experience is too small, our beings too helpless, to make sense of the complexity and enormity of the universe; we desire to see life up close, to get a glimpse of the existences of others. Do we have anything in common with them? Are they anything like us? We are seeking a shared communal order, each of us a stitch in a piece of knitted fabric. In short, we expect novels to put forward certain hypotheses that might tell us what’s what. And banal as it might sound, this is a metaphysical question: On what principles does the world operate?
I think that this, in fact, is exactly where the difference—so hotly debated in my own literary era—lies between so-called genre and non-genre fiction. The true genre novel presents us with recognizable perspectives, using a ready-made world that has familiar philosophical parameters. The non-genre novel aims to establish its own rules for the created universe, sketching its own epistemological maps. And this is the case whether the book is a love story, a murder mystery, or the tale of an expedition to another galaxy.
The Hearing Trumpet eludes all categorization. From its first sentence on, it presents an internally coherent cosmos governed by self-generated laws. In doing so it passes disturbing comment on things we never stop to question.
•
In the patriarchal order, on reaching old age a woman becomes an even greater bother than she was when young. Just as patriarchal societies think up and organize thousands of norms, rules, codes, and forms of oppression to keep young women in line, they treat old women (who have lost their alluring erotic power) with a similar degree of suspicion and aversion. While maintaining a semblance of sympathy, members of such societies endlessly dwell on the former beauty of older women with a certain covert satisfaction, pondering the effects of the passage of time. Further marginalization is achieved by pushing them into social nonexistence; they are often financially impoverished and stripped of any influence. They become, instead, inferior creatures of no concern whatsoever to others; society does little more than tolerate them and provide them (rather reluctantly) with some sort of care.
This is the status of Marian Leatherby, the ancient narrator of The Hearing Trumpet, as the novel opens. She is full of life but hard of hearing. And she is doubly excluded—first as a woman, then as an old woman. Essential to her character is a quality she shares with the novel as a whole: eccentricity (eccentricity being one of the modes allowed to an old woman when she’s not playing the role of a kindhearted granny). Indeed, casting a deaf old woman in the role of narrator, heroine, and governing spirit, and populating a book with a group of odd old ladies, indicates from the start that this novel will be a highly eccentric, radical affair.
Things that are eccentric are by definition “outside the center”—outside long-established norms and all things regarded as self-evident, on the beaten path. To be eccentric is to view the world from a completely different perspective, one that is both provincial and marginal—pushed aside, to the fringes—and at the same time revelatory and revolutionary.
The Institute, or care home, where Marian is sent by her family, is run by Dr. and Mrs. Gambit. It too is eccentric, comprising a series of bizarre dwellings—shaped like a toadstool, a Swiss chalet, an Egyptian mummy, a boot, a lighthouse —impossible and absurd, straight out of a Bosch painting or some oneiric funfair. But here eccentricity can be seen as emblematic of the oppressive, patronizing, and infantilizing attitude we take toward old people. The word “gambit” is derived from the Italian word gambetto, literally “little leg,” which also turns up in the phrase dare il gambetto—to trip up, or to plot against. The Gambits are the hypocritical, pretentious representatives of an equally hypocritical society, and their methods are summed up by the expression “for their own good.” The Gambits always know what is proper and healthy for
their wards, submitting them to an ill-defined psycho-pedagogical doctrine not unlike the one embraced by followers of Rudolf Steiner. The most comical example of this ideology are the “Movements,” perhaps a nod to the Gurdjieff movements, that the old ladies are obliged to perform on a daily basis.
The Gambits’ mission involves constant observation and judgment of their residents, another feature of the vague, quasi-religious concept of self-perfection bordering on sadism with which they indoctrinate their charges. As Dr. Gambit tells Marian:
“Reports in your particular case show the following list of interior impurities: Greed, Insincerity, Egoism, Laziness and Vanity. At the top of the list Greed, signifying a dominating passion. You cannot overcome so many psychic deformities in a short space of time. You are not alone as victim of your degenerate habits, everyone has faults, here we seek to observe these faults and finally to dissolve them under the light of Objective Observation, Consciousness.
“The fact that You Have Been Chosen to join this community should give you enough stimulation to face your own vices bravely and seek to diminish their hold over you.”
Behind the Gambits’ beneficence lies a quite specific economic motive. Yes, the Gambits make money from the old people they claim to perfect. In fact, they do not operate out of a sense of mission at all but in order to make a living. In invoking the sin of Greed, Carrington reminds us of the deeply hypocritical connections between religious institutions and economics.
Another of the novel’s eccentrics is Carmella, the heroine’s great friend, said to have been inspired by Carrington’s old friend and fellow painter Remedios Varo. Carmella has been allowed to retain some influence in the world because she is a rich old woman, and there’s nothing people respect as much as money and those who possess it. As a result, Carmella enjoys unquestioned power to make things happen. Her appearances at the dreary Institute are dramatic; her ideas are absolute, steered not by reason but by imagination and a different way of thinking. In her character eccentricity is elevated to the rank of Goddesshood.
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