Daughter of Silence

by Morris West

  For Landon himself, the music woke echoes of a private discontent. A man from the New World, he had assumed without effort the urbanities of the Old. Ambitious, he had abandoned a promising practice in his own country to climb the risky slopes of reputation in London. A rebel by nature, he had disciplined his tongue and his temper and accommodated himself to the stratagems of the most jealous profession in the most jealous city in the world. He had hitched himself to the coat-tails of eminence and now, by industry, talent and diplomacy, had established himself as a senior consultant in psychiatry and a specialist in criminal psych-pathology.

  It was much for a man a year short of forty, but it was still two paces away from the closed perimeter of greatness. Two paces – and yet this was the longest leap of all. One needed a spring-board to make it: the opportune case, the fortunate meeting with counsel in need of advice, the moment of illumination in research.

  So far opportunity had eluded him and he had lapsed by slow degrees into frustration and the tart dissatisfaction of those who are challenged always within the stretch of their talent.

  It was a kind of crisis, and he was wise enough to recognize it. There was a climacteric in every career: a season of resentment, indecision and danger. Many a hapless politician had lost a seat in Cabinet because he lacked patience or discretion. Many a brilliant scholar had missed preferment because he was a mite too brusque with his seniors. In the closed brotherhood of the British Medical Association a man had to swallow his pride and cultivate his friends. And when one ventured into the new science of the spirit, one made sedulous deferment to one’s colleagues of the scalpel and the stethoscope. If one were an outlander one was doubly careful, doubly dependent upon the quality of one’s performance and the validity of one’s research.

  So he had chosen a strategy for himself – withdrawal: this sabbatical year among the experts of Europe; three months with Dahlin in Stockholm on institutional practice with the criminally insane, a term with Gutmann in Vienna exploring the nature of responsibility, and now a brief vacation with Ascolini, famous for his use of medico-legal testimony.

  And afterwards? He too had his questions about afterwards because now he was faced with a new aspect of the crisis: the ennui of the middle years. How much should a man pay for the fulfilment of ambition? And when he had paid, how much could he enjoy – and with whom? The old, sad music mocked him with its tale of lost hopes and dead loves and the clamour of forgotten triumphs.

  There was a long, synoptic moment while the last overtones died away, then Rienzi swung round on the stool to face him. His lips puckered into a boyish, uncertain smile. ‘There now, Peter! You’ve had your music! Money on the table! It’s time to pay the piper.’

  Landon took the pipe out of his mouth and grinned at him. ‘What’s the price?’

  ‘Some advice. Some professional advice.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About myself. You’ve been here a week now. I like to think we’ve become friends. You know some of my problems. You’re shrewd enough to guess the rest.’ He flung out his hands in an abrupt gesture of appeal. ‘I’m caught, Peter! I’m married, in a country where there is no divorce. I’m in love with a wife who has no passion for me. I work for a man whom I admire greatly – and who has as little respect for me as if I were the junior clerk. What do I do about it? What’s the matter with me? You’re the psychiatrist! You’re the fellow who probes the hearts of his patients. Read my wife’s and Ascolini’s.’

  Landon frowned and stuck his pipe back in his mouth. Professional instinct warned him against such untimely intimacies. He had a dozen evasions to discourage them. But the man’s distress was patent and his solitude in his own household was strangely poignant. Besides, he had spent more than courtesy on his father-in-law’s house-guest, and Landon had been touched to an unfamiliar gratitude. He hesitated a moment and then said carefully: ‘You can’t have it two ways at once, Carlo. If you want a psychiatrist-and I don’t think you do-then you should consult one of your own countrymen. At least you’ll have a common language and a set of common symbols. If you want to bellyache to a friend, that’s something different.’ He chuckled drily. ‘Generally it’s a better prescription, too. But if you tell my patients, I’ll be out of business in a week!’

  ‘Call it a bellyache, if you want,’ said Rienzi in his brooding, melancholy fashion, ‘but don’t you see, I’m trapped like a squirrel in a cage?’

  ‘By marriage?’

  ‘No. By Ascolini.’

  ‘You don’t like him?’

  Rienzi hesitated a moment and when he answered there was a world of weariness in his voice. ‘I admire him greatly. He has a singular variety of talents and he is a very great advocate.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But I see too much of him, I suppose. I work in his office. My wife and I live in his house. And I am oppressed by his eternal youth.’

  It was an odd phrase, but Landon understood it. He had a momentary vision of the first cocktail party in Ascolini’s Roman apartment when father and daughter played to their small but distinguished audience while Carlo Rienzi walked solitary on the moonlit terrace. He found himself more gently disposed to this young-old man with the too-sensitive mouth and the restrained artist’s hands. He asked quietly: ‘Do you have to live with him?’

  ‘I am told,’ said Rienzi with soft bitterness, ‘I am told that I am in his debt. I am indebted to him for my career. In Italy today the law is an overcrowded profession and the patronage of a great man is rare to find. I am indebted to him also for my wife. And she is in debt to him, being an only daughter whose father has given her love, security and the promise of a rich estate.’

  ‘And Ascolini exacts payment?’

  ‘From both of us.’ He made a small, shrugging gesture of defeat. ‘From me a loyalty and a conformity with his plans for my career. From my wife a – a kind of conspiracy in which her youth is spent on him instead of on me.’

  ‘How does your wife feel about this?’

  ‘Valeria is a singular woman,’ said Rienzi flatly. ‘She understands duty, filial piety and the payment of debts. Also she is very fond of her father and finds much pleasure in his company.

  ‘More than in yours?’

  He smiled at that: the boyish, uncertain smile that lent him so much charm. He said gently: ‘He has much more to offer than I, Peter. I cannot read the world with my fingertips. I am neither assured nor successful though I should like to be both. I love my wife, but I am afraid I have more need of her than she of me.’

  ‘Time may change that.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Rienzi sharply. ‘In this conspiracy there are others involved.’

  ‘Other men?’

  ‘Several. But I am less worried by them than by my own deficiency as a husband.’ He stood up and walked to the french doors that gave on to the balcony and the garden terraces. ‘Let’s walk a little, shall we? It’s more private outside.’

  For a while they were silent, pacing an alley of cypresses, through whose green pillars they saw the sky within hand’s reach and the countryside spread in a multichrome of dark olives, green vineyards, brown fallow and ripe com shaken by the wind. Cynically, Landon thought that time wrought its changes all too slowly, and that for Carlo Rienzi there was need of swifter remedies. He prescribed them, curtly: ‘If your wife makes horns for you, you don’t have to wear them. Hand her back to her father and get yourself a judicial separation. If you don’t like your job or your patron, change them. Dig ditches, if you must, but cut yourself free – now!’

  ‘I wonder,’ asked Rienzi with bleak humour, ‘why it is always the sentimentalists who have the pat answers. I expected better of you, Peter. You’re a professional. You should understand more than others the obliquities of love and possession: why sometimes a half loaf is better than a basketful of pastry; why hope deferred is often a stronger bond than conquest shared.’

  Landon flushed and gave him the tart reminder: ‘If a man Likes to scratch, h
e won’t thank you for curing his itch.’

  ‘But do you have to tear out his heart to cure him? Cut off his head to teach him reason?’

  ‘Not at all. You try to help him to enough maturity to choose his own remedy. Or, if there is no remedy, to wear his affliction with dignity.’

  The words were hardly out before he regretted them, being vain of a tolerance which he did not possess, ashamed of a brusqueness with which clinical practice had endowed him. This was the penalty of ambition: that a man could not sympathize without demeaning himself. This was the irony of self-love: that he could not pity what he had not endured in his own flesh – the kiss given but not returned, the passion spent but unrequited. Rienzi’s mild answer was the bitterest reproach of all: ‘If I lack dignity, Peter, you must not blame me too much. The meanest actor can play a king. It takes a great one to wear the horns and have his audience weep. If I have not rebelled before this, it is because opportunity was lacking, not courage. It is not as easy as you think to receive the dilemmas of loyalty and love. But I’m plotting revolution, believe me! I know, better than you, that my only hope with Valeria is to beat Ascolini on his own ground – to destroy the legend which he has built up for her and which is the source of his power over her. Strange, isn’t it? To prove myself a lover, I must prove myself a lawyer first. I need a brief, Peter, just one good brief. But where the hell do I get it?’

  Before Landon had time to frame a reply or an apology, a servant came to call Rienzi to the telephone and the physician of souls was left pondering the problems of love in an old land where passions run in crooked channels and youth carries on its back five thousand years of violent history.

  Landon was glad to be alone. A man devoted to the mechanics of success, he found too much company exacting, too many new impressions a burden on the imagination. He felt the need of some restoration before committing himself to an afternoon with his very intelligent but very demanding hosts.

  Carlo Rienzi was an attractive fellow, and one could not grudge a gentleness for his dilemmas and indecisions; but it was the problem of all friendships in Italy that one was expected to be involved, to take sides in the most trivial or grandiose issue, to have a care for every sorrow and a blush for every indiscretion. If one were not careful, one was spent like a plenty-purse, sucked dry and left gasping while one’s friends waxed riotous on love or pity.

  It was a relief therefore to be quit of people and enjoy the simple tourist pleasure of looking at the view from the garden.

  The first impact was breath-taking: a bright and palpitating air that challenged the leap of heart and spirit; hills at eye-level, stark against the sky, tufted with pine and chestnut, craggy with ancient rooks and the crumbling castles of Guelph and Ghibelline; a hawk, high-wheeling against the blue; dark pines like spearmen marching the upland slopes.

  For all his crust of egotism and ambition Landon was not a gross man. One could not walk the secret ways of the human spirit without a talent for wonder, a minimal grace of compassion, and a small well of tears for man caught in the terror of discontinuity. There were tears rising in him now at the sudden wonder of this old land, peopled with noonday ghosts.

  This was the true climate of mysticism, savage yet tender, soft with tillage yet stark with relics of ancient and bloody conflicts.

  Here the little Brother Francis was wedded in a wonderful union with the Lady Poverty. Here came the mercenaries of Barbarossa: pikemen from England, bowmen from Florence, bandits from Albania, motley yet terrible in the massacre of Montalcino. The poet-king of Luxembourg, Henry of the love-songs, died here under the cypresses. On the hill of Malmarenda, crowned with four trees, was held that monstrous feast of feasts which ended in the butchery of the Tolomei and the Salimbeni. And under the ancient roofs of Siena the Lady Catherine revealed the sweet substance of her spirit – ‘Charity does not seek itself for itself…but for God. Souls should be united and transformed by charity. We must find among thorns the perfume of roses about to open.’

  It was a place of paradox, a field of fusion for historic contrarieties: beauty and terror, spiritual ecstasy and gross cruelty, medieval ignorance and the cold illumination of the age of unreason. Its people, too, were a complex of many strains: ancient Etruscan, Lombard German and soldier of fortune from God knows where. Medieval saints, Florentine humanists, Arab astrologers had all contributed to their inheritance. Their merchants traded from Provence to the Baltic and students came from the four comers of Europe to hear Aldo Brandini lecture on the regimen of the human body.

  For Landon it was a strange processional vision – part landscape and part the dredging of old memory – but when it passed he felt a mite more understanding, a shade more tolerant of the passionate, involute people with whom he had broken bread. He did not have to share the damnation they imposed upon themselves. He could forgive them – provided he did not have to live with them.

  He caught a drift of perfume and the sound of a footfall and a moment later Valeria Rienzi was standing beside him on the path. She was dressed in a modish summer frock. Her feet were bare in sandals of gold leather and her hair was tied back from her face with a silk ribbon. She looked pale, he thought. There were shadows about her eyes and a hint of weariness in her lips; but her skin was clear as amber and she greeted him with a smile.

  ‘You know, Peter, that’s the first time I’ve seen you looking like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Unguarded, unwary. Almost like a boy watching Pulcinella in the square.’

  Landon felt himself blushing, but he grinned and tried to shrug off the comment. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know I looked – wary. I don’t mean to be, I assure you. You must find me a very stuffy fellow.’

  ‘Anything but stuffy, Peter.’ As if it were the most natural gesture in the world she linked hands with him and began strolling down the garden walk at his side. ‘On the contrary, you’re a very exciting man. Exciting and perhaps a little frightening, too.’

  He played games with too many women not to recognize this simple gambit; but his vanity was tickled and he decided to play it a little longer. He asked innocently. ‘Frightening? I don’t understand.’

  ‘You’re so complete…so contained. You live from yourself to yourself. You’re like my father in many ways. You understand so much that there seems to be nothing other people can give you. You both take life like a dinner party. You eat it, get up satisfied and then pass on. I wish I could do that.’

  ‘I should have said you did it very successfully.’

  He delivered the stroke lightly like a fencer opening a friendly match. To his surprise she frowned and said seriously: ‘I know. I do it very well. But it isn’t real, you see. It’s like a pupil going through a lesson that he knows by heart. My father’s a good teacher. So is Basilio.’

  ‘Basilio?’

  ‘He’s a man I’ve been seeing lately. He makes an art of irresponsibility.’

  The gambit was not so familiar after all. Landon decided that it might be wise to quit the game before it began in earnest. He said, lamely: ‘There’s a lot of talk about the art of living. In my experience it’s mostly artifice: powder and patches and carnival masks.’

  ‘And what’s underneath?’

  ‘Men and women.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘All kinds – most of them lonely.’

  As soon as he had said it, he knew that he had made a mistake. This was the beginning of every affair – the first intimacy, the chink in the mailcoat that left the heart bare to the blade. And the blade came probing more swiftly than he had dreamed.

  ‘That’s what I read in your face, wasn’t it, Peter? You were lonely. You’re like that bird up there – high, free, with all the world spread under your wings – and yet you were lonely.’ Her fingers tightened on his palm; he felt the warmth of her body and caught the heady drift of her perfume. ‘I’m lonely too.’

  He was a physician and he understood the uses of pain. He asked coolly: ‘Wi
th so much, Valeria? With your father and Carlo – and Basilio thrown in for good measure?’

  He was prepared for anger and even for a slap in the mouth; but she simply disengaged herself and said with icy scorn: ‘I expected better of you, Peter. Because I hold your hand and tell you a little of the truth about myself, does that make me a whore? I make no secret of what I do or of whom I like. But you-you must despise yourself very much. I’m sorry for any woman who tries to love you.’

  Then, as if the one shame were not enough, Carlo was standing in the middle of the path and saying with wintry politeness: ‘You’ll have to excuse me from lunch, I’m afraid. There’s been some trouble in the village. I’ve been asked to help. I’m not sure when I’ll be back.’

  He did not wait for their comments but left them quickly, hostile actors on an empty stage, without script, prompter or any predictable resolution to their conflict. Awkward as a schoolboy, Landon stammered through an apology. ‘I don’t know what I can say to beg your pardon. I – I can only try to explain. In my work a man gets bad habits. He sits like a father confessor listening to people’s miseries. Sometimes he comes to feel a little bit like God sitting in the judgment seat. That’s one problem. The other one is that patients always try to turn their psychiatrist into something else: a father, a mother, a lover. It’s a symptom of sickness. We call it transference. We develop defences against it – a kind of clinical brutality. The trouble is we sometimes use the same weapon against people who are not our patients at all. It’s a kind of cowardice. And you’re right when you say I despise myself for it. I’m very sorry, Valeria.’

  For a while she did not answer him but stood leaning against a stone urn, stripping the petals from a wistaria blossom and scattering them at her feet. Her face was averted so that he could not read her eyes and when finally she did speak her voice was studiously grey.