The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

by Kathryn Davis

  Meanwhile, little by little, the pirate lorcha approaches the ship and the diatonic scale gives way to the so-called gypsy scale. Skyboots calls out “Pirates!” and his cry is taken up by Rattail, by the figurehead; from within the orchestra pit, Nanna’s voice is heard for the first time. “At last, my sweet, the tides conspire to set you in my path,” she sings. She tells Harry Tuck that there is no need for his crew to draw their weapons. Weapons are powerless, she explains, against the intentions of the tides. “The new moon rides between the Asses’ Ears, half-tide, full tide, or low. Her age is clear,” she sings, “it tells you where to go.” Rattail points out that women always lie about their age. “The rule of the current,” Nanna sings; “Trickery,” Rattail replies; “All the havens fill,” Nanna sings; “Don’t take the hook,” Rattail replies. They continue in this vein, as Lahloo repeats the single phrase “At last, my sweet,” over and over, the rhythm of the phrase varying in accordance with the rhythm of the drums.

  Despite Rattail’s warning, Harry Tuck throws down the boarding ladder, and up climbs the pirate queen, Nanna. She is a formidable sight, with a headdress of parrot feathers, and mid-thigh black boots. Otherwise she is naked, and you can see the vestiges of blue-green scales along her flanks. In the San Francisco Opera’s 1975 staging, the singer actually wore no clothes; in 1925, the Copenhagen production was forced to make do with a printed leotard. “Prudes,” said Maeve Merrow, the original Nanna. In the Berlin cabarets, Maeve said, you could see any part of a woman’s anatomy you wanted. Any part.

  Nanna boards the ship and stands balanced on the rail to the left of the figurehead, her one arm extended upward, gripping the jibboom. Her first aria is an extended narrative, the story of her life told in three contradictory parts. She claims to be the illegitimate daughter of a priest and a nun, set adrift in a coracle just moments after her birth, nursed by a sea cow, taught the thousand words for “fish” by a harp seal, instructed in the laws governing morality by a shark. “Call them by name before you eat them,” Nanna explains. “Ripple-fin, Shadow-gill, Coral-darter, Ticktock.” But no, that isn’t right. The truth is, she was the best-loved daughter of a mandarin; her feet were bound from birth, and so she would become a creature of air and light, she was fed nothing but plums and the roe of the sea urchin. “I was bathing in the Yangtze, and the River God saw me,” Nanna sings, “his yellow arms grabbed me and he took me for his wife.” Together they had three children, three carp with dark eyes just like her own. Beautiful eyes, Nanna remarks—doesn’t Harry Tuck agree? “Look close,” she sings, “closer now. What do you see, midnight sky or sky of morning?” Because any fool looking closely enough will be able to see that her eyes are blue. “Do you want to know what really happened?” she asks. “A man had a wife and he didn’t love her. Grabbed her and took her and called her by name. Oh, sad to say he didn’t love her, sad to say, sad to say, but who’s to blame?”

  The aria is constructed in such a way that the melody, based on the gypsy scale, is carried by the cellos, while Nanna’s voice seesaws back and forth between two notes, D and A. The melody is haunting and quite pretty, although its two augmented seconds come into inevitable conflict with Nanna’s incantation. Musically, one of Helle’s purposes for this opera was to create systems in which the ear struggled to maintain its relationship to the harmonious or the familiar, while at the same time acknowledging the inevitability of discord. She’d heard Alban Berg’s songs performed at the conservatory, and while she had to agree with her peers that the lyrics (“Over the borders of the All, you looked meditatingly out”) were ridiculous, she claimed to find his use of Schoenberg’s atonal idiom intriguing. A recent feminist analysis of Lahloo suggests that this tension inherent in the score—“the twin influences of Mozart and Schoenberg grappling for ascendancy, the resultant sense of a basically harmonious form within which, inchoate, the content seethes”—was appropriate to Helle’s growing contempt for the patriarchy. Indeed the entire opera, according to this analysis, “is a veritable feast of proto-feminist symbols. Not only are the three aspects of the goddess—creator/preserver/destroyer; Virgin/Mother/Crone; Kore/Despoena/Persephone—given glorious embodiment in the characters of Nanna, Lady Isabel, and Lahloo; but they ultimately overwhelm the male principle, as represented by Harry Tuck and Rattail, rather than the other way around. The Furrow triumphs over the Harrow, the cunt over the prick.”

  By the time Nanna finishes her aria, she has succeeded in attracting the attention of Harry Tuck’s entire crew, who arrange themselves behind her in two straight rows to sing the “Blame Song,” a traditional chorus in which the men blame each other for their own weaknesses and mistakes: My sweetheart was unfaithful because you made me sign onto this ship; I fell asleep during third watch because you gave me rum to drink; I lost the tip of my finger because you startled me while I was cutting bait; I lost my faith in God because your prayers never work; and so on. Rattail finally intervenes. But why blame yourselves? he asks. Why not blame the one who is apparently blameless—the one who invited the enemy onto the ship in the first place?

  Harry Tuck banishes the crew to its quarters. A platform descends to stage left on pulleys, curtained in the rear by the foresail; we are meant to understand that this is the captain’s stateroom. The mahogany headboard of a large bed is visible, the mattress piled high with embroidered cushions. The stage is almost completely dark, except for a single beam of blue moonlight which illuminates Harry Tuck and Nanna as they lounge against the cushions. Harry claps his hands once, twice, and Rattail appears, bearing a tray piled high with fruits, a bottle of wine, an opium pipe. A duet commences, a fugue of mutual seduction. They smoke the pipe, passing it back and forth, and as they do so, a second Harry and a second Nanna—the offspring of their drugged imaginations—appear stage right in a wavering green spotlight. The duet becomes a quartet; the fugue becomes more complicated, its motif reminiscent of the one we associate with Lahloo. “I kiss your lips,” sings the Harry on the bed. “I blindfold your eyes,” sings the dream Harry. “I kiss your throat,” sings the Nanna on the bed. “I bind your wrists,” sings the dream Nanna. Gradually, as the two figures on the bed become entwined, the two dream figures undergo a metamorphosis: little by little they wind each other round with lengths of green and blue silk until they are sleek and predatory sea creatures; drawn aloft on wires, they swim through the aqueous light, their jaws open wide. “Sweet dreams,” sings Rattail, casting out a net, hauling them in. He licks his chops, he rubs his belly. Then he takes a knife from his belt, slits the fish open, and removes their skeletons, which he plays, with his knife handle, like xylophones. It is the servant’s lot in life, Rattail sings, to dine on the dreams of his captain. Not much meat on this dream, Rattail points out.

  If the above effect was difficult to accomplish, it was nothing compared with what followed. The finale of Lahloo, the engulfing from behind of the entire ship in a gigantic tidal wave, has always required unusual technical ingenuity on the part of the production designer, and provides at least some explanation for the fact that the opera has never been widely produced. Although I suspect there are other reasons for Lahloo’s limited popularity, reasons having to do with its apocalyptic ending, reasons which, needless to say, the demands of my legacy forced me to take into account. It seemed to me that while the average operagoer is generally willing to accept the possibility that one or more of an opera’s characters will die at the end, what isn’t acceptable is that everyone will die. It’s difficult enough, after all, to exchange the charmed precincts of the opera house for the litter and discord of the world outside its doors; that loss should be enough, without having to submit to a vision of wholesale destruction while still inside. Or, as Helle herself once confessed to me, an adult who relies on apocalypse to end a work of art is no different from the desperate schoolchild who ends a story with “and then I got hit by a truck.” A fascist impulse, Helle sneered; nor was it a coincidence that Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer. Consider G
ötterdämmerung. Of course, by the time that cumbersome edifice had gone up into flames, everyone was glad to see it go.

  In any event, when Harry and Nanna awaken, Harry’s wearing a long robe and slippers, Nanna a peach-colored dressing gown. The feathered headdress is nowhere to be seen. They sip coffee, nibble toast, maintain a respectable distance from each other on the bed, propped stiffly against the pillows. “Some marmalade, my dear?” sings Nanna. “A little cream?” “Did you sleep well, my dear?” sings Harry. “No troubled dreams?” It’s almost as if they’ve been married for years; but the music, a nervous commingling of motifs, implies otherwise. In Die Zauberflöte, the essential antagonism between men and women finds reconciliation in the marriage of Tamino and Pamina; we’re made to see how univeral harmony is dependent on such synthesis. Whereas in Lahloo the underlying principle is one of fundamental disharmony. Any attempt to force the issue will prove disastrous, as Rattail subsequently points out.

  He gathers the crew around him on the deck and delivers himself of a final aria, a devilish piece which reiterates, in its use of the Chinese tonal system, his original theme. This time, however, he accompanies himself on the Jingling Johnny, a strange percussion instrument consisting of a long pole with several transverse crescent-shaped brass plates, the entire structure surmounted by a hatlike pavilion. Numerous little bells hang from the plates and from the pavilion; for the purposes of this aria the instrument was modified to include the two fish skeletons, likewise hung with bells. Rattail asks the crew to think of their own wives and sweethearts, skin as smooth as milk, eyes like stars, lips like cherries. He waxes lyrical, but his intention is ironic. What could be more boring, he implies, than the return to hearth and home? What could be more driftless than a ship captained by a man who has gotten what he thought he wanted? What puts wind in the sails, starch in the shirt, lead in the pencil? The lively whores of Woosung are waiting for us, Rattail reminds the crew, those whores with skin smoother than milk, eyes brighter than stars, lips redder than cherries. Of course we have to pay, he sings, of course, of course, of course. We always have to pay. His refrain is eventually taken up by the crew, who begin brandishing pistols and knives.

  By now the only person attentive to the ship’s progress is Skyboots. As the agitation on deck spreads to include the orchestra—the melody of Rattail’s aria consigned to the woodwinds, the Jingling Johnny’s noise augmented by drums and cymbals—it’s at first difficult to make out the sound of his voice. “She sighs,” Skyboots sings, “she wakes, her flanks stir from where she lies, lap-lap, lap-lap.” Rattail and the crew, in the act of advancing on Harry Tuck and Nanna, freeze in place; the orchestra grows quiet, with the exception of a single cymbal, brushed delicately to duplicate the lapping sound of the sea. “She’s the hand that strokes before it takes, the house that holds before it breaks. No thumb, no room, no nail, no floor, no skin, no wall, no print, no door. Lap-lap, lap-lap.” The wave becomes visible, rising up from stage rear. Just as Skyboots concludes his song, just as the wave is about to crest, casting a blue-green shadow across everything below, you can see, cupped within it, an intricate pattern of fish and seaweed; you can hear the faint soughing of the strings, the ascending fourths of Lahloo’s original chord. Little by little the strings are joined by the other instruments. The wave crests and the whole orchestra crests with it; you don’t realize, until the wave starts to fall, which elements have combined to create the accompanying panel of sound. It’s only when the wave falls that you can hear them—Harry Tuck, Nanna, Rattail, Skyboots—their individual motifs churning and disintegrative within a white surge of foam.

  Theorists point out that most modern operas, because they are durchkomponiert, or continuously composed, are nothing more than finales extending all the way back to their own beginnings. Or, as the reviewer Aksel Bram suggested, Lahloo’s finale makes us call into question the meaning of the phrase “to bring down the curtain,” since no curtain ever went up in the first place. The ship sinks beneath the water until all you can see is the prow, and on it the figure of Lahloo. She is standing; slowly she lifts her arms. “Through the dark lanes they travel now, fleet and unknown, Kuroshio current, Gulf Stream, coral and bone, Benguela, Somali, each one alone.”

  VII

  THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES was signed, ending the war. The nations of Europe, in an attempt to humiliate Germany, devised a system of economic sanctions: a heavy boot heel from under which the worst of its villains squirmed forth, hungry for retribution. You can put out poison, as they eventually did at the conservatory, but that will only serve to separate the gullible from the clever. Helle’s rat survived. Just as one day in the spring of 1920, Daisy took Helle to a large field on the outskirts of Copenhagen where, in the company of picnicking families and amorous couples, they watched an airplane make loop-the-loops through a blue, cloudless sky. When the plane landed, a tall blond man emerged from the cockpit. The crowd cheered and the man executed a neat, formal bow, before limping away to a waiting automobile. This was Hermann Göring, biding his time.

  I suppose you could say that Helle was also biding her time, although in her case there was nothing sinister about the awaited event. Night after night she’d come home from the conservatory dispirited and numb, as if all day long she’d been banging up against the walls of an expansive cage. At the dinner table, Daisy would fill her plate with beetroot salad and red cabbage, fresh sausage, slices of fuldkorn, but Helle would only pick at the food, eating like a captive, causing Daisy to comment that she was turning into a shadow. Dancer was either there or off at sea. Sometimes it was just Helle and Oluf Froulund, Daisy inexplicably having decided to spend more and more time with her most recent suitor, Thorkild Propp, the cement magnate.

  Understand, it wasn’t as if there weren’t isolated incidents which emerged with something like the brightly suggestive glow of beetroot from the otherwise all-encompassing beige plate of Helle’s life: the nocturnal sessions, for example, during which she composed Lahloo; Nellie Melba’s rare appearance as Violetta—dressed in a gown so heavily encrusted with her own lavish jewels that Dr. Grenvil almost dropped her, mid-faint—at the Royal Opera; Rasmus Rundgren’s 1917 production of Le nozze di Figaro, in which Maeve Merrow sang the part of Cherubino, and after which Dancer, no doubt inspired by the opera’s final image of happy couples, made his surprising proposal of marriage.

  As Helle described it, she and Dancer were returning from the performance, strolling along the harbor among the Russian refugees’ makeshift shelters, a cramped city of tents and open fires that had sprung up almost overnight, when he suggested a brief detour onto the Langelinie for an unobstructed view of the ocean. The moon was full, its light shining down across the heaving gray surface of the water; Helle was going on and on about Cherubino’s Act One aria. Wasn’t it wonderful, she asked Dancer, how music could make you feel that way, as if you didn’t know who you were or what you were doing? As if suddenly hollow avenues were branching out in your body, all of them waiting like streambeds in the spring to fill with water, but also like the water itself, a watery hand getting ready to pour into the waiting fingers of a glove? Of course it depended on your outlook whether this process indicated the presence of a soul or its absence.

  At one end of the Langelinie stands a statue of Gefion, the legendary goddess responsible for the creation of Zealand, a monumental woman shown cracking her whip above the heads of the oxen who were once her sons, driving her plow through great billowing furrows. At the other end there’s the statue of Andersen’s Little Mermaid, a slender and sorrowful young woman of bronze, seated on a boulder lapped over by the waves, depicted just after she’s sacrificed her tail in order to win a human prince’s love. Sometimes, Dancer said, you couldn’t be two things at once. You had to choose, he said, taking in the two statues with a single sweeping gesture. Sometimes you had to know what you were doing. Of course there was no question which of the two statues was more attractive. If Helle chose the mermaid, he said, smiling his
rueful and seductive smile, he’d begin to court her in earnest. He’d wear her down until she’d agree to marry him. He explained that ever since the night when he’d kissed her and cut her hair, he’d known that his own salvation was a matter of throwing in his lot with a woman smarter than himself. Helle could do worse, he pointed out. She could end up alone, struggling to make ends meet in an ugly apartment in the Vesterbro. An endless procession of piano students, Dancer hinted. Besides, he’d be gone for months at a time, leaving her free to compose her operas. He’d respect the fact that she’d given up her life as a mermaid for him, and in exchange she could expect his complete devotion.