Nonetheless, it appalled me that someone as deeply ill and as vulnerable as Christina Brossard should fall into the hands of this opportunist quack.
You can well understand, therefore, that I felt a certain satisfaction, not to say self-approval, when I received an urgent telephone call from the Mother Superior some three weeks later.
I had heard no more in the meantime of the Hospice or of Christina. Dr Valentina Gabor, however, had appeared with remorseless frequency on Radio Monte Carlo and the local television channels, spreading her unique brand of psychoanalytic mysticism, and extolling all the virtues of being ‘reborn’.
In fact, it was while watching on the late evening news an interview with Dr Gabor recorded that afternoon at Nice Airport before she flew back to Paris that I was telephoned by the Mother Superior.
‘Dr Charcot! Thank heavens you’re in! There’s been a disaster here – Christina Brossard has vanished! We’re afraid she may have taken an overdose. I’ve tried to reach Dr Gabor but she has returned to Paris. Could you possibly come to the Hospice?’
I calmed her as best I could and set off. It was after midnight when I reached the sanatorium. Spotlights filled the drive with a harsh glare, the patients were unsettled, peering through their windows, nuns with torches were fruitlessly searching the grounds. A nervous Sister Louise escorted me to the Mother Superior, who seized my hands with relief. Her strong face was veined with strain.
‘Dr Charcot! I’m grateful to you – I only regret that it’s so late . . .’
‘No matter. Tell me what happened. Christina was under Dr Gabor’s care?’
‘Yes. How I regret my decision. I hoped that Christina might have found herself through a spiritual journey, but I had no idea that drugs were involved. If I had known . . .’
She handed me an empty vial. Across the label was Dr Gabor’s florid signature.
‘We found this in Christina’s room an hour ago. She seems to have injected herself with the entire dosage and then driven off wildly into the night. We can only assume that she stole it from Dr Gabor’s valise.’
I studied the label. ‘Psilocybin – a powerful hallucinogenic drug. Its use is still legal by qualified physicians, though disapproved of by almost the entire profession. This is more than a dangerous toy.’
‘Dr Charcot, I know.’ The Mother Superior gestured with her worn hands. ‘Believe me, I fear for Christina’s soul. She appears to have been completely deranged – when she drove off in our oldest laundry van she described it to one of the patients as “her golden carriage”.’
‘You’ve called the police?’
‘Not yet, Doctor.’ A look of embarrassment crossed the Mother Superior’s face. ‘When Christina left she told one of the orderlies that she was going to “the ball”. I’m told that the only ball being held tonight is Prince Rainier’s grand gala in Monaco in honour of President Giscard d’Estaing. I assume that she has gone there, perhaps confusing Prince Rainier with the Prince Charming of her fairy tale, and hoping that he will rescue her. It would be profoundly awkward for the Hospice if she were to create a scene, or even try to . . .’
‘Kill the President? Or the Rainiers? I doubt it.’ Already an idea was forming in my mind. ‘However, to be on the safe side I’ll leave for Monaco immediately. With luck I’ll be there before she can cause any harm to herself.’
Pursued by the Mother Superior’s blessings, I returned to my car and set off into the night. Needless to say, I did not intend to make the journey to Monaco. I was quite certain that I knew where Christina Brossard had fled – to her father’s mansion above Vence.
As I followed the mountain road I reflected on the evidence that had come together – the fantasy of being a skivvy, the all-promising woman psychiatrist, the hallucinogenic drug. The entire fairy tale of Cinderella was being enacted, perhaps unconsciously, by this deranged heiress. If she herself was Cinderella, Dr Valentina Gabor was the fairy godmother, and her magic wand the hypodermic syringe she waved about so spectacularly. The role of the pumpkin was played by the ‘sacred mushroom’, the hallucinogenic fungus from which psilocybin was extracted. Under its influence even an ancient laundry van would seem like a golden coach. And as for the ‘ball’, this of course was the whole psychedelic trip.
But who then was Prince Charming? As I arrived at the great mansion at the end of its drive it occurred to me that I might be unwittingly casting myself in the role, fulfilling a fantasy demanded by this unhappy girl. Holding tight to my medical case, I walked across the dark gravel to the open entrance, where the laundry van had ended its journey in the centre of a flower-bed.
High above, in one of the great rooms facing the sea, a light flickered, as if something was being burned in a grate. I paused in the hall to let my eyes feel their way in the darkness, wondering how best to approach this distraught young woman. Then I saw that the massive Venetian clock above the staircase had been savagely mutilated. Several of the ornate numerals tilted on their mountings. The hands had stopped at midnight, and someone had tried to wrench them from the face.
For all my resistance to that pseudo-science, it occurred to me that once again a psychoanalytic explanation made complete sense of these bizarre events and the fable of Cinderella that underpinned them. I walked up the staircase past the dismembered clock. Despite the fear-crazed assault on them, the erect hands still stood upright on the midnight hour – that time when the ball ended, when the courtships and frivolities of the party were over and the serious business of a real sexual relationship began. Fearful of that male erection, Cinderella always fled at midnight.
But what had Christina Brossard fled from in this Palladian mansion?
Suppose that the Prince Charming who courted her so dangerously but so appealingly were in fact her own father. Had some kind of incestuous act involved the widowed industrialist and his adolescent daughter, herself an uncanny image of his dead wife? His revulsion and self-disgust at having committed incest would explain his apparently motiveless suicide and his daughter’s guilt – as I knew only too well from my court attendances as an expert medical witness, far from hating the fathers who forced them to commit incest, daughters were invariably plagued by powerful feelings of guilt at their responsibility for their parent’s imprisonment. So after his death she would naturally return to the house, and try to expiate that guilt as a servant-girl. And what better model for an heiress than Cinderella herself ?
Drawn by the distant flames, I crossed the upstairs hallway and entered the great bedroom. It was filled with paintings of young nudes cavorting with centaurs, unmistakably Gaston Brossard’s master-bedroom, perhaps where the act of incest had taken place.
Flames lifted from the fireplace, illuminating the ash-streaked face of Christina. She knelt by the grate, crooning as she fed the last of the pages torn from a familiar book of fairy tales. Head to one side, she stared at the soft blaze with overlit eyes, stroking the rough seams of the hospital tunic she wore over her bare legs.
I guessed that she was in the middle of her hallucination and that she saw herself in a resplendent gown. Yet her drifting eyes looked up at me with an expression of almost knowing calm, as if she recognized me and was waiting for me to play my role in the fable and bring it to its proper conclusion. I thought of the mutilated hands of the clock above the staircase. All that remained was to restore the glass slipper to its rightful owner.
Had I now to play the part of her rescuer? Remembering the familiar sexual symbolism of the foot, I knew that the glass slipper was nothing more than a transparent and therefore guilt-free vagina. And as for the foot to be placed within it, of course this would not be her own but that of her true lover, the erect male sexual organ from which she fled.
Reaching forward, she added the cover of the fairy tale to the dying blaze, and then looked up at me with waiting eyes. For a moment I hesitated. High on psilocybin, she would be unable to distinguish truth from fantasy, so I could play out my role and bring this psychoanalytic drama
to its conclusion without any fear of professional disapproval. My action would not take place in the real world, but within that imaginary realm where the fable of Cinderella was being enacted.
Knowing my role now, and the object which I myself had to place in that glass slipper, I took her hands and drew her from her knees towards her father’s bed.
I murmured: ‘Cinderella . . .’
But wait – they’re about to leave the terrace. You can look at them now, everyone else is staring frankly at this attractive young woman and her decrepit companion. Sitting here in the centre of Monte Carlo on this magnificent spring day, it’s hard to believe that these strange events ever occurred.
It’s almost unnerving – she’s looking straight at me. But does she recognise me, the dermatologist who freed her from her obsession and restored her to health?
Her companion, sadly, was the only casualty of this radical therapy. As he sits hunched at his table, fumbling with himself like an old man, I can tell you that he was once a fashionable physician whom she met just before her release from the Hospice. They were married three months later, but the marriage was hardly a success. By whatever means, presumably certain methods of her own, she transformed him into this old man.
But why? Simply, that in order to make the incest fantasy credible, any man she marries, however young and princely, however charming, must become old enough to be her father.
Wait! She is coming towards this table. Perhaps she needs my help? She stands in front of the restaurant mirror looking at herself and her elderly husband, and places a hand on his shoulder.
That elegant face with its knowing smile. Let me try to shake that composure, and whisper the title of this cheap magazine on my lap.
‘CINDERELLA . . .’
Her hand pats my shoulder indulgently.
‘Father, it’s time to go back to the Hospice. I promised the Mother Superior that I wouldn’t over-tire you.’
Knowing, elegant and completely self-possessed.
‘And do stop playing that game with yourself. You know it only excites you.’
And very punitive.
1980
NEWS FROM THE SUN
In the evenings, as Franklin rested on the roof of the abandoned clinic, he would often remember Trippett, and the last drive he had taken into the desert with the dying astronaut and his daughter. On impulse he had given in to the girl’s request, when he found her waiting for him in the dismantled laboratory, her father’s flight jacket and solar glasses in her hands, shabby mementoes of the vanished age of space. In many ways it had been a sentimental gesture, but Trippett was the last man to walk on the moon, and the untended landscape around the clinic more and more resembled the lunar terrain. Under that cyanide-blue sky perhaps something would stir, a lost memory engage, for a few moments Trippett might even feel at home again.
Followed by the daughter, Franklin entered the darkened ward. The other patients had been transferred, and Trippett sat alone in the wheelchair at the foot of his bed. By now, on the eve of the clinic’s closure, the old astronaut had entered his terminal phase and was conscious for only a few seconds each day. Soon he would lapse into his last deep fugue, an invisible dream of the great tideways of space.
Franklin lifted the old man from his chair, and carried his child-like body through the corridors to the car park at the rear of the clinic. Already, however, as they moved into the needle-sharp sunlight, Franklin regretted his decision, aware that he had been manipulated by the young woman. Ursula rarely spoke to Franklin, and like everyone at the hippy commune seemed to have all the time in the world to stare at him. But her patient, homely features and uninnocent gaze disturbed him in a curious way. Sometimes he suspected that he had kept Trippett at the clinic simply so that he could see the daughter. The younger doctors thought of her as dumpy and unsexed, but Franklin was sure that her matronly body concealed a sexual conundrum of a special kind.
These suspicions aside, her father’s condition reminded Franklin of his own accelerating fugues. For a year these had lasted little more than a few minutes each day, manageable within the context of the hours he spent at his desk, and at times barely distinguishable from musing. But in the past few weeks, as if prompted by the decision to close the clinic, they had lengthened to more than thirty minutes at a stretch. In three months he would be housebound, in six be fully awake for only an hour each day.
The fugues came so swiftly, time poured in a torrent from the cracked glass of their lives. The previous summer, during their first excursions into the desert, Trippett’s waking periods had lasted at least half an hour. He had taken a touching pleasure in the derelict landscape, in the abandoned motels and weed-choked swimming pools of the small town near the air base, in the silent runways with their dusty jets sitting on flattened tyres, in the over-bright hills waiting with the infinite guile of the geological kingdom for the organic world to end and a more vivid mineral realm to begin.
Now, sadly, the old astronaut was unaware of all this. He sat beside Franklin in the front seat, his blanched eyes open behind the glasses but his mind set to some private time. Even the motion of the speeding car failed to rouse him, and Ursula had to hold his shoulders as he tottered like a stuffed toy into the windshield.
‘Go on, doctor – he likes the speed . . .’ Sitting forward, she tapped Franklin’s head, wide eyes fixed on the speedometer. Franklin forced himself to concentrate on the road, conscious of the girl’s breath on his neck. This highway madonna, with her secret dream of speed, he found it difficult to keep his hands and mind off her. Was she planning to abduct her father from the clinic? She lived in the small commune that had taken over the old solar city up in the hills, Soleri II. Every morning she cycled in, bringing Trippett his ration of raisins and macrobiotic cheer. She sat calmly beside him like his young mother as he played with the food, making strange patterns on his paper plate.
‘Faster, Dr Franklin – I’ve watched you drive. You’re always speeding.’
‘So you’ve seen me? I’m not sure. If I had a blackout now . . .’ Giving in again, Franklin steered the Mercedes into the centre of the road and eased the speedometer needle towards fifty. There was a flare of headlights as they overtook the weekly bus to Las Vegas, a medley of warning shouts from the passengers left behind in a tornado of dust. The Mercedes was already moving at more than twice the legal limit. At twenty miles an hour, theoretically, a driver entering a sudden fugue had time to pass the controls to the obligatory front-seat passenger. In fact, few people drove at all. The desert on either side of the road was littered with the wrecks of cars that had veered off the soft shoulder and ended up in a sand-hill a mile away, their drivers dying of exposure before they could wake from their fugues.
Yet, for all the danger, Franklin loved to drive, illicit high-speed runs at dusk when he seemed to be alone on a forgotten planet. In a locked hangar at the air base were a Porsche and an antique Jaguar. His colleagues at the clinic disapproved, but he pursued his own maverick way, as he did in the laboratory, shielding himself behind a front of calculated eccentricity that excused certain obsessions with speed, time, sex . . . He needed the speed more than the sex now. But soon he would have to stop, already the fast driving had become a dangerous game spurred on by the infantile hope that speed in some way would keep the clock hands turning.
The concrete towers and domes of the solar city approached on their left, Paulo Soleri’s charming fantasy of a self-sufficient community.
Franklin slowed to avoid running down a young woman in a sari who stood like a mannequin in the centre of the highway. Her eyes stared at the dust, a palaeontology of hopes. In an hour she would snap out of it, and complete her walk to the bus stop without realizing that time, and the bus, had passed her by.
Ursula sombrely embraced her father, beckoning Franklin to accelerate.
‘We’re dawdling, doctor. What’s the matter? You enjoyed the speed. And so did Dad.’
‘Ursula, he doesn’t even
know he’s here.’
Franklin looked out at the desert, trying to imagine it through Trippett’s eyes. The landscape was not so much desolate as derelict – the untended irrigation canals, the rusting dish of a radio-telescope on a nearby peak, a poor man’s begging bowl held up to the banquet of the universe. The hills were waiting for them to go away. A crime had been committed, a cosmic misdemeanour carried on the shoulders of this fine old astronaut sitting beside him. Every night Trippett wept in his sleep. Spectres strode through his unlit dreams, trying to find a way out of his head.
The best astronauts, Franklin had noticed during his work for NASA, never dreamed. Or, at least, not until ten years after their flights, when the nightmares began and they returned to the institutes of aviation medicine which had first helped to recruit them.
Light flickered at them from the desert, and raced like a momentary cathode trace across the black lenses of Trippett’s glasses. Thousands of steel mirrors were laid out in a semi-circular tract beside the road, one of the solar farms that would have provided electric current for the inhabitants of Soleri II, unlimited power donated in a perhaps too kindly gesture by the economy of the sun.
Watching the reflected light dance in Trippett’s eyes, Franklin turned the car on to the service road that ran down to the farm.
‘Ursula, we’ll rest here – I think I’m more tired than your father.’
Franklin stepped from the car, and strolled across the white, calcinated soil towards the nearest of the mirrors. In his eye he followed the focal lines that converged on to the steel tower two hundred feet away. A section of the collector dish had fallen on to the ground, but Franklin could see images of himself flung up into the sky, the outstretched sleeves of his white jacket like the wings of a deformed bird.
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 147
