Angelica's Grotto

by Russell Hoban

  Klein drew the olive tree, smelling as he did so the warm summer wind and hearing the distant braying of a donkey.

  ‘Do you draw?’ said Mrs Lichtheim. ‘You have an artistic touch.’

  ‘I went to art school but I haven’t done any drawing for a very long time.’

  ‘What can you tell me about this tree?’

  ‘It’s an olive tree I saw on the island of Paxos the last time my wife – she’s dead now – and I had a holiday there. Olive trees flash silver in the sun when the wind stirs the leaves. They look as if they’re personally acquainted with gods and goddesses. This tree is very old but it still bears fruit. There’s a hole in the trunk and it looks as if the naked Persephone might just have stepped out of that darkness into the green-lit shade of the olive grove. Naked Persephone in the green-lit shade.’

  ‘When did your wife die?’

  ‘In 1977.’ Klein was looking at the olive tree in his mind, listening to the wind in the leaves, feeling the Ionian sunlight on his face. ‘Hannelore,’ he said.

  ‘That was your wife’s name?’

  ‘Yes.’ He put both hands over his mouth and whispered, ‘She killed herself.’

  Mrs Lichtheim allowed a little pause to happen, then she said, ‘If you feel ready we can now do the Rorschach Test.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Klein. ‘Let’s do it.’

  ‘I am going to show you ten cards with inkblots. The original blots were made by dropping inks on pieces of paper and then folding the paper in half. There are ten standardised inkblots that have been in use since the Rorshach was introduced in the forties. When I show these to you I’d like you to tell me whatever you can see on the card.’

  The first inkblot looked to Klein like a motorcycle seen endwise from the rear. There was no one in the saddle but there was a person on each side with both feet on one of the footrests, one hand gripping a handlebar and the other flung out behind. Both of these people were in silhouette and wore loose black garments that fluttered in the wind.

  ‘Anything else?’ said Mrs Lichtheim.

  ‘Only that the motorcycle would have to be going fast enough not to lose its balance and fall over.’

  Mrs Lichtheim wrote down his description and in this manner, very slowly, Klein made his way through the Rorshach blots. He described the two jolly fellows wearing conical red hats who, undeterred by being legless and footless, were congratulating each other with a high-five handslap. They might be genies, he thought, just out of a bottle and still trailing smoke.

  He described the two black dancers, a man and a woman, evidently romantically involved because of the two red hearts hanging point to point in the air between them. Although the idea of dancing was reinforced by musical emanations from their heads they seemed at the same time to be picking up their luggage or perhaps their shopping.

  He described the full-frontal head of a wild boar, pointing out the tusks, the snout, the eyes and ears. Schwarzwild was the German name for this animal, and he told Mrs Lichtheim about infant Schwarzwild he and Hannelore had seen at the Berlin Zoo: they were striped like vegetable marrows.

  He described the bat that was pretending to be a butterfly, how its wings were messy as if it had fallen into some muck.

  He described the bottomprint made by some woman who had inked her naked bottom, then sat down on white paper and rocked back and forth a little to leave an impression of her buttocks and vulva.

  He described what at first appeared to be the lower jaw of a shark which then became the heads and shoulders of two women with topknots, facing each other in profile.

  He described some kind of angel seen from below, bearing aloft two animals, one at the tip of each wing. This one, with its delicate pinks and greys and greens, had a transcendental feeling, as it might be the higher nature lifting up the lower nature and becoming ever more distant as it rose.

  He described two young women, possibly princesses, dancing and changing, as they danced, into deer with antlers.

  He described two magicians at the end of a party, maybe a child’s birthday party, magically making fireworks before everyone went home.

  ‘Now,’ said Mrs Lichtheim, ‘I will need to show you the cards again and ask you what you see and where you see it so I can make notes. This is part of the usual procedure.’ She had monochrome copies of the cards, and on these she circled and labelled the various parts of each blot according to his description. She was very painstaking about this, questioning him closely so that she was absolutely certain about what he saw and where in the blot he saw it.

  ‘This one, the transcendental one,’ he said when they came to it again, ‘I didn’t say it before but when I saw it I thought of Lucifer, the fallen angel. But even though he’s fallen he appears to be going up, way up, far away above me. Almost I hear music, looking at this one – the Dies Irae theme.’

  ‘Would you spell that, please,’ said Mrs Lichtheim.

  Klein spelled it. ‘Days of Wrath,’ he said.

  When Mrs Lichtheim had completed her notes she asked Klein to pick out the cards he liked the most and those he liked the least. He liked Lucifer and the two genies and the two dancing princesses best; he liked the bat and the bottomprint and the shark’s jaw least.

  ‘I’ll evaluate these and you’ll be hearing from us about your next appointment,’ said Mrs Lichtheim.

  Klein thanked her and walked home, still seeing Lucifer in pinks and greys and greens.

  7

  Fingers And Fins And Wings

  With Lucifer still soaring in his mind, Klein found himself cruising his bookshelves. He saw his hand go up and return with one of his own titles, Darkness and Light: the inner eye of Odilon Redon. He turned to No. 14 of the third series of lithographs illustrating Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Antony: Oannes with his serpentine body, human face, and pharaonic headdress, hovering in a blackness.

  He took the French edition of Flaubert from the shelves, turned to the Oannes page, and read his translation that was inserted there:

  Then appears a singular being, having the head of a man on the body of a fish. He advances upright in the air by beating the sand with his tail; and this patriarchal figure with little arms makes Antony laugh.

  ‘Redon’s Oannes,’ said Klein, ‘is not laughable; he is of the darkness, he is between the times of one thing and another.’ He read on:

  OANNES

  In a plaintive voice:

  Respect me! I have been here from the very beginning. I have lived in the unformed world where hermaphrodite beasts were sleeping under the weight of an opaque atmosphere, in the depths of the dark waters – when fingers and fins and wings were mingled, and eyes without heads were floating like molluscs, among bulls with human faces and serpents with the paws of dogs.

  ‘Yes,’ said Klein: ‘a world of undifferentiated matter where nothing has found its final form and function and doesn’t know whether to swim or fly or walk. That’s how it is with me.’ He read on:

  Over this muddle of beings, Omoroca, bent like a hoop, extended her woman’s body. But Belus cut her clean in two, made the earth with one half, the sky with the other, and the two equal worlds contemplate each other.

  ‘Is there a sky in me?’ said Klein, seeing Lucifer high, high above him in pinks, in greens, in greys. ‘Is there an earth?’ He read on:

  I, the first consciousness of chaos, I have risen from the abyss to harden matter, to regulate forms, and I have taught humans fishing, sowing, writing and the history of the gods.

  ‘“Fishing, sowing, writing and the history of the gods,”’ Klein repeated, and read on:

  Since then I have lived in the pools that remain from the deluge. But the desert encroaches on them, the wind fills them with sand, the sun dries them up; and I am dying on my bed of mud, looking at the stars through the water. I must return.

  He leaps, and disappears in the Nile.

  ‘No!’ said Klein. ‘Oannes should stay and Antony should go! Poxy old Saint Antony. What did he ever
teach that was any use to anyone?’ He looked again at Oannes hovering in the black. Was Oannes looking back at him? Were his eyes open or closed? So dim, his face! Klein thought of Oannes dying on a bed of mud, his pools filled in, his blackness gone, and shook his head. ‘But,’ he said, ‘but! Oannes didn’t die; his original self, his old self, his powerful self, moved into the head of Odilon Redon and compelled him to create a noir for him to live in. Oannes lives! Perhaps he will yet harden my matter, regulate my form, teach me to fish, to sow, to write. Perhaps he will teach me the history of the gods. Or something else. Are there pinks in the black? Greens and greys?’

  8

  Fear, Guilt, Violent Fantasies?

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Lichtheim, ‘it’s now two weeks since you did the Bender and the Rorschach tests. Looking back on that session, how do you feel about it?’

  ‘I still see Lucifer soaring high above me in pink and grey and green.’

  Mrs Lichtheim consulted her notes. ‘Days of Wrath,’ she said. ‘You said you almost heard that music while looking at the fallen angel far above you. Are you wrathful? Is there anger in you?’

  ‘Of course there is.’

  ‘Why of course?’

  ‘I don’t like being invisible, I don’t like being pushed off the pavement.’

  ‘You’re talking about now, but this anger in you, I think it goes further back than that; and it seems to me that you have to exert very strong control to keep it from bursting out.’

  ‘Well, you know, in seventy-two years a lot of resentments accumulate: the whole world changes, and every change I’ve seen has been for the worse. The only exception is residential parking in our street but I haven’t got a car.’

  ‘How do you feel about your mother?’

  ‘Why do you ask that?’

  ‘Because in you there seems to be fear of women, as well as anger and guilt.’

  ‘I think all men are afraid of women.’

  ‘But we’re talking about you.’

  ‘All right, I’m afraid of women. But I already know that and I’d like us to start dealing with the present problem.’ He was beginning to resent being steered by Mrs Lichtheim.

  ‘I think your fear of women is part of the present problem,’ she said. ‘Your inner voice is the superego; sometimes it keeps you from saying what you really think. Now it shuts down, maybe it’s tired of concealment; maybe now you are forced to hear yourself say what you really want to say. I think there are violent feelings in you, maybe violent fantasies.’ Again she looked at his folder. ‘You’re an art historian. Are you working on something now?’

  ‘I’m always working on something; I’m doing a study of the nudes of Gustav Klimt.’

  ‘Naked women.’

  ‘You can’t be nude without being naked.’

  ‘What’s the title of your study?’

  ‘Naked Mysteries: the Nudes of Gustav Klimt.’

  ‘Are naked women a mystery to you?’

  ‘They’re even a mystery to themselves; that’s why the Greeks celebrated those mysteries at Eleusis.’

  ‘Do you believe that work is the way to understand a mystery?’

  ‘Play won’t do it.’

  ‘Do you ever not work, just do nothing?’

  ‘When I knock off for the day around midnight I put my feet up and watch a video.’

  ‘You remember the first Rorshach blot, the motorcycle with a man on either side but nobody in the driver’s seat? It didn’t fall over because its forward speed maintained its equilibrium.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Do you think you’ll fall over if you stop working for a week or a month?’

  ‘Why should I stop?’

  ‘Just for the pleasure of being without producing anything.’

  ‘I picked the wrong parents for that.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Jewish immigrants from Russia, hot for self-improvement and offspring achievement. I drew well from the age of five so they laid it on me that I was going to be a great painter. I didn’t produce great paintings but I write well about Art, so maybe they’re partly easy in their graves.’

  ‘Did you like your mother?’

  ‘No.’ Encouraged by Mrs Lichtheim he let himself go and talked about his mother and her faith in enemas; he talked about his father, about his school days, his first love, his army time; he talked about Francine, his first wife, and Hannelore, his second.

  ‘Do you fantasise about women?’ said Mrs Lichtheim.

  ‘Certainly; I should think that all men do.’

  ‘What kind of fantasies are yours?’

  ‘All kinds.’

  ‘Can you describe one?’

  ‘Maybe when we get to know each other better.’

  Mrs Lichtheim looked at her watch. ‘This is the last time I’ll be seeing you – I haven’t got a vacancy so I’ll be referring you to another psychologist for therapy.’

  ‘Just when I was beginning to feel comfortable with you.’

  ‘I believe you’ll be comfortable with him as well.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘DeVere.’

  ‘DeVere: of truth.’

  ‘Is that what you’re looking for?’

  ‘Maybe it’s looking for me.’

  ‘He’ll help you find each other.’

  9

  All At Sea

  Feeling a powerful hunger for Willem van de Velde the Younger, Klein entubed at Fulham Broadway, emerged at Charing Cross, and made his way to the National Gallery.

  Trafalgar Square, hugging a greyness to itself, had nothing to say to him. Nelson on his column turned a blind eye to mortal concerns. The stairs and porch of the National Gallery bore with stony indifference the shuffling feet of visitors from everywhere, each pair of feet terminating in a head that required to be filled with images of beauty, history, war and peace, sacred and profane love and various states of mythical, real, royal and common domesticity. Once inside, the visitors walked purposefully, dawdled randomly, collapsed on to benches, consulted floorplans, guides, maps, gallery staff and one another, and stood in front of paintings.

  Klein went to the information desk, had his floorplan marked by the woman there, climbed the stairs, turned left through Rooms 29, 28 and 15, turned right through Room 22, went down the stairs, and arrived at Lower Gallery A, Screen 24 and a goodly array of the paintings of Willem van de Velde the Younger: seventeenth-century Dutch ships and boats of various kinds in fair weather and under stormy skies, in calms and in stiff breezes.

  ‘Quite a remarkable thing,’ he said, ‘to miniaturise the sky and the sea and the ships to a size and perspective convenient to the eye and readily absorbed on dry land by land-lubbers.’ He particularly admired the paintings in which small craft met with strong winds and rough seas. One of these, No. 876, A Small Dutch Vessel Close-hauled in a Strong Breeze, about 1672, showed a gaff-rigged boat, a galjoot, on a larboard tack under a dark and threatening sky, pointing as close into the wind as possible, her weather vang bar-taut, the leech of the mainsail fluttering, the spray rising high over her bows as the seas swept her fore-deck. Klein could feel the spray, smell the salt, hear the wind in the rigging and the poom! as she rose and fell with the chop. The man at the tiller was pointing to larboard, probably shouting something to the rest of the crew, only one of whom was visible in the spray. Some way ahead a man-of-war on the same tack streamed its pennant.

  ‘Dirty weather,’ said Klein, ‘but they’re not afraid, they’re used to this sort of thing, they’re born to the sea and they know what to do.’ The sea continued in his mind as he left Lower Gallery A, went up the stairs, through Rooms 22, 15, 28 and 29 without looking at anything but a few Rubens bottoms, down the stairs, out to the porch, and down to the street, the grey October afternoon, and the Underground. All the way home he heard the boom of the sea and the wind in the rigging as the bows of the Wimbledon train rose and fell with the chop.

  10

  First Session

/>   Dr DeVere was in his early forties and didn’t wear a tie. He had short hair, no beard, and nothing on the walls of his office but an unframed laser copy of the Redon pastel, Roger and Angelica. It was stuck to the wall with Blu-Tack and it moved with DeVere from office to office in his professional travels.

  ‘You’re the first doctor I’ve seen with a Redon on his wall,’ said Klein.

  ‘And you’re the first visitor who’s commented on it. You like Redon?’

  ‘I’ve done a monograph on him.’

  Dr DeVere struck his forehead. ‘Of course! You’re that Harold Klein: Darkness and Light: the inner eye of Odilon Redon. I’ve got it at home.’

  ‘At last,’ said Klein, ‘a reader. Have you read Orlando Furioso?

  ‘Parts of it.’

  ‘The part where Ruggiero rescues Angelica from Orca the sea monster, yes?’

  ‘That’s why Redon’s up there on my wall.’

  ‘Have you got it there for aesthetic or professional reasons?’

  ‘Both. It seems to me that each of us contains an Angelica chained to a rock, threatened by an Orca, and waiting for a Ruggiero. Would you agree?’

  ‘I would. You’re my kind of shrink. Am I going to be with you for a while?’

  ‘As long as it takes. Still no inner voice?’

  ‘No. I’ve started whispering into my hand or talking to myself under my breath before I say anything to anybody, so I’ve kept out of Casualty for a while.’

  ‘That’s very sensible. I’m trying to imagine how it must be for you.’

  ‘Very strange. Most of my thinking is in words, and until this happened the words were spoken by my mental voice. Now I still hear music and see pictures in my head but the only way I can do word thoughts is by speaking out loud or writing them down. When I’m at my desk it’s not a problem because my words appear on the computer screen. When I’m elsewhere I go about muttering to myself or scribbling in a notebook or both, which makes me feel a little crazier than usual.’