Lucia

by Alex Pheby

  If the daughter is infected, then the question is raised as to which direction the transmission occurred. Did the father give the girl tapeworms, or did the girl give the father them? There is no way of knowing by looking at them, so instead you must question both parties rigorously in order to establish the facts, since no independent cure can be attempted on the daughter until the question is resolved. Indeed, the resolution of the question will be pivotal to the diagnosis and consequently the cure. If, for instance, the proglottides were shed at the mouth of the uterus following the daughter’s induction of the removal of the foetus against the necessity to raise a feebleminded child, and then they invaded through the meatus and made their way up the urethra and via the circulatory system to lodge in the brain of the father, then this is one thing. If the transmission was made in the other direction, by poor hygiene in the preparation of food, and/or the undercooking of pork, then this is another thing.

  It is a simple matter to ensure pork is thoroughly cooked through: simply purchase a cook’s thermometer and establish that the temperature of the meat is between 145°F and 160°F before serving. This will ensure that any tapeworm eggs are destroyed before consumption. In a dish like cassoeula, this temperature will not be difficult to achieve, but with something like arista al latte a reluctance to overheat the milk (since it will catch) can result in the temperature not reaching the required level, regardless of how long the dish is cooked. Once consumed, the eggs will migrate across the body and infect the brain. Inserting a thermometer into meat is not an onerous task, it takes only a few moments. Similarly, washing the hands thoroughly will prevent transmission from the anus of the infected father to surfaces, door handles, and shared books should a proglottid migrate there and rupture. If both these requirements are met, the treatment of the daughter for her neurosis can continue after a course of anti-parasitics has been administered without fear of remission on the grounds of reinfection.

  If, however, the transmission is from father to daughter via the route described, then all such transmission vectors must be addressed prior to treatment since there is significant risk of re-infection during the treatment. The same holds true for other members of the family who may similarly run the risk of infection, or who are infected already, brothers or uncles included. This holds also for friends of the family who visit the household, or whom the daughter meets in the streets, or at parties, or at bookshops. Unless such transmission vectors are prevented, the risk is run that many more infections of tapeworm will be caused, and that the entire social circle of the daughter will suffer the aberrances of behaviour that are noticeable in the daughter. Such aberrances are self-replicating and auto-reinforcing when evidenced in a closed population, and it will be very difficult to effect a cure.

  If the daughter has been riddled with tapeworms since early childhood, there is little chance of a cure in any case, since she will have been dreaming the dreams of parasites and speaking the words of parasites and thinking the thoughts of parasites during the period of her development and can more properly be thought of as a symbiotic hybrid of daughter and parasite than she can be thought of as a woman. A child requires a certain amount of pure and free space to develop her own self and to come into her human inheritance and if she has been raised in a jar of squirming worms this space will not have been given to her. Also, the tapeworm can infect the eye causing visual disturbances and a sensitivity to light and in the mind this causes a tendency to see nightmarish things of the everyday world, to seek out dark places, remain in bed during the day, and only come out in the night. The daughter will wander the streets looking for experiences that reify the darkness she feels in her visual field and in her heart, which is melancholic and gloomy.

  To a tapeworm, though, this is like pleasure. It feels good to a tapeworm to reside in the bowel where it finds its mate, and even from its birth as an egg its only desire is to find darkness, to be consumed by another, to fester within them, drawing whatever it needs from the dark and private realms of the inside. To attempt to bring light into the situation is a mistake, since photophobia and hypersensitivity to ultraviolet rays can be fatal, and the patient should instead be taken to a place in which they can remain undisturbed and undisturbing and there live out their life in the manner of their kind, which is to thrash about in shit outside of the range of human experience, and there to take pain for pleasure, day for night, death for life.

  Fire is the one solution.

  Writings that are influenced by the scolices of tapeworms can be burned, as can the criticism that is produced by critics grown from tapeworm-ridden children. The eggs of tapeworms can be destroyed by introducing them in a skillet to a flame and taking them to a high enough temperature. A tapeworm removed from the body can be killed by throwing it into fire, or by heating a needle and applying it to the body or by burning it with matches. Care must be taken on removal since the proglottides are easily detached. If you intend to take a pencil and twirl the tapeworm around it like a Chinaman twirls a noodle around a chopstick then you must do it slowly and never tug, since the worm will separate in two and the free end will retract into the anus before you can grab it. Be sure to wash your hands thoroughly, since it is easy to pick up eggs on your skin if the proglottides rupture.

  If one wishes to purge oneself of tapeworms one can immolate oneself, neatly solving two problems with one stone, since the tapeworms will die and their host will also die, ridding the world of one more disturbance and ridding the disturbance of the world, which is nothing but a jar of wriggling tapeworms always seeking ingress so that they might lodge within one’s bowel and there suck all the nutrition, replacing it with a permanent stomach ache and migraines behind the eyes.

  And again, in the subsequent scene, there were strange additions and omissions – the presence of figures, symbols and images that did not fit the standard forms (as much as these are recognisable in what is often a bafflingly complicated and contradictory iconography). What was clear, and this brought the feeling of dread and unwholesomeness back to me worse than it was before, is that something terrible was being represented. All the symbols were negations, violence, destruction and chaos, where what should have been present were spells ensuring the opposite: peace, creation and order.

  O Osiris of Lucia, your mother has given birth to you today!

  Imsety, in human form, overlooked by the goddess Isis, protects the liver.

  THE BA OF LUCIA JOYCE

  LONDON AND PARIS, 1932 ONWARDS

  It is painful to live within the pages of a book, and/or to be recognised only by one’s attributes, for example to be a pair of eyes removed from their sockets and placed on a dish. Would you like it, Samuel Beckett?

  No matter how wonderful the artist, or how prestigious the gallery in which one hangs, it is no substitute for a life to be a pair of disembodied eyes staring uncannily at passers-by, even if one is considered a masterpiece. Better, infinitely, to be allowed to walk free in the summer, or to comb one’s hair, or to stretch, none of which are activities available to two dimensional representations of the facility of sight, done in gouache. If these eyes grow from the stalk of plant, that is no consolation, and is more like rubbing salt into the wounds – one would enjoy picking a flower, although not, perhaps, if it had eyes on it.

  Similarly, to be represented under a pseudonym in a book some consider obscene is also tiresome. Would you like that? To have your character dissected and the ins and outs of your behaviour commented on, and your secrets revealed? And always the sexual material?

  That you are described as beautiful and perfect to look at is nice, but then there’s all the rest of the stuff, and if someone brings your good name into question then calling you beautiful while they do it, that isn’t any consolation, even if the name they call into question isn’t your own name. You and your friends would know.

  And so what if it is never published in your lifetime? – there are plenty of very widely read books that are never published. Only those who
are completely ignorant of the way literature is produced could imagine that books aren’t read before they reach the shops. The book is already dead by the time it reaches the shops, like a cow is dead when its meat is portioned for sale by a butcher. The life it had frolicking gaily in the fields, walking free in the summer, and being passed from hand to hand between some of the most well-regarded readers in the business is all forgotten by the time the shillings are handed across the table. Everyone who matters has already read it, and do you think literary people buy each other’s books? Of course they don’t: they pass them from hand to hand as manuscripts, prior to publication. If you are in the book, and in the room when the book is passed from hand to hand, to your father, then it is no good calling a person beautiful and then exposing their sexual behaviours to the world, even if it is under a silly name, which is so bloody obvious, don’t you think everyone knows who the saints of Syracuse are?

  Even if it isn’t then published at all.

  Worse if it isn’t published, because then all the damage is done and only to those people who have a specific understanding of the party being libelled and for whom this represents evidence of a side to that party’s character previously only rumoured at. The general public might take a character study from a novel and see it in the round, bringing to it their experience of the general run of things and thereby understand it generally, thereby diluting any particular significance. They might even take your side, and so provide a counter perception of the events. But stuck in a box in an attic, or held in a library, or in a drawer in a publisher’s office, or in the studies of all the writers in Paris, then this is like a prison.

  When one is dead, it is only those things that remain that constitute one’s existence, we can all agree on that. For the ripples one makes in the pond of existence to lessen with time until they are vanishingly small, then this is also the way of things. But if someone has gone around erasing all trace that you ever existed, burning your letters and suppressing all word of you, and then there is a great rock with or without your name on it thrown into the water, it is no solace that you are dead, and cannot answer for yourself, when waves wash about you and hit the shore. That it was published post mortem is an irrelevance.

  And that Bohemianism is dead now.

  Think of the Egyptian pharaohs – not Akhenaten, who himself was erased from history and therefore might be the first pharaoh you think of, and his beautiful wife, who might also be a factor. Those who were buried with proper attendance to the rituals would secure their afterlives. Tuthmosis III will do as an example, despite the unusual style, his tomb was filled with ushebti and his walls decorated with hieratic and hieroglyphics and depictions of the hereafter. He was content to live in the representations of himself post mortem. This was his dearest dream, in fact, and he hired artists to come and paint him wonderful worlds, and write him wonderful lives that he could live out in perpetuity.

  You would want that for yourselves after death, as would anyone rational if they could believe it was true.

  And then what if some idiot came in and tore it all down? Shipped it off to museums in different countries? Exhumed you from your sarcophagus? Undid your bindings and peered at your naked corpse? Slit you with a scalpel, splayed you open to be seen by one and all? And then this was your afterlife, for all eternity. Slaves gone, wives gone, oxen gone, bushels gone. In their place the gawping wax-faced idiots who drag themselves past your body because they think it is the thing to do on a Sunday afternoon, or because they read about you in the paper, or because they have an interest in the conditions of the dead. They watch through the glass, their desire for something of the afterlife, so prurient and formless, peering in the windows hoping for a glimpse of someone else’s death, to somehow understand what theirs might be.

  There is a journey the dead must go on before they reach the Field of Reeds (which is roughly analogous to the Christian heaven), and this journey through the Duat is perilous and filled with terrors – horned snakes, crocodiles, devils – it is the journey the God Ra takes in the solar chariot during the period the sun is beneath the western horizon before it rises again in the east. The Egyptian dead are provided with magical assistance ensured by the tomb decorations, and by the rituals performed in the shrine that accompanies the tomb. Here, each scene depicted the opposite – the surrender of the deceased to the jaws of ravening jackals, or the depredations of underworld gods.

  You have been made into one who knows what was not known

  Hapy, the baboon, overlooked by the goddess Nepthys, protects the lungs.

  THE IB OF LUCIA JOYCE

  LES ATELIERS DU VIEUX COLOMBIER, PARIS, SUMMER 1927 (CONT.)

  Understand, there is no flamboyance in a role like this, no individuality – it is written into the part. The director, Jean Renoir, can read it in his notes, they are specific on the matter. That is the point! That he should be one of a sort, a soldier – to obey.

  This is the dancer’s role also. Also the actor – not to have one’s own thoughts or feelings but to be perfectly that thing that another wishes one to be. The self must drift out of view, even that part of the self that first attracted the attention of the producers, the casting director. Lucia Joyce must disappear entirely, and then only exist inasmuch as someone must perform the motions, someone must fill the space that requires filling, someone must be able to do what the notes have written them to do. Generically this is true of all roles, but specifically so here.

  Move like a wooden soldier, articulate like wood, drill like the others. Not so far from the orders given to living soldiers: be as nothing except what you are ordered to be. Do not exercise judgement in anything. Train in the manners and modes of your trade and execute them by reflex when prompted. Spasm as muscle spasms when an electrical impulse is received. Wear the uniform, exercise the frame into its correct shape. Place your face behind the mask, your head beneath the helmet, hoist the bayonet to your shoulder and learn to relish the abandonment of individuality as a pack wolf bitch learns subservience from the most vicious dog. Invisible the self, cover those brittle hands with white gloves, relineate that jaw with the face straps, cover the gradual erosion of the teeth.

  Stop sucking matches – are you crackers? Poisoned, match strike girl. Phossy jaw. Regardless of that taste of tobacco, of fireworks, of a metal strut, rusting, a bedframe, the wood splintering between molars, splinters on the tongue and gathering in the edges, where the glands secrete saliva, can’t be swallowed, must be spat out. Where gather the pieces, drying and brittling, until discovered under the bed, beneath the bedstead in a little pyre waiting for their Guy? Who’s it to be? Who likes fire that much? Little match girl, stealing a box of Swan Vesta from a pub garden table.

  —Let her have them, I’ve got more.

  —Not the point.

  Slap on the back of the hand and face to face, nose to nose. There’ll be words about this when we get home. Glass to lips and smiles for everyone else, but not for her. A hand slipped under the table to a bare knee is rebuffed with bile in the throat, heavy on the neck and shoulders, pervasive sense that the world is over, that death is the only solution. Shrink into the earth and dissolve back, seep between the grains of soil, let capillary action redistribute your water, re-use it for some useful purpose, something warranting of God’s infinite grace. Not some whiny, thieving, sken-eyed slut – a show, an embarrassment, an inconvenience.

  Not now, the door is shut.

  Not now, important work.

  The way a person moves is very particular to them – try watching silhouettes on the wall, or through frosted glass, or projected on a cinema screen before the film begins – you can tell who is crossing the stage, if you know them, by how they move. There is something in the way a person holds themselves and how they progress through the world that is tantamount to a depiction of them, and in combination these things are recognisable to the eye.

  Also, the person feels themselves at odds with the world if they are prevented from
moving in the way they are conditioned to move, and of which the body is capable. To be made to move like a soldier, and to adopt the gender of a soldier, it is a kind of unkindness. For that to be filmed, and for that film to achieve some level of success, due, partly, to the labour of one who has been treated unkindly, is an offence against natural law.

  In the same way, it is an offence to spice up the depiction of an execution in a play by beheading a criminal, even if that criminal has committed a capital offence. Or if one wishes for verisimilitude in the depiction of a horse race, of a charioteer race, and hires for the week a number of horses from a stable, and one of those horses, or several, falls in the action and breaks a limb and must receive a bolt to the head: it is wrong to allow these scenes to remain in the film, because there is something in art that cruelty is inimical to – is there not? – and it shouldn’t be done. Too close to revelling in the pain of others that civilised society does not allow itself, particularly when no screen credit is given.

  So it must feel, even if the best work is cut out. Particularly as it was performed during a period in which the artwork as a whole was produced, it has an influence, though only a very minor one. A professional should know this, and she should also know that no amount of huffing and puffing and stamping and weeping will matter for anything – that is the way it is, the conditions of the industry, the material conditions of existence, for only a few of those involved in the making of something will be rewarded. To them all the credit should go, not only for those things for which they deserve credit for and over which they had close control, but also for all those things that happened outside their purview, and for which they do not deserve credit.