Saving Lucia

by Anna Vaught

  She’s showing off to him, I think. Maybe I should try that, too. I reckon I know what to do with a man. I’ve danced Salome, you know.

  So then, Dr Griffith, who sometimes paints, he says: She keeps The Lives of the Artists by the bed. Her sister Constance, I think, brought her little cards—Fra Angelico—and when I saw her the other night, she asked me to lean in: Look, Dr Griffith: the lapis lazuli; the vermilion. He said, you know, Fra Angelico, he said that he who does Christ’s work must stay with Christ always. And she whispered that Fra Angelico was bathed in tears whenever he went to paint a crucifix and she took up hers—you have seen it, by the bed?—and cried and called for Mary. I had... had to steady my nerves. She called me back and these were her words:

  Dr Griffith. I know I am going to die and I know you think that I am mad and always have been. Please, say no more. But look at this. You see my cards? Fra Angelico The Annunciation. I have more than one because he painted this scene time and again. The dove is there, of course, cascading through the golden light from angel to virgin, but what else do you see? Look at both. There in one, not in the other?

  I said that I detected differences in form, in foliage, in colour. I wasn’t sure what she was getting at, so I observed that, of course, there were bound to be differences.

  Look up, she said, look central. Do you see the little swallow, there? I am not sure it even looks at Mary as she receives the wonderful news, but it is sharp and clear and ready to fly. And it belongs to that most poetic group: the passerines. And sometimes Fra Angelico paints it and sometimes it is not there at all. I like to think of where it went. To hotter places to tell of the news? To commune with others, to rest with the other birds even, here, as I stand outside in my little spot and feed them, arms outstretched, as I like to do. To help me?

  Of course it is all hysterical enough: neurosis, confusing times; noticing insignificant detail that a fifteenth-century friar surely cannot have meant to be... to be so portentous? But again, there is something about her. No, not just the belief and the mumbling of altarpieces. It’s something to do with those birds. I cannot get it out of my head.

  And Dr Griffith (I’ve studied him well) is also a reader of many esoteric and abstruse texts, though he does not notice or believe the detail he should, and he says, though sensible Nurse Archer rolls her eyes, and it might be a surprise to the reader to hear of this from Dr Griffith, that history shows you never can tell from where or from whom imagination may body forth or epiphany may spring, The creation myth of birds; the primordial sea—the Psalms tell of it, the mire, it is told of constantly in the Old Testament. Sometimes Jesus, sometimes a bird descends into the sea and brings up a portion of the silt and so land is created. If... He pauses because he is uncomfortable and under scrutiny: It is as if there is something she knows which we don’t. I hear her whispering to the birds here and they come to her as, I think, they would not to me. It’s as if she is creating something out there. Land? A stable place that she has created. And—please forgive me, Nurse Archer: this is hardly the kind of thing to put on notes—I wonder, in her strange way, does she still mock the man she shot, blown through with the passion of Christ? He was a strange one. He pardoned her, you know that? Il Duce had foreseen his death, but hoped for a beautiful woman as his assassin, not an old crone. I read about it.

  He adds: And I do think, if she had a fair shot at him, were he alive now, she’d do it again.

  Are you tired, Dr Griffith? asks the nurse.

  I think that I am. But listen. He forgot her; everyone has forgotten her, I meditate upon that. But she was there at extraordinary times and lived through such things and he, Mussolini, was a monster. What if she had not missed? The lives she would have saved. She must know of what came next. It’s odd: we, her carers, say she is not a companion of reality, and yet Lady Gibson is up to the minute on current affairs, primed and analytical. We have magazines, papers here; have always had. Lady Gibson insists on it all, too. And news from the outside world is exchanged, so... She has a sort of confidence. I might be her doctor, but had I been his, Mussolini’s, who would I have said was more mad?

  I like Dr Griffith. I don’t know if it’s a recent development or even the effect of Violet, but he’s tentative. I mean, he’s locked us up and medicated us; forced us to try croquet at the summer jamboree and tried to get me to play the cornet for the asylum band when I was too stiff to offer a little dance or run the dash for old women at the same event—such execrable things—but he does try. And his uncertainty is appealing. I’m less keen on this nurse, which is not one for the sisterhood. She steers him away from uncomfortable talk, which is why she says, Oh now there’s a question! Who was more mad? I’m not sure you should trouble yourself with such thoughts.

  But they’re pertinent, aren’t they? he says. To our work here? Yes, but I am tired. Now, Lady Gibson. She says she likes to talk to Lucia, Miss Joyce, you know. She has only been here two years. Poor girl with a dancer’s poise; still talking, sometimes, of Him.

  And that is?

  Beckett, Samuel, you know, the writer, of sorts. Not really to my taste. That godawful play about waiting, three years back. But I gather he’s important now and he has visited a little. He was a friend, an acolyte of her father’s and apparently Beckett and Lucia may have been lovers.

  (I hate listening in when they’re talking about me, coining and writing me.)

  Her father. And that was?

  You must know! James Joyce.

  Ah yes. But he has never been, has he? I assumed him dead. And her mother? I do remember her brother here, Giorgio, sad eyed, not so friendly, but deliberate. He came once and it was not so pleasant. I did not see him again. He complained that we were asking his sister to be involved in menial tasks. I did explain that this was right and proper; helped patients to partake properly in this community and he said no more, though he was frosty.

  This was abysmal to hear, but they’re right enough.

  They forget, goes on Dr Griffith, those who are on the outside. Who are at liberty. I am told that her father would have moved heaven and earth for her, but when he died suddenly, well... Come with me. Things to do and she, Violet, pulls at my heartstrings. Birds. The songbirds. Speaking of freedom in the garden and finding freedom for Lucia. Yesterday, when I talked to Violet, to Lady Gibson, she told me that Lucia should dance, in an espalier pose in the garden, surrounded by the sweet birds, like a thriving fruit tree, in bloom, and with its limbs outstretched. She doesn’t know the real world now. Do either of these poor birds? At least that is what I think sometimes. And yet... as Lady Gibson’s fond of telling us, she has lived in important times: the things she has not seen but, ensnared, mad, here, the things she has. And it gives me pause; troubles me, even. The stories I don’t know and the glint in her eyes of the stories she does. But enough. Would you go to her, Nurse Archer; see that she’s steady? She’s such an elegant lady, isn’t she? But I think that this is her last gasp now: she is near the end.

  Oh, and don’t forget, nurse. Do not call her Violet. Keep the title, please. She is very particular about that. And it’s fine for Lucia to be with her. I’ve seen her scuttling about with pen and notebook. I don’t know what they’re up to, but I doubt it could do any harm.

  And so the nurse goes and comes. I’ve had it up to here with all the Joyce family analysis and their pity about Beckett, I must say. You know, I’m poor this and poor that. Daddy’s dead, Mother never visited me anywhere, Giorgio was frosty, Sam jilted me for his Frenchwoman and only had me because he was Daddy’s acolyte. And on and on. I’ll jabber it before you do!

  And then the nurse, Nurse Archer, to Violet, she says this:

  Lady Gibson? Are you feeling fine? Do stay outside. It’s set fair so you could walk in the garden. You may keep Lucia with you.

  And Violet begins to whisper; the nurse hears it only as rustling and is not sure even if it is there. Thus, like a po
em:

  What balm and blessing. It is morning dear. Do stay outside!

  I cannot go beyond, you know, but oh, others cannot go beyond their rooms.

  Pardon, Violet? Could you speak a little louder to me?

  I am nearby, and listening, scribbling with a wild energy.

  Nurse, thank you, but I have to whisper in these circumstances. And please retain my title. Decorum is essential in a lunatic asylum.

  The admonished nurse retreats inside, to watch her from the window.

  Violet whispers—the nurse’s arrival made the birds skitter and scatter, but now they return and, as they do, hand across her body and hand raised to the sky, Violet begins to talk again, and this is what she says: it comes out in a torrent, because she’s had an extended period of saying nothing. It comes out in broken lines, sometimes like sprung rhythm, sometimes like she’s mocking Joyce, Daddy, sometimes, well we just have to huddle up, keep up. Oh, I could see she was rattled today, upset and crying. I didn’t take down everything she said, because you’ll wander off, reader. All a bit like Lucky. You know, in Sam Beckett’s play. Qua, qua, qua, like the poor gibbering fellow says. But here’s a flavour as Violet speaks, as she narrates. No, as she curates her story:

  So early, bundled against the pretty hoar, the rime, I will feed the birds. It will be comfort, if cold, against a bare tree and a pale lavender sky that did not know me. My greatcoat tugged up against my ears, with its hospital smell and them there watching to see, I suppose, that I have been good; that I’ve treated the little creatures with care and fed them from the crumbs I secreted, every day, in my pockets, forbidden I expect, I am sure, but known about and accepted, glossed over. I like that man, Dr Griffith. I hear him talk about his paintings and about the poetry he reads; about gnostics, creation myths, demi-urges, Cathar heresies, so much, so deep. I think, sometimes, he sees me and he suspects.

  Oh the things I have seen! Nancy Astor cartwheeling at Cliveden! King George taking tea with my father. Theosophists and Madame Blavatsky’s cronies; Mary Baker Eddy, she who cracked off the New Scientists, hitting her head on a New Hampshire pavement and being sure, after that, that everything, her own illness, wellness, was only of the imagination and those New Scientists babbling because they’d found a religion! My mother loved her, Mrs Eddy, though Mark Twain said it was all Eddy-gush and oh that, in the end, was right. Oh my dear girl. The things!

  I felt the warmth of Mary smile on me and a little white woman in the corner of the room when THEY weren’t looking. Oh, for Mass and the liturgy I crave! But, as I was saying, no, nothing is glossed; no shine and no footnote, endnote, coda. I mean, they pretend, rough handed, not to notice. But then, of course, of course, you will have known what I meant. I am so old and my strength and intent are hardly a sightly thing.

  The staff here watch me, me as I tell you, Lucia, and if they do not know the fire in my heart, they see a glow about my eye and opine confidently that it is madness, derangement’s augur and the incipient psychosis; throwing an implement or breaking a bird. I expect they saw my arm raised, in the photographs they took of me with the birds, and thought I was remembering the gun and that monster, that day, at the Palazzo dei Conservatori, his chest puffed out, chin up. And people burst into song!

  The poets and the artisans,

  The landlords and the peasants,

  With pride at being Italian

  Swear faith to Mussolini!

  They were young and fresh; just students, bonny and full of life.

  He saluted and I fired.

  But no: that is not what I am thinking about now; they are wrong. They don’t know the power of what’s out there. My hand stretches out to the passerines—how fine that word is—and it is prayer; supplication and oh! The world of the imagination. No. They don’t know the power of what’s out there. Or even the joy compressed about my heart, as one little creature finds the crumbs in my hand.

  Nurse Archer comes to check and brings with her a trainee, another of these Irish nurses; I hear tell two—or three?—of them are sisters; they’re from Roscommon. Nurse Archer says: These are Lady Gibson and Miss Lucia Joyce, you know, who…

  Will she snap the little bird’s neck? asks the other. It must be a risk?

  Fool. That’s what Violet’s thinking, by the look she gives, as they retreat inside. And she continues in her reverie, this strange monologue:

  I know these little creatures and they warm me. In this contracted world, they are the only thing, and my crumbs, so hidden and only mine, only now, that have sense and which speak. Songbirds. Passerines. Everything else gibbers and does not make sense in this hot old place. Me, I like the cold; when it bites and then the birds come to feed at my hand, I do good and I am vital, rosy cheeked, in my mind’s eye, a girl, she, me, they do not know. They have been heavy on the chlorpromazine, so you see sometimes there are muddles, but I don’t know if they are my muddles, or those of these new-fangled drugs. Still, it beats those horrid powders I used to be made to snuff up, And of course, it beats being restrained. I must think. Think hard; I must make thought crystalline.

  So. Lucia, can you hear me?

  And yes, of course, I hear the lot, wonderful crazy. And I know the most wonderful story is going to unravel. And I will have the company I crave, we both crave.

  Bertha, where are you?

  Blanche? Is it your turn to put on a show?

  Oh, these girls, Bertha, Blanche, are eminent patients. I’ve been reading all about them. The conversations we have had! You will meet them, too, when we go, when we fly.

  Lucia, are you getting this down?

  And I reassure her: of course, of course.

  On she goes in this abstracted poetry of hers:

  I am coming and I will send a bird to dive down deep and gather up silt and build us land.

  Can you hear me? Oh, I promise.

  I have been here such a long time that sometimes I can no longer tell where this place ends and where I begin; I look for the seams, the joins, but I cannot see them; read the books I have; the torn Bible; newspapers I insist upon, and then there are the old letters from my father: Oh, I am gravely disappointed, but in time you will be healed and recover from the shame of this and from your difficult self, so they tell me. He ached, like others of his time, from the awful Catholic perversion I had followed in going over to Rome. Now, I finger the handkerchief that once belonged to my mother, round and round: a peony, a hedgerow, an arched trellis where the floribunda thrive. I think of these words and cry. Here: Mother. Love. Once. Home. Home it was. A splendid home; a splendid garden with a peony whose scent I adored. Now home is here except, as I said, sometimes I cannot tell where this place ends and where I begin and what continent separates she from I. Or us; me,

  Ah, but I know the passerines and they know me.

  I think. I think I can feel a plan forming.

  When they saw me, that day, the crowd in Rome, I could not stretch out my hands to them, for I held the gun. I was tiny, frail-looking, shabby straggling black crêpe dress, grey old hair and spectacles, not just so. If they, the exultant crowd, saw me, they wouldn’t have read in me, my father, great man, the peer, First Lord Ashbourne; they’d not have glimpsed the dirty debutante or the girl on a mission. In my pocket the small revolver was warm and by God, it was willing. They thought I was saluting him—Dear old Muss, saw himself as grand as Mare Nostrum. But no! I took aim, pulled the trigger, eight inches away. The deity was astonished, cold eyes meeting mine, blood through the fingers and he staggered. I pulled again and the baying arm-raised crowd all froze. The pistol took a cartwheel in the air and my hair was pulled and I was trampled as the acolytes came for me. Was it the shot, or when I lay down, not even deflecting the blows, that cried she is mad, mad, mad?

  My grimy spectacles, inches away, cracked like the toffee shards of my childhood, the broken silver bicycle in the road and littl
e Violet crying, but I closed my eyes and I did not resist while they killed me. Then I was alive, I, me, her, whoever, while Rome in Tiber melted and I was in that cell on the muddy banks and my interrogation began.

  Violet is crying; shaking a little: struggling to compose.

  Jesus, Mary and Joseph! And they thought I was insane! He thought he was Christ! Pope Pius XI said Benito was a man sent by providence! God would call this madness! Mussolini? I asked the men: Are you sure it was me?

  I thought I could hear him laughing as he mopped his grazed nose and oiled that brazen physique to strut and curse and rule and be Christ ready for a languorous crucifixion. Mad man!

  Here is what notes might say if I were Doctor Gibson in charge of the loony bin: General paresis; malarial therapy indicated. If resistant, treat with more modern deep sleep therapy, barbiturates to be discussed with pharmacy or something like that. Instead, he was Caesar, until he got crucified, upside down on the carcass of a petrol station.

  So, I pace. And I am here. Old trees; frost. A long way down from that Roman spring. Being here, where I pace is, of course, what you would expect mad people to do and where you would expect them to be. I look at the walls and the glass in the windows and the bars across them, hint of rust; tang of acid and a tiny corrosion where a little spider might make its den. Outside, even on the days when I am told I cannot go outside, I watch the lime trees, pollarded like we are by a church and I am cascading in my tiers of dress down the path and my father looks at me, bride on his arm, and knows that I am the finest he has seen, his beautiful girl, and then He, my lost lover, the artist, is waiting for me and we are inside the church and it is well and He lifts my veil and the congregation says Ahhh, and no, he is gone and so too my father all to grey mist and we are waiting, waiting for all time, aren’t we? I mean Godot, of course! We are in a play in which nothing happens, twice. Or more, in fact.