by Daniel Hahn
The Glass Woman
Deborah Levy
The year is 1849 and yet your lips will not be so very different from my lips and the revolutions in your century will not be so different from ours but now I must take a breath as you must too and with this breath which I still have not taken I will speak to you from where I am now which is Bavaria.
Bavaria 1849.
I am observing a young woman of 23 years in age.
She is an aristocrat. I am a physician.
I am observing the catastrophic poetry of her body.
The month is August, it is past midnight and she is walking sideways with great difficulty down the corridors of the royal palace, her arms stretched in front of her as if she is afraid she will fall. Her green eyes are wide open as she makes her way to her chamber.
Something is wrong with Princess Alexandra Amelie.
On 14 July she demanded that all the furniture in the palace be covered in soft velvet and that no person should be seated next to her at the dining table, not on the right nor the left, and she announced she would no longer be able to ride her horse and that if she was to travel in a carriage it must first be lined with straw. When questioned by her royal parents the princess finally confessed that when she was a child she had swallowed a grand piano made from glass. Consequently, because of her imagined shape and fragility, she is fearful that if she knocks into anything at all or trips over her skirts or if one of the royal dogs jumps into her lap, the glass piano inside her might shatter and she will become a terrifying tangle of flesh and glass.
I was promptly summoned to the palace and consented to her anxious father’s demand for my discretion in this matter. My task as physician was to remove the glass piano from her belly. He would pay me by the day for one month. If his daughter was not cured by its end she would indeed be hidden in a straw-lined carriage and taken to a convent in the black forest where she would grow old with the nuns.
Why did I agree to the impossibility of this task? It is true that I am Europe’s expert on delusions of this kind and speak nine languages but I knew I would not cure her. All the same, I did not want the young princess to be persecuted or injured for inventing a language that is beyond the reach of our minds.
I have made many notes over the month. They are all useless.
She eats very little because of her imagined size.
Two spoonfuls of clear soup.
Her instructions to the servants are always very clear, perhaps as transparent as the piano inside her.
‘No one must ever touch me. The clocks and porcelain must be removed from my chamber. When I walk through the palace I request my maid opens all the joining doors so I will not be crushed between them.’
The piano is a sculpture made from pain.
It has form.
It is a thought.
It is a form of thinking.
Yet she will not speak her mind.
I have seen her pick elderberries off the trees in the palace gardens and slip them into her mouth.
She arranges the red berries on her tongue and encourages the birds to swoop and catch them.
She is playful with the birds.
The piano inside her is an instrument of communication.
And so is her tongue.
She has given her tongue to the birds and her belly to the piano.
I have been observing her for twenty-eight days now and have not yet succeeded in removing the glass piano from her mind. She has grown to trust me and perhaps even welcome my company.
Why have I not disclosed to her that I have been dismissed by her parents and tonight is our last conversation?
I fear the news will break her. The cook agrees with me on this matter. I understood from the start that rational argument is powerless to remove a delusion and that I would have to employ other methods. They have all failed.
I have no other methods.
Princess Alexandra Amelie can clearly see that I am standing in my overcoat in the corridors of the palace. I have chosen not to hide in the shadows or to conceal my presence. I am waving to her now as she painfully, slowly walks towards me. In my left hand I hold the glass of aromatic wine that was given to me by the cook who has instructed my valet to pack my bags and organise my carriage for the long journey to Naples in the morning.
Alexandra Amelie is wearing a white dress, her dark hair is pinned up and her satin slippers are tied with white silk ribbons that have been knotted by her staff to ensure they will never come undone. The knotting of her ribbons alone takes two hours of her day.
‘I have come to say good night, Amelie.’
‘You have rain on your coat,’ she says, leaning the palm of her hand against the wall to steady herself. ‘Where have you been?’
‘I have just returned from consoling the baker who believes he is made from butter. He will not go near his oven for fear his body turns to liquid.’
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘and how will he sleep tonight?’
‘He will strip naked and cover himself with bay leaves to keep himself cool.’
‘Will the leaves give him peace of mind?’
‘Yes,’ I reply, ‘I think they will. And you, how will you sleep tonight?’
‘How I always sleep.’
‘And how do you always sleep?’
‘I have pierced the mattress and will cover my body with its feathers. The nights are not a problem for me.’
‘I am pleased to hear that, Amelie.’
She and I have agreed to address each other informally, mostly because she does not have the breath to say my full first name, nor I her full first name and I do not wish her to call me Doctor.
I know her sleep is full of torment. She has pierced the surface of her silken pillow with a needle.
I have observed that her own breathing is shallow. It is as if the pillow is doing the breathing for her.
‘My dreams are full of animals,’ she says. ‘They are sleepy and wounded. They lie in cribs as if babies. They moan a little.’
‘What kind of animals?’
‘Yesterday I watched a foal being born in the stables. The farmer pulled it out of the mare. I would not like you to pull my piano out of me like that.’
I nod and sip the aromatic wine.
‘Of course, Amelie. We cannot remove your piano as if it were a tooth. When I was a younger man I sold my meat-eating teeth to fund my medical studies. I still lament the gap in my mouth which I have not chosen to fill with porcelain. A tooth is as valuable as a jewel and so is your piano.’
She laughs. It is a rasping sound, like a tear in a stretch of fabric. She tells me she has given her maid permission to travel home to visit her mother. Therefore she is walking with extra caution to her chamber.
‘Your piano is a phantom of your mind,’ I insist, for a physician must never be complicit with a delusion.
‘No it is not a phantom.’ Her fingers fleetingly touch the silken folds of her dress under which she no longer wears a corset.
‘You might be right,’ I reply. ‘But it is not very likely.’
And what else was happening in Europe while I sipped fine wine in the lavish corridors of the royal palace? The potato crop had been destroyed by a blight and suffering peasants everywhere were plotting to overthrow the feudal system.
‘Just one last question.’ Princess Alexandra Amelie touches her left eyelid with the tip of her soft finger. ‘What will you be doing when you return to your lodgings tonight?’
‘I will sit by the fire and think about you.’
‘Good night Tomas.’
‘Good night Amelie.’
Yet we do not move. The palm of her right hand still rests on the wall that is covered in a tempest of gold leaf.
‘Just one last question,’ I say. ‘How will you unknot your shoes if you cannot bend your body and your maid is visiting her mother?’
‘I will sleep in my shoes tonight.’
She smiles and continues on her
way.
At the beginning of her treatment I witnessed a conversation that took place with my patient and her parents. Her mother had cried in exasperation.
‘Alexandra Amelie what has got into you?’
‘A grand glass piano, that’s what,’ her daughter replied.
Her parents, fearing their daughter had exchanged her sanity for a glass phantom, requested that I perform surgery and cut the piano out of her stomach.
It was a strange idea yet it helped me understand that if they imagined it could be taken out of her in this manner, it was possible for the princess to imagine it had entered her in the first place.
In the second week I noted she pierced a lemon with thorns from a rose bush.
I asked her if it was a magic object.
‘Oh no. It is to release the scent of the lemon.’
She later told the cook (who has an alluring mole above her lip) that I was insane.
The surgeon’s knife is not as crucial an instrument for understanding human consciousness as the imagination. Does Alexandra Amelie know her parents departed two days ago to meet the abbess of the convent and inspect their daughter’s room?
I was not lying to my patient when I told her about the sad demented baker who believes he is made from butter. Here in melancholy Bavaria I have become used to the grey skies and rain. I do most of my thinking in a mustard bath at the end of a long useless day. I am thirty-six years of age and have encountered many glass delusions on my travels, yet this is my first glass piano. A philosophy professor in Rome believed he was trapped in a glass bottle. A French king believed his whole body was made from glass and wore iron ribs over his clothing to protect him if he should fall. There are men who believe their buttocks are made from glass and refuse to sit down. There have been reports throughout Europe of glass bones, hearts, chests and fingers. A carpenter from Venice refused to leave his house in case he was used by a glazier to make a window. Another glass man would only walk in the middle of the road for fear a tile from a roof would fall on his head.
So far there are no records of women who suffer from glass delusions.
In the third week I had suggested she wrap her piano in a soft warm blanket. It was a conceptual exercise. I thought it might give her some protection from her fear of breaking but she refused to accept my language. Despite her physical frailty she likes her piano naked and told me, gently, that the idea of a blanket offering her protection was a delusion.
Her father is right. I have failed to break into her body which is also her mind.
Tonight the atmosphere in the palace corridors is serene as the princess performs her strange sideways walk. The absence of her parents is a liberation. Downstairs, the staff are drinking in the kitchens and the cook is discussing with the gardener the story of Oedipus, as told by Sophocles in his tragic play, Oedipus Rex.
Alexandra Amelie is slim and poised but in her mind she is as wide as a grand piano.
She points to the small lion made from stone that lies on a marble slab to the left of the corridor.
‘I used to sit astride it when I was a child,’ she says in her low trembling voice. ‘I had to lift up my petticoats and sometimes I told it to run away with me from the palace.’
‘Is the past hidden in your piano Amelie?’
‘Oh no.’
We can hear the cook and the gardener shouting at each other in a rage. The cook has raised her voice to insist that when Oedipus plucked out his eyes it did not stop his mind from seeing whatever it was that had distressed him in the first place.
‘Alexandra Amelie, it has stopped raining and the night is warm. Let us walk to the lake and watch the swans.’
‘If you have the patience, Tomas. It will take a long time to get there.’
I do have the patience.
I ask the staff to carry soft fabrics and silken cushions to the bench that is situated on the edge of the lake. I demand they light candles and bring out more wine from the cellar. And I request a plate of kaiser rolls and a bowl of fruit.
It takes three hours to walk with her to the lake in the palace gardens.
It is not far and if I was alone it would take me no longer than twelve minutes. Even a small snail is a hazard to the princess. If she were to trip or lose her balance it would be a disaster. I can guess that she has mapped an image of her body onto the surface of her brain and it includes the grand piano made from glass. She is a giant to herself. She believes she has changed shape and size. Her veins are prominent because her skin is pale, she is blue-blooded as they say of aristocrats. Alexandra Amelie avoids the sun in case the piano inside her absorbs its heat and cracks.
It suits her to be walking in the gardens of the palace under the moon at three in the morning.
She is seated now on the many silk cushions arranged on the bench. I place myself at some distance from her as usual. The swans rest their heads on their wings and glide in their sleep across the silver lake. When I tell the princess their bodies are mostly hollow, that swans are filled with air, she laughs as if she is indulging a flippant fancy of my own.
The table is laid with wine and kaiser rolls that have been sprinkled with buttermilk pumpkin seeds. The cook has tempted us with other treats too. We gaze at the feast on the table.
A soufflé
Mild and sweet almonds
Strudel dusted with white powder
Fruit
A plate of torn pancakes.
I unpeel the rough skin of a litchi from southern China. Suddenly my fingers are wet from the soft floral flesh inside it.
I pass it to her and she holds it in her fingers.
The lake is still and deep.
‘The good thing about a conversation at night is that you cannot see my face,’ she whispers.
This is true.
I have noted that when she is forced to sit at the dining table she always positions herself behind a large vase of flowers so that no one will stare at her.
A nightingale is singing in one of the damp trees.
‘Amelie, what does the piano add to your existence?’
‘It gives it another dimension,’ she says.
‘If you swallowed your piano, it must taste of something.’
‘It tastes like glass.’
‘How does glass taste?’
‘You will have to find out for yourself.’
I lift the glass of wine to my lips.
While the nightingale sings I lick the glass.
‘It tastes like sand.’
‘Yes,’ she agrees. ‘Cold sand.’
I dip my finger into the wine and rub the rim of the glass. It makes a high-pitched melancholy sound, not unlike the nightingale.
‘Listen Amelie’ – I lean towards her as my finger circles the glass – ‘an object that should not be alive is talking to me.’
She slumps into the velvet drapes and stares at the swans. If she were to play her glass piano, what kind of sound would it make? I suspect she will not allow it to speak to her because she fears that if she expresses herself it will shatter. She will be filled with crushed glass and then she is done for.
The swans lift their necks as the glass sings across the lake. In the ghostly moonlight they too could be phantoms, white-feathered serpents conjured by my mind.
‘Where has all your life gone Amelie?’
‘Into my piano.’
‘But is your piano mute?’
‘Oh no,’ she replies, ‘and anyway, why should I tell you what it says?’
She is certain that it is there. She will not be shifted from this certainty.
It is a delusion but it is also metamorphosis.
So far its significance eludes me.
‘Is your piano your friend or enemy?’
‘It is a torment,’ she says.
As she sucks the sweet flesh of the litchi, I ask her about the first toys she played with as a child.
She tells me her father forbade toys and so she made a tortoise from mud.
> ‘And did you hope the tortoise might take you away from the palace like the lion?’
‘No, a tortoise is too slow.’
‘What is there to live for, Amelie?’
‘I could never tell you that.’
‘Your piano could speak for you.’
‘Oh it does,’ she says, ‘but let me ask you that same question. What is there to live for?’
It is of course the oldest question but when set upon myself it feels like a snarling dog tearing at my leg with its teeth. What is there to live for? I am aware that my colleagues might insist they live for their children or their wives or to meet once again a true love who slipped through time or to become wealthy or do some good in the world or to deepen their knowledge or witness the changing seasons or to meet strangers and step into new cultures but it is a greedy question and so I tell her the truth.
‘Amelie, I do not know what there is to live for except to understand more about the mystery of your glass piano and why the baker thinks he is made from butter.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Would I be less interesting to you without the piano?’
‘It is a possibility. And yet, I think you could take a chance.’
‘Why would I take it?’
I fill my wine glass to the brim.
‘Because without the piano you could run away from the palace.’
‘I see,’ she says.
‘Yes Amelie,’ I continue. ‘Without your piano you can take some risks.’
Again I dip my finger in the cool aromatic wine and press it lightly around the border of the glass which is made from finest crystal. Its lament sounds both angelic and devilish, it is piercing and yet it is also calm.
‘Does your piano have a different sort of morality from your own?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does it have desires that are forbidden to you?’