by Morris West
Does this sound strange? The thing I cannot forgive Papa is that, after that extraordinary rite of passage, he made me go back to school for another year. I had to matriculate, he said. I had to qualify for entry into a university medical school. I pleaded with him, begged him on my knees to find me tutors and let me work at home in Silbersee. No, he would have none of it. The International Academy for Young Gentlewomen had done a splendid job. I must finish the matriculation course with them. To this day I cannot understand his reasoning. How could he do it? What did he expect of a healthy young animal he himself had awakened so fully? Didn’t he understand that all the company I had at school was pubescent girls and “young gentlemen of good family and impeccable morals”? And even if their morals were not impeccable, what possible charm could they have for me now?
So, for the last year at the academy, I went wild – jungle-wild! – with a calculated ferocity which surprised even myself. Papa wanted me to matriculate? Good! I would do it with high distinction. I wanted freedom? Good! I would buy it with bright coinage. My conduct at school was beyond reproach. As a result, I was given liberties and privileges that were denied to others. I went twice a week to Geneva to do research in the university library. I took an advanced course in dressage at the riding school. I had weekend voice lessons at the Opera from Madame Corsini, a pupil of Jenny Lind.
I also managed, on the same timetable, a regular session in the hayloft with Rudi the riding master, a couple of interesting interludes with one or other of the students at the university, and a sporadic but highly dramatic affair with a bel canto tenor who practised down the corridor from Madame Corsini.
At the end of the academic year I came home completely exhausted, with high marks in all subjects and a bad attack of pneumonia. Papa treated me. Lily cosseted me. The clean mountain air completed the cure. Papa told me he had procured a place for me at the University of Padua, which has one of the oldest and most distinguished faculties of medicine in Europe. I was delighted. Life went on its placid summer way in Silbersee.
It wasn’t the same. It would never be the same again. We three still shared the apartment. We still wandered about in all stages of undress. Sometimes we all climbed into bed together and played the old games; but that was different, too. Now there was no real fun in the play. It was uneasy, unsatisfying, contrived.
Papa, I noticed, was putting on weight. Lily still kept her trim, girlish figure. She exercised every day and insisted I do the same. Her hair was greying a little and the first telltale lines showed in her face. Although her smile was still wonderful and there were always flashes of the old salty humour, she was clearly insecure, and sometimes unhappy. She was jealous of Papa and possessive of me. I didn’t blame her. While I was at school, Papa left her alone for weeks at a time, and she rattled around the empty Schloss like a pea in a dry pod. She confessed to me that she had had one or two brief affairs: one with Hans Hemeling and another – God forgive her! – with a junior priest at the Pfarrhaus, whose superiors had smartly moved him back to Vienna. But neither of them had proved satisfactory, “because your Papa’s the best, lassie! He knows how to deliver everything a woman wants. The trouble is he gets bored before we do! It’s the first buds he’s after, not the full blooms.”
I knew what she meant. I wasn’t a fresh bud any more, and Papa was bored with me too. Like Lily I was pleasant to have close, to fondle and to enjoy as a playmate. But as soon as he was fresh again, it was heels up and over the fence to the fillies in the next meadow. I asked Lily what she thought we could do about it. As always she had a plan – a secret which only she and I must know.
“Your Papa’s slowing down, as you see. He can’t stand all this trotting backwards and forwards to Vienna. He’s got a girl in Salzburg whom he’s quite serious about – at least as serious as he’ll ever get! It’s been going on for a year now. He’d like to bring her down here; but I’m in his way and so are you – and besides we might spill secrets, eh? So here’s what I’ve suggested. You’ll be going to university in Padua. He doesn’t want you living alone and unprotected. He doesn’t want you getting a bad name at the university. So I talked him into letting me set up house for you in a decent place. There’ll be a room for him when he wants to visit – which he will, believe me, because he’s set his heart on this career for you. You and I will go our own ways; and if our men don’t work out we’ll always have each other. What do you say, lassie?”
“I say I love you, Lily! I love you so much I could eat you alive!”
The record of the next five years is almost irrelevant to my present case. Papa set us up in an elegant apartment with functional plumbing and a ceiling by Tiepolo. He also paid for a daily maid and a cook. It was a good time, a happy time. Lily and I lived like two sisters, caring for each other, sharing confidences, laughing over misadventures. At the university I was first an oddity, then, when the year’s results were posted, a minor phenomenon. I had more attention than I needed as a woman; but I managed to conduct my love affairs out of sight of my student friends. It was not too hard. I needed mature men. Life was too precious to waste on mothering puppies.
Papa came to visit from time to time, always alone, but always on the way to or from some complicated occasion of the heart. In the long summer terms, depending upon the state of our love lives, we travelled together to new places, to Scandinavia, to Africa, to England and once to Petrograd to visit the Hermitage. It was then that Papa made his famous “mot” which in the end turned out to be prophetic.
Lily and I had spent the whole day playing a complicated flirtation game with two handsome Swedes in our tour party. They were married. Their wives were with them. We had set ourselves to attract their attention and if possible get them into conversation. Finally Papa exploded in exasperation.
“My God! Now I know what Catherine the Great must have been like! God save us from predatory women!”
When I reminded him that he had spent his whole life being chased by them, he objected.
“Not at all! I chase my own game! The minute a woman looks like Diana the huntress I’m off! But you two! I wouldn’t let you loose in a mortuary!”
As a medical student I spent more than enough time in mortuaries; but the effect they had on me was only to reinforce the sense of futility which haunted me in the dark hours. As I reflect on it now, listening to the mourning wail of the train whistle, I see that I am completely different from Papa. I am – or I was – a very efficient doctor. My diagnoses were good; my surgery precise. But I had none of Papa’s gentleness, his care for tissue, his hatred of unnecessary trauma. I suppose I saw medicine always as a post-house, a place of easement on the road to extinction. Death had no terror for me, and by corollary, life – even my own – commanded little respect. What was involved for me was not compassion – but combat: a question of power; how quickly I could ease the unbearable pain; how long I could defer the inevitable end. Strange that I should remember this now, while I myself am making this journey just to choose between living and dying.
But love has been like that for me, too – an exer cise of power: to attract, to hold, to command satisfaction, to dismiss when I choose. The only ones I have never loved like that are Papa, my husband and Lily. What they gave I have never been able to find with anyone else. I couldn’t command them. I never wanted to dismiss them. It was they who finally absented themselves. I wonder what is missing in me, and how I came to lose it. Was it perhaps taken away when Mamma disappeared, or when Papa invaded my first womanhood and left me no dreams at all, but only memories and desires?
Another thought comes to me in this noisy but solitary progress towards Zurich. I was brought up in Austria, in a Catholic province. I spent five years in Padua, the city of Saint Anthony the Wonderworker, whose massive tomb is encircled every day by pilgrims seeking favours. I have visited monasteries and churches, and been medical adviser to nuns and priests, but none of their beliefs or attitudes have rubbed off on me, let alone penetrated the armour of my sc
epticism. I wonder why? Is it, as Gianni di Malvasia suggests, that the gift of credence has been withheld at the whim of some divine comedian? Or is it a lack in me, an absence of some faculty like taste or smell or colour perception? To this point it has never bothered me; but now it does. I have never felt so lonely in my life as I do at this moment. If I decide to end things quietly, it would be nice to have someone to talk to before I go. Even if God is an illusion it would be comforting to have someone breathe His name in my ear. I would settle even for less – to sit in a warm bath like Petronius Arbiter, with a friend holding my hand and making pleasant talk, while life bleeds quietly away without pain
There is a whole litany of objections to my enjoying so peaceful an end. I recite it to the rhythm of the wheels on the iron tracks: “I cut the roses, I beat the dog, I bloodied the horse, I married the man, who lived in the house of Johann, Ritter von Gamsfeld.”
JUNG
Zurich
Toni and I are still grappling with the analysis of my death wish. We have gone over together all the records of my dreams; and it is astonishing how often and in how many different contexts the motif recurs. What we are trying to do now is relate the dream wish to its object in real life and examine my own connection with that object.
Today we are happier together. Last night I responded to her challenge. While Emma was sleeping, in the small hours of the morning, I slipped out of the house and cycled over to Toni’s place. We had four wonderful hours together, and I left just as the false dawn was breaking over the lake. When Emma woke and came looking for me, I was shaved and tidy and working assiduously at my desk. No smoking this time! No brandy stains on what has turned out to be a very useful set of notes!
Toni, too, is much calmer in mind. It is not simply the sexual release, although that, she assures me, was enormous; it is the fact that I dared something for her. My midnight visit was an escapade that might have cost me dear, if Emma had found out. Her outburst the other day still troubles me. I have always assumed that, like good respectable Swiss, we shall stay wedded, no matter what happens in the enclave of our marriage. Now I am not so sure. If Emma finds my delinquencies intolerable, she may well decide to take the children and go back to her family, who would without doubt receive her and comfort her. On the other hand, if my reputation gets too much mauled, I may just decide to say to hell with them all, toss my own cap over the windmill and go away with Toni. She would be quite happy for us to live together with or without benefit of clergy. I discourage talk of this; but I know it is in her mind and it lurks always at the back of mine. After all, Freud seems to survive this kind of situation better than I. I suspect that “amortising his marriage” means that he has some kind of accommodation with his wife’s sister. Which would explain why he is so devilishly sensitive to my published views on the incest taboo. Well, he’s going to hear more of the same in Munich, come September. Freud is, of course, the clear object of one death wish, and Toni continues to hammer at this single subject.
“Freud is the new father figure in your life. You adopted him to replace your natural father who failed you when he was alive, about whom you feel guilty now that he is dead. You have a deep emotional attachment to Freud. Yet, you are going to kill him.”
“No, that’s not accurate. My subconscious entertains the death wish. It expresses itself in dreams. My conscious – and my conscience – reject the thought.”
“Not true!” Toni is very resolute. She will tolerate no hedging on this argument. “You are going to kill Freud. You are going to do it at the Munich conference. You will disavow publicly one of his key doctrines. You will fight him for the presidency of the Psycho-Analytical Society and you will probably win. What is all that but a duel to the death?”
It is true, of course. I admit it and pay her a compliment on her precision and sagacity. She waves it aside impatiently.
“Please, Carl! Don’t do that with me. Not now! This is much too important. We’re just beginning to make progress. There’s something else behind this Freud situation; we have to find it together. In the last chaos dream you saw the black stallion. Right?”
“Yes.”
She riffles through her notes until she comes to the reference and reads it back to me.
“‘I saw his forequarters and the great muscles in his neck.’ But you didn’t see his hindquarters?”
“No.”
“How did you know it was a stallion?”
“Well, I suppose the build of the beast, the strength, the . . .”
“The hindquarters were hidden, but you knew there was a penis there and testicles. What are you trying to hide that has to do with your maleness? Please, Carl! You have to be honest, otherwise I can’t help you.”
Suddenly I want to tell her. The words come pouring out: the guilty joy, the bitter shame, the transference to Freud of this unresolved homoerotic episode, my fear of how she herself might regard it. At the end I am blubbering like a schoolboy, my pride in tatters. Toni strokes my bowed head and repeats over and over, “There . . . there . . . there,” as if she is soothing a stricken child. When all my tears are spent, she sponges my cheeks and cups my face in her hands and smiles at me with grave tenderness.
“Now at last I know you love me, Carl. You’ve given me the greatest proof possible: your trust.”
“I’ve given you the rottenest part of myself.”
“Don’t say that! Don’t ever say that to me! What did you expect of yourself – a boy, a parson’s son, with a man he loved and trusted? I only wish you could have enjoyed the whole thing, instead of carrying the guilt of it all these years. Don’t you see, Carl, this is a big part of your problem. Everything with you is half done, half finished, half enjoyed. Me, Emma, all the others who pop in and out of your life, your children, too! You want them and you don’t want them. Everything is a transaction. You always try to calculate whether what you get is worth what you’re paying. There’s no joy in that!”
“Then perhaps today will be the beginning of joy.”
It is a wish more than a hope. She is very pleased with herself because she has flushed out one small demon from the thickets of my soul. She does not realise that there are legions more lurking in the undergrowth. Still, she has cause to be proud, and I to be grateful, that this sordid little history is out in the open.
I am calm now. She asks whether I am ready to continue the session. I tell her yes. So long as the water flows, don’t close the sluice gate. Her next question shocks me, as she intends it to do.
“How will you kill Emma and the children?”
“That’s monstrous!”
“No. It’s the logic of the psyche. What you dream is what you wish. What you wish, you will try to accomplish, in fact or symbol. So please, my dear, my love, try to answer. Don’t retreat now!”
I do retreat. I will not tell her my thoughts about divorce, remarriage, all that social chaos. Instead I toss a bait to distract her from the subject.
“I told Emma yesterday that she must let me go my own way. She must concentrate her life on herself and the children.”
Toni reflects for a long moment. Finally she nods assent.
“If you meant it, yes, that’s a death sentence for a woman. If ever you tell me that, I’ll be sure it’s over between us. But are you certain you did mean it?”
Now I am really sliced by Occam’s razor. If I say yes, I am a horror of a man, who marries a woman, breeds five children out of her and then leaves her to her own devices. Toni sees my hesitation. She continues the inquisition.
“Do you love Emma?”
“Yes.”
“Do you love your children?”
“Yes, yes!”
“Then why do you dream their death?”
“Because they stand between me and you.”
“But why can’t you love us all?”
“There isn’t enough of me for that.”
“Ah! So you kill them to save yourself, not to possess me!”
“Thi
s is dialectic, not analysis! Let’s drop it.”
She has made her point. She is prepared to drop the argument without protest. Now she begins, more placidly, to develop another line of enquiry. This time I am prepared to cooperate, because it interests me, too. She asks:
“The train. You say it was coming from somewhere in the North.”
“It seemed so, yes.”
“Where was it going?”
“Home, here to Switzerland.”
“And the flood didn’t stop it?”
“No. It just kept going. The waters never seemed to threaten the train.”
“That’s why you wanted to stay inside?”
“Until I saw the stallion, yes.”
“Do you see any pattern there, any analogy with your own life?”
Once again I am self-conscious, reluctant. Toni forces me to fit the jigsaw pieces together and admit the connection between dream and reality.
“I am, for the present at least, in a kind of retirement. I need that. I cling to my privacy here. I need the security of a family routine. If this marriage were to break up, I don’t think I would be able – at least in this moment – to cope with it. If I lost you, I too would be lost. When you didn’t meet me on the train, I was terribly troubled.”
“So let me ask you something important, Carl. Your present is here. You need the security of your home place; but where do you see your future?”
“There will be another home place, not far from here. My future, my real future, is inside my head. I know that. I am absolutely certain of it. Wait, I have something to show you.”
I bring out the sketches I have made of my tower, of the ground plan which is at once a mandala and the Tetragrammaton. I explain them with loving care. I tell her I have not yet found the land, but I will one day. I tell her how even as I made the sketches I saw it as a place where we could be together. Her face lights up with pleasure. She is like a young bride looking at the plans of her first home. When I put away the sketches, the light is quenched and her questions take on a more sombre tone.