When she comes back for the next holidays, he offers to take charge of her sentimental education. Music, literature, philosophy, politics. He starts by bringing her a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. She is intrigued by the silver cover of the paperback, how special it feels. She devours the book in the space of a few hours, but then she doesn’t know what to do with it. She wants to give it back to him and say something witty, something that will make him think she is grown-up and sophisticated. But she can’t think of anything to say. Eventually she leaves it on his bed while he is out.
For a few days he ignores her. She is grateful for his silence.
Then one evening, on his way out, he taps on the door. He holds out a new book. And a recording of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2.
– I think you might find these interesting.
The book is The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir. She blushes and quickly slips it under her pillow, embarrassed to have that word between them. After dinner she goes straight to her room to read, but this time she is disappointed. There is little about sex and no story at all. She forces herself to read it to the end, and puts it back on his bed. She is still twelve years old.
A week later he is back with another book, this time by Masters and Johnson. He gazes at her intently as he hands it over. Human Sexual Response. And it is all she wants to know and more. He begins to fill her imagination in the long dreary days when she is away at boarding school. She begins to dream of him at night in her narrow convent bed.
And then come the banned books, Marx, de Sade, Achebe, books she is vaguely aware she could be arrested for having. She remembers one in particular about the distribution of land in South Africa and the Group Areas Act. The books take her out of and above the conventionality of her family, the blinkered mysticism of the nuns, the giggling awkwardness of the other girls at school. She remembers telling her friends that she has become a communist.
One night she climbs into his bed. And the next night he follows her back to hers. The encounter is quick and shameful. They do not speak and it is all over in minutes.
Then one day when she comes back from school for the holidays he is there with a wife. Anna sits in her school uniform watching them from the window of her upstairs room as they lounge in the garden, next to the statue of Mercury, drinking tea and eating scones. She hears the woman’s husky laughter as he takes her bare foot into his lap and holds it between his hands, massaging it, circling the instep with his thumb, softly, tickling, and then slips his hand up her calf and under her dress.
He takes his wife’s hand and leads her inside. Anna knows exactly what they are going to do. She can hardly breathe. But later that night when the whole house is asleep he comes to her bed. Furtive and silent and shameful.
From one day to the next she stops talking. Words become impossible, and language a foreign land. Dangerous, incomprehensible, treacherous.
She knows that if someone were to threaten her life, or if the building were to catch fire, some part of her would be able to react, would cry out, would run. She knows it is not a physical barrier. Somewhere, some part of her knows she could choose to be different, to break the silence and paralysis. Except she chooses not to.
She thinks a minute. Perhaps not. Perhaps she had no choice. Perhaps she was too young. Perhaps she was still caught in the web of events that had rendered her mute.
For a long time nobody notices. You can get by on nods and shakes of the head and smiles, she thinks. Especially smiles. People love to talk about themselves, and if you smile they think you agree.
She smiles often.
She can of course still understand. And thoughts still course through her brain using words. It isn’t that she has lost the ability. It is just that language as communication has become impossible, too painful, too dangerous.
He shifts in his chair, lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. She has almost forgotten that he is there.
They ask her what is wrong. Explain. Be responsible. Account for yourself. But she can’t. She doesn’t know. There are some things she can’t tell them about but also that she can’t work out, can’t make the connections in all the mess of memories – which events caused this to happen. She just knows that she feels unsafe and ashamed, so she withdraws to a place deep inside herself. She walks the streets and makes eye contact with strangers, staring at them until they avert their eyes.
Her mother makes an appointment for her to see a doctor.
She sits, fifteen or sixteen years old, hunched up on a low armchair in the waiting room, head bowed, oblivious to everything around her. The glass coffee table piled high with magazines holds no attraction. She is dressed in her school uniform – thick beige stockings, heavy brown lace-up shoes, blue dress, blue blazer, anonymous. Her long brown hair hangs loosely about her face, in defiance of school regulations, like a screen.
At last the receptionist signals to her to go inside. The doctor sits across a high desk clear of everything except an empty brown file and a pen. She looks down at her hands. He has a rich Persian carpet spread across the floor of his consulting room. His shiny black shoes surmounted by grey-and-black pinstriped trousers rest amongst its scarlet-and-blue peacocks and swirling flowers.
– So, Anna, tell me about yourself.
She doesn’t know what to say. What can she tell him? What is there to say? So she sits there as the doctor speaks, hearing but not really hearing what he is saying. He examines her reflexes, taps her knee with a little hammer making her jerk. Asks her questions that she doesn’t answer. He gives up eventually. He gets up and calls her mother into the room. Anna watches them talking, watches the smiles, the mouths opening and closing. Back in the car, a short journey to Volkshospitaal in Gardens, to another doctor, nurses, being clothed in a surgical gown and told to get into bed. Lying waiting. No, not waiting. Just lying. Not sick. Not anything.
The hospital is small, more like a sprawling Victorian house, her room large, with elaborate pressed ceilings and a bay window looking out on to the park with Table Mountain rising above the trees behind it. She lies there wordlessly, not caring about anything.
The next morning she is placed on a stretcher and wheeled into an operating theatre. The doctor from the day before, an anaesthetist, two nurses. They apply an electrode to each of her temples, others to her chest. The electrodes on her temples are attached to a little metal box, strangely primitive in appearance, like an old-fashioned, enamel-coated butcher’s scale. Two dials. A switch.
The anaesthetist traffics around her arm, finds an artery. The doctors exchange glances. The anaesthetist tells her to count to ten. She remembers counting to seven before the synthetic surge floods her nostrils and brain.
He uncrosses and crosses his legs, glances surreptitiously at the clock.
When she wakes up her head and neck ache. It hurts to open her eyes. She is back in her bed. She is aware of a flash through her brain, like having looked straight into the sun, except it won’t go away. Everything is white. Walls, ceiling, pressed ceiling with little plaster flowers around the edges, sheets, blankets. She tries to cling to details and patterns but nothing will stay in her mind. The nurses are white. The food is white. Mashed potatoes, steamed chicken, cauliflower, ice cream. There is nothing else. No thoughts, no inner dialogue. She sleeps. She wakes up and finds one of the electrodes still on her chest. The nurse tells her to leave it there. They will use it again.
Every second day the treatment is repeated. She forgets how often. Some days she manages to count to eight before the surge fills her brain. Other days she only gets to five. At some point it all becomes confused. Just flash after flash of blinding light. She doesn’t remember leaving the hospital.
She sighs.
Language, she thinks, can’t really express what happened. She remembers how all her thoughts slowed down. Disappeared. Just blinding whiteness and pain and confusion. Perhaps that is the point of the treatment. It feels like the punishment she has been expecting for so many y
ears.
Her mother visits and brings her chocolate. White chocolate. She is hungry, starving, and devours slab after slab, larva-like. One day, she supposes, her mother comes to fetch her. She has been in hospital for a month. About twenty shocks through her brain. Give or take a few. There are no records. All the old records have been destroyed, along with many memories of those years.
There are more doctors. A few weeks later, somehow, she doesn’t remember how, she ends up in the state psychiatric hospital that lies on the narrow finger of land between two rivers.
Sometimes she thinks she has never left the hospital. Perhaps she never will. Perhaps all these years since have simply been a dream. Perhaps she sits on a bench in the sun, an old woman on a back ward, dreaming her life away, conjuring up islands and emperors and oceans and ruins while a nurse in white watches silently on.
At night she lies in her narrow metal bed watching the lights from a passing car shine through the barred windows of the dormitory and cast moving shadows on to the opposite wall. Then the car rounds the bend near the river and disappears into the city of light, and the room falls back into darkness and she is once more alone with her thoughts. She listens to the heavy breathing of the other women who lie trapped in drugged sleep or cry out in terror from the deep places of their nightmares.
A bed, a small low cupboard where she keeps her toothbrush and paints; the sum total of her world.
Sometimes in the morning, after a greasy breakfast of eggs and toast and coffee, she stands at the fence of the exercise yard, her fingers caught in the diamond mesh wire, and watches the birds down at the water’s edge where they eat and breed and squabble and die. One day she saw a pelican. It flew up from the river towards her, heavy-bodied, deep-chested, its wings flapping powerfully to free itself from the earth’s pull; it passed within arm’s reach, so close she could hear its heart beat. She swears she heard its heart beat.
Three months later she is discharged against medical advice. Unimproved. The doctor tells her they can do nothing for her if she won’t speak. And that she has read too much Eliot and Sartre. She begins to wonder about psychiatrists.
For a few months after being discharged she stays in a furnished room near the university to prepare for her school-leaving exams, which she had missed while she was in hospital. The only person she sees in those months is Luke, her cousin, who arrives unannounced outside her window, heaves himself up and drops on to her bed. It is only a question of a few minutes. He takes her there, where she lies, in silence, and then straightens his clothes and climbs back out of the window.
As soon as the exams are done, she is driven to the airport and put on board an Alitalia flight via Kinshasa to Italy. Her mother has met someone who knew someone who had studied Italian at the University for Foreigners in Siena and had lots of fun. Not knowing what else to do with Anna, she puts her on a plane and sends her to Italy for a year to study Italian.
He glances at the clock. She sighs.
Yes, she knows, time to go.
Session 5
She sits down in her usual place. She feels anxious and afraid. What can he be thinking, why does he keep bringing her back here day after day if she will not talk to him, will not tell him anything? What will they do to her if she can’t speak?
He lights a cigarette and clears his throat.
– Mi è venuta un’idea. I’ve been thinking. Would you like to try to lie on the couch and see if that works better? You might feel more relaxed.
He points at a chaise longue against the wall, which she had not noticed before. She looks at it, uncertain what to do.
– Why don’t you give it a try? If you don’t like it you can always go back to the chair.
She gets up reluctantly and takes a few steps to the chaise. She sits down on the edge of it and looks up.
He is staring at her. She can see the curiosity in his eyes, senses his excitement.
She feels the breath catch in her throat. She doesn’t know how to say no, but this feels impossibly dangerous, terrifying. She feels as if she is going to faint. But there seems to be no other option, no alternative. At last she forces herself to breathe deeply, and stretches out on the couch.
Unable to stop herself, she turns over and begins to weep. She can’t stop. She cries for the whole hour.
Session 6
She comes into the room and goes straight to the chair, ignoring the couch. She sits back and closes her eyes, refusing to engage. The memories begin at once. Strange flat emotionless memories, but very clear.
She remembers staring out of the window as the airplane lands in Rome and taxies towards its terminus buildings. End of the line. It is a cold day at the end of February. She is seventeen. She is mute. She is completely alone.
Her mother has arranged for her to spend a week in Rome sightseeing before she catches the bus to Siena. She is booked into the Pensione Arcadia near the Villa Borghese gardens. Outside the airport is an empty taxi rank. She feels silly and conspicuous, standing there with her suitcase next to her, waiting. A man, leaning against a wall, grins.
– Ci ha d’aspettà. Fino alle cinque non passano più.
Anna looks at him without understanding.
– Ah, straniera! No taxi. Taxi sciopero. After five o’clock, maybe. Capisci? Strike.
He comes closer.
– Where you going? he asks.
She pulls out the address and shows him.
– Come. I take you.
She tries to think of what she should do but if there is a strike there doesn’t seem to be any alternative, so she nods, yes.
He loads her large Samsonite suitcase on to the back seat of the tiny mustard-coloured Cinquecento, since it will not fit into the boot, and then they squeeze themselves into the front. He speeds out of the piazzale and on to a country road flanked by huge advertising placards. She eyes her companion. He grins back and changes into a lower gear. Then casually, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, his hand slides off the gear lever and on to her knee. And still he grins. She looks at the hand, square, strong, with tufts of hair growing from the fleshy parts. Fingernails cut short but not too clean. As she looks, the hand begins to move, to knead and squeeze her flesh. Then it shifts upwards and inwards. He looks at her quickly, sees no opposition, and turns the car off the road into an abandoned lot. He parks amongst the nettles next to a graffiti-covered wall, and unbuttons his fly. He puts his hand on her neck and pushes her face down.
He drops her off a few hours later in front of the Pensione Arcadia. She checks in, trying to hide the abrasions on her lips and face from the curious eyes of the manager who accompanies her to her room, eyeing her legs as she walks.
For a few days the hotel becomes her home, while she waits for the week’s holiday to come to an end. Like home, it is not a safe place, and so it feels familiar. She doesn’t unpack her suitcase, knowing that soon she will be moving on.
Each time she comes back, he is there waiting for her, the hotel manager, and he accompanies her to her room. He has taken to coming inside, using his skeleton key, after checking that no one, especially not his wife, is looking. He tells her to wash herself first in the bidet. It is a quick, silent business, over in a few minutes with only a minimal disturbance of clothing, and then he is gone. She lies on the bed where he leaves her, curled up with her eyes closed.
But every morning she feels obliged to get up and pretend to exist. Like when she was a child and got up to go to school every day, no matter what had happened in the night. When she emerges on to the street the man in the mustard-coloured Cinquecento is always waiting for her outside the door. They don’t return to the abandoned lot. Once they go to the woods and lie on the damp ground, and the sun shines through the floating golden chestnut leaves as they fall silently to earth. Another time he takes her to a tiny flat, which she understands he has borrowed from a friend. Sometimes he brings a friend. Sometimes two. He allows them to take part. She goes where he takes her. Without saying
a word. And in the afternoon she comes back to the ministrations of the manager.
If his wife is there, he takes Anna out for a drive. One day they sit in the car beneath the stands of the Teatro Olimpico along the banks of the Tiber, just past the Ministero degli Esteri. His beard is rough under the rough cement arches; it tears the skin around her mouth. On the last day she realises she is bleeding, her mouth is swollen and bruised, it hurts to walk. The man in the Cinquecento takes her to the bus stop and leaves her there next to her suitcase. She has not eaten for a week. She has been too afraid and ashamed to go into a shop or restaurant and order food.
The bus takes three hours to reach its destination, climbing higher and higher into the Apennines. It begins to snow, covering everything with a soft veil of white. It is dark by the time the bus pulls in to the main square and stops. She alights with the other passengers and stands waiting beside the bus to collect her suitcase. And then she faints in the snow.
She has reached her limit.
A shopkeeper carries her into his shop, which sells ecclesiastical accoutrements. She comes back to consciousness reflected in a thousand glittering surfaces, surrounded by statues of saints and golden crucifixes and vestments and habits for priests and nuns. The owner calls a taxi, and she is taken to Signora Bruna’s.
Session 7
She stands at the door, reluctant to come inside. He waits. At last she sits down and stares out of the window. When he sees her eyes return to the room, he asks:
– Cosa stai pensando? Where are you today?
For some reason she can’t help smiling. She tries to stop herself but her face keeps twisting into a smile. He notices and smiles back.
– Something feels different today? Me ne vuoi parlare?
The Story of Anna P, as Told by Herself Page 13