by Fleur Jaeggy
Portrait of an Unknown Woman
Sometimes before a portrait something imperious and hidden, a detail, captures our attention. Does not let the gaze wander. When I abandon it, by an act of will, and resume my rounds in the halls of the museum, I am compelled to go back. Should I bid it farewell? Certainly, I must take leave of it and I think I won’t forget it. Nor will I ever see it again. Our brief encounter is over. Without the hands of the clock having moved. The shadows act as a screen, in the distance the sound of a siren. The entire city is shutting down.
I have the impression that its gaze, like an ivory ruler, takes my measure. That is not so. Its gaze is elsewhere. I know that it is indifferent to visitors, to gazes that fog its face. But there can’t be many who stop to look at it. Love and indifference don’t touch it.
And now I’d like to introduce you to the portrait. It is of a woman. An unknown woman. With her I had a little conversation. I think that she is a thief. The transparent bonnet covers her face, a round cap descends on her forehead and covers her ears. The sad bitter eyes look in no direction, because she does not need to look. They gaze at nothing, with a veiling of displeasure. The mouth is firmly shut and the lower lip protrudes slightly, a faint trace of stubbornness, and regret. Stiff, a pleated collar around her neck, like marble. It’s almost a graceful instrument of torture, keeping her company. Perhaps she sleeps with the collar on. On a bare bed, she lies wrapped in bandages. The dark monastic gown blends into the tar. The hands should be holding a book of prayers whereas they clutch gloves that seem to want to evade her grasp. A cross descends perpendicular to the fingers. And knotted at the waist a cord hung with small crosses: they look like insects and tend to hide in the folds of the habit. Does she use the gloves to hold the cross in her hands? Gloved devotion. Some use an ointment before taking the cult object into their hands. It is a rite of purification. And so the woman will take the cross in her hands only after having donned the gloves. Gray like pressed ash. She won’t let go of her hold. She grips to excess, and maybe the cross itself will drive her to squeeze it till it bleeds like a pomegranate fruit. Her impure fingers cannot touch it. Nor the lips kiss it, a gesture she wouldn’t make anyway. Only the detachment from her own body can unite her to the cross. Her face, up above, as though on a lookout, is absence itself, a face without expression, a shell made of deprivations. So little exists. And yet before that nothingness I have bowed my head, in a gesture of greeting and perhaps of complicity. Neither lament nor denial proceed from her lips, I thought I detected a quiet amorous fury when No, no, thank you was said. In reply to my greeting. Sparing were the gifts of nature, almost determined to provoke aversion. Not in me. Averse to her was the anonymous painter who portrayed her: he granted her nothing. With that, he succeeded. Because, sunk into the wall, she does not grant. A great deal she granted the hands, the gloves, and the cross. All of herself. The cross seemed alive. I am unable to leave. At the exit I realized I had lost my gloves, my gray gloves. I was about to say: hers. And the cross?
The Black Lace Veil
My mother had an audience with the Pope. I found this out from a photograph of the Holy Father with her looking at him, wearing a black veil. From that photograph I understood, perceived, in fact clearly saw, that my mother was depressed. Depressed in a definitive way. The smile is sad, the glance, which is trying to be kind, is without hope. Mother was a rather sociable person, elegant, lovely jewelry, a lot of charm, Givenchy, Patou, Lanvin — in fact many aesthetic qualities which are not dissimilar to internal ones. In the photograph I noticed for the first time that Mother was all in all a desperate woman — or almost desperate. In spite of her little bridge tables. She entertained a great deal, now some of the bridge tables have been left to me and sometimes I hear the calls: sans atout, passe, hearts. Then I ask myself why she went to see the Pope. I am her daughter and would never have thought of going. What made her seek the blessing of the Holy Father? Maybe her despair: she wanted to be blessed. Wearing the dark lace veil, partly obscuring her face that was so sad. There is something frightful in realizing from a photograph that one’s own mother was depressed. Definitively depressed. Or perhaps she only was at that moment. The presence of the Holy Father threw her into such a state of bewilderment that it made her expression unhappy. With no way out. As she desperately tried to smile and the eyes were already in darkness. They are — one could say right away — extinguished, dead, closed. Yet she was still beautiful. Beauty could not conceal the despair, as the grim veil she wore on her head could not hide her beauty.
Now I’d like to know why she went to see the Holy Father. Did she seek solace? Maybe I was wrong. It was the first impression that made me say that her gaze was desperate. She looked the Holy Father in the eye, with a distant and very direct gaze. She looked him straight in the eye. Even though her gaze was far from cheerful. It was cold and hopeless. She had no hope. Her son was beside her. And he, too, had a sad expression in his eyes. And so her son looked at the Holy Father in the bored manner of a little boy who doesn’t believe in anything. The mother wants to take him to the Pope, an audience for the very few. It is a luxury to be able to see the Holy Father, they say. I don’t know if the word luxury is a suitable one, but it is not common to be received by the Holy Father, so close that one can kiss his ring or bow one’s head or genuflect. Perhaps genuflecting is too much. I don’t know a great deal about ritual behavior toward the Holy Father. But my mother who knows the etiquette and was immediately granted an audience, she must have bowed as she started to bow before destiny. Before a not too favorable destiny that was undermining her life. Her beauty hadn’t altogether faded, there were still flashes of it, which to a careful glance might have been quite fascinating and moving. Her daughter, who does not have the depth of the mother, has always believed in the surface of things. And so in beauty. In appearance. What does she care about what is inside? Inside where? And what is the inside? Anyway the daughter believes more in photographs than in the people portrayed. A photograph might tell more than a person. Perhaps. Naturally perhaps. Always perhaps. No affirmation could lead her to grant total credence to the affirmation itself. So, to return to despair. A theme that is dear to her. What could be better than despair? If one discovers from looking at her in a photograph that a person is desperate, after the first shock a kind of calm sets in. A remission. I had never seen my mother so desperate, I would never have thought she could be desperate. It was we, her daughter and her son, who always thought we were — the two of us, he and I — desperate. Not Mother. That was our prerogative. Mother does not even know what despair might be, we thought. Well, she deceived us. To put it crudely. The card player, and perhaps a player in life, the woman who for a while protected us, who protected her children — and then let them go. Because all that was around her left her. Like a flash of lightning, there is an instant that descends, wounds, and is gone. And leaves an aura of spoliation. All it took was a photograph, the photograph of Mother in the presence of the Holy Father, to convince her daughter that she was desperate. She will continue to repeat that word, because she, the mother, never uttered it. She never uttered a word that concerned her. That concerned any malaise of hers. Any possible malaise of hers.
Even now, though many years have gone by and Mother is no longer here, I’d like to know what made her go to the Pope. Why the audience? And why that look in her eyes. If she felt the desire to see the Pope, and perhaps receive his blessing, why did she have that terribly sad look in her eyes? So much so that her daughter, many years later, was jolted — as though her mother were alive at that moment and told her that she’s had enough of life. Sufficit. The daughter was jolted, felt a pang of love for her mother who perhaps had always hidden from her that she was terribly unhappy and let herself be found out in a photograph.
An Encounter in the Bronx
In a restaurant, not far from Oliver Sacks’s house. First a visit to his freezing house. He is sensitive to heat. He loathes the heat. Or perhap
s, for mental or clinical reasons which I cannot know, the heat simply stifles him. It made a certain impression on me the degree to which he detests the heat. Maybe also because though I like the cold, the nordic climate, the nordic sky, ice, snow, I am sensitive to the cold. I cover up in the daytime, I cover up before going to bed, I typed wearing gloves with cut-off fingers. Sacks came here one winter. He opened the windows. He went out on the terrace. I stayed in the house wearing coat, scarf, gloves. My hands get cold. My neck. I am cold in a way I’m tempted to call internal, a terrible word, but never mind. An internal cold. Frost within. Oliver is always hot. He hates the heat. I don’t think it’s merely a physical matter. He weighs more than I do. Until a few months ago I weighed less than ninety pounds. But I have known thin people who hated the heat. So it’s not just a question of how a body is constructed. Nor a question of blood. Nor do I think it’s a question of feelings. Mine can be quite cold. Though ardently wishing for heat. But not too much. Naturally it depends on what type of heat it is. One summer, in Thessaloniki, Greece, there were headlines in the papers, people were dying of heat. I realized something was odd, and I was hot, too. But I wasn’t worn out. It was when we went looking for Philip’s tomb. It was shut. But they let us in. When it’s that hot I cover up. In Greece once more, in the Peloponnese, a nun mistook me for a nun. I was wearing something long, white, and a cut of linen on my head that fell down my back.
And so, at the restaurant with Oliver. There were fish in an aquarium. Oliver and Roberto talk. Oliver orders an immense steak. Next to us a long table. A man at the head of the table. All around him, only women. Dressed in lace, jewelry, lacquered nails, really fantastic nails. Long dresses, tight corsets embroidered in rayon, silk, sparkling, pink, mauve, yellow, white. They all looked like brides. Narrow wrists. Sparkling eyes. He’s the boss. Black. Elegant. Almost distant from his women. I looked at them. And I looked at the aquarium. I look at one fish, I don’t know which, but he is already a friend. Quite large, large eyes, always the same route, half the aquarium. He seems to respond to my gaze. I had the very precise impression that he understood. I was talking to him. In silence. With affection. He knows he must die. He knows he’ll have nothing more from life. And he observes the clients at the restaurant. For a moment I think that his fate is not different from mine. We are both observing. I may have an advantage, some future, a little bit of time ahead of me. Before being killed. The fish is so intelligent. His eyes express love, I am not exaggerating. The clients go toward the aquarium, with a finger they point to the fish they want to eat. The fish that will be served at the table. The fish moves. Always the same route. What else can he do. They come to look at him up close. Meanwhile he is fresh. Because he is alive. The clients can be sure that the fish is fresh. Anyone can look. And they, the fish, ogle. Desperate — indifferent — I didn’t know. And yet I felt a certain kinship between the fish and me, especially with one. I remember him very well. I remember his shape. His gaze. I can’t save him. I leave the restaurant after taking my leave of him. I spoke a few words of affection. I move my lips. As he does. And good-bye.
The Aviary
“You can’t forget,” a honeyed, babyish voice was saying.
Stefan is sitting in the dark, the voice is behind the locked door. She cannot go in, he has forbidden it. He didn’t allow her to go into the room where his mother’s objects were. Once she had touched them and the boy had felt a queasiness in the stomach. But he didn’t let on. After all couldn’t his wife touch his mother’s things? There was no harm in his wife picking up a flower vase, or a picture off the floor to look at it. She had also touched the rugs, his wife, but a cloud of insects that had been disturbed emerged from one bag. They gave off a poisonous vapor. He let her. With his eyes and the pain in his stomach he followed those soft hands touching his mother’s things.
The pain rose to his mouth, he had a spasm. His wife started to laugh. His soft little doll. Stefan was trembling. Did he fear that his mother might be reborn from the objects? She approached Stefan and said, “Now we’re alone, you and I. We’re all alone in the world, we have nothing to worry about.” The young wife no longer needed to be nice to Madam Hanne. Now, she could insult her if she liked. But she didn’t tell Stefan that. It was too soon.
They were not alone in the world. She still has her alcoholic mother. Cirrhosis of the liver. He, Stefan, was alone. Not his wife. She still had a mother who always stayed in bed, hair disheveled, mouth painted and smeared. Her two husbands, she’d buried them. The first in Argentina, the second in Colombia. We Germans, she’d said, all end up in South America. But then we want to go back to Europe. She had gone back to Europe taking her daughter with her, sleeping in the same bed.
During the night the mother embraced her and called her by the name of one of the husbands, the one who wasn’t her father. The sheets were hot. The mother stayed in bed wearing a German-Argentine style of evening dress, as was the custom in South America right after the war. Or she kept her jodhpurs on. She hardly ever undressed. She had a horror of undressing. Every now and then she wore her husbands’ pajamas, but then she’d take them off, they are not flattering, and she could still smell sleep on them.
She no longer has underwear, and even the South American cocktail dresses were rotting, though they still somewhat held their own. She looked like an old harlot of bygone splendors and she liked to be called Freiin. Baroness. The jodhpurs were made of very tough material. She’d made an effort to meet Madam Hanne.
“Hand me the fan.” She still had a dozen of them, with ivory slats and feathers. She used them to dust before the arrival of Madam Hanne. Exhausted, the Baroness fanned her neck, her face, gazing into infinity, lit up on the wall lamps. Head bent, like a lady on a veranda contemplating the sunset out over the pampa.
The daughter was donning light blue. Komm, komm hier, mein Kind. She looked for her under the bed as if she were a little dog. She had just turned seventeen and she looked pure. The little dog found another bed, Stefan’s, and they were married.
“How fortunate that we could meet,” the Freiin said without conviction, and a joyful ring.
The Baroness chirped in bursts over nothing that day, she was jovial, grinning at Madam Hanne’s every sentence. She laughed cautiously when the subject of Nazism was touched. Her mind strayed. Oh yes, her husbands had believed in it. And for what, after all — to drive trucks in South America. The Freiin no longer has connections. Everyone has abandoned her. And now her darling is abandoning her too. Her eyes became moist, a brief emphasis. It is good to show maternal love.
At the age of nine Stefan became sad. Madam Hanne had wanted that son more than anything in the world. The boy had a mean look. The immense blue eyes, his mother was proud of them, seemed stolen. Stolen from some homicidal kid — or from someone of that ilk. Hanne was reading a book by a Hungarian psychiatrist specializing in bloodlines, his two sons had killed themselves. She wrote him letters, no reply. Meanwhile she rummaged through her ancestry, to see if there might be a criminal or a depressive. The generation preceding theirs went from birth to death, thinking and hoping, without manias, without scandals, without depressions. Even though they were by no means cheerful in the family. But they were good, doggedly good. Her son’s celestial eyes were mean.
The sadness of others one should leave alone. It is a small garden, a fragile delicate Arcadia, one should not disturb it. But this Hanne did not know. Sadness is almost a sin, it is wicked, Hanne thought. He has everything, she told herself over and over. She imagined of course that children too can have their upsets, when she was young she too laughed at trifles. A nervous laugh, her parents said. When they were all serene, puritanically serene, Hanne could not contain a certain animosity. She called them the small messes in her beauty case. Sometimes, during prayers before meals, she cursed the monstrosity of Giving Thanks.
But how she had thanked the Lord, how devoted she had been to him, when Stefan was born. At four
in the morning. From the baby’s first cry there had been an idyll between her and the Lord. “I offer you this child you have given me,” Hanne said again as dawn filled the room at the clinic. Convinced that the Lord would never take that child from her. But it was an offering she wanted to place on the altar of the Heavens. Her happiness called for ceremony, ritual. While Stefan was in the nursery, she lifted her arms before her, palms up, showing her green eyes to the void. They stared at the ceiling, the white wall, an iconostasis of fervor, walled-in air, disinfectant.