Sylva

by Jean Bruller

  During the following days I dared not be too insistent in getting Sylva in front of a looking glass again. I had immediately replaced all the mirrors, including the cheval glass, but Sylva at first pretended not even to notice their presence—though she could not prevent herself, when passing through the gallery where two tall pier glasses faced each other, from quickening her pace and even running.

  Nevertheless, we saw her gradually losing her fear. She could no longer avoid seeing her face from time to time in a windowpane, reflected in a glass case or the high polish of a piece of furniture. There came a day when, instead of running away or pretending not to have seen it, she looked at it and stopped. Thereafter she would approach her reflection. Timidly at first, then with curiosity, then with absorbed attention. The cheval glass became a center of interest for her, one of which she did not seem to tire. She would now look at herself at all hours of the day. But not as a woman does, admiringly or disconsolately, nor even simply to study herself. Rather as a sort of constant checkup, as if she were never sure of finding opposite her, returning stare for stare, this creature whose reality seemed to plunge her into endless perplexity.

  She would leave the mirror and curl up at the foot of the bed, her face in her cupped hands, her eye’s staring straight ahead without seeing anything, never batting an eyelid, like a motionless cat. At those moments, I would have gladly given months of my life to be able to penetrate that little brain and witness what was going on in it. Perhaps nothing much was, at least after the fashion that our too highly developed brains are able to imagine.

  When at last she emerged from this unseeing contemplation she would huddle up even more tightly and go to sleep, or else skip around and start to play as she used to. I have told how she enjoyed pouncing on objects, on all sorts of “quarry,” showing a marked preference for those that could be knocked over or sent rolling: a stool, a chair, Nanny’s needlework basket (when the contents scattered all over the place, she would take refuge in a corner and wait for the nurse’s outburst with a half-roguish, half-rueful expression), or else a pitcher, a box. But now she would suddenly stop playing, grasp the object between her hands, inspect its every side. Sometimes she would carry it in front of the mirror and gaze at herself with it, a strained look in her fixed eyes. It was hard to say whether they expressed anguish, absent-mindedness or deep thought. As a rule, after such a scrutiny she would drop the object, go and curl up on her bed again, her chin in her hands, with staring, vacant eyes. She almost always fell asleep in the end.

  One day, in the course of playing she flung herself on a small basket filled with apples which Nanny had gone to fetch from the loft. The apples naturally rolled in all directions. Sylva chased them with the bounding grace of a young gazelle at large. At last she picked one up and began to munch it. Suddenly, as if prompted by a brain wave, she jumped to her feet, left the room, ran downstairs. Nanny and I followed her, much intrigued. We found her in the dining room gazing at the large still life copied after the Master of Munich above the sideboard. She turned toward us and said, “Apples.”

  I cast a triumphant glance at Nanny, who grew pale, then blushed and lifted her hand to her bodice with emotion. She took Sylva by the fingers.

  “And this?” she asked.

  “Grapes.”

  “And this?”

  She was pointing at a corner of the painting, to a small silver statue representing a standing, young Bacchus, with his face raised and a bunch of grapes held against his lips. But Sylva did not say anything. She looked at it for a long time but did not speak. Nanny said, “That’s a gentleman.” But Sylva looked without saying a word. Then her eyes slipped away, she withdrew her fingers, with one leap she was on a chair, which fell over, and she resumed her game without paying attention to us.

  “That was too difficult,” I told Nanny. “The painting of a sculpture, and a silver one at that! That is quite meaningless for her. Too far removed from reality.”

  But Nanny vehemently shook her kind, doggy face, which made her heavy jowls ripple like washing being laundered in the river.

  “The grapes and apples aren’t much like real fruit, either. It’s fantastic that she recognized them. I have read that certain savages in Indonesia are still quite incapable of it. Quite fantastic that she has grasped that apples are something that can be portrayed.”

  “Has she really understood it? That’s not so sure,” I said prudently. (It was my turn to show circumspection.) “I’ve been observing her ever since that mirror business. What seems to me beyond doubt is that she has begun to be able to ‘separate’ objects from one another, just as she has done for herself. To isolate each object. And once they are isolated, she can recognize them even when portrayed. Which doesn’t mean that she is already able to—”

  But Nanny wasn’t listening. I saw her open her mouth a little, as if to interrupt me. But this was immediately wiped away by an expression of such startled surprise that I spun round full-circle.

  The French window was open. And Sylva, darting with a swallow’s speed, was running toward a distant figure, short and squat, which loomed in the twilight like a ghost of the Stone Age.

  For the first time in my life I was sorry I wasn’t a marksman. That I could not dash to my gunrack, grab a weapon from the hook, fire into the air and oblige that cursed gorilla to flee for his life.

  For lack of a gun I grabbed from behind the chest one of the ivory-knobbed sticks that had belonged to my father and rushed out, yelling curses; I had gripped the stick by the ferrule end and was whirling it around furiously.

  I am of respectable size and as I came rushing up, yelling and flaying the air, I must have looked fairly horrifying. The result was that my pithecanthrope turned on his heels and decamped without asking for more. Sylva, seeing him run away, stopped in her course. She watched him disappear, with a look more curious than grieved on her face. I felt a distinct urge to break my stick on her back, but I flatter myself on keeping some self-control in all circumstances—or nearly all. I stopped, and let the stick glide along my hand until I could make use of it in the ordinary way: I leaned on it. Sylva had turned round and was eying me. I called her in a commanding voice.

  I cannot describe her movement better than by saying that she came crawling. She was walking upright, but sideways like a crab, and her whole body was so full of reticence, so visibly drawn against her will, against her obvious desire to flee, that all my anger dissolved, gave way to amusement and tenderness. She was coming toward me to receive a prospective thrashing, without quite knowing the reason why, like a good little dog who only knows from his master’s voice that there are strokes in the offing.

  When she was quite close, I let go of the stick, which dropped to the ground; Sylva gave a hedge sparrow’s chirp, picked it up, carried it away to the house frisking and gamboling, laughing with joy, put it back in its place behind the chest and, running back to meet me, flung herself at me just as I was passing the door with such strength that I stumbled and fell with her onto the carpet, where she hugged and licked me and nibbled my ear. Her body on top of mine was beginning to sway so gently and suggestively that I had to throw her aside so as not to lose, before the uproariously laughing Nanny, all decency together with her respect and my dignity.

  And I was wondering, with growing perplexity, by what means it would ever be possible to teach my innocent little vixen, if not a sense of sin, at least a semblance of modesty.

  This latter characteristic was indispensable if I hoped to be able some day to invite friends to the house or take Sylva visiting. I imagined with scowling embarrassment one of those overaffectionate displays that Sylva might indulge in, without any warning, amidst a circle of friends. If I were its object, I might put a stop to it quickly enough, but if it was some visitor she took a sudden fancy to?

  I confided my apprehensions to Nanny, and we pondered them at length. I don’t know what people will be thinking about Freud in the 1960’s. As for me, I had only just discovered psyc
hoanalysis, as had the rest of the civilized world. The aim of this method is not, of course, to implant complexes in people who don’t suffer from them, but rather to uproot them where they are burgeoning.

  Still, we told ourselves that if in Sylva’s case it were possible to provoke the growth of some reasonable inhibitions it would make our life in the future a good deal easier. It was patently obvious that Sylva was absolutely devoid of those dark nooks and crannies in which the human being hides away his impure or odious impulses. If we wanted to turn Sylva quite simply into someone respectable (we were not presumptuous enough to hope we could make a lady of her), we would first of all have to build up against her appetites some of those foolproof impediments which at times no doubt are conducive to neuroses, but without which she would go on behaving with the innocent, savage shamelessness that foiled all efforts to civilize her.

  So we both reread the major works of the inspired Viennese. Since they laid down suitable methods for unearthing sexual inhibitions, we were able to hope we might inversely discover some means of injecting them. But to our great regret it appeared that there was only one means to that end: to grow up in society from earliest infancy. Nothing proved applicable to a fox changed into a woman long after puberty. We also read the works of Jung, who ascribes our subconscious life to the existence of ancestral archetypes in our atavistic selves. Unfortunately, as far as Sylva was concerned, there were no ancestors other than foxes. Finally we were forced to conclude that all these explanations of the origin of our inhibitions merely shoved the mystery further away in order to side-step it more effectively.

  We, however, were confronted with a human creature in a state as pure as that prevailing on the day after the first mutations, without ancestors and without a social environment, descended among us, as the doctor said, brand-new from its animality.

  Chapter 22

  I HAD not dared bother Dr. Sullivan again, either by driving over to him or asking him to come and see me. After what he had told me on my last visit, I could only wait for him to give me the first sign.

  But he gave none. I was growing vexed with impatience, more and more convinced that I bore some blame. It was all because of my living with Sylva the way I did, I said to myself. Nanny had understood the need for it and did not blame me any more; Dorothy too had pretended to concur, but perhaps it had only been a face-saving device to make her appear broad-minded and hide her jealousy? Sylva’s and my equivocal propinquity had probably pained her after all, wounded her pride. And—perhaps—her unavowed love?

  In churning up these conjectures I was also churning up my heart, torn in twain between two ever more irreconcilable sentiments. I was less than ever prepared to abandon Sylva now that she had given the first evidence of her ability to acquire a genuinely human nature. But to give up Dorothy! Her prolonged absence, the obstacles she seemed to put in the way of my desire to see her, aroused, as usually happens, feelings that might otherwise have remained dormant and uncertain.

  I wrote her a first letter, couched in terms that were deliberately restrained, and received no reply. A second letter, already less reserved, remained similarly unanswered. I was preparing a third in which, losing all control, I was recklessly about to burn my boats when Dr. Sullivan made an unannounced irruption at Richwick Manor.

  There is no other word to describe the way in which he arrived. It was raining, and over his black frock coat the old doctor was wearing an enormous old-fashioned cape which gave him, normally as lean as a furled umbrella in its sheath, the massive shoulders of a stevedore. I was alone; Nanny was upstairs helping Sylva to get undressed. I was reading the papers that had just arrived, or rather skimming through them with half an eye, my mind elsewhere. The door suddenly opened and somebody presented to me a back that I could not identify—in that vast cloak which he was shaking like a wet dog on the tiled floor of the hall. Then he turned around, removing his cloak, and at last I recognized the familiar figure. I jumped to my feet.

  “You at last! After all this time! What kept you away?”

  The doctor carefully folded his cloak, dry side out, and placed it with the same care over the back of an armchair. Obviously he was giving himself time to catch his breath and assume a calm countenance.

  “What weather!” he said at last. “Forgive me. Yes, for coming without warning.”

  “You’re always welcome, Doctor, so don’t apologize, but tell me, without further precautions—”

  He raised his hand, sitting down in front of me, or rather letting his long body slump into one of the deep and somewhat worn leather armchairs. Then he looked at me and seemed to grope for words. His full lips, under the protuberant nose, were mutely forming words that he could not bring himself to utter. His eyes grew moist. And suddenly he stammered—but it was plain that it was not at all what he had meant to say:

  “You must come. I’ve come to fetch you.”

  “At this hour?” (Darkness had fallen.) “Is it so serious? What has happened?”

  I was already on my feet to get my hat and raincoat. But he stopped me with a gesture, motioned me to sit down.

  “No, there’s nothing new. Nothing urgent. But I’m powerless, I no longer know what to do. I’ve no idea whether you can do anything either. Perhaps you can. Perhaps it’ll only make it worse. I don’t know. We must try. What else can be done? It gets worse from day to day.”

  This stammering did not enlighten me at all, and at the end of my tether with worry and impatience, I burst out:

  “Will you tell me once for all what’s going on, for heaven’s sake!”

  He seemed drained of all energy; his long black frock coat seemed to empty itself, to shrink deflated in the hollow of the armchair, while his bony knees stood out high in the tight trousers. His eyes looked at me as if through a rain-blurred window. His big chin moved and I heard, in a sigh of discouragement:

  “It’s narcotics, my poor boy.”

  “Even when she was still a little girl, I had to keep a close watch on her,” he said a little later, as he was sipping the tea which Mrs. Bumley had brought us—then she had tactfully withdrawn. “Yes, a studious child,” he said, “intelligent, but strangely weak-willed in the face of any temptation. She would guzzle sweets and marzipan in secret, and you’ll remember her at the age of twelve, fat as a goose, a real balloon. After the time of sweets, there came a more dangerous one: a period of dancing, flirting, boating. I could not always be about. You were too young, more’s the pity. There was that tall, handsome Godfrey above all, a brilliant fellow, too brilliant, but with something about his eyes that made me wary—not wary enough, alas! Perhaps I lacked energy.

  “Dorothy told me the truth only a few months ago. One evening, lying on their backs, drifting in a punt, he held out his open hand to her: ‘Breathe this.’ She breathed it, and felt unbelievably happy. She has told me everything. She did not love Godfrey. He amused her, intrigued her, certainly dazzled her a little, but she did not love him. Not really. Only who else could have obtained for her the heavenly powder? She did not know where else to get it nor, had she known, would she have dared.

  “Nobody understood her marriage, but nobody guessed the wretched reason for it, the impure, secret, squalid reason. Not even I, though I gradually learned appalling things about her husband and the revolting life he led—but not a word about drugs. His sordid death came as no surprise to me. I must confess I even gave a rather scandalous sigh of relief, all the more as Dorothy had never managed to hide from me how unhappy she was. I thought she would come back to me. And I failed to understand her reasons for staying on in London. She had found a fairly good job there but one that couldn’t possibly interest her: secretary to the manager of a brickworks.

  “I only learned the truth when she had to go to hospital for the first time. The doctor wrote to me. There are always some risks involved during a cure—fits of raving madness, suicidal mania. I dashed up to London, but I was not allowed to see her. Fortunately everything went well. After
the cure I wanted to take her back with me, but she pleaded her work, declared that she could not leave her employer in the lurch. It is a fact that he was full of praise for Dorothy when I went to see him. He had not guessed a thing and naturally I did not tell him. Perhaps I should have done so. He’d have kept an eye on her. But drug addicts are incredibly clever at outwitting surveillance, so probably it would have been no good.

  “Anyhow, she started again. A relapse is always more serious. This time, her work suffered. She stayed away for two or three days at a time. So much so that, after her second cure, four years later, she found her place at the brickworks had been filled. In a sudden burst of clearsightedness she wisely decided to come home.”

  As he was speaking Dr. Sullivan had remained with his empty cup in his hand, hunched forward, his eyes glued to the Tadjik carpet as if he wanted to engrave its pattern in his memory. He now put the cup down on a side table and turned toward me.

  “I had counted so much on you.” He sighed.

  I felt guilt-stricken and thought he was accusing me. But no, his disappointment was not caused by me.

  “She was fond of you, more than fond—anyway, as much as a drug addict can be. When she was fourteen or fifteen she even had a crush on you. But you were too shy to notice it, and later your youthfulness played against you. Young girls have a weakness for men of a certain maturity, and afterward it was too late, she was in the grip of an exclusive passion which left no room for ordinary love. When she wrote me that she would like to see you again, I had great hopes. So had she perhaps. They lasted for a few weeks. And then… Ah, then…”

  He had slumped down again in his armchair.

  “I don’t know when she started again. I didn’t notice it at once. And even up to a few days ago I wondered how ever she could get hold of the stuff in a place like Wardley. An envelope in the wastepaper basket with a London postmark and a postbox address enlightened me on that point. I can’t keep her locked up, after all!” he exclaimed, and fell silent.