The Asylum of Dr. Caligari

by James Morrow

  The exhibition on the south wall included the work of a watercolorist who’d reimagined the three most powerful humanoid chess pieces—knight, bishop, queen—as berserkers armed with, respectively, a lance, a pike, and an ax, each weapon dripping gouts of blood. “Before losing his mind, Gaston Duchemin was a Grandmaster. Be prepared to hear all about Morphy’s 1857 queen sacrifice to Paulsen.”

  Counterpointing Gaston’s watercolors were three large spiderwebs, rendered in oils and mounted in decorative walnut frames, variously suggesting a mandala, a suspension bridge, and a maelstrom. In each case the spider herself lurked in the corner, waiting for a meal to become ensnared in her handiwork. “Ilona Wessels would have us believe she’s the Spider Queen of Ogygia. Dr. Verguin and I aren’t ready to disabuse her of that identity, for we can’t decide whether her arachnophilia—or arachnomania or arachnofixation or whatever one might call it—bespeaks mere neurosis or an imminent psychotic break.”

  I couldn’t assess the most compelling artifact in the gallery, for it was occluded by a crimson velvet curtain draped over the top edge of the canvas. Was this painting so outrageous that Caligari had elected to censor it? At least thirty feet long and fifteen high, the mysterious panorama consumed most of the west wall, and I calculated it could be lowered into the cellar only if placed upright and diagonally on the elevator platform.

  “Who created this magnum opus?” I asked Caligari.

  “Perhaps Monsieur Derain informed you that I dabble in oils myself. I call it Verzückte Weisheit—Ecstatic Wisdom—from a chance remark I overheard the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche make when he was a patient here. Yesterday I saw my painting under the skylight for the first time, and I realized it needs much more work.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to enroll in my class. Your first assignment would be to complete your epic.”

  “I appreciate the offer, Mr. Wyndham, but Ecstatic Wisdom must never be seen by our patients, not even your art students.” He thrust his cane toward a staircase in the far corner. “Those steps lead to my underground atelier, and that is where I shall apply the final brushstrokes.”

  An emphatic rapping noise resounded through the gallery, as if someone were assailing the walls with a hammer. Caligari waddled across the room and unlatched the door to reveal a tableau at once entrancing and disquieting. Dressed in a yellow cotton blouse and loose gray Punjabi pants, a zaftig woman perhaps ten years my senior stood in the jamb, pressing a sculptor’s mallet against her bosom as a novitiate might carry a crucifix. Her ebullient red hair and vibrant features—gazelle eyes, mischievous lips, lofty cheekbones—put me in mind of Munch’s Vampire, the most arresting Expressionist entry in the Armory Show. Saying not a word, she rushed toward her mandala web and assaulted the surrounding plaster with her mallet. The resulting fissures extended the web beyond the confines of the walnut frame, turning the piece into a kind of collage.

  “That’s exactly what it needed,” said Caligari. “Francis, meet Fräulein Wessels, the creator of these magnificent spiderwebs. Ilona, this is our new painting master, Mr. Wyndham of America.”

  I extended my hand, but Ilona Wessels declined to grasp it. Instead she faced Caligari and asked, in halting but lucid English, “What happened to Herr Slevoght?”

  “He joined the Kaiser’s army,” Caligari replied. “There’s a war coming, Fräulein. Regiments are on the march. You’re not supposed to be here.”

  “Doh ray me fah so lah tee doh,” sang Ilona in a high and beguiling voice. “I have just escaped from Nurse Ianotti and her ghastly choral society. I’m her only soprano. Zu schade. May I tell you my parting words to her? ‘Fritz teed his ray so fah up Lahme’s doh she’s going to have a baby.’ ” She tugged on my sleeve and moved her lips in a manner at once guileless and knowing, the smile of a Madonna with a past. “I am the Spider Queen of Ogygia, and you are so young, Mr. Wyndham. Are you also shallow?”

  “Callow?” I suggested.

  “Callow.”

  “I’ve never been asked that before.”

  “I was callow once,” said Ilona. “Then I went out into the world, and I didn’t much like it. If you ask Herr Doktor, he’ll tell you I’m here at his sufferance. If you ask me, I’ll tell you I’m here because I have four eyes and eight legs.”

  “Your spiderwebs are extraordinary.”

  “Stay away from the world,” said Ilona. “That is my advice to you, young Francis.”

  “Fräulein, you must give me the mallet,” said Caligari.

  “Why?”

  “Because your mandala is perfect now, and I’m afraid you’ll try to improve it.”

  “Herr Doktor, I bring dire news.” She alternated her gaze between the mallet and the alienist. “Last night someone broke in here”—she surrendered the mallet to Caligari—“and humiliated your picture.”

  “Humiliated it?”

  “Or is the word ‘mutilated’?”

  Seized by acute panic, Caligari rushed toward the west wall, then lifted the curtain away to create a narrow aperture between velvet and canvas. He dipped his head into the gap. Exploiting the situation, which I suspected she’d deliberately contrived, Ilona reached into her blouse and retrieved from her camisole an apparent duplicate of Caligari’s museum key.

  “Herr Slevoght entrusted his secret copy to me,” she whispered, passing me the key. “If Herr Doktor finds it on my person, he’ll be furriest.”

  “Furious,” I said, then pocketed the key, wondering whether to betray Ilona’s transgression.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the painting.” Caligari stepped away from his magnum opus, letting the curtain slide back into place.

  “Perhaps I used the right word first,” said Ilona. “Your picture has on it seven humiliating specks of dust.”

  “Have you really seen Ecstatic Wisdom?” Caligari asked her.

  “Goats romping across a field of clover,” said Ilona. “Very lovely.”

  “Fräulein, I need a serious answer. If I were to say, ‘Ilona Wessels has never seen Dr. Caligari’s painting,’ would I be telling the truth?”

  “Don’t you always tell the truth?”

  “Even in its unfinished state, the thing might make you sick.”

  “I’m already sick.”

  “You must never look at it.”

  “How could I?” asked Ilona. “I have no key. I should return to my tongue fun now.”

  “Your dungeon?” I suggested.

  “My dungeon. If Nurse Ianotti comes looking for me, tell her I’ve moved to Brazil.”

  “It’s not a dungeon—it’s your private room,” said Caligari, pivoting toward me. “The prohibition applies to you as well, Mr. Wyndham. My painting is for an invited audience only.”

  “Will my name ever appear on a guest list?” I asked.

  “Ecstatic Wisdom will bring permanent financial security to our asylum, but only if I restrict its exhibition.”

  “I’m eager for Monday morning to arrive,” Ilona told me. “We have much to offer each other, young Francis. You will teach me what you know of art, and I shall teach what I know of badness.”

  “Madness?” I said.

  “That, too.”

  Whereas my first visit to the Kunstmuseum had been a vivid and memorable experience, my inaugural meal in the asylum refectory quickly became the epitome of ennui. Although the food was appetizing, a smorgasbord featuring slabs of ham and heaps of sauerkraut, my dinner companions—the various nurses, orderlies, hydrotherapists, and grounds-keepers who kept Träumenchen functioning—would admit no topic to the conversation that hadn’t passed the inanity test. Clogged drains, invasive mice, truculent straitjackets, obstinate wheelchairs, the low comedy of bedpans: these phenomena and little else were deemed fit for discussion. I bolted my meal and exited the refectory at a brisk pace.

  That night I was plagued by insomnia of a particularly aggressive strain. Not only did sleep elude me, but I kept picturing my body lying awake in my luxurious canopy bed, while batw
inged incarnations of melancholia, catatonia, paranoia, and dementia praecox swirled all about me. Inevitably I thought of Goya’s etching of an artist asleep at his desk, head cradled in his arms, his dreaming psyche conjuring up a maelstrom of predatory birds and beasts. The caption on the side of the desk read, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. “The sleep of reason breeds monsters.”

  Finally my own reason grew dormant, but after a short interval I came abruptly awake. My nemesis was music: an aggressive march, aboil with trumpets and percussion. I glanced at my pocket watch. Four-thirty a.m. Sensing that these frenzied measures came from the nearby gallery, I threw on my dressing gown and retrieved the secret key (which I’d hidden beneath a loose floorboard in the sitting room). I exited my apartments and, pacing myself to the march, hurried along a warped corridor, then down the involuted passageway to the museum.

  The instant I pulled back the door, I realized my instincts were correct, for the music grew loud enough to stir my blood. I entered slowly, wary that someone might have lowered the elevator platform. My fear was well founded: a rectangular void occupied the center of the room, a cavity from which rose billows of steam, multicolored and redolent of oil paint, even as brassy quarter-notes spewed forth like acoustic lava. I fixed on the west wall. Ecstatic Wisdom was gone—returned to the subterranean atelier, I surmised. The only evidence of the painting was the crimson curtain (it lay in a pile beneath the wainscoting) and the row of three iron spikes on which the suspension cable had rested.

  Against my better judgment, but true to a characteristic impulsiveness, I dashed to the staircase and descended twenty crooked steps to a skewed landing. Here I paused, having obtained an unobstructed overhead view of Caligari’s atelier, or perhaps I should call it his alchemical laboratory, for he’d covered the dusty benches and filled the cobwebbed shelves with flasks, retorts, alembics, and test tubes.

  Propped on a pair of gigantic steel easels, bathed in the light of suspended gas-lamps, Ecstatic Wisdom presented its reverse side to me, a tract of blank canvas nailed to mahogany stretcher bars. The painting was likewise invisible to the quartet of seated musicians—trumpeter, cornetist, fife player, drummer—each man adorned with black lipstick and handicapped by a leather blindfold. Operating their instruments by touch alone, they were evidently supplying the master of Träumenchen with the mood he needed to finish his epic.

  Caligari stood before a worktable, swaying to the music as he added ingredients to four beakers filled with paint, each positioned above a lighted Bunsen burner and held fast by a ring-clamp. A black cat pranced insouciantly amid the roaring torches. The first beaker in line, containing vermilion paint, received a wriggling red salamander. To the cadmium yellow the alienist added a twitching golden beetle. To the viridian he sacrificed a small glaucous toad. The ultramarine received a blue slug. With each fillip, the steam rising from the elixir thickened, the vaporous columns mingling with the preternatural rainbow I’d seen pouring from the elevator hatch.

  “Tonight, Cesare, we unleash the power of Kriegslust!” Caligari shouted above the clamor of the musicians. Apparently he was addressing the cat. “Viribus meis, et vocavi te!”

  The alienist scuttled to the far corner of the atelier, where a stuffed raven was perched on a human skull surrounded by four eggs. He transferred the clutch to a basket, one bright magenta egg at a time, then brought it to his worktable. He cracked open an egg, added yolk and white to the vermilion brew, and dropped the vacant shell into a graduated cylinder. He cracked a second egg, spilling its contents into the cadmium yellow paint. Next the viridian pigment acquired an egg, then the ultramarine.

  Cesare offered me a contemptuous glance, and for an instant I feared he might betray me with a hiss, but then I sensed that (as with the other cats in my experience) his owner’s welfare was at best an intermittent concern.

  Caligari stirred the burbling beakers with a glass rod.

  “Ut excessus sapientiae, de vitam!”

  Employing a panoply of brushes, he painted with a fury such as I’d never observed in a fellow artist. For the nuances he used bristles as delicate as the threads of Fräulein Wessels’s spiders. The boldest flourishes required a tawny sea-sponge impaled on a spatula, pigment dribbling from its pores.

  The sleep of reason breeds monsters. For many years the caption on Goya’s painting had puzzled me. Was he saying that imagination must be constrained by rational intellect? I doubted that any serious artist would make such an argument. Perhaps Goya meant the opposite, that rational intellect, while masquerading as humanity’s salvation, was in fact a narcotic that prevents our grasping hidden truths—shades of William Blake’s riposte to the hegemony of science, “Pray God us keep from single vision and Newton’s sleep.” Eventually I happened upon Goya’s own elaboration. “Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters,” he’d written. “United with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.”

  “Hominus age incitatos, hominus age rabidos!”

  Watching Caligari suffuse his canvas with whatever species of wizardry or variety of delusion possessed him, I decided his methods represented neither imagination bereft of intellect, nor revelation allied with logic, but a third phenomenon. He had seduced both forces into a condition of mutual betrayal, reason convincing fantasy that violent monsters were desirable, fantasy coercing reason into forsaking its tedious allegiance to facts.

  “Effundam spiritum meum in vobis, virtutibus! Perfectus es!”

  Now he began spinning in circles—like a deranged dancer, or a whirling dervish, or a man inhabited by devils.

  “Exicita te! Le petit mort! Eveniet! Le petit mort! Eveniet!”

  Suddenly I realized that from his fluctuating perspective Caligari might notice me crouched on the staircase. Step by deliberate step, breath by halting breath, I ascended to the relative safety of the gallery.

  “Tomorrow, Cesare, it returns to the wall, there to work its wonders!”

  Le petit mort. The little death. Orgasm as an intimation of oblivion. The phrase was French, but the experience, I had no doubt, was universal.

  As I fled from Dr. Caligari’s lurid artistic ritual in the bowels of the museum, the bleached light of dawn seeping into the twisted passageway and the winding corridor beyond, I vowed to behold the finished version of Ecstatic Wisdom at my earliest opportunity. The forbidden picture had aroused in me the aesthetic equivalent of satyriasis. My curiosity was fully engorged. I would have to act discreetly, of course, lest Herr Direktor catch me surveying his magnum opus, terminate my employment, and demand to know where I’d gotten a key.

  Just as Conrad had promised, a full breakfast awaited me, along with a copy of the New York Herald. When not scanning the headlines, I consumed four plump sausages (they brought to mind the military dirigibles about which Caligari had rhapsodized the day before), two boiled eggs, a fresh roll with butter, and a carafe of coffee. Austria was still bombing Belgrade. Germany had declared war on Russia. France intended to honor its treaty with the Czar. The British government, allied to France via an Entente Cordiale, had announced that if the Kaiser’s troops marched through Belgium, thereby violating that country’s neutrality, Britain would declare war on Germany.

  The bell in the clock tower tolled six times, each peal so mournful it seemed to augur the coming clash of nations. I removed my dressing gown, then crawled into bed. Despite the caffeine in my blood and the visions in my brain—Kaiser Wilhelm’s dirigibles, Fräulein Wessels’s spiders, my employer’s burbling beakers—a delicious drowsiness possessed me. Lark songs and cricket trills wafted through the open casement in the sitting room. As the war came ever nearer to Weizenstaat, I wondered, would all such summer music be drowned out by bursting shells and exploding grenades? Perhaps, but for now it was mine to enjoy.

  Three hours later I awoke, well-rested and in possession of a plan. I would eat my evening meal at the hostelry in Kleinbrück, then seek out Janowitz the proprietor (whom I’d treated rat
her rudely on Friday night) and inform him that the rumors about Caligari were true. The man indeed fancied himself a sorcerer, and Werner Slevoght’s plea, “The magician must be stopped,” was surely a cri de coeur worthy of our attention.

  I donned my street clothes and proceeded to the grand lobby with its rotating population of delusionals (today’s gathering included a buxom Cleopatra and an American Indian with three feathers in his headband). Stepping into the blazing August sun, I started across the immaculate lawn toward the gingerbread cottage. The corpulent sentry from yesterday morning was still at his post. When I told him I was going into town, he responded with a porcine snort and a practiced sneer.

  “No staff member may leave the grounds without written permission from Herr Direktor,” he said, stroking the handle of his pistol.

  “You must be joking.”

  “I have no sense of humor,” said the sentry.

  “I insist that you let me pass.”

  “Your choices are to take up the matter with my employer or with my Luger.”

  A basso profundo voice called, “Herr Jerabek, that is quite enough!” An instant later Dr. Caligari, Malacca cane in hand, hobbled into view, his balding pate shielded from the sun by a crinkled stovepipe hat. “You can do your job properly”—he glowered at the sentry—“without resorting to bad manners.”

  “My apologies, Herr Direktor.”

  “Does this mean I may dine in town after all?” I asked Caligari.

  “A reasonable inference, but incorrect. Please join me for a turn about the rose garden, and I shall explain why you must remain on the grounds.”

  “Signore, this is preposterous.”

  Caligari got his way of course—within the world of Träumenchen, I suspected, he always got his way—and for the balance of the afternoon we strolled through the interior courtyard enmeshed in an unhappy conversation. The lunatics took little notice of us, but on passing Herr Direktor the nurses and orderlies deferentially bobbed their heads.