A Henry James strolled through here with a Henryjamesian face of disgust at the extra-literary phenomenon (this “beguiling infatuation” with “their tragic history”; save me the “fantastic” and the “sentimental” and “the ecstasies” of “our wonderful public”), which, for him, obscured the achievements of their work, and yet, no doubt, he was deeply breathing in the air of the place and the scent of besotted specters like those in The Turn of the Screw and “Maud-Evelyn” as well as the suffering and epiphanic and infirm men like Ralph Touchett and Milly Theale, while, at all cost, he tries to forget how his own sister, the mad Alice, so closely resembles a Brontë character.
And Penelope arrived there, driving always at night, naively thinking in that way nobody would see her; but looking at herself in the rearview mirror and saying: “I don’t look like a deer blinded by the headlights, but like a blinding deer behind the steering wheel.”
Penelope arrived in a brand new rental car that after a few miles (miles wear more than kilometers; miles pass more slowly) already looked like one of those vehicles worn out from robbing banks and making prison escapes.
Penelope drove through Keethly, where the sisters went to buy what little clothes they had, stopped off to pee along the side of the road in Top Whitens (a ruinous property which may or may not have inspired Wuthering Heights) and to vomit in Ponden Hall (which may or may not have inspired Thrushcross Grange), and then passed a small forest.
And suddenly there, on the other side (luckily it’s a small forest; Penelope is afraid of forests), was the church where the three girls prayed. And the school where Charlotte Brontë taught (and where the children gave her bouts of “nausea” and to Emily seemed “less intelligent than any dog”). And the pub where Branwell drank everything in reach of hand and gullet while reciting grand plans impossible to put into practice, trying to forget his Mrs. Robinson and—on top of it all, without them knowing, but, probably, suspecting it—having discovered his sisters were writing on the sly and didn’t want to play with him anymore. And there were all those Brontëified businesses (including an Indian restaurant that served spicy dishes with allusive names like Chicken Heathcliff Very Spicy).
And, at last, the parochial house canonized as museum.
Penelope entered it the way one enters a dream, the way one returns to a place from their childhood and finds it smaller than they remembered, but, also, more important in relation to all the other places that came after.
Everything begins here, including me, thought Penelope. And I’ve ended up here, to make an offering of myself and to see if they have something to offer me. To see if I receive some clear instruction and some saving advice, she said to herself.
And there amid the manuscript pages in glass cases and the locks of hair and the small portable desks of polished wood and the dog collars and the tiny adult shoes that looked like those of children and the son’s paintings and the father’s pistol.
And the small beds/chambers in the small rooms with sliding doors (they reminded Penelope of the sleeping modules on space shuttles and stations). And the round table where all three of them wrote at the same time, feeling they had all the time in the world as long as they didn’t stop writing. The table around which they paced circles until they fell down exhausted when they couldn’t shed the spider webs of insomnia (Penelope walked several circles around it, in both directions).
And, of course, the gift shop. There, as if in passing, books, the books, the life’s work. Pocket, Trade, Hardback. Cheap and limited editions. But the main and most and best-selling items are teapots, key chains, coasters, refrigerator magnets. And prints of those portraits signed by Branwell Brontë and that flattering drawing of Charlotte Brontë (who drew a lot and more and better than her brother) that George Richmond did for her. And those photographs of trios of women who might be them though nobody’s entirely sure. (Blurry photographs and so different from those retouched photographs of the Karmas, omnipresent on Mount Karma, on bookshelves sans books, on bookshelves made photoshelves, in living rooms and bedrooms and bathrooms and kitchens, massive group pictures, with everyone perfectly positioned according to their power in the family pyramid, but, in the end, all of them there, prisoners not of a golden cage but of so many silver frames. Photographs that, Penelope thinks, are the family version of fast-food restaurant billboards: where everything looks so perfect and tasty, but, ah, the cruel reality when you arrive to your table and you open the little cardboard box and what’s there inside has little or nothing to do with what those magnificent vistas sold you.) All that’s missing is the Haworth Parsonage Lego set (little figures of the family included; Branwell’s with a bottle in hand), thinks Penelope.
And then—is it possible that even here, even now she can’t stop thinking about the Karmas?—Penelope feels strange and crazier than ever. Penelope feels again like she did that morning at the wedding and that night on the beach. Penelope realizes she’s in trouble, that she doesn’t know where she is, just that it’s a place called trouble.
But it’s called Haworth.
It’s not even called Wuthering Heights.
Or Cumbres Borrascosas.
And Penelope thinks the world would be a better place, a more comprehensible place, if all the names of towns and cities and countries were descriptive and emotional. Wouldn’t it be better if Barcelona were called Touristic Inferno and Rome Vocational Averno? There are half-assed attempts, faint glimmers, that aren’t, in the end, effective, because they’re overly concerned with the aesthetic or the style: New York as Gotham, Paris as Ville Lumière. And there are disorienting errors: Buenos Aires, or Piedras Negras, or Sad Songs (where Penelope was happier than anywhere else, when she was a girl, high up on those ever so gothic and windy and nineteenth-century cliffs). There are functional cases, but cases that, really, aren’t names: El Paso, the pass to cross, or Death Valley, where you go to die, or the Puerto Escondido, where you go to hide. But, though there are many, they are not sufficient, they do not attain the climatic and topographical but also spiritual and temperamental perfection of Cumbres Borrascosas or Wuthering Heights.
And, here, Penelope feels like this: high and turbulent and a little like Alice Liddell plummeting toward Wonderland or Dorothy Gale spun away by an Oz-bound twister. She’s at the X on the map and at the precise and real place that, nevertheless, feels irreal and disorienting, it feels just how she feels. Like a dislocated location, like a depersonalized person.
It took her so many years to get here and now that she’s here Penelope wonders why she came, what did she think was going to happen, how did she imagine that things could ever change. That this Haworth could alter or correct or erase what she did, so long ago, when she was eight years old, on behalf of this Haworth but from so far away.
And everything gets worse when, in the souvenir shop, she sees the prints of the Fritz Eichenberg and Clare Leighton woodcuts, used to illustrate respective editions of Wuthering Heights. And, of course, it’s known, Penelope detests when Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw are shown. She hates that they get drawn and put in front of you and ask if you recognize them, as if they were robot portraits of two fugitives like her and who knows what they’ve done or whom they’ve done it to.
The answer, of course, is no. She has never seen them. She has never read them. That version of them. They’re not hers. They bear no resemblance whatever to the ones who’re everything to her.
But in the case of Eichenberg and Leighton, Penelope has to acknowledge that there’s something there; that the artists knew how to produce a kind of rare alchemy where the writing itself was transformed into the lines they carved. There, Catherine Earnshaw with one foot on a rock, posing like a defiant explorer, birds seeming to burst from her windblown hair. And Heathcliff at her feet, almost worshiping her, in happy times. It’s not bad at all. But the effect and the achievement are intensified even more in the three prints of Heathcliff alone.
One of them shows him moving through the snow, hea
vy footsteps, under a stormy sky, like an explorer of the known and not the unknown: someone who knows perfectly well what he wants to rediscover and to recover in order to plant his flag right there.
And the best of all are the other two, one by Eichenberg and another by Leighton, but both focusing on the same abyssal and tormented moment of Wuthering Heights: the scene in which the always helpful Nelly Dean, never one to miss out on a big moment, tells Heathcliff—who’s waiting for her outside, in the park that surrounds Thrushcross Grange—the news that Catherine Earnshaw has died.
Then Nelly Dean tells Lockwood that Heathcliff “was there—at least, a few yards further in the park; leant against an old ash-tree, his hat off, and his hair soaked with the dew that had gathered on the budded branches, and fell pattering round him. He had been standing a long time in that position, for I saw a pair of ouzels passing and repassing scarcely three feet from him, busy in building their nest, and regarding his proximity no more than that of a piece of timber. They flew off at my approach, and he raised his eyes and spoke: ‘She’s dead!’ he said; ‘I’ve not waited for you to learn that. Put your handkerchief away—don’t snivel before me. Damn you all! she wants none of your tears!’” Then Heathcliff fires off his instantly famous and quotable curse and Penelope recites it again now, in her cell/study, remembering her time in Haworth: “Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you—haunt me then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe—I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” And Heathcliff begins to beat his head against the tree trunk and releases the howl of a wounded wolf and Nelly Dean, though moved and frightened, cannot help but analyze the scene with a forensic obsession that promises not to miss the slightest detail; or, perhaps, inventing the best way to tell all of it, because she owes her audience: “I observed several splashes of blood on the bark of the tree, and his hands and forehead were both stained; probably the scene I witnessed was a repetition of others acted during the night. It hardly moved my compassion—it appalled me; still I felt reluctant to quit him so. But the moment he recollected himself enough to notice me watching, he thundered a command for me to go, and I obeyed. He was beyond my skill to quiet or console!”
And, yes, another exceedingly Karmatic quality in Nelly Dean: the way she’s always saying that she is helping and supporting, but is only doing so in appearance. A lot of talk, not much action. And so, nobody does anything, because they’re too busy talking about what they would do and what others don’t do if they weren’t talking all the time. All blah-blah and no do-do. Hiriz in particular and the Karma females in general were like this, Penelope recalls: adding up all their theoretical undertakings, but subtracting themselves when it comes to putting them in practice and leaving you all alone and on your own. Like how Nelly Dean abandons Heathcliff, who, again, in the prints of Eichenberg and Leighton, looks so much like Penelope’s Heathcliff.
In the first, Heathcliff leaning his back against the tree, its branches like bolts of lightning, cursing the heavens. In the second, Heathcliff with his face in shadow, pressing it against the trunk, as if wanting to fell it with nothing but the pressure of his forehead. In one and the other, Heathcliff has an air similar to that of the heroes of independence of Penelope’s home country. Titans with long sideburns and names like those of the country’s secondary schools who cross cordilleras and soar through the air on their steeds—even behind enemy lines—and die in the solitude of exile. And Penelope wonders if the fact that she likes those prints so much and that they seem appropriate and that their perspective corresponds a great deal to her own might not be because they were done not long after Wuthering Heights was published. Not yet considered “a period”—and, as such, an irreal—piece. Maybe that’s why they feel so believable and true to her. Prints with no motivation but the powerful and imaginative radiation of the book’s pages. There being, at that time, neither movies nor actors’ faces.
It’s not the first time Penelope has seen those prints and she remembers the first time she saw them.
She can’t forget it.
She was still a girl, but was already, also, a veteran worshipper of all things Wuthering Heights with all the same passion her few friendly little friends at school had for collecting dolls and little houses to put them in, resplendent little houses that had nothing to do with the dark architecture of Wuthering Heights.
And her parents laughed at Penelope and made fun of her “madness.” And told her Emily Brontë’s novel was a “minor” work. And if she was interested in star-crossed love, then she was old enough to read Tender Is the Night, their favorite book. And that’s the way her parents acted and how they raised her: through opposition and option. It was enough for you to say you wanted a cat for them to bring you a dog (and Penelope always thought, like Heathcliff, the only use for those animals was to be able to command them to “Attack!” or to help you strengthen your hand muscles when you strangle them); or to say you wanted to learn to play the saxophone (long before Lisa Simpson, that saxualized girl, would become the paradigm for the family-problem-solving daughter) for them to toss you an acoustic guitar.
And Penelope—just to be able to argue with the authority of knowledge—reads the Fitzgerald novel right away (she never understood that idea that you have to “be old enough” for a book or that once you have learned to read and understood that all books, beyond what they tell, are read according to the same system). And the truth is, Tender Is the Night doesn’t seem that special to her, because—to begin and to end with—Tender Is the Night is not Wuthering Heights. And the woes of Nicole and Dick are so sordid and domestic and maybe that’s what appeals so much to her parents, who always go around looking for themselves in everything. Maybe that’s the origin of that “great idea” of theirs, so Fitzgeraldian and so marketable (“Fitzgerald began in advertising,” her father always recalled, as if he were just starting out), to travel the world filming themselves and promoting a brand of whiskey. The perfect crime: they make money and get famous (the kind of fame almost all the Scotts and Zeldas who don’t write will attain in the twenty-first century, with their compulsive exhibition on social media) and spend little time at home with their children.
On one of their trips, Penelope’s parents arrive to England, tie off the Diver on the bank of the Thames and, there, her parents playing dirty tricks on the Royal guards at the doors to Buckingham Palace and disguised as John Steed and Emma Peel and walking across Abbey Road.
And when they come home from that trip—as a conciliatory gesture—they bring Penelope the two prints of Heathcliff by Eichenberg & Leighton. Penelope asks to have them framed (none of that sticking them to the wall with thumbtacks) and hangs them beside her bed at eye-level when lying down. And she talks to them every night. And tells the two Heathcliffs that, without a doubt, it won’t be long now before they meet.
And her parents tell her they have another surprise for her. “Another Wuthering Heights surprise,” they warn; but they aren’t going to give her any kind of preview, they prefer she see it for herself when the moment arrives.
And weeks later, they turn on the TV and Penelope sees it.
And what Penelope sees is something she never wanted to see.
And it’s then Penelope decides she’s going to stop being Lockwood (the one who listens and takes note of everything everyone does and he would never do) and is going to enter the fray.
Penelope is going to be Heathcliff, Penelope thinks then, as a girl, seeing her parents on TV, while her parents watch her watch them, there inside, on the TV screen, in the black and white of sweet dreams, in the black and white of bitter nightmares suddenly come true.
When she was a girl, Penelope didn’t know where her parents ended and the TV began. Her parents were tuned in and broadcast every so ofte
n in the house where they lived or, rather, passed through a few days a year. But her parents were on TV all the time and at every hour.
Appearing suddenly, like a holiday spot, between one block and the next of more dramatic shows and afternoon telenovelas and evening procedurals and even the misty chapters of Cumbres Borrascosas or the crepuscular episodes of The Twilight Zone.
There.
In front of her.
Much closer than they tended to be in person.
Her parents interspersed with other ads for cigarettes or sodas or laundry detergent.
Her parents making their way between other stranger and more disconcerting spots. Ad spots selling no consumer product but the one that consumes you: fear and guilt. Spots of the “public service” variety. Spots showing the perspective of a man drowning in the ocean for having failed to take the necessary precautions or soliciting money for children (depicted like little Heathcliffs, a keening song as background music) who live in the streets and were born, also, because someone failed to take the necessary precautions. And that other spot asking for “the collaboration of all citizens” if they see “any suspicious or subversive activity” and where a telephone number is provided to call and “denounce controversial elements and enemies of the state.”
All those spots like stains, there, on those apparatuses with antennas to manipulate, without remote control, and “ghostly” images and sudden spasmodic fits “from the vertical and the horizontal.”
And also, suddenly—not technical imperfections but historical imperfections—interrupting the transmission of national comedies or foreign series to break the news of new terrorist attacks and counterattacks by the brand new military government.
The Dreamed Part Page 28