Angelica's Grotto (4 page)

‘Yes,’ said Klein: ‘a world of undifferentiated matter where nothing has found its final form and function and doesn’t know whether to swim or fly or walk. That’s how it is with me.’ He read on:

Over this muddle of beings, Omoroca, bent like a hoop, extended her woman’s body. But Belus cut her clean in two, made the earth with one half, the sky with the other, and the two equal worlds contemplate each other.

‘Is there a sky in me?’ said Klein, seeing Lucifer high, high above him in pinks, in greens, in greys. ‘Is there an earth?’ He read on:

I, the first consciousness of chaos, I have risen from the abyss to harden matter, to regulate forms, and I have taught humans fishing, sowing, writing and the history of the gods.

‘“Fishing, sowing, writing and the history of the gods,”’ Klein repeated, and read on:

Since then I have lived in the pools that remain from the deluge. But the desert encroaches on them, the wind
fills them with sand, the sun dries them up; and I am dying on my bed of mud, looking at the stars through the water. I must return.

He leaps, and disappears in the Nile.

‘No!’ said Klein. ‘Oannes should stay and Antony should go! Poxy old Saint Antony. What did
he
ever teach that was any use to anyone?’ He looked again at Oannes hovering in the black. Was Oannes looking back at him? Were his eyes open or closed? So dim, his face! Klein thought of Oannes dying on a bed of mud, his pools filled in, his blackness gone, and shook his head. ‘But,’ he said, ‘but! Oannes didn’t die; his original self, his old self, his powerful self, moved into the head of Odilon Redon and compelled him to create a
noir
for him to live in. Oannes lives! Perhaps he will yet harden my matter, regulate my form, teach me to fish, to sow, to write. Perhaps he will teach me the history of the gods. Or something else. Are there pinks in the black? Greens and greys?’

‘Well,’ said Mrs Lichtheim, ‘it’s now two weeks since you did the Bender and the Rorschach tests. Looking back on that session, how do you feel about it?’

‘I still see Lucifer soaring high above me in pink and grey and green.’

Mrs Lichtheim consulted her notes.
‘Days of Wrath,’
she said. ‘You said you almost heard that music while looking at the fallen angel far above you. Are you wrathful? Is there anger in you?’

‘Of course there is.’

‘Why of course?’

‘I don’t like being invisible, I don’t like being pushed off the pavement.’

‘You’re talking about now, but this anger in you, I think it goes further back than that; and it seems to me that you have to exert very strong control to keep it from bursting out.’

‘Well, you know, in seventy-two years a lot of resentments accumulate: the whole world changes, and every change I’ve seen has been for the worse. The only exception is residential parking in our street but I haven’t got a car.’

‘How do you feel about your mother?’

‘Why do you ask that?’

‘Because in you there seems to be fear of women, as well as anger and guilt.’

‘I think all men are afraid of women.’

‘But we’re talking about you.’

‘All right, I’m afraid of women. But I already know that and I’d like us to start dealing with the present problem.’ He was beginning to resent being steered by Mrs Lichtheim.

‘I think your fear of women is part of the present problem,’ she said. ‘Your inner voice is the superego; sometimes it keeps you from saying what you really think. Now it shuts down, maybe it’s tired of concealment; maybe now you are forced to hear yourself say what you really want to say. I think there are violent feelings in you, maybe violent fantasies.’ Again she looked at his folder. ‘You’re an art historian. Are you working on something now?’

‘I’m always working on something; I’m doing a study of the nudes of Gustav Klimt.’

‘Naked women.’

‘You can’t be nude without being naked.’

‘What’s the title of your study?’

‘Naked Mysteries: the Nudes of Gustav Klimt.’

‘Are naked women a mystery to you?’

‘They’re even a mystery to themselves; that’s why the Greeks celebrated those mysteries at Eleusis.’

‘Do you believe that work is the way to understand a mystery?’

‘Play won’t do it.’

‘Do you ever not work, just do nothing?’

‘When I knock off for the day around midnight I put my feet up and watch a video.’

‘You remember the first Rorshach blot, the motorcycle
with a man on either side but nobody in the driver’s seat? It didn’t fall over because its forward speed maintained its equilibrium.’

‘What about it?’

‘Do you think you’ll fall over if you stop working for a week or a month?’

‘Why should I stop?’

‘Just for the pleasure of being without producing anything.’

‘I picked the wrong parents for that.’

‘How so?’

‘Jewish immigrants from Russia, hot for self-improvement and offspring achievement. I drew well from the age of five so they laid it on me that I was going to be a great painter. I didn’t produce great paintings but I write well about Art, so maybe they’re partly easy in their graves.’

‘Did you like your mother?’

‘No.’ Encouraged by Mrs Lichtheim he let himself go and talked about his mother and her faith in enemas; he talked about his father, about his school days, his first love, his army time; he talked about Francine, his first wife, and Hannelore, his second.

‘Do you fantasise about women?’ said Mrs Lichtheim.

‘Certainly; I should think that all men do.’

‘What kind of fantasies are yours?’

‘All kinds.’

‘Can you describe one?’

‘Maybe when we get to know each other better.’

Mrs Lichtheim looked at her watch. ‘This is the last time I’ll be seeing you – I haven’t got a vacancy so I’ll be referring you to another psychologist for therapy.’

‘Just when I was beginning to feel comfortable with you.’

‘I believe you’ll be comfortable with him as well.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘DeVere.’

‘DeVere: of truth.’

‘Is that what you’re looking for?’

‘Maybe it’s looking for me.’

‘He’ll help you find each other.’

Feeling a powerful hunger for Willem van de Velde the Younger, Klein entubed at Fulham Broadway, emerged at Charing Cross, and made his way to the National Gallery.

Trafalgar Square, hugging a greyness to itself, had nothing to say to him. Nelson on his column turned a blind eye to mortal concerns. The stairs and porch of the National Gallery bore with stony indifference the shuffling feet of visitors from everywhere, each pair of feet terminating in a head that required to be filled with images of beauty, history, war and peace, sacred and profane love and various states of mythical, real, royal and common domesticity. Once inside, the visitors walked purposefully, dawdled randomly, collapsed on to benches, consulted floorplans, guides, maps, gallery staff and one another, and stood in front of paintings.

Klein went to the information desk, had his floorplan marked by the woman there, climbed the stairs, turned left through Rooms 29, 28 and 15, turned right through Room 22, went down the stairs, and arrived at Lower Gallery A, Screen 24 and a goodly array of the paintings of Willem van de Velde the Younger: seventeenth-century
Dutch ships and boats of various kinds in fair weather and under stormy skies, in calms and in stiff breezes.

‘Quite a remarkable thing,’ he said, ‘to miniaturise the sky and the sea and the ships to a size and perspective convenient to the eye and readily absorbed on dry land by land-lubbers.’ He particularly admired the paintings in which small craft met with strong winds and rough seas. One of these, No. 876,
A Small Dutch Vessel Close-hauled in a Strong Breeze,
about 1672, showed a gaff-rigged boat, a
galjoot,
on a larboard tack under a dark and threatening sky, pointing as close into the wind as possible, her weather vang bar-taut, the leech of the mainsail fluttering, the spray rising high over her bows as the seas swept her fore-deck. Klein could feel the spray, smell the salt, hear the wind in the rigging and the poom! as she rose and fell with the chop. The man at the tiller was pointing to larboard, probably shouting something to the rest of the crew, only one of whom was visible in the spray. Some way ahead a man-of-war on the same tack streamed its pennant.

‘Dirty weather,’ said Klein, ‘but they’re not afraid, they’re used to this sort of thing, they’re born to the sea and they know what to do.’ The sea continued in his mind as he left Lower Gallery A, went up the stairs, through Rooms 22, 15, 28 and 29 without looking at anything but a few Rubens bottoms, down the stairs, out to the porch, and down to the street, the grey October afternoon, and the Underground. All the way home he heard the boom of the sea and the wind in the rigging as the bows of the Wimbledon train rose and fell with the chop.

Dr DeVere was in his early forties and didn’t wear a tie. He had short hair, no beard, and nothing on the walls of his office but an unframed laser copy of the Redon pastel,
Roger and Angelica.
It was stuck to the wall with Blu-Tack and it moved with DeVere from office to office in his professional travels.

‘You’re the first doctor I’ve seen with a Redon on his wall,’ said Klein.

‘And you’re the first visitor who’s commented on it. You like Redon?’

‘I’ve done a monograph on him.’

Dr DeVere struck his forehead. ‘Of course! You’re
that
Harold Klein:
Darkness and Light: the inner eye of Odilon Redon.
I’ve got it at home.’

‘At last,’ said Klein, ‘a reader. Have you read
Orlando Furioso?

‘Parts of it.’

‘The part where Ruggiero rescues Angelica from Orca the sea monster, yes?’

‘That’s why Redon’s up there on my wall.’

‘Have you got it there for aesthetic or professional reasons?’

‘Both. It seems to me that each of us contains an Angelica chained to a rock, threatened by an Orca, and waiting for a Ruggiero. Would you agree?’

‘I would. You’re my kind of shrink. Am I going to be with you for a while?’

‘As long as it takes. Still no inner voice?’

‘No. I’ve started whispering into my hand or talking to myself under my breath before I say anything to anybody, so I’ve kept out of Casualty for a while.’

‘That’s very sensible. I’m trying to imagine how it must be for you.’

‘Very strange. Most of my thinking is in words, and until this happened the words were spoken by my mental voice. Now I still hear music and see pictures in my head but the only way I can do word thoughts is by speaking out loud or writing them down. When I’m at my desk it’s not a problem because my words appear on the computer screen. When I’m elsewhere I go about muttering to myself or scribbling in a notebook or both, which makes me feel a little crazier than usual.’

‘The words you mutter, the words you write – are you hearing or seeing anything unusual?’

‘Unusual compared to what I ordinarily say or write but nothing remarkable – mostly rude words and sexual thoughts of the sort that might slip out when I’m drunk; it’s pretty much what was described in the
Times
piece: there’s no censor on duty.’

‘Would you say, Mr Klein, that when your inner censor’s working it has to work pretty hard? Or not?’

‘What would be your guess, Dr DeVere? Would you expect the inner censor of a little old man to have to work harder than that of a large young man? Or not?’

‘I see your point but I’d like to hear you spell it out for me if you would.’

‘All right. I have a certain reputation in the world of the arts but in the streets of daily life I am an object of no significance to anyone.’ He told DeVere what he had told Mrs Lichtheim about his apparent invisibility. ‘I won’t bore you with more examples,’ he said, ‘but my inner censor used to be kept pretty busy.’

‘So you’ve got a lot of anger in you. What about the rude words and sexual thoughts?’

‘I sometimes think a dirty old man might be the only kind of old man there is.’

‘Go on, please.’

‘My interest in women has become obsessive; one of these days I’ll be hit by a car while crossing the road with my eyes on a female bottom. I marvel at the action of hips and thighs, the articulation of knees and ankles. I love to see good flesh over good bones, women walking around in really classy skeletons and moving like thoroughbreds. The streets are full of beauties and I can’t stop looking and wanting.’

‘Are you married?’

‘I was. Her name was Hannelore. She was eighteen years younger than I when she moved in with me in 1970; I was forty-five; she was twenty-seven. She’d been my editor on the Daumier book I did for Hermetica. She was with me for seven years, then one day when I was at the British Library Reading Room she set the timer clock to start
Die Schöpfung
on the record player about the time I was expected home. Then she emptied a bottle of Tomazipan tablets and half a bottle of gin. When I got there she’d been dead for about three hours and the chorus were belting out
‘Und es ward Lichf.
She was a very methodical person.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Then, after a few moments of silence, ‘Do you know why she did it? Was there a note?’

‘No. She was a mystery to me, and as time passes I know less and less about her. I think about her all the time; now that I have no words in my head I see her face and I talk to myself. I was never her kind of person; she liked to go out and I like to stay in; she liked parties and I like to work. I got her by being a good wooer but I never properly recognised the uniqueness of her. She was a handsome woman and tall. People wanted to be thought well of by her.’

Dr DeVere paused for another sympathetic silence, then he said, ‘Any children?’

‘No. She had two miscarriages, then a hysterectomy.’

‘Was she very depressed after the hysterectomy?’

‘Very. Actually she never got over it.’

‘You’ve been alone since she died?’