The White Hotel (18 page)

Still the poor young woman struggled against acceptance. For a while, her symptoms remained severe. The degree of suffering, and the intensity of her struggle, did not slacken until I offered her my two pieces of consolation—that we are not responsible for our feelings; and that her behaviour, the fact that she had fallen ill in these circumstances, was sufficient evidence of her
moral character. For every gift has its cost, and the price of freedom from intolerable knowledge had been an hysteria. By the time she had returned home that night, she had so completely buried the knowledge of her homosexuality that she could write an unusually ardent letter to her husband. A few hours later, her pains came on. The rejected Medusa had exacted her price. But the price was worth paying; for the alternative would have been still worse.

When I explained all this, her resistance weakened, without ever disappearing entirely. Rather, she accepted it and dismissed it at the same time, in her eagerness to turn our discussions to the less threatening discovery of her mother’s behaviour. Her relief at having exposed this childhood memory was palpable; and as we proceeded to explore it there was a progressive improvement in her condition.

I could not help but admire the economical way in which her mind had rendered this memory harmless, by a simple cut as with a pair of scissors, leaving her with nothing more flagrant than a tender marital embrace. Yet I was still not sure
what
she had seen. If it did not mask some much more devastating discovery, if it was no more than her spirited mother and uncle embracing, more or less for anyone to see who happened to stroll that way, it could have been comparatively innocent. She agreed that this was true—in theory; but was nevertheless convinced that her mother and uncle were adulterers, and that she had somehow sensed this, even at four or five years old. She pointed out, as evidence of their guilt, how excited and overindulgent her mother became as her brother-in-law’s visits drew near. She recalled her depressions in the autumn and winter, her trips to Moscow, and the lavish gifts she brought home—as though to salve her conscience. She did not believe her mother had gone to
Moscow at all: but rather to some convenient place between Odessa and Vienna—probably Budapest—to rendezvous with her lover. (As a teacher of languages, he doubtless had plenty of conferences to attend….) She recalled an embarrassed silence, both before and after her mother had been brought home for burial; a reluctance to speak of the dead woman, then or later; the fact that her aunt did not come to the funeral, never visited the house again, and now almost never mentioned that time in her life. When I argued that there were perfectly good, and likelier, explanations for all of this, she became angry, almost as if she
needed
to establish her mother’s guilt. She recollected, with suspicious suddenness, that the sailors who had insulted her when she was fifteen had made obscene remarks about her mother, saying everyone knew she had perished with a lover in Budapest. They had employed a coarse term to suggest that the charred bodies could not be separated.

She was now arguing, of course, that her uncle did not die of a heart attack in Vienna a few months after her mother’s death, but died in the same hotel blaze. Her father and her aunt, between them, had concocted the false story to allay gossip; but, in the way of these matters, probably everyone in Odessa knew what had happened, except Anna and her brother. When I asked whether she ought not to approach her aunt with these suspicions, she said she did not wish to reopen wounds. Still I urged her to do so, or even to consult newspaper files; for I was sure her phantasies were running wild. She was now so much better that she was starting to go for walks on her own around the city. And one day she stormed in with an air of triumph. She flourished before me two photographs. One, somewhat brown and tattered, was of her mother’s grave; and the other, a fresh photograph, was of her uncle’s. She had found his resting place only
after much searching, she said, because her aunt did not visit it. It was overgrown, as the photograph showed. To my surprise, the dates of death on the two graves, faint but discernible, were the same. I had to admit that I was impressed, and that the balance of evidence, such as it was, had swung toward her version of events. She smiled, and enjoyed her triumph.
¹

It is time to summarize what we know of this unfortunate young woman’s case. Circumstances from her earliest years had contrived to load her with a heavy burden of guilt. Every young girl, when she reaches the Oedipal stage, begins to nurse destructive impulses towards her mother. Anna was no exception. She wished her mother “dead,” and—as if she rubbed a magic lamp—her mother
was
dead. Thanks to the serpent (her uncle’s penis) in her paradise, the field was free to Anna, and she could do what every little girl wants, bear a child to her father. But instead of bringing her happiness, her mother’s death brought misery. She learned that death meant being in the cold earth forever, not just staying away for a few more days. Nor was her matricide rewarded with her father’s love; on the contrary, he was colder and more remote; obviously he was punishing her for her terrible crime. Anna had brought about her own expulsion from paradise.

Preserved by the affection of mother-surrogates, nurses and governesses, she was punished—again by men—when a mob of sailors frightened and abused her. She learned from them that perhaps her mother had deserved to die, for being a bad woman. But by this time her father’s harshness towards her had driven her to an intense idealization of her mother; the sailors’ remarks were insupportable, and needed to be buried in her unconscious along with her memory of the summer-house. It was at this time that she developed symptoms of breathlessness and asthma—perhaps a mnemic symbol of choking in a fire. Simultaneously her father proved to her once and for all that he was indifferent to her well-being, and she cast him out of her heart, resolving to make for herself a new and separate life.

In the capital, she had the misfortune to become attached to an unworthy lover, of a sadistic and somewhat sinister temperament. Nevertheless, it was to be expected that she would select a lover of this kind, for at seventeen the compulsive pattern of her relationships had become established. It was to be expected that the sexual act with A. should turn out to be a failure; and also that she should be befriended by a woman and “saved” by her, though not before further damage had been done. In Madame R.’s home, her self-esteem was restored; the widow’s motherly affection was absorbed into the idealizing pattern of maternal love—the genuine
first love
. Feelings of a homosexual nature became established in Frau Anna, though she could not admit them to herself, much less to Madame R. Fortunately she was able to survive the shock of her friend’s remarriage through the re-entry into her life of her aunt, a woman whose maternal feelings had been thwarted and who was, in fact, the uncanny image of her mother. One is tempted to see Anna’s discovery of a musical talent at this time, especially as expressed in the rich tones of her
chosen instrument, as a spontaneous “flowering” from her restored sense of her own value.

Driven by her desire to prove to herself that she was capable of a normal relationship, she found a husband. Predictably it was another disaster, but she was reluctant to admit failure. She must have been secretly relieved when the outbreak of war separated them. However, it required a serious mental illness for her to take action to end the marriage, giving (to herself and others) the reason that she would be unable to cope with having children.

Some news of Madame R., and a stray remark from her aunt, threatened to overthrow all she had so painfully achieved. Her marriage was an hypocrisy; and her music was, at least in part, a sublimation of her true desires. The incompatible idea had to be suppressed, at whatever price; and the price was an hysteria. The symptoms were, as always with the unconscious, appropriate: the pains in breast and ovary because of her unconscious hatred of her distorted femininity; anorexia nervosa: total self-hatred, a wish to vanish from the earth. Also, the breathless, choking condition which had afflicted her during her puberty reappeared, as a consequence of having glimpsed the true circumstances of her mother’s death. It remained uncertain why the pains attacked the left side of her body. An hysteria not seldom attaches itself to a physical weakness in the constitution, provided it fits in with the primary symbolism; and it may be that there was a propensity to illness in the patient’s left breast and ovary, which would become manifest later in life. On the other hand, perhaps the left-sidedness arose from a memory that was never brought to the surface. No analysis is ever complete; the hysterias have more roots than a tree. Thus, at quite a late stage of the analysis, the patient developed a mild phobia about
looking into mirrors, claiming that the act gave her nervous palpitations. This phobia, fortunately short-lived, was never satisfactorily explained.

Frau Anna’s analysis was less complete than most. Since she felt practically restored to health, she was anxious to take up again her musical career. There were disagreements, which in a way I was happy to see, since it meant she was regaining her independence. Most of these concerned my estimate of her attachment to Madame R.; she was still loath, at times, to admit openly that it had a homosexual component. We both had a feeling that our discussions should be broken off, and we parted on friendly terms.

I told her I thought she was cured of everything but life, so to speak. She did not dispute this. She took away with her a reasonable prospect of survival, in an existence that would doubtless never be less than difficult, and might often be solitary. By the end, she was able to say that she could understand how her mother might have craved affection and novelty, after the first transport of her marriage had worn off. This acceptance of the unalterable past owed much to the serenity of Gastein and the subsequent writing of her “journal”: an interesting example of the unconscious preparing the psyche for the eventual release of repressed ideas into consciousness.

I have compared the journal to an operatic stage—but it is a stage with one great difference. That is, that the characters in her drama are interchangeable. Thus, the young man is from time to time (or even at the same time) Anna’s father, brother, uncle,
¹
her lover A., her husband, and even the unimportant young man on the train from Odessa. Anna herself is (at times) the opera singer; but also the prostitute without a breast, the pale, thin invalid without a womb, the dead mistress in the common grave. Sometimes the “voices” are distinct, but more often they blend, melt into each other: “the spirit of the white hotel was against selfishness.” With moderate help from the physician, Frau Anna’s journal moved her towards psychological health, through acceptance of her mother’s mysterious individuality. There is a symbolism of the corsetière which the patient did not mention: hypocrisy. Her mother was not as she appeared, not nearly so strict—with herself. She was Medusa—as well as Ceres. When she seemed most loving to her child, her mind was perhaps elsewhere. But far below the conscious level, the patient was learning to forgive her mother her fallible nature, and thereby (most profoundly) her own.
¹

I was thus quite mistaken in assuming the central characters to be “a man, a woman; a woman, a man.”
²
Whatever the appearance to the contrary, the role of the male, of the father, in the patient’s private theatre was subordinate, and we were faced with two “heroines”—the patient and her mother. Frau Anna’s document
expressed her yearning to return to the haven of security, the original white hotel—we have all stayed there—the mother’s womb.
¹

About a year later, I met Frau Anna again, quite by chance. By a pleasant coincidence, the meeting occurred at Bad Gastein, where I was on holiday with another member of my family. We were out walking when I saw a familiar face. It emerged that Anna was playing in the orchestra of a small touring company, and I was glad to see that she looked well; indeed, she had rather too much flesh than too little. She appeared pleased to see me, and expressed the hope that we would attend the performance that evening. She was on her way to a rehearsal. The opera she was due to play in was a modern piece of some obscurity, and I protested my lack of appreciation of modern music—adding that I should certainly have come had she been performing in
Don Giovanni
! The sly allusion was not lost on her, and she smiled. I inquired if she was familiar with the language of the opera (the score of which she had in her hands) and she replied that, yes, she had added Czech to her repertoire. My companion
expressed admiration that she could learn to read so many languages, and Frau Anna replied with a melancholy smile, delivering her words rather to me, that she sometimes wondered from whom she had acquired that gift. It was perhaps inevitable that she should ask herself whether her father’s coldness, after her mother’s death, sprang from a suspicion that she was not his child.

Frau Anna said she had continued to suffer some mild recurrences of her symptoms from time to time, but not to a degree that would interfere with her playing. However, she feared that her belated start, and prolonged setback, would prevent her from reaching the heights of her profession. I am happy to say that I have continued to hear of her over the years, as a talented musical performer, pursuing a successful career in Vienna, and still living in the company of her aunt.