Three Women in a Mirror (31 page)

Calgari claims that I am horrified by ties of blood, that I cannot stand them; I replied that I do not know any such ties; I was eight years old when my parents died, and that time has hardly left a mark on me.

For months this answer did not satisfy him. Calgari regularly claimed that I was tensing up, and he finally resorted to a new procedure: hypnosis.

Yes, Gretchen, I'm not about to tell you about some fairground attraction I might have seen, I am about to relate an episode as serious as they come, which I myself experienced: with the help of a pendulum and some incantatory words, Calgari brought me to a hypnotic state.

Can you imagine? A ridiculous piece of jewelry, some soothing words, and you can stop exercising control over your mind . . . I can remember my state, it was neither sleep nor unconsciousness, but a different sort of precise and voluntary concentration. It was as if I had gone into a tunnel: my field of vision shrank, my auditory space as well, and with them my bad faith vanished, too, that sort of haughty reserve that compels me to lie in order to protect myself. Now I was yielding to obedience, I depended on no one but Calgari, his warm voice, his precise questions; I abandoned myself to him.

And then I heard myself speaking the truth—in hindsight, I am also surprised that it was during this session. Yes, in this bizarre state, I revealed the secret of my origins.

I confessed to my adoption: those whom I had called my parents were not my parents, and while they may have left me the means of my subsistence, they did not bring me into the world.

The details rose docilely to my memory, like a fish being reeled in on a line: my suspicions to begin with, the questioning that assailed me at a very young age, my parents' behavior later on, the way they would look at me, both loving and fearful, as if I were a bomb about to explode in their hands.

Why have I so often hidden my actual genealogy? Was it out of a need for comfort, or through indifference? According to Calgari, since indifference does not exist in the treatment of memory, there was something I stood to gain by hiding my ascendants.

“Now I have a better understanding of your general attitude,” concluded Calgari. “You never feel legitimate. In society or with your husband, you're haunted by imposture, you think you must remain silent and listen to others, you are of the opinion that Franz chose the wrong wife and will eventually realize it. These fears come from your initial position, that of an adopted child who receives an arbitrary affection, unjustified by blood.”

Well, dear Gretchen, isn't he brilliant, my dear Calgari? No one has ever penetrated me so deeply.

Now, after these months of treatment, when I go back to my life as Frau von Waldberg, I am different; in appearance nothing has changed, but deep down everything has.

I have grown more mature. I no longer cling to Franz like a drowning woman to her buoy. There are times when he seems so insipid to me that I no longer know whether I love him or hate him.

He annoys me. He bores me with his calm manner, his good humor, his even temperament, his unchangeable urbanity. Even his good looks bore me. As the wishy-washy Viennese gossips say, he looks like a dream, with his regular face, his sparkling teeth, his pink lips, his solid neck above his supple, muscular body; he is the incarnation of the Prince Charming we have all seen in our books of fairy tales, the first man we ever fantasized about. The only problem is that those fairy tales never showed us what Snow White or Cinderella were thinking after several years of marriage, as they all stop at the threshold of the bedroom and close the door when the lovers go to bed. “They lived happily ever after.” It's a bit laconic, don't you think, to describe an entire life?

I have been heading the opposite direction from that formula ever since I entered the Prince Charming's alcove: I am not living happily ever after. Yes, I confess, dear Gretchen, life with the ideal man is excruciatingly boring . . .

Franz is far too inclined to seek satisfaction. With him, pleasure comes very quickly—after three piano chords, two lines at the theater, the first bite he takes, the instant he speaks, the moment he falls asleep, the moment he goes to bed, the moment he touches me. I feel as if I am living with a baby who has his every desire met, and who does not suspect that the paths to pleasure, for me, are more complicated.

Content although blind.

Content because blind?

I have dared to touch on my marital privacy with Calgari. Aunt Vivi was right: I have not yet experienced “the dazzling moment.” My lovemaking with Franz is pleasant but laborious. A dull ritual.

Did I tell you? My relations with Aunt Vivi have changed: we have become the best friends on earth. What a vivacious woman! Always cheerful, whirling here and there, so free. Several times a week, either at her home or mine, or at the couturier or the pastry shop or the ice cream parlor, we meet to laugh and chatter our heads off. She shamelessly tells me about her multiple affairs, both old and new; I admire her for having had the nerve and independence to turn a poisonous life into a breathtaking adventure.

We often go to the café and I observe her technique for procuring a gentleman's interest. Her success is due to a rapid contrast: first she displays total indifference, then in a flash she shoots an intense look at the officer or artist sitting a few tables away. This mixture of hot and cold so unsettles the man that she cannot leave the premises without a gallant note being brought to the table by an assiduous waiter.

It spreads like contagion: I have received declarations as well, since some men think I must be as forward as Aunt Vivi; in particular, there is one dark-haired student with black eyes that would seem belligerent were they not fringed with long, gentle eyelashes, like those of an Egyptian princess.

Why am I writing this? I don't know. Perhaps it's the spring fever invading Vienna.

Dr. Calgari—despite his prohibition, I go on calling him Doctor—decided that we must work on this issue, “the things of the bedroom,” and I finally consented. For a man who is not my husband to want caresses to make me happy . . . there is something disturbing about this, don't you think?

I blush when Calgari discusses my frigidity. Naturally the word is vexing; but the fact that he employs it rejoices me; I am overwhelmed by his desire to help me; this revives the emotions of our first encounter where, foolishly, I believed he wanted to kiss me on his couch.

Now I wonder if I wasn't right. Perhaps I was not so foolish . . . To be sure, at the time I knew nothing about psychoanalysis, but my female instinct recognized a man who desired me. And whom I desired.

Yes, Gretchen, I am not ashamed to tell you: there are times when I do want him. In addition to the fact that I am drawn to his slender form and his agile hands with their interminable fingers, I owe him so much.

Thanks to him, for example, I understand why I collect sulfides and millefiori. A collection expresses frustration; while we are not aware of it, it is compensation for what we are lacking. Since my life as an adult woman does not satisfy me, the glass globes represent my desire to stop time, not to get old, to go back to the immobile paradise of childhood. Since I grew up in the country—something you, my childhood playmate, know perfectly well—I adore nature and I idealize it in these mineral flowers frozen in crystal.

Every time I add a new one to my collection, I feel satisfaction, but it is only partial and does not answer my fundamental desire. It is not so much the paperweights I value as the illusion they enable me to maintain. As I go deeper into my neurosis, I have to start over and over.

On the other hand, when I break one of my paperweights—as on the night my waters broke—it expresses a desire to recapture reality. And indeed, in the hours that followed, I discovered the truth of my phantom pregnancy.

Should I then destroy my collection in order to be cured? Dr. Calgari has forbidden it.

“Destroying a symbol will not cure you. On the contrary, there is a risk of creating a vague anxiety, a harmful lack of security. Some day you will be able to appreciate your paperweights in a balanced way, and to appreciate them for what they are more than for what they are not.”

Recently, since our discussions on the matter, I have managed to stop buying them. This is huge progress, don't you think? I informed Schönderfer the banker.

So, dear Gretchen, these are the efforts your cousin has been making to return to the land of the living. Without Calgari, I would have gone mad, they would have locked me up in an asylum. He is curing me of myself.

I will never be able to thank Aunt Vivi enough for having sent me to him. Yesterday I said as much to her once again. She narrowed her almond-shaped eyelids over her lavender eyes, then her delicate lips murmured, “My little Hanna, do you have a soft spot for Dr. Calgari?”

All I did was laugh. Too loud, and too long. My body was shaking. I had cramps in my abdomen. My laughter confirmed to Aunt Vivi and to me everything that I did not dare express.

If I cannot say the words, I shall try to write them.

I am in love with Dr. Calgari.

And this love is incredibly powerful, it inhabits my body, my heart, and my soul.

Only one question remains: when will I tell him?

 

Your Hanna

An intermittent bed.
Nothing more.
Yes, from time to time, a bed. With sheets that are too thin. A single pillow.

And adventures.

A chase scene on water skis. Johanna in front. She's really good at the fancy stuff, fat bitch in her beige swimsuit!

Then they shoot a commercial, and Anny plays an ice cube in a glass of whiskey the size of a swimming pool. Obviously, she drowns. Hilarious. The director waves his megaphone. The insurance company refuses to pay. At the bottom of the water—well, no, of the alcohol—Anny, who is supposed to be dead, is splitting her sides laughing. Her adoptive parents, sitting next to the foot bath, are applauding.

Right, the bed.

Vuitton Bag comes up to her, takes her by the hand, and leads her into her dressing room. Instead of dresses there are stuffed animals. A zebra is staring at her. Even though Anny knows that the quadruped behind the gentle glass eyes is dead, she has doubt. He is staring at her so intensely. She is terrified, she is trembling. Finally she reaches out to touch the zebra's nose. The moment she touches him, he is transformed into David, and he whinnies. Then an ostrich comes along and knocks David out. The ostrich is charming; it has a blonde tuft of hair on top of its head. It doesn't answer when you ask it questions, even though it seems to understand them.

A sudden change of venue. Anny is walking in a strange city. In the middle of every street: water. Not a drain, not a puddle, no, a wide stream. A childhood friend with a guttural accent tells her that these are canals. “Oh, so we're in Venice?” People tell her she's a dumbbell. There are a lot of people, they are fierce. Anny admits that a beer would a nice consolation. Just then, a gnome steals her handbag. She runs after it. He's about to shake her off, he knows the neighborhood like the back of his hand. On a street corner, Anny loses her clothes. “What, not again!” She's curious, and she has the impression this is something she's already experienced. She's completely naked; she comes upon an esplanade where a woman is hanging at the end of a noose. She knows her. She goes up to her. Someone strikes her in the back of the neck.

The bed again. Not comfortable.

Around the mattress is a room in light wood. What hotel is this?

Sucked into space, Anny is racing on her skis. She is slaloming down a narrow snowy passageway. Her speed increases, she loses control, sees behind her a car shaped like a caterpillar where bearded men are screaming, “Get out of the way.” They're going to catch up with her. She pictures herself stuck in the middle of a bobsled track. They are headed straight toward her. What should she do?

The bed.

Phew.

This must be the place where she'll end up for good. Reality is the dream that recurs the most often, isn't it?

She gathers all her strength to stay there in the bed, not to escape too quickly into another space.

She explores the mattress with her hand. Sheets like cigarette paper. Hey, I'd love a smoke. Oh, this pillow! Is it foam? She prefers goose feathers. Why just one?

She opens her eyes. Around her is a room of light, slightly yellowed wood. Oh, right, it's bamboo, the latest fashion in interior design. In her opinion it's a rip off, this craze for bamboo; how can you make wide flat boards out of a round stem? Someone will have to explain that to me someday. And toothpaste? How do they manage to make red stripes in white paste, all the way to the end of the tube? Without the white and the red getting mixed up inside . . . the world is full of mysteries.

Ethan is here. Cool, a sweet dream. He has come into the room and he is smiling. From where she can see him from the bed, he is as tall as the ostrich she saw in her earlier delirium.

He sits down on the edge of the bed, strokes her cheeks, then offers her a glass of water.

He's right. She's dying of thirst.

When she sits up, her joints are aching. Her muscles have shriveled up.

Damn, this time it's obvious, she's not crazy! Farewell waterskiing, downhill. Her body is heavy, awkward, painful.

“Ethan, I'm not dreaming?”

“No.”

“That's what you said in my dream.”

“I can't answer for what I say to you in your dreams.”

She grows thoughtful, because his statement seems so deep to her that she is not sure she can grasp its meaning. Oh! And now she cannot understand a thing: welcome to real life!

Ethan helps her drink, then lowers her head delicately onto the pillow. No sooner does it touch the fabric than she enters a labyrinth. A trap door closes behind her. There are bull dogs at every turn, growling, fangs bared; as a result, she can't take the right path. Oops, she had never noticed that dogs looked so much like sharks. She goes up to a little girl who is dancing, dressed like a gypsy, whirling dizzily in her ample dress of red lace. Brisk disco music gives rhythm to her steps. When Anny leans closer, the happy little girl trains her hollow eyes on her: they have been gouged out, she cannot see. Anny bends down to kiss her but the girl, surprised, runs away, screaming with fright. A door slams.