Angelica's Grotto (3 page)

‘I have no inner voice and must speak my thoughts aloud,’ he said, ‘but I feel pretty good actually. I represent a triumph of the medical arts and the never-say-die spirit of the NHS. In clinical circles all the receptionists have a smile for me and I am known to consultants and other golfers as “he who declines to hop the twig”. In operating theatres I have more than once topped the bill; I am accomplished in nil by mouth and there is talk of getting me a permanent locker for my dentures. Life isn’t what it was but it’s a lot better than it’s going to be.

‘Now there comes to me a memory and I can smell the trees, feel the hot sun through the leaves. It was on the Appalachian Trail or it might have been somewhere else: my best friend Jim and I, hot and sweaty, pushing our bikes up a woodland road over a little mountain. At the top of the slope was a spring. I remember a stone trough and the clear cold water. There were leaves in the bottom of the trough and tiny crayfish. The water gushed from the pipe and it was a foreverness of itself, the endless quenching of all thirst. We drank it like an elixir and stuck our heads in the trough among the leaves and the crayfish and became new and strong and untired, for ever refreshed by the magic of that clear cold water that sparkled in the sunlight and the shadows on the mountain.’

‘Actually,’ said Professor Slope to Nathalie Lichtheim, ‘I haven’t come across anything like this inner-voice loss before – it might even be worth writing up.’ They were having coffee in Slope’s office where Escher’s carp lurked dimly on the wall.

‘You’re telling me this poor man has completely lost his mental privacy, his
Selbstgesprach?’
said Mrs Lichtheim.

‘He whispers into his hand when he wants to be private. He presented like he was about to blow all his fuses and my first thought was hypomania and the usual bipolar thing. Then I began to wonder about his frontal lobes but I doubt that there’s anything organically wrong – his general irritability makes me think that his mental drains are blocked and he’s got a lot of sewage backing up on him.’

Mrs Lichtheim shook her head and sighed a little. ‘I’m surprised that it doesn’t happen more often. Year after year we don’t say all kinds of things that could get us into trouble, we keep an internal watch on the words about to come out of our mouths: we monitor the prearticulatory speech output code during speech production by means of an internal loop to the speech comprehension system. So here’s this guy of yours who’s been not saying things
for about seventy years which is quite a long time, really. He hears these unsaid things in his head but they never come out of his mouth. Finally the monitor, the voice in his head, says, “The hell with this, I quit. You want to say something, say it out loud.” You think it could be something like that?’

‘I hope he survives long enough for us to find out,’ said Slope.

Nathalie Lichtheim M.Sc. AFBPsS. C. Psychol. was in her mid-forties, tall, with black hair, a luminous bespectacled face, and an abstractly motherly air. There was nothing in her office to lie down on but Klein whispered into his hand, ‘It would be nice to fall asleep with her sitting nearby.’

‘Can you tell me something about yourself,’ she said, ‘maybe something about how things are with you now?’ She spoke softly and with a slight accent, perhaps Viennese.

Klein told her about the loss of his inner voice.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but apart from that?’

‘I’m not in very good shape. I live about a mile away and I walked here. I had to stop four times and rest because of angina. Life seems more of a struggle than it used to be; often people coming towards me don’t give me room to pass, as if I’m invisible. When I take a bus the people who should be queuing behind me shove past me to get on – that sort of thing …’ He trailed off into whispers.

She asked him what medications he was on and he told her. ‘Now we’ll begin with the Bender Gestalt Test,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you nine cards and I’ll ask you to look at them and copy them.’

‘How does that bear on my inner-voice loss?’

‘This problem doesn’t come out of nowhere; we need to look at what’s underneath it.’ She showed him the cards and one by one he copied the various arrangements of lines, dots, and geometric shapes, whispering, muttering and singing into his left hand while his right hand was drawing. He sang ‘Stormy Weather’ and ‘Nobody’s Sweetheart Now’.
‘“Oh no,”’
he said,
“‘it wasn’t the airplanes, it was Beauty killed the Beast.”’

‘“… Beauty killed the Beast”’, wrote Mrs Lichtheim. ‘Is that a quote?’

‘From the film
King Kong,’
said Klein as he continued his copying, ‘when Kong’s lying dead in the street. I notice that I shorten everything. I wonder if tall men elongate.’

“‘… if tall men…?”’

‘Elongate.’ When he had copied the nine cards Mrs Lichtheim removed them, asked him to sign the sheet with his drawings, gave him a new sheet of paper, and asked him to draw the cards from memory.
‘“Far and few, far and few, are the lands where the Jumblies live …”’
he said as he set to work.
‘“The very thought of you makes my heart sing, like an April breeze on the wings of spring …”’
he sang, no longer hiding his mouth with his hand. He was able to recall seven of the cards more or less but not in the correct order; his attempts at the eighth and ninth were only guesswork. Again he signed his name and she collected that sheet and gave him a fresh one.

‘That was the Bender Recall,’ she said. ‘Now I would like you to draw a person, any kind of person.’

Klein drew a young woman seen from the rear.

‘Sign it, please,’ said Mrs Lichtheim, ‘and now a person of the opposite sex.’

Klein drew himself seen from the rear.

Mrs Lichtheim took the drawing and placed the first one in front of him. ‘Could you tell me a bit about this one?’

‘She’s a young woman I saw in the Underground a couple of summers ago; I don’t believe I ever saw her face. She had long fair hair, was wearing a broad-brimmed hat, straw or maybe canvas, black cotton vest, tight white denim trousers, tennis shoes I think. She was very attractive, very appealing; her figure was shapely and girlish, she was graceful in the way she moved. She looked the very essence of youth and beauty. Walking away from me.’

Mrs Lichtheim wrote down his words. ‘Anything about her state of mind? What she could be feeling, what she could be thinking about?’

‘She looked as if she might be going to meet someone she liked. She seemed well-pleased with life.’

‘Anything about her future?’

‘Years and years ahead of her, full of good things.’

‘How old would you say she was?’

‘Twenty-two or so.’

‘And this other person you’ve drawn?’

‘Well, that’s me. I’m seventy-two years old. I’ve drawn this man from the rear in pretty much the same pose as the young woman. His posture – he looks hesitant, as if he’s been brought to a halt, come to a pause. He’s wearing a rucksack because I don’t feel right unless I’m burdened to some extent. I think somewhere in Sholem Aleichem somebody says something like, “God doesn’t ask how far you can carry your burden, He just says to put it on your back.”’

When Mrs Lichtheim finished taking down his words she offered him another sheet of paper. ‘Now I’d like you to draw a tree, please.’

Klein drew the olive tree, smelling as he did so the
warm summer wind and hearing the distant braying of a donkey.

‘Do you draw?’ said Mrs Lichtheim. ‘You have an artistic touch.’

‘I went to art school but I haven’t done any drawing for a very long time.’

‘What can you tell me about this tree?’

‘It’s an olive tree I saw on the island of Paxos the last time my wife – she’s dead now – and I had a holiday there. Olive trees flash silver in the sun when the wind stirs the leaves. They look as if they’re personally acquainted with gods and goddesses. This tree is very old but it still bears fruit. There’s a hole in the trunk and it looks as if the naked Persephone might just have stepped out of that darkness into the green-lit shade of the olive grove. Naked Persephone in the green-lit shade.’

‘When did your wife die?’

‘In 1977.’ Klein was looking at the olive tree in his mind, listening to the wind in the leaves, feeling the Ionian sunlight on his face. ‘Hannelore,’ he said.

‘That was your wife’s name?’

‘Yes.’ He put both hands over his mouth and whispered, ‘She killed herself.’

Mrs Lichtheim allowed a little pause to happen, then she said, ‘If you feel ready we can now do the Rorschach Test.’

‘Yes,’ said Klein. ‘Let’s do it.’

‘I am going to show you ten cards with inkblots. The original blots were made by dropping inks on pieces of paper and then folding the paper in half. There are ten standardised inkblots that have been in use since the Rorshach was introduced in the forties. When I show these to you I’d like you to tell me whatever you can see on the card.’

The first inkblot looked to Klein like a motorcycle seen endwise from the rear. There was no one in the saddle but there was a person on each side with both feet on one of the footrests, one hand gripping a handlebar and the other flung out behind. Both of these people were in silhouette and wore loose black garments that fluttered in the wind.

‘Anything else?’ said Mrs Lichtheim.

‘Only that the motorcycle would have to be going fast enough not to lose its balance and fall over.’

Mrs Lichtheim wrote down his description and in this manner, very slowly, Klein made his way through the Rorshach blots. He described the two jolly fellows wearing conical red hats who, undeterred by being legless and footless, were congratulating each other with a high-five handslap. They might be genies, he thought, just out of a bottle and still trailing smoke.

He described the two black dancers, a man and a woman, evidently romantically involved because of the two red hearts hanging point to point in the air between them. Although the idea of dancing was reinforced by musical emanations from their heads they seemed at the same time to be picking up their luggage or perhaps their shopping.

He described the full-frontal head of a wild boar, pointing out the tusks, the snout, the eyes and ears.
Schwarzwild
was the German name for this animal, and he told Mrs Lichtheim about infant
Schwarzwild
he and Hannelore had seen at the Berlin Zoo: they were striped like vegetable marrows.

He described the bat that was pretending to be a butterfly, how its wings were messy as if it had fallen into some muck.

He described the bottomprint made by some woman who had inked her naked bottom, then sat down on
white paper and rocked back and forth a little to leave an impression of her buttocks and vulva.

He described what at first appeared to be the lower jaw of a shark which then became the heads and shoulders of two women with topknots, facing each other in profile.

He described some kind of angel seen from below, bearing aloft two animals, one at the tip of each wing. This one, with its delicate pinks and greys and greens, had a transcendental feeling, as it might be the higher nature lifting up the lower nature and becoming ever more distant as it rose.

He described two young women, possibly princesses, dancing and changing, as they danced, into deer with antlers.

He described two magicians at the end of a party, maybe a child’s birthday party, magically making fireworks before everyone went home.

‘Now,’ said Mrs Lichtheim, ‘I will need to show you the cards again and ask you what you see and where you see it so I can make notes. This is part of the usual procedure.’ She had monochrome copies of the cards, and on these she circled and labelled the various parts of each blot according to his description. She was very painstaking about this, questioning him closely so that she was absolutely certain about what he saw and where in the blot he saw it.

‘This one, the transcendental one,’ he said when they came to it again, ‘I didn’t say it before but when I saw it I thought of Lucifer, the fallen angel. But even though he’s fallen he appears to be going up, way up, far away above me. Almost I hear music, looking at this one – the
Dies Irae
theme.’

‘Would you spell that, please,’ said Mrs Lichtheim.

Klein spelled it.
‘Days of Wrath,’
he said.

When Mrs Lichtheim had completed her notes she asked Klein to pick out the cards he liked the most and those he liked the least. He liked Lucifer and the two genies and the two dancing princesses best; he liked the bat and the bottomprint and the shark’s jaw least.

‘I’ll evaluate these and you’ll be hearing from us about your next appointment,’ said Mrs Lichtheim.

Klein thanked her and walked home, still seeing Lucifer in pinks and greys and greens.

With Lucifer still soaring in his mind, Klein found himself cruising his bookshelves. He saw his hand go up and return with one of his own titles,
Darkness and Light: the inner eye of Odilon Redon.
He turned to No. 14 of the third series of lithographs illustrating Flaubert’s
The Temptation of Saint Antony:
Oannes with his serpentine body, human face, and pharaonic headdress, hovering in a blackness.

He took the French edition of Flaubert from the shelves, turned to the Oannes page, and read his translation that was inserted there:

Then appears a singular being, having the head of a man on the body of a fish. He advances upright in the air by beating the sand with his tail; and this patriarchal figure with little arms makes Antony laugh.

‘Redon’s Oannes,’ said Klein, ‘is not laughable; he is of the darkness, he is between the times of one thing and another.’ He read on:

OANNES

In a plaintive voice:

Respect me! I have been here from the very beginning. I have lived in the unformed world where hermaphrodite beasts were sleeping under the weight of an opaque atmosphere, in the depths of the dark waters – when fingers and fins and wings were mingled, and eyes without heads were floating like molluscs, among bulls with human faces and serpents with the paws of dogs.