Dreaming for Freud Page 11

  “But you did not speak to your parents?” the doctor asks.

  “No, I said nothing to anyone,” she says. “I felt so ashamed, so ashamed, I didn’t want anyone to know what had happened.” Even now she still feels ashamed, and she was certain it would all be blamed on her, whatever she said. She thought that there must be something wrong with her, as he had said, that she must be a bad girl for him to do such a thing, to let him do such a thing to her.

  “After that, everything changed,” she tells him. “I saw the whole world in a different, sick way. I felt that surely no one would want to marry me, that I was soiled. And I didn’t want to marry anyone, either, if men were like that. I avoided being on my own with him. Neither of us mentioned what had happened, but every time I passed a couple in the street who seemed to be amorous, I would feel shame and repulsion.”

  She heaves now with distress, afraid she might vomit, but the doctor does not seem particularly moved by her words. What a hard man.

  He says, “I don’t see why you would feel disgust. I know Herr Z., as I said, quite well. He is an attractive man in his prime. You might, of course, have been offended from a moral point of view—a married man and somewhat older than you, but surely your physical reaction was an extreme one?”

  “I know I feel everything in extremes, but surely any young girl would have felt what I felt—horribly humiliated? Perhaps I feel more than anyone else but that is how I felt. I saw myself from afar just standing there unable to move, passive, and letting this man, Father’s age, as old as—well, as old as you, put his arms around me and press his body against mine, his hands on my lady parts, murmuring those horrible lies in my ear,” she says, between coughs and great heaves of breath.

  She was so filled with repulsion for him and even more for herself. It was her inability to react to this disgusting man that really upset her. “Why did I not defend myself? Why did I not kick him in his private parts! How could I have let this happen?” she exclaims.

  “Is it possible that the reason you let him do what he did was that what you felt was not disgust—or not only disgust, but on the contrary, really desire, something that you could not admit to feeling? A repressed desire? Is that not really what you felt, what you still feel, perhaps, this sensation of a man’s body pressing against your own?”

  She cannot speak now, coughing and coughing, a grinding pain all the way down both her legs as the doctor goes on asking her if she knows what happens to a man’s body when he desires a woman.

  She nods her head. “I know, I know,” she has to admit, afraid he might explain it to her. Of course she knows, horribly, it is often part of her own fantasies: the little boy who swells as he sucks and is beaten for it. She learned about it long ago, first from her brother who once showed her his horrid white wormy thing and how big it could get if she consented to stroke it. Then she had promised on her sacred honor not to tell anyone, and she never will. And then all of this was confirmed by the books the fräulein gave her, and their intimate conversations, sitting close together in her bedroom on the fräulein’s bed and giggling, in the late afternoons, making fun of men with their strange and frightening anatomy. She knows about the whole awful thing, though she is horribly embarrassed at this older man’s talking about it to her now. How does he dare talk about such disgusting things? Does he find this exciting perhaps? Is his own body swelling at this moment as he maintains Herr Z.’s did, as the little boy’s does in her fantasies?

  The image of a man’s erect part thrusting against trousers comes to her as the doctor suggests that what she felt was not against her chest, at all, that what she still remembers so long afterward was rather lower down on her body, that what she remembers was the thrust of his masculinity.

  “No! No! No!” she cries out in rage and distress.

  She finds it difficult to leave his room, dragging her leg painfully, coughing, and not bothering even to say good-bye or to shake his horrid hand.

  December 1900

  XIII

  * * *

  BATTLE

  AS SOON AS SHE IS lying down on his sofa, stroking his soft carpet, the doctor goes on the attack. He asks her to tell him all she remembers about Herr Z. “Are you sure you have told me all? Is there nothing you might have forgotten? Is this scene you have described perhaps only a fragment that hides something else?” he asks.

  She pulls the blanket up over her cold feet in her tight boots. Her father is growing impatient with this slow cure. He makes her walk to the doctor’s office with only her maid now or sometimes even alone. At breakfast this morning he said, “No carriage for you, young lady, this afternoon. Your doctor’s visits are costing enough as it is, without spending it on the horses. And quite frankly I don’t see any noticeable improvement in your behavior. What is going on there? Are you listening to the doctor, his advice? What is he telling you?”

  And when she would make no response he said, “You are as surly as ever with both me and your poor mother. Have you no respect for your elders! All I hear from you is the banging of doors!”

  The doctor has told her she can choose her subject, but he directs her to return to his favorite one, not her father or her mother but Herr Z. He seems to want her to talk about him all the time. She would like to ask him if it is not he who is in love with him, not her. Perhaps he is still his patient and is telling him stories about her? Or could Pippina actually be the one? She who was so often ill, after all.

  Perhaps he knows them both socially. He seems to know so many of his patients socially. Sometimes he dines with them or visits their country estates, her father has told her. Often he sees them twice a day. After all they are such a small circle of people who stay together in this city, shunned, ultimately, despite their knowledge or wealth, by the rest of “good” Viennese society. When she says she cannot think of anything else to tell him about Herr Z, which is not true, he says, “Are you certain you have been entirely truthful? Are you sure you were not once in love with him? That you might not want to admit to this or have repressed this feeling? Are you quite sure? You admit that he took notice of you, that he gave you presents, wrote to you. Was that not at least flattering to a young girl?”

  She shakes her head. Vehemently she says, “No! No! No!”

  She feels they are engaged in a lethal battle in this crowded room. All his old statuettes seem lined up to stare at her disapprovingly like soldiers in an army about to advance on her, to march into battle against her, to mow her down! She is not at all certain this doctor wishes her well, that he feels benevolently or even objectively about her. She senses rather that back there in his corner he is plotting and planning his strategy, her enemy, contemplating his next move, that they are fighting to the death, and he is winning. Yet each day she wakes and feels drawn to walk down the street to his consulting rooms. Something draws her back here almost despite herself.

  Yet all of this seems to her not to be about sex or repression at all, as he maintains it is—what he insists on calling her repressed sexual longing for Herr Z., or for her father, or even for him—but rather about power, a struggle for power. And she wants to win! What he wants, it seems to her, is to be right, as people so often do when they argue, no matter what they are arguing about, and this man is particularly persuasive. He is closing in on her with his superior knowledge of life, his experience with sick people, his certitude, his masculine pride. The image that comes back in the dim light of the winter afternoon is of a man’s private part, something hard and large, a stone, a flint, a weapon thrusting against his pants. He seems so sure that any healthy girl would desire any man who approaches her. Yet she has no desire for this frightening image. On the contrary. If one applies his logic, one might wonder whether it is not he who desires any girl who approaches him, she cannot help thinking.

  She says, “I don’t remember ever having had amorous feelings for him.” She decides to tell him the truth even if it will o
ffend him. She says, “For goodness’ sake, he was too old! He is as old as you! I thought of him more like an uncle, like my uncle Karl, Father’s brother. I do not like old men in the way you suggest.” She senses in the silence that follows the offense she has given. So she says, trying to please him, “I did have a friend who once accused me of being wild about him. But I don’t remember that, and certainly, after he had thrust himself at me, I was repulsed by him. Surely you understand that!” she says. She was only thirteen and the daughter of his friend—a friend who was his wife’s lover.

  “I’m not sure that the age or even the situation is so important here. A thirteen-year-old girl is quite capable of feeling desire, is she not? After all, your mother was betrothed, I seem to remember you saying, at seventeen.”

  “You have a good memory for facts that are useful to you,” she says angrily.

  He laughs a little at that. He says it is not as good as it used to be when he was very young and had a photographic memory that enabled him to pass his medical exams quite easily. “Even very young children have strong desires, after all,” the doctor says quite reasonably.

  “It is true I loved Father passionately as a child; I would have given my life for him, and that is why I am so angry with him now,” she says. But then, she surprises herself with her own words. She says, “If you really do want to hear the truth, as you keep saying you do, the person I was really in love with at that time, really in love with, was not Herr Z. at all, as you keep insisting, but rather his wife, Pippina”—she says her name with pleasure.

  There is silence in the doctor’s room after this remark, which rather pleases her. This, he was perhaps not expecting.

  Yet she sees Pippina’s dark blue eyes, the thick blond hair worn in soft ringlets around her oval-shaped face, the bright-red kimono with its embroidered flowers that she often wore in her bedroom, the silk clinging to her soft, welcoming body, the gentle way her head tilts a little to one side, like a Renaissance painting of the Madonna, like a Raphael.

  She wonders if Pippina has lain on this silky carpet where she lies now, so miserably.

  She tells him that when she was fourteen, she had gone on summer holiday alone with the Z.’s to the Austrian Tyrol. It was a simple place in the mountains, a small town, where they had rented a tiny house, but it seemed lovely to her as she was there with Pippina. “Herr Z. was often absent, and Pippina and I were alone with the children, you see. I loved everything about the place: all the little shops because we went shopping there together, the tiny dark wine stores with their straw-covered brick steps, going down into the cellars, even the grocery shops, the fruit stores with the bright fruit piled up outside, the pharmacy where we went to buy Clara’s medicine.

  “Probably they invited me on my own so that I could help with the children, particularly Clara, who was sick,” she tells him.

  What drew her at first to Pippina that summer was her tenderness with her own children: she was always teaching the little girl, reading to her in her soft, sweet Italian voice or teaching her to read, or letting the little boy clamber up into her lap to play some game with her. And she loved to watch her sew in the evenings, her little hands moving so cleverly. She would help her sort out the skeins of bright silk, or pick up her scissors if she dropped them, or thread her needle if she had difficulty. All Pippina’s movements seemed so elegant, elegant, and also efficient, adroit.

  She and Pippina had slept at the top of the house in a room under the eaves, in a double bed together with the children in their cots. Indeed, Clara, who was so often ill, her heart fluttering wildly like a little bird in her chest, trying to escape, she would say, sometimes climbed up and slept between them if she woke in the night. Together they would tend to her, lying beside her in the darkened room, telling stories.

  “I would lie there in the half dark. I could see nothing but Pippina’s two large, dark eyes. I felt her gaze was penetrating to my very soul. I loved her then without any sort of reservation, despite what I knew was happening with Father and with her husband. Indeed, in some ways I put up with it all, and kept silent, just because of her. I so wanted her to be happy. I loved everything around her. Little Clara would lie with her head in her mother’s lap and her legs across my knees, while her mother told her stories, and I felt that my whole body was part of her mother’s through the child’s body. I wanted to cover the mother’s forehead with the shower of kisses I gave the little girl’s knees, her little feet, her toes. I longed to dedicate myself to the little sick girl, to make her well, and to the mother, indeed, in a way, to the whole family. I felt I would do anything for her, for them.

  “Pippina knows wonderfully strange Italian folk stories, like the one about a half bird half man,” she tells the doctor. “She would sing as well in such a sweet voice. She knows lots of the well-known Italian arias from operas like Don Giovanni or Rigoletto. Caro nome, she would sing, and I would lie in the half dark beside her and listen with such pleasure.

  “Sometimes she would weep. I knew she was so unhappy about many things: her child’s illness above all, of course, which is serious, and also I knew she was unhappy with her husband, who betrayed her constantly, as he had tried to betray her with me, and that, too, formed a bond between us, a sort of complicity, though we never spoke of it. Sometimes, too, we would play cards together—she is good at card games—such a clever woman who takes an interest in books like I do, just the blue night-light lit, sitting by the bed while Clara slept.”

  They would play the honeymoon bridge that would one day be so useful to them both and provide a means of making a living.

  Herr Z., when he was there, slept alone in a room at the end of the corridor on the pretext that he needed to work, but the truth was, Pippina had banished him from her bed, so as to be free of his unwanted caresses.

  “Like Mother with Father, Pippina seemed to have no desire for Hans, who, I suspect, is probably sick like Father. Perhaps you cured him of his disease, too?”

  Pippina said she had taken her into her room to help with the children but she understood it was so they could be more intimate, and she was thrilled.

  “We would whisper together in the muffled light, lying beside Clara, who would sometimes moan softly in her disturbed sleep, poor little girl. We read so many books together and discussed them—plays like Romeo and Juliet or Midsummer Night’s Dream, which we read aloud to the children. We would exaggerate and make the children laugh. Or we did Twelfth Night with Pippina sometimes playing the pompous Mercurio, and sometimes myself. We read love poetry by Goethe or Novalis,” she says.

  She came to adore Pippina—“I loved her unconditionally. I wanted to shine for her. I made up fantasies where I saved her from dangerous situations: pirates, shipwrecks, battles, and she thanked me with her kisses. Or I played the piano at some grand and imaginary concert and she applauded loudly. She sat radiant in the audience and came rushing up at the end onto the stage with flowers and kissed me and said, ‘That was beautiful!’

  “She held my hand in the night and told me I was such a kind, warmhearted, and sensitive child, and she didn’t know what she would do without me. Sometimes she called me “carissima.” She made me laugh, and gave me so many presents: some of the most wonderful big hats and fine dresses that she made herself—I’m wearing one of her dresses today,” she tells the doctor, spreading out her skirt on the couch. ‘You take it, darling, it looks much better on you,’ she would say.

  “Once, just once—but I’ll never forget it—one night she reached across the bed and took me into her arms and played the lover, holding me close and kissing me, and touching my new breasts,” she tells the doctor. “She told me she preferred to be beside me because I was so soft and sweet and gentle, because I was so loving with her little girl, her children, rather than her husband who was brusque and boorish. But, in the end, it was all a sham. A sham!” she says.

  “One morning I caught a
glimpse of Pippina as she came from her bath. She was naked, her beautiful white body shimmering in the sunlight, her hair falling down like a golden rope, as she leaned forward to pick up the towel she had dropped. She did not seem embarrassed at all and took her time.

  “When she saw me staring at her she just shrugged and smiled and said, ‘Nothing you haven’t seen before.’ Which wasn’t true. I had never seen anything so beautiful. A woman’s body is always much more beautiful than a man’s, isn’t it?” she asks the doctor, who does not deny it.

  “We spoke of things I could never have spoken of with Mother, who cares only about the household chores or going to spas with old sick people, and never discussing what is in her heart.

  “I opened up my heart to Pippina. I told her my secrets, though I never mentioned what her husband had done to me, as I was afraid that might hurt her. But I told her about the French fräulein and the forbidden books she gave me to read, though I promised I wouldn’t, and how I had read Mantegazza’s The Physiology of Love. We had endless discussions about the ridiculous differences between men and women and how they are viewed here in Viennese society, the way ‘decent’ women are supposed to cover themselves up even in the bath, and are not even allowed to ride bicycles, while the men are out roaming the streets looking for prostitutes in the shady parts of the town, where they throng half-naked, giving and getting, the poor things, so many awful diseases.

  “How could she have repeated all these things I had confided to her in privacy to her husband, so that he could use them against me, with Father. How could she have been so false?” she says.