The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Page 14

  When Helle looked back at that period in her life, it was clear that the twin influences against which she railed—represented in more or less equal measure by Oswald Bingger and Daisy Huj og Hast—were manifestations of a single deity, and that deity’s name was Compromise. Of course to all outward appearances no two people could have been more dissimilar: where Daisy was luminous and graceful, Bingger was puffy and awkward; she moved seamlessly, like water, and he in jerks, like spoiled milk falling in clots from a jar. Nor could anyone accuse Daisy Huj og Hast, at least superficially, of having allied herself with the forces of reason. For most of the major decisions (whether to take a given suitor seriously, for instance), she would rely on cards, tea leaves, dice, the stars—it didn’t appear to matter which method of divination Daisy chose, so long as the result conformed to her desires. Which it always did, since Daisy understood better than anyone the power implicit in the act of interpretation. “I am to accept Hr. Lok’s gifts but not his kisses,” she would say, pointing meaningfully at a brown smear of leaves in the bottom of her teacup. No, Daisy’s similarity to Bingger resided, instead, in her attitude toward her own womanhood, an attitude based on the assumption that her ability to get what she wanted increased in direct proportion to her ability to appear soft and malleable. Gunhild, likewise, had tried to trade on those qualities, but she lacked Daisy’s subtlety, her strength of intellect, her vision. Helle would never have dreamed of trying to poison Daisy, whose pale blue eyes never blinked; she knew everything.

  Thus Helle was daily forced to sharpen her new persona against two whetstones, each of which seemed to have been designed for the sole purpose of wearing her away to a thinness verging on invisibility. Once the metal is suitably thin, it becomes pliant; you can transform a knife into a bracelet, a threat into an adornment. Besides, both Daisy and Bingger had the advantage of knowing that she was an impostor. Daisy never came right out and accused her of being a woman; instead, whenever a suitor came to call, she made sure that Helle was present to witness the force beauty exerts over all other forms of ambition. “Henning,” she would demand imperiously, “come into my room. I can’t decide which necklace to wear with this dress.” Then, leaning into the mirror, she would begin perfecting the canvas of her face, providing a prototype from which Helle might derive a working replica. Daisy knew, Helle said, that Henning’s mother had died when he was very young, and what she felt for him, if she felt anything at all, was pity. Thus in the household hierarchy Henning came to occupy a place just above that occupied by Oluf Froulund, the lowest of the low. Or perhaps Henning was at the bottom: at least Oluf Froulund understood how to capitalize on his deformity.

  Bingger, on the other hand, understood Helle’s imposture in musical rather than sexual terms. Had the subject of gender ever come up, most likely he would have encouraged Helle to ignore sex altogether, as he claimed to have done. Music, Bingger used to say, was the only suitable companion for a true musician. Bad enough to fall in love if you were a performer; but for a composer—how could the music of the spheres ever begin to penetrate the wall of babble and demands that was another human being? The one time Bingger invited Helle to his house for coffee and cake, she was surprised to discover that he had not only a parrot—a large red and green creature which talked incessantly—but also a wife, as colorless as the bird was bright. And while Frau Bingger hardly said a word, it was obvious that her silence constituted a demand of unappeasable proportions. When Helle told her that the cake was delicious, she sighed. From a bakery, Hr. Bingger snarled—the cake came from a bakery.

  Initially Helle concluded that Daisy was the kinder of the two, that in keeping her suspicions to herself she was motivated by a desire to protect, whereas Bingger—who chose a public forum for her humiliation, her infamous first encounter with solfeggio, in which she was forced to stand in front of her peers and sight-sing—was motivated by a desire to destroy. Only later would she realize that Daisy’s apparent kindness was nothing more than a means of exerting control, and that Bingger was genuinely benevolent. He knew that Helle was talented, and he knew how useless such talent could be when left to its own devices. Bingger’s pedagogy might have been old-fashioned, but he meant well. Solfeggio, the nightmare which confronts every conservatory-trained student! No matter whether you’re a student of voice or, as I was, a pianist who can’t carry a tune to save your life, you have to prove that you can read the music and assign to it the correct syllables of solmization (do, re, mi, etc.). For this exercise Bingger relied, in keeping with tradition, on the 1786 text Solfèges d’Italie; when it was Helle’s turn he had her sight-sing a piece by Caffaro, a piece which happened to be in the key of G.

  A love of analysis, an ability to subject a piece of music to the most elaborate and painstaking analytic procedures, characterizes the successful student of music theory. You have to like to count, to assign abstract symbols to equally abstract quantities, to know the circumstances under which one set of symbols takes precedence over another. In a large and sunny, brown-paneled room, where large squares of sunlight were draped like drop cloths over the four rows of wooden chairs in which nineteen other music theory students sat breathlessly hoping for disaster, Helle sight-sang the Caffaro and waited for Bingger’s response. It wasn’t what she expected. How, he asked, could this Ten Brix have stated in his application letter that he had already written an opera and a cycle of songs, yet not be able to complete an exercise even his five-year-old niece could manage, and she, God help her, as musical as a donkey? Or words to that effect. What Helle had failed to take into account was that in traditional solfeggio, whatever the tonic, it is sung as “do.” Instead of singing “so” for G, Helle should have sung “do.” A simple enough mistake, you might say; certainly no cause for despair. But the damage had been done. Students tend to regard any sign of grandiosity in their peers as license to ridicule. Thus Helle Ten Brix became Henning the Hayseed, a farm boy from the north with the hubris to claim mastery at composition.

  There was never any doubt in Helle’s mind that her early training had been inadequate. Old Clara hadn’t known the first thing about theory; and Ida, who did, had remained mute on the subject. Indeed, it was as if teaching her daughter what she needed to know would have required a greater effort than Ida was interested in expending on anyone besides herself. When you’re raised by essentially selfish parents, you learn to turn loneliness into a virtue, just as when you’re set adrift from your peers, you learn to cultivate the mystique of solitary genius. To enhance the effect, Helle took to dressing like a sailor, using Dancer for her model: a trim cap, its narrow visor set at an angle over the right eye; a sweater of dark wool; a red-and-white-striped scarf, both ends free to fly in the breeze; black woolen leggings tucked into knee-high boots. While the other students tended to gather after hours at one of several respectable cafés in the center of town, Helle frequented bars near the docks, places where the front doors never remained closed long enough to keep out the smell of pitch and fish, where cold winds blew in off the Øresund, and where, on any given night, you might find yourself sitting at a table with an Indonesian sailor who picked his teeth with a knife and tried to sell you opium.

  In those days, the soul of the Danish seaman had not yet become an object of missionary zeal. As in any population which derives its character from contention with an unreasoning force of nature, the souls of the men with whom Helle spent her time were rampant and heathen, making it an easy task for the Lutherans, when they finally moved in, to supplant one set of superstitions with another. The method of discourse in both cases was anecdotal: the sailors spun yarns; the missionaries read stories from the Bible. The lesson, ultimately, was the same. A sailor lost his hand and, with it, his gold signet ring to a shark. Years later he saw that very ring on the hand of another sailor, who claimed to have found it lodged in the baleen of a right whale killed off the Newfoundland coast. The two sailors fought for ownership of the ring, and in the course of the fight the second sailor stabbed
the first through the heart. Afterwards, whenever that second sailor shipped out, the voyage was marked by ill luck and bad weather. Eventually his shipmates cast him off onto an island, where he perished. The morality here was primitive, and hence suitable, as Bingger would’ve quickly pointed out, to opera: what triumphed was an inscrutable natural order. Among sailors, the Lutherans always won more souls with stories in which Jehovah figured prominently than with bewildering parables from the New Testament.

  Under cover of darkness, in those noisy, smoke-filled bars, Helle’s metamorphosis into Henning was so complete that, by the time she finally entered her room and inserted her body between the salty, damp sheets, she felt as if all that was left of Helle was a single black thread of disintegrative matter, not unlike the vein you have to remove from a shrimp before you can eat it. Oh, what was left of Helle may have been vibrant with potential, but it obviously required nothing less than the broad hand of inspiration, or, failing that, the small hand of another human being, to stroke the genius in it to life! Sometimes she cried herself to sleep. Some nights she couldn’t sleep at all, lying there listening to the whistling noise Oluf Froulund’s breath made as it caught on the hairs in his nose holes next door. Daisy’s clocks would strike the hours, but because she forgot to synchronize their action it seemed like nothing so definite as three o’clock, for instance, actually existed. Sometimes Helle could hear the loud rattling sound of Dancer or Kayo urinating into a chamber pot. She would get up and light a candle; she would try to work.

  By now Helle no longer relied on a piano to compose her music. Even before she’d left Krageslund, on those long, dreamy afternoons under the beech trees, she’d discovered she could hear the sounds that emerged from the note-clogged field of her mind, at first like seepage, and then in a torrent, more clearly without one. A piano had a way of imposing its own set of tonal relationships, its own peculiarly black-and-white personality, on whatever came out of it; to have relied on a piano would have made impossible the composition of Den onde Stedmoder or Sange til Inger. During the days, when she was parading her alienation up and down the conservatory’s dark brown hallways, her mind stuck in reflection on Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum, that loneliness remained a pose. Only late at night, in her closet bedroom, did it become a reality. A full orchestra worked itself into a frenzy, the strings soughing melodramatically, duplicating in their continuous ascents and descents of minor scales the tidal action of the sea, a little tame finger of which pointed past her window toward the heart of the city. Moonlight on the swells: a harp executing rapid glissandos in the higher octaves; kettledrums, coperti, their heads swathed in cloth like mummies. Helle took this down as if it were actual music, when it was nothing more than the sound of her own desperation, just one more late-night sound in Daisy’s house.

  When she finally got up the nerve to show her notation to Bingger, he dismissed it as keck, meaning audacious. Henning should limit himself to simple exercises; maybe in a month or so he’d be ready to experiment with that form of counterpoint found in the fugue. The universe could be contained in a single drop of water, so why try to describe an entire ocean? Helle could tell, however, that Bingger had decided to accord her the respect he saved for only his most serious students. He gave her a key to a private practice room, which she reached by climbing six sets of stairs, each set narrower and darker than the one before it, a room about the same size as the one at Daisy’s. Similarly, the practice room had one small window and the same unpainted, grayish plaster walls. Instead of a bed, however, Helle’s room at the conservatory was equipped with an upright piano, and when she stood at the window she could see a family of storks nesting on a nearby slate rooftop, instead of a forest of masts rising from the harbor. Also, she could lock the door. “Dux et comes,” Bingger would yell at her, whenever he saw her headed for the staircase, notebook in hand—leader and follower. Of course what he was encouraging Helle to remember was not only the tonal relationship between the parts of a fugue but the rules governing their relationship as well.

  II

  BUT ISN’T THIS always the problem: you never really know, do you, who or what has the upper hand. And even when you think you’ve managed to slip free of the world’s persistent grip, choosing instead to make worlds of your own, the next thing you know the very creatures you’ve given life to are standing up on their own hind legs, waving their little fists in your face. God had this problem, Helle said, which was why he no longer existed. The hierarchy at the conservatory might seem clear enough, but that clarity was an illusion. Better instead to take a ship for your model. At least on board a ship the situation tended to change according to circumstance. You’d begin by granting the captain absolute power, but the minute the weather threw you off course and the food threatened to run out, it was the cook’s favor you had to court. Displays of friendship among the crew would be limited to telling stories, rolling dice, endless games of snip-snap-snorem. Hadn’t sailors been known to kill for a single cupful of wormy beans, boiled down to a glutinous pottage?

  This mood of watchful ambivalence, of sly caution, seems to have been especially strong in Helle during what Kerman refers to as her “Copenhagen period”—when she chose an opium clipper as the setting for her first fully realized opera, when she came up with one of her greatest inventions: the singing figurehead, Lahloo. Supposedly mentioned in an eighteenth-century manuscript—which Helle claimed had caught her eye because it provided yet one more example of the essentially intractable nature of all artifacts, and which I was never able to locate, due no doubt to the fact that it was pure fabrication—this figurehead had been commissioned by Captain Harry Tuck, and was intended to represent his dead fiancée, the Lady Isabel, who turned out to be more animate and seductive in effigy than she’d ever been in life. Her delicate, lobeless ears were folded close to her head, just as an animal folds in its ears before it snarls or bites. Similarly, the grain of the wood wouldn’t permit her hair to remain bound, so instead it fell in great swooping waves from her frighteningly high temples, back and down around her naked shoulders. The dress just wouldn’t stay in place, and Harry was enchanted. The woman of his dreams! For, when you got right down to it, had he ever really loved the essentially boring Isabel?

  At first the figurehead was nothing more than a single high note during the Act One finale of Don Giovanni—the very note which Helle told me about on the afternoon of Ruby and Flo’s ninth birthday party. She originally heard it one night in the winter of 1915, as she was walking home from the Royal Theater, where she’d attended a production of that opera memorable not only for the presence in it of Feodor Chaliapin, who was on a police blacklist in his native Russia, but also because the role of Zerlina was sung by the as yet unheard-of Maeve Merrow. In the Royal Theater’s production the scream was left unvoiced. The onstage orchestra, having abandoned the sweet melodic line of the minuet, began its rapid ascent in a series of inversions on the G-major triad, as the Don attempted to complete his seduction. Helle could hear it coming, that high sound of pure outrage, and then the key shifted ominously; the expected note was replaced by an A-flat—“Gente, aiuto, aiuto, gente!” All hell broke loose; lightning flashed; Zerlina escaped into the less exciting arms of her new husband, Masetto.

  Oh, she was charming, Maeve Merrow, as antic and bright-eyed as anyone could hope for in a soubrette, although her voice was already too unbridled and histrionic, more that of the dramatic soprano she was to become. And though the Don’s final descent into hell was handled with customary bravado by Chaliapin, Helle remained unmoved. She didn’t realize it at the time, but she was instead getting ready to hear the first chord of The Harrowing of Lahloo.

  How happy Helle was! All around her men and women were assuming their winter coats of dark fur and light fur; the lobby was filled with the combined smells of camphor and rosewater and tobacco and then, suddenly, someone opened the huge front doors and those limited human smells were vanquished by the smell of snow. For it had been snowing the wh
ole time they’d been inside the theater: another drama had been preparing itself behind their backs, and this time they had no choice but to participate, to wander out into that blue theatrical light where every small gesture—a jeweled wrist lifted in farewell, a pocket watch consulted, a swift embrace, even a sneeze—was suggestive, operatic. Cabs arrived and departed, and in their headlamps each falling snowflake revealed its capacity to contain all the colors of the spectrum, to dazzle briefly before it hit the ground. A man drew a piece of paper from his pocket, looked at it, and sighed; a woman flung a snowball at her escort’s head. Was this comedy or tragedy? Mozart understood the difficulty of making such distinctions, which is why the critics continue to disagree in their interpretation of the Don’s damnation.

  Helle was at once happy and edgy. If she were to go home, Daisy would be sitting in the parlor with her latest suitor, and she’d be forced to play the piano, to drink a cup of Dutch cocoa, to listen to more talk about Admiral Jellicoe’s courage in the face of Admiral Scheer’s audacity (despite the fact that history tells us the former had the appearance of a “frightened tapir”), as, all the while, a pair of porcelain spaniels regarded her with sorrowful approbation. Most of the theatergoers had disappeared by now, into cabs or one of the brightly lit cafés that ringed Kongens Nytorv. The air was mild and soft, as it sometimes is after a heavy, rapid snowfall, and she could understand the impulse said to overtake arctic explorers, to curl up in a snowdrift, your final dream lodged forever within the frozen folds of the brain. Eventually a door on the west wall of the theater swung open and out came Chaliapin, his huge body encased in an ankle-length coat of caracul; behind him was the smaller figure of Maeve Merrow, her auburn hair briefly visible before she drew up the hood of her black velvet cloak. “Là ci darem la mano,” sang Chaliapin, but when Maeve Merrow pulled back, laughing, Helle could see the expression on her face in the snow-flecked cone of yellow light cast by a gas lamp, and it was anything but flirtatious. Later she heard from Dancer that the two of them had shown up well after midnight at one of the taverns near the docks, and that while Chaliapin had proceeded to consume a bottle of akvavit, the young woman had snuck away in the company of a sailor from the Argentine.