The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Read online

  “Look,” said Viggi Brahe, “it’s Helle.” Anders lifted what had once been the proud shield of his face, and whereas before he’d deployed it in her presence as if he were Perseus confronting the Gorgon, now his face reflected back nothing. Did she feel sympathy? Panic or grief? Mainly, Helle said, what she wanted to do was run. “Who?” asked Anders. How odd, she thought, that his earlobes would have gotten longer, and that he should be ending his days in the company of a man he’d once scorned. “Helle,” Viggi Brahe repeated. “Your daughter.”

  “Oh,” said Anders, staring at a pile of rope in the corner. “Well, whoever you are, you’ve certainly succeeded in making a spectacle out of yourself.” Then he looked her in the eye and smiled. When she asked if he’d liked the opera, his smile widened. “You know perfectly well I’ve never liked fish,” he said, exposing a mouthful of stunningly white false teeth.

  “Spectacle” was the key word, for as Helle explained—despite Aksel Bram’s contention that the “monstrous creatures on Spark’s wave provided a suitable visual counterpart to the score, each measure of which was, itself, a monstrosity,” and despite Bram’s undeniable status as Copenhagen’s most powerful and influential critic—Lahloo became a popular success because both the opera and its composer satisfied the audience’s taste for the spectacular. Following the war, Helle said, the tiresome god Progress had so infected the hearts and minds of her fellow Danes that they would embrace anything as long as it implied forward motion. And if they might not have shared Spark’s understanding of her artistic vision, they obviously adored the evidence Lahloo provided of money and technology at work, just as they were titillated by the fact that the opera had been written by a woman masquerading as a man. “Den mystiske pige!” they called her—“that girl of mystery!” “Hvem er den œgte Helle Ten Brix?” everyone wanted to know. “Who is the real Helle Ten Brix?”

  In this way Helle managed to secure her position as one of Rasmus Rundgren’s protégées; between September 24, 1925, when Lahloo was first performed, and March 7, 1944, when she left Denmark behind forever, all of her composed work premiered under his direction on the stage of the Royal Theater. Four operas date to her Copenhagen period: Despina Unmasked (1928), The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep (1931), Waves (1935), and The Heroine (1943), in addition to a variety of pieces in other forms, including Innocence, a song cycle for alto voice based on the poetry of Sappho; numerous concerti, of which the Piano Concerto in D minor is the most frequently performed; and the Resistance Requiem.

  Of course I studied those four operas for clues to help me with The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf. But with the exception of Despina Unmasked, they were faithful to the texts on which they’d been based, and therefore to the endings the authors provided, so I found them less helpful than, for example, Fuglespil—a fifth opera begun in that period, although left incomplete until 1953. Despina Unmasked is a one-act opera, its central character “stolen” from Mozart’s Così fan tutte, in which Despina is lady’s maid to the two sisters, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, around whose maligned fidelity that opera’s plot revolves. According to Helle, however, Mozart’s Despina was a glorious woman, clearly deserving of an opera of her own; an expert in the art of deception, she not only disguises herself as a doctor and a notary but also recognizes romantic love itself as a form of disguise. Thus Helle’s Despina makes her first appearance as a maid, undergoes a series of unmaskings, each one revolving around a new romantic attachment, until at the opera’s conclusion she reveals herself in her true form: a sleek, black creature, moist and clearly dangerous—a Fury, in fact, the Bog Queen’s prototype. The music in Despina Unmasked is an homage to Mozart—the final aria, “So do we all,” is obviously parodic—and sublime, though more often performed in concert, since the opera as a whole is considered too bleak to draw an audience. Like Bluebeard’s Castle, said one critic, except that Bluebeard is a woman, and it’s easier on the ears.

  Whereas The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep, the only opera Helle composed for children, is frequently staged, despite its difficult atonality. Andersen’s story provided the plot, Daisy’s parlor the inspiration: a story of love between a porcelain chimney sweep and a porcelain shepherdess, the opera can be seen as an indictment of that flaw in the Danish character, the need to make things hyggelige, snug and homelike, which so infuriated Helle. A repressed landscape, everything flat and neat, clipped and polished. Andersen, Helle said, had been similarly infuriated, which explained his tendency to provide the objects in his stories with the gift of speech. It was as if beneath the bland, tidy surface of Denmark there seethed an angry river of language, looking for a way out; and since the mouths of Danish men and women refused to release such language, it had to escape through less guarded, inanimate orifices. A menacing view of the world, really. Even though the ending seems happy, obviously the lovers’ happiness doesn’t extend forever into the future. Indeed, the finale takes place when the two figures shatter, and while the pieces are very beautiful—not unlike the shimmering cloud of moths released from the Lindworm’s wound at the end of Det omflakkende Møl—there is no hope that even the most skilled application of glue and rivets could ever rejoin them.

  Based on Virginia Woolf’s novel, Waves also interests itself in the revelatory possibilities of language, and in this case Helle created parodies of six musical styles for the six separate voices, limiting the encompassing atonality of Sweep to the book’s italicized sections. Each of these styles is suggested by the character’s initial speech: for example, Bernard’s “I see a ring hanging above me; it quivers and hangs in a loop of light” suggests the impressionist style of Debussy; Susan’s “I see a slab of yellow spreading away until it meets a purple stripe” suggests Bach, in particular the great organ preludes; Rhoda’s “I hear a sound, cheep, chirp, cheep, chirp, going up and down” suggests Mozart’s piano sonatas. As in Woolf’s novel, each of the voices narrates its own version of what will emerge as a comprehensive story involving all of them; and because it’s the nature of music to permit many voices to speak simultaneously, Helle was able to pile up voices in duets, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets. The opera ends, as does the novel, with Bernard’s cry of “O Death!”—followed by an extended atonal passage representing the waves breaking on the shore.

  Of these four operas, only the last, The Heroine, makes overt the correlation between events—specifically, the invasion of Denmark and the romance with Maeve Merrow—and their effect on Helle’s life. The source was Isak Dinesen’s short story of the same name, published in Denmark in 1942, in which a young Englishman’s wartime encounter with a beautiful and fiercely proud young woman—a woman “like a lioness in a coat of arms”—completely alters his perception of reality. Finally, years later, she provides him with a corrected version of the truth, one which honors human weakness in the face of those twin deities Eros and Thanatos. The opera is faithful to the text, its musical structure driven not by character but by plot: there are no memorable arias in The Heroine, no hauntingly individual voices. Event presides over a relentlessly constructed network of sound; you almost have the sensation, listening to The Heroine, that it is nothing more than a single, endlessly complex, and essentially claustrophobic measure.

  If Helle expected me to come to terms with Inger’s and the Don’s enmity, what possible solution might these operas suggest which the composer would find “compatible with her intentions”? In two of them—Despina Unmasked and The Heroine—the ending is dominated by a single powerful female figure, although in the former the vision is reductive, severe; in the latter, subtle and ambiguous. Whereas Sweep and Waves imply that whatever routine struggles we experience in our lives must be understood in the context of a disintegrating universe, the minute parts of which are, ultimately, indistinguishable. Eventually, of course, in Fuglespil, Nightingale would embody these two warring possibilities, although that war’s outcome only serves to confirm the horrible strength inherent in such a dichotomy.

  Was it simply a
question of gender? Once, when Helle was playing me a recording of the Dinner Table Sextet from Waves, I asked whether she could similarly assign musical styles to all of us—to me and the twins, to Sam and Maren, to herself. Oh, she replied, maybe, but what would be the point? To do so would be to assume there was a formal integrity to what the six of us represented, and unless she was mistaken, that wasn’t the case. Besides, the men in Woolf’s novel and, by extension, in Helle’s opera, posed no real threat to the predominant, female voice of the sea. When the waves fall, when death overtakes the characters, they’re all the same. But Sam? How could I think there was any way to render someone like Sam musically? Prokofiev, if you had to—the duck in the wolf’s belly, duck and wolf and belly all wrapped into one. Childish music, seemingly pleasant, annoyingly sentimental. As long as Sam’s around, Helle said, the waves won’t fall; or if they do fall around here, she added coldly, only one person will get it. A threat? I asked, and she shook her head. No, Frances darling, she said; a prediction.

  Meanwhile, undeterred, I continued my affair. If anything, the minute Helle was released from the hospital, Sam and I began seeing each other more frequently, becoming less cautious in our choice of trysting places. The new configuration of alliances—Ruby and William at the Blackburns’, Helle and Flo in the trailer—made it occasionally possible for us to meet at my house. Ping pang pong, the pebbles would hit the window. He would have parked his car a half-mile away, driving it up an old logging road and hiding it behind a glacial erratic. The logging road skirted the back edge of the soggy area Judkins had tried to reclaim as pasture, and Sam would press his way through wild raspberry bushes and scrub poplar, stepping over mossy, crumbling lengths of deadfall, toward the pleasures of my bed. For my part, I suspect that the thought of Helle’s eye trained on us, watching us as we stood staring at each other fully clothed, as we each waited for our bodies’ wheels and pulleys to create in the feverish space between us a mechanism discrete from ourselves, a mechanism suggesting its own course of action, acted as an erotic stimulant. Sam, on the other hand, once the initial excitement of conquest was behind him, became driven instead by need, choosing like many men to present his need as passion. He could hardly get enough of me. Not just sex, but me—what Helle probably meant by duck and wolf and belly all wrapped into one. And she was right: his need was the unappeasable kind of hunger that a man with an empty place in his soul will always feel for a woman. A woman can fool herself into thinking that empty place is being filled during intercourse; a man cannot. That’s why some men devour women whole. And then how sad they become, how tender and loving toward the poor little duck quacking deep inside them.

  Although it would be a lie to suggest that this condition is limited to relationships between men and women. Or to quote Cook, in Fuglespil, “The bad eggs aren’t all men.” For although Helle was reticent to talk about the time she spent with Maeve Merrow—years which corresponded to her “Copenhagen period,” and culminated in catastrophe—from time to time something would so forcefully remind her of Maeve that it was as if, in order to go on doing whatever she’d been doing when the memory hit, she had to unburden herself. Thus it happened that one day as Helle and I were wandering down the section of the Branch Road beyond Buggy Moore’s house, two young women came cantering past us on horseback, and Helle, who’d been eagerly anticipating an afternoon in search of wild mushrooms, sat down on a rock and refused to go any farther. A bucolic sight, she said, wasn’t it? You couldn’t get more bucolic if you tried. Midsummer, the woods alive with birds and insects, girls riding horses, an old mushroom hunter and her beloved accomplice poised in the cool shadows of the trees, listening to the sound of retreating hoofbeats.

  Ah, Frances, she said, why couldn’t you assign form to your life the way you could to an opera? It would be so much easier, although without any firm knowledge about the circumstances of an ending, of course it was impossible. At least the religious disposition had the advantage of being able to acknowledge the twin portals of birth and death, both giving onto a world of pure spirit. But if you didn’t believe in God, the symmetry was less pleasing, and the potential for happiness implicit in the fact of having been born was outweighed by despair at the prospect of dying. Only the creator of such an arrangement could find its symmetry pleasing.

  You could force the issue. You could try to make things fall into place, the way they did in an opera. For instance, you could say that the start of your life had been presided over by the flaxen-haired deity of Inger, while it was dark-haired Frances who commanded its ending. You could try to see in Inger’s lack of guile, in her insistence on fairness, a useful symbol for commencement; in my dark skepticism, one more fitting for conclusion. But were you to do so, you’d be overlooking the lesson of the bog. You’d be disregarding the fact that for the artist, there was always the possibility of an alternative portal, that third door which, in fairy tales, you were never supposed to open. This was the horrible lesson of Maeve Merrow.

  Horrible, yet like so many horrible things, including most attempts at going where you weren’t supposed to, it caught you off guard by beginning on an auspicious note. Bucolic, even. Midsummer, horses—did I get the picture? A day in midsummer, the fields outside Copenhagen bright yellow with flowering rape, the sky that deep blue used by medieval painters to represent the vault of heaven. A hot, windless day, and Helle was sitting astride a tall, white gelding who continually lowered his head, pulling her down across the bony hump where the neck joined the body as he tried to grab mouthfuls of flowers. Meanwhile, several yards ahead, on a younger, livelier horse, rode Maeve Merrow, appropriately attired in jodhpurs and leather boots, a white shirt with a stickpin at the collar. From time to time she would look back over her shoulder, frowning, shouting, “Don’t let him get away with that! Remember, you’re the master.” Flies were buzzing all around them, their sustained note, Helle noticed, pitched exactly one half-tone higher than that of the grasshoppers and crickets hiding in the rape flowers, a continuo above which she could hear the squeaking of the saddle leather, the jingling of the curb chains, the clopping of hooves.

  Maeve Merrow had grown up on the west coast of Ireland and, if she was to be believed, had been hurtling over hedges and walls and streams on the back of one of her father’s mares before she took her first step. All the Merrows, according to Maeve, were long in the torso and short in the leg, which no doubt explained why they delighted the eye only when they were on horseback. A delight to the eye, Helle said. As indeed Maeve was that midsummer afternoon, the broad planes of her face lit by the sun, her carriage perfectly erect, the fluid motion of her pelvis suggesting that, at least from the waist down, the distinction between horse and woman had been erased. What you couldn’t see, watching Maeve ride, was how thoroughly the element of tyranny had informed this relationship. By fixing on the beauty of the myth, Helle said, you missed the operation of will that made myth possible.

  They finally left the rape fields behind, and the whole surface of the earth began to tilt slightly upward, no longer yellow but green, dotted here and there with squat bushes, in whose branches horned caterpillars had erected sticky, filamental tents. The caterpillars chewed away the tender parts of the leaves, avoiding the veins; once satiated, they dropped down into pools of shadow on the ground, where the birds stopped singing for a moment to pluck them up and eat them. It seemed to Helle that they’d been riding for hours, moving farther and farther from the precincts of the known world, and that the molecular composition of things beyond the crest of the hill—toward which Maeve had been leading them all afternoon—would prove inhospitable to normal life. Or maybe, she said, that was merely the way it appeared now, looking back. Of course there was no tangible boundary between the two worlds, such as Maeve claimed there was in Ireland, where you could tell that you’d crossed over because the dogs would all have red ears.

  At the top of the hill Maeve reined in her horse. How are you doing? she asked, though her blue-violet eyes in the
ir thicket of black lashes, the only glamorous feature in an otherwise plain face, were focused not on Helle but on the horizon. Do you think that’s the Øresund? she asked, pointing toward a thin sliver of water barely visible off to the east. Helle said she didn’t think so, and Maeve consulted her wristwatch. Well, suppose it was, she said, and suppose she had an appointment in Copenhagen at six; did Helle think if she rode like hell she could make it in time? No, Helle replied, smiling the shy smile of the newly elect, the one for whom the old lover was about to be stood up. A hard smile to sustain, given Maeve’s refusal to cut loose from her past; but despite Rasmus Rundgren’s pointed warning—Maeve Merrow will sleep with anything, he’d said, men, women, animals, showers of coins—in matters of the heart you always hope that you’ll prove the exception to the rule. Besides, Helle reminded me, this was her first real love affair, even though she was thirty years old, the same age I’d been when we first met on the opera house steps. An innocent, a naif! It hadn’t yet dawned on her that Maeve’s governing obsession was not with her but with the horse. Nor had she yet realized that Maeve was not primarily a singer—that her astonishing voice was nothing more than the outward expression of a will dedicated to adventuring forth on its own, heedless of the consequences.

  Which was probably why Helle misunderstood Maeve’s request that she dismount, just as she attributed the subsequent weakness in her legs to an anticipation of passion rather than the fact that her legs had been clamped for hours to a saddle. A midsummer afternoon … love on a sunny hilltop … birds eating caterpillars … the horses wandering away … who cared? Though as it turned out, what Maeve wanted was the chance to ride off by herself. Helle shouldn’t take offense, she said, but this snail’s pace was driving her crazy. A half hour at most, Maeve promised, regarding Helle as if it were she, and not her dismal mount, who was cursed with spavined hocks and a frail constitution. Thus the heedless will, in order to thrive, requires that there should be a sedentary observer, a fixed marker against which it can measure its own velocity, by which it can calculate how far it has traveled. Would this account for the religious bent we find in so many explorers? Certainly it would explain the plight of women.