Milking the Moon (40 page)

She came again to lunch. Then she was a little bit more loose. The next time I met her by chance in a bookshop. There were two tough English ladies who had a bookshop in Rome. I mean tough. That cigarette hanging, you know, and that short hair and that sweater. I called them the dragons. Their name was Doggin or something, but I called them the dragons. Anyway, I ran into Ingeborg there, and she was more relaxed, so I took her to lunch at this little place around the corner and up the street from the bookshop. I guess she finally realized that I was just something that got loose from Alabama. We became great friends.

Much later she came and settled in Rome for a while. And when she came back, she was a very smart lady. She’d had this book published, which was a big success, and she was taken up by the German intelligentsia. So she was very smartly dressed. Her hair had been reddened more, and she was wearing a perfect lipstick. I don’t know if she’d been in the sun or something, but she looked different and was a little more sure of herself. She had this big crush on Hans Werner Henze, the composer. He adored Ingeborg, but he has a lot of dancing boys in attendance. You know.

Anyway, we had a dinner one night. She said, “Now I have brought Bitsy with me from Klagenfurt.” I said, “Who is that?” “Oh,” she said, “we have been friends for a long time. Now I want you to bring Coco.” So I went, and there was a table for four set. She was cooking up something. She said, “Now put Coco right there.” And she went and got Bitsy. It was her teddy bear. And she was saying to Bitsy, “Now don’t you start eating until I tell you because we have to say grace.” She said, “Is yours table trained?” I said, “Oh yes, Coco is table trained.” And she would say, “Now, does Coco want some of this?” Finally I got into the spirit. We did this whole evening with the children. She never dropped it. She held up Bitsy and waved her paw when I was taking Coco home.

It was while I was in Madrid that Ingeborg, reading late at night and sipping her gin, set herself on fire with a cigarette—she smoked like a fiend. She was wearing some sort of nylon or something and puff! She lasted in the hospital in intensive care for a month and then died. I just couldn’t believe it. I tried to go to the hospital and see her, but there was no way. They wouldn’t let you near her. I never knew if she got what I left for her or not. I never knew how out of it she was those last weeks in hospital. So that’s the story of Ingeborg.

*

Now as I said, the German composer Hans Werner Henze was a friend of Ingeborg Bachmann’s. I went to Naples to see her once and met him, and we had a lot to laugh about. Afterwards we became friends. I liked his music so much. It was modern, but it was not so modern that it put your teeth on edge. It had melody. It was like Aaron Copland, taken slightly a bit further into an acid quality. But I loved it. He was looking for a libretto, and he liked my
Monkey Poems,
so he asked me to write him a libretto. I started one about the town of Sybaris, from which we have the word
sybarite.
These are the people who got up at noon and who slept on mattresses of dried rose petals. Who taught their horses to dance a number of different steps to their favorite music. Who had everything: good food and good wine and love, love, love. Then there were battles with the more puritan tribes from the mountains. The spies learned of the tunes that the Sybarites played for the horses. So in the big meeting on the battlefield, the invaders got their musicians to play these tunes, and the horses started dancing rather than charging, so the Sybarites lost and the city was captured. I thought that was a theme for an opera. And naturally with a Sybarite princess and a little mountain boy who loved each other, like Romeo and Juliet. And how he tried to warn her, but she ran away, and when she heard the city was destroyed, she jumped off a cliff. He finds her body floating in the water in the last scene. Curtain. But I didn’t want horses onstage. What a mess that can be. You know, in
Aida
there’s always a moment when some horse forgets. Let’s not have any animals onstage, thank you.

Anyway, I was writing that when I came down with a tropical virus and had to go in hospital. So then Hans Werner Henze got Ingeborg to do a libretto, and she chose a German tale of the nineteenth century about an Englishman who goes to this little town and he has his monkey with him. I sort of gave some hints. That’s why there’s a black cook from Mon Louis Island who sings my grandmother’s ginger balls recipe in one scene.

I really wish I could have written my libretto, but I did appear in the gala Christmas production at the Rome opera of Ingeborg’s
The Young Milord
instead; I created the part of the Englishman. The monkey was played by a ballet dancer, a tenor, and an acrobat. I was onstage for five acts; had to change in the wings. My role was all in pantomime. There were no lines to learn. Nothing to do but have fun. The greatest compliment I ever had, which really humbled and thrilled me—the wife of the director of the Rome opera said to me at a party afterwards, “Eugene, you know something strange?” She said, “I had a little chill about halfway through the opera.” I said, “Was there a draft in your box?” “No,” she said. “I went all that way before I realized you didn’t sing or say anything. But I knew what you were talking about.” So I thought, That’s my diploma in the pantomime department. There were eight performances and a matinee on Sunday. Then I did the English translation, which was performed at Lincoln Center in New York.

Now, I got that tropical virus because I went once to Positano, where I had done a show of Lillian Whitteker’s paintings. I had been told, “Don’t drink the water,” because they haven’t changed the filter system in three years and it was supposed to be changed every six months. “Only drink bottled water.” When I went into this little auberge, I ordered bottled water. It never came, it never came, it never came. I was so thirsty that I was about to die, so I turned on the faucet and let the cold water run forever, and I drank a full glass. The next day I started having this runny nose and strange headache, and when I got back from Positano, I had to go straight to bed. Then, I couldn’t walk. I don’t have things like that; it’s not my style. But I was in the hospital two weeks so they could try and get the spine unparalyzed. They wanted to operate for a slipped disc, which they thought I had. Then the voice that sometimes speaks clearly to me, the monkey voice that I’ve tried to conjure all my life, said to me, “Don’t be operated. Don’t have the knife.” Then this Dr. Heller, the famous surgeon from Milwaukee or something who doesn’t like to operate unless necessary, was there for the summer courses with some famous sculptor in Rome. He came to call on me in the hospital and said, “I’d like to see your blood tests. I’d be very careful about being operated on.” Well, that just corroborated it.

So finally I said to my dear friend Paul Wolfe, the harpsichordist, who came every day, “Couldn’t you bring a board and get me out of here?” because I couldn’t walk. And he said, “Well, I’ve got the harpsichord case lid, the lid of the crate the harpsichord travels in.” He said, “I’ll get three other guys, and we’ll come and get you out.” Then I bribed the Indo-Chinese nurses with Tabasco. I knew they loved Tabasco but couldn’t get it from the shops. So I sent a friend to the American embassy commissary to get some, and I gave it to those nurses. And I said, “Now I want to get out that laundry door on Sunday afternoon when all the doctors are away.” The Indo-Chinese nurses were glad to do it for Tabasco. So Paul Wolfe and three others carried me out on a harpsichord lid. There was a boy at each corner, and they just hauled me out. I got home and got some Jim Beam right away.

This American doctor finally saw my X rays and blood tests. What I had was a tropical fever called the Iceland virus which paralyzes the muscles that hold the spine. And if you are cut when those muscles are in spasm, you are dead. I would have died. It was identified by German and American doctors only after there was an epidemic of it in Iceland brought by sailors on some boat from the Mediterranean who obviously picked it up from North Africa. You have a high fever at first and this pain in the lower spine, and the muscles of the lower spine tighten. Then you have it a year later in a milder form, and a year after that it’s almost unnoticed. The doctor said, “What you want is gallons of liquids.” I said, “Is it all right if I put a little water in my Jim Beam?” He said, “Just take it easy for a while. It’ll go away.”

That’s what happened. There was one night I got drunk enough—I drank a whole bottle of Jim Beam, and I crawled out of bed. I was wearing this steel corset that they’d put me in in hospital. I got loose from that, and I threw it over the balcony into the Corso Vittorio. I filled the tub with hot water and climbed into the tub and soaked. That was it. A year later, sure enough, I had a slight flu and a backache for three days. I was looking for it for a third year, but I didn’t notice anything.

The funny part about being in a Rome hospital: I could not, being born and raised a Catholic, I could not let a nun in white with horn-rimmed spectacles shove a suppository up my rectum. I could not. Cultural history forbade it. I said, “Oh, Sister, put it there on my bedside table. I’ll do it.” Well, they didn’t tell me you were supposed to take the tinfoil off. So I had a form of constipation after a few days. The doctor came and we talked and he said, “The diet is very carefully chosen. You certainly drink plenty of liquids, and we let you have your bourbon every evening. I don’t understand this.” After we talked a while, he finally realized and he laughed and said, “Well, what you need is what we call a depth charge.” He brought back this foaming stuff which tasted like that citrate of magnesia or something I’d taken as a child. Stinky stuff. And finally I gave birth to a little modern sculpture made of tinfoil. It looked like a little man, so I called it “Tear Ass Tummy.” I guess the moral lesson of that is: No matter what hospital, somebody who knows should insert the suppository. Oh, Lord.

*

For the tenth-anniversary number of
Botteghe Oscure,
I wrote a lot of people that we hadn’t heard from, like Alice B. Toklas; like Dorothy Strachey Bussy, sister of Lytton Strachey; like Isak Dinesen. Of course, I had taken
Seven Gothic Tales
in my barracks bag through the war. And I loved them, especially the story called “The Monkey,” about the unpredictability of people and fate. I had carried the seventeenth-century classical Chinese novel
Monkey,
translated to English by Sir Arthur Waley, and
Seven Gothic Tales
by Isak Dinesen. Those were the two books in my barracks bag which I reread several times, over and over. I had a lot of other books, but those two went through the war with me. They were a great influence on my life. The minute the war in Europe was finished, I sent Isak Dinesen seeds of a new morning glory called Scarlett O’Hara and some Guerlain soap, as I did to the poet Miss Pitter in England and as I did to the lady who wrote under the name of Olivia, Dorothy Strachey Bussy. Thinking of those ladies of style and elegance stuck in war zones, I sent them all garden seeds and French soap. And then I sent a copy of my
Monkey Poems
to Isak Dinesen. I’ve forgotten how I got it to her. I think I sent it care of the American embassy in Copenhagen. There was never any reply. But then all those thousands of years later, I was writing all those people and said, “We’d love it if you have something that you would care to submit for the tenth-anniversary edition of
Botteghe Oscure.
It’s going to be a delightful number. We’re having a lot of young writers who’ve never been published, and we’d like to hear from people we haven’t heard from in a while.” The princess loved to publish work by famous older writers beside the work of younger, unknown writers. She always had everything from children to dodderers. Dorothy Strachey Bussy wrote back and said, “How kind of you. The only thing I write nowadays are laundry lists.” And then Isak Dinesen wrote back saying, “What a thrill. What a delight. Your letter reached me the day I came out of hospital. And pleased me very much. Yes, I have a story I’ve been working on called ‘The Country Tale.’ I will send it along. I have not been in Rome since 1911.” Blah, blah, blah. “If I came to Rome, would somebody show me a good time?” I wrote back and said, “Send ‘The Country Tale.’” And I said, “Oh, yes, someone will show you a good time.” It was the first time Isak Dinesen had published in ten years.

Three or four months after, she did come to Rome, and I met her at the
airport with this apple-cheeked secretary, Clara Svendsen. I had never seen a photograph of her. They didn’t exist. There was a painting of the back of a woman’s head that was repeated three times in a Book of the Month Club thing saying “Karen Blixen, Isak Dinesen, Pierre Andrezel. Who is which? Who is he or she?” I didn’t know what I was looking for. Then I saw this thing in a bearskin coat in the summertime. Tiny lady, but a bearskin coat to the ground in summer in Rome and this hat. It had a brim she had to look out from under. And these eyes exactly like the monkey that’s the frontispiece of
Monkey Poems.
Black, black eyes, mascara, and this little apple-cheeked secretary standing there with her. A tablespoon of mascara: plop, plop, and then took the handle and made a little hole to see out of. It’s that Arabic stuff; she called it kohl. I forget what it’s made from—charcoal paste and camel fat or something. But it was the real thing. I loved it. I rushed up to her and I said, “Baroness Blixen, welcome to Rome.” She said, “And how did you know it was I?” I mean, who else would it be? That bearskin coat and that hat. I adored her immediately. We just sort of took to each other. Monkey and cat, cat and monkey. She quoted my monkey poem, the one that says, “We’ve eaten all the ripened heart of life /And made a luscious pickle of the rind.” She knew it by heart, and she was reciting it to me at the airport. That was her greeting to me. She is one of the few people who really made my knees tremble, because she played the part so well. When she spoke, she cast her head back and she had this way of speaking slowly and emphasizing every word so you found all of yourself listening. She was frail and fragile, because she’d been operated on for this brain tumor and gone down to nothing. And in Denmark I met the doctor who had done the operation. He said, “Oh, Tanya Blixen has done many clever things in her life. But the cleverest thing she’s ever done is survive my operation.” But she was exuberant, a jolly soul. She was a monkey. She was totally a monkey. And the secretary/companion was a pussycat. When I saw those two at the airport, I knew it was my material.