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When I was very small and fidgety, my parents told me to read Grimm’s fairy tales and the fairy tales of Perrault, along with the illustrated Jesus shown in bright primary colours sitting with children on his lap, telling them all about magic, another name for miracles.
The magic of Grimm’s fairy tales was a darker and more powerful magic. Fairy tales, with their forests, castles, talking mirrors, whispering animals, their cruelty and plot holes, would become my template for understanding much about the world of adults, reality’s sly and surprising stories in which it seemed that the king and queen might be unable to live happily ever after.
There is, for example, the story of Bluebeard and many women of my generation have gone on that particular journey: the mysterious wealthy husband who goes away on business and leaves his childbride all alone in a house with one locked door. Her distant family asks questions she cannot answer: the cries of sisters and mothers echo in us like shrill warnings. Tortured by curiosity, she deceives him, steals a key and opens the door on an unwelcome darkness of abduction, murder, buried secrets.
This is a story about self-deception, the ongoing fabrication of romantic love that serves to mask an intolerable emptiness between people who must share a house and a bank account, raise children together, go on holiday together and sit side by side staring out at the pounding wild sea. The pretence of togetherness.
And if for a moment I might speak of myself in the third person, there was once a woman from the south who fell in love with a man from the north and went to live with him in his wintry landscape so different from her own country of heat and dust.
When she arrived, it was still winter up there above the snowline and the man from the north would sometimes go out in the grey dawn on ‘business matters’, warning her not to open doors or windows because the warmth in the house cost money and must not be allowed to escape. From an upstairs window she watched him walk away, his footsteps in the snow dark and visible for just a moment and then filled up again with whiteness, leaving the snow unblemished and radiant in the morning light that grew stronger and poured over the low hills.
At about the same time each morning, the postman would walk down the cul-de-sac delivering mail and he would be whistling and singing the same tune each morning, an old folk tune:
One is one / And all alone/ And ever more shall be so.
When she went downstairs, the news websites were busy with the story of the Austrian monster Josef Fritzl and the hidden cellar in which he kept his daughter and the children he forced her to bear. A prison he had created first in his mind, fantasy chambers of horror that would only later become actual. He dreamed up his underground labyrinth in all its ingenious beauty and then began to tunnel down, patient as a mole.
The house above the snowline was filled with undusted rooms, some of them locked. The woman from the south worked on her laptop, did some housework and cooked meals in the bachelor’s kitchen. She searched for extra keys and found none. When her lover came home in the evening, shaking snow from his heavy coat, she asked about the locked rooms: he said there was nothing in them and he had shut them up to save on housework. After supper they sat together in the living room while the gas fire hissed and images of Fritzl glowered from the TV screen
And then one morning he went out to meet a friend for breakfast and left his keys on the kitchen table, a large bunch of keys, some tarnished. She took the keys upstairs and opened the door on the landing and then the doors at the end of the passage.
The rooms were empty. She went over and looked at the dead flies on the sills below the shuttered windows, opened cupboard doors and looked at unused space.
She saw then what he had tried to protect her from knowing. That there was nobody home.
Jeeez…I wonder how many times I’ve left a relationship for that reason?
And how many have left me for the same reason?
Love,
Terri in Joburg
Yup, nobody home — Terri I was thinking of a poem by AR Ammons that begins ‘I had a life that did not become’ and my own house of self filled with echoes. What happens when the projections fail and we find ourselves staring into the void?
A haunting and powerful story if ever there was one, Louisey, and the twist at the end satisfying in a sad sort of way.
Elisabeth this is an allegory I found for a particular love affair that haunted me for a while, the more so as I was troubled by the unasked questions and echoes around Josef Fritzl at the time and then began to explore the way in which old fairy tales and myths often show us a portal into ways of saying what happened, what was lacking, of working with some unconscious archetype. .
Jesus damn you sure can write.
I mean, damn.
It is like standing there waiting for the archer standing in front of you to let that arrow fly, and then she does, and then you are slain.
That’s not it, either. But it approximates the feeling.
yrs-
Scott
Very kind of you Scott– at the time I was preoccupied with the ‘monstrous’, the Minotaur in his labyrinth, another kind of Bluebeard and then woke up, so to speak, to find myself in a different situation, a different kind of bleak fairy tale.