The Asylum of Dr. Caligari Page 2

  According to a map posted in the train station, the center of town was only three kilometers away, and so despite my burden of luggage I decided against hiring a private conveyance, and within the hour I stood before a charming hostelry called Das Blaue Einhorn—the Blue Unicorn. After securing my lodgings and receiving the key, I asked the clerk to arrange my transport to Träumenchen the following morning, whereupon his face acquired an expression of supreme dismay. When I asked what was wrong, he attempted to assume a nonchalant demeanor, then told me, in broken English, that if I was determined to work for Caligari, a hired car would be waiting for me at ten o’clock.

  I ascended to my chamber, deposited my luggage beside the world-weary mattress, and, upon returning to street level, entered the dining room, where I ordered sauerbraten and a tankard of pilsner. Shortly after my meal arrived, a florid man sidled unbidden into my booth, assumed the opposite bench, and introduced himself as Herr Janowitz, the proprietor.

  “Please sit down,” I said in a sardonic tone.

  “Sie sind also geschäftlich . . . I understand you have business at the asylum,” said Janowitz.

  “I’m the new painting master. Herr Direktor likes to supplement his methods—”

  “As, yes, the famous Caligari system.”

  “With art therapy. I’ve heard his techniques are quite efficacious.”

  “Frequently an entire family will stay here prior to leaving a relation at Träumenchen, which means I’ve observed many a patient firsthand. I particularly remember a catatonic so severely afflicted it took three nurses to feed her. She returned from the asylum completely cured and eager to study modern dance.”

  “For a second I imagined you were about to warn me away from the place.”

  “Then there was the deluded young man who fancied himself Jack the Ripper. After his stay at Träumenchen, he became a tailor, sewing pieces of fabric together to make women’s gowns.”

  “My employer sounds like a miracle worker,” I said.

  “A miracle worker but also, if the gossip is correct, a sorcerer,” said Janowitz.

  “This is the twentieth century.”

  “Not for people who choose to live in the Renaissance. It is rumored that Caligari dabbles in alchemy and occasionally raises the dead.”

  “At some point in his career, I imagine, anyone who heals by unorthodox techniques is subjected to slander.”

  “Did you know you had a predecessor? Werner Slevoght from Bremen?”

  “Let me guess. He went to work at the asylum and was never heard from again. Really, mein Herr, this is all too banal.”

  “No, he went to work at the asylum, and two months later Caligari arranged for his conscription into the German Imperial Army. The last time I saw Slevoght, just before he marched off with the Sixth Corps, he told me, ‘The magician must be stopped.’ I hope I haven’t spoiled your appetite.”

  “Not at all, but if our conversation continues, my dinner will get cold.”

  “You have no belief in sorcery?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “Neither do I. What I fear are people who lack the good taste to disbelieve in sorcery and thereby end up practicing it. Enjoy your supper, Mr. Wyndham.”

  Although Herr Janowitz’s warning about metaphysical anomalies at the asylum seemed ludicrous to me, like the rant of a decadent aesthete in a Huysmans novel, I awoke the next morning in a state of low-level paranoia. I ate a hasty breakfast in the hostelry dining room. The promised motorcar, a Daimler, was waiting for me, driven by a voluble French-speaking chauffeur who couldn’t stop lamenting his son’s decision to enlist in the Belgian Army.

  Ten minutes later, having paid the driver and collected my luggage, I approached the Moselle River, its churning current spitting flecks of foam, then crossed the footbridge to the museum. The sign on the lawn read Einritt nur mit Einladung—Admission by Invitation Only—an assertion corroborated by the chain slung across the oaken doors in a stark iron smile. Träumenchen was likewise sealed, its windows crosshatched with metal bars, its ramparts rising at least twenty feet, its main portal fitted with a high steel gate. It made sense, of course, for Caligari to have conceived the place as much along the lines of a penitentiary as a maison de santé. Obviously the inmates must not be allowed to wander away and make mischief in the town.

  A mustachioed guard inhabited the sentry box, his authority advertised by a holstered Mauser. He scanned my introductory letter from M. Derain with a gaze of quintessential suspicion, likewise the letter to Derain from Caligari’s secretary stipulating the three o’clock interview, but eventually he allowed me to enter—the massive gate encompassed a door of begrudgingly human proportions—and proceed along a narrow, brick-walled lane to a second sentry box. Here I was again treated with gratuitous incivility, the beady-eyed armed guard perusing my credentials twice before raising the saw-toothed boom barrier.

  Checkpoint number three was a cottage defaced by gingerbread decoration, beyond which a radiantly green lawn spread in prelude to a multilayered château. The grounds thronged with free-roaming inmates, some wearing costumes congruent with their delusions: Arabian sheikh, Roman senator, Joan of Arc, Jesus Christ. The present sentry—a walrus of a man with a freckled face—was the rudest yet. After a protracted interval he cranked up his intramural telephone and proclaimed my arrival to whomever was on the other end.

  Several minutes later two asylum employees appeared: a stately, stern-faced, white-coated woman with a stethoscope dangling from her neck like a pendant, her lips limned in red, and a tall, pale, cadaverous man in his late thirties, dressed all in black, his hair as dark and glossy as anthracite. To my eyes he suggested an autonomous shadow long since detached from its owner, or perhaps the Grim Reaper on his way to a ballet lesson. In impeccable English he introduced the female physician as Dr. Florence Verguin, the sanitarium’s medical director, and himself as Conrad Röhrig, private secretary to Caligari.

  I gestured toward the costumed lunatics. “Do I surmise that allowing inmates their delusions is part of their therapy?” I asked Dr. Verguin.

  “Not really,” she replied brusquely. “At Träumenchen we don’t condescend to our patients. We cure them. Keep that in mind when preparing your art lessons.”

  As Dr. Verguin bustled away, Conrad Röhrig took my belongings in hand and guided me toward the château. Entering the grand lobby, I spotted more inmates in the throes of fantasy—a buccaneer, a Virgin Mary, a harlequin juggling rubber balls—and I speculated that such theatricality would ere long acquire normalcy in my eyes. Conrad now led me along a crooked corridor hung with Gobelins landscape tapestries, until we reached a portal labeled Künstler in Residenz—Artist in Residence.

  “Your apartments,” he explained, unlocking the door.

  We passed through the foyer into a sumptuous study filled with books and appointed with famous paintings (reproductions, I assumed), among them a still life tracing to Paul Cézanne’s erotic relationship with fruit, a specimen from his celebrated Bathers sequence, and Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the despondent, gourd-headed subject standing on a bridge at sunset, palms clamped against his ears and cheeks.

  “The bathtub is capacious and the pipes reliably deliver hot water,” said Conrad, handing me the key, “but I must ask you to consume it frugally.” He gestured toward the Cézanne still life. “Do you know his boast, ‘I shall astonish Paris with an apple’?”

  Nodding, I secured the key in an escritoire. “He also said, ‘The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.’ ”

  “The kitchen staff hopes you enjoy your lunch,” said Conrad, indicating a tray on which rested a carafe of white wine, half a cold chicken, and a loaf of fresh bread. “A full breakfast will arrive each morning at seven o’clock, along with a recent edition or either Le Figaro, the Berliner Morgenpost, or the New York Herald. Naturally you will prefer the English-language paper. Dinners and midday meals are served in the refectory on the second fl
oor.”

  “How can Caligari afford so opulent a facility? Are his patients all spoiled aristocrats? Is he in fact a sorcerer?”

  “I had a notion Americans were brash and impolitic,” said Conrad. “How silly of me.”

  We followed a narrow hallway to the sitting room, a sundrenched space featuring an overstuffed divan, a paint-spattered worktable, open shelves filled with art supplies, and an easel holding a blank canvas. Caligari evidently had an aversion to ninety-degree angles, for every pane of the high casement window was a trapezium.

  “As you can see, your predecessor used this room as his private studio.” Conrad indicated an icebox as large as a steamer trunk. “If you become hungry late at night, this amenity is stocked with delicacies. I shall return shortly before your three o’clock interview with Herr Direktor. Cézanne’s remark about the carrot—was he being facetious?”

  “I think not. He also said, ‘When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.’ ”

  “One thing you’ll appreciate about Dr. Caligari is that he never confuses himself with God—at least not on Sunday,” said Conrad with a disconcerting laugh as he exited the sitting room. “As for his alleged status as a sorcerer, that rumor is certainly worth discussing, but not today. Schönen Tag.”

  Although the wine, a good Riesling, had made me tipsy, I managed a decorous ascent of the marble stairs to the fourth floor. Conrad graciously carried my portfolio. Our destination proved to be a high-ceilinged salon boasting an immense Persian carpet and a picture window overlooking an interior courtyard where inmates strolled in seeming serenity among elms and rose bushes.

  Alessandro Caligari ruled the world, or at least the world of Träumenchen Asylum, from behind a mahogany desk covered with stacks of books, piles of psychiatric journals, and proto-Cubist carvings of the human figure by African tribal artisans. He was a stout and blockish man, reminiscent of Andrew Dasburg’s plaster Lucifer from the Armory Show, with redundant chins, tumescent cheeks, a beetle brow, and round-lensed, black-rimmed spectacles behind which his tiny eyes lurked like skittish voles. His clothing was elegant, a black frock coat with a vest of green brocade. Despite his formidable features, he proceeded to install on his face a countenance so benevolent that a pastor would have gladly entrusted him with the role of Saint Nicholas in a church pageant.

  Conrad set down my portfolio, placed M. Derain’s letter in the alienist’s grasp, and slipped silently out of the room.

  “Show me your work,” muttered Caligari upon learning of the Fauve’s resignation. His voice was melodious though not distinctly Italian. “Lay your banquet before me.”

  I unlatched my portfolio and spread my Philadelphia-themed sketches and paintings across the carpet in a horizontal exhibition. Caligari rose and, aided by a Malacca cane capped with a boar’s head, poled his bulk around the end of the desk like a gondolier navigating a canal.

  “What do you call that one?” he asked, pointing his cane toward my watercolor of a beggar woman soliciting alms in Rittenhouse Square.

  “The Least of These.”

  “It’s sentimental horse manure.”

  “Precisely my intention,” I said, making no effort to conceal my annoyance.

  “This is rather better.” He indicated Skin for Sale, an unframed oil depicting a prostitute importuning a merchant sailor on the Front Street docks. “But the colors are too muted for so lurid a subject.”

  “I thought about using lurid colors, but I decided the result would be sentimental horse manure.”

  “This one works.” With his cane he singled out my largest oil, Step to the Rear, which reimagined the mythic boatman Charon as the driver of a Market Street trolley car. “I admire any artist who would rescue Impressionism from prettiness. It’s been twenty years since Monet started giving us his insipid water lilies, and he keeps revisiting the same damn pond. May I assume you’ve had classroom teaching experience?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “That hardly matters. Nothing could prepare you for these students. You’ll be taking over a class of four talented inmates handpicked by your predecessor, Herr Slevoght.”

  “Do you mean the position is mine?”

  “If you still want it after the faint praise with which I damned your portfolio.”

  “I’m delighted, Signore.”

  “You’ll meet with Slevoght’s protégés every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning for three hours starting at nine o’clock. The classroom is on the third floor. North light, running water, a cornucopia of art supplies.”

  “I heard that Slevoght joined the mobilization.”

  “I don’t blame him. The aesthetic intensity of this war will be beyond imagination. Even as we speak, European nations are manufacturing U-boats, battleships, military dirigibles, and combat aeroplanes like there’s no tomorrow, the very condition those technologies are intended to secure.”

  “Did you say ‘aesthetic intensity’?”

  “A rare commodity.” Returning to his desk, Caligari rummaged through the top drawer, then drew out a gleaming pistol. “I am fond of my nine-millimeter Glisenti, but it lacks the aesthetic intensity of a machine gun or a howitzer.” He laid the pistol on the desk. “What do you know of our methods here at Träumenchen?”

  “They famously eclipse those of Sigmund Freud, who I gather is a charlatan.”

  “I’m glad to learn his reputation is growing.” Caligari unveiled a rank of large, gleaming teeth. “That Viennese cocksucker never should have turned his back on Charcot and the mesmeric tradition. The future of psychiatry belongs to hypnotism, not to some byzantine theory of sublimated fucking.”

  “And the future of hypnotism belongs to you, Signore?”

  “Precisely,” said Caligari, still beaming, “and to the brave new world of heteropathic medicine.”

  “I’ve heard of homeopathic medicine.”

  “Treating a disease by aping its symptoms instead of attacking the cause. Homeopathy has everything going for it except validity and results.”

  “Rather like Freud’s system?”

  “How pleased I am that Monsieur Derain couldn’t accept the position.”

  “And heteropathy. . . ?”

  “We charm the patient into embracing a self-image incompatible with the behavior that brought him here. Does he suffer from a split personality? Then convince him, through drugs and hypnotism, that he is the God of the Jews, that is, the most monolithic entity imaginable.”

  “Isn’t that simply trading one form of derangement for another?”

  “At first, of course, the patient may try to play the part of a Supreme Being,” said Caligari in a tone of assent. “He’ll devise a canon of commandments and entreat his fellows to obey them, but in time his spasms of dissociation and his delusions of divinity will neutralize one another.”

  “How ingenious.”

  “In cases of uncontrolled female sexual desire, we persuade the patient she is a Sister of the Carmelite Order,” said Caligari. “Our nunphomaniacs, as it were, go on to lead surprisingly fulfilling lives.” He removed a brass bell from atop his desk and, like a carnival barker soliciting the attention of fairgoers, shook it vigorously. “As for the average melancholic, he will show marked improvement upon coming to believe he’s an actor renowned for portraying Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.”

  “Why not an actor renowned for portraying a clown?”

  “You have much to learn about the human psyche.”

  Summoned by the bell, Conrad slithered into the room, a lock of black hair lying aslant his forehead like a scar.

  “Before meeting your pupils in person, you should get to know them through their art,” Caligari told me. “I shall conduct the tour myself. Herr Röhrig, please assemble Mr. Wyndham’s portfolio and return it to his apartments.”

  “A powerful piece,” said Conrad, offering an unsolicited opinion of Steam Dragon, my oil painting of a locomotive pulli
ng into 30th Street Station. “It fuses the modern with the medieval.”

  “Herr Slevoght inspired his students to discover and colonize the nethermost reaches of their imaginations,” said Caligari. “Any art therapist would feel lucky to have such accomplished lunatics in his class.”

  As the alienist conducted me down the jagged, portholed passageway connecting the asylum to the Kleinbrück Kunstmuseum, he searched through his pockets, soon finding a key so large it could have functioned as a palette knife. He unlocked the door. The space beyond was not so much a museum as a solitary gallery the size of a ballroom. Sunbeams poured through a trapezium-shaped skylight. Dormant gas-lamps protruded from the walls. The floor held a huge elevator platform suspended on four vertical chains threaded through pulleys attached to the ceiling, so that by cranking the adjacent winch a curator could deliver large paintings and heavy sculptures to the cellar for storage.

  The room vibrated with art. Caligari was right about my predecessor’s skills as an educator. Somehow Slevoght had inspired his students to venture into the wilds of their disordered psyches and then recollect their journeys through cathartic acts of creation. A row of six abstract sculptures cast voluptuous shadows on the east wall, a configuration bisected by the oaken doors leading to the outside world. “These pieces are by Ludwig Ruttluff, who travels about the solar system in his private rocket ship,” Caligari explained as I approached the papier-mâché artifacts, each of which, though nonrepresentational, was manifestly erotic and arguably lewd. “Ludwig insists they are replicas of the indigenous sculptures he sketched while visiting the aborigines of Ganymede.”

  Sidling toward the passageway door, I surveyed the still-life etchings surrounding the jamb: a chunk of rotting meat invaded by maggots, a shaving basin filled with cockroaches, a turnip bristling with rusty nails, and an apothecary’s cabinet displaying phials of poison. “Like all paranoids, Pietro Barbieri is his own worst enemy,” said Caligari. “Fortunately, his mind swerves so abruptly from one fantasized catastrophe to the next that his condition is not incapacitating.”