Freud's Sister Page 7

  During one of those evenings, Bertha came down to Sarah’s room and asked us to come up to her salon to meet the artist who was to paint their family portraits. As soon as I saw him, his face seemed familiar to me, and when he began to talk about himself I remembered. Four years earlier, I had been seated next to him at the entrance exam for the School of Applied Arts. His name was Gustav Klimt. He was now eighteen years old, the same as I was. Even though a thick beard covered his face and his hair was already thinning, I recognized him by his pug nose, his gaze, and his self-assured smile.

  That evening he was talking about shameful things that were kept hush in every home and among all but the very dregs of society. Even when Bertha’s friends attempted ever so gently to steer the conversation in another direction, or asked him where he had completed his first commissioned works, he described how at fifteen he had painted certain acts on the walls of a brothel, and then he went on about everything he did there besides painting. They asked him whose portraits he had painted in the past few years, and he reeled off the portraits of the wives of butchers, bankers, doctors, and professors, but he spoke less about the portraits and more about what he did with those whose portraits he painted. He spoke, we blushed, and Bertha Auerbach decided, likely that very evening, to tell this young man she was canceling the commission for the family portraits.

  There, next to Klimt, sat his sister Klara, two years his senior, who from time to time, completely inappropriately for the gathering, struck him roughly with her elbow and rebuked him, but he justified himself by saying his behavior was part of the freedom every human being required. She told him that the manner in which he expressed himself did not demonstrate he was free, rather that he had contempt for women, that he ridiculed and degraded them. He was silent for a moment, waiting for someone else to say something, and then he started in again with his indecencies. When Klimt’s vulgarity became so intolerable that Bertha’s friends excused themselves, said they had to leave, and quickly left the drawing room, Klara cut her brother off and said, “My brother is right when he says that sexual expression is a path to freedom, but his understanding of both sexuality and freedom is incorrect. Sexuality is, in fact, freedom, a freedom that society fears because of its potential to break down the hierarchies and systems that support it, causing the very society that exists today to fall apart. So it attempts to have sexuality wrapped in mendacity and hypocrisy.”

  One of the young men sitting by the piano said, “We all know that, but we do not know how these things can be changed without turning in a worse direction.”

  “For a start,” said Klara, “mothers must stop advising their daughters to submit to their husbands. The advice mothers give their daughters can be summed up in one sentence: Obey your husband, because in that way you are submissive to God, because God gave him to you as your lord, and, even if he behaves badly toward you, suffer everything; try to please him, and do not complain to anyone.”

  A discussion concerning women’s rights ensued between Klara and Bertha’s friends, who belonged to the young Viennese intelligentsia. The discussion was more like an argument. The young intellectuals said that even so, the male gender must rule in the world, and Klara, before leaving the salon, stated, “Evidently, we young women must take for ourselves what the world and this era do not want us to have.”

  Klara did not come again to Bertha’s salon, but that is when our friendship began. Sarah and I socialized with her almost daily, and so, little by little, we learned about her life. She spoke of beautiful things and ugly ones. She spoke about her father, who painted miniatures on tiles that later decorated the kitchens of the wealthy. Not only could he paint magically; he could also tell his children stories about the paintings that appeared on the tiles under his hand: the rooster and the hen, the windmill and the cow, the milkmaid and the river. Sometimes he got drunk and beat the children and his wife, Anna, who at that time earned money scrubbing floors in the homes of the wealthy. When she went to work, Klara’s mother tied her sons and daughters to their chairs. She punished them harshly when they bickered, when they were naughty, when they went out of the house without asking her. Klara’s brothers somehow, even as children, managed to save themselves from this terror by going to their father’s workshop and helping him paint tiles, and later, when he would get drunk, they would run down the street so as not to be near his hand when he began to strike. It was more difficult for the sisters, but even for them salvation appeared: Hermine and Johanna went to live with their mother’s parents, where they remained until their grandparents died, and Klara went to live with her father’s sister.

  When Klara moved to her aunt’s house, her aunt had just become a widow and had returned from London, where she had lived with her husband. She had no children and devoted herself fully to her niece. She taught Klara to speak English and French; she gave her not only popular novels but also the works of Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft—a bit premature for Klara to understand them in their entirety, but just the right age for her to make up her mind to fight for women’s rights. The two of them lived together for five years, but later, after her aunt died, Klara had to return to her parents. She was then sixteen years old, and her mother burned all the clothes and books she brought with her.

  Klara was now dedicated to the idea of making women aware that they must win for themselves what belonged to them. She made posters on which she wrote that girls’ education should be preparation not for their role as homemakers but to enable them to be independent. She pasted them on the walls of the schools; she demanded that wives have the right to seek divorce; she organized groups that petitioned for women’s right to vote. For this, the political parties turned her in to the police. She was put in prison and charged with acting against not society but humanity.

  When she was released, Klara would meet with Sarah and me. Her prison terms were short, several days, and she always came out with bruises. But she never wanted to tell us anything about prison brutality, nor did she talk about her mother’s brutality. We learned about their relationship later, from Gustav, but Klara said nothing about it; laughing, she described how people threw stones at her when they saw her riding a bicycle or wearing trousers. With distress she described how children were abandoned on the streets after their parents’ death and died frozen and hungry. With anger she described the injustices women suffered in their marriages, and she repeated, “We young women must take for ourselves what the world and this era do not want us to have.”

  I OFTEN THOUGHT OF THAT WORLD AND THE TIME WHEN we were girls. I thought about this long after we were no longer girls. I thought of the young women of our era, who Klara said must ultimately liberate themselves, the young women whose place, my mother said, was in the kitchen. We were the first generation of girls born after the introduction of the word sexuality, in 1859; we were girls at the time when some called intimate relations between male and female bodies “bodily acts,” others “venereal acts,” yet others “instincts for procreation.” From this union of two bodies one expected the elevation of souls to some heavenly sphere, but it was also regarded as an animal act that sullied the soul.

  When I was no longer young, and I tried to recall the young women from that period when I, too, was a girl, I recalled the fearfulness of their gestures, the quavering of their voices, the restraint that further accentuated their bridled excitement. At that time, love was something that trembled between two souls and two bodies, a time in which passion was described as the rumbling of a volcano and longing as the rampaging of a hurricane, a time in which the words soul and passion and longing were spoken and written down so often—most often, by those whose bodies and souls had barely ever trembled with passion and longing—that they became as worn as old shoes. It was a time when young people, or at least the young people of my acquaintance, lived in anticipation of the realization of that love, and believed that the beginning of their shared life would be as if the heavenly kingdom had descended to earth. But later th
ey were sobered by the banality of the daily life that awaited them, because every anticipation that is greater than the reality, like each love that is greater than those who are loved, ends in either collapse or triviality.

  That was our era, a time of silence concerning carnality. There was silence everywhere about anything connected with that new word sexuality. There was silence in the schools, the churches, and the synagogues. There was silence at home, in the drawing rooms, and in the public squares. The newspapers were silent, as were the books. Clothing that covered everything from toe to chin also served as a covering for that word. Girls and young women were most often kept in complete ignorance about their sexuality from birth until marriage, and they could only vaguely sense such things. They went out of their homes only in the company of their mothers or some other adult relative. Every image of the intimate parts of the male body and every image of intimate relations was hidden from them. Some young women found out from their mothers only hours in advance what would happen on their wedding night. Chastity was an ideal because of the husband. Those young women who remained unmarried became the subject of scorn, and their virginity, the century’s ideal, was turned into an embarrassment, as if it were unnatural, because there was no one to whom it would be given.

  Such was our era, the era in which we grew up, but Sarah, Klara, and I knew much more than the majority of our peers. Occasionally, we would take a peek in some of Sarah’s father’s medical books. Sometimes we overheard something in Bertha’s salon. Sometimes Klara passed on to us something she had learned from Gustav, or from the women she helped find their way through life’s vicissitudes. We also learned that that same era carried within it a different world from the one that was talked about openly and that could be seen in the course of a day. Behind the silence of sexuality hid insincerity and hypocrisy.

  ONE DAY MY BROTHER DECIDED TO SHOW ME SOME OF THE things Sarah, Klara, and I had only heard about. Sigmund had just graduated and was already interning at the Vienna General Hospital. Sometimes I went to visit him, and during one of those visits my brother led me to a unit of the hospital that he said was secret and illegal. While leading me to this unit, he told me what choices a young unmarried woman had if she became pregnant and the man who got her pregnant did not want to marry her. I knew that most often the parents, because of their shame, threw these young women out of the house, and very soon thereafter their lives ended from hunger, cold, or sickness, even before the birth of the child. I knew that some who survived long enough to give birth left the child in an orphanage, and they worked the hardest jobs, and as a result their lives did not last long. I knew that there were those who were unable to endure the shame and, in order to preserve their family’s honor, killed themselves without telling their closest kin that they were pregnant. I knew that some women sought out someone with a little knowledge who would give them bitter liquids to drink, after which their bodies rejected the fetus, and that sometimes they themselves died from the poison. Then Sigmund told me that the wealthiest people, with their influence and money, could skirt the law forbidding abortions.

  At the Vienna General Hospital, there were surgeons who spent some of their time performing an activity that was against the law but was nevertheless permitted for some people: they performed abortions on the daughters and mistresses of the wealthy. We were standing outside the secret unit when my brother told me that he himself had learned how it was done; he began to describe the procedure in detail, and, as I imagined the metal grabbing the fetus, I felt sick to my stomach and vomited.

  When it was already growing dark, we went to the poorest section of Vienna. We proceeded through the semidarkness of the narrow alleys and barely squeezed past girls in tattered dresses, and men in equally tattered clothing who approached those girls with prematurely weathered faces, with makeup that served only to emphasize the coarseness, and with breath that smelled of alcohol. Some of the girls touched Sigmund, stated their price, and then ran after us, lowering the price until it came to about as much as one would pay for a piece of bread. In some of the decrepit houses, half-naked women stood in the windows and called to the men walking past.

  We left that part of the city and entered one of the more elegant quarters. Sigmund pointed out the small hotels on the side streets and told me that middle-class men came here to visit prostitutes, and that in those same rooms young middle-class men met poor girlfriends whom they hid from families that would not allow them to see each other. He told me the people from the wealthiest class went to brothels housed in mansions, or else kept unsuccessful actresses and ballerinas. “Do not think there is a difference between the first, second, or third; what some do in the dirtiest rooms of nearly decrepit houses, others in hotels, and still others in mansions does not make them different,” my brother said. “Only the façade varies. The insides of those who do it are the same. The coarse give vent to their impulses; we abstain. We abstain in order to maintain our integrity. We do not squander our health, our capacity for enjoyment, our strength. We are saving ourselves for something, even though we ourselves often do not know for what. Rather than spend ourselves so shallowly and basely in animal gratification, we abstain, and our abstinence allows our feelings to deepen, to become more refined.”

  That evening spent along the Vienna streets was intended to be a lesson for me. What my brother wanted was for me to see the animal in man that does not permit the union of the corporeal and the spiritual, and for me to be repulsed by it in the same way he was. That night, the thought of a corporeal union of Sigmund with some woman kept me awake; the horror of it had me tossing in bed. My heart recoiled at the thought that some woman, resembling those we had seen that evening along the narrow alleyways, would introduce him to that which is only corporeal and emptied of the soul, and in this way separate him from our shared dreams.

  SOMETIMES I WOULD ASK MYSELF, WAS THE IMPETUS FOR MY suggesting to my brother that he meet Sarah the horror of the thought that he would seek bodily satisfaction in one of those alleyways if he did not encounter true love? The closeness between Sarah and my brother began at their first meeting, from the moment he approached her in her room, gently extending his hand, and she stood up, attempting to keep her balance. Many times afterward, I returned in my thoughts to that moment, that uncertainty not only in her behavior but also in his, the forced restraint in their glances, pierced with anticipation and curiosity, and that joyful unease, composed of happiness and timidity, that flickered across her frail face, and across his, which he had always striven to give an appearance of seriousness—a desire that had led him, already in the first years of his studies, to grow a beard. All their subsequent meetings held these nuances of that first meeting, that joy and that unease, that anticipation, that curiosity, that restraint, that uncertainty, all those things that mingled with their words yet remained unspoken. I was always beside them, as a witness to something that was happening behind the words, something they never told each other.

  Sometimes I wanted to be a witness as well to what happened when they were not together, to what happened to them in the absence of the other, in their solitude. I wanted to be able to see the images that flickered in their dreams and to discern their thoughts; I wanted to know what they would say to each other if that restraint, that unease, that timidity, were to fall away. I wanted to see the movement of their bodies in the moment when desire overcame all that remained, making the skin of their bodies all that separated them.

  Their worlds were composed of such different elements, but both he and she wanted so much to hear from the other about those differences. My brother spoke to her about his world, which extended from his home to the university, the library, the homes of his friends, and the hospitals, where, together with his colleagues, he was acquiring a practical knowledge of medicine. Sarah told him about her world, which ended at the threshold of her home, about the things she could see beyond the border of her world, that other world, which she could see through the window of her room: the s
treet and the houses on the opposite side, and the trees beside the houses and the sky above them; part of that intangible world was also what she could see in her books. Sarah would ask Sigmund about himself, about his studies, about his friends, about what he wanted to do the next day, and in ten years, and he said he wanted to unravel the riddle of being human; he wanted to know how love and hate are born, what it was that created desire, how our thoughts are propelled. “Perhaps we do not need to know these things,” Sarah said, as she ran the palms of her hands along her legs, along her dress that hid the metal braces.

  After they became acquainted, I never spoke with Sarah about my brother, nor with my brother about Sarah; I only sensed how much they looked forward to Wednesday’s arrival, the day when our peers gathered in Bertha’s salon, but Sigmund and Sarah stayed a long while in Sarah’s room, and I stayed with them, a witness to what they kept silent, and when we knew that the gathering in Bertha’s salon was nearing an end, then he, she, and I would go to the upper floor, and we would greet the guests, and we would hear Bertha’s gentle reproach that we had not honored them with our presence.

  I SAW KLARA LESS AND LESS. SHE NO LONGER CAME TO THE hospital. She rarely visited Sarah. When Klara came to see me, my mother always found some unpleasant word for her, and she did not feel welcome. She was now helping out in homes where women who had been driven out by their husbands lived, and in homes for children without parents. Her brother was earning enough to support the entire family, and she no longer had to sell flowers in the city’s cemeteries; now she dedicated herself to helping those who had been outcast and to enlightening them about their rights.