lunedì 9 agosto 2010

the hearing trumpet

Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet [1974] (London: Penguin, 2005).

This is a funny and visionary book that draws the reader into an esoteric and liberating end-of-the-world dimension. Its protagonist is Marian, an old lady who cannot hear very well, and is given a peculiar hearing trumpet, as a present, by her dear and eccentric friend Carmella. Thanks to it, Marian is able to hear of her son’s plan to send her to a “home for senile females”. Marian is not happy about this change in her life, but she is not given any choice.
This place is headed by a mysterious couple, Dr. and Mrs. Gambit who have set up a series of chores and activities for the ladies in the house. One of these activities is called “the movements” and consists of some physical exercises, like rubbing one’s own stomach “in a circular clockwise movement”. Marian reacts to her first session in an unpredictable way, by bursting into an uncontrollable laugh, a destabilising physical response to the silly physical exercises she is being asked to do. As Ali Smith notes in the introduction, Dr. Gambit theories’ are “a mix of cod-therapy talk and religious salesmanship”.
Soon Marian gets to know her fellow guests, who each live in a different space. Veronica Adams lives in a boot-shaped hut, Anna Wetz in a Swiss Chalet, Georgina Sykes in a circus tent, Natacha Gonzales in an Eskimo’s igloo, and Maude Wilkins and Vera Van Tocht share a bungalow “which must have once been a birthday cake”. In the meal-room, a curious figure in a painting attracts Marian’s attention and begins to recur in her thoughts and dreams. It is a winking nun, who seems to have been the head of the house when it was a convent centuries before.
The story takes a strange turn, when Marian is given a book about this nun by Christabel. Carrington begins a long digression centred on the life and adventures of this nun, who looks more like an esoteric witch than a daughter of God. Her name, Doña Rosalinda della Cueva, is imagined by Marian long before she actually knows about it, as if she were establishing an unconscious and direct bond with the nun. And, in fact, the nun represents a kind of catalysing force, which helps the protagonists to find her true self.
After this digression, the narration pace becomes tighter and the story takes unexpected turns. Maude is found dead and Marian attempts to find out how she died. Believing Maude to have been poisoned by Natacha and Vera, Marian and the others organise a hunger strike to get the two suspects out of the house. In this way, the story is transformed into a revolutionary social protest, where female old age is presented as an exciting adventure, as Marian herself affirms: “one would not have expected these kinds of problems in a home for senile old ladies”. The protest makes the ladies closer and more self-confident. In one fascinating scene, they all dance together by the bee pond of the institution:

We began by nodding our heads in time to the drumming, then our feet. Soon we were dancing round and around the pond, waving our arms and generally behaving in a very strange manner. (…) Never before had I experienced the joy of rhythmic dance, even in the days of foxtrot in the arms of some eligible young man. We seemed inspired by some marvellous power, which poured energy into our decrepit carcasses.

This liberating dance is quite different from Mrs. Gambit’s boring exercises and embodies the ladies’ now subversive approach to life. Marian, in particular, ventures into a journey of initiation where she meets and devours herself: “a mighty rumbling followed by crashes and there I was standing outside the pot stirring the soup in which I could see my own meat, feet up, boiling away merrily as any joint of beef”. The story takes a final surprising turn when the earth falls under a new glacial era where the animal and human worlds manage to reunite themselves and time seems a category of no importance.
The Hearing Trumpet is a rollercoaster of fantastic events cooked with subtle irony and signposted by Carrington’s own sophisticated illustrations.

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