The World Is Made of Glass by Morris West

Author:Morris West
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760638528
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

JUNG

Zurich

Finally, I think I have her launched on the crucial part of the story, the one which should take us to the graveyard where the bodies are buried. I use the words in a metaphorical sense; but I have the uneasy sense that the metaphor is very close to fact.

I am not well acquainted with the demi-monde. When I was young in Paris, my poverty, my Puritan upbringing and my fear of infection kept me tolerably chaste. In my better years I have managed to find some diversions from monogamy; but I have never had enough money to indulge in the diversions or perversions of the rich – which in any case are not widely available in Zurich! However, I know enough of the gilded world to understand that it protects its privacy very well, and that Magda Liliane Kardoss von Gamsfeld may be exaggerating her risky follies to conceal a far graver matter.

There is another possibility which I must not dismiss: that she is suffering as I am from a progressive fragmentation of the personality, so that it seems that all the beasts of the subconscious are set free to threaten her. In this case, it is quite possible that all I am hearing is an elaborate fairy tale.

We have not even begun to analyse her dream. I am hoping that what she is about to tell me will illuminate some of its meanings. As she begins her narrative, I notice a distinct change of style. She is no longer reliving the sensuous joys of childhood and trying to make me a vicarious partner. Now she is a young adult – sharing her delight in travel and intellectual discovery.

“Papa gave me Padua as ancient princes gave territories and domains to their sons. He made me aware that the gift was a precious one, a share of his own youth. He had studied medicine at ‘Il Bo’ when Padua was still a Habsburg city, where Austrian police patrolled the alleys and Metternich’s spies mingled with the plotters of the Risorgimento at the Caffè Pedrocchi. Because Papa was young and Hungarian he had no time at all for Austrians, Czechs, Slovaks or Croats, and gave all his sympathies to the Italian cause. Because he fell constantly in love with Italian women, married and unmarried, he became an assiduous and practised plotter. He had a fund of tall stories about hairbreadth escapes from jealous husbands and zealous agents of the Emperor. We arrived, the three of us, just after Ferragosto, to find an apartment and complete the formalities for sojourn permits and my admission to the university. Papa lodged us in the best hotel, hired a coachman to attend us every day and set out to display my new inheritance: Venice, Vicenza, the Euganean hills, all the summer splendours of the Lombard plain – and Padua itself, the city of St. Anthony the Wonderworker, of Livy and Petrarch, Boccaccio and Tasso and the greatest names in medical history.

“Papa boasted that he could

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