Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [35]
“No, my friend, you must stay some minutes longer! A patient is about to turn salamander, an always impressive spectacle. Sit down and I’ll show you.”
He gestured to a divan and stood facing them and dabbing his brows with the handkerchief. He said, “Tell me, Lanark, what instrument do you play?”
“None.”
“But you are musical?”
“No.”
“But perhaps you know about ragtime, jazz, boogie-woogie, rock-and-roll?”
“No.”
Ozenfant sighed. “I feared as much. No matter, there are other ways of speaking to patients. I will show you a patient.”
He went to the nearest tapestry and dragged it sideways, uncovering a circular glass screen in the wall behind. A slender microphone hung under it. He brought this to the divan pulling a fine cable after it, and sat down and said, “Ozenfant speaking. Show me chamber twelve.”
The neon lights in the ceiling went out and a blurred image shone inside the screen, seemingly a knight in gothic armour lying on the slab of a tomb. The image grew distinct and more like a prehistoric lizard on a steel table. The hide was black, the knobbly joints had pink and purple quills on them, a bush of purple spines hid the genitals and a double row of spikes down the back supported the body about nine inches above the table. The head was neckless, chinless, and grew up from the collarbone into a gaping beak like the beak of a vast cuckoo. The face had no other real features, though a couple of blank domes stuck out like parodies of eyeballs. Munro said, “The mouth is open.”
Ozenfant said, “Yes, but the air trembles above it. Soon it shuts, and then boom!”
“When was he delivered?”
“Nine months, nine days, twenty-two hours ago. He arrived nearly as you see him, nothing human but the hands, throat and sternum mastoid. He seemed to like jazz, for he clutched the remnant of a saxophone, so I said, ‘He is musical, I will treat him myself.’ Unluckily I know nothing of jazz. I tried him with Debussy (who sometimes works in these cases) then I tried the nineteenth-century romantics. I pounded him with Wagner, overwhelmed him with Brahms, beguiled him with Mendelssohn. Results: negative. In despair I recede further and further, and who works in the end? Scarlatti. Each time I played The Cortege his human parts blushed as pink and soft as a baby’s bottom.”
Ozenfant closed his eyes and kissed his fingertips to the ceiling. “Well, matters remain thus till six hours ago when he goes wholly dragon in five minutes. Perhaps I do not play the clavichord well? Who else in this wretched institute would have tried?”
Munro said, “You assume he blushed pink with pleasure. It may have been rage. Maybe he disliked Scarlatti. You should have asked.”
“I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart.”
Lanark moved impatiently. Light from the screen showed Ozenfant’s mouth so fixed in a smile that it seemed expressionless, while the eyebrows kept moving in exaggerated expressions of thoughtfulness, astonishment or woe. Ozenfant said, “Lanark is bored by these technicalities. I will show him more patients.”
He spoke to the microphone and a sequence of dragons on steel tables appeared on the screen. Some had glossy hides, some were plated like tortoises, some were scaled like fish and crocodiles. Most had quills, spines or spikes and some were hugely horned and antlered, but all were made monstrous by a detail, a human foot or ear or breast sticking through the dinosaur armour. A doctor sat on the edge of one table and studied a chessboard balanced on a dragonish stomach. Ozenfant said, “That is McWham, who is also unmusical. He treats the dryly rational cases; he teaches them chess and plays interminable games. He thinks that if anyone defeats him their armour will fall off, but so far he has been too clever for them. Do you play any games, Lanark?”
“No.”
In another chamber a thin priest with intensely miserable eyes sat with his ear close to a dragonish beak.
“That is Monsignor Noakes, our only faith healer. We used