Man Into Woman - Chapter 19 by Lili Elbe Lyrics
Lili's brother and sister-in-law lived in a villa outside the small fjord town in Jutland. Here she could live undisturbed by curious gazes.
She was received in the most heartfelt way, especially from her sister-in-law, a kind-hearted person, that showed not just deepest compassion but also understanding for Lili as a woman.
The brother did not have an easy time getting used to the new sister. But it did not take long for him to find his way around her, and he saw nothing elsе but a sister in Lili.
And brother and sister-in-law compеted with one another to make Lili's days in Andreas' home peaceful and sheltered.
And Lili enjoyed being treated here like a child who had been sick, and now had to be cared for and pampered. And the brother's wife sat next to Lili's bed every night and held her hand, until she had dozed off. And during the day they left her alone. When she went out, one of them accompanied her. When Lili staved them off, they barely let her get a word in: there were bad people and bad dogs or other dangers in small towns, too ...
In that quiet, safe environment Lili's nerves calmed. She went on long walks into the surroundings of the city, along the fjord and into the big forests that now shone in colorful fall splendor.
Here on the fjord and in the woods Andreas had lived through the happiest days of his happy childhood. But almost all memories of that day had been erased in Lili. Everything seemed new to her. It was as if she were here for the first time. Only now and then, in a certain light, through a noise, a scent, could a distant memory be kindled in her, as through a veil of mist. But it was never anything specific that stirred her memory.
One day the brother went with her to town, to show her the old parental home, in which Andreas had been born and had grown up, where the parents had lived until their death.
Lili stood in front of the old ancestral home and she recognized it, distant and misty, like something one once dreamed of. The brother asked her often, if she could not remember this or that event from their shared childhood. The brother had been only a few years older than Andreas. And Andreas had always been the one who could recall all events from the past the most clearly and the most accurately. But Lili always had to reply with a no, no matter how ardently she strained her thoughts, to find an image from Andreas' past again. She always felt so strange, as if something in her inward depths resonated. But she was apparently too tired to gain any clarity about what that was. Those questions often pained her, and the brother sensed it and did not ask any more.
Not through the past did she feel connected to the brother and the sister-in-law. But they were so good and nice to her, and so it happened that she did not feel like a stranger here. But that was all the memory that had stayed with her.
"Lili," the brother said to her one day, "now you have been here for a whole month, and you have not yet visited Father's and Mother's grave on the old church yard."
"I would really like to go there," replied Lili, "but you have to show me where they lie." And suddenly she had to cry bitterly.
Her brother looked at her puzzled. Then he took his arms and pressed her against himself protectively.
Lili felt, what he was thinking.
"Yes," she said, plagued by a secret fear, "I know, I have had neither mother nor father. I stand completely alone in the world, and I often think that life is too full of dangers for one to be able to overcome it alone. Especially for me. You have to understand that. My life began with the most terrible pain, and often I fear that everything has been for nothing. But then again I feel as if something much bigger and stronger kept me up right. Then I feel as if something delightful was stirring within me. In my dreams that happiness is completely perfect."
With questioning eyes her brother looked at her, as if he wanted to say something.
Lili caressed him then. "Dear Brother, maybe you cannot understand me at all when I talk like this. But that does not matter. So long as you are good to me. I do not understand myself, do not understand my life, can never stop being astounded."
- - -
Andreas Sparre was dead.
- - -
She was living again in her small attic room in Copenhagen.
Here she met a young Norwegian veterinarian with her hosts, who, without knowing what had happened to her, told her that he had been experimenting with transplanting and implanting ovaries in animals. And he explained to her how the effects of those new ovaries were so great that they completely changed the character and temperment of the animal while also determining their age. And since animals were less valuable materials than people, he had more opportunities as a veterinarian to study this phenomenon than other doctors.
Of course it would be possible to observe similar processes in humans.
Lili now understood that the crisis she had gone through especially during that first time in Denmark, and which she was still suffering from, had been a natural result of the implantation that had been enacted on her. Her entire brain functions, she thought, had been put on a new course.
And she admitted as much to herself in her diary:
"In the first months after my operation it was all about gathering new strength. When that had somewhat succeeded, physical transformations began happening to me suddenly. My breast formed, my hips changed, became softer and rounder. And at the same time different forces were stirring in my brain and obscured all that was left of Andreas. A completely new emotional life emerged in me that way."
- - -
Back then she also wrote a letter to Werner Kreutz, in which she expressed everything going on within her:
"I feel so changed, as if you had operated not on my body but on my brain. And although everything I had to go through can still be seen in my face, I do believe that I grow younger and younger as days go by.
Andreas Sparre's name no longer has a bitter sound to me. He had his youth first, but now I believe that I will have mine too. And now and then I find that it is not fair that I should maintain his age and his birthday. Because my biological age is different from his. And it is also painful for me that his name is in the public register instead of mine. Andreas and I do not have anything to do with each other, actually.
I have now spent a few weeks in my birthplace, but I have always felt like a stranger there. Nothing of what is now stirring within me has been born in his parents' house. I am created anew. I was born down there with you, and my birthday is that day in April on which you operated on me. My temperment, too, is like April weather. I cry and I laugh at the same time. My heart is full of expectation like a spring day. And each time when I feel that new life and new youth is stirring within, as if I was mother and child at the same time, then all my thoughts wander back to you in boundless gratitude."
- - -
A few days later Lili filled many pages of her diary again:
"I know that only doctors can understand me, when I talk of the question of my age. And a few doctors have promised to help me if I want to try later to free myself in this respect from Andreas, too, so that I can receive the age that is the equivalent of my physical development as a woman. Many others may smirk at that question and see it as irrelevant. They think that it is most important before all things to feel young and to appear young. I on the other hand think the opposite. That one really is the age that is displayed on official documents, whether one feels young or old. Yesterday I talked to a friend, who is a lawyer, about this question and I said to him:
"Do not forget: every time when one registers at a hotel, during the census, when looking for a job and also when one gets married, one always has to answer the question of one's age. On every passport, on every legitimation paper one's age is listed."
And what did the lawyer reply?
I should not be so immodest. I had to take over Andreas' age as inheritance just as if I were about to inherit his estate with all the rights. What I energetically denied.
"Assume, for example," I said, "that I also had talent in painting and was about to start painting as he did. Andreas had his connections as a painter. He had exhibits in a number of salons in Paris etc. and was member of several of those. Can you imagine me going to the various exhibition committees that knew him and telling them my fantastical story, so I can claim Andreas' rights for me? The French just as the Danish colleagues would think me crazy, if I wanted to claim I was one and the same person as Andreas. At least I would be seen and gawked at as an unlikely phenomenon.
No, if I really were to paint one day, I would have to build my entire career anew. Otherwise I would just be the butt of the people's jokes.
And could you see, for example, me, Lili Elbe, claiming the award that Andreas Sparre received from the French state? Could you imagine me decorating myself with that? No, for that the memory of Andreas is too sacred for me.
I know very well, I am just a stupid female person and also a big nobody.
And also you know that when one inherits something it always means that one assumes all the assets and liabilities, and for that reason one can refuse to accept an inheritance. I do not claim Andreas' inheritance. Least of all for his birthday, because his birthday means nothing to me but a liability. I can not be required to take over this inheritance by force. I don't want to carry Andreas' age around with me like a burden. Because I fear that especially that condition could be damning for my own future. Just look at me, I am missing all the securities that Andreas had. My next of kin, meaning Andreas' relatives, tell me every day how completely different from me Andreas had been in his temperment. He stood so securely on the ground. He could weather storms. I feel like a freshly planted tree that will be uprooted by the first gale of wind.
I must try to create an existence for myself, to undertake something, to earn money for my livelihood. And here especially age plays a role. Once you have employment, once one has achieved a place, then age as listed on the papers no longer plays a role. Then it only matters how one feels and appears, how one fills one's place in existence. But should one begin anew then everyone asks, especially if it is a woman; how old is she? And almost everywhere the younger people are preferred, because they think that they have a future, that they have all the possibilities of development. This is not just true among artists. But also with all other occupations.
I do admit that my case is something extraordinary, something new. But can you not understand as well, that it is wrong that they put my name instead of Andreas' on the baptismal record? My name, Lili Elbe, who neither Andreas' mother nor father knew. And now it really is as if from a legal point of view Andreas never existed.
But that is of course nonsense, pure madness. Because a large number of paintings bear the name of Andreas. You can find his paintings in many museums and art collections here in Denmark and France. Andreas has published books, that bear his name. That is why I think it was not right to just strike through his name in the church register and put mine down instead."
And what did the lawyer give me as a response?
Then I would have to see Andreas' name to some extent as my pseudonym.
"No," I countered, "that would be a wrong, because I have nothing to do with Andreas' pictures. They were created by Andreas. And his pictures are his complete, unrestricted property. He was not a double-being as a painter. When he was painting, he was completely a man. And strangely, - until his last breath."
Then the friend asked me, if I had never had the desire to paint like Andreas, especially since his art had been the real and essential thing in him.
"No," I replied, "I don't have the least desire to paint. And not because I am still feeling too tired and weak. No, but I see with every passing day how I, as opposed to him, see the world less and less with a painter's eyes. There is no wish within me to continue his work. My life has to go its own way. I don't mean by this that I am not an artist. Maybe I am an artist. But I believe firmly that I have will find a different expression for my artistic desire, meaning for the desire to create something. However I can't say anything about that yet. Because I don't know anything about these things within me yet."
We walked through the park of Bernstorff Castle. It was a grey December sky. And the friend asked me, if I had lost all of the feeling for nature that Andreas had.
"No," I said to him, "it's just everything that I see no longer means a motif for a painting. I am not "possessed" by a landscape, by a mood of nature. When I see something truly beautiful, then I have the impression that my unconscious is absorbing it. I don't know more today. Perhaps I will be able to give all of this a visible, audible expression some day, in some form of art, be it painting, or music, or poetry, or something else.? At the moment nothing causes more stirrings in me than music. But if I think about myself, then I feel like I am on a boat that is drifting under full sail and lets itself be guided by the wind, wherever the wind will take it ... Dear God, I am still so new. I have to have some time to find myself – how old am I really? Maybe the doctors can find that out. But my age has nothing at all to do with Andreas' age. Because I have not shared Andreas body and blood from the beginning. It was Andreas who had the exclusive rule over this body for a whole human lifetime, if not longer. And it was only later that I developed within our shared body, so that this body changed shape more and more. Until there was no strength, or rather no life force left for Andreas.
However odd that might sound for others, that is how it was, and not different in any way. And it is why I think that Andreas' name has to remain in the church register of his home town, where he was born, - and that they should make a passport for stateless persons like me, the homeless one, with my own biological age ..."
The friend finally left me, shaking his head. And this shaking of the head is what I will certainly encounter with most people."
She was received in the most heartfelt way, especially from her sister-in-law, a kind-hearted person, that showed not just deepest compassion but also understanding for Lili as a woman.
The brother did not have an easy time getting used to the new sister. But it did not take long for him to find his way around her, and he saw nothing elsе but a sister in Lili.
And brother and sister-in-law compеted with one another to make Lili's days in Andreas' home peaceful and sheltered.
And Lili enjoyed being treated here like a child who had been sick, and now had to be cared for and pampered. And the brother's wife sat next to Lili's bed every night and held her hand, until she had dozed off. And during the day they left her alone. When she went out, one of them accompanied her. When Lili staved them off, they barely let her get a word in: there were bad people and bad dogs or other dangers in small towns, too ...
In that quiet, safe environment Lili's nerves calmed. She went on long walks into the surroundings of the city, along the fjord and into the big forests that now shone in colorful fall splendor.
Here on the fjord and in the woods Andreas had lived through the happiest days of his happy childhood. But almost all memories of that day had been erased in Lili. Everything seemed new to her. It was as if she were here for the first time. Only now and then, in a certain light, through a noise, a scent, could a distant memory be kindled in her, as through a veil of mist. But it was never anything specific that stirred her memory.
One day the brother went with her to town, to show her the old parental home, in which Andreas had been born and had grown up, where the parents had lived until their death.
Lili stood in front of the old ancestral home and she recognized it, distant and misty, like something one once dreamed of. The brother asked her often, if she could not remember this or that event from their shared childhood. The brother had been only a few years older than Andreas. And Andreas had always been the one who could recall all events from the past the most clearly and the most accurately. But Lili always had to reply with a no, no matter how ardently she strained her thoughts, to find an image from Andreas' past again. She always felt so strange, as if something in her inward depths resonated. But she was apparently too tired to gain any clarity about what that was. Those questions often pained her, and the brother sensed it and did not ask any more.
Not through the past did she feel connected to the brother and the sister-in-law. But they were so good and nice to her, and so it happened that she did not feel like a stranger here. But that was all the memory that had stayed with her.
"Lili," the brother said to her one day, "now you have been here for a whole month, and you have not yet visited Father's and Mother's grave on the old church yard."
"I would really like to go there," replied Lili, "but you have to show me where they lie." And suddenly she had to cry bitterly.
Her brother looked at her puzzled. Then he took his arms and pressed her against himself protectively.
Lili felt, what he was thinking.
"Yes," she said, plagued by a secret fear, "I know, I have had neither mother nor father. I stand completely alone in the world, and I often think that life is too full of dangers for one to be able to overcome it alone. Especially for me. You have to understand that. My life began with the most terrible pain, and often I fear that everything has been for nothing. But then again I feel as if something much bigger and stronger kept me up right. Then I feel as if something delightful was stirring within me. In my dreams that happiness is completely perfect."
With questioning eyes her brother looked at her, as if he wanted to say something.
Lili caressed him then. "Dear Brother, maybe you cannot understand me at all when I talk like this. But that does not matter. So long as you are good to me. I do not understand myself, do not understand my life, can never stop being astounded."
- - -
Andreas Sparre was dead.
- - -
She was living again in her small attic room in Copenhagen.
Here she met a young Norwegian veterinarian with her hosts, who, without knowing what had happened to her, told her that he had been experimenting with transplanting and implanting ovaries in animals. And he explained to her how the effects of those new ovaries were so great that they completely changed the character and temperment of the animal while also determining their age. And since animals were less valuable materials than people, he had more opportunities as a veterinarian to study this phenomenon than other doctors.
Of course it would be possible to observe similar processes in humans.
Lili now understood that the crisis she had gone through especially during that first time in Denmark, and which she was still suffering from, had been a natural result of the implantation that had been enacted on her. Her entire brain functions, she thought, had been put on a new course.
And she admitted as much to herself in her diary:
"In the first months after my operation it was all about gathering new strength. When that had somewhat succeeded, physical transformations began happening to me suddenly. My breast formed, my hips changed, became softer and rounder. And at the same time different forces were stirring in my brain and obscured all that was left of Andreas. A completely new emotional life emerged in me that way."
- - -
Back then she also wrote a letter to Werner Kreutz, in which she expressed everything going on within her:
"I feel so changed, as if you had operated not on my body but on my brain. And although everything I had to go through can still be seen in my face, I do believe that I grow younger and younger as days go by.
Andreas Sparre's name no longer has a bitter sound to me. He had his youth first, but now I believe that I will have mine too. And now and then I find that it is not fair that I should maintain his age and his birthday. Because my biological age is different from his. And it is also painful for me that his name is in the public register instead of mine. Andreas and I do not have anything to do with each other, actually.
I have now spent a few weeks in my birthplace, but I have always felt like a stranger there. Nothing of what is now stirring within me has been born in his parents' house. I am created anew. I was born down there with you, and my birthday is that day in April on which you operated on me. My temperment, too, is like April weather. I cry and I laugh at the same time. My heart is full of expectation like a spring day. And each time when I feel that new life and new youth is stirring within, as if I was mother and child at the same time, then all my thoughts wander back to you in boundless gratitude."
- - -
A few days later Lili filled many pages of her diary again:
"I know that only doctors can understand me, when I talk of the question of my age. And a few doctors have promised to help me if I want to try later to free myself in this respect from Andreas, too, so that I can receive the age that is the equivalent of my physical development as a woman. Many others may smirk at that question and see it as irrelevant. They think that it is most important before all things to feel young and to appear young. I on the other hand think the opposite. That one really is the age that is displayed on official documents, whether one feels young or old. Yesterday I talked to a friend, who is a lawyer, about this question and I said to him:
"Do not forget: every time when one registers at a hotel, during the census, when looking for a job and also when one gets married, one always has to answer the question of one's age. On every passport, on every legitimation paper one's age is listed."
And what did the lawyer reply?
I should not be so immodest. I had to take over Andreas' age as inheritance just as if I were about to inherit his estate with all the rights. What I energetically denied.
"Assume, for example," I said, "that I also had talent in painting and was about to start painting as he did. Andreas had his connections as a painter. He had exhibits in a number of salons in Paris etc. and was member of several of those. Can you imagine me going to the various exhibition committees that knew him and telling them my fantastical story, so I can claim Andreas' rights for me? The French just as the Danish colleagues would think me crazy, if I wanted to claim I was one and the same person as Andreas. At least I would be seen and gawked at as an unlikely phenomenon.
No, if I really were to paint one day, I would have to build my entire career anew. Otherwise I would just be the butt of the people's jokes.
And could you see, for example, me, Lili Elbe, claiming the award that Andreas Sparre received from the French state? Could you imagine me decorating myself with that? No, for that the memory of Andreas is too sacred for me.
I know very well, I am just a stupid female person and also a big nobody.
And also you know that when one inherits something it always means that one assumes all the assets and liabilities, and for that reason one can refuse to accept an inheritance. I do not claim Andreas' inheritance. Least of all for his birthday, because his birthday means nothing to me but a liability. I can not be required to take over this inheritance by force. I don't want to carry Andreas' age around with me like a burden. Because I fear that especially that condition could be damning for my own future. Just look at me, I am missing all the securities that Andreas had. My next of kin, meaning Andreas' relatives, tell me every day how completely different from me Andreas had been in his temperment. He stood so securely on the ground. He could weather storms. I feel like a freshly planted tree that will be uprooted by the first gale of wind.
I must try to create an existence for myself, to undertake something, to earn money for my livelihood. And here especially age plays a role. Once you have employment, once one has achieved a place, then age as listed on the papers no longer plays a role. Then it only matters how one feels and appears, how one fills one's place in existence. But should one begin anew then everyone asks, especially if it is a woman; how old is she? And almost everywhere the younger people are preferred, because they think that they have a future, that they have all the possibilities of development. This is not just true among artists. But also with all other occupations.
I do admit that my case is something extraordinary, something new. But can you not understand as well, that it is wrong that they put my name instead of Andreas' on the baptismal record? My name, Lili Elbe, who neither Andreas' mother nor father knew. And now it really is as if from a legal point of view Andreas never existed.
But that is of course nonsense, pure madness. Because a large number of paintings bear the name of Andreas. You can find his paintings in many museums and art collections here in Denmark and France. Andreas has published books, that bear his name. That is why I think it was not right to just strike through his name in the church register and put mine down instead."
And what did the lawyer give me as a response?
Then I would have to see Andreas' name to some extent as my pseudonym.
"No," I countered, "that would be a wrong, because I have nothing to do with Andreas' pictures. They were created by Andreas. And his pictures are his complete, unrestricted property. He was not a double-being as a painter. When he was painting, he was completely a man. And strangely, - until his last breath."
Then the friend asked me, if I had never had the desire to paint like Andreas, especially since his art had been the real and essential thing in him.
"No," I replied, "I don't have the least desire to paint. And not because I am still feeling too tired and weak. No, but I see with every passing day how I, as opposed to him, see the world less and less with a painter's eyes. There is no wish within me to continue his work. My life has to go its own way. I don't mean by this that I am not an artist. Maybe I am an artist. But I believe firmly that I have will find a different expression for my artistic desire, meaning for the desire to create something. However I can't say anything about that yet. Because I don't know anything about these things within me yet."
We walked through the park of Bernstorff Castle. It was a grey December sky. And the friend asked me, if I had lost all of the feeling for nature that Andreas had.
"No," I said to him, "it's just everything that I see no longer means a motif for a painting. I am not "possessed" by a landscape, by a mood of nature. When I see something truly beautiful, then I have the impression that my unconscious is absorbing it. I don't know more today. Perhaps I will be able to give all of this a visible, audible expression some day, in some form of art, be it painting, or music, or poetry, or something else.? At the moment nothing causes more stirrings in me than music. But if I think about myself, then I feel like I am on a boat that is drifting under full sail and lets itself be guided by the wind, wherever the wind will take it ... Dear God, I am still so new. I have to have some time to find myself – how old am I really? Maybe the doctors can find that out. But my age has nothing at all to do with Andreas' age. Because I have not shared Andreas body and blood from the beginning. It was Andreas who had the exclusive rule over this body for a whole human lifetime, if not longer. And it was only later that I developed within our shared body, so that this body changed shape more and more. Until there was no strength, or rather no life force left for Andreas.
However odd that might sound for others, that is how it was, and not different in any way. And it is why I think that Andreas' name has to remain in the church register of his home town, where he was born, - and that they should make a passport for stateless persons like me, the homeless one, with my own biological age ..."
The friend finally left me, shaking his head. And this shaking of the head is what I will certainly encounter with most people."