Man Into Woman - Chapter 21 by Lili Elbe Lyrics
During these short weeks of being together with Grete here in Copenhagen Lili had for the first time encountered a happy woman in love.
And now when Grete had left her alone, Lili sensed a secret pain, a restrained grief, a tentative feeling of envy, no it was not envy, that she knew, because nobody begrudged Grete hеr luck less than she did.
And finally she found what stirrеd painfully within her, an emptiness in her life, something unfulfilled, that she would probably never be able to fill ...
She felt this vaguely, and she was afraid to give a name to this new thing stirring within her.
Spring was beginning. The garden around the house in which her small attic rooms were situated shimmered in their first green, and Lili felt her body thriving. But she also felt how this puzzling desire for something that she could not give a name to was stirring ever more aroused and fervent.
And she began to work more and more diligently as if she had no time to lose. Throughout the night she wrote her life's confession. She allowed herself only a few hours of sleep a night. During the day she would sit at the grand piano playing for hours. She also did quite womanly chores, she sewed herself new dresses, helped with the household chores. In the evenings she was together with relatives and girlfriends. She often went to her German friend, bringing him new pages of writing. But she dared less and less to talk with him about what she had written.
"Collect everything," she often said at those times, "and read it only when I am no longer in Copenhagen."
One thing she had agreed on with Grete: come summer she should be down south with her and Feruzzi ...
- - -
"The doctor I visit frequently told me today: "when I first saw you, I thought you were a pitiful, degenerate, unhappy human child. But now I have been able to observe you calmly, and I know that you are a healthy, strong living woman."
I can not express how happy those words made me.
In the evening I told this to my German friend, and he said to me:
"Now it will soon be time that you paint again."
I looked at him shocked.
"Again?" I said, "will you understand already that I have never painted and that I still don't know if I will ever be able to begin to paint."
He looked at me firmly. The first time I saw a doubt in his eyes. He said:
"The healthier you become, the more certainly all the positive things that were in Andreas will rise up again. What was immortal in him, the divine spark, his artist's genius.
And even if you are not yet able to admit the truth of this creative impulse within yourself, that only has to be triggered through working on something yourself, then you are still far enough along to teach others, I mean by that, in a certain way to reproduce, to instruct young people who have a talent for painting.
He had risen and paced excitedly up and down the room. And then he said:
"I have read your confession page by page, you know that. And I also understand that something like shyness peeping out of this confession. You are a woman. Now and then you are afraid to express the last thing. Because that last thing is the completely naked, the brutal thing. But all truth is brutal. Much of it is to a certain degree shameless, and there are only few people who understand the innermost, most complete shame, can endure it, namely the shame of shamelessness."
Now I took up his word: "Do you want to say that I am not sincere enough?"
He stopped standing in front of me, took my hand, hooked me under the arm and slowly paced up and down his room with me.
And he said: "Lili, you have described yourself as a bridge builder, one who is building a bridge from the firm, safe banks of today. And you said yourself that you did not know if the other bank was the past or the future."
Then he fell silent.
We both stood in front of the window of his room. From here one can see the harbor, across the water and over many warehouse roofs to the Öresund.
Both of us had become very quiet, and then he told me approximately these words:
"This bridge, Lili, it leads much deeper into the past than you can guess today. Because it leads over that abyss which otherwise is separating man from woman. That is the unique thing about your fate, what makes you chosen, namely the emotional connection between the two sexes. This premonition in your blood, which is now streaming through a woman's heart, your heart, just as it streamed through the heart of a man earlier, because now and then through colorful, mournful mists, rising to awe-inspiring knowledge. And this foreboding knowledge you have carried into your fateful confession, very reluctantly and perhaps expressed in insufficient, fumbling, sparse words. And sometimes your words just hint at things, sometimes they leave something out, out of guarded shame. These new lands, Lili, these new lands of the soul are slumbering within you, and more things will open up within you. Whether you want to admit it or not, it has long since opened up within you."
Then he was quiet.
And I sat down in the darkest corner of his room and closed my eyes. He had not seen that I was crying. I went home all alone. And the other day I asked him if he would send his little daughter, a girl of sixteen years, who had been attending the Copenhagen art school for a few months, to me as a student."
And now when Grete had left her alone, Lili sensed a secret pain, a restrained grief, a tentative feeling of envy, no it was not envy, that she knew, because nobody begrudged Grete hеr luck less than she did.
And finally she found what stirrеd painfully within her, an emptiness in her life, something unfulfilled, that she would probably never be able to fill ...
She felt this vaguely, and she was afraid to give a name to this new thing stirring within her.
Spring was beginning. The garden around the house in which her small attic rooms were situated shimmered in their first green, and Lili felt her body thriving. But she also felt how this puzzling desire for something that she could not give a name to was stirring ever more aroused and fervent.
And she began to work more and more diligently as if she had no time to lose. Throughout the night she wrote her life's confession. She allowed herself only a few hours of sleep a night. During the day she would sit at the grand piano playing for hours. She also did quite womanly chores, she sewed herself new dresses, helped with the household chores. In the evenings she was together with relatives and girlfriends. She often went to her German friend, bringing him new pages of writing. But she dared less and less to talk with him about what she had written.
"Collect everything," she often said at those times, "and read it only when I am no longer in Copenhagen."
One thing she had agreed on with Grete: come summer she should be down south with her and Feruzzi ...
- - -
"The doctor I visit frequently told me today: "when I first saw you, I thought you were a pitiful, degenerate, unhappy human child. But now I have been able to observe you calmly, and I know that you are a healthy, strong living woman."
I can not express how happy those words made me.
In the evening I told this to my German friend, and he said to me:
"Now it will soon be time that you paint again."
I looked at him shocked.
"Again?" I said, "will you understand already that I have never painted and that I still don't know if I will ever be able to begin to paint."
He looked at me firmly. The first time I saw a doubt in his eyes. He said:
"The healthier you become, the more certainly all the positive things that were in Andreas will rise up again. What was immortal in him, the divine spark, his artist's genius.
And even if you are not yet able to admit the truth of this creative impulse within yourself, that only has to be triggered through working on something yourself, then you are still far enough along to teach others, I mean by that, in a certain way to reproduce, to instruct young people who have a talent for painting.
He had risen and paced excitedly up and down the room. And then he said:
"I have read your confession page by page, you know that. And I also understand that something like shyness peeping out of this confession. You are a woman. Now and then you are afraid to express the last thing. Because that last thing is the completely naked, the brutal thing. But all truth is brutal. Much of it is to a certain degree shameless, and there are only few people who understand the innermost, most complete shame, can endure it, namely the shame of shamelessness."
Now I took up his word: "Do you want to say that I am not sincere enough?"
He stopped standing in front of me, took my hand, hooked me under the arm and slowly paced up and down his room with me.
And he said: "Lili, you have described yourself as a bridge builder, one who is building a bridge from the firm, safe banks of today. And you said yourself that you did not know if the other bank was the past or the future."
Then he fell silent.
We both stood in front of the window of his room. From here one can see the harbor, across the water and over many warehouse roofs to the Öresund.
Both of us had become very quiet, and then he told me approximately these words:
"This bridge, Lili, it leads much deeper into the past than you can guess today. Because it leads over that abyss which otherwise is separating man from woman. That is the unique thing about your fate, what makes you chosen, namely the emotional connection between the two sexes. This premonition in your blood, which is now streaming through a woman's heart, your heart, just as it streamed through the heart of a man earlier, because now and then through colorful, mournful mists, rising to awe-inspiring knowledge. And this foreboding knowledge you have carried into your fateful confession, very reluctantly and perhaps expressed in insufficient, fumbling, sparse words. And sometimes your words just hint at things, sometimes they leave something out, out of guarded shame. These new lands, Lili, these new lands of the soul are slumbering within you, and more things will open up within you. Whether you want to admit it or not, it has long since opened up within you."
Then he was quiet.
And I sat down in the darkest corner of his room and closed my eyes. He had not seen that I was crying. I went home all alone. And the other day I asked him if he would send his little daughter, a girl of sixteen years, who had been attending the Copenhagen art school for a few months, to me as a student."