Cold air.
The cold air had made her feel better the previous night, but how could she get as far as the street? Once more she was noticing each detail of what was happening to her—her breathing rate (there were moments when she felt that if she did not make a special effort to inhale and exhale, her body would be incapable of doing so itself), the movement of her head (the images succeeded one another as if there were television cameras whirring inside it), her heart beating faster and faster, her body bathed in a cold, sticky sweat.
And then the terror, an awful, inexplicable fear of doing anything, of taking a single step, of leaving the chair she was sitting in.
It will pass.
It had passed last time, but now she was at work; what could she do? She looked at the clock, and it seemed to her an absurd mechanism, two needles turning on the same axis, indicating a measurement of time that no one had ever explained. Why twelve and not ten, like all our other measurements?
I mustn’t think about these things, they make me crazy.
Crazy. Perhaps that was the right word to describe what was wrong with her. Summoning all her willpower, she got to her feet and made her way to the toilets. Fortunately the office was still empty, and, in a minute that seemed to last an eternity, she managed to reach them. She splashed her face with water, and the feeling of strangeness diminished, although the fear remained.
It will pass, she said to herself. Yesterday it did.
She remembered that, the day before, the whole thing had lasted about thirty minutes. She locked herself in one of the toilets, sat on the toilet seat, and put her head between her knees. That position, however, seemed only to amplify the sound of her heart beating, and Mari immediately sat up again.
It will pass.
She stayed there, thinking that she no longer knew who she was; that she was hopelessly lost. She heard the sound of people coming in and out of the toilets, faucets being turned on and off, pointless conversations about banal subjects. More than once someone tried to open the door of the cubicle where she was sitting, but she said something in a murmur, and no one insisted. The noise of toilets flushing was like some horrendous force of nature, capable of demolishing an entire building and sweeping everyone down into hell.
But, as she had foreseen, the fear passed, and her heartbeat returned to normal. It was just as well that her secretary was incompetent enough not even to notice her absence, otherwise the whole office would have been in the toilets asking if she was all right.
When she knew that she had regained control of herself, Mari opened the cubicle door, again splashed her face with water for a long time, and went back to the office.
“You haven’t got any makeup on,” said a trainee. “Do you want to borrow some of mine?”
Mari didn’t even bother to reply. She went into the office, picked up her handbag and her personal belongings, and told her secretary that she would be spending the rest of the day at home.
“But you’ve got loads of appointments,” protested her secretary.
“You don’t give orders, you receive them. Do exactly as I say, and cancel the appointments.”
The secretary stared at this woman with whom she had been working for nearly three years, and who had never once been rude to her before. Something must be seriously wrong with her, perhaps someone had told her that her husband was at home with his lover, and she wanted to catch them in flagrante.
She’s a good lawyer, she knows what she’s doing, said the girl to herself. Doubtless tomorrow she would come and apologize to her.
There was no tomorrow. That night Mari had a long conversation with her husband and described all the symptoms she had experienced. Together they reached the conclusion that the palpitations, the cold sweats, the feelings of displacement, impotence, lack of control, could all be summed up in one word: fear. Together husband and wife pondered what was happening. He thought it might be a brain tumor, but he didn’t say anything. She thought she was having premonitions of some terrible event, but she didn’t say anything either. They tried to find some common ground for discussion, like logical, reasonable, mature people.
“Perhaps you’d better have some tests done.”
Mari agreed, on one condition, that no one, not even their children, should know anything about it.
The next day she applied for and was given thirty days’ unpaid leave from the office. Her husband thought of taking her to Austria, where there were many eminent specialists in disorders of the brain, but she refused to leave the house; the attacks were becoming more frequent and lasted longer.
With Mari dosed up on tranquilizers, the two of them managed, with great difficulty, to get as far as a hospital in Ljubljana, where Mari underwent a vast range of tests. Nothing unusual was found, not even an aneurism—a source of consolation to Mari for the rest of her life.
But the panic attacks continued. While her husband did the shopping and the cooking, Mari obsessively cleaned the house every day, just to keep her mind fixed on other things. She started reading all the psychiatry books she could find, only immediately to put them down again because she seemed to recognize her own malaise in each of the illnesses they described.
The worst of it was that, although the attacks were no longer a novelty, she still felt the same intense fear and sense of alienation from reality, the same loss of self-control. In addition, she started to feel guilty about her husband, obliged to do his own job as well as all the housework, cleaning apart.
As time passed, and the situation remained unresolved, Mari began to feel and express a deep irritation. The slightest thing made her lose her temper and start shouting, then sob hysterically.
After her thirty days’ leave was over, one of Mari’s colleagues turned up at the house. He had phoned every day, but Mari either didn’t answer the phone or else asked her husband to say she was busy. That afternoon he simply stood there ringing the bell until she opened the front door.
Mari had had a quiet morning. She made some tea, and they talked about the office, and he asked her when she would be coming back to work.
“Never.”
He remembered their conversation about El Salvador.
“You’ve always worked hard, and you have the right to choose what you want to do,” he said, with no rancor in his voice. “But I think that, in cases such as these, work is the best therapy. Do some traveling, see the world, go wherever you think you might be useful, but the doors of the office are always open, awaiting your return.”
When she heard this, Mari burst into tears, which she often did now, with great ease.
Her colleague waited for her to calm down. Like a good lawyer, he didn’t ask anything; he knew he had a greater chance of getting a reply to his silence than to any question.
And so it was. Mari told him the whole story, from what had happened in the movie theater to her recent hysterical attacks on her husband, who had given her so much support.
“I’m crazy,” she said.
“Possibly,” he replied, with an all-knowing air, but with real tenderness in his voice. “In that case, you have two options: Either get some treatment or continue being ill.”
“There isn’t any treatment for what I’m feeling. I’m still in full possession of all my mental faculties, and I’m worried because this situation has gone on now for such a long time. I don’t haven’t any of the classic symptoms of insanity, like withdrawal from reality, apathy, or uncontrolled aggression—just fear.”
“That’s what all crazy people say, that they’re perfectly normal.”
The two of them laughed, and she made more tea. They talked about the weather, the success of Slovenian independence, the growing tensions between Croatia and Yugoslavia. Mari watched TV all day and was very well informed.
Before saying good-bye, her colleague touched on the subject again.
“They’ve just opened a new hospital in the city,” he said, “backed by foreign money and offering first-class treatment.”
“Treatment for what?”
“Imbalances, shall we say. And excessive fear is definitely an imbalance.”
Mari promised to think about it, but she still took no real decision. She continued to have panic attacks for another month, until she realized that not only her personal life but her marriage was on the point of collapse. Again she asked for some tranquilizers and again she managed to set foot outside the house, for only the second time in sixty days.
She took a taxi and went to the new hospital. On the way, the driver asked if she was going to visit someone.
“They say it’s very comfortable, but apparently they’ve got some real nutters in there too, and part of the treatment includes electric shocks.”
“I’m going to visit someone,” said Mari.
It took only an hour of conversation for Mari’s two months of suffering to come to an end. The director of the hospital—a tall man with dyed hair, who answered to the name of Dr. Igor—explained that it was merely a panic disorder, a recently recognized illness in the annals of world psychiatry.