“I’ll go and sleep and then I’ll come back, but could I just talk to you for a few more minutes?”
“It’ll have to be a few. I’m very busy today.”
“I’ll come straight to the point. Last night, for the first time, I masturbated in a completely uninhibited way. I thought all the things I’d never dared to think, I took pleasure in things that before frightened or repelled me.”
Dr. Igor assumed his most professional air. He didn’t know where this conversation might lead, and he didn’t want any problems with his superiors.
“I discovered that I’m a pervert, doctor. I want to know if that played some part in my attempted suicide. There are so many things I didn’t know about myself.”
I just have to give her an answer, he thought. There’s no need to call in the nurse to witness the conversation, to avoid any future lawsuits for sexual abuse.
“We all want different things,” he replied. “And our partners do too. What’s wrong with that?”
“You tell me.”
“There’s everything wrong with it. Because when everyone dreams, but only a few realize their dreams, that makes cowards of us all.”
“Even if those few are right?”
“The person who’s right is just the person who’s strongest. In this case, paradoxically, it’s the cowards who are the brave ones, and they manage to impose their ideas on everyone else.”
Dr. Igor didn’t want to go any further.
“Now, please, go and rest a little; I have other patients to see. If you do as I say, I’ll see what can be done about your second request.”
Veronika left the room. The doctor’s next patient was Zedka, who was due to be discharged, but Dr. Igor asked her to wait a little; he needed to take a few notes on the conversation he had just had.
In his dissertation about Vitriol, he would have to include a long chapter on sex. After all, so many neuroses and psychoses had their origins in sex. He believed that fantasies were electrical impulses from the brain, which, if not realized, released their energy into other areas.
During his medical studies, Dr. Igor had read an interesting treatise on sexual deviance, sadism, masochism, homosexuality, coprophagy, coprolalia, voyeurism—the list was endless.
At first, he considered these things examples of deviant behavior in a few maladjusted people incapable of having a healthy relationship with their partners. As he advanced in his profession as psychiatrist, however, and talked to his patients, he realized that everyone has an unusual story to tell. His patients would sit down in the comfortable armchair in his office, stare hard at the floor, and begin a long dissertation on what they called “illnesses” (as if he were not the doctor) or perversions (as if he were not the psychiatrist charged with deciding what was and wasn’t perverse).
And one by one, these normal people would describe fantasies that were all to be found in that famous treatise on erotic minorities: a book, in fact, that defended the right of everyone to have the orgasm they chose, as long as it did not violate the rights of their partner.
Women who had studied in convent schools dreamed of being sexually humiliated; men in suits and ties, high-ranking civil servants, told him of the fortunes they spent on Rumanian prostitutes just so that they could lick their feet. Boys in love with boys, girls in love with their fellow schoolgirls. Husbands who wanted to watch their wives having sex with strangers, women who masturbated every time they found some hint that their men had committed adultery. Mothers who had to suppress an impulse to give themselves to the first delivery man who rang the doorbell, fathers who recounted secret adventures with the bizarre transvestites who managed to slip through the strict border controls.
And orgies. It seemed that everyone, at least once in their life, wanted to take part in an orgy.
Dr. Igor put down his pen for a moment and thought about himself: What about him? Yes, he would like it too. An orgy, as he imagined it, must be something completely anarchic and joyful, in which the feeling of possession no longer existed, just pleasure and confusion.
Was that one of the main reasons why there were so many people poisoned by bitterness? Marriages restricted to an enforced monogamy, within which, according to studies that Dr. Igor kept safely in his medical library, sexual desire disappeared in the third or fourth year of living together. After that, the wife felt rejected and the man felt trapped, and Vitriol, or bitterness, began to eat away at everything.
People talked more openly to a psychiatrist than they did to a priest because a doctor couldn’t threaten them with Hell. During his long career as a psychiatrist, Dr. Igor had heard almost everything they had to tell him.
To tell him, for they rarely did anything. Even after many years in the profession, he still asked himself why they were so afraid of being different.
When he tried to find out the reason, the most common responses were: “My husband would think I was behaving like a prostitute,” or, when it was a man: “My wife deserves my respect.”
The conversation usually stopped there. There was no point saying that everyone has a different sexual profile, as individual as their fingerprints; no one wanted to believe that. It was very dangerous being uninhibited in bed; there was always the fear that the other person might still be a slave to their preconceived ideas.
I’m not going to change the world, Dr. Igor thought resignedly, asking the nurse to send in the ex-depressive, Zedka, but at least I can say what I think in my thesis.
Eduard saw Veronika leaving Dr. Igor’s consulting room and making her way to the ward. He felt like telling her his secrets, opening his heart to her, with the same honesty and freedom with which, the previous night, she had opened her body to him.
It had been one of the severest tests he had been through since he was admitted to Villete as a schizophrenic. But he had managed to resist, and he was pleased, although his desire to return to the world was beginning to unsettle him.
“Everyone knows this young girl isn’t going to last until the end of the week. There’d be no point.”
Or perhaps, precisely because of that, it would be good to share his story with her. For three years he had spoken only to Mari, and even then he wasn’t sure she had entirely understood him; as a mother, she was bound to think his parents were right, that they had just wanted the best for him, that his visions of paradise were the foolish dreams of an adolescent completely out of touch with the real world.
Visions of paradise. That was exactly what had led him down into hell, into endless arguments with his family, into such a powerful feeling of guilt that he had felt incapable of doing anything and had finally sought refuge in another world. If it hadn’t been for Mari, he would still be living in that separate reality.
Then Mari had appeared; she had taken care of him and made him feel loved again. Thanks to her, Eduard was still capable of knowing what was going on around him.
A few days ago a young woman the same age as him had sat down at the piano to play the Moonlight Sonata. Eduard had once more felt troubled by his visions of paradise and he couldn’t have said if it was the fault of the music or the young woman or the moon or the long time he had spent in Villete.
He followed her as far as the women’s ward, to find his way barred by a nurse.
“You can’t come in here, Eduard. Go into the garden, it’s nearly dawn, and it’s going to be a lovely day.”
Veronika looked back.
“I’m going to sleep for a bit,” she said gently. “We’ll talk when I wake up.”
Veronika didn’t know why, but that young man had become part of her world, or the little that remained of it. She was certain that Eduard was capable of understanding her music, of admiring her talent; even if he couldn’t utter a word, his eyes said everything, as they did at that moment, at the door of the ward, speaking of things she didn’t want to hear about.
Tenderness. Love.
Living with mental patients is fast making me insane. Schizophrenics don’t feel things like that, not for other human beings.
Veronika felt like turning back and giving him a kiss, but she didn’t; the nurse would see and tell Dr. Igor, and the doctor would certainly not allow a woman who kissed schizophrenics to leave Villete.
Eduard looked at the nurse. His attraction for the young girl was stronger than he had thought, but he had to control himself. He would go and ask Mari’s advice, she was the only person with whom he shared his secrets. She would doubtless tell him what he wanted to hear, that in such a case, love was both dangerous and pointless. Mari would ask Eduard to stop being so foolish and to go back to being a normal schizophrenic (and then she would giggle gleefully at her own nonsensical words).
He joined the other inmates in the refectory, ate what he was given, and went outside for the obligatory walk in the garden. While “taking the sun” (on that day the temperature was below zero), he tried to approach Mari, but she looked as if she wanted to be left alone. She didn’t need to say anything, Eduard knew enough about solitude to respect other people’s needs.
A new inmate came over to Eduard. He obviously didn’t know anyone yet.
“God punished humanity,” he said “He punished it with the plague. However, I saw him in my dreams and he asked me to come and save Slovenia.”
Eduard started to move away, while the man continued shouting: “Do you think I’m crazy? Then read the Gospels. God sent his only Son and his Son has risen again.”
But Eduard couldn’t hear him anymore. He was looking at the mountains beyond and wondering what was happening to him. Why did he feel like leaving there if he had finally found the peace he had so longed for? Why risk shaming his parents again, just when all the family problems were resolved? He began to feel agitated, pacing up and down, waiting for Mari to emerge from her silence so that they could talk, but she seemed as remote as ever.
He knew how to escape from Villete. However strict the security might seem, it was actually full of holes, simply because, once people entered Villete, they felt little desire to leave. On the west side there was a wall that could quite easily be scaled since it was full of footholds; anyone who wanted to climb it would soon find himself out in the countryside and, five minutes later, on a road heading north to Croatia. The war was over, brothers were once more brothers, the frontiers were no longer guarded as they had been before; with a little luck he could be in Belgrade in six hours.