EEG

by Daša Drndic

  The detailed examinations and tests I carried out on Charlotta Ben did not reveal any anomalies of the eyes or nervous system. But, the patient walked uncertainly, knocked into objects that happened to be in her path, even when she did not know that I was watching. Through conversations with Charlotta Ben over the course of our ten psychotherapeutic sessions, I discovered the following:

  For six years Charlotta Ben lived with an older woman, the judge Gertrude Salaš, with whom she was in an active lesbian relationship. Recently, however, Charlotta Ben had begun to suffer from fierce jealousy, as her partner was allegedly seeing a woman who was displacing her, Charlotta Ben, from the life of Gertrude Salaš. Two days before coming to therapy, Charlotta Ben secretly followed Salaš to the home of her new girlfriend and saw them both getting into a car in the dark garage. The driver turned on the headlights, the car set off, and Charlotta Ben stumbled and fell almost under the front wheels, so that she could have been seriously hurt. The frantic women picked Charlotta Ben up and took her home, where she announced that she could see absolutely nothing. I’m blind, she said, completely blind. Persuaded by her partner, who was weighed down by guilt, Charlotta Ben came to me seeking help, although she declared that she was not at all concerned about this new sightless state. I feel fine being blind like this, she said, one day everything will fall into place.

  After initial therapy, I carried out several sessions of hypnosis on Charlotta Ben, who in the meantime was reconciled with her lover and, as I had expected, her sight gradually returned. But Charlotta Ben stubbornly believed that she had begun to see through some inexplicable miracle and that her blindness had an exclusively organic origin. Evidently for Charlotta Ben, her confrontation with reality and symbolic autocastratory hysterical blindness were too disturbing for her to allow into her consciousness. (In the dreams and fantasies she related to me, her eyes symbolically took the place of testes.)

  I last saw Charlotta Ben on July 20, 2013. She said, Now everything is as it should be, it’s all fallen into place. The day after tomorrow at 8:17 p.m. there will be a full moon. I shall swim toward the open sea to kiss the Moon, to embrace Gertrude Salaš.

  P.S. Come to Pula. I have some information about the life of Adam Kaplan.

  ALBERT LAUBE. Thirty.

  Nothing works, nothing works here, the medicines don’t work, I hate this place, I’ve been coming here for seven years now, I’ve been here for seven years now, it’s all useless, the medicines don’t work, I hate this place, nothing works, I’ve been here seven years, nothing works, I hate this hospital, nothing works, it’s useless, I’ve been here seven years.

  You came yesterday.

  I’ve been here seven years, nothing works, it’s all useless, I hate this hospital, I’ve been here seven years, nothing works, the medicines don’t work, seven years.

  You were brought here yesterday.

  Nothing works. On the X-ray of my chest, there’s no heart! Where’s my heart?!

  Giuseppe Desa’s father was a carpenter who went broke, lost everything and vanished. His mother, always severe and now embittered, was forced, on June 17, 1603, to give birth to her son in a stable. The boy was apparently not bright. He would sit for hours with his eyes rolled upward, gaping; the other kids called him “bocca aperta” open mouth. For years his body was covered with sores.

  He loved the Church and everything about the Church, but his uncle, a priest, thought him unfit for the cloth. Some Capuchins took him in as a lay brother and assigned him to the kitchen, but he was hopeless: breaking dishes, knocking over pots into the fire, mistaking the rye for wheat. He was expelled after a few months, returned home in rags, and was berated by his uncle and mother.

  Somehow he found work in another monastery, tending the mules, and his piety, or otherworldliness, was such that they accepted him as a novitiate. He had difficulty learning and only passed the examination by a miraculous coincidence: the Bishop happened to ask him the one question to which he knew the answer.

  He spent sixteen years in the monastery in Grotella, in a cell bare of even the few things monks were allowed. His self-mortifications were extreme. Draped in chains, he would beat himself with a scourge studded with nails and star-shaped pieces of steel; the walls of his cell were sprinkled with blood. For most of the year he ate only on Thursdays and Sundays; his food was dried fruit and beans — not even bread — to which he added an unknown bitter powder. A friar once tasted Giuseppe’s dinner and was so disgusted by it that he couldn’t eat for days.

  He didn’t understand when people spoke to him. After he warmly greeted two women on the road, a companion asked Giuseppe if he knew them: Of course. It’s our Blessed Mother Mary and St. Catherine of Siena. When he spoke at all, he would mumble bits of prayers or snatches of scripture, sing songs of his own invention, or say enigmatic things. Once, on meeting a Protestant, he exclaimed: Be cheerful: the deer is wounded, and the man later converted. He would often tell sinners: Go and adjust your bow, but no one knew what this meant. He once ran outside during a furious storm, shouting Dragon! Dragon! and the storm suddenly ceased. He could summon birds by calling them. He would fall into trances, and the other monks would prick him with needles, hold torches to his skin or touch his unblinking eyeballs. No reaction. Opening the door to his cell, he always invited his guardian angel to enter first.

  He avoided women and loathed money. When the pious attempted to give him a donation for the monastery, he would refuse and tell them to speak to a superior. Someone once slipped a coin into his cowl. Giuseppe began to breathe heavily and sweat and finally cried out, I can’t take this anymore! He returned to normal only when the coin was removed. He drove a flock of sheep into the chapel, recited the litany to them, and they baa-ed in unison after every Sancta Maria.

  There was something else about Giuseppe. Devotion had reduced his body and his mind to the state of physical zero for which Gandhi, in his celebrated fasts and elaborate tests of resistance to sexual temptation, had longed. Giuseppe was barely here at all, and therefore he could fly. Twice a day at Mass, and on countless other occasions, he would suddenly shout a word or two: Love! or Holy Mother! or Beautiful Mary! or even Immaculate conception! He described those words as the gunpowder in a cannon. And then he would shoot up to the ceiling of the cathedral or church or chapel, hovering in the air, sometimes for hours, singing praises with his knees bent and arms outstretched.

  Two popes, ambassadors, various government and church officials, and thousands of others saw him and have left scores of eyewitness accounts. Once he flew to the top of a tree and its branches did not bend, as though a small bird were perched on it. Once, he took the hand of a confessor, lifted him up and danced with him in the air. Once, a deranged man, the Chevalier Baldasserre, was brought to him tied to a chair. Giuseppe untied him and pulled him by his hair to the top of the cathedral altar. Upon their descent, the man was sane again.

  Questioned by Cardinal Lorenzo Brancati about what exactly was happening during his flights, he replied in the third person and said that Giuseppe found himself in a great gallery filled with beautiful, rare objects. Among them was a bright mirror that Giuseppe would stare into and, in a single glance, Giuseppe could see the forms of all the things in the world and all the hidden mysteries of the universe that God had chosen to show him.

  Royalty came to visit, but the Church did not know what to do with him. The Inquisition investigated; his presence was deemed to be too disruptive; he was sent to obscure monasteries, traveling by night on back roads, where he was given the most hidden of the cells, but crowds of pilgrims still found him. Toward the end of his life, under orders from the Pope, he was sent to Osimo and forbidden to see anyone outside the monastery.

  On September 18, 1663, after six years of solitary confinement, Giuseppe, in a fever, whispered, The donkey is climbing the mountain. The next day, preparing the body for embalmment, the monks discovered that his heart was bloodle
ss, completely shriveled and dry. He had once said of the Virgin Mary: My mother is very strange; if I bring her flowers, she says that she does not want flowers; if I bring her cherries, she will not take them; and if I then ask her what she wants, she replies: I want your heart for I live on hearts.

  This digressionary little tale (like the other stories that fall out of the frame and upset or break the so-called “uniform flow of narration”) ought to lie in a real little envelope stuck where the little tale is inserted. Then whoever holds the book in his hands could take the little tale out and read it (with the aid of a cheap plastic magnifying glass attached to the book, because the little tale would be printed in tiny letters, because of its alleged insignificance), and if he doesn’t wish to — so what? The reader could take all the parenthetic fabrications scattered within the covers of this book and move them from one miniature envelope into another or simply throw them away and so alter the content, create the “story” he wishes, a course of events which would flow harmoniously and rationally, in compositional and literary terms correctly, or he could do nothing: stick the little envelopes down, seal them. But, no one wants to make such a “design,” no publisher, no printer, because it’s expensive and considered absurd.

  Fernando, his grandmother Dionisia said to Pessoa before she died in a lunatic asylum, Fernando, you will become like me because blood is a traitor. You will drag me with you your whole life. Life is madness and till your death you will fill your pockets with madness.

  One night, Alberto Caeiro, pale, blond and blue-eyed, spoke in Fernando’s skull. I am your father and your master, he said. I shall die of TB in the village of Ribatejo, in the arms of my big, fat aunt.

  Such is life, replied Pessoa, a riddle. Everything in it is hidden, including yourself.

  When Alberto Caeiro died, Pessoa did not cry, he was making love to Ophelia Queroz, a little secretary from the company where he worked.

  Here’s a poem for you, said Álvaro de Campos, a decadent futurist and nihilist with whom Pessoa drank from time to time, mostly in a little restaurant called Pessoa, where Bernardo Soares secretly noted his anxieties on napkins and used bus tickets. Having listened to Álvaro de Campos’s lines, Pessoa was moved.

  It’s a wonderful poem, he said. There are a lot of young men who look like girls. They even use cream for wrinkles around their eyes. They are delicate and like tight clothes. And jewelry. I shall break off my relationship with Ophelia.

  The next day, Ophelia came to work in a green dress with yellow flowers on it and a yellow ribbon in her black hair.

  I often pass the same beggar, Pessoa told Ophelia. His stench follows me for a long time afterward. Farewell, dearest Ophelia. I wrote poems for all the people in the world, but only my parrot knows how to recite them.

  Had he been born deaf, Pessoa may not have quadrupled, he would have remained single. And dumb. Returning from work arm in arm with the sweet Ophelia, shivering in her mauve winter jacket, he would have watched cockroaches mating.

  Andreas, we don’t know if these feelings are some slow madness brought on by hopelessness, if they are recollections of some other world in which we’ve lived — confused, jumbled memories, like things glimpsed in dreams, absurd as we see them now, although not in their origin if we but knew what that was. I don’t know if we were once other beings, whose greater completeness we sense only incompletely today, being mere shadows of what they were, beings that have lost their solidity in our feeble two-dimensional imaginings of them among the shadows we inhabit.

  Yours,

  Fernando Pessoa

  Alberto Caeiro

  Ricardo Reis

  Bernardo Soares

  Álvaro de Campos

  I took these stories (and I have more, hundreds of them), my stories and other people’s, laid them out and a map of life opened up, where lines are definitively drawn, where everything vacillates and, as in that vacillation, alters. I tried to make a crossword puzzle and saw that many of those lives crossed one another, that many of them were like others, that they were in fact the same life, or rather, that they could have been one single life, the life of a single person, both male and female, both adult and child, the lives — or life — of one single time that both vacillates and stands still. Whose voice is this? Adam Kaplan’s or mine?

  Paris.

  For thirty-eight years I didn’t so much as flit through Paris, let alone spend any time there. I now have three Parises: the playful one of the 1970s, when I scampered through it, completely disoriented, plunging into it, wanting to embrace the whole of it (what foolishness), when I spent my days visiting museums, parks, markets and cafés, where painters, writers and philosophers had used up their lives over the centuries, walking over bridges, dreaming, and at night I drank with prostitutes, sometimes in the bars of the Latin Quarter, sometimes in their moldy little rooms on dented squeaking beds with crumpled sheets, which gave off the aroma of shallow, spent passions — spacious Paris, elusive, unconquerable; I have a Paris (the one from thirty-eight years ago), which gathered itself into a knot at the center of which was my mother’s death, a little constricted Paris, confined to a few half-dark streets which, through their underground spaces, through the grilles on the pavements where the homeless sleep to keep warm, vomit the steam of effluents, the stench of millions of our innards, mystical Paris, a city which, like every last town on this planet, it is impossible to disarm, impossible to conquer, in which walkers only crawl over its outside, while it just turns lazily here and there from one side to the other, sometimes with a half-asleep smile, sometimes as though saying, leave me alone. And now I have the Paris I have come to tell that everything’s all right, that I no longer dream, that I can gather up all its stories, all its phases, but only its flickers, the flakes of its being, the Paris I look at panoramically, suppressing the desire to leap into it, to drown in it. I also have a fourth Paris, the Paris of Marisa, Rudolf, and Karlo, the one from 1939, and a fifth, that sparkling, headstrong Paris from Ada’s already cleansed, dried stories that we leaf through the way old people leaf through albums or the tattered and smudged pressed-flower books for children, I am full of images of Paris, like marbles of various sizes and shapes, from the clumsy homemade clay ones to the magical, brightly colored glass balls jingling in my embrace and now, when I raise my arms in a gesture of surrender, I will allow them to roll away into their own life or their own death.

  So, in 2013, I came to gather oblivion.

  It is 1977. In New Belgrade, on the sixth floor of one of the “Six Corporals,” as you look at them from the bridge, a retired officer of the Yugoslav Army sells processed aloe vera in green Fruška Gora Riesling bottles, from which he does not have time to remove the labels; there is great demand, but also great mortality. The thick gray liquid is applied to radiation burns, today no one mentions those terrible radiation burns, oncology has improved. Marisa’s skin is falling off in strips. The officer calls the liquid “balm.” We rub Marisa with balm. We make a tincture of aloe vera, which is taken by mouth. I go with Ada to Kisvárda, a village on the Hungarian–Russian border where in winter tears freeze. Marisa is young. In the train the attendants are Russian, in blue homespun uniforms with short skirts, everyone with swollen knees, everyone fat. The uniforms have gold buttons, like the dress coats of captains on long-haul ships. The attendants are Russian because the train continues on to Moscow, it only passes through Kisvárda. The attendants sell weak Russian tea in glasses, boiling hot, and they don’t sleep at all.

  Kisvárda is a village like those in the Banat region of Serbia. It has an inn and good goulash. It has farms. It has frozen mud. In Kisvárda, Dr. Baross sells anticancer drops in a little room with a low ceiling. There are rugs all over the room, on the floor and on the walls and covering the armchairs because the armchairs are shabby. There’s also a microscope, old-fashioned. One enters the “clinic” through the kitchen, where the doctor’s wife sits in a blue
fustian housecoat; the doctor’s wife sits at a wooden table and waits, there are small plastic snowdrops in a vase. There is a cabinet, reseda green, glass-fronted, and behind the glass lie upturned coffee cups. People come in droves, people come from all over Yugoslavia, because this is the day for Yugoslavia, other countries have their days. Tito is still alive, my mother Marisa dies before Tito. We get back toward morning, our mother Marisa, Marisa the doctor, psychiatrist, expert diagnostician, is waiting for us with a smile and hope for Dr. Baross’ small, pointless, deceitful drops, which, of course, do not help.

  We tried everything. Including Paris.

  Professor Merkaš said, There’s no salvation, the richest and the poorest die of cancer, and later he himself died of cancer. In Paris I converse with tramps and sleep in cheap brothels, the sky is clear, Parisian-blue and it is winter again, probably the same as the Hungarian winter. Marisa is bleeding everywhere. Her blood soaks through the mattress and drips onto the polished floor of the Institut d’Oncologie, within the complex of the Paris Faculté de Médecine, or perhaps it does not happen within the complex of the Paris Faculté de Médecine at all, although there are indications that this is precisely where our mother is lying, because they are trying out new medicines, carrying out trials on her (our mother — a submissive half-dead rabbit, still beautiful — We’re experimenting, they say, we’re testing, they say, we’ve got nothing to lose); maybe our mother is falling apart and bleeding in the Hôpital de l’Institut Curie, because the Hôpital de l’Institut Curie specializes in treating malignant diseases, or perhaps in the Val-de-Grâce military hospital, although I don’t know why our mother would be in the military hospital Val-de-Grâce given that our family has never had any connection with the army, particularly the French Army, for a long time now, for generations, our family has been an ordinary civilian, urban family. Perhaps our mother is lying (and draining away) in Hôpital Cochin. Near the Panthéon, they tell me, there is also the Hôpital Laennec, and the Maternité Port-Royal, I don’t remember, I remember only the proximity of the Panthéon, where Voltaire and Victor Hugo and Zola lie, and the spry Jean Jaurès and that tame Rousseau, who all, to a man, unlike my young and beautiful mother, mean absolutely nothing to me and without them my life is perfectly possible. In Paris I see Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg and, with Adam’s brother Alvaro Kaplan, I eat steak tartare out of a soup plate, with a spoon, in the stuffy apartment belonging to the gallery owner and antiquarian Bojon. In Paris I buy crepes at an open market, fill them with raspberry ice cream, which melts completely on the way to the hospital, leaving dark-red traces on the pavement behind me, a circus troupe is dancing, and the sky is alarmingly blue.