Teach Us to Sit Still

by Tim Parks

  If that was so, and if this circumstance made a significant difference, perhaps I should give them my first performance of the night. Or maybe, so as not to offer something too close to the digestion process, I should give them the second. Or, even better, I could pee all the night’s pee into a single container – a bowl, say, or a jug – and then pour out a tube’s worth in the morning; after giving it a good swirl, of course. That way they would get the full minestrone.

  I couldn’t decide. The whole thing was irritating. It seemed extraordinary that there weren’t specific guidelines for people in my predicament. Before going to bed, I phoned Carlo for advice.

  ‘Pee any time,’ he said drily.

  I decided on the night’s second, which turned out to be around two, and stood there, over the loo, holding the test tube, thinking about Leopardi who used to think so hard he couldn’t go. In his case the problem could hardly have been an enlarged prostate because the description of him struggling to perform refers to the adolescent Giacomo. The source of the info, as I recalled, was the poet’s competitive father, Monaldo, who explained that to help his son to urinate he had to keep him company with the chamber pot and distract him. Imagining my wife waking six times a night to help me distract myself into passing water raised a chuckle and I began to pee, taking care to steer the thin thread of liquid into the tube. But the smile must have caused my hand to shake, or a moment’s inattention, because a few drops trickled over the rim and wetted my fingers. Quickly adjusting the position of the tube, I inadvertently touched it against my foreskin.

  Damn! The instructions on the green box the tube had come in specifically said that you weren’t to touch the rim of the tube with your ‘genitalia’ because superficial bacteria would then get into the urine and alter the results.

  What to do? The sensible thing would be to delay the tests for a day or so while I procured another tube.

  But hadn’t I already delayed for too long?

  The hell with it. I lifted the tube to check if it was full enough. The urine was a pale lemon colour, not exactly the waterseller’s brimming glass, but not unattractive, in its way. I pushed in the stopper and washed my hands.

  But if I didn’t care about the bacteria and consequently misleading test results, why had I spent so much time worrying about when was the best time to pee?

  I’ve no idea.

  Going back up to bed – we sleep in a room under the roof and have to go down a flight of stairs to the loo – it occurred to me that Carlo had been offhand about the timing of the sample because the readings that mattered wouldn’t be affected by the relation between the urine and my food intake. Right. What they were testing for was something ominously simple, like blood in my pee, or cancer cells.

  But hadn’t I promised myself, I reflected, that I wouldn’t think about any of this until the tests were over and I could make a pondered decision?

  I thought about Leopardi instead. Not only did the poet have problems in the bathroom but having spent his childhood bent over books he soon developed severe scoliosis. At twenty he looked like a hunchback. He also suffered from stomach pains, was lazy with personal hygiene and, later on in life, rarely washed his clothes. When asked why she hadn’t been to bed with him, a certain lady remarked, ‘My dear, he stank.’

  Nevertheless, Leopardi wrote sublime poems. Just a few evenings earlier I had been helping Stefi to learn one for school. It tells how the poet takes pleasure in sitting behind a hedge high on a hillside. The fact that the hedge blocks the view allows him to imagine the vastness of eternity beyond it. His ‘thoughts drown in this immensity’, and in the last line he tells us that it’s ‘Sweet to be shipwrecked in this sea’.

  How interesting, it occurred to me, pulling up the bed covers in the shadowy room while my wife snored softly, that Leopardi found it positive when ‘thoughts drown’. And how interesting, too, that he associated such happy moments with high water. Does water dissolve thoughts? In Velázquez’s painting, both the boy and the old man seem to have been placed under some kind of spell by that full glass of water with its fragrant fig.

  I lay quietly. If anyone is dismayed at the idea of having to get up six times a night, let me assure them that I always loved the business of returning to my bed and going back to sleep. Sometimes I actually thought I was lucky to get the chance to drift into dreams so many times in a single night.

  Worrisome Dissatisfied Individuals

  THE ‘WORK’ I insisted on doing day by day, whatever state I might be in, was no more and no less than telling stories. Surely an innocuous occupation. But over the following weeks, I suddenly found myself wrestling with a disturbing and decidedly noxious story, something that came back to me from twenty years before with the dry clunk of a lock turning in a heavy door.

  The morning of the blood and urine tests I had gone to the clinic, as was my wont, with the intention of not really being there. I had taken a book so that my mind would remain focused on my mental world, not my bodily fluids, nor the people around me. I had been asked to write an essay on the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Certainly Bernhard, I thought – I was reading his autobiography Breath: A Decision – had a far worse deal health-wise than I ever did. Hospitalised for pleurisy at seventeen, then diagnosed with tuberculosis, he spent a year at death’s door, followed by a lifetime of debilitating lung disease, until in 1989, he finally succumbed, aged fifty-eight, two years younger than my father had been when he also died of lung problems, cancer in his case. One thing you must put in your essay, I told myself, was that Bernhard’s lungs were his destiny. Like D.H. Lawrence, he never breathed easy. It must have affected his writing.

  Already I was aware of a small presentiment fluttering against the fogged window of my early-morning consciousness. I ignored it, concentrating on Bernhard and keeping half an eye on the illuminated number that showed where the staff were up to. Each ping was another patient dealt with.

  My number eventually flashed up and I went to a window where, without any exchange of words, a young woman at a keyboard transformed my prescriptions into barcodes on adhesives to be attached to various test tubes. How reassuringly efficient and impersonal this was, I thought, compared to the old days when they would make you stand in line for hours.

  Then I remembered.

  The marvel is that I should have contrived not to remember for so long. Still, my first response was self-congratulation. Thank God, I told myself, you haven’t been asked to do the sperm test this time! The awful sperm test. But now it was only a question of seconds before my whirring mind settled on the words: ‘after decades of pain and frustration such patients will inevitably leave their problems on the operating table in their fifties or sixties.’

  The lock turned. Waiting outside the room where they take your blood, I could no longer concentrate on Thomas Bernhard. All this had been foretold.

  More than twenty years previously, suddenly finding I had to go to the bathroom literally every ten minutes, I had been diagnosed with acute prostatitis. I must do a sperm test to find out what bug had got in there, what antibiotic could treat it. On my arrival at the front of a long queue in this same clinic, the nurse, seeing my foreign name on the prescription, had announced with the kind of clarity and booming volume some people imagine all foreigners appreciate: ‘SPERM! MAKE SURE THE FIRST DROPS GO IN THE CONTAINER. IT’S THE FIRST DROPS THAT COUNT WITH SPERM.’

  This was the funny side of the story, something I had told at parties a hundred times, mimicking the surprise on the faces of the others in the queue as the nurse yelled ‘Sperm!’ and then my embarrassment, minutes later, trying to produce that sperm in one of only three cubicles available while others queued outside to provide urine samples, coughing and shuffling and complaining that I was keeping the loo too long. I distinctly remember how relieved, pleased, even proud I was when the crucial first drops were safely steered into the little plastic container.

  Olé!

  But that wasn’t the end of the story. Vit
al as it is for the continuation of the species, the prostate is particularly well protected by layer after layer of near impermeable membrane. It is not easily infected. Once infected, it isn’t easily treated. Once treated, it rarely returns to its pristine state. You get over the acute phase to find you’re looking at the chronic. About three months after these troubles began, I came across a young doctor who, in his eagerness to be candid, gave me a publication that was meant only for people like himself, doctors specialising in urology. The last paragraph of this booklet read as follows (I quote from bitter memory):

  It has to be born in mind that the chances of a complete recovery from prostatitis are minimal, almost non-existent in fact. Prostatitis sufferers tend to be restless, worrisome, dissatisfied individuals who drag their miseries around from one doctor to the next in search of a cure they never find. The urologist must be careful not to let himself be demoralised by these people and their intractable pathologies. In the end, after years, perhaps decades of pain and frustration, the vast majority of such patients will inevitably leave their problems on the operating table in their fifties or sixties.

  The urologist must be careful! Poor fellow. Nobody wants to be demoralised. But I was a young man of thirty being told I would be sick in my intimate parts for the whole of my virile life. My soul rebelled. I flew to London, paid a man in Harley Street who put me on more or less permanent antibiotics and after something like a year I was cured.

  ‘I am cured! Completely cured! The booklet was wrong!’

  I remember yelling those words to myself in delight and rage, time and again. ‘Wrong, wrong, wrong! The book was wrong!’ I wanted to find the author and stick his miserable prophesy right up where his prostate was. ‘What a hateful story, and not even true. He got it wrong. I’m cured! CURED!’

  But was I?

  Had I ever been?

  ‘Urine sample over there,’ the nurse said.

  I turned and slotted my test tube into a rack with a community of other test tubes, thirty or forty of them, in orderly rows, cosy and indistinguishable as crosses in a war cemetery.

  Perhaps my condition had simply been dormant. Or I was lying to myself. I had always been uncomfortable. Just that I was used to it, to a certain level of it. I had told myself the tale of being cured because it made me feel better. I so much wanted the booklet to be wrong. Wasn’t it strange, for example, that I had been unable to tell Carlo when these pains actually began?

  ‘Clench your fist,’ the nurse said. She smiled. ‘No need to look so worried.’

  In the past I have sometimes had trouble watching blood flow from my arm. Now I barely noticed. The dark liquid bubbling into the syringe had nothing to do with me. What mattered was this ugly story: ‘inevitably . . . on the operating table . . . in their fifties or sixties’.

  For the following days and weeks I was in thrall to this version of my life, ‘the official medical version’, I kept saying to myself. That’s what you’re up against, the version you chose twenty years ago to deny and which now is taking its revenge. Here I was, barely past my fifty-first birthday, and a doctor, entirely innocent of my medical record, was prospecting exactly the operation that had been foretold when I was thirty.

  What was the point of struggling?

  Or was it rather a question of suggestion? The medical publication of so long ago, written in a style and from a point of view that were no longer acceptable, probably out of print for over a decade and read by absolutely no one, was nevertheless acting as a powerful spell, a hex, a curse. My primitive mind was unable to wriggle free from the words of a witchdoctor who had told me I would wither and die.

  But he didn’t tell you you’d die! I protested out loud. I was in my office no doubt, pacing up and down by my laptop. Just that you’d need a simple, routine operation. Nothing more ordinary. Prostatitis and enlarged prostates are neither of them life-threatening conditions. Why get so upset?

  Then I recalled that there were cancers of the prostate that were indeed life-threatening. I stopped. But no, this didn’t frighten me. What was mortifying wasn’t the prognosis; it was this loss of confidence in my version of the past, my sudden uncertainty as to what the last twenty years had really been.

  So how long has this been going on?

  Well . . . I don’t know.

  Do I try to write stories, I wondered now, because in general I have such a weak grip on the story of my own life? I remembered having once thought something of the like about my father. Every Sunday, matins and evensong, the man’s sermons repeated the same story: sin, despair, redemption, paradise. At fourteen, fidgeting on my pew, it came to me that the person he most needed to convince was himself. That was the day I stopped believing. And what had I just written? What was the plot of my latest novel? The story of a man whose son has written a defamatory biography of him, undermining his sense of who he is, forcing him to revisit the past and reaffirm his version of events. But the reader knows from page one it’s a lost cause. The guy is finished.

  Your stories and your illness are pathetically mixed up, I told myself.

  These unhappy reflections didn’t help with my famous pains, which were all at once more insistent than ever. Not for the first time, then, I had to ask myself whether there wasn’t a psychosomatic element to all this. ‘Prostatitis sufferers tend to be restless, worrisome, dissatisfied individuals,’ the booklet said. The doctor didn’t declare in so many words that the problem was psychosomatic, but he did imply that personality and pathology were related. If that was the case, how should I react? Had my cry of ‘cured’ so many years ago been an attempt to respond to the booklet’s predictions by refusing to be the worrisome, dissatisfied individual it described? Every illness is a narrative. What matters is the version you tell yourself.

  Could I try that ruse again? Simply deny it?

  I was in a hall of mirrors. And the problem for the person who spends all day on his own writing stories is that the only resistance he has to such reflections are the stories he’s trying to tell. There is no phone ringing, no business to be done that might force the mind elsewhere. D. H. Lawrence, I recalled, denied his illness right to the end. He refused to accept that he had tuberculosis. He went on regardless. And the characters in his books are notoriously people who set their wills against the world, who thrive on opposition, even hopeless opposition. Full of vitality and wilfulness, the books themselves are part of Lawrence’s denying he is ill, they are barriers thrown up against sickness. Whereas Bernhard’s genius was to take on his disease by telling it. Bernhard constantly denounced the scandal of illness. He got his energy from the scandal. He scolded his illness. So both men did more than any ordinary human being usually can because they feared illness would stop them doing anything at all.

  But I was paralysed. Nothing would flow. I couldn’t get on with the novel I was writing because with the sudden flaring of this health problem, and in particular the return of an unhappy story I thought I’d shrugged off twenty years ago, what I was writing seemed pointless. It made no sense to me. This is the worst thing that can happen when writing. The words and stories seem pointless, mere constructions to sell a book or two. Every word you write you cross out. It’s mere invention. Even if the book were successful, which it won’t be, who cares? Who needs it? You change from the novel to non-fiction because it suddenly seems absolutely essential to write straightforwardly about something that matters. Otherwise you can’t write. But then realising that you will never be able to say exactly what has happened, exactly what life is – it’s too complicated, it’s too cruel to the people around you – you go back to fiction, hoping to construct some story that at least offers a fair analogy. Only it doesn’t. You can’t find the formula that will make the words seem necessary. You go back and forth between novel and non-fiction, unable to be or become anything at all, the story won’t settle. And meantime a hateful paragraph in a second-rate medical publication of twenty years ago is dragging you towards the operating table.


  So just go and get it done now! Get yourself cut and start living again!

  In a dream, a dark patch on the floor flew up in my face, closing its wings around my nose, mouth, eyes. A bird. A bat. Choking me. The floor was the floor of my father’s church as visited a month before by myself and my brother.

  Would it help to know, I wondered, that my nervous father had suffered from the same condition? Had he? Were prostate problems hereditary? I remembered Mum making fun of him because, when she called him to meals, he always had to ‘slip away and spend a penny’ before coming to table. He wanted to be comfortable. So perhaps Dad had had to go to the bathroom a lot at night too and I had known nothing about it. I should phone my mother, I decided, and get the story from her. As soon as I had confirmation that the condition was congenital, I would accept the situation, do the operation, and get it over with; though of course my father had never had such an operation, at least as far as I knew.

  Could it be that it was precisely his worrying about a possible operation that brought on his cancer?

  Certainly my father had been a worrisome, dissatisfied individual.

  I resolved to call my mother. For some weeks I was on the point of calling her. But I didn’t. I realised that if she said, ‘No, Dad didn’t have that problem,’ then things would be worse: it wasn’t the gene pool; I couldn’t blame it on Dad. On the other hand, if she said, ‘Yes, Dad had that problem too, poor soul, oh dear, and you too now, Timothy,’ again things would be worse. At that point it would be quite impossible to deny it. It would be written in stone. Better not to know, I thought. If there was one thing I didn’t want it was to be like my father, though I wasn’t so blind as not to see that I was, in fact, very like him. I shared his nerves, for one thing. If I haven’t yet started tearing oranges apart, I will certainly never hold a glass of water with the same beautiful stillness of Velázquez’s waterseller.