Teach Us to Sit Still

by Tim Parks

  After a week and more of these early-morning browsings, I realise that the sheer abundance of ‘cures’ can only mean there are none.

  My cure method include seven parts.

  1. Eat four kinds of nature product every day. Bee honey, royal jelly, bee pollen and propolis.

  2. Take the following Chinese medicines . . .

  I’ve read that some people take a magnesium/zinc supplement to clean out the prostate stones. Does this actually work? And if so what is the recommended daily dose rate of magnesium and how much zinc must I take to balance out the side effects of the magnesium?

  Fresh parsley juice. You gotta try it!

  I don’t even take mental notes, never mind written ones. Less and less am I planning to try anything anyone suggests. If these solutions worked, everyone would be using them: there’d be no chat rooms and no problem.

  So what am I doing at the computer? I’m not enjoying myself, I’m not getting anywhere, but I can’t stop. It seems to be a common condition. All these sufferers are interminably surfing the net.

  I started some very extensive and exhausting research on prostate pain and prostate problems. Since modern medicine was telling me there was ‘nothing really wrong with me’, I decided to research every other avenue I could find.

  Isn’t this an updated version of the ‘restless, worrisome, dissatisfied individual’ described in that urologists’ manual so many years ago? ‘Dragging his miseries about’ from one website to the next. I’m being drawn back into that story again, the one that ends on the operating table. Almost infallibly, the guys with symptoms like mine seem to be obsessive types, anxiously weighing up the pros and cons of surgery. Some of them are still going over and over the problem even after taking the plunge.

  I look at data for a living. I build information programs and systems to help decision-makers do their jobs. I am used to looking at incomplete, contradictory information and constructing analyses out of it. So I thought I was well-suited to work through the process of choosing a surgical methodology, and I continue to think I did a good job. But when it came to outcomes – how fast I would become continent and regain my sexual capabilities – I now can recall to mind how circumspect were those I queried, how hedged were their responses. Nevertheless, like so many, I suspect, I fell for the best-case scenarios and rosiest anecdotal accounts.

  ‘You should still do the operation,’ Carlo tells me.

  It’s about two weeks after the cystoscopy. He is drinking orange juice and there’s no doughnut.

  ‘I know you’d feel better,’ he insists.

  I can see my friend is trying to help and however blind he might have been about his own condition, the fact is that he and his colleagues treat hundreds of patients like me every year. They know what they know. I start to tell him about some recent Japanese research I’ve seen that uses three-dimensional imagining and shows that poor flow during urination can be caused by poor interaction between the two urinary sphincters, rather than by any actual physical obstruction through the prostate.

  Carlo nods. ‘That’s why we open the top sphincter permanently, then only one sphincter has to work.’ He hesitates. ‘The fact is, if you go on as you are, the bladder wall will thicken with the effort you’re making every time you go to the bathroom. It will age prematurely.’

  I haven’t seen anything about bladder-wall deterioration on the net. After a pause, I sigh. ‘It’s too bad they can’t do all these tests at night, you know, because then it’s so different from—’

  ‘Listen,’ Carlo interrupts. ‘It’s your call. You decide.’

  He has realised I’m not going to do it. He’s not exactly offended but something in his voice tells me I mustn’t ask him for any more advice from now on. I am no longer his patient.

  The Pilotòn

  ‘I’LL HAVE TO stop. You go on.’

  The thing my wife and I do most together is walk. We live in the hills just outside of town. Within a few minutes you’re on paths through vineyards and cherry orchards, following stone walls thick with ivy. One path negotiates a steep gulley round a place called the Witches’ Well, then climbs up to a ridge. At the top, there’s a whitish stone column, the Pilotòn. This is where all the paths meet and you can see for miles in all directions.

  I lean on the stone.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m too uncomfortable.’

  We’re only about fifteen minutes out from home.

  ‘You’ve got to sort this out somehow,’ Rita tells me. ‘It’s been months.’

  ‘It’s just a bad day.’

  She walks on to exercise the dog and I rest on the grass. This has never happened before. We have always walked, ever since we met thirty years ago. Our relationship is walking. Now I find it too uncomfortable.

  The Pilotòn is about two feet in diameter and ten feet high and dates back to Roman times. Once it was twice the height but in the Middle Ages they put an iron crucifix on top and it was struck by lightning. The stone shattered. Absurdly, the circumstance reminds me of that word prakruti, the complex amalgamation of original and acquired traits. Appropriated to Christianity, the pagan phallic column split apart. The tension was too much. Now it’s a relic, with neither the cross on top, nor the virile thrust it had before.

  Since the operation, I get a kind of tickle and fullness, but haven’t been able to achieve a proper . . .

  This is silly. Like when I started thinking of the waterseller’s fig as the prostate. Yet I notice that my mind is more at ease with these eccentric analogies than with the information onslaught of the net. I have the impression they bring me closer to some truth about my condition, but in the way dreams do. Something important is staring you in the face, only you can’t decode it. It won’t come out in words. That’s the fascination of dreams. And certain paintings. There is truth that can’t be said, knowledge you can’t access or use. My mind wanders off in these enigmas and after a while I find I’m feeling a little better. Is it a placebo effect? One day, I suppose, I will discover the meaning of Velázquez’s painting. Or maybe that would spoil it. It’s such a quiet pleasure, lying down with closed eyes, trying to recall that glass of clear water with its dark fig.

  I sit up and look across the valley towards Verona. I’ve lived here, or within a few miles of here, for almost thirty years. Could it be, it comes to me, that Italy, Italian, is the acquired trait that clashes with my original English inheritance? Is this the long tension that undid my health? A smile spreads across my face.

  I came to Italy because I met an Italian girl in the States. She assured me she would never go back to Italy to live. A year in England changed her mind. When we arrived together in Verona, I spoke not a word. I knew from school that languages were beyond me. I struggled. Now I lecture in Italian. On translation, into Italian. And every moment, every word I speak, I’m on my guard against mistakes, I’m listening to correct my accent. It will never be quite right.

  Is this the sort of structural conflict the ayurvedic doctors were talking about? Italy versus England (always an impossible game for me). I love Italian. It has become my destiny. My whole life is tied up with Italy. And I hate it. I hate it for having become my destiny. For taking up so much space. Would I get better, I wonder, if I went back to the UK and lived a monochrome English life? Or would I just have the same problem the other way round? Yearning for Italy. Most likely the damage, like the benefits, is irreversible now.

  It’s pleasant on an April morning to follow odd thoughts to the point where you shake your head and laugh. I’m put in mind of two essays I’ve been working on, one finished and one in the pipeline. Thomas Hardy was born more dead than alive into a family of masons, builders. He was thought too weak to follow his father into the profession. So since he was bright they pushed him at school and he moved up in the world to become an architect. That meant leaving his village home to study in Dorchester. Eventually he went to London, worked in an architect’s office and won prizes for his designs. Just when things appeared
to be going well, he fell ill, or, as he put it, ‘felt weak’, abandoned his career and went home again. This might seem like a disaster, except that at home he completed a novel he had started in London. Writing allowed him to link his ambitions for city celebrity with security among his village roots.

  Later, having married an upmarket woman from Cornwall, Hardy started to oscillate between life in London and life in Dorchester. He never really knew where he wanted to live. And his books are frequently about young people who leave their homes, always country homes, too early, feel overwhelmed, frightened, exploited, and beat unhappy retreats to their roots, their mothers. It’s never clear how far they are victims of society or flawed in themselves. A great walker (like my wife!), his characters are forever traipsing back and forth between village and town, infancy and adulthood, security and adventure. Often it seems they’d rather walk for ever than arrive.

  Hardy’s wife got mixed up in this uneasy character trait. Having married in 1874, the novelist began to drag her back and forth from London to Dorchester. Seven moves in eight years. The children they wanted did not arrive. Encouraged to help with his writing during romantic betrothal, the childless Emma was now frozen out of his professional life. She did not mix well in London, where she preferred to live, or at all in Dorchester, which he now seemed to prefer.

  But in 1880 their relationship was suddenly transformed when Hardy fell ill and, taking to his bed for many months, allowed Emma to run his life for him. His recurring mystery illness, vaguely described as a ‘bladder inflammation’, did not prevent him from meeting the gruelling demands of serialised novel publication. He wrote reams. On his recovery, Emma was sufficiently reassured about her role in the partnership to agree to the building of a permanent home not far from Dorchester. Or alternatively: when Emma was sufficiently reassured about her role in the partnership to agree to the building of a permanent home not far from Dorchester, Hardy recovered.

  Could it be, then, I wondered, that the secret purpose of Hardy’s bladder inflammation – and the few symptoms described in the biographies would not look out of place among Google’s six million and more posts for prostate pain – was to reset his relationship with his wife, turning her from an embarrassing would-be literary helper into a traditional carer? And simultaneously to sort out the interminable question of where to live, in city or country? Needed again, albeit in a different way, Emma was willing to move back to Dorchester, on condition that they build their own posh home. Hardy got his father and brother to do the building to his, Hardy’s, design in a place near to, but nevertheless separate from, the family’s village. In terms of relationship and location, he was realigning the inherited and acquired aspects of his personality.

  With an illness.

  So, in what way has my mystery condition altered my relationship with my wife?

  Or my situation in Italy?

  I frown and tear up a couple of tufts of grass beside the solid Pilotòn. It’s easy to come to conclusions about someone whose biography you can study. Not to mention the novels, poems and letters Hardy left. You can go backward and forward through the pages, checking dates and events. But how can I hope to understand my own situation when I don’t even remember when these pains began? Was it shortly after I arrived in Italy? Is that possible? As I see it, there’s no question of the condition’s having changed my wife’s role in any particular way. She is not one of those anxious women who write to the chat rooms on behalf of their husbands. Nor would I want her to be. She doesn’t have more power because I’m not well. Or less. Nor has the problem altered where I work, or live, or plan to live. Perhaps it has frozen things, though. All decisions – holidays, home improvements – seem to have been put off until I’m well again. We are living in a kind of limbo. Now we can’t even walk together.

  About a kilometre to the north of where I’m sitting, as the ridge rises gently towards the Alps, there’s a convent. And to the south, where the path winds down towards the plain, there are the three towers of the Castello di Montorio, which, in the Middle Ages, was a monastery. It seems that at night there was quite a back-and-forth of lusty nuns and monks along this ridge-top path; it’s not hard even now to imagine them in their hoods and habits hurrying to moonlit liaisons. Eventually, the scandal reached such proportions that the monks were kicked out and sent elsewhere. I wonder if the nuns laid cool fingers on the virile Pilotòn as they passed, whether the monks somatised the conflict between vows and libido in prostate problems. Some psycho-site on the net claims that pelvic pain is often a guilt response to adultery, which was a sin, funnily enough, that became quite an obsession, for Thomas Hardy. ‘Eastern ideas of matrimony secretly pervade his thoughts,’ wrote the ironic Emma. But though the author was almost always in eager correspondence with young female admirers, all the information we have suggests that he never broke the deadlock of wedlock.

  Could bladder pain be a way of keeping yourself true?

  The other essay I’m writing is about Mussolini. The man could not be more different from Thomas Hardy yet, as always, I have a habit of making connections. Mussolini’s parents were famously poles apart. His father was a blacksmith, an aggressive socialist activist gaoled on a number of occasions, once village mayor, almost the only man in the community never to go to church, not even on Christmas Day. His mother was a much loved, very devout Catholic schoolmistress. The young Benito oscillated between periods of exemplary piety and episodes of rebellious violence. In late adolescence he formed a habit of more or less raping a girl, then doing everything he could to have her love him. He was happy to be sentimental, if he could dominate. Eventually, after his mother’s death, he married the daughter of his father’s long-term mistress. Married is not quite the word. They pledged themselves to each other for ever, but without being officially married. Benito didn’t believe in formalities. Meantime, every institution he was involved in – schools, newspapers, political parties – kicked him out, until he started a movement of his own that all Italy would be obliged to join.

  Preaching violence, Mussolini was never involved in it himself. On his desk he kept a loaded pistol, but never used it. He preferred reading, writing, translating. Threatening parliament with draconian reforms, talking about how radically he could and some day would impose his will on Italy, for more than a decade he actually left things much the same. His wife accused him of not living up to the severity of his rhetoric, of postponing a more brutal manifestation of himself to some indefinite moment in the future and meanwhile letting his enemies off the hook. ‘You should be tougher, Benito!’ she told him. Occasionally he followed her advice: in 1924, shortly after the murder of socialist MP Giacomo Matteotti, the first high-level political assassination of the Fascist period, Il Duce was afflicted by violent stomach pains. He was reduced to writhing on the floor. He couldn’t function. He then arranged for the murdered man’s widow to be given a state pension.

  These pains came and went intermittently throughout the rest of Mussolini’s life. Physicians diagnosed an ulcer and he settled down to a diet of mostly warm milk. Like a baby. Another severe crisis occurred after his visit to Berlin in 1937. He had seen at first hand how successful Hitler was and how ruthless. Here was a man who had no hesitation in keeping his violent word, who didn’t put off his purges and massacres or revert to a sentimental maternal piety. On returning to Rome, Mussolini got serious and introduced the race laws and the goosestep. ‘Trying very hard to be wicked,’ says his biographer, Richard Bosworth. At once he was paralysed with stomach pain. After his death, an autopsy could find nothing wrong with his stomach at all. There had been no ulcer.

  One of the curiosities of Mussolini’s life is how abjectly and comprehensively this habitual bully eventually surrendered power and prestige to Hitler, a man he had previously despised, allowing the German to make all the important decisions in their alliance. Perhaps this surrender spared him some stomach pain. However, and despite the fact that his own survival had come to depend on Hitler’
s, Mussolini would always rejoice when the German army was defeated. At some deep level he couldn’t wish the ugly side of himself to triumph. It was a mental tussle he never resolved. Captured and summarily executed, he offered no resistance.

  ‘What are you up to?’

  It was Rita’s voice. I opened my eyes to find her standing over me.

  ‘Just reflecting that a guy with bladder pains is unlikely to become a serial rapist.’

  Walking home, I found the pain had gone. I felt fine. It was strange.

  Maybe a week or so after this aborted ramble, I had my first experience of impotence.

  Harley Street

  SOMETIME IN MAY, I ordered an American self-help book on line. It’s the kind of thing Tim Parks doesn’t do, and I was at pains to stress to my wife that the book was medical, nothing loony or mystical. I had found it during one of my purgatorial dawns on the net. It was called: A Headache in the Pelvis. The title at first seemed incongruous, silly even, of a nature anyway to guarantee that it could never appear on the first page of responses to any question typed into Google’s search engine. Later, I realised it was precisely this superimposition of head and belly that had drawn me to it.

  My ayurvedic enquiry had been a traveller’s whim. It was one thing idly to speculate on the concept of prakruti and quite another to embark on a programme of sesame oil enemas or to follow recommendations from a study of the heavenly bodies as of 11 p.m., 19 December 1954. Willing to be fascinated, I retained an intense distrust towards any treatment that wasn’t underwritten by Western science.

  Yet Western science was letting me down. I had a further demonstration of this when, London-bound for a conference, I got in touch with friends and had them recommend a urologist in Harley Street. Once again I would appeal in extremis to the most prestigious combination of science and upper-class tradition that England has to offer.