Belladonna

by Daša Drndic

  That’s when it begins, when it condenses.

  She, that malicious, uneducated woman with great scholarly ambitions in a small provincial university, will look repulsive in old age. She will have big ears. Her nose will become sharper still, and, weighed down, it will sink toward her top lip, upon which it will come to rest; because of a lack of teeth, her chin will turn upward, warts will break out all over her face, and her speech will come to resemble snarling.

  Oh yes, he would have liked to abandon all those collectives that devour, those consumers of ideas, that cacophonous din, those blank masks that disguise a still greater nullity, and give himself up to cheerful occupations, nourish his brain cells so that they pulse and drum, but a pathetic pension in the small, ruined, pompous country in which he lives (how did this horror of destiny befall him, how?), in a country in which all rush headlong to leave if they can, in a country where a minister of education threatened to introduce patriotism as a subject into the school curriculum, in which publicly, in the open air and on television, in order for the message to reach the most remote village, people sing songs with the refrain our Croatian mother bore me, so that those whom the Croatian mother did not bear feel unwanted, while all those whom their Croatian mother did bear leap up, proud and superior, prepared one way or another to eliminate those whom the Croatian mother did not bear, by stoning if necessary, in this country, a country in which people want to believe that they are brought into the world by their homeland rather than by a woman, in a country of such false decorum and hypocrisy that people have executed names, and at work address one another as director, dean, professor, boss, a pension in this country earned after twenty-five years of education, studying, after forty years of work, guarantees a relatively swift and objectively awful — death; that pension, that retirement benefit that really makes one wind down, run down, insidiously and meanly drilling into one’s ears on a dozen fronts at the same time takes one’s life away. So he, Andreas Ban, cannot accept that his pension should dictate how he will wind down, that the undying Croatian mother should say when she has had enough of her son, and decides to take things into his own hands. He, Andreas Ban, cannot be resigned to living on chicken wings which he can’t take, and if he could, and if he wanted to, that possibility eludes him because chicken wings are becoming increasingly expensive, in the end all that would be left to him would be the spleen and the lungs and other repulsive animal innards which some people feed to their dogs. He is already imprisoned, already chained, nailed to this little country because he can’t travel, he can’t run away (he has no money), even though he is mobile and still (though not for long) receiving a salary. He will not walk around in worn, outmoded shoes, he won’t wear gray matted sweaters, he won’t shove badly made dentures into his mouth, no. (He recently told somebody that his sweater was completely matted, and she laughed and said, What a funny word, matted, what does it mean?) He won’t travel on buses to town in the morning (between ten and twelve) (even if the Croatian mother offers pensioners those rides for free), buses that are full of incapacitated, loud, deaf creatures carrying bags from the market, containing two apples, one bell pepper and instant polenta. He will not listen to:

  They put her in a home, she hopes she’ll get out, but she won’t.

  Can she walk?

  They put her in a home and sold her apartment.

  Is she senile?

  They haven’t told her she doesn’t have an apartment anymore, if they told her she’d drop dead, she’s not senile.

  he won’t look at those sagging, hungry, insatiable faces, those wizened people who cross themselves when the bus passes a church, mumble something into their chins and bow their heads humbly before “God,” he won’t look at those toothless faces rhythmically sucking the inside of their drooping cheeks with a revolting infantile smacking sound, those ravenous faces, which can best be seen on holidays and feast days when in town squares the Croatian mother bestows on them two sardines or a child’s portion of beans, for which they wait for hours, patiently, lined up, while marshals watch them from the side, just in case, heaven forbid, they should have a rush of blood to the head and charge forward in a frenzy. Those benign feast days for the sick, the old, the abandoned fanatically in love with life, begin at nine a.m. and end at midday, when all that was on offer has been eaten and drunk, falling like a stone into those thinned, shrunken old people’s stomachs, so that the squares can be cleaned with jets of water in time for the evening’s musical entertainment for the young and well fed. Andreas Ban watches that horde of half-rotted living corpses, which multiply, proliferate, there are more and more of them everywhere, especially at clinics, waiting rooms are full of them, they go there for the company, in winter — for the warmth, they occupy all the chairs in waiting rooms, they go to doctors’ offices and clinics because they are anxious about their health, they particularly like giving blood samples, although the lines at the laboratories are long and there are no chairs, there’s no commotion, no relaxing, just wearisome waiting and shifting from foot to foot, in that line stretching over two floors, in which those old people touch, stick to one another, they wait, they stand and wait, where do they get such patience, such hunger and thirst for an already devastated, shriveled nothing of a life, a desire to live over the line, beyond beauty, in a desert, let them be downtrodden, it doesn’t matter, they are those quiet, persistent, stubborn types accustomed to suffering and forbearance. One woman insisted she should have a cataract operation, although she was riddled with metastases, You’re riddled with metastases, the doctors told her, you don’t have long to live, they told her, that’s medical practice today, throw it all in a patient’s face, tell them the outcome but without explanation, just the bare outcome, because doctors don’t have time for refinements, and that woman kept repeating, I want to be able to see clearly, she said, so the doctors relented, they did her a favor, they restored her sight, although it was questionable whether she had ever had it, so that she then had a clearer perception, without clouding, of her corroded, dying body.

  Andreas Ban watches these bedraggled nags clutching their lives in their arms as they stagger and hobble their way across the road in a grotesque race, so what if someone knocks into them, so what if a car runs them down, that would at least be a worthy end, but no, their eyes are wide open, their mouths gaping, and, as though rescued from drowning, they leap onto the sidewalk, because they love life, because that life, that beautiful, rich life was gifted to them by their Croatian mother.

  And Andreas Ban wants none of those calendars which the Croatian mother distributes to its pensioners before the end of each year, because, as if in some régime setting, in some penitentiary, in some ghetto, he would have to strike off his days.

  In 2011, twenty-five members of the Macedonian organization UNIT, an association of dismissed workers, killed themselves. They could no longer bear life in poverty. They were all over fifty. Some hanged themselves, some jumped off bridges or buildings, and one set himself on fire. (Newspaper report)

  He is a good-looking man, Andreas Ban, a refined decadent, former inhabitant of the big cities of the world, who, having battled for twenty years with this provincial town, was finally crushed by it. Now he is rapidly fraying, inside and out. Andreas Ban covers up the external fraying with clothes, for his own sake, so as not to have to look at it. He camouflages his flabby belly, his slack muscles, the puckered skin on his thighs and upper arms, his flaccid testes, he wears caps and hats, he is not entirely bald, he has his own teeth. As for his internal wasteland, he lets that spread. There had been an effort, yes, he had endeavored, he had tried with hoses and water cannon to shift, disperse that heavy desert sand around him, but got nowhere. Now he is tired.

  What had been important to him he had registered and in his imagination touched at a distance, in the distance: old friendships, dead loves, abandoned towns, books, books, real and unreal characters, spending more and more time with writers, mostly decea
sed, but some living ones as well, because the small town had grown like dough steeped in yeast, enveloping him, sucking him into its porous entrails and finally swallowing him up. That is why he has difficulty breathing, wedged in that clammy mass. He is sinking.

  He has found characters, male and female, who bear parts of his history, which he is now erasing. Those figures seem to him what is most alive in the shallow, dead town surrounding him. They crouch, squeezed between the covers, they thrash around, wriggle, sometimes they burrow through the paper like woodworms and he lets them sit at the table, lie down with him, accompany him on his infrequent walks, sometimes like crazed spirits, like swifts, they circle around his rooms, flying right up to the ceiling, then drop to the floor and drag themselves along, legless, and he is afraid he might step on them, trip on them, squash them, and what then? There would be unbearable loneliness, black silence.

  In a crowd of tourists from many countries, on the shore of Lake Geneva, I found a man who was seeking solitude. The man had sat down on “my” bench, with his stick he drew a circle around himself in the sand and said, There, we’re sitting on the same bench, I’m addressing you, you’re listening to me, but this circle separates us and you are more remote from me than the remotest planet. That is solitude. But solitude is not only the force that sometimes raises us to the skies, sometimes casts us into an abyss, it is also a refuge for lost loves.

  My name is Edouard Estaunié, I am a writer of solitude. I know that our past, with all its secrets, winds around us, suffocates us, restricts our space, cramps our life, until it crushes it completely. Beneath our visible reality is hidden another that would astonish our acquaintances should they become aware of it. There is no sickness so terribly elusive as this one. The more it weighs us down, the deeper is our silence. Solitude need not be dramatic, but it is like a sack filled with stones, brimming with sorrow.

  Piling up experiences brings about changes in the brain,chemical changes. This can be seen clearly in animals; there is no reason why it should be different with the human brain. When two groups of adult rats,

  Oh, Andreas Ban cannot bear rats. Stefan Biber had kept 1,300 rats in his apartment and heaven knows how many cats. The floors of the apartment were covered in rat and cat feces and urine. While the cats were loose, the rats were crammed into cages, many of them without eyes or legs. That is why the town authorities dislodge Stefan Biber from the apartment and he buys a ten-meter yacht to which he moves his rats and his cats. On Biber’s yacht the situation with regard to the rats and the cats is no better than it had been in his apartment. Representatives of the Society for the Protection of Animals come onto his yacht and take away thirty-seven of Biber’s rats and six cats, and report him for cruelty, for keeping animals in too confined a space. Veterinary examinations establish that all of Stefan Biber’s animals are healthy. Biber gives a statement to the press saying that he is a victim of vengeance and persecution.

  when two groups of adult rats, over the course of, say, eighty days, are exposed to conditions in which the rats from one group are isolated and put into poor environments, while the rats from another group are placed together (in good company, so they become lively), in environments “enriched” by various toys and activities, the mass of the cerebral cortex of the rats living “a rich life” increases, and the activity of the cortical acetylcholinesterase becomes more significant. With the other, from every point of view, the brain mass of impoverished rats shrinks, the brain empties, their experience evaporates, images disappear. Other areas of the brains of the rats living dynamic lives also show visible positive changes.

  I’m turning retarded, my brain is shrinking, says Andreas Ban.

  Your voice is losing modulation, Andreas, your sentences are slow and monotonous, you wash less frequently, Andreas, and you twiddle your thumbs in silence.

  An ambulance brings in a patient who had cut off his tongue two hours earlier. The patient had also cut off his testicles, but now that’s not an issue. The patient is evaluated as normal. Before he had cut off a third of his tongue, the patient had injected an ampule of anesthetic (Lidocaine HCI 20 mg, Epinephrine 0.125 mg/mL) into its root and tip, so that he would feel no pain during the “operation.” To prevent the doctors from restoring, sewing back on, the piece of his tongue, the patient had snipped it into little pieces with scissors. There was not much bleeding. The patient was given an antitetanus injection and sent home to recover. Two months later he killed himself playing Russian roulette. The patient was called Daniil Demidov and lived in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

  Estaunié’s Solitudes remind Andreas of Loti’s An Iceland Fisherman, a book that had moved him so deeply as a teenager that he wept. And now he hesitates — to abandon himself to “the insatiable sea” or continue to languish in solitude.

  What a vast desert without shadow or water! Listen, Andreas, a man cannot open up even to his neighbor. That is the tragedy of all lonely souls who, parallel to their conventional, publicly visible lives, live terrible, painful, secret existences. They are silent sufferers. In your previous life, Andreas, you would have judged the state of men and women ashamed by their desolate, destructive silences as repression, quite professionally, according to the books, yet in that silence life does not stop, it does not end, but gradually expires, becomes paralyzed, languishes in secret, in darkness. Such a life in a glasshouse, a life of isolation, is a life of suffering. You know that now, Andreas. All that is needed is to be, to exist! Write, Andreas, write it down.

  A quoi bon? A quoi bon? Andreas Ban asks Estaunié. Or perhaps he does not ask anyone, because there is no one, perhaps he just mumbles and catches his breath.

  Then Conrad, that depressive who tries to kill himself but refrains, leaps up in front of Andreas Ban:

  Who knows what true loneliness is — not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. That’s how I survived.

  Oh come now, Conrad, says Andreas Ban. What memory, which illusion. Memories are illusions, and illusions are elusive. Couéism is for idiots. Only the blind (and the insane) chant the mantra: Tous les jours à tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux.*

  Andreas Ban still reads, less and less now, but still. He seeks confirmation of his discoveries even though to him the situation is clear. He reads discourses on Dürer’s Melencolia, that engraving from 1514, of which Benjamin affirms that it represents the deadening of emotions, a high degree of sadness. But he is not sad, Andreas Ban. I’m not sad, he says. Dürer’s inconsolable angel evokes compassion in him, not identification. It is only that landscape, that landscape with the transcendent sea in the distance that disturbs Andreas Ban. That is my vista, he says, and glances toward his already rotten closed shutters. That’s it, end game, he says. Benjamin believes that there is “enigmatic wisdom” in each object in Dürer’s cataclysmic world; Andreas does not. Foolishness, says Andreas Ban, shuts the book and puts Dürer away.

  Andreas Ban knows that the impasse he is struggling to cope with did not arrive overnight, it slunk into his days quietly and gradually, following his footsteps like a shadow, until he tripped over it. Ah, the disharmony, the collision of what had been and what is now, what a mess. That is why he is now standing, leafing, leafing through himself, through those close to him, through his surroundings, and before their final erasure all kinds of things leap out. Secrets that fall at his feet, uninvited, and outlines of the past, whose edges he endeavors to sharpen by squinting, shreds of memory that land, singed, on his shoulders, little sparks of joy under which he rests, imagining that they are small fireworks (or soft waterfalls). And then, like an immense deadly wave, he is flooded with unbearable irritation, fury and impotence.

  * * *

  * Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.

  Andreas Ban is lying on a doctor’s table, bare to the waist. It is dark in the clinic. He is wait
ing for an ultrasound scan. Outside, it is raining. The drops drum on the tin gutter. He lies there, counting. He counts the drops that fall quickly, very quickly, he cannot catch them all. He leans his right arm, in a cast up to the elbow, against his side. Raise both arms over your head, says the doctor. His right arm is heavy, the plaster is heavy, they have put on too many layers of plaster, they have put the plaster over the splint, you should not do that, but it was easier for them. And quicker. This is the second time he has come to see Dr. Molina. He was here three days ago. He had woken up sweating, his face contorted with pain. What have you done to your arm? said Dr. Molina, You’re soaked through, tidy yourself up and come back the day after tomorrow. It had been pouring then as well. In this town, it rains in spring, it rains in the autumn too, and in summer, the vegetation grows luxuriantly and sends out micro seeds that clog his bronchi, he drags little asthma pumps around in his pockets and as he walks he inhales like an addict sniffing glue and rolling his eyes. He does not roll his eyes.