If, however, he could find a way of combatting vitriol, the poison which Dr. Igor believed to be the cause of insanity, his name would go down in history and people would finally know where Slovenia was. That week, he had been given a heaven-sent opportunity in the shape of a would-be suicide; he was not going to lose this opportunity for all the money in the world.
Dr. Igor felt happy. Although he was obliged for economic reasons to accept treatments, like insulin shock for example, that had long ago been condemned by the medical profession, the same economic reasons lay behind Villete’s instigation of a new psychiatric treatment. As well as having the time and the staff to carry out his researches into vitriol, he also had the owners’ permission to allow the group calling itself the Fraternity to remain in the hospital. The shareholders in the institution tolerated—note that word well, not “encouraged,” but “tolerated”—a longer period of internment than was strictly necessary. They argued that, for humanitarian reasons, they should give the recently cured the option of deciding for themselves when would be the best moment for them to rejoin the world, and that had led to a group of people deciding to stay in Villete, as if at a select hotel or a club for those with similar interests and views. Thus Dr. Igor managed to keep the insane and the sane in the same place, allowing the latter to have a positive influence on the former. To prevent things from degenerating and to stop the insane having a negative effect on those who had been cured, every member of the Fraternity had to leave the hospital at least once a day.
Dr. Igor knew that the reasons given by the shareholders for allowing the presence of healthy people in the hospital—“humanitarian reasons” they said—were just an excuse. They were afraid that Ljubljana, Slovenia’s small but charming capital, did not have a sufficient number of wealthy crazy people to sustain this expensive, modern building. Besides, the public health system ran a number of first-class mental hospitals of its own, and that left Villete at a disadvantage in the mental health market.
When the shareholders had converted the old barracks into a hospital, their target market had been the men and women likely to be affected by the war with Yugoslavia. The war, however, had been brief. The shareholders had felt certain that war would return, but it didn’t.
Moreover, recent research had shown that while wars did have their psychological victims, they were far fewer than, say, the victims of stress, tedium, congenital illness, loneliness, and rejection. When a community had a major problem to face—for example, war, hyperinflation, or plague—there was a slight increase in the number of suicides but a marked decline in cases of depression, paranoia, and psychosis. These returned to their normal levels as soon as that problem had been overcome, indicating, or so Dr. Igor thought, that people only allow themselves the luxury of being insane when they are in a position to do so.
He had before him another recent survey, this time from Canada, the country an American newspaper had recently voted to have the highest standard of living. Dr. Igor read:
According toStatistics Canada , 40% of people between 15 and 34, 33% of people between 35 and 54 and 20% of people between 55 and 64 have already had some kind of mental illness. It is thought that one in every five individuals suffers some form of psychiatric disorder and one in every eight Canadians will be hospitalised at least once in their lifetime because of mental disturbances.
They’ve got a bigger market there than we have, he thought. The happier people can be, the unhappier they are.
Dr. Igor analyzed a few more cases, thinking carefully about those he should share with the council and those he should resolve alone. By the time he had finished, day had broken, and he turned off the light.
He immediately ordered his first appointment to be shown in: the mother of the patient who had tried to commit suicide.
“I’m Veronika’s mother. How is my daughter?”
Dr. Igor wondered if he should tell her the truth and save her any unpleasant surprises—after all, he had a daughter with the same name—but he decided it was best to say nothing.
“We don’t know yet,” he lied. “We need another week.”
“I’ve no idea why Veronika did it,” said the woman tearfully. “We’ve always been loving parents, we sacrificed everything to give her the best possible upbringing. Although my husband and I have had our ups and downs, we’ve kept the family together, as an example of perseverance in adversity. She’s got a good job, she’s nice-looking, and yet…”
“…and yet she tried to kill herself,” said Dr. Igor. “There’s no reason to be surprised; that’s the way it is. People just can’t cope with happiness. If you like, I could show you the statistics for Canada.”
“Canada?”
The woman seemed startled. Dr. Igor saw that he had managed to distract her and went on.
“Look, you haven’t come here to find out how your daughter is, but to apologize for the fact that she tried to commit suicide. How old is she?”
“Twenty-four.”
“So she’s a mature, experienced woman who knows what she wants and is perfectly capable of making her own choices. What has that got to do with your marriage or with the sacrifices that you and your husband made? How long has she lived on her own?”
“Six years.”
“You see? She’s fundamentally independent. But, because of what a certain Austrian doctor—Dr. Sigmund Freud, I’m sure you’ve heard of him—wrote about unhealthy relationships between parents and children, people today still blame themselves for everything. Do you imagine that Indians believe that the son-turned-murderer is a victim of his parents’ upbringing? Tell me.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” replied the woman, who couldn’t get over her bewilderment at the doctor’s behavior. Perhaps he was influenced by his patients.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Dr. Igor. “The Indians believe the murderer to be guilty, not society, not his parents, not his ancestors. Do the Japanese commit suicide because a son of theirs decides to take drugs and go out and shoot people? The reply is the same: no! And, as we all know, the Japanese will commit suicide at the drop of a hat. The other day I read that a young Japanese man killed himself because he had failed his university entrance exams.”
“Do you think I could talk to my daughter?” asked the woman, who was not interested in the Japanese, the Indians, or the Canadians.
“Yes, yes, in a moment,” said Dr. Igor, slightly annoyed by the interruption. “But first, I want you to understand one thing: apart from certain grave pathological cases, people only go insane when they try to escape from routine. Do you understand?”
“I do,” she replied. “And if you think that I won’t be capable of looking after her, you can rest assured, I’ve never tried to change my life.”
“Good.” Dr. Igor seemed relieved. “Can you imagine a world in which, for example, we were not obliged to repeat the same thing every day of our lives? If, for example, we all decided to eat only when we were hungry, what would housewives and restaurants do?”
It would be more normal to eat only when we were hungry , thought the woman, but she said nothing, afraid that he might not let her speak to Veronika.
“Well, it would cause tremendous confusion,” she said at last. “I’m a housewife myself, and I know what I’m talking about.”
“So we have breakfast, lunch, and supper. We have to wake up at a certain hour every day and rest once a week. Christmas exists so that we can give each other presents, Easter so that we can spend a few days at the lake. How would you like it if your husband were gripped by a sudden, passionate impulse and decided he wanted to make love in the living room?”
The woman thought:What is the man talking about? I came here to see my daughter.
“I would find it very sad,” she said, carefully, hoping she was giving the right answer.
“Excellent,” roared Dr. Igor. “The bedroom is the correct place for making love. To make love anywhere else would set a bad example and promote the spread of anarchy.”
“Can I see my daughter?” said the woman.
Dr. Igor gave up. This peasant would never understand what he was talking about; she wasn’t interested in discussing insanity from a philosophical point of view, even though she knew her daughter had made a serious suicide attempt and had been in a coma.
He rang the bell and his secretary appeared.
“Call the young woman who tried to commit suicide,” he said. “The one who wrote the letter to the newspapers, saying that she was killing herself in order to put Slovenia on the map.”
“I don’t want to see her. I’ve cut all my links with the outside world.”
It had been hard to say that in the lounge, with everyone else there. But the nurse hadn’t been exactly discreet either, and had announced in a loud voice that her mother was waiting to see her, as if it were a matter of general interest.
She didn’t want to see her mother; it would only upset both of them. It was best that her mother should think of her as dead. Veronika had always hated good-byes.
The man disappeared whence he had come, and she went back to looking at the mountains. After a week the sun had finally returned, something she had known would happen the previous night, because the moon had told her while she was playing the piano.
No, that’s crazy, I’m losing my grip. Planets don’t talk, or only to self-styled astrologers. If the moon spoke to anyone, it was to that schizophrenic.
The very moment she thought this, she noticed a sharp pain in her chest, and her arm went numb. Veronika felt her head spinning. A heart attack!
She entered a kind of euphoric state, as if death had freed her from the fear of dying. So it was all over. She might still experience some pain, but what were five minutes of agony in exchange for an eternity of peace? The only possible response was to close her eyes: In films the thing she most hated to see were dead people with staring eyes.
But the heart attack was different from what she had imagined; her breathing became laboured, and Veronika was horrified to realize that she was about to experience the worst of her fears: suffocation. She was going to die as if she were being buried alive or had suddenly been plunged into the depths of the sea.
She stumbled, fell, felt a sharp blow on her face, continued making heroic efforts to breathe, but the air wouldn’t go in. Worst of all, death did not come. She was entirely conscious of what was going on around her, she could still see colors and shapes, although she had difficulty hearing what others were saying; the cries and exclamations seemed distant, as if coming from another world. Apart from this, everything else was real; the air wouldn’t enter her lungs, it would simply not obey the commands of her lungs and her muscles, and still she did not lose consciousness.
She felt someone touch her and turn her over, but now she had lost control of her eye movements, and her eyes were flickering wildly, sending hundreds of different images to her brain, combining the feeling of suffocation with a sense of complete visual confusion.
After a while the images became distant too, and just when the agony reached its peak, the air finally rushed into her lungs, making a tremendous noise that left everyone in the room paralyzed with fear.
Veronika began to vomit copiously. Once the near-tragedy had passed, some of the crazy people there began to laugh, and she felt humiliated, lost, paralyzed.
A nurse came running in and gave her an injection in the arm. “It’s all right, calm down, it’s over now.”
“I didn’t die!” she started shouting, crawling toward the other patients, smearing the floor and the furniture with her vomit. “I’m still in this damn hospital, forced to live with you people, living a thousand deaths every day, every night, and not one of you feels an ounce of pity for me.”
She turned on the nurse, grabbed the syringe from his hand, and threw it out into the garden.
“And what do you want? Why don’t you just inject me with poison, since I’m already condemned to die? How can you be so heartless?”
Unable to control herself any longer, she sat down on the floor again and started crying uncontrollably, shouting, sobbing loudly, while some of the patients laughed and made remarks about her filthy clothes.
“Give her a sedative,” said a doctor, hurrying in. “Get this situation under control.”
The nurse, however, was frozen to the spot. The doctor went out again and returned with two more male nurses and another syringe. The men grabbed the hysterical girl struggling in the middle of the room, while the doctor injected the last drop of sedative into a vein in her vomit-smeared arm.
She was in Dr. Igor’s consulting room, lying on an immaculate white bed with clean sheets on it.
He was listening to her heart.