Against the Wind (5 page)

 

Truth is the gift the gods leave us
when they abandon us.

María Zambrano,
Claros del bosque

Joseph wondered how he had come to this. For four long days he had been going around and around, cursing the decision he had made of his own free will, which had brought him to what he called “the hospital for minds,” faithful to the memory of the words of his father Léopold. He had even chosen his own hospital, “the Jewish” in Montreal, because he felt that the Jews, who had suffered for millennia, would be better able than others to sympathize and heal. To heal unhappy minds like his.

He had come here by himself in a taxi and had told no one, neither his mother nor his friends, that he had decided to admit himself to a psychiatric hospital.

To accomplish this, he had found himself a family doctor, a Jew, in his neighbourhood, Côte-des-Neiges.When trust had been established between them, he thought he would be able to get a “prescription” for a bed in the hospital for minds. But Dr. Rubinstein had immediately dismissed the idea of a stay in hospital. He told Joseph, “My son, you're not so sick, and you're not crazy at all. You're just a little depressed, and we have good medications for your type of problem.”

So, for six months, Joseph had swallowed antidepressants, which only aggravated what he called his “existential pain” and drained his energy and kept him from getting back to painting. He had not touched his brushes or even wanted to look at a canvas since his return from Europe. Two years ago. Back in Quebec after four years of study and work that had already established him as “one of the best painters of his generation,” he had gone into a kind of lethargy and unhappiness that left him disoriented and at a loss for words.

But he had decided to take the bull by the horns and seek help where he thought he would find it. In response to Dr. Rubinstein's refusal to see things his way, and under the disastrous effect of the antidepressants, he decided, one evening before falling asleep, to do everything in his power to go crazy, starting the next day. He would begin by not getting up, not leaving his bed except for vital needs, eating only what was necessary to keep going – he didn't want to die – and not simulating madness, but inducing it, bringing it on by the sheer desire for it.

Because Joseph believed that madness was a way to escape the pain of living, a way to avoid normal life, which was causing him so much suffering. He said to himself,
If I can take one step, just one, outside reality, if I can go to where I don't have to think anymore, at least I'll be able to rest from what is tormenting me, and then someone who takes care of diseases of the mind will come and help me.
He wondered,
How do they do it, people who abandon everything and go out of their minds
– he had known some of them –
how do they cross that divide and reach the other side?
And he believed that, perhaps, by cultivating his unhappiness day after day, motionless, and paying no attention to anything else, he would finally go beyond that reason that registers everything and encrusts it with opaque layers of misery and ugliness.

After six days, thinking he had reached the limit of normal reason, Joseph asked Dr. Rubinstein to come, telling him on the telephone that, in any case, he could no longer get out of his bed.

Dr. Rubinstein came at the end of the day. He examined Joseph, asked him some questions, lectured him like a kind but stern father – he was caring and compassionate – but after half an hour, he declared, “You won't get away with playing crazy with me. Your symptoms are atypical. I'm certainly not going to hospitalize you.” And he added firmly, in an irritated tone, “You're not crazy, Joseph. Promise me you'll stop this nonsense.”

Joseph did not promise anything. He saw the new prescription (“a more appropriate medication,” Dr. Rubinstein had said) as a betrayal. The next day, no longer able to go on, he went to the drugstore for his prescription, and when he got back home, rushed to the sink, filled a big glass with water and began swallowing the antidepressants, counting them out, no longer feeling anything. But at the seventeenth one, he suddenly said to himself,
I don't want to die
, and he stopped.

He then telephoned Dr. Rubinstein and told him, announcing that he was going to the Jewish General to have his stomach pumped and for a psychiatric admission. Then he called a taxi, prepared his things to take with him, locked his apartment and went downstairs to wait on the street.

After the stomach pumping, the visit by Dr. Rubinstein, the answers to a great many questions and a few formalities, Joseph had found himself in a small room in the psychiatric unit, half asleep.

The first night, he had seen and heard nothing, and had fallen asleep in a dreamy, foggy state that made him think that perhaps in the morning, things might finally look more hopeful. He slept for fourteen hours straight.

As soon as he woke up, Joseph's world turned upside down. Leaving his little bed (which reminded him of his dormitory bed at boarding school) and his tiny room where he was alone – oh, blessed solitude that he would cherish all the rest of his stay there! – Joseph saw and heard the reality of madness. On his way to the cafeteria, which was also the “day room” for all group activities, he saw about forty bizarre creatures, men and women, young and old, walking about in all directions, some of them making strange gestures he had only seen in movies. There were others who were completely motionless, as if stunned, with glassy stares, apparently so incapable of movement that putting one foot in front of the other required enormous effort or deep reflection. Some were talking to themselves, yelling and screaming, muttering and babbling, and a few were chanting or shouting long rambling speeches that were indecipherable to anyone who listened and tried to understand. A few, finally, were totally absent from everything, or so it seemed to Joseph, seeing their bodies sunk in their chairs, their eyes unseeing, as if they were deeply examining the table without seeing it, waiting for the dishes that would be put under their noses and then falling on their food in the only actions they still seemed to know, those of eating.

Joseph ate, unable to believe the spectacle he was witnessing. He immediately realized he would have to leave as soon as possible, to get back to his apartment and try to take up his life again in a different way. And he understood Dr. Rubinstein's words: “My son, you're not crazy. Your place is not there. Stop this foolish nonsense!”

After breakfast, Joseph went to the main office and asked to speak to “the administration,” because he didn't know who administered what and did not want to make a mistake. He had happened upon the administration in person, the director of the Individual and Family Therapy Centre, a woman of around forty, a psychologist, as she told him in the course of the conversation, a nice, friendly woman, who seemed to grasp a lot of things when she looked at you, as if she was looking deep into your eyes. She quickly made it clear to Joseph that he could not leave now. That she could not “sign his release.” That the authorization had to come from the general director, the chief psychiatrist of the unit. But that first, since he had “signed himself in” on the advice of the attending physician, he had to stay a minimum of three weeks, go through all the medical examinations and the battery of psychological and psychiatric tests. She added that only the psychiatrist assigned to him (the centre was divided into ten care units, each under the supervision of a psychiatrist, who was also responsible for the individual treatment of five or six patients), Dr. Laporte, who would see him the following day, would be able, after supervising all the examinations and tests, to advise the general director to release him. “On the condition, of course, that you behave during your stay as you are behaving now,” she added, and then exclaimed, “But, my God, why did you
choose
to come here?”

Joseph did not know what to answer. He told himself he would use the next three weeks to try to understand. He just looked at her and said, “I thought they treated unhappiness at a hospital for minds. I never thought that actual madness could be so dreadful. You'd have to be pretty stable to not go crazy here. How do you do it?”

She smiled, but rather sadly, and did not answer. At least not in words. And Joseph understood. He knew that she would be an ally to him during this time he had to do “as prisoners do their time.” And this woman, Rebecca Goldberg – but he would always call her Rebecca – became his ally during his stay, and subsequently, his staunch friend.

That essential thing having been agreed upon, Rebecca gave him the broad outline of the “rehabilitation” program over coffee and a cigarette: schedules, what was allowed and what was not, examinations to be undergone, tests to be taken, individual therapy and group therapy, occupational therapy, visits, and so on.

Joseph asked for just one thing: the elimination of the prescribed medications, the antidepressants and sleeping pills. Rebecca promised to ask his psychiatrist if he could see him that day. Which she did. The psychiatrist, Dr. Laporte, talked to him for quite a long time and concluded that Joseph could do without the medication, “unless there's evidence to the contrary.”

She buried her head in her hands,
and the emotion was so strong that
she cried noisily and felt that
everyone around her was moving
away from her in fear of being
close to a woman who was
ridiculous, or worse: maybe drunk.
Or worse: maybe crazy.
Or worse still: maybe sad.

Agustina Izquierdo,
El amor puro

This is how Mute came to be in the hospital for minds. Mute is what they called her there, at least those who could talk called her that, because she said nothing, ever, and her silence was so charged, so heavy, and seemed so intelligent that it made you want to give her a name. They named her Mute at first.

Joseph met Mute, really saw her for the first time, on the fourth day, when the emptiness of himself and his surroundings seemed so vast that it made him dizzy. It happened during occupational therapy. In front of the canvas that he had not refused, looking at the paints and brushes that seemed to be taunting him, Joseph had finally decided to paint something. To see, he had said to himself, just to see.

Spontaneously, he had opened only the tubes of black and anthracite. He mixed and smoothed the blacks on his palette, wanting to bring out light, variations of light, through the dark shapes and textures. He thought about Soulages, for whom he had enormous admiration, Soulages, who drew light from the night, and he wanted to do better, even better, if possible, so that life itself would spring forth out of nothingness. He thought about Nicolas de Staël, his inner teacher, and wanted, using only the opaque, translucent shapes of the blacks, to marry abstract and concrete, to make them blend without losing their attributes. Then, without even knowing how, Joseph found himself painting, he saw the painting appear out of his movements, and he saw the young woman everyone called Mute looking at him and his painting; he saw her for the first time.

And he saw that in spite of her thinness, her pallor and her unfathomable sadness, Mute had a beauty that was so pure it was almost unbearable, and he didn't understand how he could have seen her as one of those who were beaten down and absent. This did not prevent him from working on his painting, his eyes moving back and forth from it to her. From time to time, their eyes met, and Joseph knew that Mute understood what he was doing on the canvas, between the canvas and himself. He would learn that she understood more when, later, she began to speak of what was, behind that dark look shot through with so much light, the reason for her eloquent silence.

And Mute spoke. She said her name first: “My name is Véronique.” Then, slowly, jerkily, in halting little sentences, she told Joseph so many things that she seemed barely to have begun when it was time for group therapy.

They had to go their separate ways, since Véronique was in a different group. While putting away his paints and proudly pinning up his canvas to dry, Joseph saw that he had added some shapes that made the blue slip from cobalt to sapphire or azure depending on the textures and forms of the black, and he hadn't noticed it. He had played with those blues without even realizing it. Joseph saw that he had inadvertently found new forms, and he understood that once again he had been carried away by the act of creation. He knew that this thing he could not define would not soon let go of him.

Before leaving, he went over to Véronique, who was taking a last glance at the painting pinned to the wall, kissed her hands and said thank you, without really understanding where this gratitude was coming from.

The rest of that day, Joseph dreamt of Véronique as one dreams of a miracle, taking pains to recall everything, to put the pieces back in the order in which she had recounted them. Yes, she had wept so long and loud in the streets of Montreal that people, frightened by so much sadness, had called the police ambulance service. Two men had come, whose kindness and gentleness contrasted with their uniforms. They had taken her to the nearest hospital, this one, and she had been kept here, where she found life even sadder than on the outside.

Her parents had come and told the head psychiatrist they couldn't take it anymore – they had been looking after her for months, watching her perish little by little, eating almost nothing, never going out, not sleeping, and they were becoming sick themselves from seeing her that way, “as if in a desert of sorrow,” her mother had said. And they had told them about her music and about her hands. How Véronique, so gifted, the winner of the Prix d'Europe and one of the great pianists of her generation, had ended up losing the use of her hands as a result of repeated bouts of purulent eczema, the cause of which was unknown.

How, at the beginning, everyone had helped her, replacing her at the last minute for important concerts, sending flowers to her apartment, and even helping her obtain a substantial grant so that she could live without financial worries until she was better. And how, little by little, with the situation getting worse, they had stopped calling her for concerts, recitals or tours. And how, with her hands never healing, she could no longer even practise the piano or give private lessons or classes, which could have provided a decent income.

She had run out of money and had to give up her nice apartment, and her parents, whom she hadn't lived with for many years, had “taken her in again,” her father had said in a despairing tone of voice. They had done “everything” to help her, but the weeks had passed and Véronique had sunk into a “terrible depression,” her mother had said. The most surprising thing was that her hands “had healed all by themselves” a few months ago, but Véronique was mired in “a sickness of the mind” her parents felt powerless to deal with.

Joseph thought about all this, and although his story was very different, and less dramatic, he felt so many affinities and such strong empathy with Véronique, an intuitive, almost visceral understanding, that it disturbed him. He felt moved. Not sad. There was even something serene in that emotion.

That evening, alone in his little room, he knew Véronique would come looking for him. He could not visit her. She slept in a four-bed room in which all the beds were occupied – which she had not liked, but there were no other places “on the women's side.” The evening was the quietest time, and the only pleasant part of those long days. No program, no mandatory activities. The more agitated patients had received their nighttime injections, which plunged them into a kind of tranquil catatonic stupor in their beds. The others, alone or in quiet little groups, watched television, played cards or Scrabble, or checked their horoscopes. Some read. One lady knit constantly while crooning songs in a language no one knew – but they were beautiful and no one stopped her from singing, which sometimes seemed to take her to the verge of ecstasy.

Véronique came into Joseph's room and said, “I didn't take my medication tonight. I want to be with you.” Joseph made room for her in the narrow bed. They talked softly and listened to themselves think, closely entwined like two children who had emerged from a sea of sorrows. Each time one of them cried, the other would whisper “shhh” in their ear. They drifted between waking and sleep, between caresses, kisses and hazy dreams, until dawn, when side by side they fell into a deep sleep.