Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (23 page)

Such was the situation of Lucho Abril Marroquín a year after the accident: abandoned by his young spouse, condemned (
stricto sensu
) to a pedestrian life, with no other friend save anguish. (The yellow Volkswagen became overgrown with ivy and covered with spiderwebs before being sold to pay for his blond wife’s passage to France.) His colleagues and acquaintances were whispering behind his back that he had no choice left him save going quietly off to the insane asylum or dramatically committing suicide, when the young man learned (manna that falls from heaven, rain on thirsty desert sands) of the existence of someone who was neither a priest nor a sorcerer yet nonetheless cured souls: Dr. Lucía Acémila.

A superior woman, without complexes, who had reached what science agrees is the ideal age—her fifties—Dr. Acémila—broad forehead, aquiline nose, penetrating gaze, rectitude and goodness itself—was the living negation of her surname (literally, a pack mule; figuratively, a stupid ass) (which she was proud of and paraded like a glorious victory banner before the eyes of mortals on her visiting cards or the plaques outside her office), a person in whom intelligence was a physical attribute, something that her patients (she preferred to call them her “friends”) could see, hear, smell. She had earned countless diplomas and academic honors in the world’s great centers of learning—Teutonic Berlin, phlegmatic London, sinful Paris—but the principal university in which she had acquired her extensive knowledge of human misery and its remedies had been (naturally) life. Like every individual who has risen above the average, she was talked about, criticized, and derided by her colleagues, those psychiatrists and psychologists who, unlike her, were incapable of working miracles. But to Dr. Acémila it did not matter in the least that they called her a witch, a satanist, a corruptress of the corrupted, a madwoman, and other vile names. As proof that she was the one who was right, she needed only to remember the gratitude of her “friends,” that legion of schizophrenics, parricides, paranoiacs, arsonists, manic-depressives, onanists, catatonics, hardened criminals, mystics, and stutterers who, once they had passed through her hands and undergone her treatment (she herself would have preferred calling it “sharing her advice”), had returned to everyday life as unusually loving fathers, obedient sons, virtuous wives, honest and hardworking jobholders, fluent conversationalists, and pathologically law-abiding citizens.

It was Dr. Schwalb who advised Lucho Abril Marroquín to consult Dr. Acémila, and he himself who (Swiss promptitude that has given the world its most precise timepieces) arranged an appointment. More resigned than confident, the insomniac presented himself at the hour agreed upon at the mansion with pink walls, surrounded by a garden full of fragrant floripondios, in the San Felipe residential section in which Lucía Acémila’s office (temple, confessional, laboratory of the spirit) was located. A neatly groomed nurse took down certain details of his personal and medical history and showed him into the doctor’s office, a high-ceilinged room with shelves full of leather-bound volumes, a mahogany desk, thick carpets, and a couch upholstered in mint-green velvet.

“Get rid of the prejudices you’ve brought with you, and your suit coat and tie as well,” Dr. Lucía Acémila greeted him with the disarming straightforwardness of those possessed of genuine wisdom, pointing to the couch. “And stretch out there, face up or face down as you prefer, not because I believe in Freudian sanctimony, but because I want you to feel comfortable. And now don’t tell me your dreams or confess to me that you’re in love with your mother—just tell me, as precisely as you possibly can, how that stomach of yours is behaving.”

Presuming that the doctor had confused him with another patient, the medical detail man, already stretched out on the comfortable couch, timidly mumbled that he hadn’t come to consult her about his stomach but about his mind.

“They are indissociable,” the lady practitioner informed him. “A stomach that empties itself promptly and totally is the twin of a clear mind and an upright soul. A sluggish, lazy, avaricious stomach, on the other hand, engenders bad thoughts, sours the character, fosters complexes and perverted sexual appetites, and gives rise to criminal tendencies, a need to take out on others one’s own excremental tortures.”

Thus enlightened, Lucho Abril Marroquín confessed that he sometimes suffered from attacks of indigestion, constipation, and even avowed that his stools, in addition to being irregular, also varied in color, volume, and no doubt—though he did not recall having palpated them in recent weeks—consistency and temperature. The lady doctor nodded approvingly, murmuring, “I knew it.” And she ordered the young man to eat without fail, until further advice to the contrary, a half-dozen prunes each morning on an empty stomach.

“Now that that basic question has been resolved, let’s go on to others,” the lady philosopher added. “You may tell me what’s troubling you. But I warn you beforehand that I shall not castrate you of your problem. I shall teach you to love it, to feel as proud of it as Cervantes of his useless arm or Beethoven of his deafness. Speak.”

With a fluency learned in ten years of professional dialogues with disciples of Hippocrates and apothecaries, Lucho Abril Marroquín frankly summed up his history, from the disastrous accident outside Pisco to his most recent nightmares and the apocalyptic consequences that this drama had had for his marital life. Overcome with self-pity, he burst into tears as he recounted the final chapters and finished his story with an outburst that to anyone else but Lucía Acémila would have been heartbreaking: “Doctor, help me!”

“Your story doesn’t sadden me. On the contrary, it’s so banal and stupid it bores me,” this engineer of souls comforted him affectionately. “Wipe your nose and persuade yourself that in the geography of the mind your illness is the equivalent of an ingrown toenail in the geography of the body. And now listen to me.”

With the manners and turns of speech of a woman who frequents high-society salons, she explained to him that what led men astray was the fear of the truth and the spirit of contradiction. With regard to the former, she enlightened the insomniac by explaining to him that chance, so-called
accidents
, did not exist; they were merely subterfuges invented by men to hide from themselves how evil they were.

“In a word, you
wanted
to kill that little girl, and so you killed her,” the doctor said, dramatically summing up her thoughts on the matter. “And then, since you were ashamed of what you’d done and afraid of the police or of Hell, you
wanted
to be hit by the truck, as punishment for what you’d done or as an alibi for the murder.”

“But, but…” he stammered, his bulging eyes and his forehead drenched with perspiration, betraying his abject despair. “What about the Guardia Civil? Did I kill him, too?”

“Who hasn’t killed a Guardia Civil at some time or other?” the lady scientist reflected. “Perhaps you killed him, perhaps it was the truck driver, perhaps it was a suicide. But this isn’t a special performance, where two people get in for the price of one. Let’s concentrate on you.”

She explained to him that, on frustrating their natural impulses, people aroused unconscious feelings of resentment in their mind, which thereupon took its vengeance by engendering nightmares, phobias, complexes, anxiety, depression.

“One can’t fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser,” the lady apostle pontificated. “Don’t be ashamed of what you are; take consolation in the thought that all men are hyenas, and that being a good person simply means knowing how to dissimulate. Look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself: I’m an infanticide and a cowardly speed demon. Let’s have no more of these euphemisms of yours: don’t talk to me about accidents or wheel syndromes.”

And going on to cite examples, she told him that the emaciated onanists who came to her on their knees begging her to cure them, she treated by giving them pornographic magazines, and that patients who were drug addicts, dregs of humanity crawling on the floor and tearing their hair as they spoke of the hand of fate, she treated by offering them marijuana cigarettes and handfuls of coca leaves.

“Are you going to recommend that I go on killing children?” the medical detail man roared, a lamb suddenly turned into a tiger.

“If that’s what gives you pleasure, why not?” the lady psychologist answered coldly. “And I warn you: no more of this shouting at me. I’m not one of those shopkeepers who believe that the customer is always right.”

Lucho Abril Marroquín burst into tears once again. Paying no attention whatsoever to him, Dr. Lucía Acémila spent the next ten minutes covering several sheets of paper with her elegant penmanship, labeling them “Exercise for learning how to live sincerely.” She handed them to him and made an appointment with him for eight weeks later. As she bade him goodbye with a cordial handshake, she reminded him not to forget to eat his prunes every morning.

Like the majority of Dr. Acémila’s patients, Lucho Abril Marroquín left her office feeling as though he’d been the victim of a psychic ambush, and certain that he had fallen in the toils of an absolute madwoman who would only make his ailments worse if he were to be foolish enough to follow her recommendations. He made up his mind to flush the “Exercises” down the toilet without even looking at them. But that very same night (debilitating insomnia that drives the sufferer to excesses), he read them. They struck him as pathologically absurd and he laughed so hard he got the hiccups (he rid himself of them by drinking a glass of water from the far edge, as his mother had taught him); but then he felt a burning curiosity. As a distraction, to while away the long sleepless hours, with no faith in their therapeutic effectiveness, he decided to try them.

Visiting the toy section of Sears, he had no difficulty finding the car, the truck number 1 and the truck number 2 that he needed, as well as the figurines that were to represent the little girl, the Guardia Civil, the thieves, and himself. Following the doctor’s instructions, he painted the vehicles the same colors he remembered them as being, and the clothes of the figurines as well. (He had an aptitude for painting, and so the guard’s uniform and the little girl’s humble garments and crusts of filth turned out very well.) To imitate the sand dunes of Pisco, he used a sheet of wrapping paper, on one edge of which, in his obsessive desire for verisimilitude, he painted the Pacific Ocean: a blue strip with a border of sea foam. The first day it took him nearly an hour, kneeling on the floor of the living room/dining room of his house, to reproduce the story, and when he came to the end, that is to say when the thieves flung themselves on the medical detail man to rob him, he was almost as terrified and heartsick as on the day it had actually happened. He lay on his back on the floor, in a cold sweat and racked with sobs. But on the following days the nervous shock became less intense, and the operation became a sort of sport, an exercise that took him back to his childhood and filled the hours he would not have otherwise known how to occupy, now that his wife was gone, since he’d never prided himself on being a voracious reader or a great music lover. It was like playing with a Meccano set, putting a jigsaw puzzle together, or doing crosswords. Sometimes, as he was handing out samples to the detail men in the warehouse of the Bayer Laboratories, he surprised himself by digging down in his memory in search of a detail, a gesture, a motive for what had happened that would allow him to introduce a variation, to prolong his re-creations of events when he got home that evening. On seeing little wooden figurines and little plastic toy cars all over the living room/dining room floor, the cleaning woman asked him if he was thinking of adopting a child, warning him that, if so, she would charge more. In accordance with the progression outlined in the “Exercises,” he was now staging sixteen reconstructions of the—accident?—on a Lilliputian scale each night.

The section of the “Exercises for learning how to live sincerely” having to do with children seemed even more preposterous to him than the business with the figurines, but (the inertia that leads to vice or the curiosity that is responsible for scientific progress?) he faithfully followed it as well. It was subdivided into two parts: “Theoretical Exercises” and “Practical Exercises” and Dr. Acémila pointed out that it was imperative that the former precede the latter, for wasn’t man a rational being whose ideas preceded his acts? The theoretical part left ample scope for the pharmaceutical representative’s gift for observation and speculative turn of mind. All it prescribed was: “Reflect daily on the disasters to humanity caused by children.” He was to do so systematically, at all hours, and wherever he might be.

“What harm did innocent little children do humanity? Were they not grace, purity, happiness, life itself?” Lucho Abril Marroquín asked himself on the morning of the first theoretical exercise as he walked the five kilometers to his office. But, more out of a desire to make this exercise assigned him as interesting as possible than out of heartfelt conviction, he admitted to himself that at times they could be very noisy. As a matter of fact, they cried a lot, at all hours, for all sorts of reasons, and since they were not yet rational creatures, they did not realize the harm caused by this propensity, nor could they be
persuaded
of the virtues of silence. He then remembered the case of that worker who, after his exhausting day’s work in the mine, returned home and was unable to sleep because of the frantic wailing of his newborn baby, whom he had finally—murdered? How many millions of similar cases occurred around the globe? How many manual laborers, peasants, shopkeepers, office clerks, who—the high cost of living, low salaries, lack of adequate housing—lived in tiny apartments and shared their cramped quarters with their offspring, were prevented from enjoying a well-deserved night’s sleep by the howls of a baby incapable of telling its progenitors whether its bawling meant it had diarrhea or wanted to be nursed again?