Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (34 page)

“Leaving your mother and you?”

“Yeah, after the attack. You know, he went to Cuba. And that’s when she got sick. You know all about that.”

“You keep saying I know all about that.”

“That’s the first time I’ve said it.”

“You’ve said it before. Why do you think I know all about it?”

“Because my mother must have told you.”

“Why don’t we forget what I know from your mother? You said she got sick after he left?”

“Yeah, that’s when she stopped talking, writing things down on paper—”

“She stopped talking?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“She said everything had to be kept—” I stopped before I said the next word—secret. The revelation felt like a slap. I looked at Halston.

He was still sideways in his chair, only mildly interested. “Yes … ?”

“I see. I was imitating what she did. But she didn’t—I mean, when she started bothering me, she didn’t stop moving.” I laughed. “She kept painting the apartment.”

“Bothering you?”

“Yeah, when she would, you know, in bed …” I gestured, inviting him to supply the proper term. I had no word for it. Incest was wrong, since that implied intercourse and activity on my part.

Halston frowned. He lifted his chin off his hand and straightened. “When she would do
what
in bed?”

“You know.” I was ashamed. Besides, I thought, he knows; why did I have to spell it out?”

“I don’t think you should assume I know anything. Why don’t you tell me? If I know already, so what? I can stand hearing things twice.”

My irritation at his playacting was strong. I looked away and talked to the floor, both to spare myself embarrassment and to hide my annoyance. “She didn’t talk. She wrote things on paper, tore them up and flushed them down the toilet. And she kept painting—”

Halston interrupted, a very rare occurrence. Also, impatience crept into his usually neutral tone, “Yes, you said that before. But what did you mean, she
bothered you?”

“I was getting to that!” I snapped at him. “She kept painting my room so I had to sleep with her.”

“You
had
to sleep with her?”

“Well, I couldn’t sleep in my room.”

“So you had to share her bed?”

“Yeah.”

Silence. Halston stared at me. He adjusted his glasses and nodded for me to continue.

“Well, I didn’t understand what was going on, but, you know, she rubbed up against me and you know …” I trailed off.

“I don’t,” he said and continued to gaze at me with an intense, cold expression.

“Didn’t she tell you?”

“Forget that I knew your mother.”

I smirked. “That’s a little hard.”

“For the purpose of giving me information about her. I’m sure that’s not too difficult. You said she rubbed up against you and …” He gestured for me to continue.

I looked away. “You know … She came.”

“She came?”

“I don’t know what to say!” I was infuriated by his coyness. What was the point of embarrassing me?

“You’re saying that she rubbed up against you until she had an orgasm?”

“Right.” I continued to avert my eyes. I was sad for her and angry that he had needlessly forced me to repeat her sin. “I mean, when I had sex with Sandy—”

“Pardon me?” Halston interrupted. His tone was full of feeling. He sounded outraged.

“I forgot to tell you. I mean, we didn’t get to it.” I looked at him boldly, proud of myself. “I lost my virginity on Saturday.”

“Rafael,” Halston leaned over his desk toward me. He usually called me Rafe. “What kind of game is this?”

“Game?” Now I felt I was in trouble. I hadn’t been quick enough before, but my senses came alive to the fact that something was wrong.

“You come in here and say you’re going to tell me your big secret and that turns out to be something everybody knows.”

“What? What do you mean, everyone?”

“Anyone who knows your story. Your uncle has custody of you. Isn’t it true that your entire family knows this story? Everyone you know is aware that you testified in court about the passport and your father’s politics.”

I was confused. For a moment, I couldn’t see how he was wrong, although I was sure he was, and also I didn’t understand why he was angry. “I guess.”

“And then you casually drop these bombs. That your mother bothered you in bed and that you lost your virginity to your cousin. You say those things as if they aren’t secrets.”

“I didn’t lose my virginity to Julie. I did it with Sandy. Her friend.”

Halston waved his hand, dismissing the fact. “When did your mother bother you?”

“After my father left, before she—you know, before she went crazy and got arrested at the U.N.” I understood now, understood the misunderstanding, and I was frightened. “She never told you?” I asked plaintively. Another blocked memory was unstuck for me: Ruth pretending to be catatonic and whispering to me that Halston was a fool. I was in danger. All my senses told me so: I wanted to run. But where?

“Forget about what you think your mother told me. Let’s pretend I never met her. Tell me what you think she did in the bed with you?”

Think. He used the skeptical word think. “It was nothing.”

“Nothing? You said before she had an orgasm.”

“I don’t know for sure. I was a kid.”

“Why did you say she had an orgasm if you weren’t sure?”

I was exposed. Part of me, the chess player in me, cursed my brain for having left myself so undefended. I couldn’t contest him. We had come so far; and I thought we had made the journey together, abandoning the usual lies and tactics. I appealed to him to stop trying to defeat me. “Look, don’t you understand why what I did to my father is a big secret? I’ve been living with my uncle because he thinks I hate my Dad and that I hate my mother, but I don’t, I just wanted his money. I wanted to live well and I was angry at my Dad. He never did anything bad to me. It’s a secret, a real secret. You can’t tell anyone.”

“Why? What would happen if everyone knew?”

“A son who lies about his father? Who lies to his uncle?”

“What lies?”

“That I want him to be my father. That I love him.”

“You’ve told him that?”

I nodded. Surely he must see, he had to understand. How could he have listened to the story of my life and not comprehend what I had done?

“Did you tell your uncle what your mother did with you in bed?”

“No!” I was appalled.

“No? Not even that night when your mother was arrested and you wanted him to take you with him?”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t it have been another reason for him to pity you and rescue you?”

“It isn’t a lie.”

“I didn’t say it was a lie.”

“But you think I’m lying?”

“Why do you think I don’t believe you?”

“I don’t. I don’t think anything. Look, all she did was hug me close and rock back and forth and she … I didn’t really understand until I was with Sandy and I realized what Mom was doing.”

“I see. So you realized only this Saturday what happened years before?”

“No. I just understood it better.”

“If you didn’t think what your mother did was so wrong, why didn’t you tell me about it sooner?”

I held my head in both hands, rubbing my forehead, trying to reason it out. I wasn’t used to talking about the past. Its pictures were clear in my mind. Without words, without their labels and their judgments, what had happened was simple. Only the words changed what they meant, that’s the way it seemed to me: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

“I thought maybe my uncle found out, maybe he knew from you.” That wasn’t true. The instant I said it, I realized I never had such a thought. I simply didn’t think much about whether anyone else knew. I didn’t want to remember it had happened, and with my mother dead, to speak of it was merely cruel. Cruel and shameful.

“I see.” Halston glanced at the clock, pulled his thick glasses off with his left hand and rubbed his eyes with the right. “Your father had left. Your mother wasn’t talking, writing things on paper and she painted your room.”

He was believing me. I nodded eagerly and helped. “She never finished painting it. That’s why I had to stay in her bed every night.”

Halston put his glasses back on. “How many nights?”

“I don’t know. A month. Two months. I can’t remember.”

“And every night she rubbed against you?”

“No, no. A few times.” I remembered the first time, the gentle passage of air through my room. “Actually the first time was in my bed.”

“She came into your bed. Your father was away—”

“It was the night he sent his letter. I think it was that night.”

“What letter?”

“The letter explaining why he wasn’t coming back to live with us.”

“You slept in your mother’s bed for a month or maybe two and a few times she rubbed up against you and made sounds?”

“She moaned. And moved around. You know, like she was excited.”

“And you understood that she was having an orgasm?”

“I didn’t know what an orgasm was. How could I understand?”

“Then how did you know she wasn’t crying?”

“What are you saying!”

“Calm down. I’m only asking questions. Sit in your chair.”

I hadn’t realized I was out of it. I wasn’t standing, actually. I was perched on the chair’s edge. I sat back, stiff with anger. “What are you trying to tell me? That it didn’t happen?”

“I’m not trying to tell you anything. I don’t know what happened. Only you know. But you don’t seem to be sure. You seem to have made up your mind on Saturday when you had sex with this other girl. I just want to help you to be sure. I think it’s important for you to know what you feel and what you think happened.”

I looked at the edge of his desk, at the carved mahogany lip and tried to project the past. What was there? A dark room, waking from sleep, her legs capturing me, rocking, low moans, her trembling. Were they sobs? Had I misunderstood?

“Let’s go back to before your father wrote the letter. You saw your parents being attacked in Tampa. You saw something happen to your mother. What did you see?”

“I saw her naked. I saw a man—” I stopped. A man peed on my mother, that’s what I remembered.

“You saw what? What was the man doing to her?”

“He was peeing.”

“You saw pee come out onto your mother?”

I said nothing. The
Gusano
had an erection. He pointed his erection at my mother’s face. No. On a city street? Out in the open? How could that be? I gave up, uneasy and angry. “What was he doing? You tell me.”

“I don’t know. You do. You were there.”

“Of course you know. Mom must have told you.”

“Your mother was ill. Very ill. You’re not. It’s possible, even probable, that you can remember better than she could. I know there’s part of you that wants to be ill, but you’re not. You can remember clearly and understand what you remember, especially if you don’t think about how you wished things were, or what your uncle wishes happened, but what actually did happen.”

“But I don’t remember clearly. I was scared. He was doing something, maybe planning to rape her, maybe peeing, I don’t know.”

“I understand. But yet you’re so sure your mother had an orgasm with you in bed?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure?”

I wasn’t. I looked down at my lap and wished I could see into myself and know the simple truth, no matter how ugly. “Why would I make it up?” I asked aloud.

“That’s an interesting question,” Halston said, his voice friendly again. He glanced at the clock. “Our time’s almost up. Maybe you should think about that. Did you want your mother to have sex with you?”

I could hardly breathe. Had everything in my head been a lie? Were the secrets not secrets, the lies not lies, the truth a fantasy? Had I been hiding nothing?

“But if it isn’t true, I’m crazy,” I blurted out, not really talking to Halston.

“That’s interesting. Why do you say that?”

“I’d have to be.”

“Does it shock you to know that at one time or another, all boys fantasize about being their mother’s lover?”

I shook my head no. Actually, it did. It shocked me, in this context, down to the bottom of my soul. I had vague knowledge, the conversational and literary awareness of Oedipus and of Freud using it to make a famous theory, but that went no further than a shadowy notion that sleeping with your mother leads to madness and that merely having the desire somehow caused emotional distress. What Halston was really referring to, infantile sexuality, was unknown to me.

“It doesn’t shock you?” Halston repeated.

“You mean, they dream about it?”

“No. There’s a period of time when all children wish to be their parent’s lover.”

I nodded wisely, although again I didn’t really understand.

[I’m not a fan of ignorance and I don’t approve of the general direction of modern education, toward specialized knowledge, and I dislike the silly love of professional jargon in psychology and psychiatry—indeed, writing this in laymen’s language is an attempt to counteract that. However, all that said, I sometimes wish educated people knew a lot less about psychology and psychiatry, rather than the partial and distorted information they do possess. Too often, in our time, an educated person discussing human psychology resembles a five-year-old operating a Mack truck.]

“What I mean to say,” Halston glanced again at his clock, “is that having sexual wishes and fantasies toward a parent is a universal experience during a certain time in childhood. But, of course, they aren’t acceptable to us. Even as children, they are taboo. So people sometimes distort, or become confused, about events or feelings or even just wishes toward their parent. Our time is up,” he said. He smiled awkwardly. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

By now, of course, professionals can foresee the course of my therapy with Dr. Halston. He took me through the rape, my father’s desertion, and my mother’s incestuous behavior, and—without making any direct assertions, so that I felt the insights were mine—convinced me of several important conclusions about my past. First, that whatever the anti-Castro Cuban may or may not have been doing to my mother while my father was being beaten and humiliated, I saw it as a sexual attack because, out of terror, that was how my unconscious translated the reality, using my own taboo wishes as source material for worldly evil. I knocked down the Cuban with the gun, horrified by the sight of my id on top of my mother, castrating my father in the process (the image of his “decapitated head” in the hands of his attacker), and substituting for him as my mother’s protector (with dangerous psychic consequences to myself). Hence, I felt that I had driven my father away from us (murdered him) and that I was obliged to take his place as my mother’s lover, “forced,” as it were, to fulfill the taboo Oedipal fantasy for which my mother, instead of me, was punished by madness and suicide. Of course, if Dr. Halston were presenting this interpretation, he would do so in much more learned—and coded—language, and without the details you have read of the actual events, many of them uncomfortably inconvenient to his analysis. Since Halston was in theory, if not in practice (he never put me on the couch and was only casually interested in my dreams), an unreformed Freudian, educated and trained in the 1930s and 40s, he is an easy target for criticism by a psychiatrist of my generation, but it is important to remember that, however misguided, he was applying his skill as he had been taught, and that he expected this understanding would help me. Even a great surgeon, holding a rusty penknife, can’t perform a successful heart transplant.