Memoir From Antproof Case (7 page)

Château Parfilage was very much in the mountains, but the Germans had become disenchanted with its methods, so, to attract the English and the French, who, after the war, were extraordinarily crazed, the directors rented office space in Montreux. "Oy nivir seen a newt hotch ass shmal ant affice-like ass this," Spinney said, looking around. "Oy've bratcha anuther newt, Sisther, boot whar iss he supposed ta sleep?"

A tiny nun, no less than my age now, unbuckled my jacket and set me free forever, explaining that it was a sin to put anyone, much less a child, in such a thing.

"Sisther, whot if the divil's in 'im, ant he's throshin like to kill himsolf ar soomeone alse?"

"You put him in the middle of a wide meadow," she said, "where he will be alone with God and the ants."

Within twenty minutes she and I were on a small train winding through the hills above the lake. It was. a bright, blue day. We opened the window, and I leaned out to feel the wind and smell the sun-warmed vegetation. What could be better than to be on a train crawling steadily through sunlit uplands, with open windows, and mountain air gusting in, pulsing with the rhythm of the rails? On the climb to Château Parfilage we were lifted into a world of brilliant white—the white of snowfields, ice, and clouds.

When Sister Jacob de Meunière saw that I was content with the Alpine sun that glinted across high prairies of clean ice, shf said, "If once you were insane, you are probably insane no longer, but you must stay with us for time enough to convince those who cannot believe, or see, or know, that you have achieved by long and painful labor what God has just given you in a burst and in a flash."

After the train, we went by pony cart. When the pony wanted to eat, he stopped to graze, and Sister Jacob knitted. I jumped out of the cart at these times and often as it was moving (during most of my life, and certainly in my boyhood, I thought it better to be able to jump on and off a moving conveyance than to be the richest man in the world). I ran to the edge of steep defiles, to see the view. As I remember it, my stepping on and off and circling the slow-moving pony was something close to the movements of a foal or a kid. Funio does this, and he breaks into spontaneous dances. A child moving freely is one of the most beautiful things one can behold. When my father took me surfcasting at Amagansett I would go ahead on the beach road, stooping to grind the heather between my fingers for the scent, rising to run on soft sandy stretches that led to the cold blue sea.

So high that you could see France straight to the west and the Black Forest to the north, the château sat on a small rise in the middle of a great meadow walled in at its edges by palisades of evergreens as dense as the teeth of a fine-toothed comb and cooler and more fragrant than I can convey from a garden in the hot sun.

The building itself was a graceful construction of monastic stone, with a courtyard in which were fifty thousand geraniums and a round fountain filled to the brim with frigid water newly liberated from the not-so-distant glaciers.

I had never seen a field so wide. I had never been in air so clear. I had never seen snow so pure and white, for as white as is the snow on the Hudson, it is always tinted by the blue of Canada. I had never seen so many wildflowers jealously and proudly guarding their high posts in colors both bright and apoplectic. France was so distant and purple as it fled to the Atlantic that looking at the world was like gazing through a prism. And I had never been as high as I stood at 3,000 meters, nor so close to the sun, nor so unprotected from its benevolent glory.

I alighted from the cart and went up near the plodding pony so as to walk the rest of the way, to feel every inch of the road that led to a mental institution that I now believe may have been one of the few refuges of sanity in a world everywhere insane.

Though the rector of this institution was no bigger than a Saint Bernard dog, he had about him the aura of power that attaches to people who are gigantic. I immediately felt protective of him, and yet in awe, thinking that not only had he long before finished high school—which I had yet to enter, and never would—and, indeed, college, and then medical school, but the various layers of medical apprenticeship that give one a place on the links for the rest of one's life. It seemed that in Switzerland physicians were more monastic and scholarly, their social standing lower, their intellects better exercised, and their sense of humility sharper than that of their well tailored American brethren.

I took a seat opposite him, hardly able to look away from the snowfields of the Jungfrau, which, though distant, managed to throw their fiery light through his narrow windows and directly into my eye.

"American?" he asked in what I did not then know was a Danish accent.

I nodded.

"Then the first thing I must tell you is that nothing is expected of you."

"Nothing?" I asked.

"Only hard work, study, arising at five, and service in the fields. Nothing more than would be required of a monk, a Roman galley slave, or a virtuous king. In my experience, Americans have always felt the need to amaze everyone. Perhaps that is because the New World is less tired than the Old."

"What about the psychological stuff?" I asked.

"What psychological stuff?"

"You know—jackets, shocks, expensive interviews."

"We don't go for that sort of thing."

"You don't?"

"No, not at all. Ten years of that isn't worth a month of bringing in the hay."

"You mean this is a 'keep-busy' sort of a place? We have one at the tip of Long Island. It's called the Butterworth sanitarium, and it doesn't work. They go in as walnuts, they exit as coconuts, and they die as pistachios."

"I beg your pardon?" he said, failing to understand my schoolboy slang. I'm not sure I understood it either.

"This isn't a 'keep-busy' place," he continued. "Here you work only five days a week. On weekends, if you wish, you can be overcome with terror,' lethargy, and regret. The idea is not to keep all your plates spinning, but to let them fall."

"Is coffee here?"

"No. Neither coffee, nor tea, nor alcohol, nor tobacco. No drugs of any kind. No excessively fatty or sugared foods. No motor vehicles. No chocolate. No electric lights, no Victrolas, no telephones, no telegraphs, no magazines."

"No coffee?" My lungs felt as if each one had been freed of the intrusion of a cinder block. My neurasthenia began to clear.

"Coffee is the work of the devil," he said. "I am a physician, and I know whereof I speak. That people actually drink this substance is one of the world's continuing tragedies, a pitiable opera of madness and self-immolation."

I was astonished, and pleased of course. He went on. "A careful consideration of its chemical components shows why. Have you taken organic chemistry?"

"I don't know what it is. I haven't even started high school."

"Regardless of your academic progress, coffee, when steeped for more than a minute at or above ninety-five degrees centigrade, leaches tri-oxitan methyl parasorcinate, loxiphenyl-metasolicitous, oxipalmate dendrabucephalous chloride, indo-crapitus paraben, sulfuro-hydrogelous-exipon, moxibobulous-3 toxitol, and benzene esters of noquitol-soxitan.

"Studies have shown that any of the de-ionized loxiphenyls is highly carcinogenic in the presence of a saturated oxitan. Even minimal exposure to the sulfuro-hydrogelous-exipons almost invariably causes cardiac atomatoxsis and aggravated renal palagromia."

"Are you mocking me?" I asked.

"Perhaps a little," he answered, "but certainly we have no coffee here. I detest coffee. I understand fully what drove you to do what you did, and will make no attempt to rid you of your anger and disgust. You
don't
have to live in the world. What they say when they want to drive the truth from the soul of an honest man is,
You have to live in the world.
Well, you don't. You can live in a place like this, you can live alone in nature, you can rise so high that nobody will dare make or drink a cup of coffee in your presence, you can kill yourself, or you can sleep.... One thing is sure. You simply do not have to adjust to that filthy, horrendous, addictive bean that has created a population of slaves spread throughout every part of the globe.

"Not, anyway, for the next four years. These will be your anchor years. You'll remember them as years of freedom, responsibility, agonizingly hard work, love, and revelation."

"You mean I won't be going to school?"

"Your education will be entrusted to God, your own curiosity, and Father Bromeus."

"Who's that?"

"He takes care of the cows, and is the drillmaster."

"What do you mean, 'the drillmaster'?"

"Most people here are adults. We can't afford to train the adolescents in all the academic subjects they require, and yet by cantonal law you must present yourself every now and then for examinations in French, German, and Italian, in history, physics, mathematics, chemistry, botany, the history of the destructiveness of coffee, and other things."

"How do you go about that," I interrupted, "without a system of education? I don't speak those languages. I'm terrible at mathematics. How is one supposed to learn chemistry without a laboratory?"

"Don't worry a bit. We have designed our own educational system, and it works. I thought of it myself after I visited the United States in 1910 and watched a game of baseball.

"What you call the
pitchers
were practicing along the sidelines. Well, being a man of science, I leaned over the rail and asked, 'Do you always practice with the same-sized ball?' In fact, they did, or at least they said they did. 'Why?' I inquired. 'Why not?' they inquired back.

"I then told them that it was obvious in regard to physics and physiology that they would enormously improve their performance if they practiced with balls of radically different sizes—a pea-sized pebble on the one hand, and a soccer ball on the other. The difficulties and exertions of doing so would make them champions with a ball tailored for the fist and of the proper weight and density for throwing.

"I don't know if they followed my system, but we do, as you shall see. By the way, do you play an instrument?"

"No."

"She does."

"Who is
she
" I asked.

"She is here because of her abhorrence of grasshoppers."

"Aren't there grasshoppers in the fields?"

"Not at this altitude."

"Where did she come from that she abhors grasshoppers?"

"Paris. They have lots of grasshoppers in Paris."

"I didn't see any."

"How long were you there?"

"Two days."

"
Voilà.
Anyway, the infestation doesn't start until the latter part of May and early June. Miss Mayevska lived there all year 'round, and every year at the beginning of summer she suffered great emotional distress."

"Should you be telling me this?"

"Everyone here knows about it. In August, she and her family used to go to the South of France, and when she was fourteen it was the year of the locusts, which is why she is here. All Provence erupted with a plague that, to her, was absolutely overwhelming."

"Is she French? What kind of name is Mayevska?"

"She is a Polish Jewess, but yes, she is French, although if one listens hard one can detect the traces of an accent."

"I see."

"Not yet you don't."

Although I continued the practice in the Second World War, I learned at Château Parfilage (and associate most strongly with the years of my confinement and freedom there) the nomadic technique of using a blanket. Marlise hardly knows what a blanket is, but up there where the air was thin and blizzards could strike close upon the heels of a brilliant summer sun, you needed to wear your blanket.

One blanket of thick virgin wool in a tight weave, long enough to be doubled or even quadrupled and hung from the shoulders as a wrap, was enough for winter or summer. We had no fires in our rooms, and of course no modern heating system, but it was a delight to sit within the folds of the blanket, studying or, as in the case of Miss Mayevska, playing the piano.

I did not see Miss Mayevska, but was almost always able to hear her at the piano, even if at times just faintly. I had thought that I would encounter her during the first meal, but because we were in an insane asylum we took our meals on the monastic pattern, savoring them in our rooms, in the cold, as we obsessed.

My first task, dictated by Father Bromeus for reasons that he would not disclose but that later appeared quite obvious, was to memorize the telephone directory of Zurich. To this day I can recall names and numbers that are no longer associated and that are forever lost, but that once made the hearts of boys and girls race as they saw on the page a code that would bring them, by voice and ear, to the houses of their beloveds.

The object of Father Bromeus was to train my mind to take in information. This was the French half of the education I received at Château Parfilage. I can still tell you that the atomic weight of cobalt is 58.93, that the altitude of the railroad station at Neuchatel is 482 meters, that Shakespeare used the word
glory
94 times, that the Italian word for
diphthong
is
dittongo,
that (though I cannot tell you who invented the pickle) Johann Georg Pickel invented the gas lamp in 1786, and that Roberts captured Bloemfontein on March 13, 1900, though Bloemfontein was never able to capture Roberts.

Father Bromeus presented me with so many tables, lists, texts, photographs, paintings, and musical compositions to memorize that I spent hours and hours a day at it. Soon I had mastered rapid apprehension and assimilation of virtually any material, never to be forgotten unless I deliberately banished it. Only later would the next test come, which was just as shocking as suddenly being presented with the Zurich telephone book. This was the task of analysis, which, with Jesuitical discipline, Father Bromeus divided up into interpolation, extrapolation, induction, reduction, and deduction.

When I had started upon these things, I was examined. "I have learned from Father Bromeus," the rector said, "that you have at your command the information necessary to tell me how you would, from this location, kill all the grasshoppers in Paris."