But I had too little to do with these guys. At night, some curled up and whimpered irritatingly, and others ground their teeth to make you shudder. Those close to me (literally, since our “kindergarten” was bed by bed near the entry doors) were different. Near my bed, separated from me by a nightstand, was a suffering, deformed shoemaker about fifty-five years old, whose skull, with skin the color of feces, emerged directly from a misshapen trunk. It looked like two children’s heads, one in back and one in front, were forcing themselves up through his flannel pajamas. In addition to this hideousness, the hunched man had been struck by hemiplegia right in his miniscule shoe shop. He was the only one in the hall who was completely helpless, unable to sit up in bed, and the target of everyone’s hatred, since he made the room smell terrible at least once a day, when one of the nurses put “the pot” under him, and after a period of time, took it away again, wrapped in dirty paper. The poor man was so embarrassed, he begged the ground to open up and take him in. I talked many times to this Leopardi tortured by melancholy. Evenings I took off his old watch, with its calcified face and khaki canvas band, to close it in his “drier,” and in the morning I would buckle it to his wrist again. This man of pain had deep folds between his eyebrows. Only visits from his family cheered him up a little: an oligophrenic woman, who had had an operation on her head, in front, where a blue scar, crossed with stitches, arched up until it entered her hair, and a normal girl, his great pride. Three quarters of the time he spoke only of her, how well she studied, how she played …
One morning, while a doctor was making rounds, Mr. Paul, the shoemaker, found he couldn’t talk: he babbled, he didn’t find his words, and his face turned purple the way the embarrassing organs hold blood. A terrible fear consumed him. The doctor tried to calm him down, but the deformed man’s mouth suddenly gaped open toward the ceiling (what was with his teeth that they looked so unusual? a deformed bridge? tartar deposits on each tooth, forming cameos of religious scenes, gardens of forking paths?) and loosed sharp howls, silly sounding, like a fox caught in a trap. He screamed like this and writhed as much as his hemiphlegia would allow, with his face flushed and tears running over his temples, until they tranquilized him. Toward evening he cheered up again and laughed happily. He had thought that, on top of deformity, on top of paralysis, God had also smitten him with babbling. This had driven him out of his mind: “What would Smârdan’s damn kids say if I came back from the hospital babbling?” But there was no reason to fear. To my right was a zit-faced dick, with an Oltenean horse-face, a poorly dressed jackass of a soccer player. He had arrived just the day before I did. After a fall on the pitch, blood had started to come out of his ear. He woke up one night with a red pillow. Hair cut straight, small round eyes, a mouth without lips and ubiquitous acne gave him the classic look of a “no-gooder” from old films with crusaders and chastity belts. He was under observation, like the good-looking and well-raised young man next to him, who, with a completely normal medical record, went to sleep one night and couldn’t be awoken for eight days, at which point he opened his eyes, happy and hungry. Since then more than a month had passed, his brain was explored in I don’t know how many rounds, and the EEG came back normal every time. “Nobody knows what I have,” he told everyone, proudly. I discussed literature with him, I enthusiastically recited Tzara and Vornca, and he talked to me about Mandiargues and Beckett. He liked to make me laugh, since then (as my illness progressed) the right half of my face came to life, the corner of my mouth rose happily toward my ear, my eye narrowed and flashed, while, like the unseen face of the moon, the left side stared like stone, hieratic and mysterious. “It’s like you’re both Riga Crypto and Enigel the Laplander!” Also around age 17 or 18 was the only epileptic in the hall, a big country boy, with long, hanging ears and bloodshot eyes. While I was there, he only had one attack, but it was violent and terrible: he fell suddenly, howling like he was being impaled, into the space between the rows of beds, and his clonic movements began right away. A doctor came quickly and pushed his hands hard against the boy’s mouth and nose until the convulsions became less intense, and the large body in blue pajamas became inert on the floor. But until then, no one was scared. On the contrary, he was entertaining us with pointless, childish stories, lost in details, about ghosts coming out of the pond and children who could tell the future. The soccer player, the narcoleptic (named George, I think), the epileptic, and I were the “kindergarten,” and we spent all our time together, usually playing cards, at the end of a bed or on the terrace, telling jokes and spying on the nurses. In the last week of my stay, they added a kid of about ten, who had a burning desire to be operated on, for a reason that will surprise you: after an appendicitis they had taken out his tonsils and some polyps, and now he was faking (so the doctor thought) acute pains in his stomach. If there was so much as talk of an operation, his little pecker would instantly harden, which made the soccer player roll on his bed with laugher. Of course the ass took care to “get him up” twenty times a day, describing, in great detail, silly dissections, resections, and trepanning and pretending that he was salivating from pleasure. But the boy saved himself from all the teasing with his unusual gift for cards. He trounced us, over and over again, at 21. He won dozens of boxes of matchsticks. His miraculous intuition told him when to stop at 14 or 15, or, on the contrary, to take a hit when he had 19 or even 20.