My medicine was cortisone-based. Thus, I was not allowed to eat salty food, but they thought maybe I would enjoy the terrible salt substitute on every table on the balcony, potassium chloride. I was also given some vitamins, but, thank God, no shots. The treatment the doctor prescribed, from the first day she saw me, after the nurse examined me all over (not including my pajama bottoms, as I hoped and feared, because I had seen that one of the examination rubrics was “genital appearance” — but there the nurse had written, ex officio, “normal”) she scratched a key over the sole of my foot, put drops in my eyes and checked my other reflexes with a rubber hammer. The examination excited me to an unexpected degree. The nurses, one blond and plump, the other red-haired, wore white gowns that were easy to see through, especially when they leaned over, showing their panties and, when they wore them, their bras. Every day I ascertained (and discussed with my friends) the color and design — circles and flowers — of their intimate lingerie. Between their buttons, the gowns, ironed like paper, sometimes gaped to show the roundness of their breasts and, if you were lucky, even the circle of a nipple. Since I was 16 and my hormones were first in line as blood irrigated my brain, I had no trouble imagining that I would have both of them, that they would come to my bed one after the other, on some night colored by moans and gnashing teeth. There was also a third nurse, “the saint,” as the deformed man always called her, a girl with a thin, pale face, almost without a body, in any case without feminine attributes, who floated quietly among the ill, doing the most revolting tasks (pushing the catheter into a patient’s urethra, reducing a rectal prolapse, carrying the chamber pots) without her face showing that grimace of disgust and scorn found on the other two. After this first examination, the doctor set my diagnosis, treatment, and even a reasonably ambiguous prognosis, saying, apparently as a joke: “Now don’t go thinking we can make a toothless baba into a marriageable girl …”
The weather outside was miserable, it rained hard and stupidly, the few trees that could be seen through the veranda windows only had a few yellow leaves on their branches, and the alleyways were black, wet, and foggy. In the evenings I read, most of the time, especially after eating. Twice a week I “took the rays” and twice, on different days, I got a massage, since it was part of the treatment. In the meantime, my facial paralysis had become total. Being a “nice” and typical case, I was often visited by medical students doing a rotation in our hall, in groups of 7 or 8, surrounding a bed and trying to make a diagnosis. “Look at his face,” the professor would say to them, after they closed in around me. There were cute girls and guys in short-sleeved doctor’s shirts. “Is it symmetrical or asymmetrical?” “Asymmetrical,” most of them shouted, but with a disapproving glance from the bearded one, the others shouted louder: “Symmetrical! Symmetrical!” “Now, laugh, my boy,” the professor added, and I complied, like a trained monkey. “Asymmetrical,” they all hooted triumphantly. Next, they put drops in my eyes, straining to spot I don’t know what reaction. Once the professor left, I knew I would have some quiet. The short-sleeved guys slapped the girls on the butt, they went on the veranda to smoke, they joked and talked without paying any attention to the sick people in cherry-red gowns or pajamas with washed-out stripes, with a rough texture like sheepskin.
When I took the rays, I went down two floors, through vast, cold hallways that felt as sinister as a morgue. Each had two or three vinyl benches where hardly anyone ever sat. A public telephone hung on the wall, where a frail patient in a robe with circles like a kimono was talking. I went into a dark hallway, lined with blue oxygen tanks. I caught foggy images from the hell of intensive care out of the corner of my eye, through the slit between rubber paper curtains, and finally, I reached the narrow examination room loaded with electrical devices. Even I could recognize how bizarre and ridiculous these boxes with ebony buttons and dials were. They were held together with beefy bolts, like on a tank. Inside the dials moved needles shaped like arrows, down to their little tails, and the letters and symbols were written in ink, in an old hand. It was like the warehouse of some television repair store, where you tripped over cables and wires, where countless metal jacks awaited plugs with ordinary plastic caps, where panels with potentiometers and voltmeters looked like tram controls. I would sit on a chair in front of each one in turn, and the doctor, usually buried in a copy of Sport when I arrived, came, looking like a skeptical magician, to place two Vaseline-covered electrodes on my temples, which he then stuck fast to my skin with leucoplast gum. Then he turned an ebony button to a certain level and went back to his corner, lost behind the pages of athletic classifications and commentaries. I was left with an hour of waiting and anxiety. The Vaseline popped slightly when the electrical current passed through, as though it were bubbling in a boil. With my eyes closed, I imagined how the electron fluid traversed my scalp, burrowing into my skull bone and perforating the sheets of thick, vaulted parchment that wrapped my brain. Next, it sunk into the complicated and analgesic marrow, exploring its circuits and structures, favoring the emissions of neurotransmitters, stimulating glial cells, waking the princesses sleeping in alcoves of mystery, proliferating the ragged claws of crabs and beetles scuttling in the basements, and vibrating the quartz globes in kaolin halls vaster than the mind itself. Violated, humiliated, but at the same time greased with a strange myrrh in the irrigation of its veins, my brain slowly unfurled its twisted legs, blossoming like a land of milk and honey, watered by a carnivorous Jordan. I descended into the karst, excavated by streams of violet current. I explored tragic, grand structures, propelled toward their heights — abstruse palaces glowing in the sun, their pointed peaks flying weathervanes made of masses of neurons, their checkered halls with floors teeming with moist, transparent animals, whirlpools of colored information, and balls of serpents braided around jade spools. I crossed the swamp of axons on skiffs of iridium, I hacked away dendrites and tentacles with a machete, I faced dangerous hurricanes of nightmares, I dared to meet the eyes of heavenly emissaries, until, in the end, through fogs of blue, I spotted the liminal space I so long had hoped for, the cochlea of the opposite ear rising from the temporal cliff like an enormous Ferris wheel. Then, in a daze, I would open my eyelids: the hour had passed. The technician ripped off the leucoplast and removed the electrodes, leaving my temples glistening. After every appointment for the rays, I spent the following afternoon staring at nothing, dreaming without dreaming of anything, meditating without a thought, but feeling my life was as expansive and pure as an enormous summer sky. I would respond to my friends if they asked me something, eat if it was time to, but I was not there, and I felt strongly I was not from there, that the colored forms around me, like the ironwork of voices, and the deceit-work of autumn clouds, although identical to those from my world (and exactly because they were identical) were nothing more than a vast and shabby stage set. I looked at everything, without fixing my gaze anywhere. My eyes moved in different directions, the right and left phantoms parted, slowly, from each other, and the world doubled and melted into a kind of fine mist, brownish-red, and then gold, until only the gold was left, like on an icon, shaking in the cold and emptiness … Then images of the ward came back, but without shape or sense, like the baroque fabric design that I used to gaze at as a child, on afternoons when they forced me to sleep. I would stare, with my face to the wall, at the back of the sofa, the floral patterns of its cloth. I followed all the twists and forks as though they were under a magnifying glass, and I observed each shift of nuance of color, until I knew the material as did perhaps only the one who had made it, but without knowing why I knew it, why my mind recreated that piece of fabric, why it glowed anew, in three dimensions, in the center of my visual field, with every thread and every colored millimeter visible in a radiant light. Images where you do not exist are horrible, images that anyone could see and graft onto your mind, your flesh … In the end, after hours and hours of nothing, I came back to my own feelings. I rediscovered my endocrine glands and my skin, my history and my values, my pajamas and my playing cards. I laughed again, with half of my face, at George’s jokes, and at night, before sleeping, I pictured the asses of the two nurses, and in my mind I took them from behind, again and again, under my warm and damp sheets. In the morning, I buckled the cripple’s watch back onto his hand, and then the doctor and assistants came. Time reproduced itself with the placidity of an inferior invertebrate, three-quarters full of eggs …