Involuntary Witness - Страница 3

And I ran for it, steering clear of the lift.

4

My doctor had agreed to prescribe something to help me sleep, and with those pills the situation seemed to improve. A little.

My mood was still mouse-grey but at least I wasn’t dragging myself around like a ghost, dead of insomnia.

All the same, my output of work and my professional reliability were dangerously below safety level. There were a number of people whose freedom depended on my work and my powers of concentration. I imagine they would have been interested to learn that I spent the afternoons absent-mindedly leafing through their files, that I couldn’t care less about them and the contents of their files, that I went into court totally unprepared, that the outcome of the trials was to all intents and purposes left to chance and that, in a word, their destiny lay in the hands of an irresponsible nutcase.

When I was obliged to receive clients the situation was surreal.

The clients talked. I paid no attention whatever, but I nodded. They talked on, reassured. At the end I shook them by the hand with an understanding smile.

They seemed pleased that their lawyer had given them their head in that way, without interrupting. He had evidently understood their problem and requirements.

I was a really decent sort, was the opinion confided to my secretary by a pensioner who wanted to sue her neighbour for putting obscene notes in her letter box. I didn’t even seem to be a lawyer at all, she said. How true.

The clients were satisfied and I, at the best of times, had only a vague notion of the problem. Together we proceeded on our way towards catastrophe.

It was during this phase – after I had managed to get some sleep for a few nights running – that a new factor intervened. I began to burst into tears. At first it happened at home, in the evening as soon as I got back or when I first got up in the morning. Later, it happened outside as well. As I was walking along the street, my thoughts went berserk and I began to cry. I did, however, manage to control the situation, both at home and – more important – in the street, even if each time it was a little more difficult. I concentrated all my attention on my shoes or on the number plates of cars, and, above all, avoided looking into the faces of the passers-by, who, I was convinced, would be aware of what was happening to me.

Finally it happened to me in the office. It was one afternoon and I was speaking to my secretary about something when I felt the tears welling up and a painful sensation in my throat.

I set myself to staring dully at a small patch of damp on the wall, answering meanwhile by simply nodding, scared stiff lest Maria Teresa should realize what was going on.

In fact she realized perfectly well, suddenly remembered that she had some photocopies to make and very tactfully left the room.

Only a few seconds later I burst into tears, and it was no easy matter to stop.

I felt it was not a good idea to wait for a repetition, in the middle of a trial for example.

Next day I called my doctor and got him to give me the name of that specialist.

5

The psychiatrist was tall, massive and imposing, bearded and with hands like shovels. I could just see him immobilizing a raving lunatic and forcing him into a straitjacket.

He was kindly enough, considering his beard and bulk. He got me to tell him everything and kept nodding his head. This seemed reassuring. Then it occurred to me that I too used to nod my head while clients were talking and I felt somewhat less reassured.

However, he said that I was suffering from a particular form of adjustment disturbance. The separation had worked in my psyche like a time bomb and after a while had caused something to snap. Caused, in fact, a series of ruptures. I had made a mistake in neglecting the problem for so many months. There had been a degeneration of the adjustment disturbance, which was in danger of evolving into a depressive state of moderate gravity. Such situations ought not to be underestimated. There was no need to worry, though, because the fact of having come to a psychiatrist was in itself a positive sign of self-awareness and a prelude to recovery. I was certainly in need of pharmaceutical treatment, but, all in all, after a few months the situation would be decidedly improved.

A pause and a piercing look. They must have been part of the therapy.

Then he began writing, filling a page of his prescription pad with anxiolytics and antidepressants.

I was to take the stuff for two months. I must try to find distractions. I must avoid dwelling on myself. I must attempt to see the positive side of things and avoid thinking there was no way out of my situation. I must hand over 300,000 lire, there was no question of a receipt and we’d meet in two months’ time for a check-up.

From the doorway as he showed me out, he advised me against reading the descriptive leaflets enclosed with the drugs. He was a real authority on the human psyche.

I hunted for a chemist’s a long way from the centre of town, to avoid meeting anyone I knew. I didn’t want a client or colleague of mine present when the chemist yelled out to the assistant in the back some such phrase as “Look in the psychotropic cupboard and see if we have extra-strong psychiatric Valium for this gentleman.”

After cruising around a bit in the car, I selected somewhere in Japigia, on the outskirts of the city. The chemist was a bony young woman with a rather unsociable air, and I handed her the prescription with averted eyes. I felt as much at my ease as a priest in a porn shop.

The bony chemist was already making out the bill when I recited my little speech: “While I’m here I’ll get something for myself as well. Have you some effervescent vitamin C?”

She looked at me for a second, without a word. She knew the script. Then she gave me the vitamin C along with the rest. I paid and fled like a thief.

When I got home I unwrapped the package, opened the boxes and read the enclosed leaflets. I found them all interesting, but my attention was irresistibly drawn to the side-effects of the antidepressant. Trittico with a trazodone base.

The patient began with simple dizzy spells, passing swiftly on to dryness of the mouth, blurred vision, constipation, urinary retention, tremors and alteration of the libido.

It occurred to me that I had already seen to altering my libido on my own, then I went on reading. I thus discovered that a limited number of men who take trazodone develop a tendency to long, painful erections, what is known as priapism.

This problem might even require an emergency surgical operation, which in turn might result in permanent sexual impairment.

But the end was reassuring. The risk of fatal overdose of trazodone was, fortunately, lower than that resulting from the use of tricyclic antidepressants.

Having finished reading, I fell to meditating.

What do you do in the case of a prolonged and painful erection? Do you go to a hospital holding the thing in your hand? Do you put on very comfortable underpants? What do you say to the doctor? What does permanent sexual impairment amount to?

And again, how much does one need for a fatal overdose of trazodone? Are two pills enough? Or does it require the whole packet?

I found no answers to these questions, but the Trittico ended up down the bog, along with the rest of the medicines prescribed by my psychiatrist. My ex-psychiatrist.

I conscientiously emptied all the packets and pulled the chain. Into the rubbish bin went the boxes, phials, ampoules and descriptive leaflets.

That done, I poured myself an ample half-glass of whisky – avoid alcoholic beverages – and put Chariots of Fire into the video machine. One of the few cassettes I had brought away with me.

When the first pictures started coming, I lit up a Marlboro – avoid nicotine, especially in the evening – and for the first time in a very long while I almost felt in a good mood.

6

When I was a boy I used to box.

My grandfather took me along to a gym after seeing me come home with my face swollen from the beating it had taken. Administered by a fellow bigger – and nastier – than me.

I was fourteen then, very skinny, with a nose red and shiny from acne. I was in the fourth form at grammar school, and was perfectly convinced that there was no such thing as happiness. For me, at any rate.

The gym was in a damp basement. The instructor was a lean man approaching seventy, with arms still lean and muscular and a face like Buster Keaton’s. He was a friend of my grandfather.

I have a precise recollection of the moment we entered it, at the foot of some narrow, ill-lit steps. There was not a voice to be heard, only the dull thud of fists hitting the punch bag, the rap of skipping ropes, the rhythm of the punch ball. There was a smell I can’t describe, but it is there in my nostrils now, as I write, and a thrill runs through me.

That I was going in for boxing was long kept secret from my mother. She only learned it when, at the age of seventeen and a half, I won the welterweight silver medal in the regional junior championships.

My grandfather, however, never got to see me on that pasteboard podium.

Three months previously he had been walking through a pine wood with his Alsatian when at a certain moment he stopped and calmly sat down on a bench.

A lad who was nearby reported that, after stroking the dog, he had leaned his head on the back of the bench in an unusual fashion.

The carabinieri had to shoot the dog before they could approach the body and identify him as Guido Guerrieri, former Professor of Medieval Philosophy.

My grandfather.