Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [97]
Such was the situation of Lucho Abril Marroquín a year after the accident: abandoned by his young spouse, condemned (stricto sensu) to a pedestrian life, with no other friend save anguish. (The yellow Volkswagen became overgrown with ivy and covered with spiderwebs before being sold to pay for his blond wife’s passage to France.) His colleagues and acquaintances were whispering behind his back that he had no choice left him save going quietly off to the insane asylum or dramatically committing suicide, when the young man learned (manna that falls from heaven, rain on thirsty desert sands) of the existence of someone who was neither a priest nor a sorcerer yet nonetheless cured souls: Dr. Lucía Acémila.
A superior woman, without complexes, who had reached what science agrees is the ideal age—her fifties—Dr. Acémila—broad forehead, aquiline nose, penetrating gaze, rectitude and goodness itself—was the living negation of her surname (literally, a pack mule; figuratively, a stupid ass) (which she was proud of and paraded like a glorious victory banner before the eyes of mortals on her visiting cards or the plaques outside her office), a person in whom intelligence was a physical attribute, something that her patients (she preferred to call them her “friends”) could see, hear, smell. She had earned countless diplomas and academic honors in the world’s great centers of learning—Teutonic Berlin, phlegmatic London, sinful Paris—but the principal university in which she had acquired her extensive knowledge of human misery and its remedies had been (naturally) life. Like every individual who has risen above the average, she was talked about, criticized, and derided by her colleagues, those psychiatrists and psychologists who, unlike her, were incapable of working miracles. But to Dr. Acémila it did not matter in the least that they called her a witch, a satanist, a corruptress of the corrupted, a madwoman, and other vile names. As proof that she was the one who was right, she needed only to remember the gratitude of her “friends,” that legion of schizophrenics, parricides, paranoiacs, arsonists, manic-depressives, onanists, catatonics, hardened criminals, mystics, and stutterers who, once they had passed through her hands and undergone her treatment (she herself would have preferred calling it “sharing her advice”), had returned to everyday life as unusually loving fathers, obedient sons, virtuous wives, honest and hardworking jobholders, fluent conversationalists, and pathologically law-abiding citizens.
It was Dr. Schwalb who advised Lucho Abril Marroquín to consult Dr. Acémila, and he himself who (Swiss promptitude that has given the world its most precise timepieces) arranged an appointment. More resigned than confident, the insomniac presented himself at the hour agreed upon at the mansion with pink walls, surrounded by a garden full of fragrant floripondios, in the San Felipe residential section in which Lucía Acémila’s office (temple, confessional, laboratory of the spirit) was located. A neatly groomed nurse took down certain details of his personal and medical history and showed him into the doctor’s office, a high-ceilinged room with shelves full of leather-bound volumes, a mahogany desk, thick carpets, and a couch upholstered in mint-green velvet.
“Get rid of the prejudices you’ve brought with you, and your suit coat and tie as well,” Dr. Lucía Acémila greeted him with the disarming straightforwardness of those possessed of genuine wisdom, pointing to the couch. “And stretch out there, face up or face down