Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [98]
Presuming that the doctor had confused him with another patient, the medical detail man, already stretched out on the comfortable couch, timidly mumbled that he hadn’t come to consult her about his stomach but about his mind.
“They are indissociable,” the lady practitioner informed him. “A stomach that empties itself promptly and totally is the twin of a clear mind and an upright soul. A sluggish, lazy, avaricious stomach, on the other hand, engenders bad thoughts, sours the character, fosters complexes and perverted sexual appetites, and gives rise to criminal tendencies, a need to take out on others one’s own excremental tortures.”
Thus enlightened, Lucho Abril Marroquín confessed that he sometimes suffered from attacks of indigestion, constipation, and even avowed that his stools, in addition to being irregular, also varied in color, volume, and no doubt—though he did not recall having palpated them in recent weeks—consistency and temperature. The lady doctor nodded approvingly, murmuring, “I knew it.” And she ordered the young man to eat without fail, until further advice to the contrary, a half-dozen prunes each morning on an empty stomach.
“Now that that basic question has been resolved, let’s go on to others,” the lady philosopher added. “You may tell me what’s troubling you. But I warn you beforehand that I shall not castrate you of your problem. I shall teach you to love it, to feel as proud of it as Cervantes of his useless arm or Beethoven of his deafness. Speak.”
With a fluency learned in ten years of professional dialogues with disciples of Hippocrates and apothecaries, Lucho Abril Marroquín frankly summed up his history, from the disastrous accident outside Pisco to his most recent nightmares and the apocalyptic consequences that this drama had had for his marital life. Overcome with self-pity, he burst into tears as he recounted the final chapters and finished his story with an outburst that to anyone else but Lucía Acémila would have been heartbreaking: “Doctor, help me!”
“Your story doesn’t sadden me. On the contrary, it’s so banal and stupid it bores me,” this engineer of souls comforted him affectionately. “Wipe your nose and persuade yourself that in the geography of the mind your illness is the equivalent of an ingrown toenail in the geography of the body. And now listen to me.”
With the manners and turns of speech of a woman who frequents high-society salons, she explained to him that what led men astray was the fear of the truth and the spirit of contradiction. With regard to the former, she enlightened the insomniac by explaining to him that chance, so-called accidents, did not exist; they were merely subterfuges invented by men to hide from themselves how evil they were.
“In a word, you wanted to kill that little girl, and so you killed her,” the doctor said, dramatically summing up her thoughts on the matter. “And then, since you were ashamed of what you’d done and afraid of the police or of Hell, you wanted to be hit by the truck, as punishment for what you’d done or as an alibi for the murder.”
“But, but…” he stammered, his bulging eyes and his forehead drenched with perspiration, betraying his abject despair. “What about the Guardia Civil? Did I kill him, too?”
“Who hasn’t killed a Guardia Civil at some time or other?” the lady scientist reflected. “Perhaps you killed him, perhaps it was the truck driver, perhaps it was a suicide. But this isn’t a special performance, where two people get in for the price of one. Let’s concentrate on you.”
She explained to him that, on frustrating their natural impulses, people aroused unconscious feelings of resentment in their mind, which thereupon took its vengeance by engendering nightmares, phobias, complexes, anxiety, depression.
“One can’t fight with oneself, for this