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By Root 2168 0

love only when he saw a battered, bruised body. He thought or dreamed he heard the pharmacist’s voice, once again, asking him for help, and in his half sleep, as on that night, he palpated him, felt the round bulge in the zone of the inferior emotions, the abnormal temperature of the crown, where Spurzheim had located the organ of sexuality, and the deformation, in the lower occipital curve, just above the nape of his neck, of the cavities that represent the destructive instincts. (And at that moment he was suddenly surrounded once again by the warm atmosphere of Mariano Cubí’s study, and heard once more the example that Cubí used to cite, that of Jobard le Joly, the Geneva arsonist, whose head he had examined after the decapitation: “In him this region of cruelty was so enlarged that it looked like an enormous tumor, a pregnant cranium.”) Then he heard his own voice, telling the pharmacist-anarchist the remedy again: “The thing you must rid your life of, comrade, is not vice but sex,” and explaining to him that when he had done so, the sexual path would be blocked and the destructive power of his nature would be channeled toward ethical and social goals, thus multiplying his energy for the fight for freedom and the eradication from this earth of every form of oppression. And without a tremor in his voice, looking him straight in the eye, he again made him the fraternal proposal: “Let’s do it together. I’ll make the same decision and abide by it, to prove to you that it’s possible. Let us both swear never to touch a woman again, brother.” Had the pharmacist kept his vow? He remembered his look of consternation, his voice that night, and thought or dreamed: “He was a weak man.” The sun’s rays penetrated his closed eyelids, burned his pupils.

He, on the other hand, was not a weak man. He had been able to keep the vow—until this morning—because the power of reason and knowledge served as a firm support, a source of strength for what in the beginning had been merely an impulse, a comradely gesture. Weren’t the search for sexual pleasure, the enslavement to instinct a danger to someone engaged in a war without quarter? Weren’t sexual urges liable to distract him from the ideal? What tormented Gall in those years was not banishing women from his life, but the thought that his arch-foes, Catholic priests, were doing precisely the same thing that he was, though admittedly in his case the reasons were not obscurantist ones, rooted in sheer prejudice, as in their case, but the desire, rather, to make himself stronger, freer of impediments, more available for this fight to reconcile, to conjoin what they, more than anyone else, had helped to turn into permanent enemies: heaven and earth, matter and spirit. He had never been tempted to break his vow—“till today,” Galileo Gall dreamed or thought. On the contrary, he firmly believed that this absence of women in his life had been transformed into a greater intellectual appetite, into an ever-increasing ability to act. No: he was lying to himself again. The power of reason had been able to get the better of sex when he was awake, but not when he was asleep. On many nights during these years, tempting female forms slipped into his bed as he slept, clung to his body, stole caresses. He dreamed or thought that these phantasms had been harder to resist than women of flesh and blood, and he remembered that, like adolescents or comrades locked up in jails the world over, he had often made love with these impalpable silhouettes fashioned by his desire.

In anguish, he thought or dreamed: “How could I have done that?” Why had he flung himself on that young woman? She had been fighting him off and he had struck her. Overcome with anxiety, he asked himself if he had also hit her when she had stopped fighting him off and was allowing him to strip her naked. What had happened, comrade? He dreamed or thought: “You don’t know yourself, Gall.” No, his own head told him nothing. But others had palpated it and found in him highly developed impulsive tendencies and curiosity, inaptitude for the contemplative,