social propriety. The poor are grilled and cross-questioned; the rich have their statements taken down, with close attention to accurate spelling.”
Paul had recounted the events with his eyes closed, lying on his back, his delivery slow and monotonic, almost bored. I wondered if this cold insouciance was a product of his unemotional character, or if it was a defense he had developed.
“And Katya?” I asked after a silence. “How did all this affect her?”
“As you would imagine. She was fond of the young man… perhaps even loved him. The fact of his death was shocking; the method of it—by her own father’s hand—was shattering. If she had also known that the shooting was no accident, that her father (or rather the madness hiding within her father’s flesh) had cold-bloodedly shot him down, I daren’t consider what effect it might have had on her. Fortunately, she never knew. So you see, to this day my family survives in a fragile web of interwoven misapprehensions. Katya believes Father shot the young man by error, and that his mental state was precariously shocked by the event. Father believes that Katya shot the fellow in panic after his attempt to violate her. And both of them are willing to do whatever is necessary—to pull up roots and go to the ends of the earth if necessary—each for the purpose of protecting the other. I hope you can appreciate how dangerous it would be for both of them if your probing were to expose them to the truth. Your blundering about in our affairs could easily tear the delicate web of lies that prevents my father and my sister from discovering the horrible and destructive truth.”
“And you sit at the center of the web. A spider-god controlling their fates.”
Paul vented a long, shuddering sigh, as though infinitely weary of me. He was silent for a time before continuing in his flat, almost indolent tone. “It would not have been a matter of the guillotine for Papa. It would have been an asylum. Have you ever experienced an asylum for the criminally insane, Montjean? Do you have any idea what they’re like?”
“As a matter of fact, I have. I did a year of internship at the Passy institution before coming to Salies.” I did not confide to Paul that my experiences at Passy had turned me away from all thoughts of pursuing my interest in the new science of psycho-analysis. I had found the treatment of the mentally ill, even at such an advanced facility as Passy, to be brutal, degrading, horrid. The nurses and attendants seemed to have been dredged up from the lowest orders of society. The case which, in my mind, italicized the horrors of institutionalization was that of a young woman I shall call Mlle M. She was young and very pretty, beneath her slovenly, indeed disgusting, faзade. The event that had driven her beyond the boundaries of reality had to do with incest. No purpose would be served in detailing it further. Mlle M. used to wander the grounds of Passy, her expression bland and distant, her soft eyes empty. The most salient manifestation of her condition was her practice of soiling herself and refusing to allow anyone to clean her up. Despite my natural disgust, I felt particular compassion for her, and after many months of gently, slowly bringing her to have confidence in me, I learned something that shocked me and filled me with rage. During her first weeks at Passy, the gentle and withdrawn Mlle M. had been subjected to frequent and rather bizarre sexual assaults on the part of guards and attendants who, as I later discovered, considered such opportunities to be one of the privileges associated with their unpopular occupations. Mlle M. confided in me with expressions of sly pride that it was to protect herself from these assaults that she had devised the practice of soiling herself and making herself too disgusting to be desirable.
With outrage and fury I reported what I had discovered to the hospital administrator, who warned me against giving credence to the distorted rantings of persons who, by definition, were adrift from reality. But he assured me that he would look into the matter.
Over the next several months I devoted a great deal of time to Mlle M., whom I discovered to be a charming, very intelligent young woman, despite the deep bruising her mind had undergone. Slowly, and not without several discouraging setbacks, I convinced her that the danger to her person had passed, and that she could dare to live without the horrid armour of her own feces. I remember the delight and sense of accomplishment I experienced one morning in late spring when she arrived at the little conference room, fresh and clean, her hair brushed and tied back with a bit of ribbon. I knew better than to make a great fuss about her victory over her dreads, but she smiled with shy pleasure when, at the end of our chat, I mentioned in passing that she looked particularly nice that morning.
She failed to attend her next conference, but I was not unduly surprised, as she had missed several over the course of our relationship, and it is not uncommon for a patient to retreat for a day or two after some barrier has been broken through. But when she failed to appear the following morning, I went in search of her.
I found her in her cell, attended by a dour matron whose martyred “I-told-you-so” expression revealed her longstanding mistrust for this newfangled approach to treating—pampering—the insane. Mlle M. was coiled up on the floor in the corner of the cell, snarling at me like a rabid animal, her dress torn to shreds, her cheeks raked and bloodied by her own fingernails, stinking of feces she had smeared over her arms and into her hair. I realized instantly what must have happened to her—probably on her way back to her cell from our meeting. Because she had trusted me, she had dared to make herself clean… and desirable.
I knelt down beside her and reached out to touch her shoulder consolingly, but she recoiled and snarled at me. Hate glinting in her narrowed eyes, she snatched up her torn dress, revealing her bare privates, and hissed, “Your turn! Your turn! Your turn!”
I burst into the office of the administrator, demanding an immediate investigation leading to maximal punishment. I was met by the callous indifference of the official whose greatest desire is to avoid unnecessary trouble and publicity. It was obvious to me that he would do nothing more than go through the motions of an inquiry because, as he informed me with a slight shrug, we had to remember that the insane tended to invite this sort of thing—they enjoy it, really.
When I screamed at him that I intended to bring the entire matter to the attention of the press, his eyes hardened and he rose to face me. In cold, measured tones, he reminded me that everyone at Passy knew of my particular attentions to Mlle M., and that our activities during our “sessions” were common knowledge.
My first blow broke his glasses, my second his nose.
I was immediately dismissed from the staff, and the evaluation written into my record was such that I could give up all hope of ever being accepted into a desirable practice. It was because of this damning evaluation that I was so surprised and grateful when Doctor Gros invited me to join him for the summer at his clinic in Salies.
I had been silent for a time, remembering these experiences, before repeating to Paul, “Yes I have some acquaintance with institutions for the criminally insane.”
“Then you know that they are unspeakable places. I visited one when I was trying to decide what I would do if Father ever had a relapse. Those poor, drooling inmates bereft of the slightest dignity. Those hectoring guardians with their brutal, meaty faces. All babble and stench. I could never allow such a fate to befall a cultured and scholarly man like my father. After our mother’s death, he concentrated all his affection on Katya and me. It was our birth, after all, that had cost him the wife he loved beyond the capacity of most men to love. Our debt to him can never be repaid.”
“But if his distorted identification of Katya with his dead wife could bring him to kill once, could it not happen again?”
“That is possible. And that is why I keep careful watch on him, looking for the slightest signs of derangement.”
“I take it these ‘signs’ have appeared again?”
After a pause, he nodded.
“And that is why you made the sudden decision to flee from Etcheverria?”
He nodded again.
I understood then why Paul had demanded that I conceal from his father the fact that I was fond of Katya; why he had warned me against touching her, taking her in my arms. He saw me as the next victim of his father’s madness! All his actions and motives, which I had ascribed to an unhealthy jealousy, were now clear.
But it was not Paul who occupied my concern. “Poor Katya,” I said softly. “How unjustly life had closed in around her! And she tries so to find a little joy in the beauties of nature, to amuse herself with her silly jokes… those painful puns. Good God, she can’t even allow herself to be held in the arms of a man who loves her!”
“Yes, poor Katya.” Paul sat up. “Poor Paul, if it comes to that. Even poor Jean-Marc, I suppose. But—above all—poor, poor Papa.”
“No. Not ‘above all’! I am sorry for him, but his life is nearly spent. You and Katya are still young. And
