Fearsome Madman ate his food with his hands. They say that he killed people and everything. I know that on visiting days no one ever came to see Fearsome.
The pigeons flew up into the sky, ready to crap on someone’s head or a car windscreen. I remember one time when a mental patient took some ant poison to give to the pigeons. The result was a trail of pigeons on the ground. Dead. All of them.
There was a lunatic there who was a man but who dressed like a woman. He liked banging his head against the wall and was always shaking. There was another who reminded me of my grandmother on my mum’s side, always really elegant. Another who had a really strange habit of filling one cup full of coffee and another with milk, and drinking each one without mixing them. That wasn’t something a crazy person does. Once I got close to her and she was talking about Heraclitus and Parmenides with a Spanish accent. She was Chilean. I made up a backstory for her in my mind: that she had fought for Allende and lost, like all Chileans. She was politically persecuted. Abused by the government. She was tortured and wound up in a mental asylum in Brazil. She was a sociology professor. Surely she had children who didn’t know her whereabouts and who moved around from place to place looking for their mother. Governments do so many things to destroy the lives of those who are a nuisance to them. Being a nuisance seems to be a condition of being a good civil servant. To see the dirty tricks and not do anything, see people losing strength, people with no money losing money, paying high wages to bureaucrats …
All of a sudden I heard screams. Desperation. Some patients were hurling halfwits around. They grabbed the halfwits and hurled them up in the air and into a ditch, too. Less-crazy lunatics were leading the event. Yes, that was an event. A kind of ritual.
I didn’t stop being paranoid. My chip was still implanted inside me. I’d swallowed a cricket when I was fifteen. And when I was six, I was visited by aliens who were going to come back to get me at my house when I was eighteen. Ten years had already passed and the extraterrestrials hadn’t come to get me. Fronsky hadn’t come to get me. The chip is for the CIA and the KGB to control me. I’m important, because I can fart without smelling my own odour. I developed a filtering technique. All joking aside, I always felt like I was being followed. I’m always glancing over my shoulder when I walk along the street, and every once in a while I break into a full-on sprint. Once my psychiatrist took the bus with me, just to prove that there was no problem with riding the bus in Rio, in the Zona Sul. That idea went down with a ton of money, plus her watch. The bus was robbed.
They grabbed a patient and hurled her up in the air. The lunatics were hurling around anyone who appeared in front of them. They threw them into a ditch. The person could have got hurt, but the other loonies laughed and wanted more. They queued up to be hurled into the ditch.
Night came and along with it came the worst thing of alclass="underline" the soundtrack. Our asylum was next to a favela. Rio funk played all night long and all day too. Go Lacraia, go Lacraia, go Lacraia! Go Serginho, go Serginho. Sleeping with that rubbish playing … blaring!
I thought there was a really strange door in here somewhere, which people never came back out of. They would walk through that door and disappear. I kept an eye out. Two days ago the Chilean woman entered and disappeared.
I’m going to Paracambi. If you don’t eat, you’ll go to Caju5.
I couldn’t stand being in the cubicle any more. My joints were killing me. No lunatic deserves this treatment. I know that in my case, it was punishment for wrecking the whole house. It worked like a child’s punishment.
Once I had to write out ‘I like the maths teacher’ 200 times, hating the maths teacher. Now copy and paste on the computer has done away with that punishment.
When the sun came out, it dripped on each employee one by one. The asylum was full. It was overcrowded. It was Sunday, visiting day. There were set hours for daily visits and a set visiting day for everyone, which was Sunday. I still had my chip, which sometimes bothered me physically. I thought about to what extent my chip had derived from the cricket — the one from before. I had moments of lucidity. They were few, but I had them. Sometimes the drugs they used work. But there are people who don’t get better, even with the medicine. What good is hospitalisation, then? To gather together human debris.
When the asylum was full, it was time to be quiet. You could get tied to the bed for any little thing. Stuck inside the cubicle and tied up — that was the worst. A lot of alcoholics were constantly being tied up to deal with withdrawal syndrome. Where the clinics really go wrong is in mixing up the types of patients.
I had a craving for my granny’s cake. But I didn’t have a granny any more, let alone any of her cake. What I did have was a piece of cornmeal fudge, which was utterly tasteless. But which everybody ate in wide-eyed wonder. The asylum food was the kind of food that gets made for two hundred people at a time. Enter the Matrix. It had no seasoning. It was really bad. But it’s not right to complain, when there are so many people going hungry and when there were people in the asylum who thought that it was the eighth wonder of the world.
There was no guava jelly today.
I’d been there for ten days. For ten days I’d been eating poorly. At least I’d lose weight. I missed food from home. When there was no guava jelly, there was nothing that I liked. Even if it did stick to your teeth, it was good. It reminded me of my childhood. Reminded me of the North-east. I wanted to eat an apple. I hadn’t had an apple for a long time. The only fruit they had there were bananas. I wanted an apple, an avocado. I was dying for an avocado smoothie.
A cockroach came into the cubicle. I had to kill it with my hands. There was no other tool within reach. The cubicles are made for the person inside not to hurt anyone else, but also not to hurt himself. So that I wouldn’t hurt myself, there was nothing in the cubicle. We’re sometimes tied up at the beginning of our stay. Our treatment varies according to how dangerous we are.
They haven’t done lobotomies for ages. Electroshock therapy only gets administered under sedation. There’s the movement against mental hospitals. But where do you put all the people with no family, who are lost causes?
I was afraid of the future. Maybe this was it, living with all kinds of people. Sane people, crazy people, cops, street cleaners. I had nothing against the street cleaners. They were very clean and always wanted to clean up. But being locked up all day long, watching everything from afar. It was sad. It started raining, pouring down. I got even sadder. I couldn’t remember love. The last time I was loved, she said she didn’t love me. She’d fallen in love with the craziness in me. Sometimes lunatics are very seductive. I missed reading a good book on a cold day. On a hot day, too. I wanted to read Henry Miller.
There were lots of slums around the mental hospital. In twenty years everything would be taken over by the favela. The slums kept swallowing up the hillside, and there was less and less green space, and more roofs and ramshackle housing. In that cubicle it was always winter. It was always cold. It didn’t bother me, I like the cold. You don’t have to take off your shirt. No fat guy likes to take off his shirt. Showing off his flab isn’t a fat guy’s idea of fun.
I hate mirrors. Mirrors are just good for showing how we deteriorate with age. The first thing I broke at home was the mirror. I didn’t even care about the seven years of bad luck. Then I went for the booze and, seized with undeniable madness, I started throwing the whisky bottles to the floor, one by one. It turned into a dangerous place. A sea of glass shards. Some things didn’t break, like the glass top of the big table in the lounge, which proved to be indestructible. A table decoration was also unbreakable. There were things that melted away at the slightest touch, that self-destructed when I stroked them, and others that remained steadfast. My father came and asked me to stop. I didn’t stop. My little niece was screaming. My brother was screaming. My mother was screaming. My sister was screaming. Our cleaning lady was screaming.