A pause and a piercing look. They must have been part of the therapy.
Then he began writing, filling a page of his prescription pad with anxiolytics and antidepressants.
I was to take the stuff for two months. I must try to find distractions. I must avoid dwelling on myself. I must attempt to see the positive side of things and avoid thinking there was no way out of my situation. I must hand over 300,000 lire, there was no question of a receipt and we’d meet in two months’ time for a check-up.
From the doorway as he showed me out, he advised me against reading the descriptive leaflets enclosed with the drugs. He was a real authority on the human psyche.
I hunted for a chemist’s a long way from the centre of town, to avoid meeting anyone I knew. I didn’t want a client or colleague of mine present when the chemist yelled out to the assistant in the back some such phrase as “Look in the psychotropic cupboard and see if we have extra-strong psychiatric Valium for this gentleman.”
After cruising around a bit in the car, I selected somewhere in Japigia, on the outskirts of the city. The chemist was a bony young woman with a rather unsociable air, and I handed her the prescription with averted eyes. I felt as much at my ease as a priest in a porn shop.
The bony chemist was already making out the bill when I recited my little speech: “While I’m here I’ll get something for myself as well. Have you some effervescent vitamin C?”
She looked at me for a second, without a word. She knew the script. Then she gave me the vitamin C along with the rest. I paid and fled like a thief.
When I got home I unwrapped the package, opened the boxes and read the enclosed leaflets. I found them all interesting, but my attention was irresistibly drawn to the side-effects of the antidepressant. Trittico with a trazodone base.
The patient began with simple dizzy spells, passing swiftly on to dryness of the mouth, blurred vision, constipation, urinary retention, tremors and alteration of the libido.
It occurred to me that I had already seen to altering my libido on my own, then I went on reading. I thus discovered that a limited number of men who take trazodone develop a tendency to long, painful erections, what is known as priapism.
This problem might even require an emergency surgical operation, which in turn might result in permanent sexual impairment.
But the end was reassuring. The risk of fatal overdose of trazodone was, fortunately, lower than that resulting from the use of tricyclic antidepressants.
Having finished reading, I fell to meditating.
What do you do in the case of a prolonged and painful erection? Do you go to a hospital holding the thing in your hand? Do you put on very comfortable underpants? What do you say to the doctor? What does permanent sexual impairment amount to?
And again, how much does one need for a fatal overdose of trazodone? Are two pills enough? Or does it require the whole packet?
I found no answers to these questions, but the Trittico ended up down the bog, along with the rest of the medicines prescribed by my psychiatrist. My ex-psychiatrist.
I conscientiously emptied all the packets and pulled the chain. Into the rubbish bin went the boxes, phials, ampoules and descriptive leaflets.
That done, I poured myself an ample half-glass of whisky – avoid alcoholic beverages – and put Chariots of Fire into the video machine. One of the few cassettes I had brought away with me.
When the first pictures started coming, I lit up a Marlboro – avoid nicotine, especially in the evening – and for the first time in a very long while I almost felt in a good mood.
6
When I was a boy I used to box.
My grandfather took me along to a gym after seeing me come home with my face swollen from the beating it had taken. Administered by a fellow bigger – and nastier – than me.
I was fourteen then, very skinny, with a nose red and shiny from acne. I was in the fourth form at grammar school, and was perfectly convinced that there was no such thing as happiness. For me, at any rate.
The gym was in a damp basement. The instructor was a lean man approaching seventy, with arms still lean and muscular and a face like Buster Keaton’s. He was a friend of my grandfather.
I have a precise recollection of the moment we entered it, at the foot of some narrow, ill-lit steps. There was not a voice to be heard, only the dull thud of fists hitting the punch bag, the rap of skipping ropes, the rhythm of the punch ball. There was a smell I can’t describe, but it is there in my nostrils now, as I write, and a thrill runs through me.
That I was going in for boxing was long kept secret from my mother. She only learned it when, at the age of seventeen and a half, I won the welterweight silver medal in the regional junior championships.
My grandfather, however, never got to see me on that pasteboard podium.
Three months previously he had been walking through a pine wood with his Alsatian when at a certain moment he stopped and calmly sat down on a bench.
A lad who was nearby reported that, after stroking the dog, he had leaned his head on the back of the bench in an unusual fashion.
The carabinieri had to shoot the dog before they could approach the body and identify him as Guido Guerrieri, former Professor of Medieval Philosophy.
My grandfather.
I won other medals after those regional championships. Even a bronze as a middleweight in the Italian university championships.
I never had a deadly punch, but I’d acquired a good technique, and I was tall and lean, with a longer reach than others at my weight.
Shortly before I took my degree I gave it up, because boxing is something you can keep up for long only if you are a champion, or if you have something to prove.
I was not a champion and it seemed to me I had already proved what I had to prove.
Having decided to get along without modern psychiatry, I searched my mind for some alternative. And I found what I needed was a spot of fisticuffs.
Thinking it over, I realized that it had been one of the few solid things in my life. The smell of glove leather, the punches given and taken, the hot shower afterwards, when you discovered that for two whole hours not a single thought had passed through your head.
The fear as you were walking towards the ring, the fear behind your expressionless eyes, behind the expressionless eyes of your opponent. Dancing, jumping, trying to dodge, giving and taking ’em, with arms so weary you can’t keep your guard up, breathing through your mouth, praying it’ll end because you can’t take it any longer, wanting to punch but being unable to, thinking you don’t care whether you win or lose as long as it ends, thinking you want to throw yourself on the ground but you don’t, and you don’t know what’s keeping you on your feet or why and then the bell rings and you think you’ve lost and you don’t care and then the referee raises your arm and you realize you’ve won and nothing exists at that moment, nothing exists but that moment. No one can take it away from you. Never ever.
I searched for a gym that catered for boxing. The old basement of nearly twenty-five years before was long gone. The instructor was dead. I consulted the Yellow Pages and saw that the city was full of gyms for the martial arts of Japan, Thailand, Korea, China and even Vietnam. The choice was vast: judo, ju-jitsu, aikido, karate, Thai boxing, taekwondo, tai chi chuan, wing chun, kendo, viet vo dao.