The first time I saw you, you weren’t wearing the yellow dress with the spaghetti straps. You were wearing a black blouse and gray pants. You were sitting at a table and staring impatiently through the window of the hotel café. I was a whole eight minutes late. I embraced you as fluidly as if I’d been embracing only you my whole life.
“Do we know each other that well?” you asked. “Better,” I replied, and as long as I live I’ll be proud of that answer. Of course your name was not Ala-Alberta. Your name is what I always wanted it to be; your arms are the arms I’d always wanted to be yours; you have green eyes, so green; and you have hands specially created for me by God. You are beautiful and wise.
As for me — I’m happy. Of course, I can’t mention the fact that I’m happy to anyone here, I can’t divulge my feelings of happiness even to my therapist (as you correctly guess, it’s Kasia), I can’t even write my feeling of happiness down in my emotional journal. A happy alco immediately raises the worst suspicions; a happy alco bodes terribly ill.
What bodes well is an alco in the doldrums, an alco in depression, an alco in despair. Alcoholism may be the only illness in which the patient being in a dreadful state gives hope. A true full-blooded alco has to hunger constantly for booze, he has to feel the constant pressure of longing for a bottle of Żołądkowa Gorzka, to be down in the dumps, to be in hell.
I miss music here. The summer is overcast, but there are sunny days, and at such times I wander with an odd fascination among the dormitories of the insane, which are set amongst untended gardens. At times, singing can be heard from behind the barred windows. Around noon the gardens fill with a crowd of schizophrenics and suicides, and the toneless melody of their jabbering rises to the sky. Yesterday, I passed a suicide on the main avenue; he was carrying a huge portable radio on his shoulder and pressing it convulsively to his ear. From several yards away I could make out a low hypnotic voice singing a recent hit about a silk scarf. It made me think of Don Juan the Rib, my favorite figure and a person close to my heart, and once again I felt the looming shadow of the black cord; Lord, let me be with her as long as possible.
We were sitting in the hotel café; you were drinking green tea, I was drinking one of the last beers of my life (of my life — not before I die). We were sitting and gazing at one another, and those first gazes, that intense staring at each other, so entered our bloodstream that afterwards it was always like that. Our heads always turned toward one another on their pillows; we gaped at each other endlessly. And it’s going on still, even from here I can still see you. My head is turned towards you and I know that you can see me too, that right now you’re also looking in my direction, you’re giving me strength. You’re giving me a strength that I can’t show here either, by the way. My strength remains my secret. One of the she-therapists’ favorite mantras is: you contain as much sickness as you contain secrets. That is — you have to admit — a terrible, terrible thing to say. According to the view that prevails here, an alco can stay alive only on condition that he allows himself to be disemboweled; more, that he disembowels himself, in accordance with professional instructions. Guts, entrails, problems, fears, bad thoughts and weak hopes, nightmares, colorless innards — everything comes out into the open. Your God is in the open, your sex life is in the open, your puke is in the open. (That’s right, the subject of one of the key confessions is: “The Story of my First Drunken Vomiting.” As you can imagine, it was not without enjoyment and not without satisfaction that I spent numerous pages recounting my first technicolor yawn: I described with relish how I hurled pepper-flavored pieprzówka in the Gierek era, ration-card vodka in the first Solidarity period, and home-brewed moonshine during martial law; I described in detail how under Jaruzelski my head drooped over the toilet bowl. Unfortunately, toward the end of the essay a certain thematic and also aesthetic monotony crept in, since during both the Wałęsa presidency and the Kwaśniewski presidency I barfed nothing but Żołądkowa Gorzka. C’est la vie.)
I hope I’m not irritating you with my immoderation (including the stylistic kind). I’m writing a little as if I were writing from Siberia or from the Lubyanka, yet you’re only two hundred miles away. Today we spoke on the phone, and in a few days you’ll come visit me and we’ll go for a walk by the Utrata River. In a few weeks we’ll be together forever.
When I say that I’m abandoning my habit for you, I’m telling the truth. Because I don’t exist without you, I don’t exist without us. My “I” is no longer singular. I cease to be when you’re not there; every separation is unbearable. (Do you remember how we both cried at Centralny Station? How you ran alongside the train?) You can’t be more than a hundred inches from me; beyond that it’s all the same whether you’re a mile or two hundred miles away. (Two hundred miles from my arms.) Beyond that, there’s always a gulf, and everything that’s in between is really. .
[End of manuscript legible only for addressee.]
Chapter 18. Dr. Swobodziczka
I’M LYING IN MY parents’ bed, which is as vast as an ocean liner. I’m delirious, though I don’t know what it means to be delirious. I can smell alcohol, though I don’t know it’s the smell of alcohol; Dr. Swobodziczka is leaning over me. Rectified spirit has taken on the form of a luminous aura that shines through all the chakras of his body. Terrifying is Dr. Swobodziczka, terrifying as a shaman from an adventure story. He passes through the center of town like the angel of destruction, clutching his physician’s case; he wades through three-feet-high snowdrifts as if he were the mythical man of snow, swaying from side to side like the Flying Dutchman. He drinks fearfully and insanely. Suicides do not have an easy life with him.