The three of us engaged in light conversation for a few minutes. Luis took the lead, and seemed in a good mood. He was drawing out the situation, I guessed, in the hope that his daughter would relent and stay with us. Yet she remained standing next to our table, responding to us with perfect politeness but with a succinctness that suggested urgency, that set a limit.
Before saying goodbye, she asked Luis not to smoke so much. I lit another cigarette. She blew us a kiss with both hands, moved away from the parasol and emerged into the sunshine. I watched how she walked off, her unruly hair, the swaying of her medium-sized hips, the red triangle of her bathing suit as she grew smaller in the distance. Luis bit his lip. Silence came over us once more. The sunlight rotated on Anita’s skin, like someone pointing a mirror at her back.
JUAN, JOSÉ
1. JUAN
I AM WRITING THIS so as to put time in order. There is nothing more disorderly than failing to write down events. And, of late, things at home are utterly disordered.
My mother has just brought me breakfast. Her smile is so identical from one morning to the next that I am beginning to suspect she doesn’t notice the days go by. Perhaps she is living in a continuous past that has ousted the present? It would be a clever way of evading the future, which doesn’t offer her much hope. I love my mother dearly.
My father’s case is different. Not because I don’t love him, but because neither of us has managed to put ourself in the place of the other. It’s ironic: in order to be able to say this I have had to put myself in his place. That is precisely why I am writing this, I keep saying, I keep telling myself. If I don’t discuss the matter with myself, I can’t understand who occupies what place. My father is a different case because he works, and he has his world, so to speak, outside our world. He inhabits the house in a way that is healthier because he isn’t really here: he comes to visit us and disappears. Moments before he is due to leave, I notice how contented he becomes. He is in such excellent spirits that it is a pity, he would seem to be saying, that he has to go to his consulting room. But that’s what duty to one’s patients is about, and so on. How much of this does Mama notice? Mystery. She smiles and prepares my breakfast.
And me? I don’t speak much to my father, I am far too silent with my mother and I am ashamed to confess I continue to avoid household chores. I have just turned thirty-three and still live at home. Put baldly like that, it already sounds like a reproach.
What further introspective insights could I make about myself? Lots, but not now. I have to read over my latest reports, make notes and copy everything out before my session with José.
2. JOSÉ
Monday 30 April. The situation sometimes appears to be at an impasse. I don’t know whether to interpret this as a failure or a minor victory. I try to cheer myself up with the thought that, without me the patient would be worse off. This consolation doesn’t last long. The time it takes me to tell myself that others more experienced than I would perhaps have made better progress.
Juan continues to insist on behaving as if his parents were alive. As simple and terrifying as that. In his eyes they are still there; nothing at home has changed. Every so often, I carefully try to oppose that impression. In the main, I am content to listen, waiting for some kind of reaction from him. When he contradicts himself in this matter, I try to give him a knowing look. He interprets this as my agreeing with him.
There isn’t much advice you can offer someone who has been orphaned. But one thing is obvious, and occasionally I let it slip: Juan should have moved a long time ago. To leave that house and everything it represents, its unforgotten furniture. As Bachelard says, there are spaces that are a time. That is Juan’s problem: he doesn’t move out of that space and time doesn’t move on for him. Despite the development of his pathology, I realize that basically his conflict is no different from the usual model. That is to say, faced with normal pain, he has responded abnormally. Or perhaps not even that: he has responded in a classic manner, but has taken all the processes to such an extreme he has become ill.
My greatest regret is that Juan could have resolved two conflicts at a stroke. He is over thirty now. He lives in the house where his parents brought him up. And his salary would be enough for a single person. It is worth noting that if he did manage to take the step of moving out, he would overcome two of his biggest fears: emancipation and grief. By clinging to the family home, Juan clings not only to absent figures, but also to a regressive identity that functions as a space, a habitat. And he fears he will be out in the cold if he leaves.
3. JUAN
I have to confess there are moments when the clinical model defeats me. During my years of practice (which are few, but very intense), I have never been caught up in such a dynamic. The patient insists on asking again and again about my own parents, interrogating me about their age, habits, health, family relations, and so on. In the most recent sessions, José has begun to analyse (I let him think he is analysing) my parents’ weaknesses, obsessed as he is with the loss of his own. It is as though, transferentially, José needed to share the burden of his orphanhood with his interlocutor.
By means of this strange projection, the patient has succeeded in visualizing more clearly his own trauma and analysing it with a degree of objectivity. Thanks to the indirect information I provide him with about himself, he in turn responds to me with greater clarity. I am not sure to what extent this strategy is permissible. But, since I began this procedure, the results have improved.
By supposedly focusing the sessions on my situation rather than his, José has become more collaborative, relinquishing his defensive posture and even appearing more self-critical. Obviously this self-criticism is limited from the outset, based as it is on a misapprehension. Although during the communicative praxis the symptoms appear positive, I keep wondering whether the patient has found in this swap a cathartic outlet, or a clever excuse to shift responsibility. I am supposed to be the one who gauges these contradictions, but that is where I acknowledge my limitations. Methodologically speaking, it isn’t hard to play José’s game. I have learned how to do it: I make a mental note of the patient’s comments, while speaking in the first person about the problems afflicting him. I wonder at what point I will be able to turn the board around and show him the real state of the game. And most of all I wonder whether, just prior to that critical moment of anagnorisis, José will give me a sign.
I intercalate two brief digressions of a personal nature.
One: while it is my genuine belief that I maintain the appropriate distance throughout our sessions, I am still concerned about the autobiographical foreshortenings I have recently been forced to take. In particular, when the patient questions me about precise details that in his case are unknown to me, and that in order to keep up the pretence of credibility oblige me to respond with a truth (or a version of the truth) about myself. In the last session, for example, José showed an interest in my father’s treatment of my pet animals. Since I knew nothing about that aspect of his childhood, I had to reply by resorting to my own experience. It was a minor detail, but it put me on my guard.