Say Her Name (44 page)

Just as had been happening all winter in New York, I kept finding myself trapped in a silent movie, everything black and white and jittery. I went into a bar, Le Sully, that some of the Mexicans I knew in Paris used to hang out in, but didn’t recognize anybody and sat alone in a corner and ordered a drink, and then another. Everything flickery. Everyone’s skin, face, and hands like candy canes with the stripes licked off. Radioactive eyes. Rat-like scheming in every facial expression. People rubbing their hands together under their chins, pursing their lips, and trading glances. A man crying into his hands like a Rodin sculpture. Flames in the mirrors, and the whole bar looks like it’s melting or like celluloid film about to combust, and I paid and headed outside to walk.

The main reason I’d come to Paris, though, was that I wanted to visit La Ferte, the asylum clinic that was the model for the asylum in Aura’s unfinished novel. So that Aura could research La Ferte, our plan had been to go there in the spring of 2008. Now it was nearly a year after. I felt I owed it to Aura to fulfill that ambition. What I’d
known before about La Ferte, from Aura, I’d since supplemented with some research of my own. I knew that it was an experimental utopian asylum clinic of a very French kind where, in Aura’s novel, the psychoanalyst Marcelo Díaz Michaux was going to work. La Ferte is housed in a seventeenth-century château where patients, mental health professionals, nurses, and other staff are all supposed to live side by side as equals, running the clinic together. In the kitchen, psychoanalysts chop parsley alongside psychotics chopping onions. In theory, the patients at La Ferte aren’t supposed to always know who among the other patients is a psychoanalyst, and so on. Even a psychoanalyst, I read somewhere, might not always know if he’s speaking to a patient or to another incognito psychoanalyst.

Late that last fall, her first semester in the MFA program, Aura wrote a letter to La Ferte, addressed to the clinic’s longtime director, the eighty-seven-year-old Dr. Olivier Arnaux, asking if she could visit. About two months later she received a reply in the mail: a plain brown envelope with our Brooklyn address hand-printed in green ink, and inside, on a sheet of paper without a letterhead, in the same handwriting and with the same green pen, a few lines inviting Aura to visit La Ferte. But instead of being from Dr. Arnaux, the letter was signed by Sophie Deonarine. Was that Dr. Arnaux’s secretary? No title, professional or otherwise, identified her. The handwriting looked as if a trembling grip had painstakingly traced each letter from an alphabet of crudely shaped thin wires. Was Sophie Deonarine just a patient who, with or without permission, answered Dr. Arnaux’s mail? That possibility had kind of thrilled us.

The time Aura and I had stayed in the Cité Universitaire was because I’d been invited by my friend Juan Ríos to talk to the evening writing workshop he ran at the Mexican Cultural Institute. One of the students was a young Frenchwoman, Pauline, who’d lived in Ecuador a few years working for an organization that was trying to save an endangered species of Andean bear. She was a PhD student, too, but was enrolled in the workshop
to keep up her Spanish writing. After the workshop, we all went out for dinner, and Aura and Pauline were talking when one of those coincidences occurred that can make a writer, especially a young writer like Aura, feel as if the cosmos is aligning to help bring her book into being. It turned out that when Pauline was a very small child, some twenty-five years before, her mother had worked at La Ferte. Some of Pauline’s earliest memories were of being a little girl at La Ferte.

Later I found notes of that conversation with Pauline in one of Aura’s notebooks. Psychotics can seem pretty normal, Aura had recorded, until they don’t. Like the patient who used to give Pauline’s mother a shopping list of things he wanted when she went into town. She’d saved one of these lists as a souvenir and Pauline saw it:
Le Monde,
pipe tobacco, batteries, cherry preserves, semen …

I took a Sunday morning train to the town nearest La Ferte. In the seat across from me sat a little boy dressed in a Spider-Man costume, traveling with his parents. I should dress like that, I thought. Maybe tomorrow I will. For a moment it seemed so plausible and even reasonable that tomorrow I might dress as Spider-Man that I felt a little scared.

In the train station I stopped at the newsstand and with my third-grade French tried to ask the elderly woman working there where I could get a taxi to La Ferte. Her answer was improbably long, and I didn’t understand it. A tall, young black man buying a newspaper turned and said, in Caribbean-accented English, She says that you do not need a taxi. There is a van that will come from La Ferte. You only need to telephone. You are going to the clinic, correct?

The newsstand woman had a card with La Ferte’s telephone number printed on it, and after the Caribbean fellow had done me the favor of phoning La Ferte on my cell, he said, They will come for you at one in the afternoon. You are to wait in front of the station. It is a blue van.

It was a little before eleven in the morning. I wandered the town, stopping into the church, and then went down to the river.

A psychoanalyst, seated in his chair, sees a new patient come into his office for the first time, observes him for a moment, and says, Oh, you aren’t here, are you? You are still outside in the garden.

I read that anecdote in an essay by Dr. Olivier Arnaux that had been published in English. Most personalities, wrote Arnaux, are organized around a single point that holds the self together. But schizophrenics have many such points that are all over the place and that’s why their selves aren’t limited only to their bodies or even to the same enclosed space that their bodies happen to be in. The psychiatrists and psychoanalysts at La Ferte, with their famous method of Intuitive Poetic Diagnosis, are trained to recognize such conditions at first sight. That’s how the psychoanalyst could tell that even though the patient was there in his office, he was really in the garden, or at the beach, or somewhere else a century ago, or a few years ago.

At La Ferte, the method is to treat psychotics, schizophrenics, and severe melancholics like normal people who, however medicated, can still respond to talking therapies and participate in a community and have chores and take classes and so on. The goal, I read, is to be able to
graft
into that patient just enough of one of those self-anchoring points that, amid the chaos of all those other points, the patient will be able to reach for the grafted one, or at least have a chance to. It’s not a cure but can lessen suffering and provide a patient with unprecedented, if fleeting, instances of repose and even human connection. Cobweb thin, I pictured it, or delicate as an eardrum, a peaceful prosthetic soul, artfully grafted into the middle of swirling delusion, pain, lostness, terror. I liked that idea, like something out of a fairy tale, the elf cobblers who come out at night to make, instead of magical new shoes, a self or
a soul. What had Aura made of that idea when she came across it? When Marcelo Díaz Michaux saw Irma—Julieta and little Alicia’s housekeeper—for the first time, what did he see that made him want to take Irma back to France and put her in La Ferte? Could a shadowy facsimile of Aura’s soul or self be grafted onto mine? Was it maybe already there and would they see it?

A large blue van pulled up. There were two people in front and a few passengers scattered among three rows in back, including a man in the very back staring out the window at me, long pale face, thin mouth, a dark fedora, a resemblance to William Burroughs. Patients on a Sunday outing into the city, I thought. But maybe that man in the fedora isn’t a patient.

The front window came down. A woman with thick curly black hair, vivid eyebrows, and brown skin, a striking woman somewhere in her thirties, wearing a down vest over a sweater, said my name. I shook her delicate hand through the window, pulled the van door open, and got in. An elderly woman next to me, in a crumpled wool coat, sat slumped forward, looking resolutely out the window; on the seat between us was a plastic shopping bag with some items in it. The driver, a ruddy man in a watch cap, asked me something, and it was instantly established that I didn’t speak French. The woman in front, however, turned out to be a visiting intern from Brazil who could speak Spanish. Her name was Luiza. We were driving out of the town when Luiza asked, And which patient are you coming to visit? I answered that I wasn’t coming to visit any patient. She translated that for the driver, who glanced at her questioningly, but neither of them said anything. We were driving along a woods-lined road, bare skinny trees flashing past like obelisks. I was sure that Luiza was silently rehearsing how to tell me that I wasn’t going to be allowed into La Ferte. I hope I at least get to see it, I thought. I turned and looked at the pale man in the fedora, who stared back at me with the sad quivering gaze of a dog in the rain.

And what is the motive for your visit? Luiza asked me.

I told her about Aura, her incomplete novel, and our correspondence with Dr. Arnaux. Aura had received an invitation to visit, I said, from Dr. Arnaux’s secretary.

But Dr. Arnaux doesn’t work on Sundays, said Luiza, and neither does his secretary. There’s hardly any staff today.

If I could just have a look around, I said. I paused and added, So that when I do get a chance to speak to Dr. Arnaux, I’ll have a better idea what to ask.

The château was like a castle in a forest, with sandstone walls, gables, dark slate roofing, a pillared portico, long rows of windows, and a tower topped by a conical roof on each side.

The person in charge that Sunday, Luiza told me, was Catherine, and I would have to speak to her. Catherine was a slight woman with gray-yellow hair and a lined face, dressed in sweater and jeans, wearing a dark red lipstick. We found her smoking a cigarette at the back of the main hall, by a bay window through which I could see some of the other buildings on the property, a few with smoke pouring from their chimneys, and the winter woods and fields beyond. Catherine, who did speak English, quizzed me about my visit. I repeated what I’d told Luiza in the van. The whole time, I felt her smallish blue eyes observing me. What did she see? It couldn’t have been so terrible, could it have? She gave me permission to spend the day. The van, she said, would bring me back to the town in time for the last evening train to Paris.

And so my love, that’s how I managed to get us into La Ferte. What I saw there is what I imagine you expected or hoped to see. I think it would have lived up to your expectations. They have their own little bakery, where the patients crowd inside, standing close together in the warmth from the wood-burning oven and that damp yeasty smell, singing children’s songs while they wait for the cheesecloth-covered loaves to rise; and they have a goat barn, and horses, and all kinds of classes, art, music, even creative writing
classes in the old stone chapel. Do you know what the château reminded of? Mohonk Mountain House, though without hunting trophies on the walls, and shabbier, the furniture more worn out, it being an asylum, of course, and not a spa-hotel. But there was a fire in the stone fireplace. There was a bar—with dark wood-paneled walls and a domed, painted ceiling unlike anything at Mohonk—serving soft drinks, fruit syrups, cookies and candies, and where every Saturday, Luiza told me, Marie, a folksinger from the town, comes to perform from two in the morning until just before dawn. The patients themselves chose those hours. Those are the hours when they are up and awake and in the mood to listen and sing along. If I asked Marie to sing “Stephanie Says,” would she? I felt a strong longing to be there with them, singing, thinking that maybe I would find something out, something important, if only I could do that. The patients, of course, were nothing like the guests at Mohonk. But I will spare you descriptions of the colorful mad.

Luiza, in the first room she took me into, unlocked a cabinet and began dispensing medicines to the horde of patients crowded in there. Among them was a man who would not get off the floor. He was lying prostrate on his stomach with his head turned to the side, occasionally even conversing, though barely, and in a tortured voice, with the other patients who were stepping and milling around him.

I am not like that man after all, I thought. I’ve come all the way here for you, and for me.

So what
would
Aura have made of La Ferte? Why
was
Marcelo Díaz Michaux going to bring Irma back here with him?

When I was climbing the curving wooden staircase to the second floor of the château, I noticed dust on all the steps, and spiderwebs in the corners and on the banisters. Such a pity that Irma isn’t here anymore, I thought, she’d never let this place get so dirty. That wasn’t my voice. It was Marcelo’s. I was Marcelo, the psychoanalyst, climbing the stairs, on my way to work with some patients. Isn’t my young wife waiting for me at home? Doesn’t she
love me? Then why do I feel so bereft? Is it because Irma isn’t at La Ferte anymore? But she still lives in France, doesn’t she? Where is Alicia? She’s not here anymore, either, is she? Where has she gone? Où sont les axolotls?

How can I ever know or imagine what Aura would have made of La Ferte? Do with La Ferte what you will, my love. I know it will be great. I kept my promise, and brought you here.

¹
I’m turning slutty / And I read Bukowski though I hate it / It seems that I’d like to be a man / And pick up all the women who cross my path / Nobody be scandalized / This is private / This is a lie / Poetry is fiction and doesn’t save anybody

²
I love you papá I don’t know why you separated. But I still love you anyway like I did when we were together. Listen, do you still love me like before? I hope so because I even adore you good-bye papá I love you with all my ♥.

³
La Sra. Gama, administradora del Condominio Insurgentes y responsable directa de la clausura de dos de los lugares que amurallan la entrada al maltrecho inmueble—los conocidos antros El Bullpen y El Jacalito—camina segura en su traje de saco y minifalda azul eléctrico por el agrietado y oscuro pasillo del piso diez. Con una sonrisa forzada, invita a sus posibles futuras inquilinas, dos mujeres jóvenes buscando un espacio para empezar su negocio de costura, a tomar las escaleras hasta el piso ocho (el último que alcanza el único elevador sobreviviente de los cuatro que existían hasta el temblor del ’85 y cuyas paredes están adornadas por coloridos e inteligibles graffitis). Bajan en el piso cuatro.