Eros and Tano

  "Will you be my servant or my master?” she asked.

  "Um... do I have to give a definitive answer?"

  "If you want..." she whispered languidly.

  That was enough to make me take a decision. I don’t think it’s necessary to report what happened as a result of that brief conversation, but I must say that I still remember it with pleasure... and even with a little dismay.

  Then I felt gripped and pulled away.

  When I came back to my senses, I was surprised to find that I was still at the home of Vanessa. She was lying next to me, smoking a cigarette.

  "Uh? Isn’t the ambulance here yet? Have I been away such a short time?"

  "Two days, my dear. And three nights," she said, looking delighted.

  "Why didn’t you call the emergency room? I explained you what to do if..."

  "Why do you care? You're okay now, right? "

  "But why have you kept me here for two days?"

  "I'm not telling," she said with a leer, "but know that you have a fabulous rigor mortis."

  It was then that something broke inside me.

  The fact that I had been used as a doll by a half-deranged girl, actually, was only the straw that broke the camel's back. What I could not stand was that I had to keep playing that senseless Russian roulette.

  I realized that my bizarre fate would inevitably led me to having to deal with weird women like the one currently lying at my side, shunning away from me those with whom I would have been able to establish a relationship falling within the boundaries of normality. I was no longer willing to accept such a situation.

  I decided to give up sex.

  The luminary 3.

  "Tell me about your problem."

  "Excuse me, hasn’t the colleague you have replaced passed you my file?"

  "Um..." he said, casually averting his gaze for a moment, "if you do not mind, I would like to hear you expose that in person."

  I changed my position for the umpteenth time on that really uncomfortable chair. The matter was starting to make me a bit nervous. How was it possible that, since I had requested the support of the psychological care centre of the USSL, the doctor in charge had already changed three times, and each time we had started all over again?

  I shielded myself with patience and did as he asked. While I was talking, he looked up at me maybe a couple of times, and did not say a word. Occasionally he scribbled something on a notepad.

  "Have the drugs that have been prescribed to you brought any benefit?" he finally asked.

  "I think so, but perhaps it would be better to increase the dosage."

  He didn’t raise any objection in this regard. Without another word, he filled in the prescription and dismissed me.

  "See you next time, parasite", I couldn’t help but think.

  I went to the pharmacy and took the medicines, a load of drugs sufficient to send half the neighbourhood into orbit. And to think that I had only asked to talk about my problem with someone who was qualified to help me make a sense of my crazy life.

  Obviously I didn’t even think of taking that shit, I already had enough problems of my own, turning into a legalized addict wouldn’t certainly have helped. I was going to give all of those goodies to Ciro, my friend from elementary school, who lived two doors down into the condo-anthill in which we were both born. He had a nice group of "friends" to whom he would sell the goods, then we would share the proceeds equally. Yes, because nowadays, unless you have some knowledge at the upper floors, you can forget finding a decent job, and certainly you can’t make a living by working every other month to those charlatan agencies for temporary employment.

  Life is a scam, and everyone has to do what he can.

  The family doctor.

  Lucio is my family physician. Once those who covered his role were called "health insurance doctors", a term which often took on a negative connotation, as if to indicate carelessness. Yet, of all the institutions I had to do with, this is the only one that offered me a reference point, the possibility of relating with someone who would listen.

  However, it seems that someone didn’t like that definition, so it was changed. Frankly, I think that the alternative is not such an enlightened choice, it seems a little discriminatory. Why "family"? What does it mean, that those who live alone have no right to medical care? And then, when you meet him you say "good morning doctor", not "good morning physician."

  Lucio laughed. In addition to pondering such considerations for no reason at all, I also had the bad habit of voicing them aloud whenever I had a chance, and in that specific circumstance I was sitting in front of his desk.

  "As long as they simply change our title it’s fine," he said kindly, but with an underlying note of regret, "sooner or later they will get rid of us."

  "Are you kidding Lucio?" It had been him, when we had met for the first time, who had invited me to call him by first name. After all he was just a few years older than me.

  "Well, I hope I'm wrong. But lately you hear voices like that. It seems that the government thinks we are a waste of money."

  "And what will those who need a doctor do?"

  "They want to create centralized clinics, patients will go there and refer to the doctors on duty."

  "So I could have a different one each time I go there to be visited?"

  "Yes, I think it would be so."

  "Are they crazy?"

  "No, they just don’t care about people's needs. Anyway, never mind for now. How are you? "

  "Well, you know, I'd like to be able to address to someone who listened to me... but, excuse me, you are specialized in psychology, why don’t you take care of this yourself?"

  "I cannot, Tano. Us general practitioners have been downgraded to mere bureaucrats. Twenty years of studies to stay here and fill out forms. For anything worse than a flu, I have to send you to a specialist. The system works like this, and fighting against it is a waste of time."

  "But you volunteer in a clinic, couldn’t I come there for you?"

  "If you really want to, but I’ll tell you right away that I don’t agree. People coming there live in conditions of real hardship and poverty... they are much worse than you. I would not feel right taking time and resources away from them to devote them to less relevant cases, like yours."

  "I see," I said sheepishly.

  "Don’t feel belittled", he laughed, "on the contrary, you are more unlucky than many others."

  Then, in a more serious tone, he added: "And sure you don’t believe that if I was taking care of you I would made available to you all those beautiful prescriptions with which you and your friend Ciro do business."

  I paled for a while, but from him I felt nothing more than a mild rebuke. Lucio had been born and raised in the block, he knew how things went there. The downside was that you couldn’t hide anything from him.

  "Did you examine the papers I brought you, in the end?" I asked, just to change the subject.

  "Yes, and they are very interesting. Did you know that during one of your first... absences, you were made a long-term EEG? In practice, they monitored you all the time, from the time you were brought to the hospital until you recovered."

  'Wow. All this for me?"

  "Yeah, it seems that you were still an interesting case. Right now, they must be fed of seeing you get there rigid as a piece of wood."

  "Well, I have stopped bothering them a while ago", I sighed.

  "And that's the problem, Tano. For fear of your apparent deaths, you're giving up on life."

  At these words, an embarrassed silence fell. He was the one who started speaking again. And the subject he took on seemed so out of place that at first I thought he was kidding.

  "You know how a termite nest is built?" he asked.

  "A termite nest?"

  "What are you doing? Repeating after me? You've never seen any in some documentary?"

  "Yes, of course. It’s that I don’t understand what that has to do with it."

  "You kn
ow that, in the proper proportions, they rival in size and architectural solutions with the biggest skyscrapers?" he went on, deliberately ignoring my question.

  "Ah, yes, those are really smart animals", I admitted.

  "Yet their brain is the size of a pinhead. In your opinion, how can they design and implement such structures?"

  "I suppose they act instinctively."

  "Which is to say that we don’t know," he remarked.

  "No, we know. It's instinct."

  "Oh, yes? And what is instinct?"

  "Um... instinct is the thing..." I muttered, confused.

  "... that makes you do things that you cannot explain otherwise. A label we attach to whatever we are not able to understand", he said for me. "In the case of these social insects," he explained, "they put together some of their own organs. Ants, for example, collectively digest cellulose, regurgitating it to one another, from the stomach of one to that of the following."

  "Disgusting," I said.

  "The other day I saw you go into a fast food. After having been in there, you shouldn’t be disgusted by anything in the world. "

  "Okay, there was the offer. A burger for one euro."

  "It must have been meat of the highest quality", he said dryly. "Going back to our friends, the termites", he continued, "it seems that they manage to create an actual common brain, interacting by means of chemical signals, a bit like the individual neurons of the human brain do to create what we call intelligence. Fascinating, isn’t it?"

  "Amazing. Will you keep me here much longer?"

  "Hold on there, I'm not done. This ability is certainly not exclusive of termites. For example, what does a dog do when it sniffs you?"

  "He's going to piss me on a leg."

  "No! That is, yes, it might, but that's not the point. Actually it is inspecting you. From your scent, which also consists of chemicals, the animal is able to take an unimaginable amount of information about you, your health, your relationships, your mood, your personality. And if he likes you, then maybe a good piss ensues. That, too, is an olfactory message, if you think about it."

  "So it is better to be obnoxious."

  "And be bitten?"

  "Ok, the piss will do. Very small, though. However, if it is as you say, it’s a real superpower. Too bad we do not have it."

  "Oh, but we have it, Tano, just like animals."

  "Eh?"

  "Get that stupid look off your face, I'm not kidding. We are able to perceive this and other low-intensity communications. But this capacity is rarely used because we have a much more powerful and refined means of communication: words."

  "You mean that the mere fact of being able to speak is a greater power than the one you just described?"

  "Of course, by far. Through words you can know what a person living on the other side of the world thinks, without the need to go there and sniff them. And you can transmit exactly, in detail, concepts, ideas, technologies, and even moods, to other people, sharing knowledge and making it possible to conceive new ones. It is through words that all literary works have been created. Having such a tool, you no longer need to waste time to interpret much weaker signals, you see?"

  "Yes. It's like when a louder noise covers another."

  "Exactly. It covers it, but doesn’t delete it. For example, when you realize that someone is lying to you, it is because what he is saying does not match the other messages broadcast from his body. You perceive the contradiction and therefore you have the feeling that you can’t trust him."

  "So that's why we say that a thing «stinks», or that we «smell a rat»", I remarked.

  "Yes... yes, that's right, I hadn’t thought of that. But back to us."

  I saw him rummage in a drawer and pull out a long sheet of paper folded over and over on itself.

  "From your long-term EEG it can be seen that a few minutes before regaining consciousness, after the episodes of apparent death, your brain produced an intense electrical activity."

  "And what does that mean?"

  "It means that all the bizarre heavens of which you have spoken to me were not real. They were dreams."

  "Ah," I said in a tone of disappointment.

  "Don’t do that sad face. This is fantastic news."

  "Uh?"

  "Please, stop grunting to express yourself, you're not a caveman."

  "But I don’t understand..."

  "I'll explain. Your mind produced those visions as a result of a prolonged period of total sensory deprivation. Let's say it had nothing to inspire itself to create them. Therefore, it used for that purpose the only interesting material in its possession."

  "What material?"

  "Tano, during a sexual intercourse, an exchange of fluids takes place."

  "Actually, I thought it was... you know... one way, that's it."

  "No, it is not so," he said, sincerely amused by my naivety, "even saliva and sweat are bodily fluids. And then, usually, on the mucous membranes which come into contact, microscopic lacerations are created, with consequent mixing of the blood flow."

  "Damn. But then they should make overall condoms, like diver suits."

  "Yes, with helmets. Come on, Tano, it’s a serious matter."

  "But I can’t understand what you're getting at."

  "Listen," he said in a patient voice, "it was you, just a few seconds ago, who spoke of the ability to interpret chemical messages describing it as a superpower."

  "I was just kidding..."

  "But it’s seriously so, and you did. In your hallucinations you transformed the information you had received in the form of chemical messages into symbols that could be interpreted to accurately define the personality of the person who transmitted them to you. The equivalent of years and years of analysis condensed in a few moments. A source of invaluable information in my work."

  He paused, I’m not sure if to give me time to reflect or simply to catch his breath after so much talking.

  "Excuse me, what should I do?" I blurted out after briefly pondering, "screw your patients and then tell you what I dreamed?"

  "I wouldn’t put it in these terms, but basically... yes. Obviously I would prepare psychologically the patient for the encounter, and what would follow. I would personally keep you under observation while you are in a state of apparent death, and that in itself would be better than being at the mercy of anyone, left on a stretcher in a hospital. When you come back to your senses you would receive the needed assistance, after which I would hypnotize you to collect your testimony accurately."

  "Please don’t joke. I would never lend myself to such a thing."

  "No? You’d make yourself useful to people who suffer. But most of all to yourself."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Tano, you suffer because you cannot make sense of what fate had in store for you. It's something you will be able to overcome only by transforming what you now consider a curse into a new potential."

  "A superpower?"

  "If you want. But if you also want the coloured jumpsuit, you’ll pay for it yourself."

  Annalisa.

  The clinic where Lucio voluntarily lent assistance was situated in an area even more crumbled than the one where I lived. One of those gray areas that the public and the mass media deliberately ignore, then suddenly remember when some tragedy happens. Illiteracy, prostitution, ethnic tensions, unemployment, drug addiction and rampant petty crime in a mosaic of despair which is a shame for a country that has the arrogance to call itself "civilized".

  My friend and family physician, along with a few brave people like him, put their knowledge at the service of the people living there. No one ever gave them trouble, they went there to help, and for this they were respected.

  I arrived there on a hot summer afternoon, the same in which, just before entering in the bar, I heard that tipsy patron wish for himself the same misfortune that had ruined my life.

  Lucio welcomed me in his bare office, asked me half a dozen times if I had taken a shower, then
sent me to take another in a small adjoining bathroom, and I realized that he was more nervous than me.

  "Mrs. Bianchi has been in my care for a long time. I believe that her current neuroses are linked to events in her childhood, but I have never been able to identify them. If the experiment is successful, it will be a turning point in her therapy," he explained, as if he hadn’t already repeated it a hundred times.

  "Relax, Lucio. I'm the one who has to get friendly with your patient and then kick the bucket", I reminded him.

  "Yes. Yes, right. Here, take these, you never know."

  He handed me two little blue pills. I looked at him with an ill-concealed sense of superiority.

  "Look, I don’t need this stuff. Where's the patient?"

  "In there."

  "Ok, leave it to me."

  Annalisa was a housewife, flabby and stuffed with barbiturates. Forty-five years, so the medical records said, but she could have been half or twice as old. She was so sloppy that her age was indefinable. When I entered the room, I read in her eyes a weariness for living that for a moment took my breath away.

  "Mrs. Bianchi?"

  "Yes..."

  "I forgot something, I'll be back."

  I went back, a bit out of breath, to Lucio’s study.

  "What is it?" he said.

  "Um... do you still have those pills?"

  Anyway, I did my duty. Shortly after...

  Darkness.

  But... but where did I end up? What is this? A soap-opera...?

  As promised, when I woke up I found Lucio next to me. After checking that I had recovered, he made me stare for a long time at the funny abstract patterns projected on the wall by a cute gimmick, while he spoke softly and more and more slowly.

  "Now let’s start counting together... one hundred... ninety-nine... ninety..."

  Epilogue.

  The experiment worked. Thanks to the data collected, Lucio managed to make significant progresses with Annalisa. I saw her after some time, and I had the impression that she was feeling much better.

  Given the encouraging debut, we decided to apply the method to other cases, and most of the time fortune smiled on us. Other times it didn’t. In two cases we even ended up in court, charged of having plagiarized the patient, but we dodged it, and the thing started to become known. Finally, some glimmer about the reliability of our method opened even in academic circles.