Authors: Rodrigo Souza Leao
The Fearsome Madman started to eat everything in sight. He bit off the tip of another lunatic’s finger. The nurses reprimanded him. All the nurses were fat. The ones who weren’t fat were strong.
I would always give a cigarette to the lunatic who spent lunchtimes banging his head against the wall. Imagine if that freak were a footballer. His headers would be unstoppable. After all that banging his head against walls, he’d slam in headers from anywhere. Maybe he’d get called up to play for Brazil.
He takes a cigarette. Smokes the whole cigarette. Let’s see if he stops banging his head against the
wall.
I was on so many meds at this point, I’d developed the elastic, bovine
drool that writer talks about
3
.
After lunch I counted the stars in the sky and I didn’t see any. After lunch I crapped out that awful food in the toilet. There wasn’t a single patient who offered a prayer of thanks for that food. Just because a guy’s nuts, does he have to eat this crap? A sliver of guava jelly
–
that was the only good thing. It was the kind of guava jelly that sticks in your teeth. The lunatics ate it. My mum, every time she came to visit me, made me take a shower. I took it where the others did. It was a clean place, that had to be cleaned all the time. Every other minute a lunatic would come in and take a dump on the floor and leave all his shit there. Imagine if one of the lunatics were a pigeon. He’d go around flying and crapping. There wouldn’t be a single hat, cap, car windshield or bald spot without shit encrusted on it. But lunatics don’t fly, they stay still while they shit. Sometimes they get it all over themselves.
My mum brought me a tuna sandwich and I devoured it like it was fillet steak. I was homesick.
Mum, when will I get out of here? Will I leave here worse off than when I
came?
If you go about threatening people, we’ll be here much longer. Why are you always in that gloomy corner?
One day my mum would come and the next my dad would come. It seemed like their consciences were weighing on them for having me committed.
I broke the china cabinet.
I broke all the glasses.
But I got all the bad spirits out of the house.
Here comes the gang to give me my injections. They stretch my lard and give me Benzetacil.
Benzeta.
Benzeta.
I want a Benzetacil injection. Penicillin on account of a wound I have on my leg. I need to lose 100 pounds. A nurse said I was actually kind of cute, but that I needed to lose a few pounds. I could be the Casas da Banha mascot
–
a lard-arse for the lard supermarket
–
and sing their jingle.
I’ll dance
the cha-cha-cha.
Casas da Banha
4
.
I was a pig. A swine. Filthy. I had no idea what was or wasn’t degrading. But one day, for sure, I was going to create something biodegradable; I’d get rid of my impurities and be clean. Clean on the outside. Inside I’d always have those marks that animals leave, bite marks. With bruises on my soul. I’d always be looking for myself and finding pieces here and there. The Fearsome Madman passed by in the background. He was already out of his cubicle.
When are they going to get me out of here, nurse?
The first taste of freedom is leaving the cubicle. The second is walking around the asylum. Freedom itself only happens outside the asylum. But real freedom doesn’t exist. Heading for freedom, I always run smack into someone. If there were freedom, the world would be one big madhouse with everyone in it. I could walk out and about with Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Go on holiday to Angra dos
Reis.
Rimbaud killed a jaguar that was circling around my body the other day, at night. Another day, during the day, we ate the asylum slop together. Me and Rimbaud. He was admitted for drugs. He limps a little. Must be in his forties. I asked why he wrote so little. He told me he hated writing. What I like is to feel the wind in my hair. There are breezes that are dangerous for a frail guy like Rimbaud, but he’s a clever guy, knows how to sidestep misfortunes. Soon he’ll be released.
Back to the cubicle and the injections. They don’t trust me any more. They only give me medicines by injection. They think I’m going to spit the medicine out or hide it somewhere. Why do these doctors hate me so much? Five come to hold me down. I struggle like a whale. But then I calm down. Then I’m calm. And I almost don’t feel it, them stretching my lard so much. I almost don’t feel the pain of the injections.
A beautiful rainbow opened up that only I could see, through a far-off window, really far off. That day I cried because I was alone. I cried because I didn’t have a job. I cried because I didn’t have a wife. I cried because I didn’t have kids. I cried because I didn’t have a family. I cried because I was thirty-seven years old and living like a teenager.
Why are you crying, fatso? I cry for the fatsos of the world, for those who want to eat an apple pie, a chocolate truffle. But who don’t have the money to buy all the treats in the world. Me, I cry because I want to eat you. Oh, you bastard! Eat you roasted. I’d do like the cannibals and eat people. But I’d rather be less crazy and stick to sugar. Chocolate éclairs, napoleons, chocolate-chip ice cream, coconut sweets, peanut brittle. I’d get so fat, I’d blow up like Mr Creosote.
The only time I left the cubicle was at mealtimes. But there was a nurse who didn’t take his eyes off us for a second. What if I worked at the asylum? It must be really hard dealing with that clientele, with all kinds of people. With posh guys from Rio’s Zona Sul and with street sweepers. With old halfwits and senile Attorney Generals. The insane must be the easiest ones to care for. Every time, I stopped believing in God. A place like the asylum was a sign that God didn’t exist. Or that he existed, and didn’t care about who was inside that little
hell.
I was still a kid and was at the club having fun in the pool when I saw a small child, smaller than me, almost a newborn, drowning. The scene got to me, and it took me a while to think of rescuing the child. I just stood there. Like an idiot. Another kid came along. He was faster, he grabbed the child who was drowning and pulled him out of the pool. They threw a party for the hero. A party that should have been for me. I stayed in the corner. I realised that day that some people are born to be heroes, others are born to be average. I was condemned to be average. I’d never be a superman.
I’d go back to the cubicle. The only good things were the guava jelly and the nurse’s pert little bum. Sometimes I go to bed and can’t stop thinking about the night nurse. I’d come just putting my body on hers. Just being able to feel her flesh on mine. The first time I had sex was with a boar. They held the animal by its hooves and said
stick it in
. I stuck it fifteen centimetres inside the animal and then they let him go. I came just because the boar jumped up and down. Its arsehole was prickly. It hurt my penis. My penis hurt so much! After a long time the animal tired out. I came six times in a row. I lit a joint, he retreated to the other corner, and I stood there, high as a kite. I did a lot of drugs in my teens. Once, when I drank some mushroom tea, I ended up by our water tanks, having a philosophical chat with myself. The worst of it was that I found answers. I didn’t even know there was a higher me. I ventured a few questions about the future and my I told me everything. Except that after the mushroom tea wore off I forgot everything I’d
said.
An armed cop came
in.
I heard the shots. I paced back and forth. I was flooded with adrenaline at daybreak. The day broke with those shots. Could someone be
hurt?
Yesterday, there were shots fired in here, Mum. Tell me what happened. Tell me. You know I’m curious.
If that ever happened, I’d have you taken out of here straight away, son. You’re here to get better. To stop destroying Mum’s house. That’s
all.
Actually, they had killed a guy in there. A police officer knifed him. The Fearsome Madman was involved.
Every day before bed I prayed the Hail Mary. Every day I asked God to get me out of there as fast as possible
–
and that as fast as possible would be the next day. Later, I didn’t believe in God or the Hail Mary, but I prayed. Doesn’t hurt to pray. Doesn’t cost anything to ask. Some Christian, one Sunday, appeared right near my cell and left a little leaflet. I looked at it and read it when the doses weren’t high and they let me read, then I ripped up the paper. My God! Fundamentalists are taking over the world. They’re even coming here to recruit the utterly fucked. Religion nowadays just fucks with people. I think they knew there were a lot of alcoholics in here. Religion isn’t just the opium of the people. But it’s what keeps the people happy. It’s a sad thing when a nation needs religion to lean on. It’s worse than a lunatic who’s been cured, but who will always need the support of another person to be happy. Better to be an incurable lunatic.
Fearsome Madman ate his food with his hands. They say that he killed people and everything. I know that on visiting days no one ever came to see Fearsome.
The pigeons flew up into the sky, ready to crap on someone’s head or a car windscreen. I remember one time when a mental patient took some ant poison to give to the pigeons. The result was a trail of pigeons on the ground. Dead. All of
them.
There was a lunatic there who was a man but who dressed like a woman. He liked banging his head against the wall and was always shaking. There was another who reminded me of my grandmother on my mum’s side, always really elegant. Another who had a really strange habit of filling one cup full of coffee and another with milk, and drinking each one without mixing them. That wasn’t something a crazy person does. Once I got close to her and she was talking about Heraclitus and Parmenides with a Spanish accent. She was Chilean. I made up a backstory for her in my mind: that she had fought for Allende and lost, like all Chileans. She was politically persecuted. Abused by the government. She was tortured and wound up in a mental asylum in Brazil. She was a sociology professor. Surely she had children who didn’t know her whereabouts and who moved around from place to place looking for their mother. Governments do so many things to destroy the lives of those who are a nuisance to them. Being a nuisance seems to be a condition of being a good civil servant. To see the dirty tricks and not do anything, see people losing strength, people with no money losing money, paying high wages to bureaucrats
…
All of a sudden I heard screams. Desperation. Some patients were hurling halfwits around. They grabbed the halfwits and hurled them up in the air and into a ditch, too. Less-crazy lunatics were leading the event. Yes, that was an event. A kind of ritual.
I didn’t stop being paranoid. My chip was still implanted inside me. I’d swallowed a cricket when I was fifteen. And when I was six, I was visited by aliens who were going to come back to get me at my house when I was eighteen. Ten years had already passed and the extraterrestrials hadn’t come to get me. Fronsky hadn’t come to get me. The chip is for the CIA and the KGB to control me. I’m important, because I can fart without smelling my own odour. I developed a filtering technique. All joking aside, I always felt like I was being followed. I’m always glancing over my shoulder when I walk along the street, and every once in a while I break into a full-on sprint. Once my psychiatrist took the bus with me, just to prove that there was no problem with riding the bus in Rio, in the Zona Sul. That idea went down with a ton of money, plus her watch. The bus was robbed.
They grabbed a patient and hurled her up in the air. The lunatics were hurling around anyone who appeared in front of them. They threw them into a ditch. The person could have got hurt, but the other loonies laughed and wanted more. They queued up to be hurled into the ditch.
Night came and along with it came the worst thing of all: the soundtrack. Our asylum was next to a
favela
. Rio funk played all night long and all day too. Go Lacraia, go Lacraia, go Lacraia! Go Serginho, go Serginho. Sleeping with that rubbish playing … blaring!
I thought there was a really strange door in here somewhere, which people never came back out of. They would walk through that door and disappear. I kept an eye out. Two days ago the Chilean woman entered and disappeared.
I’m going to Paracambi. If you don’t
eat, you’ll go to Caju
5
.
I couldn’t stand being in the cubicle any more. My joints were killing me. No lunatic deserves this treatment. I know that in my case, it was punishment for wrecking the whole house. It worked like a child’s punishment.
Once I had to write out ‘I like the maths teacher’ 200 times, hating the maths teacher. Now copy and paste on the computer has done away with that punishment.
When the sun came out, it dripped on each employee one by one. The asylum was full. It was overcrowded. It was Sunday, visiting day. There were set hours for daily visits and a set visiting day for everyone, which was Sunday. I still had my chip, which sometimes bothered me physically. I thought about to what extent my chip had derived from the cricket
–
the one from before. I had moments of lucidity. They were few, but I had them. Sometimes the drugs they used work. But there are people who don’t get better, even with the medicine. What good is hospitalisation, then? To gather together human debris.
When the asylum was full, it was time to be quiet. You could get tied to the bed for any little thing. Stuck inside the cubicle and tied up
–
that was the worst. A lot of alcoholics were constantly being tied up to deal with withdrawal syndrome. Where the clinics really go wrong is in mixing up the types of patients.
I had a craving for my granny’s cake. But I didn’t have a granny any more, let alone any of her cake. What I did have was a piece of cornmeal fudge, which was utterly tasteless. But which everybody ate in wide-eyed wonder. The asylum food was the kind of food that gets made for two hundred people at a time. Enter the Matrix. It had no seasoning. It was really bad. But it’s not right to complain, when there are so many people going hungry and when there were people in the asylum who thought that it was the eighth wonder of the world.