She sits down on the comfortable bench. She’s sick of setting out each day and studying the map of the city to find the roads she needs to follow. After taking in the four walls of the room she looks away, lowers her head, looks down. She studies her swollen feet, her shoes, and thinks about all the streets she’s walked in the past few days, in a vast city, alone, disoriented all the while. She’s not moved by the beauty of this room. She takes advantage of it to restore her energy.
She closes her eyes and stretches out on the bench without paying any attention to me. She lies down on her back, her eyes closed. That’s how she manages to fully inhabit and possess this room, crossing a certain threshold I’ve always respected.
On the Couch
I saw a therapist for about a year. She lived in a far-flung neighborhood I didn’t know well. The building was pink, built long ago. There was a sarcophagus in the courtyard, lots of plants, a few amphoras. The elevator was made of wood and glass, with slender double doors that led to a tiny compartment. The apartment was also cozy, always partly shaded, the shutters partly closed. The couch for patients, plum-colored, was right there where you entered. The room was so small that it felt like a beautifully furnished closet, but the ceiling was high and books covered the walls from top to bottom. Maybe I chose that therapist simply because I loved arriving in that courtyard, riding up in that elevator, entering that room.
I would lie back on the couch and she sat in an armchair behind me, looking at me. Or maybe she looked somewhere else. She was an attractive woman with dark eyes and a space between her front teeth. Behind a set of doors was the life she led with the rest of her family: the pantry full of food, dirty dishes to wash, the laundry drying on a rack. All I knew was the space dedicated to curing her patients: an individual sanatorium that hosted one anguished soul at a time.
She always started by saying the same thing: Please begin. As if each session were the first and only time we met. Every session was like the start of a novel abandoned after the first chapter.
What did I talk to her about? Dreams, nightmares, nonsense. Sometimes I’d recount my mother’s fitful rages, the quarrels I’ve never forgotten, terrifying scenes my mother no longer has any memory of. I’d talk about all the ways my mother found fault with me. How severely she’d berate me. The oppressive mother who weighs nothing today, the invasive mother who, in her old age, struggles to take a step. The father who died suddenly when I was fifteen.
“I’ve been having nightmares,” I mentioned one day.
“About what?”
“A square container of glass, enormous, full of my blood.”
“How did you know it was your blood?”
“I can’t remember. But I knew it was mine.”
“Anything else?”
“A few days ago I had a dream about my bed. It was full of black bugs, they were crawling all over the sheets.”
“Were you sleeping among them?”
“Yes, but when I realized it I got out of bed, I was horrified. Then when I looked at them closely I saw that they were sweet-looking, with kind eyes that seemed almost human, and that reassured me.”
“So the dream about the blood in the glass container was more upsetting?”
“I’d say so, yes.”
At every session she would ask me to tell her something positive. Unfortunately my childhood harbors few happy memories. Instead I would tell her about the balcony off my apartment when the sun is shining and I’m having breakfast. And I would tell her how much I like to sit outside, pick up a warm pen in my hand, and write down a sentence or two.
On the Balcony
I, too, act as a therapist for a friend of mine. She’s in her forties like me but she’s rushing through life, she’s always harried. She has everything I don’t: a husband, kids, constant plans, a country house. In other words, the successful life my parents had hoped I’d lead one day. My friend works hard, she’s got an important job that sends her around the world. This means she’s off to the airport at least once a month, leaving her family behind. Her suitcase is always packed and ready, with pills to calm her down, given that she hates flying. She’s racked with guilt but she doesn’t let up, she’s always on the move.
She comes over now and then. Something tells me my spartan place is a refuge for her. I make her a cup of tea. “This is the only place where I can relax,” she says. She likes the silence, and not seeing objects scattered everywhere. She likes my glass coffee table and the piles of books arranged on it, a few stones I’ve picked up along the seashore.
She says: “In my house I can never just sit and be. There’s always something that needs to be done, I never lean back on the sofa and check out for a minute. The coffee table is always a mess, it depresses me to look at it. In that house I’m only happy when I’m sleeping. But, God, we spent a fortune fixing it up. I think in the end all I need is a little corner to myself. I’d love a tiny apartment like yours.”
Before she was married she used to live like I do. She describes the place: the small living room, the bedroom that looked over the courtyard, the morning light that flickered on the carpet. She didn’t mind the noisy street, the old pipes and heating. One day she confessed that, in spite of her fear of planes, she loves the nook she occupies in flight, the seat that becomes her bed, the lamp behind her shoulder, everything she needs at arm’s reach.
Today she’s distraught and she smokes a cigarette. We’re sitting on the balcony, where there’s space for two metal chairs. She tells me that she’s just gotten back from a long trip overseas, and discovered a notebook belonging to her younger daughter. It contains a story about a girl who misses her mother, who feels abandoned. It begins: “There was a little girl who always felt lonely, who cried every night before going to bed because her mother was almost never there to wish her good night.”
She shows me the notebook. The story is handwritten, illustrated with neatly drawn pictures. The mother, with short dark hair, resembles my friend. She wears a scarf around her neck, lipstick, and holds a suitcase in her hand. There’s a taxi in the background waiting to take her away.
“Can you keep this for me?” she asks.
“Why?”
“Because it was written for me, it’s mine, I should keep it and I don’t want to lose it. But my house is a mess and I can never find anything there, I can’t even get my own bearings, and also…”
“Also?”
“I don’t want my husband to come across it.”
I set aside the notebook. “I’ll look after it,” I say.
“Will you stay put for a while?” I ask.