The children no longer came into her bedroom, not since she had slapped one of them for no reason, and then knelt down, kissed his feet, begging forgiveness, tearing her nightgown into shreds in order to show her despair and repentance.
After another week, in which she spat out the food offered to her, drifted in and out of reality several times, spent whole nights awake and whole days asleep, two men came into her room without knocking. One of them held her down while the other gave her an injection, and she woke up in Villete.
“Depression,” she heard the doctor say to her husband. “Sometimes it’s provoked by the most banal things, for example, the lack of a chemical substance, serotonin, in the organism.”
From the ceiling in the ward, Zedka watched the nurse approaching, syringe in hand. The girl was still standing there, trying to talk to her body, terrified by her vacant gaze. For some moments Zedka considered the possibility of telling her about everything that was happening, but then she changed her mind; people never learn anything by being told; they have to find out for themselves.
The nurse placed the needle in Zedka’s arm and injected her with glucose. As if grabbed by an enormous arm, her spirit left the ceiling, sped through a dark tunnel and returned to her body.
“Hello, Veronika.”
The girl looked frightened.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Fortunately, I’ve managed to survive this dangerous treatment, but it won’t be repeated.”
“How do you know? Here no one respects the patient’s wishes.”
Zedka knew because, during her astral journey, she had gone to Dr. Igor’s office.
“I can’t explain why, I just know. Do you remember the first question I ever asked you?”
“Yes, you asked me if I knew what being crazy meant.”
“Exactly. This time I’m not going to tell you a story. I’ll just say that insanity is the inability to communicate your ideas. It’s as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that’s going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don’t understand the language they speak there.”
“We’ve all felt that”
“And all of us, one way or another, are insane.”
Outside the barred window, the sky was thick with stars, and the moon, in its first quarter, was rising behind the mountains. Poets loved the full moon; they wrote thousands of poems about it, but it was the new moon that Veronika loved best because there was still room for it to grow, to expand, to fill the whole of its surface with light before its inevitable decline.
That night she felt like going over to the piano in the living room, and celebrating that night with a lovely sonata she had learned at school. Looking up at the sky, she had an indescribable sense of well-being, as if the infinite nature of the universe had revealed her own eternity to her. She was separated, however, from her desire by a steel door and a woman who was always, endlessly reading a book. Besides, no one played the piano at that hour of night; she would wake up the whole neighborhood.
Veronika laughed. The “neighborhood” were the wards full of crazy people, and those crazy people were, in turn, full of drugs to make them sleep.
Her sense of well-being continued, though. She got up and went over to Zedka’s bed, but she was sound asleep too, perhaps recovering from the horrible experience she had been through.
“Go back to bed,” said the nurse. “Good girls should be dreaming of angels or lovers.”
“Don’t treat me like a child I’m not some tame madwoman who’s afraid of everything; I’m raving, hysterical, I don’t even respect my own life, or the lives of others. Anyway, today I feel more vigilant. I’ve looked at the moon, and I need to talk to someone.”
The nurse looked at her, surprised by her reaction.
“Are you afraid of me?” asked Veronika. “In a couple of days’ time I’ll be dead; what have I got to lose?”
“Why don’t you go for a walk, dear, and let me finish my book?”
“Because this is a prison, and there’s a prison warden pretending to read a book, just to make others think she’s an intelligent woman. The fact is, though, that she’s watching every movement in the ward, and she guards the keys to the door as if they were a treasure. It’s all in the regulations, and so she must obey them. That way she can pretend to have an authority she doesn’t have in her everyday life, with her husband and children.”
Veronika was trembling without quite knowing why.
“Keys?” said the nurse. “The door is always open. You don’t think I’d stay locked up in here with a load of mental patients, do you?”
What does she mean the doors open? A few days ago I wanted to get out of here, and this woman even went with me to the toilet. What is she talking about?
“Don’t take me too seriously,” said the nurse. “The fact is we don’t need a lot of security here, because of the sedatives we dole out. You’re shivering, are you cold?”
“I don’t know. I think it must have something to do with my heart.”
“If you like, you can go for a walk.”
“What I’d really like is to play the piano.”
“The living room is quite separate, so your piano playing won’t disturb anyone. Do what you like.”
Veronika’s trembling changed into low, timid, suppressed sobs. She knelt down, laid her head on the woman’s lap, and cried and cried.
The nurse put down the book and stroked Veronika’s hair, allowing that wave of sadness and tears its natural expression. There they sat for almost half an hour, one crying, the other consoling, though neither knew why or what.
The sobbing finally ceased. The nurse helped her up, took her by the arm, and led her to the door.
“I’ve got a daughter your age. When you were first admitted, full of drips and tubes, I kept wondering why a pretty young girl, with her whole life ahead of her, should want to kill herself. Then all kinds of rumors started flying around: about the letter that you left behind, which I never believed could be the real motive, and how you didn’t have long to live because of some incurable heart problem. I couldn’t get the image of my own daughter out of my head: What if she decided to do something like that? Why do certain people try to go against the natural order of things, which is to fight for survival whatever happens?”
“That’s why I was crying,” said Veronika. “When I took the pills, I wanted to kill someone I hated.