UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY (5 page)

Otherwise Dalla Piccola and I are the same person. Since I found the cassock in my bedroom, after the day of the Mass (the 21st) I would have been able to return to impasse Maubert dressed as Dalla Piccola (if I'd had to go to a Mass, it is more credible that I'd have gone as an abbé), before taking off the cassock and wig, then later going to sleep in the abbé's apartment (and forgetting that I had left the cassock at Simonini's). The morning after, Tuesday, the 22nd of March, waking up as Dalla Piccola, not only would I have found myself with no memory, but I wouldn't have been able to find the cassock at the foot of the bed. As Dalla Piccola, with no memory, I would have found a spare cassock in the corridor and would have had as much time as I needed to escape the same day to Auteuil, only to change my mind by the end of the day, steel myself and return to Paris later that evening, to the apartment at impasse Maubert, hanging the cassock on the hook in the bedroom, and waking up with no memory once again, but as Simonini, on the Wednesday, believing it was still Tuesday. Therefore, I reasoned, Dalla Piccola loses his memory on the 22nd of March and remains amnesiac the whole day, finding himself on the 23rd as an amnesiac Simonini. Nothing exceptional after what I had learned from — what's his name?—that doctor at the clinic in Vincennes.

Except for one small problem. I reread my notes. If that was how things had happened, Simonini would have found in his bedroom, on the morning of the 23rd, not one cassock but two — the one he had left on the night of the 21st and the other he had left on the night of the 22nd. Yet there was only one.

But no, what a fool I am. Dalla Piccola had returned from Auteuil to rue Maître-Albert on the evening of the 22nd, put down his cassock, then gone to the apartment in impasse Maubert and slept there, waking the following morning (the 23rd) as Simonini, to find only one cassock on the rack. It is true that, if events had taken that course, when I entered Dalla Piccola's apartment on the morning of the 23rd, I should have found the cassock that he'd left there on the evening of the 22nd, but he could have hung it back up in the corridor where he had found it. All I had to do was check.

I went along the corridor, with lighted lamp, feeling a certain trepidation. If Dalla Piccola and I were not the same person, I told myself, I might have seen him appear at the other end of that passageway, he too perhaps carrying a lamp in front of him . . . Fortunately that didn't happen. And I found the cassock hanging at the far end of the corridor.

And yet, and yet . . . if Dalla Piccola had returned from Auteuil and, on leaving the cassock, walked the whole length of the corridor to my apartment and happily gone to sleep in my bed, it was because at that point he knew who I was, and knew that he could sleep here just as well as in his own place, seeing that we were the same person. Dalla Piccola had therefore gone to bed knowing he was Simonini, whereas, the morning after, Simonini had woken not knowing he was Dalla Piccola. In other words, Dalla Piccola first loses his memory, then regains it, then goes to sleep and passes his loss of memory on to Simonini.

Loss of memory . . . This phrase, meaning nonrecollection, opens a gap in the mist of time that I had quite forgotten. I remember talking about people with memory loss at Chez Magny, more than ten years ago, with Bourru and Burot, with Du Maurier and with the Austrian doctor.

3

CHEZ MAGNY

25th March 1897, at dawn

Chez Magny . . . As far as I can recall, it used to cost no more than ten francs a head at that restaurant in rue Contrescarpe-Dauphine, and the quality matched the price. I'm a lover of good food, I know, but you can't eat at Foyot every day. In years gone by, many used to go to Magny to catch a glimpse of famous writers like Gautier or Flaubert or, earlier still, that consumptive Polish pianist kept by a degenerate woman who went about in trousers. I looked in there one evening and left right away. Artists are insufferable, even from afar, always looking around to see whether we have recognized them.

Then the "great men" stopped going to Magny, and moved on to Brébant-Vachette, in boulevard Poissonnière, where you ate better and paid more, but evidently
carmina dant panem — p
oetry does give you bread. And once Magny had been purged, so to speak, I started going occasionally, starting in the early '80s.

I saw men of science there, including eminent chemists such as Berthelot and many doctors from the Salpêtrière. The hospital isn't exactly close by, but perhaps the clinicians find pleasure in taking a short walk in the Latin Quarter rather than eating at the filthy
gargotes
where the patients' families go. Since medical discussions invariably relate to the infirmities of others, and since at Magny, to compete with the noise, everyone talks loudly, a trained ear can usually pick up something interesting. Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.

While the writers and artists had always sat together at long tables, the men of science dined alone, as I did. But after sitting at neighboring tables on several occasions, I became familiar with a few medical men. My first acquaintance was Doctor Du Maurier, a man so loathsome that I wondered how a psychiatrist (which he was) could inspire the trust of his patients with such an unpleasant face. It was the pale, envious face of one who thinks he is destined always to remain in second place. He was, in fact, the director of a small clinic for nervous illnesses at Vincennes, but knew full well that his institute would never enjoy the fame and prosperity of the clinic run by the more renowned Doctor Blanche — though Du Maurier used to mutter sarcastically that one of Blanche's patients thirty years before had been a certain Nerval (according to him, a poet of some merit) who had been driven to suicide after being treated at his famous clinic.

Another two table companions with whom I became familiar were Doctors Bourru and Burot, unusual fellows who looked like twin brothers, both dressed in black with almost the same cut of coat, the same long black mustaches and clean-shaven chins, with collars slightly grubby, inevitably, as they were in Paris as travelers, since they practiced at the École de Médecine at Rochefort and came to the capital for only a few days each month to follow Charcot's experiments.

"What, no leeks today?" Bourru asked one day, irritated. And Burot, scandalized: "No leeks?"

While the waiter apologized, I interposed from the next table: "But they have excellent wild salsify. I prefer it to leeks." Then, with a smile, I softly sang: "
Tous les légumes, / au clair de lune, / étaient en train de s'amuser / et les passants les regardaient. / Les cornichons / dansaient en rond, / les salsifis / dansaient sans bruit . . .
"

Persuaded, the two table companions chose
salsifis
. And from there began a cordial acquaintance, on two days each month.

"You see, Monsieur Simonini," Bourru explained, "Doctor Charcot is studying hysteria, a form of neurosis that manifests itself in various psychomotor, sensory and vegetative symptoms. In the past it was regarded as an exclusively female phenomenon caused by disturbances in uterine function, but Charcot has formed the view that hysterical manifestations are to be found equally in both sexes, and may include paralysis, epilepsy, blindness or deafness, and difficulties in breathing, speaking or swallowing."

"My colleague," Burot interrupted, "has not yet mentioned that Charcot claims to have developed a treatment that alleviates the symptoms."

"I was just about to get there," responded Bourru, exasperated. "Charcot has chosen the path of hypnotism, which until recently was an occupation for charlatans like Mesmer. Under hypnosis, patients ought to be able to recall traumatic episodes, which are the origin of the hysteria, and be cured through awareness of them."

"And are they cured?"

"That is the point, Monsieur Simonini," said Bourru. "For us, what goes on at the Salpêtrière often feels more like the theater than clinical psychiatry. Let us be clear: we wouldn't want to dispute the infallible diagnostic abilities of the master . . ."

"Not to question them at all," confirmed Burot. "It's the technique of hypnotism itself that . . ."

Bourru and Burot told me about the various systems for hypnotizing, from the quackish methods of a certain Abbé Faria (my ears pricked up at that Dumasian name, though it is well known that Dumas plundered real stories) to the scientific approach of Doctor Braid, a true pioneer.

"The best magnetizers," said Burot, "now follow procedures that are much simpler."

"And more effective," added Bourru. "A medallion or a key is waved before the patient, who is told to watch it closely. Within one to three minutes the subject's pupils develop an oscillatory movement, the pulse slows down, the eyes close, the face relaxes, and drowsiness may last for up to twenty minutes."

"It has to be said," Burot observed, "that much depends on the subject, since magnetization does not depend upon the transmission of mysterious fluids, as that buffoon Mesmer suggested, but upon phenomena of autosuggestion. Indian gurus obtain the same result by focusing on the point of their nose, the monks of Mount Athos by staring at their navel.

 

"In the past it was regarded as an exclusively female phenomenon caused by disturbances in uterine function."

"We do not much believe in these forms of autosuggestion," Burot added, "though we ourselves are only putting into practice ideas developed by Charcot himself, before he began to place so much trust in hypnotism. We are dealing with cases of personality variation, in other words, with patients who think they are one person one day and someone else another, and the two personalities know nothing of each other. Last year a certain Louis came to our hospital."

"An interesting case," said Bourru. "He complained of paralysis, anesthesia, contractions, muscular spasms, hyperesthesia, skin irritation, hemorrhaging, coughing, vomiting, epileptic fits, catatonia, sleepwalking, Saint Vitus' dance, speech impediments . . ."

"Sometimes he thought he was a dog," said Burot, "or a steam locomotive. And then he had persecutory delusions, restricted vision, gustatory, olfactory and visual hallucinations, pseudo-tubercular pulmonary congestion, headache, stomachache, constipation, anorexia, bulimia, lethargy, kleptomania . . ."

"In short," Bourru said, "a normal picture. But instead of resorting to hypnosis, we applied a steel bar to the patient's right arm, and there, as if by magic, he appeared before us like a new man. Paralysis and insensitivity had disappeared from the right side and had moved to the left."

"In front of us was another person," continued Burot, "who remembered nothing of what had happened a moment earlier. Louis, in one of his states, was teetotal; in the other he had a tendency to drunkenness."

"Note," said Bourru, "that the magnetic force of a substance acts even from a distance. For example, a small bottle containing an alcoholic substance is placed under the subject's chair without his knowledge. In this state of somnambulism the subject will display all the symptoms of drunkenness."

"You understand that our practices respect the mental integrity of the patient," concluded Burot. "Hypnotism makes the subject lose consciousness, whereas with magnetism there is no violent impact upon an organ but a progressive charging of the nervous plexus."

From that conversation I formed the view that Bourru and Burot were two imbeciles who tormented poor lunatics with injurious substances, and I felt confirmed in my opinion when I saw Doctor Du Maurier, who was following the conversation from a nearby table, shaking his head several times.

"My dear friend," he said to me two days later, "Charcot and our two from Rochefort, instead of analyzing the past history of their patients and asking themselves what it means to have two states of consciousness, spend their time worrying about whether it's better to work on them with hypnosis or with metal bars. The problem is that in many patients the passage from one personality to another occurs spontaneously, without our being able to predict how and when. We might talk of self-hypnosis. In my view Charcot and his disciples have not given sufficient consideration to the experiences of Doctor Azam and the Félida case. We know very little about these phenomena. Memory disturbance may be caused by a reduction in blood flow to a still unknown part of the brain, and the momentary constriction of the vessels could be provoked by a state of hysteria. But where in the brain is the lack of blood flow that causes memory loss?"

"Where?"

"That is the point. You know that our brain has two hemispheres. There may be people who think sometimes with a complete hemisphere and sometimes with one that is incomplete, in which the memory faculty is missing. In my clinic I have found a very similar case to that of Félida. A young woman a little over twenty called Diana."

Du Maurier stopped for a moment, as if anxious about revealing a confidential matter.