No, I thought, it isn’t your prudery; it’s because like all the circumcised men of your race you’re obsessed by sex but try to forget it. I’d just like to see, when you put your smutty hands on that Martha of yours, if you don’t produce a long line of little Jews and don’t make her consumptive from the exertion.
Froïde meanwhile continued: «My problem, unfortunately, is another. I have finished my supply of cocaine and am plunging into melancholy. Doctors in ancient times would have said that I have an excess of black bile. I used to be able to find the compound at Merck & Gehe, but they have had to stop making it, as they can find only poor-quality raw material now. The fresh leaves can be processed only in America, and the best producer is Parke & Davis of Detroit, a more soluble variety, pure white in color and with an aromatic odor. I had a modest supply, but here in Paris I don’t know whom to ask.»
Music to the ears of one who is well informed on all the secrets of place Maubert and its neighborhood. I knew certain people to whom it was enough to mention not just cocaine, but a diamond, a stuffed lion or a carboy of vitriol, and the following day they would deliver it to you, so long as you didn’t ask where they’d found it. For me cocaine is a poison, and I thought, I don’t mind contributing to the poisoning of a Jew. So I told Doctor Froïde that within a few days I would obtain a good supply of his alkaloid. Froïde, of course, didn’t imagine my ways were anything less than irreproachable. «You know,» I told him, «we antiquarians get to meet all kinds of people.»
All of this has nothing to do with my problem, but helps to explain how, in the end, we became acquainted and spoke about all manner of things. Froïde was eloquent and witty. Perhaps I’d been mistaken—maybe he wasn’t Jewish. It was easier to talk to him than to Bourru and Burot, and our conversation turned to the experiments of those two, and from there I mentioned Du Maurier’s patient.
«Do you believe,» I asked him, «a woman that sick could be cured with Bourru and Burot’s magnets?»
«My dear friend,» replied Froïde, «in many of the cases we examine, too much importance is placed upon physical aspects, forgetting that if sickness develops, its origin is most probably psychic. And if the origin is psychic, it is the mind that has to be treated, not the body. In a traumatic neurosis, the true cause of the illness is not the lesion, which in itself is generally modest, but the original psychic trauma. Do people not faint when they experience a powerful emotion? And therefore, for those concerned with nervous illnesses, the problem is not how they lose their senses, but what emotion caused it.»
«But how can you know what this emotion was?»
«You see, my friend, when the symptoms are clearly hysterical, as in the case of Du Maurier’s patient, hypnosis can artificially reproduce those same symptoms, and it is indeed possible to go back to the initial trauma. But other patients have had an experience so unbearable that they have sought to erase it—it is as if they had hidden it in some inaccessible part of their mind, so remote that you could not reach it even under hypnosis. Then again, why under hypnosis ought we to have greater psychic capacities than when we are awake?»
«And therefore we will never know …»
«Don’t ask me for a clear and definitive answer. I’m expressing ideas not yet fully formed. Sometimes I am tempted to think we reach that deep area only when we dream. The ancients understood just how revealing dreams can be. My sense is that if a sick person could speak, and speak for a long period, for days on end, with someone who knew how to listen, perhaps by simply describing what he had dreamt, the original trauma might suddenly emerge and become clear. In English you might use the expression ‘talking cures.’ You will have noticed when talking to someone about distant events, that while describing them you remember details you had forgotten, or rather, thought you had forgotten, but which in fact your brain was storing in some secret recess.
I believe the more detailed this reconstruction is, the more likely it is for an episode to reemerge. This, I would say, includes even an insignificant fact, a subtle detail that has had such an unbearably disturbing effect as to provoke a…how do you say, an Abtrennung, a Beseitigung… I cannot find the right word. In English I would say removal. What do you say in French when an organ is cut out…une ablation? Yes, perhaps the correct term in German would be Entfernung.»
Here is the Jew emerging, I thought. At that time I was, I think, already interested in the various Jewish plots and that race’s ambitions for their sons to become doctors and pharmacists in order to control Christian bodies as well as minds. If I were ill, would you want me to hand myself over to you, telling you things even I don’t know about myself, so that you could become master of my soul? Worse than the Jesuit father confessor, because at least, talking to him, I would be protected by a grille and wouldn’t tell him what I really thought but rather the things that everyone does, so everything is described in the same almost technical terms—I have stolen, I have fornicated, I have not honored my father and mother. Your very language betrays you. You talk of removal as if you wish to circumcise my brain…
Meanwhile, Froïde had begun to laugh and ordered yet another beer.
«But do not regard my pronouncements as fact. They are the imaginings of a dreamer. When I return to Austria I will marry, and then, to look after my family, I’ll have to set up in medical practice. And I’ll use hypnosis wisely, as Charcot has taught me, and will not go prying into my patients’ dreams. I’m no oracle. I wonder whether Du Maurier’s patient might not benefit from taking a little cocaine.»
That was how the conversation ended. At the time it left little impression upon me, but now it all comes back to mind, perhaps because I’m in the situation, not of someone like Diana, but of an almost normal person who has lost part of his memory. Apart from the fact that I have no idea where Froïde has ended up, nothing in the world would persuade me to retell my life story even to a good Christian, let alone to a Jew. With the work I do (whatever it is) I have to talk about other people’s business, for payment, but must refrain at all costs from talking about my own. But perhaps I can retell my own story to myself.
I remember now how Bourru (or Burot) told me that holy men used to hypnotize themselves by staring at their navel.
That is why I have decided, with some reluctance, to keep this diary, writing down my past as I gradually bring it back to mind, including the most insignificant details, until (what did Froïde say?) the traumatizing element reemerges. But I will do it by myself. And I want to recover by myself, not end up in the hands of doctors who treat lunatics.
Before beginning (though, in reality, I did so yesterday), I would have enjoyed a visit to Chez Philippe in rue Montorgueil to put myself in the appropriate frame of mind for this form of self-hypnosis. I would have sat down quietly, taken my time in studying the menu—the one served from six P.M. to midnight—and ordered potage à la Crécy, turbot with caper sauce, fillet of beef and langue de veau au jus, finishing with a maraschino sorbet and petits fours, washed down with two bottles of vintage Burgundy.
By then, midnight would have passed and I would have had a look at the night menu. I would have allowed myself a turtle soup (a delicious one comes to mind, made by Dumas—so did I know Dumas?), salmon with spring onions and artichokes with Javanese pepper, with a rum sorbet and English spiced cakes to follow. Further into the night I would have treated myself to some delicacy from the morning menu, perhaps the soupe aux oignons, which the porters at Les Halles would also be tucking into at that moment, happy to demean myself with their company. Then, to prepare myself for a busy morning, a very strong coffee and a pousse-café of cognac and kirsch.
To tell the truth, I would have felt a little heavy, but my mind would have been rested.
Alas, I could not permit myself such sweet license. You have no memory, I told myself. If you were to meet someone at the restaurant who recognizes you, you may not recognize him. What would you do?
I also wondered what I would do if someone were to come and see me at the shop. It went well with the fellow who came about the Bonnefoy will, and the old woman selling hosts, but it could have gone worse. So I’ve put a notice outside saying The Owner Will Be Away for a Month, without any indication as to when the month starts or ends. And now I realize something else. I’ll have to shut myself in here,
