Daria by Irene Marques

Author:Irene Marques
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inanna Publications
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

TRUTH OR DARE. As time passed inside Tarrafal, and as each day did not bring to Arsénio what he was looking for, his methods became graver, more inhumane—his punishments revealing the wickedness of the human spirit, the suffering that it must have had to endure to come to such extreme of evil execution. The compound doctor visited the chief’s chamber frequently, often only to use his stethoscope to see if he could detect a heartbeat in the victim, who was invariably lying immobile on the floor after enduring Arsénio’s physical punishment or severe psychological coercion. Or he would come to stop a bleeding vein, to attempt to save an eye, or to give a dose of Haldol to someone who could no longer withstand the mind games and had finally fallen into a dark well, howling unstoppably to the moon or to the scalding sun or ravaging his own body like a truly mad person. The doctor was a nice man from Lisbon from a wealthy upper-class family, a man used to the nice advantages that status can bring. He later became an acclaimed writer, unveiling in his sombre, existential, and psychotic pages some of the most atrocious miseries of the human soul, his books acting as mirrors of what we can become when possessed by the unmeasured corruption that power brings, or when abused by that power. They revealed that no matter what side one is on, one is always a victim, a victim to the fallibility and shortcomings of human nature. These were powerful books, treatises, which can hopefully teach some of us to see what we could become, to not repeat history. In his book, The Asses of Men, which has received high acclaim recently in Israel, he recounted tales of the horrors that he witnessed in Tarrafal. He described monstrosities that were comparable to those inflicted upon the Jews in Germany or Poland, and later on many others in Rwanda, or Syria, or Libya, or Afghanistan—that land of rugged mountains and very old customs where women still cannot learn the alphabet, cannot learn a truly beautiful lullaby to sing to their daughters just before they fall asleep. The Israeli literary judges described his writing as That magic sorrowful voice that touches us in the deepest part of ourselves and makes us want to become better. It is a universal voice that makes humans from all walks of life stop and consider their doings, whether these doings are doing something or simply undoing the human race. This man is brilliant. Deep. A voice to be cherished. A bible for our times. The doctor had reddish hair and freckles. In Tarrafal, he had to be both a surgeon and a psychiatrist, though he was trained as a psychiatrist and was therefore more familiar with the pains of the mind than the bloody lacerations of the body. He was not there because he wanted to be there, and he was not there because he was a friend of the regime.

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