Someone Else by Benacquista Tonino

Author:Benacquista, Tonino [Benacquista, Tonino]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781908524133
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Published: 2012-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

What a perfect feeling: he had found a friend.

Thierry Blin

He had never been so frightened as he was that morning. The moment he woke up he had to battle with his own overpowering fear by persuading himself he was a good man, a man who saw his dreams as reality and his longings as orders. On the way to the clinic he almost managed to convince himself. His fears regained the upper hand, however, when the nurse asked him to put on the strange white nightshirt which tied up at the back like a straitjacket.

At precisely 8 o’clock, he went into the clinic’s admissions office and was treated to a Vermeiren in every sentence. He was then shown to his room, where he anxiously answered all the questions asked by a woman dressed in white, who made sure he took a pill to help him relax. Psychiatry has inventoried the different kinds of sick mind which lose touch with themselves, and it has given them complicated names – his condition must have had one of its own. If he had known this wretched word, he might have tried to find a cure – he just needed to be in a different department. Rodier had given him one last chance to change everything on the spot, perhaps Joust would too? The latter came in, drawled a few words out of habit and started tracing lines on his patient’s face in silence. The tranquillizer was beginning to take effect; even if he had still wanted to, Blin could no longer change his mind. All of a sudden his shoulders dropped and his whole body started to float. A rapt smile spread across his lips when he saw someone approaching with a stretcher. In the operating theatre, he looked in Joust’s eye one last time; it already did not matter any more, as if Blin’s consciousness were slowly leaving his body to slip into Vermeiren’s. The anaesthetist injected a whitish fluid into his vein, making his arm feel warm, and he asked him to count to five. It was the last face he saw before losing his own.

*

He had not invented this pain, it really was there but it was not making him suffer, it was keeping itself busy, without waking him. He was every piece of his body at the same time, his veins, his blood, his heart, which was beating slowly; he was his muscles and his own sleeping strength.

*

Someone put a damp compress over his lips; something a woman would do, he thought. He could sense her moving about the room from small signs: the clink of a glass, the squeak of her shoes on the parquet, her clearing her throat. He desperately wanted to open his eyes but his eyelids remained sealed, which was terrifying. If he had still had the strength, he would have given in to panic, but the bandaging round his jaw meant he could not cry out. Another dose of painkillers and tranquillizers soothed him.

Not being able to speak again for the rest of his life would not have mattered to him all that much.

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