The Man Who Walked Away A Novel (5 page)

“And his
house
!” Monsieur Eager is saying to—the Doctor can only assume, since he cannot turn around—what must be his eager companion. “Dark alcoves, tattered gothic tapestries, melancholics suffering from syphilis squirming on thirteenth century prayer stools. We—that is, myself and my dear friend, his son—ran around dodging the millionaires from Germany, Russia, America, England, Turkey, who come for prescriptions for strychnine or the thermal cure at Lamalou . . .”

Tomorrow there will be a bruise from those digging knees, the Doctor is sure. The ember of irritation that has been burning slowly under his skin becomes a hot flare. He doesn’t want to be marked by the bony knees of this shouting fishy man. In an effort not to melt into the amphitheater of eagerness, the Doctor turns his head as much as possible in order to give Monsieur Eager a look that says,
Please, be less eager with your knees
.

Monsieur Eager looks directly at the Doctor—is he pressing his knees even more firmly into the Doctor’s back?—as if to say,
And what of it
?

A shrill squeal from somewhere beyond the doors of the amphitheater saves the Doctor from wondering why he even bothered. Every eager head in the amphitheater turns.

“It is the great doctor’s South American monkey,” Monsieur Eager says, standing to deliver the news, delighted at the opportunity to educate.

Ahhh
, says the amphitheater. A few men nearby laugh knowingly, as if they understood all along.
But of course
—a smug nodding of heads—
the great doctor’s South American monkey!
The Doctor has heard the rumors: the monkey in a high chair at the great doctor’s dinner table chewing bananas and stealing food from people’s plates. He puts his jacket back on and takes it off again for the pleasure of digging his elbows one more time into the ribs of the smug nodders on either side of him. He focuses again on the replicas in the center of the sawdust-covered amphitheater, the weight of their possibility. Anything might happen.
This
is why the Doctor has come.

Anything might happen because this man whose monkey dines at his table has planted a flag for the centuries. He has taken an ancient word and made it new again. Anything might happen during one of these famous unplanned lectures they have all traveled so far to see, in which everything unfolds in the moment, in which everything is yet to be discovered. Anything might happen because they are all here to see the great doctor: this man who not only treats millionaires from Germany, Russia, America, Poland, England, Turkey, but lectures on syphilitic aneurysms, cerebral syphilis with gumma formation, meningitis, progressive optic atrophy, who began the first neurology clinic, and now has six thousand patients in his charge, in what he calls his museum of living pathology.

“Prepare yourself: This is the Versailles of pain,” the aristocratic forehead in front of the Doctor whispers to the aquiline nose beside him. The Doctor hears it: a warning, a promise, and a wish.

“I’ve heard he’s made a diagnosis of an eighteenth century woodcut,” the aquiline nose says, laughing. “Perhaps he’ll diagnose a piece of wood for us. His entire office is painted black, you know. The furniture too.”

The great doctor is so great he inspires the kind of envy that disguises itself as dismissal. But the Doctor hasn’t come all this way to dismiss him. He may not agree with the great doctor’s theory that the volatile emotions of the women he treats suggest a disorder of neurologic origin, an invisible lesion that is evidence of a moral crisis. But he understands the complexity of making visible to others one’s own vision of reality. This is what drew the Doctor into this line of work in the first place; it’s what drew him to the asylum and the philosophy of moral medicine, with its attention to the emotional life of patients, where invisible lesions aren’t the only answer. The patients’ own poignant effort to make visible to others their vision of reality, this nearly impossible translation, is the larger concern around which the Doctor’s life revolves. Why, for example, did Rachel mention
The Flying Dutchman
and begin to cry for her mother the other day? Why did she stare at her hands for hours on end? Why does she believe a frog lives inside of her? She looks at the Doctor as if she were speaking in intelligible sentences, as if he should know. And then there is Walter, who stops the Doctor in the hallway to ask with great urgency, “Is the woman in the painting my wife?” The Doctor’s life is devoted to understanding these efforts of translation whose source cannot possibly be an invisible lesion, or only an invisible lesion, but an invisible life. Every day, when the sun sets and the hornbeams and the lavender bushes that line the public square outside the Palace of Justice appear to be on fire with the red light, the Doctor thinks of the view Richard must have had as he stepped so casually out of an upper-story window of the asylum. The attendant, George, hadn’t realized what was happening. “That awful, wet thud,” he said before dissolving in tears. George, the largest, hulking attendant they had, who could sling a grown man across his shoulders, suddenly tiny with grief. “They are on fire,” he claims Richard said just before, though how could he be sure? It happened so quickly. What did it matter anyway? All that was left was the jutting bone and the blood crawling stealthily away across the cobblestones as if it, like his family who dropped him off one day and then never returned, wanted nothing to do with him anymore. There had been talk around town after that—the Director is too lax, too permissive, these patients need to be restrained, not coddled. But those who were so critical never seemed to have any answers except returning to the days when mental patients were locked up in chains.

The Doctor may not agree with everything the great doctor is up to, but he has inspired him to deeper thinking about the intimate lives that exist underneath the great doctor’s diagnosis. The intimate, invisible life
in addition
to the invisible lesion. This is why the Doctor is here. The great doctor has never suggested anything he has not also attempted to demonstrate, so let him make his case.

The great doctor’s monkey squeals again. “That poor beast, locked up somewhere,” says the high forehead sitting in front of the Doctor, a man whose back has been suffering from the Doctor’s own eager knees.

Why is the great doctor not here already,
making his case
?

The monkey squeals again and, as if it is his cue, in walks the man himself, the great doctor.

“There he is,” Monsieur Eager announces, as though no one else can see. Everyone leans forward, an amphitheater of knees digging into an amphitheater of backs.

There he is, the humble son of a wagon maker, now the great doctor. The man who has been endlessly discussed and dissected, who has refashioned an ancient word until it is as exquisite and ornate as one of his father’s decorated carriages.

He is rotund. Stumpy.
Tiny
, really. The cast of the woman’s body is enormous next to him. It could swallow him whole.
So this is all
, thinks the Doctor. Even as he feels a small zing of satisfaction, he is disappointed.

But then the great doctor speaks.

“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting long.” His voice is a sturdy house into which he invites each one of them.
Come in. Wander around. Take a look in my secret closets.

The audience laughs nervously, as though it is they who have kept
him
waiting.

“What, then, is hysteria? What is its nature? We know nothing about its nature. Nor about the lesions that produce it. We know it only through its manifestations. Be forewarned: I will not lead you down a well-delineated path.”

Dense and muscular, each word adds a centimeter to his height and removes one from his sizable girth. A grandeur hovers around him, a gentle Parisian mist. The Doctor feels the dewy wonder of it on his face; it washes away the smirks from the faces of any detractors.

“I have not pushed aside the thorny bushes that make this journey difficult,” the great doctor says. “This lecture is for the benefit of those among you who have not already completed your medical training. I have no embarrassment in finding my way in front of the rest of you.”

“He has the head of Napoleon,” Monsieur Eager whispers to his neighbor.

The comparison is apt but the Doctor knows, even as the spell is being cast, the close resemblance, that fierce elegance, is carefully cultivated.

“The girl we will examine today suffers from intermittent cramps, trembling, convulsive attacks, and the paralysis of her right leg,” the great doctor says. “For the past several days we have waited and watched. We have not interfered.”

“She is very fond of ether, I hear,” Monsieur Eager whispers.

“Is she clairvoyant?” whispers his companion with his aquiline nose. “I’ve heard some of them are clairvoyant.”

Shhh.

“You cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it,” the great doctor says, gesturing to a tall, skinny man hovering in the corner, a pair of spectacles perched precariously on the top of his pointy head.

The tall, skinny man, in the midst of unfolding a tripod, appears to have been magically transported from the grand photography annex the Doctor has read about—a glass-walled studio, dark and light laboratories, a wealth of equipment. Platforms, beds, screens, backdrops in all colors, headrests that serve as vises for those patients who can’t hold still to allow a photographer to capture a close-up of ears, eyes, nose. There are rumored to be gallows from which to suspend those patients too distressed to hold themselves upright, which fold up tidily along the wall of the studio at the end of the day.

“
I
am nothing more than a photographer,” says the great doctor, “inscribing what I see.”

But the great doctor is nothing like
this
photographer. Everyone in the amphitheater can see that. Beneath the camera’s black tenting, the photographer’s thin legs are indistinguishable from the thin legs of the tripod; from time to time mistaken for the spindly wooden legs of an inanimate object—a piano, for example. His shins are bruised because just the other night, in a restaurant where he’d gone with his wife, someone distractedly and repeatedly swung a foot under a table, mistaking his legs for those of a chair.

“Why you say nothing,” his wife said when he showed his bruised shins to her later, “is the bigger question.”

The bigger question is easily answered. The photographer prides himself on his talent for fading into the background. It is an art, blending into a room until he is a small flake of paint on the wall, a splinter of wood in the floor, a dust mote in the air. The great doctor wants him to find proof of what he is looking for but the photographer isn’t after proof, he is after the question of the spirit enacted in the anatomy, that smoky ghost caught just for a moment in flesh and bone. Before the photographer became a photographer, he had gone to medical school. He had been on his way to becoming a man of science, though, contrary to what his teachers thought, he did not
take up photography because of his mediocre grades in anatomy or because he couldn’t stomach the sight of blood. He keeps it to himself but what he truly believes is that there is something else to taking pictures beyond recording the facts. Every photograph captures an irretrievable moment. Photography’s precision, its science, is what has made it so appealing to men of medicine. Still, in every photograph there is also the mystery of a life moving through time; in every face the photographer captures on a photographic plate, a flicker of something. A life force? A spirit? He doesn’t know, but in the corner of an eye, in the twist of a mouth, in the blur of a head turning or an arm flailing, there is something that cannot be contained.
This
is what photography can do. This is what photography is
meant
to do. It eludes him, as art should.

There is something in the photographer’s face when the great doctor says,
I am nothing more than a photographer
, that catches the Doctor’s attention, a look that says back,
If only you
were
a photographer
. The Doctor recalls a recent article accompanied by the photographer’s portraits of the great doctor’s women. There was a portrait of a young woman, writhing so parts of her were blurred yet she still looked directly at the camera. The Doctor found himself looking into those eyes, far more composed than her body. The difficulty of portraying the
expressions of the passions
in the face and body. This is how the great painter Charles Le Brun had described the classic problem in painting. But there, in the photograph of the young girl, the photographer had captured the movement of the soul on the body
.
This tall, skinny fellow lurking in the corner, looking as though he might at any moment become entangled in his equipment, was the man who had done that. He had made the girl’s illness visible
.