Lust for Life

“It is better to leave him alone,” he said. “If you speak to him, he will fly into a rage. It will be over in a few hours.”

The walls of the monastery were thick, but all through lunch Vincent could hear the changing cries of the afflicted one straining through the vast silence. He spent the afternoon in a far corner of the garden, trying to escape the frenetic wails.

That night at supper, a young man whose left side was paralyzed, grabbed up a knife, sprang to his feet, and held the knife over his heart with his right hand.

“The time has come!” he shouted. “I shall kill myself!”

The man on his right side rose wearily and gripped the paralytic’s arm.

“Not today, Raymond,” he said. “Today is Sunday.”

“Yes, yes, today! I won’t live! I refuse to live! Let go of my arm! I want to kill myself!”

“Tomorrow, Raymond, tomorrow. This isn’t the right day.”

“Let go of my arm! I shall plunge this knife into my heart! I tell you, I’ve got to kill myself!”

“I know, I know, but not now. Not now.”

He took the knife from Raymond’s hand and led him, weeping in a rage of impotence, back to the ward.

Vincent turned to the man next to him, whose red-rimmed eyes were watching his trembling fingers anxiously as he tried to carry the soup to his mouth.

“What is the matter with him?” he asked.

The syphilitic lowered his spoon and said, “Not a day has passed for a whole year that Raymond has not tried to commit suicide.”

“Why does he try it here?” asked Vincent. “Why doesn’t he steal the knife and kill himself when everyone has gone to sleep?”

“Perhaps he does not wish to die, Monsieur.”

While Vincent was watching them play bowls the following morning, one of the men suddenly fell to the ground and went into a convulsive paroxysm.

“Quick. It’s his epileptic fit,” shouted someone.

“On his arms and legs.”

It took four of them to hold his arms and legs. The writhing epileptic seemed to have the strength of a dozen men. The young blond reached into his pocket, pulled out a spoon, and thrust it between the prostrate man’s teeth.

“Here, hold his head,” he cried to Vincent.

The epileptic went through a rising and falling series of convulsions, their peaks mounting ever higher and higher. His eyes rolled in their sockets and the foam lathered from the corners of his mouth.

“Why do you hold that spoon in his mouth?” grunted Vincent.

“So he won’t bite his tongue.”

After a half hour the shuddering man sank into unconsciousness. Vincent and two of the others carried him to his bed. That was the end of the affair; no one mentioned it again.

By the end of a fortnight, Vincent had seen every one of his eleven companions go through his own particular form of insanity: the noisy maniac who tore his clothes off his body and smashed everything in sight; the man who howled like an animal; the two syphilitics; the suicide monomaniac; the paralytics who suffered from excess of fury and exaltation; the epileptic; the lymphomaniac with a persecution mania; the young blond who was being pursued by secret police.

Not a day went by without some one of them having a seizure; not a day passed but that Vincent was called to calm some momentary maniac. The third-class patients had to be each other’s doctors and nurses. Peyron looked in but once a week, and the guardians bothered only with the first and second-class residents. The men stayed close together, helped each other in the moments of affliction, and had endless patience; each of them knew that his turn was coming again, soon, and that he would need the help and forbearance of his neighbours.

It was a fraternity of fous.

Vincent was glad that he had come. By seeing the truth about the life of madmen he slowly lost the vague dread, the fear of insanity. Bit by bit he came to consider madness as a disease like any other. By the third week he found his comates no more frightening than if they had been stricken by consumption or cancer.

He often sat and chatted with the idiot. The idiot could only answer with incoherent sounds, but Vincent felt that the fellow understood him and was pleased to be talking. The sisters never spoke to the men unless it was imperative. Vincent’s portion of rational intercourse each week consisted of his five minute conversation with Doctor Peyron.

“Tell me, Doctor,” he said, “why do the men never talk to each other? Some of them seem intelligent enough, when they are well.”

“They can’t talk, Vincent, for the minute they begin to talk, they argue, get excited, and bring a seizure upon themselves. So they’ve learned that the only way they can live is by remaining utterly quiet.”

“They might just as well be dead, mightn’t they?”

Peyron shrugged. “That, my dear Vincent, is a matter of opinion.”

“But why don’t they at least read? I should think that books . . .”