At first, nobody came and sat down next to me at lunch. It was as if the other inmates were trying to keep me at a safe distance. Stafford had been eyeing me hesitantly for a while. He finally stood up and came and sat down. He was holding his head up high, trying to make himself look good. He was between forty and sixty. What made me think it was more likely sixty was his wrinkled neck, with folds of skin hanging down like on a chicken. It was obvious he wanted to make friends with me, which is the kind of thing that immediately puts me on the defensive. I just sat upright on my chair and looked straight ahead. He ended up tugging at the sleeve of my uniform.
“Don’t you want to talk, son?”
I took my time, shoveling a big spoonful of mash into my mouth and slowly swallowing it. Then I looked down at him and said, “Talking’s the easiest thing in the world. Everybody talks, everybody shoots the breeze, you think it’s never going to end.”
He nodded. But not once: ten times, twenty times. And then he asked me what I was in here for, in a low voice as if it was a state secret. When I told him I’d bumped off my grandparents, he seemed doubtful and even disappointed. He’d been expecting better.
“How old would you say I am?”
I paused before answering. Seeing all the effort he was making to be nice to me, I said about fifty.
He started laughing like a man possessed. “I was born a year before the start of this century.”
That was an easy calculation to make. I remembered Leitner’s advice. None of the guys in this wing were really a danger to me, but I had nothing to gain from making friends with these perverts. I had nothing in common with the rapists, the crazies who didn’t distinguish between a woman, a man, a child or a goat as long as they could bang it. At the thought that I could be confused with guys like that, a dull anger rose inside me. That was the best thing they could do if they really wanted to make me feel guilty.
I went back to my room. At that hour I was supposed to be taking part in a group session but they didn’t yet know which group to put me in. I stayed on my bed for about an hour and a half, reading. I lay on my back, looking up through the skylight at the sky. It was the same blue sky every day, flecked with high white clouds. I was gradually getting into my book. I’d held back a little at first, but then let myself go.
A guard interrupted my reading to take me to the laundry. It was at the other end of the hospital, and to get there you had to go down a mile of corridors painted piss yellow. I knew a lot depended on that laundry. That was where they would judge my aptitude for work, and therefore my suitability for rehabilitation. I’d dirtied my own linen, now I was being asked to wash it, which seemed logical.
Two thousand sheets passed through the laundry every week as well as at least a good thousand uniforms of different sizes, not to mention the underwear. It was a huge piece of organization. Some inmates were in charge of collecting the dirty linen, others of stuffing it into big industrial washing machines, others of drying, folding and redistribution. Along with the kitchens, it was the activity that required the most manpower. There were two or three patients on the management side of things but you could tell they were just there to support the other supervisors, who all came from among the guards. After all, apart from me, and I say this in all sincerity, all the men being kept there were really sick people. You could understand that, when it came to such serious tasks, they weren’t entrusted to patients. It was my intention to change all that. At least until I entered the laundry, where I thought I was going to faint. The smell of washing mixed with the damp of a Turkish bath reminded me of the washroom in the house in Montana. I felt so bad I almost turned right around again. My determination to prove I didn’t belong in this community of crazies made me change my mind. The only way I could still show that I’d been sane when I committed those two crimes was to behave at all times like the normal man that I was. At that precise moment, I’d happily have spent twenty years in prison as long as they recognized that I’d been responsible for my actions.
I had killed the old lady because of that screechy voice of hers that started up every time I got any further from the house than a limit she’d set arbitrarily, which corresponded to that part of the land she’d completely domesticated, apart from the moles and rabbits. The worst of it was that I didn’t even have any desire to get away from that fucking house. I felt suffocated when I did. But that she should forbid me to do something I didn’t even allow myself, that was something that required a drastic solution. I have to admit when I fired, I wasn’t thinking about all that. I really wasn’t. I don’t know if it’s true that I have a higher IQ than Einstein, but I have to admit that I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking during the first part of my life, I was too busy struggling with thoughts I hadn’t initiated. When I started thinking again about these things, surrounded by the detergent smells of the laundry, I was filled with an inner anger. At times like that, I could kill someone, but I didn’t see who, so my anger abated in a few seconds. The guard who had brought me introduced me to one of the laundry managers, who took his time explaining my job. I remembered the little jobs I’d done when I was younger. The people who’d employed me then were always surprised by how quickly I picked things up. I’d helped a blacksmith on a ranch, I’d branded cattle, and I had sold newspapers on a busy street in Helena in the middle of winter, where it was so cold you could hear the sinister sound of the rocks in the mountains cracking. To toughen me up, my mother had forbidden me to wear gloves. I must have been about eleven. I remember an old man who made a detour to buy a paper from me on the pretext that, in the condition I was in, the news had to be fresher than a fish frozen on a line. My mother always said my father’s approach to bringing me up would turn me into a girl. That was when she was sober. But when she was drunk, she’d scream at him that he was turning me into a big fat fairy. I could never understand what my weight had to do with my future situation. My hatred of Montana was certainly born out of that time when my mother made the climate even harder to bear. When it was cold, she made sure I got even colder than anybody else. She’d send me to school in a shirt with an unlined linen jacket, with no gloves and no hat. Waiting for the school bus became an ordeal. If someone ever told her off about it, she would reply that I was never sick, unlike those kids who wore too many thick clothes. In the hottest part of the summer, she’d take advantage of the heat to give me really tiring chores to do.
I never knew what homosexuality was until I got to that hospital. A few months after my arrival, when I was already in a position of responsibility in the laundry, I caught three guys indulging in that kind of thing between piles of linen in the storeroom. I had the impression that one of them hadn’t totally consented, so I went in and broke it up. They all left in different directions, without a word and without showing any shame. This episode didn’t arouse anything in me, either desire or revulsion.
My first job was folding the sheets. There were ten of us at work, in teams of two. My partner was a sad-eyed old man who smiled all the time. He wasn’t very tall, and he had a bald skull lined with blue veins. When the folding was done, he came toward me with a ridiculous little dance step. I think he was a friend of Stafford, the guy who’d tried to befriend me. This guy was as crazy as Stafford was—apparently—normal. I felt bad when he told me he’d also killed his grandparents at my age, well before he was arrested for raping minors, a charge he denied because, according to him, not only were these minors consenting but they had provoked him. The medication was having an effect on him, you could see it by his sunken eyes and his complexion, which was sometimes paler than a corpse. I took things in hand when I realized that it was taking three times longer than necessary to carry out our share of the work. I pushed him along a little. He must have thought about hitting back but my size and his medication stopped him in his tracks. Over the next few days, he behaved with me like a stray dog that’s latched on to a new master. I was quite proud of my ascendancy. It’s thanks to him that I decided never to take the pills I was handed every night before they turned the lights out.
I was open about that with Leitner, I told him I didn’t want to end up like all those ghosts wandering around the hospital. He assured me that the only purpose of the molecule I was being given was to relax me and to avoid panic attacks linked to my guilt for what I had done.
“I often felt guilty in the past, but that was when I didn’t know why.”
He didn’t want to make a big thing out of the medication, and he left me free to take it or not. But the question of guilt seemed to be on his mind.
“Don’t you ever feel sad about your grandfather?”
“I’ve tried, but I don’t see any reason to be sad. Why do you ask me that?”
He lit a pipe, which I’d never seen him do before and which didn’t suit his face, passed his hand through his hair and then said, evasively and with a touch of mockery, “My job is to ask questions, lots of questions. I don’t always know why I ask them and I never know when the answer will come. Sometimes it comes when I’m least expecting it. You see, when you tell me about your grandfather, I think about another grandfather. I didn’t know him but I took an interest in his life. This was a man who lived in the Midwest and took care of his grandson when he was a child. The child had been abandoned by his father, and his mother didn’t see much of him because she drove a truck and was always on the road. Then she took up with another man—a good man—and the boy went to live with her. He’d become a disturbed teenager. One day, for no apparent reason, he killed his mother and her new husband. He was later sentenced to death and executed. His grandfather wasn’t present at the execution, he died a few days later, of grief. Do you think the boy should also have killed his grandfather to save him all that pain?”
“I think there was only one person he should have killed, that son of a bitch his father, who abandoned him. And anyway there’s no comparison, my grandfather never took care of me. To be honest, I didn’t know him very well. He bought me a Winchester .22 for my birthday, but that wasn’t to please me, he just wanted to use me to kill pests, because my grandmother was obsessed with the moles and rabbits. The farm stretched over about a hundred and twenty-five acres, but she was obsessed with the twenty thousand square feet of garden she’d planted around the house. If I’d believed that my father really cared about his parents, I might have thought twice about shooting them. I’m sure he was shocked but now he doesn’t care. I know I scare him, but I’m sure he doesn’t hold it against me. He’s killed people, he knows what it’s like, he knows sometimes you have no choice, if you don’t want to die yourself. And why would I have swapped my life for the old girl’s? Why? To get back to the young man you talked about, I think you have to be really crazy to hit the wrong target like that. He must have lost his mind.”
“And you, Al, do you have the feeling you lost your mind at some point?”
“Send me back to prison if you like but I’ve never lost my mind. I have to tell you, Dr. Leitner, it makes me sick that I wasn’t sent to prison. They simply dismissed me with a wave of the hand, like I was some poor kid who wasn’t responsible for what he did. It’s the same old story, you know? My mother looked at me like a horse looking at its own shit, my sisters saw me as an obstacle between them and the refrigerator, my grandmother as her whipping boy and my grandfather as the person who was going to cause him problems with his wife. After living through all that, there were reasons to feel guilty, to tell myself I must really be a monster for everyone to treat me like that, even though my father tried to reach out to me whenever my mother let him. You see, I know a hell of a lot about guilt. So when I say I have no reason to feel guilty for what I did, I’d like people to accept that.”
Whenever Leitner’s eyes became even bluer than usual, it meant he was really worried. “There’s no question of sending you back to prison, Al. My objective is to allow you to re-enter society sooner or later, when we think you’re no longer a danger to it. As long as you remain convinced you were right to kill your grandmother and relieve your grandfather of his life, everyone will think of you as a pathological case. We haven’t known each other for very long, Al, but there’s something in you that makes you likeable. Get it into your head, society will give you another chance the day you feel guilty for what you did, the day you have empathy for your grandparents. Without guilt, there’s no civilization, Al, we become animals again. I already told you, only the state, in other words, society, can justify killing in the interests of the community. But society will always think of you as a criminal or a sick person if you give yourself permission to kill. It’ll get rid of you one way or another, you can rely on that. Society normally has a representative in the brain of every human being, which sets the limits of what’s admissible. Its representative didn’t do its job in yours. You don’t know the difference between right and wrong, I’m sure because nobody ever did right by you, or taught you. As a result, the border between the two is porous. I’m going to try to rebuild it, and you’re going to help me in that direction. Your reason was altered by the way your family destroyed your emotional center. Reason and emotion go together, if one of the two gets disconnected, that’s when the trouble starts. That’s what happened to you. Now, tell me, you claim that what triggered your act was your grandmother’s voice when you went beyond the garden. Why? Did that remind you of something? Or rather, no, let’s look at it from another angle. You told me you sometimes felt a strong sense of guilt in your childhood. Guilt about what?”
I remembered vague but violent feelings of anxiety that grabbed hold of me at the top of the stairs leading up from the cellar to the first floor of the house, where the others were allowed to live. As soon as I entered all that light and space, I had the feeling I wasn’t in my place anymore. There was an incredible amount of space around the house. I was really drawn to it, but as soon as I surrendered, I felt that anxiety in my limbs, along with a sense of suffocation.
As well as my parents’ room, there were three bedrooms on the first floor, one for each of my sisters and a guest room that was never used, because there were never any guests. But it had to stay free. The upper floor was used as a loft. I sometimes went up there to hide.
The room where I’d been stuck since my birth wasn’t as small as all that, although it’s true that a child sees everything as being bigger than it is. In some ways, it was too big for a child. It occupied a good third of the cellar. I don’t know if you can call it a bedroom, given that there was no separation between it and the boiler. A big gas boiler that was always on, because when it wasn’t heating the house, it was still heating the water. It would come on every hour for a good fifteen minutes. Through its open firebox I could see the fires of hell spitting away. Although they taught us in catechism classes that God would decide at the end of our lives whether we were bound for heaven or hell, I had the feeling that when it came to me, everything had already been decided. I opened up about that to the priest who looked after the small Catholic community of Helena. He was tall, a good man, I guess, as far as I knew about goodness. He visited my mother one day when she wasn’t expecting it. She took it very badly because she didn’t like surprises. She was scathing at first, saying that even an envoy of God has to let people’s know he’s coming. The priest wouldn’t let himself be intimated by my mother’s size or her low voice, which was slurred by booze and tobacco. My mother thought he’d come to complain about my behavior in catechism classes, so before he could even open his mouth she told him that I was a child who carried evil in him. The priest replied that he doubted it, then came to the real point of his visit. She looked at him for a long time in silence, long enough to turn into an understanding and open-minded woman. She told him that putting me so close to the boiler was meant to remind me where I’d end up if I wasn’t a better person. Before he could ask her permission to take a look, she apologized and said she couldn’t show him my room, because I kept it incredibly untidy. Then she stood up and dismissed him without even offering him a cup of coffee. After he left I went off to hide because I knew she was going to bawl me out. But when dinnertime came, she turned on my father, and that overshadowed the anger she had intended for me. The following day I punished her. My mother loved cats. I think they’re the only things I ever saw her love. She was proud of them because they won prizes at competitions. Toward my sisters, who were neither cats nor men, she had a kind of benign indifference, which consisted in letting them stuff themselves while pretending to encourage them not to eat too much. She had a long-haired she-cat, a highly prized kind, which she’d let breed. She had kept one kitten and sold the others. The day after the priest’s visit, coming back from school, I found myself alone in the house. I grabbed the kitten. It clung to my hands with its little claws as if it had an idea of what was in store for it. I was torn between the pity it inspired in me by its innocence and an uncontrollable need to punish my mother. But into the boiler it went. I really enjoyed it when my mother sat in front of me, gave me one of her pitiless stares, and asked me what had happened to the kitten. I didn’t look away but didn’t say anything, savoring the silence. She was tempted to beat me to get me to talk, then she gave up and poured herself a glass of scotch. That was the first and last time I incinerated one of her prize kittens alive. Six months later, I cut the head off of one of them, buried the body and kept the head in my room in a box for bicycle tire repair patches. I don’t know how that box got in my room when I didn’t have a bicycle. My mother regularly searched my room. She’d go through it from top to bottom like the guards in prison—nobody knows what they’re looking for but they must know. She came across the box with the kitten’s head rotting in it and started screaming. At first it was anger, then despair at the fact that she’d given birth to a torturer. But as so often, the worse her anger got, the more she distanced herself from me. She never came and screamed in my face. Curiously, this event brought me closer to my sister, the younger of the two.
At this point, I’ll take a pause in my story. All these things I’m telling you may not be an exact reflection of what I told Leitner. A sixteen-year-old kid, even one as advanced as I must have been, doesn’t give up his secrets easily, doesn’t have confession in the blood, you understand. There were times he really had to drag it out of me, times when my memories came out in such a jumble that he had to make an effort to reconstruct them chronologically. What I liked about Leitner was that he didn’t judge me. I never heard him make a moral statement about any of my actions. The story of the decapitation did startle him, though, even though he must already have known about it because it was mentioned in the statement my mother made to the police after I was arrested. In it she’d said that she hadn’t been surprised by what I did because I’d once cut the head off a cat. He stood up and started walking around his office. I noticed for the first time that the window of his office looked out on open country and that he never locked it even though it did have a lock. But I had no desire to run away. Even if they’d thrown open the doors of the hospital and rolled out the red carpet for me, I wouldn’t have wanted to leave the place, because then I wouldn’t have had anyone to talk to. By the time he sat down again, his face was all lit up with satisfaction, and what he was saying he was saying for himself.
“She makes you lose your head. She makes you lose your head, you cut off the head of what matters most to her. You make her lose her head. You’re even. You start by throwing the kitten in the boiler. That’s a straightforward reaction to the fact that she makes you sleep next to the boiler. But that’s not enough. You cut the head off her cat and leave it in a box in your room, knowing perfectly well she’ll find it sooner or later. Are you following me?”
I was following him.
“It’s symbolic. You kill her cat and cut its head off, because you don’t dare do that to your mother. Did you ever think about cutting your mother’s head off?”
“No, never.”
“Yet she’s the one who makes you lose your head.” He stopped to think for a while. “Up until that point, you’re in control of everything. Things start to go wrong when you move to your grandparents’ house. You don’t know your grandmother well. How many times had you seen her before?”
“Twice.”
“But did you feel close to her? Did you feel any affection for her?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt any affection for anyone.”
“Not even your father?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Your grandmother reminds you of your mother. She’s pretty much the same kind of domineering personality. It’s no surprise your father married your mother. It’s because she’s so like his mother. And when he finally realizes that, he leaves her, he gets a divorce, because he can’t stand the idea of sleeping with his mother. For you, your grandmother is the model your father married when he married your mother. Unconsciously, you blame her for your parents’ marriage. Are you following me?”
I was still following him, although, in all modesty, I wasn’t learning much.
“You blame your grandmother for your birth. The real responsibility is hers. What you can just about take from your mother, because she’s your mother, you can’t take from your grandmother. It’s now that the idea of killing her takes root. What stopped you from killing your mother doesn’t stop you from killing your grandmother. The door’s wide open, all you’re waiting for is the signal. The signal comes when you hear her voice as you’re going beyond the limits of the garden. The limits of the garden remind you of that other place where you were kept under a kind of house arrest: the cellar. There’s no question about it anymore. You have to act now. It’s her or you. It’s her life against your sanity. By killing her you’re avoiding insanity. Which means you aren’t insane. But you aren’t responsible either because you were driven by an insane impulse. But you weren’t performing some kind of charitable act either, Al. You can’t take the law into your own hands, especially when other people’s justice isn’t capable of understanding your gesture and, in any case, like they say: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”
He breathed as if he had done the hardest part. He took off his glasses, held them up to the light to see if the lenses were dirty, and put them down in front of him. He moved back and stretched his legs.
“In our country, people are fascinated by their geographical roots. They’d be better off if they were fascinated by their psychological roots. The beginning of your story, Al, goes back a long way. What made your maternal grandfather a pervert ready to commit incest, we’ll never know. But he’s probably the reason your mother hates men. She could have kept her distance from them, but no, she prefers to get close to them so that she can grind them down. Your father got caught in her net because his mother had predisposed him to it. She’d hounded him all his life. As for you, you were her creature, her thing, she could do whatever she liked with you. You had to defend yourself against the crushing weight of that family tradition. How? By cutting the branches. It’s a miracle you didn’t put a complete end to that dynasty of perversion, Al. I’ve known cases where the youngest child killed everybody before killing himself. It was as if in some strange way he was trying to purge the whole bloodline.”
He was silent for a while.
“Be prepared for the possibility that your father will have other children. Crossing his bloodline with your mother’s was a disaster for him. His son ended up killing his own mother. It’s like a pincer movement, cutting him free from both his parents and his offspring at the same time. You describe your sisters as dull creatures, so the war hero will have to start again from scratch to survive. I know it’s a little brutal, Al, but you’ll never see your father again. When he got rid of you in Los Angeles by sending you to your grandparents, he was starting to protect himself. He couldn’t bear to have the consequences of his disastrous marriage right there under his nose. He knows it’s not your fault, but seeing you suffocates him.”
He stopped to think for a moment, as if something was bothering him.
“I’m sure you thought about killing yourself before you left for Los Angeles.”
“Yes, twice.”
“How many times did you think about killing your mother?”
“Also twice.”
“Did you think about killing yourself immediately after planning to kill your mother?”
“Yes, right away.”
Then he brought the session to an abrupt end as if everything had gone too fast. The chess game hadn’t started. Satisfaction was written all over his face. I felt excluded. I wondered if understanding made any difference to my situation.
In the following sessions, it was as if all the essential things had already been said. But we continued to unravel my story. My relationship with the youngest of my sisters interested him. She would join me in private games. An old barber’s chair stored in the house, we had no idea why, became a makeshift electric chair for us. We’d take turns in trying our forearms to the chair with electric wire. We used a transformer we found among my father’s equipment to get the current moving and gradually increase the intensity. Pushed to the maximum, it sent through enough juice to knock back a bull. That way we tested our resistance to pain. The dial went from 1 to 6. Every time one of the two of us did something wrong that our mother found out about, we’d punish each other. The discovery of the mummified head of the prize kitten earned me a level 6 electrocution. We both knew I could withstand that intensity. The temptation was stronger than reason. I sat down in the chair, and my sister carefully tied my wrists. She held the transformer in her hands and I could sense the real pleasure that gave her. Suddenly, she started the current and I fainted. She took fright and immediately went up to see my mother, who just then was talking to some cops who’d come over to question her about a drunk-driving incident. She came down to the cellar, in no hurry at all, and seeing that I had woken up, said she was going to punish me. I had just been in the electric chair, what more could I fear? But she never talked about it again, as if risking your life on morbid games wasn’t worth bothering about. She was more worried about that drunk-driving thing. She’d probably have to pay a heavy fine, and she was afraid for her reputation. She always liked to make out she was a respectable woman.