Morning shadows drape the hospital common room in gray. A streak of light slices the darkness into slivers. A figure stands in a corner. I recognize the crest of Miguel’s spiky hair. His bright eyes sink into the darkness of his black shirt as he dips his head forward and I know he has not slept. The dull morning light grazes him, and he staggers to another dark corner, and another, until none are left and he stands awkwardly stark, blinking in the light.
Miguel spots me and walks over, holding a set of earphones in his fist, a portable tape player clipped to his belt.
“How ya doin’, Blanca?”
“Hello, Miguel. Everything okay?”
“Not bad, not bad. Didn’t know you were an artista.”
“I’m not, but sitting around doing nothing is not therapeutic.”
“Yeah,” he smiles. Then he glances around the room and lowers his voice conspiratorially. “You know why we’re in here, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the man. He wants to keep us locked up one way or another. We’re suspicious of shrinks and stay away from them when we can. It kinda helps not to speak English. Makes them stay away from us, too. But when they catch us, they lock us up for a real brain-burning. That’s the way it is, you know?”
Miguel glances over his shoulder.
“It’s part of the game, man. You know, less than white is bad for you. And we fall for it. You know, I met a Puerto Rican guy once who had a Confederate flag sticker on his windshield. Jesus! But, I tell you, we’re lucky not to be in the state mental hospital, that’s really the pits. It’s where they put most of us. I was there when my father wouldn’t let me use his health insurance to come to a private clinic. Wanted to teach me a lesson. But I went real crazy. They treated us bad. Man, these people treat their dogs better. A bro’ found a rusty can in the yard and cut his wrists open one night. That’s when I freaked out, man.”
“Why were you in?”
“Alcohol, drugs, a lotta drugs. Then, I don’t know what got into me, some kinda bad feeling, and I tried to kill myself.” He pauses and starts fumbling with his earphones, pretending to be distracted. “Couldn’t sleep last night either. Don’t know how much longer I can hold out. These jerks won’t give me a sleeping pill. You give ‘em to everyone else, I says. They wanna clean my system, they says. Man, but I can’t sleep.”
With this, Miguel plugs in his earphones and sets off to pace across the common room. He nods constantly, affirming the beat of the music with his pineapple-spiked head. My Uncle Liberato had hair like that and also spent a life nodding, not to music as Miguel did, but to a world that went on only in his head.
Madness: one of the patterns in Blanca’s life. She met her great uncle Liberato on her return to Puerto Rico at the age of 12. Every first of the month she boarded the bus to Ponce de León Avenue and Parada 19. From there she walked down to El Fanguito carrying a grocery bag brimming with country eggs, a pound of coffee, yucca, avocados and other fruit and vegetables, and ten dollars in her pocket for Mamá Paula, Blanca’s paternal great grandmother.
Mamá Paula was 97 and lived in a rented shack with her son Liberato. He could not bear the sight of shoes or belts, so he was always barefoot and secured his trousers with twine. He spent his days squatting on the floor drawing angles with his tall thin frame while he cursed the woman responsible for his insanity with all the vile words in his repertoire. Everyone said the woman he cursed had cast a spell on him. Except for his curses, Liberato was calm.
On the only occasion when he was possessed by a paroxysm of anger and distress, he was young and strong. Ignited by the fury of whatever passion lurked in him, he stomped outside and rocked the shack where he lived with Mamá Paula again and again, like a hurricane. Mamá Paula screamed and ran out of the rocking shack as he proffered strings of colorful obscenities. Neighborhood men subdued him and dragged him to a mental institution. The insane asylum was so crowded, Liberato escaped without anyone noticing his absence. He returned home to Mamá Paula. Humiliated by the horrors he suffered at the institution, he was tame for the rest of his life.
When Blanca visited, Liberato always asked her the same question:
“You’re Ramón’s girl, aren’t you?”
Blanca nodded, and Liberato smiled, satisfied by the affirmation of what he remembered and, except for his cursing, remained silent for the rest of the visit.
Mamá Paula brewed coffee with a thick cone-shaped sock hung from a circular wire which extended out into a long handle. She stirred the dark aromatic coffee grains in the water that boiled on a table-top kerosene stove. When a thick brown foam floated to the surface, she poured the mixture through the conical sock into a large tin can. The smell was sweet and strong, like honey. She boiled milk and sifted it through a small wire strainer to remove the thick seamed skin that collected on the surface. She served Blanca in a pink plastic cup reserved for visitors.
When not squatting on the floor hurling obscenities, Liberato vigorously engaged in cleaning the shack. He wet a large rag in a metallic barrel they kept outside to collect rainwater, and wiped the floor boards. Then he rinsed the rag several times, making sure all the dust was removed, and wrung it with his long skinny hands. Finally, he wiped the floor dry. Once the floor was dry to his satisfaction, he repeated his actions until the voices in his head became louder and louder and he was forced to squat on the floor and resume his cursing.
Blanca loved Liberato. A mad man with a turbulent past, entangled in shadows only he could discern, he had escaped the harshness of the poor man’s never-ending and meaningless life of work. There was something romantic, Blanca mused, in the fulfillment of his destiny, something tender in his remembrance of the mysterious woman he cursed constantly. A woman who remained alive in his hate, which was probably the other side of love.
I can still hear a dog barking in the distance and I shudder. I sit in a corner of the common room, away from the other patients, and start to draw with colored pencils, biting my lower lip. I sketch quickly. Figures hiding in the branches of a despondent willow, bloody members dripping on purple blades of grass. I need time to think. But I have no use for the thoughts that appear suddenly, without my wanting them, and subject me to their dissonance. I want to capture those thoughts without meaning, words, names, phrases and by taming them, make them mine.
“Lunch time.” Miguel’s voice startles me. “Saved you a chair away from the old lady,” he says.
Patients have their meals at a long table. All except Ursula, who is usually heavily drugged and rarely eats with the others. Nina sits at the head of the table, the position she has claimed, and pounds the floor with her cane.
“What kinda junk is this?” she bellows, the loose skin in her upper arm trembling.
Her full-blown bluster pours from a tiny mouth sunk like a hole in her face. Forever mourning losses, she only wears widow’s weeds. A conch comb holds a bun at the nape of her thin neck. She grabs the arm of a white-clad orderly.
“I don’t wanna eat this junk, do you hear me? Whatta you think I am, a cow? Feeding me grass like this?” Nina sweeps a hand over the table, and her plate shatters on the floor. Lettuce sodden with French dressing clings to the orderly’s white uniform. Two male nurses rush from the office and drag Nina away.
When Nina’s last bellow echoes and dies, the dining room slumps into silence. The patients look intently at their trays and earnestly spread butter on their bread rolls, slice the grayish meat of indistinct identity, and chew and swallow deliberately. Debra stares at the skeins of noodles on her plate in evident distress. When Silvia starts stirring her coffee frantically, making ringing sounds as the spoon hits the cup, only Miguel does not look up. He avoids at all costs contact with the eyes of others. I understand his reluctance. In the wounded eyes of others, he sees his own pain duplicated.
In this thin wedge of existence, a scalable barrier exists between madness and sanity. Some remain straddled between the two. Others make periodic incursions to the alienated world, returning sporadically to breathe the air of normal people, which before long repulses them and sends them back to the refuge of their private worlds. Some, like me, remain at the edge of madness, tempted constantly by its promises of forgetfulness and relief. Many navigate to the edenic and infernal land forever, their minds swept clean of their most painful memories, yet their brains cluttered with odds and ends like a century-old attic.
Miguel wolfs his food down with singularity of purpose. He stares at his empty plate and rubs his fingertips together to remove some bread crumbs. I pick at the food and finally pass my plate to Miguel who gratefully eats the leftovers. When he finishes, I put the tray on the counter and hurry out of the dining room before Castule, the resident pyromaniac, begins pushing his dentures out with his tongue as he does after every meal, rhythmically clacking them in and out.
Back in the common room, I find that sketching surrealistic figures is not at all soothing, so I try to construct words. I spin thoughts in my head but cannot name them. For many nights now I wake up at midnight with the echoes of words ringing in my mind. Later, when the day is heavy with ennui, the words hide in a distant fold of the brain. I stare at the blank sheet of paper and suck on the ballpoint pen. Thoughts anchor me once more in the present. I am not crazy all the time. Only when I want to escape. Only when its perfection and silence draw me inexorably into the calm waters of madness or the definitive peace of death.