Samuel Cogolati was the only other person in the library. He sat at a table on the far side and did not look up from his book. From this distance, Cogolati’s hairless, waxy complexion resembled a child’s. Midhat approached the medical dictionaries and pulled down the latest edition of Larousse. He sat in a chair and turned to “N.”
Page 746 showed an illustration of a wheeled machine captioned “Nettoyage par le vide.” On the opposite page was the definition he wanted:
Neurasthenia: – (Syn: Nervous exhaustion, nervousness, neuropathy, cerebro-cardiac neuropathy, hyperaesthesia general, general neuralgia.)
SYMPTOMS. Neurasthenia may be manifested in two very different ways. Sometimes the neurasthenic has a healthy appearance, a fresh complexion, and a confident air. And on the contrary he is sometimes a depressed individual; emaciated, pale, holding his head down, answering with difficulty even the simplest of questions. These two varieties of patients generally complain of the same ills: headaches occupying the top of the head, limited at the neck or various parts of the skull, increased by sounds, smells, and intellectual fatigue, and decreasing after meals.
This fitted with the stick-stirring, in any case.
Insomnia is frequent and painful. The patient feels the need to sleep after dinner but soon wakes up, failing to fall asleep again until morning; and so he rises already tired, since during the interval he has been persecuted—
A page of photographs intervened illustrating “Nettoyage par le vide.” A man stood in a street beside a vast black machine labelled: VACUUM CLEANER; the same man then knelt indoors, pressing the end of a tube into the floor; then two women in aprons raked the ground with various metal prongs.
—by a kind of jittering of thought and many distressing sensations, so that even when he seemed to rest he was assailed by nightmares.
Dizziness sometimes occurs: an empty feeling in the brain, flies before the eyes, staggering without falling.
A finger down the other symptoms: Digestive disorders … Respiratory and circulatory disorders … Disorders of the genito-urinary tract, one of the causes of the disease … Ringing, observed in the ear … Extreme sensitivity to hot or cold, causing pain …
The constant study of his health to which the neurasthenic applies himself causes him to perceive a thousand sensations, unnoticed by everyone else, which he interprets and exaggerates.
The treatments included a diet without crustaceans, with the addition of raw egg yolks and broth.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Midhat.”
Cogolati stood above him, holding a book with a finger between the pages.
“Ah, Samuel. How are you?”
“What are you reading, the dictionary?”
“I am, yes. I am researching neurasthenia.”
“Interesting. May I sit? What have you found.”
Midhat’s stomach rumbled. He coughed.
“Oh, not much,” he said. “The only unifying trait seems to be strange physical sensations. Apart from that, it seems you diagnose a patient as a neurasthenic if you can judge them to be a hypochondriac. Isn’t that strange? They are ill if they are not ill. There is no specific ailment, nothing physical or neurological, just this subjective, doctorly reading of the patient herself. Or himself.”
“Yes. That is vague. Perhaps this is what Rivaut means when he says we are part of a developing science!” Cogolati tipped his head back with silent laughter.
Midhat was already elsewhere. His mind was seeking out its well-worn channels and now streaming back by the gravity of habit to that shamed idea of his: the idea of invisible causes, that there might be other, hidden sources of Ariane Molineu’s pain. He thought of Jeannette’s resistance to the idea of madness. He thought of the babies in the jars, labelled and locked.
“We should look in the Psychiatry section.” Cogolati set down his own book and marked his place with a slip of paper.
Midhat was glad of the company. Together he and Cogolati examined the titles on spines, consulted contents pages, and set books in piles, mapping recurring terms. Midhat found no mention of “hystero-neurasthenia” anywhere but he seized on “hysteria” and other terms that appeared alongside it.
“What is the nature of the research?” asked Cogolati.
“I was just reading about neurasthenia in a … novel.”
“Aha! The best kind of research, led by the imagination. I admire that.”
Briquet’s “Treatise on Hysteria” contained 430 case studies. Almost all concerned young women, frequently lower class. A few mentions of aberrant sexual activity.
“Ho ho, listen,” said Cogolati. He elbowed aside a discarded volume on the table to rest open the one he was reading. “This writer says: ‘It certainly happens that neuroses above the belt are far more clearly understood than those below.’ How amusing. How awfully unhelpful.”
The rumble in Midhat’s stomach was sharpening into hunger. The clock said three; breakfast had been more than seven hours ago. In a recent issue of L’Encéphale he found an article entitled “Les Cénestopathies,” and he read through the six case histories at manic speed. The article argued that the cause of lesionless pain was disordered bodily sensation. Incorrect inhabitation of the body, Midhat wrote in his notebook, a little shakily.
The sun faded through the windows. Cogolati yawned.
“This has been instructive, but I am not quite sure what we have learned. That definitions are often in conflict? Or that the mind and the body should remain different spheres. You know, I have a friend you should talk to, majoring in psychiatry. At the moment he is working with traumatised soldiers. Would that be helpful?”
“Wait, listen. This is in,” Midhat shut the cover to see the jacket, “La Conscience Morbide, Blondel. ‘Morbid consciousness is a kind of cenesthetic instability,’ he says … ‘a rebel to logic’ … ‘a refractory in our conceptual regime, and different in kind from normal consciousness.’”
“Yes, it’s … I mean, I don’t know. I’ll have to go, Kamal. But this has been fun—we should—anyway I’ll see you in Botany tomorrow. Good luck. I look forward to hearing your conclusions.”
“Thank you,” said Midhat. “It has been wonderful having you here.”
“I am so glad the library is your home,” said Cogolati with a wink. “Until soon.”
The library door gonged shut, and echoed up the stacks. Midhat’s hunger was fading, as during a fast. He returned to the thread he had just dropped.
Perhaps Madame Molineu had not been normal. Perhaps she was “morbid.” But really, what did that prove in the end? It seemed worse to him than blaming an evil spirit. At least people would try to expel a spirit, and the victim was not isolated, they did not disbelieve her, nor diagnose her because they thought she did not have the symptoms she claimed. How could one tell if a symptom was not there, if it was not the kind of symptom that could be seen?
La France Intellectuelle, with her granite monuments engraved with birth dates and death dates and graduation dates, was a place of such unerring certainty that Midhat felt he was often gazing up her plinths in awe. Even in wartime the French argued from their lecterns, formulated between four walls; while in Nablus—in Nablus they reached for the supernatural when they were helpless, whether with prayers to God or the charms of a sheikh to protect them from the evil eye. Nabulsis spent their lives close to their graves, at nature’s mercy, and sought antidotes to the world’s pain in the vapours of ritual. Here in Europe the trains always ran on time, the streets were paved perpendicular, one did not feel the earth—and yet it seemed now to Midhat that these structures were also illusory. They gave only the appearance of rightness. For at times and in certain lights you could see it was a baseless fabric, which could be lifted. And one could reach a hand beneath, and beyond it feel the thin air.