Jesse Ball - A Cure for Suicide

It was my idea the following day that if she was strong enough, we should take another walk into town. She wanted to, but felt that we should wait a day. I insisted that it would do her good, that waiting a day might just make her settle into a sort of lassitude from which she would only emerge when we had returned to the city, and then we would have lost the opportunity once more to see the town. We might never come back here again, I said. Oh, we shall come back many times, she disagreed. But, all the same, I forced her out the door, and we made it about a quarter of the way to the town before I realized what an awful idea it had been. She was absolutely overtaxed. She could barely stand. We stood there in a sort of alpine clearing, the path going up on one side and down on the other. Even the vegetation appeared taxed. I can go no further, she said. She didn’t say anything. She would never say that she couldn’t go on. It wasn’t her way. Instead, she sat there and wept soundlessly. That was her way of giving up. I carried her back to the house and installed her again in the daybed. I got her water and some food. Then, I drove down into town to fetch more things, and returned, and made her supper. By the evening, she was feeling better again, although she was weaker than I had ever seen her. She had taken off her clothing. She wore just a loose pair of pants and a shawl. She lay on the bed, her head propped on a pillow. When I entered the room, she smiled. When I came again, with supper, she sat up and, leaving the shawl, came to me there in the middle of the room. She was mad with energy, then, I told the interlocutor. But, as soon as we were finished, she was exhausted again, and I had practically to feed her the supper spoon by spoon.

When supper was through, I told her about my visit to the town. I told her the wineseller had been talking to me about her brother’s death again. She said that he always talks about it. He had a son who was best friends with my brother, and the family took it hard. In fact, the wineseller himself was probably her fifth or sixth cousin, related at some insurmountable distance. I had mentioned this thing, my conversation with the man, as a way of gaining territory. I wanted her to feel that I was conversant with the town and with the past. That even, separate from her, I could navigate the waters of her past and of her family’s past, and that furthermore, to others I was identifiable as someone connected to her. All of this was present when I had said, the wineseller talked more to me of your brother. But, if this statement had the effect that I wanted, I did not see it. Rather, it plunged her into a sadness in which she could think only of her family illness. She wanted to speak of it with me. Now she would tell me about it. The family illness. Before, she hadn’t said anything of it to me, but now perhaps it was good for me to know, and why not from her, rather than from strangers like this wineseller, who, after all, does not know the real account, or the real ideas, but goes along filling in the narrative with his own creations, or so she supposed. You wouldn’t believe, I told the interlocutor, how carefully she laid out these mental objects, the mythology of her family’s illness. She said to me that she had never spoken about it to anyone before, to anyone who had not had complete knowledge about it, and so, she would be clumsy in talking. She was unused to ignorance on this subject, as everyone in her family possessed knowledge about it that predated her own. Still she would try. She told me that her family was known, in the places where they historically had owned land, as a family of effete languishers. They were practically defined by their illness. One after another, for seven hundred years, as far back as the family goes, the illness has struck again and again. The only way out of it, she confided, is to die in some physical accident. Even in this age of medicine, there has been no advancement. And why? Because, she said, it is not worth it for the world at large to put medical resources to work on a problem that affects.000000014 percent of the population. I don’t know if that is the actual number, she said, but if it isn’t that one, it is one like it. During the Renaissance, the family had been wealthy, much wealthier than they are now, and they had employed doctors specifically to find a cure. Of course, the state of medicine was such that it was useless. They tried to cure it with alchemy. This was not a joke. Vast wealth had been spent trying to save her family from an illness using alchemy. If it had worked, her brother would still be living. In fact, before that, before her brother’s death, when she allowed herself to think about the illness more often, it had occurred to her, and she had once actually said so to her father, that the money had been ill spent. Ill spent? Her father had not understood. His daughter, eight years old, was standing before him, telling him that their fifteenth-century predecessors had misspent funds. What could she mean, so I told the interlocutor, that’s what she said to me, explaining her father’s turn of mind concerning his young daughter’s statement. I told him, she said, continuing, that if our ancestors had set aside the sum used to employ those doctors, quite a large sum, and set those monies at compound interest for all of the time until now, medicine would have changed, would have become useful, actually useful, as it is now, rather than useless, as it was then, and we would have the money to employ scientists and doctors to find a cure. Her father and mother had enjoyed this idea very much, and had often brought it out as evidence of their daughter’s brilliant impudence, relating it at dinner parties. So often have they told it, so Rana said to me, sitting there in my arms on the daybed, that I tired of it and never wanted to hear the story. But I tell it to you now, as it makes sense to hear it. The other idea that was had, and this was a very good idea — it was had during the nineteenth century, by some woman of the family who went on to be an abbess, who actually left the family to be an abbess. All the same, she had an idea for the family, as a young woman, while still with the family. That idea was: we could benefit from marrying others, and not marrying with the group of ourselves. Breed it out of us, so she said. Although this suggestion was taken very seriously, it could not be effected. Why was that? I asked her. The reason is this: almost no one in my family can tolerate the presence or conversation of those not in my family. Although we are in some sense a populous family, although in each generation there are between seven and ten children, every house a full house, she said, still it is true that it remains the same blood. Cousins marry cousins marry cousins. Occasionally sister marries brother. And why? Because we are all so sensitive. We simply cannot bear to speak with or be with other people. Therefore, a feeling grew up in the family, within the family, one never spoken of, that the illness is simply what we deserve. She told me this and I told the interlocutor, saying it with the same emphasis she used, what we deserve. That my father, for instance, she continued, deserves to die based upon his parents’ inability to tolerate the company of regular people. That my brother deserved to die based upon my father’s inability to tolerate anyone other than my mother. But, what about, I said, you and I have met and we are together. If we were to have children…I don’t think I need to tell you, she said, what the general feeling is in my family about you. It is regrettable, but we shouldn’t hide from it. She laid her head against my neck. It isn’t your fault, she said, but they don’t really want to see you around. They have, you see, certain things that they want to talk about, and they only want to talk about those things, and they only want to talk about them in a particular way. You could imagine yourself, perhaps, now, as we sit here talking, thinking of a way that you could isolate, through careful study, what are the exact things that my parents, and their brothers and sisters, my great-aunts, my great-uncles, the whole clan of them, settled at a long table or beneath an arbor at a gathering, would want to talk about, what those things are and what they are not. You imagine now that you could isolate, she used the word again, these things, and that having done so you could take part, meritoriously, in such a conversation. But, in fact, it just isn’t true. You would begin to say something and immediately you would go awry. You would miss a subtlety of phrasing, and a feeling would spread through the crowd — disdain. It wouldn’t be your fault at all. Darling, I feel that you are their equal, that you are equal to every last one of them, even to them all gathered together. Wasn’t I the one who said, let us go to a foreign city? Didn’t I say it just yesterday or the day before? I did. Yet, you aren’t good enough for them, not in the way that you want. And when I am there, with them, it is even hard for me, much as I champion you, to listen as you put your foot wrong again and again and again. Even when we speak of something like, the last time you came to visit the house, you see now what a thing it has been for me to have you visit, and still, I had you visit again and again and again, don’t you see what that means, well, when you last came to visit — there was said, my father, he told us a story about his work. You remember, he said that he was conducting an examination of the Hruezfeldt dam, along with two of his brothers, who are all amateurs by the way, none of my family has ever professionally done anything, nonetheless they are brought in to consult often on matters of every sort by government, because of their extreme expertise. You recall that he said the problem of the dam was not a physical problem, but an economical problem. The government itself, in its maintenance of the dam, might as well be standing there at Hruezfeldt with its finger blocking the dam. That was the manner in which the Hruezfeldt dam problem was holding back the province at large from taking effective action in any number of spheres. Do you remember what you said then, in response? She remembered, I told the interlocutor, the entire conversation, a conversation I had utterly forgotten. I had to tell her that I did not remember. At that very moment I wanted to be for her a person who remembered everything and who therefore perhaps, beyond all possibility, possessed a chance of earning her father’s respect. But even in that one minor incident of our conversation about a conversation, even there, away from her family, I was forced to capitulate and explain that I could not remember what had been said, so I told the interlocutor shamefully. He looked on, waiting for me to continue.