Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“Please,” I begged the odometer. “Just say what you mean.”

“I mean this nonsense that no one is responsible for their actions. Everything is excusable because of its supposed root cause. It’s as if we were to decide Hitler had a perfect right to murder twelve million people in the camps because, after all, he was traumatized as a boy. Probably it was a Communist who rejected him when he applied to be an architect. Or was it a Jew? Anyway, that was abuse, wasn’t it? Or perhaps his father spanked him when he got poor grades and it was a Jew who gave him the F, so naturally he had to kill six million of them. You know, I can’t forgive the WASPs for what they did to Latin America, or their terrible arrogance about making money, as if it were a sacred act, a duty performed for God, but there was one thing you can give those Episcopalians, when they fucked up they believed it was their fault, not their toilet training.”

I turned to look at him, my head still resting on the wheel. My skin squeaked against the fake leather. Francisco’s face was flushed, eyes alive, staring through the window but not seeing what was there, a look of abstraction I remembered from my childhood. He wasn’t in Tampa with me. He was debating somewhere else, to a grander audience. “You were the one who taught me that the simpleminded morality of society isn’t the truth.”

“What?” He looked at me, annoyed. I had called him down from the thrilling heights.

“You were the one who taught me that property is theft, that ignorance isn’t stupidity, that slavery didn’t end with the Civil War, that—”

“Look.” Francisco waved a finger at me. He probably wished he had a rolled newspaper. “Of course. Of course. Everybody knows that. Only a cretin, a reactionary cretin, believes laws are the natural order, instead of rules made by the winner. But let’s say it happens one day. I mean, it’s laughable to say right now, but let’s say one day the earth is one government, a perfect communist world, with an abundance of goods, power completely decentralized, everything shared, everything democratic. There will still be thieves. There will still be criminals. I don’t know. Maybe it’s only ten percent of the population, maybe it’s five, maybe it’s twenty. Doesn’t matter. There will always be criminals. All of them,” he nodded toward Nebraska Avenue, empty now in the midday sun, but the night inhabitants were easy to recall, the whores and drug dealers and addicts—“all of those godforsaken people aren’t criminals. Some of them are without hope, without any reason to care. But some of them are bad, that’s all, pure and simple. And the same is true for the ruling classes. Many of them do what they do because they think it’s right. Some of them are scum who love to rule others. What people do, in the end, in their personal lives, is their responsibility. Understanding history doesn’t mean individuals aren’t to blame. It’s an incredible phenomenon what’s happening here. I don’t understand it. Politically, I mean.”

“Sure you do,” I mumbled. Sighing, I raised my head from the wheel, trying to straighten out. I was going to have to move on, get reservations, fly to New York, forget last night and today, call Phil Samuel, finish the book on Joseph’s work, get married, have children, age and die … I needed to sit up straight, look forward, and drive on, without clemency or pardon. “Of course Americans don’t want to accept responsibility for anything. We can’t, or we won’t, solve our problems on a social scale. It’s easier to go to a shrink than to rebuild our infrastructure.”

“So that’s what you think.” Francisco shifted in his seat. Sweat rolled down the sides of his temples.

“Do you want me to turn on the air?”

“Let’s open the windows.”

We rolled them down. Francisco breathed in Tampa’s warm pollution and sneezed. A finger under his nose he asked, “Then how can you be a psychiatrist?”

“I don’t treat those people, I treat …” I sighed. My father’s point of view, his impatience with child abuse, wasn’t as unusual as he liked to believe. People just don’t know. They hadn’t sat with me for all those hours, not with criminals trying to get a lighter sentence, not with celebrities looking for a hook to their autobiographies, but with the broken bodies and the lonely eyes of the abandoned. I sighed again and found my father regarding me with genuine curiosity, waiting for me to answer, perhaps for the first time in thirty years, actually prepared to listen. “I can’t make racism go away, Dad. I can’t convince my fellow citizens that owning a Mercedes isn’t as satisfying as having a just world. But I can pull a few of their discards out of the sewer and try to wash them clean.”

Francisco smiled with his lips closed, a gentle smile of regret and, I fancied, a smile of forgiveness. “You can’t change the world a person at a time.”

“I don’t think I can change the world, Dad.”

He turned away, looking at his childhood home. “What you mean is: the world can’t be changed. That’s what you think Cuba proves. That’s what you think this”—he gestured to the barred houses and the baking, empty streets—“this so-called triumph of capitalism proves. But you’re wrong.” He rolled up his window and opened the door. He put one foot out, then twisted his torso back in my direction, showing his handsome face, convinced of his command of me. “I’m seventy-four years old and I can assure you, the world can be changed. It has been changed. It’s been changed for the worse.”

“I DON‘T THINK YOU‘RE GOING TO FIND THE PEDIATRICIAN STUDY TO BE good news,” Phil told me when I reached him at home on Sunday. Diane was out, having brunch with an old friend. I sat on the couch, morosely watching the weekly television news roundup shows, listening to reporters and columnists pretend they were historians or psychics, making sweeping judgments about the importance of yesterday’s presidential news conference or equally confident predictions about the year ahead. (When the Berlin Wall came down none of them had been able to imagine a single brick would be chipped merely a few weeks before the event. Watching Tom & Jerry cartoons would have told me more about our political future.)

“Why is that?” I asked Phil, my finger on the remote’s mute button, wondering why Sam Donaldson didn’t spend more money on his toupee. At least, I hoped it was a toupee.

“Well, the best thing is for you to read it and you should look at one of the videos. I’ll send a video too, okay?”

“Sure. But give me the short version. What did you find?”

In the background I heard a little boy ask, “Dad! Come on! You said you were going to play.”

“Just a minute.” Although Phil’s words were harassed, his tone was friendly. “I’m talking to somebody for a minute, that’s all. Then we’ll finish the game. Now go outside and wait for me, okay?” He lowered his voice to explain to me, “I’m being shot with laser guns.”

“Hope it doesn’t hurt,” I said. Sam Donaldson had given way to a young woman in a string bikini, her buttocks undulating as she carried two six packs of beer across a pink beach heading for turquoise water. A young man who would not need Sam’s toupee for quite a while joined her and, in an unlikely action, seemed more interested in holding the beer than her.

“That’s the great thing about laser guns,” Phil said. “They make a lot of noise, but when they blow a hole in you, there’s no blood.”

“We must issue them to all the armies of the world.”

“Listen, Rafe,” he said, “this study is going to rock you. I’m sure you’ll be tempted to reject it out of hand, that’s why I hope you’ll look at the video. We used your techniques. You’ll see that. But it made no difference. Almost half the kids made up stuff about what the doctor did to them. Incredible stuff — sticking stethoscopes in their vaginas, ramming their anus with tongue depressors. One boy said the doctor swallowed his penis and wouldn’t give it back until he touched the doctor’s penis. Well, you’ll see. They had no trouble fantasizing without verbal cues. In terms of proving that children under six are reliable witnesses, it’s a disaster. I’m delivering the paper at the Arizona Children’s Forum in two weeks. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to recommend that psychologists refuse to assist child abuse prosecutions when the alleged victims are this young. God only knows how many innocent people we’ve ruined.”