Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“Let’s go back to before your father wrote the letter. You saw your parents being attacked in Tampa. You saw something happen to your mother. What did you see?”

“I saw her naked. I saw a man—” I stopped. A man peed on my mother, that’s what I remembered.

“You saw what? What was the man doing to her?”

“He was peeing.”

“You saw pee come out onto your mother?”

I said nothing. The Gusano had an erection. He pointed his erection at my mother’s face. No. On a city street? Out in the open? How could that be? I gave up, uneasy and angry. “What was he doing? You tell me.”

“I don’t know. You do. You were there.”

“Of course you know. Mom must have told you.”

“Your mother was ill. Very ill. You’re not. It’s possible, even probable, that you can remember better than she could. I know there’s part of you that wants to be ill, but you’re not. You can remember clearly and understand what you remember, especially if you don’t think about how you wished things were, or what your uncle wishes happened, but what actually did happen.”

“But I don’t remember clearly. I was scared. He was doing something, maybe planning to rape her, maybe peeing, I don’t know.”

“I understand. But yet you’re so sure your mother had an orgasm with you in bed?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure?”

I wasn’t. I looked down at my lap and wished I could see into myself and know the simple truth, no matter how ugly. “Why would I make it up?” I asked aloud.

“That’s an interesting question,” Halston said, his voice friendly again. He glanced at the clock. “Our time’s almost up. Maybe you should think about that. Did you want your mother to have sex with you?”

I could hardly breathe. Had everything in my head been a lie? Were the secrets not secrets, the lies not lies, the truth a fantasy? Had I been hiding nothing?

“But if it isn’t true, I’m crazy,” I blurted out, not really talking to Halston.

“That’s interesting. Why do you say that?”

“I’d have to be.”

“Does it shock you to know that at one time or another, all boys fantasize about being their mother’s lover?”

I shook my head no. Actually, it did. It shocked me, in this context, down to the bottom of my soul. I had vague knowledge, the conversational and literary awareness of Oedipus and of Freud using it to make a famous theory, but that went no further than a shadowy notion that sleeping with your mother leads to madness and that merely having the desire somehow caused emotional distress. What Halston was really referring to, infantile sexuality, was unknown to me.

“It doesn’t shock you?” Halston repeated.

“You mean, they dream about it?”

“No. There’s a period of time when all children wish to be their parent’s lover.”

I nodded wisely, although again I didn’t really understand.

[I’m not a fan of ignorance and I don’t approve of the general direction of modern education, toward specialized knowledge, and I dislike the silly love of professional jargon in psychology and psychiatry — indeed, writing this in laymen’s language is an attempt to counteract that. However, all that said, I sometimes wish educated people knew a lot less about psychology and psychiatry, rather than the partial and distorted information they do possess. Too often, in our time, an educated person discussing human psychology resembles a five-year-old operating a Mack truck.]

“What I mean to say,” Halston glanced again at his clock, “is that having sexual wishes and fantasies toward a parent is a universal experience during a certain time in childhood. But, of course, they aren’t acceptable to us. Even as children, they are taboo. So people sometimes distort, or become confused, about events or feelings or even just wishes toward their parent. Our time is up,” he said. He smiled awkwardly. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

By now, of course, professionals can foresee the course of my therapy with Dr. Halston. He took me through the rape, my father’s desertion, and my mother’s incestuous behavior, and — without making any direct assertions, so that I felt the insights were mine — convinced me of several important conclusions about my past. First, that whatever the anti-Castro Cuban may or may not have been doing to my mother while my father was being beaten and humiliated, I saw it as a sexual attack because, out of terror, that was how my unconscious translated the reality, using my own taboo wishes as source material for worldly evil. I knocked down the Cuban with the gun, horrified by the sight of my id on top of my mother, castrating my father in the process (the image of his “decapitated head” in the hands of his attacker), and substituting for him as my mother’s protector (with dangerous psychic consequences to myself). Hence, I felt that I had driven my father away from us (murdered him) and that I was obliged to take his place as my mother’s lover, “forced,” as it were, to fulfill the taboo Oedipal fantasy for which my mother, instead of me, was punished by madness and suicide. Of course, if Dr. Halston were presenting this interpretation, he would do so in much more learned — and coded — language, and without the details you have read of the actual events, many of them uncomfortably inconvenient to his analysis. Since Halston was in theory, if not in practice (he never put me on the couch and was only casually interested in my dreams), an unreformed Freudian, educated and trained in the 1930s and 40s, he is an easy target for criticism by a psychiatrist of my generation, but it is important to remember that, however misguided, he was applying his skill as he had been taught, and that he expected this understanding would help me. Even a great surgeon, holding a rusty penknife, can’t perform a successful heart transplant.

Unfortunately, thanks to my natural affinity with psychoanalytic thinking, I soaked up Dr. Halston’s analysis like a thirsty fanatic lost in the desert. What it meant to me emotionally was quite simple: I was an untamed beast whose life history was a fantasy. I had a new reason, a better reason, to keep my story secret. It was made up.

I resented my uncle more than ever. He had lured the loathsome creature in me out of its lair and gave it a club to kill my father. I said so to Halston. He, in turn, explained the concept of projection, and once again, there was no villain in the world but me. My ruthless uncle was just another dark face of Rafe’s, another monster from my subconscious. I was the whole world: I had swallowed reality and everything was born from me: God and Satan, love and death, truth and lies.

It was hardly a surprise, then, that Sandy was infatuated with me. I seemed, even to myself, to have become quite irresistible, in a dreadful sort of way. She called me every night that week and, much to Julie’s astonished and, I hoped, also jealous eyes, openly took me to bed with her the next Friday. That was how Sandy announced our affair to her roommates. The following morning we came to breakfast together, her arm draped around my bare shoulders — I was wearing only my underpants. I said in a friendly voice, “Hi Julie,” to my cousin’s grave expression.

Kathy, smoking a joint, hunched over the New York Times, looked up. “This is definitely heavy,” she said in a mumble.

“Sandy,” Julie said, nodding toward the hallway, “I have to talk to you.”

“About me and Rafe?” Sandy said, letting go of me. She moved to the coffee pot. “You want some?” she asked me.

“Yep,” I said and sat down. Kathy offered me the joint. I sucked in the harsh smoke and felt truly and beautifully evil. I had had intercourse three times that night, quadrupling my lifetime experience in a few hours. Sandy had taken me into her mouth, I had used my tongue the way I knew how to use my hand, I had rolled her nipples between my teeth, licked the soft tissue of her inner thighs and kissed the firm cheeks of her ass. I was brimming with self-hatred, but it was a supremely confident self-hatred. I may not be a genius, I thought, but I’m a genius at living.