The following morning, he woke in a particularly good mood, since a rumour had been going round at the newspaper that he was going to be taken on officially, which would mean he would be a real journalist, with a press card and a guaranteed salary. When he went downstairs, he was surprised to find his parents already up and waiting for him. Pedro was beside himself with rage, but he said nothing.
It was Lygia who spoke: ‘Paulo, we’re worried about your asthma and so we’ve made an appointment with the doctor for a check-up. Eat your breakfast because we’ve got to leave soon.’
A few minutes later, his father took the Vanguard out of the garage – a rare occurrence – and the three drove along the coast road towards the city centre. Seated in the back, absorbed in thought, Paulo gazed out at the fog over the sea, which made Guanabara bay look simultaneously melancholy and poetic. When they were halfway along Botafogo beach the car took a left turn into Rua Marquês de Olinda, drove another three blocks and drew up alongside a wall more than 3 metres high. The three got out and went over to a wrought-iron gate. Paulo heard his father say something to the gatekeeper and, moments later, saw a nun arrive to take them to a consulting room. They were in the Casa de Saúde Dr Eiras, a large hospital occupying various buildings and large mansions in the woods at the bottom of a hill.
The nun went ahead, showing his parents the way, with Paulo behind, not understanding what was going on. The four of them took a lift to the ninth floor and, as they walked down a long corridor towards the consulting room, the nun opened a door and showed Pedro and Lygia a bedroom with two beds and a window with an iron grille. She smiled, saying: ‘This is where the boy will sleep. As you can see, it’s a nice bright, spacious room.’
Paulo couldn’t understand what he was hearing and had no time to ask, since, by then, they were all in the doctor’s consulting room. Seated behind a desk was the psychiatrist Dr Benjamim Gaspar Gomes, a fifty-two-year-old man, bald, with small eyes and a pleasant face.
Astonished, Paulo turned to his parents: ‘If I’ve just come here for asthma tests, why have you booked a room for me?’
Pedro said nothing and Lygia gently tried to explain to her son that he was being admitted to an asylum. ‘You’re not going to school any more, and you’re not going to sleep at home. You left St Ignatius so that you wouldn’t be expelled and you’ve ended up failing at Andrews. On top of that you ran over the boy in Araruama …’
Then his father spoke for the first time: ‘This time, you’ve really overstepped the mark. Forging a signature, as you did mine, isn’t just a prank – it’s a crime.’
Things moved rapidly from then on. His mother said that she and his father had had a long talk with Dr Benjamim – a colleague of Pedro’s and a person whom the family trusted implicitly – and that they were all agreed that he was too excitable and needed medication, so it would be a good idea for him to spend a few days in this ‘rest home’. Before he could recover from the shock, his parents stood up, said goodbye and disappeared down the tiled corridor.
Suddenly he found himself alone, locked up in an asylum with his school file under his arm and a jacket over his shoulders, not knowing what to do. As though he thought it might still be possible to escape from this nightmare, he said to the doctor: ‘You mean you’re going to lock me up like a madman without examining me – no interview, nothing?’
Dr Benjamim smiled: ‘You’re not being admitted as a madman. This is a rest home. You’re just going to take some medicine and rest. Besides, I don’t need to interview you, I have all the information I need.’
No one with any common sense would think that the information given by Paulo’s father could justify this treatment: his parents’ complaints – that he was irritable, hostile, a bad student and ‘even politically opposed to his father’ – were not very different from the complaints that nine out of ten parents make about their adolescent children. His mother had more precise concerns and thought that her son ‘had problems of a sexual nature’. The three reasons for this suspicion are surprising, coming as they do from an intelligent and sophisticated woman like Lygia: her son had no girlfriends, he had refused circumcision to correct an overtight foreskin – phimosis – and, finally, it seemed, lately, that his breasts were developing like those of a girl. There was, in fact, an explanation for all of these ‘symptoms’, including the change in his breasts, which was nothing more than the side effect of a growth hormone prescribed by a doctor to whom she herself had taken him.
The only problem of a psychiatric nature that might have concerned his parents was one of which they were in fact unaware. Some months earlier, during one of his many sleepless, anxiety-filled nights, he had decided to kill himself. He went into the kitchen and began to block all the air vents with sticky tape and dusters. However, when it came to turning on the gas inlet from the street to the oven, his courage failed him. He saw with sudden clarity that he didn’t want to die: he only wanted his parents to notice his despair. He describes how, as he removed the last strip of tape from behind the door and started to go back to his room, he realized, terrified, that he had company: it was the Angel of Death. There was good reason for his panic, since he had read somewhere that, once summoned to Earth, the Angel never left empty-handed. He recorded the conclusion to this macabre encounter in his diary:
I could sense the smell of the Angel all around me, the Angel’s breath, the Angel’s desire to take someone away. I remained silent and silently asked what he wanted. He told me that he had been summoned and that he needed to take someone, to give an account of his work. Then I picked up a kitchen knife, jumped over the wall and landed in an empty plot of land where the people in the shanty towns kept their goats running free. I grabbed hold of one of them and slit its throat. The blood spurted up and went right over the wall, splattering the walls of my house. But the Angel left satisfied. From then on, I knew that I would never try to kill myself again.
Unless his parents had been so indiscreet as to read his diary – as he suspected some time later – the sacrifice of the goat, which at the time was attributed to some perverse evil-doer, could not have been one of their reasons for having him admitted to the asylum.
Still absorbing the shock of this new situation, Paulo was led to his room by a male nurse. As he leaned against the iron bars at the window, he was surprised by the beauty to be found in such a wretched place. From the ninth floor he had an unbroken view of the white sands of Botafogo beach, the Flamengo gardens and, in the background, the spectacular outline of Morro da Urca and Pão de Açucar. The bed beside his was empty, which meant that he would have to suffer his torment alone. In the afternoon, someone arrived from his house and handed over at the gate a suitcase with clothes, books and personal possessions. The day passed without incident.
Lying on his bed, Paulo thought of the options open to him: the first, of course, was to continue with his plan to be a writer. If this didn’t work out, the best thing would be to go mad as a convenient means to an end. He would be supported by the state, he wouldn’t have to work any more nor take on any responsibilities. This would mean spending a lot of time in psychiatric institutions, but, after a day wandering the corridors, he realized that the patients at the clinic didn’t behave ‘like the mad people you see in Hollywood films’: ‘Except for some pathological cases of a catatonic or schizophrenic nature, all the other patients are perfectly capable of talking about life and having their own ideas on the subject. Sometimes they have panic attacks, crises of depression or aggression, but they don’t last for long.’
Paulo spent the following days trying to get to know the place to which he had been confined. Talking to the nurses and employees, he discovered that 800 mentally ill people were interned at the clinic, and divided up according to the degree of their insanity and social class. The floor he was on was for the so-called ‘docile mad’ and those referred by private doctors, while the remainder, the ‘dangerously mad’ and those dependent on public health services, were in another building. The former slept in rooms with a maximum of two beds and a private bathroom and during the day they could move freely around the entire floor. However, you could only take the lift, the doors of which were locked, when accompanied by a nurse and a guide nominated by a doctor. All the windows,