GabriellaSivilla
Governor
I am carried into this clinic by the two hospital staff who have accompanied me in the car from the Mestre, they help to lie down on a hospital trolley. I am shaking with loud sobbing, in the grip of hysterical crying. A doctor approaches, touches my wrist, inspects my eyes with a bright light, lifting the eyelids, moving the small light, perhaps to see if I follow his movements ... No, I don’t follow, the light irritates me, and I have in my eyes those tragic images of that body splattered on the cobble-stones, with those strange wounds. After a few minutes the doctor returns holding a syringe, I don’t even have time to ask what he is doing, or to resist, the needle enters a vein in my arm, in a short time my vision is blurred ...
I am awakened by the trilling of an electric bell. I am now lying in a bed, drips are releasing their rosy liquid drop by drop with exasperating slowness. Around me I see other figures, also in their beds, also connected to drips. Meanwhile a doctor arrives, inserts the needle of a syringe into the rubber stopper of a bottle and injects the contents. This time my vision does not fade ... The sounds in this large room are muffled, light penetrating from high windows illuminates the dust that lingers hesitantly, disturbed only by the movement of air when one of the busy nurses crosses the cone of light. They are distributing breakfast, a cup of hot tea, four biscuits ...
I understand that life in this clinic (leper-house, prison, asylum or gulag?) is regulated by the sound of the bells, as if they are alarms. They seem to use a sort of morse code, a prolonged trill followed by a short, or vice versa, or later a combination of long and short sounds – I shall have to learn the meaning. There are no clocks on the walls, time passes slowly or quickly only in relation to the interval between one alarm and another.
During the afternoon (as I take it to be, since we have eaten lunch) I am allowed to get up, I am escorted to what will be my room, a room with two beds, one to the right and the other to the left of a central window, a small wardrobe for each of the patients, a night table, a chair - like a monastic cell.
Do I have to wear this uniform, the in-patients’ (or prisoners’?) uniform? A long coat of heavy white canvas, shapeless, without a belt (dangerous, you can use it to hang yourself?) A pair of plastic slippers, not uncomfortable. All personal items will be kept in a basket in a locker. My room-mate, (or fellow-prisoner?) Is absent at the moment. She has scattered on the windowsill, and hung on long strings, many small crosses - I wonder why, perhaps a kind of devotion, or a symptom of psychosis ? I'll get to understand ...
I sit in consternation on the bed, staring at my feet stuck in these strange slippers. The attendant who has accompanied me warns me that at the next buzz of the bell I have to go down, using the corridor and the stairs we have just come by, to go out into the courtyard. In the afternoon we spend some time outdoors (prisoners' exercise time?). The regulations require that we may not talk with the lay staff who work at the clinic, we can only address the nursing nuns, and even among us inmates talking is are prohibited.
The bell warns me of the planned interval out of doors. I go out, there is no key to the room, I walk along the corridor hesitantly, find the stairs, go down them, now I'm in an atrium, there are other women waiting for the signal to go out into the courtyard. No talking, they look but they do not see each other, each one closed in her world apart. Anxiety grips me as I go out, but it is not the same side as the entrance, under the bell-tower from which the miserable suicide hurled herself.
I sit on a wooden bench, my thoughts still focused on this tragic event. Now I'm those moments: the figure that appears on the parapet of the tower is shaking with fear - but of what? She seems to want to escape from some danger, even if she is being driven into worse danger. She seems to be being pursued by someone - but by whom? She look back, but what does she see? Of course her pursuer. Gazing into the emptiness is terrifying, yet she decides to throw herself off, her fear is greater than the emptiness that is about to receive her, or she has decided that it is better to end her life than to fall into the hands of those who are hunting her like prey?
The slow-motion images of the fall are now indelibly impressed in my mind, they slide one after the other in front of my closed eyes: the image of the horribly tortured body is burnt into my soul. The blood, the wounds, and those deep incisions around the wrists and ankles, as if they had been bound with rough ropes, as if she had been trying for a long time to get free of them, and then finally succeeded, and then searched for a way to escape, but then she realised that everything was hopeless, that the brute who had imprisoned her was chasing her, that she had chosen the wrong way, and only found the tragic alternative, die or return into the hands of those who were torturing her. She chose the first, but who was pursuing her? Certainly it was someone who is still within these walls, but who? Has nobody any suspicions? Did that poor woman commit suicide just because she was crazy? Why was she being treated in a clinic for mad people? And why am I in such a clinic?
The summoning bell interrupts my dark thoughts. It's already dinner time, we eat early in hospitals ...
I am awakened by the trilling of an electric bell. I am now lying in a bed, drips are releasing their rosy liquid drop by drop with exasperating slowness. Around me I see other figures, also in their beds, also connected to drips. Meanwhile a doctor arrives, inserts the needle of a syringe into the rubber stopper of a bottle and injects the contents. This time my vision does not fade ... The sounds in this large room are muffled, light penetrating from high windows illuminates the dust that lingers hesitantly, disturbed only by the movement of air when one of the busy nurses crosses the cone of light. They are distributing breakfast, a cup of hot tea, four biscuits ...
I understand that life in this clinic (leper-house, prison, asylum or gulag?) is regulated by the sound of the bells, as if they are alarms. They seem to use a sort of morse code, a prolonged trill followed by a short, or vice versa, or later a combination of long and short sounds – I shall have to learn the meaning. There are no clocks on the walls, time passes slowly or quickly only in relation to the interval between one alarm and another.
During the afternoon (as I take it to be, since we have eaten lunch) I am allowed to get up, I am escorted to what will be my room, a room with two beds, one to the right and the other to the left of a central window, a small wardrobe for each of the patients, a night table, a chair - like a monastic cell.
Do I have to wear this uniform, the in-patients’ (or prisoners’?) uniform? A long coat of heavy white canvas, shapeless, without a belt (dangerous, you can use it to hang yourself?) A pair of plastic slippers, not uncomfortable. All personal items will be kept in a basket in a locker. My room-mate, (or fellow-prisoner?) Is absent at the moment. She has scattered on the windowsill, and hung on long strings, many small crosses - I wonder why, perhaps a kind of devotion, or a symptom of psychosis ? I'll get to understand ...
I sit in consternation on the bed, staring at my feet stuck in these strange slippers. The attendant who has accompanied me warns me that at the next buzz of the bell I have to go down, using the corridor and the stairs we have just come by, to go out into the courtyard. In the afternoon we spend some time outdoors (prisoners' exercise time?). The regulations require that we may not talk with the lay staff who work at the clinic, we can only address the nursing nuns, and even among us inmates talking is are prohibited.
The bell warns me of the planned interval out of doors. I go out, there is no key to the room, I walk along the corridor hesitantly, find the stairs, go down them, now I'm in an atrium, there are other women waiting for the signal to go out into the courtyard. No talking, they look but they do not see each other, each one closed in her world apart. Anxiety grips me as I go out, but it is not the same side as the entrance, under the bell-tower from which the miserable suicide hurled herself.
I sit on a wooden bench, my thoughts still focused on this tragic event. Now I'm those moments: the figure that appears on the parapet of the tower is shaking with fear - but of what? She seems to want to escape from some danger, even if she is being driven into worse danger. She seems to be being pursued by someone - but by whom? She look back, but what does she see? Of course her pursuer. Gazing into the emptiness is terrifying, yet she decides to throw herself off, her fear is greater than the emptiness that is about to receive her, or she has decided that it is better to end her life than to fall into the hands of those who are hunting her like prey?
The slow-motion images of the fall are now indelibly impressed in my mind, they slide one after the other in front of my closed eyes: the image of the horribly tortured body is burnt into my soul. The blood, the wounds, and those deep incisions around the wrists and ankles, as if they had been bound with rough ropes, as if she had been trying for a long time to get free of them, and then finally succeeded, and then searched for a way to escape, but then she realised that everything was hopeless, that the brute who had imprisoned her was chasing her, that she had chosen the wrong way, and only found the tragic alternative, die or return into the hands of those who were torturing her. She chose the first, but who was pursuing her? Certainly it was someone who is still within these walls, but who? Has nobody any suspicions? Did that poor woman commit suicide just because she was crazy? Why was she being treated in a clinic for mad people? And why am I in such a clinic?
The summoning bell interrupts my dark thoughts. It's already dinner time, we eat early in hospitals ...
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