The Psychiatrist & Other Stories

by Machado De Assis

  Crispim Soares was equally happy to be restored to the good graces of the alienist, whose unexpected announcement had convinced him that prudence is, indeed, the best policy in times of revolution. The apothecary appreciated the generous spirit of his old friend. At the time of Crispim’s release from the Casa Verde, the physician had offered his hand in a warm personal greeting.

  “He is truly a great man,” said the apothecary to his wife when he told her about Bacamarte’s gesture.

  There is no need to speak in detail about the mule outfitter, about Martim Brito, about Costa and Coelho, or about any of the others named in the previous pages of this narrative. Suffice it to say that they all returned to their old ways. The honey-tongued Martim Brito, who had been committed to the Casa Verde for his excessive admiration of Dona Evarista, delivered a speech praising the alienist as “an exalted genius that soars far above the sun, leaving behind all the other inhabitants of the earth.”

  “Thank you,” said the alienist, “for confirming that I was correct to release you.”

  In the meantime, the town council of Itaguaí, which had refrained initially from making any formal response to Simão Bacamarte’s official communication, met to address the last part of point four. At the meeting, it voted without debate to authorize the detention in the Casa Verde of persons displaying symptoms of a perfect equilibrium of all their mental faculties. As a result of the council’s painful prior experience, however, it added provisos making the authorization provisional for one year (a period deemed sufficient to test the alienist’s new theory) and reserving the right to close the Casa Verde by administrative decree whenever it deemed such a measure necessary for reasons of public safety. Councilman Freitas proposed, moreover, that in no case were members of the town council to be institutionalized, a final proviso that passed easily over the objection of Councilman Galvão. Galvão objected that a rigorous scientific experiment could not, without obvious logical inconsistency, exempt members of the town council. The councilmen shouted Galvão down, characterizing his objection as “audacious” and “senseless,” whereupon Galvão said merely that he maintained his vote against the exemption.

  “A seat on the town council,” he concluded, “does not alter the laws of nature, nor does it exempt us from the human condition.”

  Simão Bacamarte accepted all the council’s restrictions. He would regret having to institutionalize any councilmen, of course. Fortunately, their support of the exemption proved that, as a group, they did not suffer from a perfect equilibrium of all their mental faculties. The same could not be said, however, about Councilman Galvão, whose insightful analysis and moderate behavior revealed a well-balanced brain. He requested, therefore, that Galvão be interned in the Casa Verde. The other councilmen, still smarting from Galvão’s criticisms, approved the request unanimously.

  Understandably, a single act or utterance was no longer sufficient to get one committed to the Casa Verde. To the contrary, accurate diagnosis now required an extensive study of an individual’s personal history and present circumstances. Father Lopes, for example, was not detained until thirty days—and the apothecary’s wife, forty days—after the town council authorized the alienist to pursue his theory. His wife’s detention filled Crispim Soares with indignation. He went around bellowing with rage, telling everyone that he was going to box the tyrant’s ears. One of the alienist’s few enemies in Itaguaí found the apothecary’s threats so disturbing that, putting aside his animosity, he went straight to Simão Bacamarte’s residence to warn him. Simão Bacamarte thanked the man, whose truthfulness, good faith, sound judgment, and generosity of spirit he quickly ascertained. Shaking the man’s hand with pleasure and gratitude, he sent him to the Casa Verde.

  “What an extraordinary mind,” remarked the alienist to his astonished wife. “Now we’ll see about our Crispim.”

  Crispim Soares quickly appeared. Grief had overcome rage; he did not box the alienist’s ears. The latter consoled his friend and confidant, assuring him that all was not lost. Crispim’s wife might have a mental disorder that had escaped detection so far. One could only hope. The alienist promised a thorough examination, but until then he could not release her in good conscience. On the other hand, considering that the husband’s cowardice and lack of integrity could be a therapeutic influence on his consort, Simão Bacamarte offered to let the apothecary eat and sleep with her in the Casa Verde.

  “You can still work in your shop every day.”

  The proposal placed the apothecary on the horns of a dilemma once again. He wanted to be in touch with his wife, but he was afraid to reenter the Casa Verde. The poor man remained speechless until Dona Evarista offered to visit Crispim’s wife on his behalf every day and carry messages back and forth between them. The apothecary kissed her hands, babbling his gratitude, a gesture of pusillanimous selfishness that set the alienist’s eyes twinkling.

  After five months, he had eighteen patients again, but still the man of science did not rest. He went from street to street, from house to house, watching, asking questions, taking notes. He interned each new patient with the kind of enthusiasm that he had felt earlier when committing people by the dozen. The smaller numbers confirmed that he had at last discovered the true principles of cerebral pathology. One day he even had the chief magistrate of the district court sent to the Casa Verde, but only after the most scrupulous and painstaking investigation and only with the approval of the most prominent citizens of Itaguaí. More than once he was about to detain someone who turned out to be perfectly unbalanced. Such was the case of a certain lawyer, a man in whom the alienist identified such fine moral and mental qualities that it seemed dangerous to leave him at large. He ordered the man’s arrest, but the arresting officer suspected that something was amiss, and he asked permission to conduct an experiment. The officer went to talk with a friend who was trying to gain an inheritance that was not his, and he recommended that his friend retain the legal services of Salustiano, for that was the name of the lawyer in question.

  “So you think … ?”

  “Tell him everything, the whole truth, and see if he will take the case.”

  The friend went to talk with Salustiano and confessed to him that he had falsified the will. Salustiano did not decline the case. He studied all the documentation, analyzed it thoroughly, and demonstrated in court, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the will was authentic. The judge solemnly awarded the inheritance to Salustiano’s client, and thanks to the result of this experiment, the distinguished attorney avoided internment in the Casa Verde. However, nothing escapes the penetrating intelligence of a truly brilliant mind. Simão Bacamarte, who had been observing the zeal, sagacity, and patience of his arresting officer for some time, became so impressed by the officer’s skill in conducting the delicate investigation that he lodged him in one of the best rooms in the Casa Verde.

  The alienist had reorganized the Casa Verde according to various categories of insanity. There was a ward for those who were excessively modest, another for the incurably loyal, a third for those whose most notable defect was truthfulness or sincerity, a fourth for the regrettably wise, a fifth for the deplorably magnanimous, and so on. The friends and relatives of his patients naturally protested against the new theory. Some demanded that the town council rescind the operating license of the Casa Verde. The councilmen remembered the annoying language of Galvão, however. Rescinding the license would imply Galvão’s release and restoration to a seat on the council, so the councilmen refused. In a subsequent communication, Simão Bacamarte congratulated them on their display of petty spite.

  At this point, a few leading citizens of Itaguaí appealed secretly to Porfírio the barber, promising him money, men, and material support if he began a new movement to overthrow the alienist and the town council. They assured him of their influence at the court of the viceroy in Rio de Janeiro, promising to intervene on his behalf. The barber declined. Overweening ambition had once led him to violate the law, but he now r
ecognized his errors and was resolved not to repeat them. The council had authorized the alienist to test his revised theory for a year. Therefore, the proper course was to petition the council and, if the council declined, to petition the viceroy. He could not encourage, and much less participate in, a tactic that had failed disastrously in the past at a cost in blood that caused him endless remorse.

  “He said what?” exclaimed the alienist when his spies informed him of the secret conversation.

  Two days later, the barber was back in the Casa Verde, muttering that he just couldn’t win.

  At the end of a year, the council authorized an additional six-month trial period to allow adequate testing of the alienist’s new therapies. No episode in the annals of Itaguaí ends more unexpectedly, and no episode is more significant. A full recounting would require perhaps ten further chapters of exposition, but I will make do with a single chapter, a chapter containing one of the most sublime examples of scientific objectivity and integrity imaginable.

  XIII

  Ever Onward!

  After diagnosis comes therapy. Simão Bacamarte, so tireless and perspicacious in diagnosing all forms of dementia, excelled even more in the delicate science of treatment. All of the old chronicles concur completely on this point: the illustrious alienist accomplished truly prodigious cures, exciting astonishment and enthusiasm in Itaguaí.

  His therapeutic method was straightforward. Having categorized his patients according to their salient traits, Simão Bacamarte made a frontal assault on the problematic perfection of each. Take, for example, modesty. The alienist applied a treatment designed to stimulate the contrary quality—in this case, vanity. He initiated therapy not with a maximum dose, but rather, applied an escalating dosage carefully graduated according to the age, temperament, physical condition, and social position of the patient in question. A wig, a ribbon, a tailcoat, or a walking stick might be all that was required to restore a healthy imbalance of the mental faculties. In other cases, the disease proved more persistent, and the alienist applied a diamond ring or an honorary degree. There was one lunatic, a poet, whose perfect mental stability seemed unshakable. Simão Bacamarte had almost despaired of curing him, when he thought of sending out the noisemaker to announce in the streets that the lunatic’s poetry rivaled the greatest compositions of all time.

  “It was a miracle cure,” said the poet’s mother. “A miracle cure!”

  Another madman, suffering from a similar delirium, also resisted treatment. Not being a writer (he could barely sign his name), this patient was not susceptible to the noisemaker cure. Simão Bacamarte moved the dosage to the highest level, asking His Majesty to confer a title of nobility on the poor man. The approach was admittedly desperate and fraught with delay. Lisbon denied the request initially, whereupon the alienist specified that the title could be strictly honorific and therapeutic, and the government finally acquiesced as an exceptional and temporary measure, given its utility for the advancement of medical science. One chronicler alleges that the request might never have been granted were it not for the intervention of the minister of overseas and naval affairs, the patient’s second cousin once removed.

  Another miracle cure.

  “It’s really remarkable,” commented the populace of Itaguaí, observing the healthful expression of conceit on the faces of the two ex-lunatics.

  Such was the method. The rest may easily be imagined. The alienist assaulted the seeming moral or mental perfection of each sufferer at what appeared its strongest point, with unfailing results. Or rather, when the frontal assault failed, the alienist made a flanking attack, like a good military strategist, on some lesser virtue, and having breached the patient’s defenses he overwhelmed the primary virtue from behind.

  After five and a half months all the patients had been cured, and the Casa Verde stood empty. Councilman Galvão, so cruelly afflicted with integrity, had the good fortune to lose an uncle. The uncle left an ambiguous will, subject to varying interpretations, and Galvão managed to cheat the other heirs and keep the entire inheritance for himself. Simão Bacamarte showed his sincerity, on that occasion, by admitting that he had played no part in the cure. The treatment of Father Lopes was a different matter. Knowing that the vicar could read neither Hebrew nor Greek, the alienist asked him to write a critical assessment of the Greek translation of the Old Testament. Father Lopes accepted the challenge and, two months later, he had a lengthy manuscript and his freedom. As for the apothecary’s wife, she did not stay long in the Casa Verde.

  “Why doesn’t Crispim come to visit me?” she asked every day.

  The staff offered one excuse or another, but finally they told her exactly what had happened. The worthy matron could not contain her fury:

  “What an ingrate! That cheat! A fortune he’s made peddling medications with false ingredients a thousand years old!”

  Observing that, whatever the truth or falsehood of her utterances, a healthful imbalance of her mental faculties had clearly been restored, the alienist discharged the good woman from the Casa Verde within the hour.

  Now if you imagine that the alienist was thrilled to discharge the last of his patients, you still do not know our man. His motto was Ever Onward! For him, it was not enough to have discovered the true theory of mental illness, not sufficient to have restored the reign of Reason to Itaguaí. Ever Onward! Rather than elated, he was troubled and pensive. Something told him that beyond his new theory lay another, even newer theory.

  “Let us see,” he said to himself, “if I can discover the ultimate truth.”

  Such were his thoughts as he paced back and forth in his vast library, the largest in all His Majesty’s overseas dominions. A damask robe tied at the waist with a silken cord embroidered with gold (the gift of a European university) enveloped his body. A powdered wig covered his head, grown bald from years of scientific cogitation. His feet, neither too delicate nor too large, precisely proportioned to the rest of his body, were encased by a pair of buckled shoes—their buckles neither of gold nor of silver, but rather, of simple, modest brass. Observe the contrast. His only luxuries were those of academic origin. All else was simple and unassuming, exactly as befits a truly wise man.

  Back and forth he went, the great alienist, from one end to the other of his vast library, lost in meditation, oblivious to everything except the daunting intellectual problem of cerebral pathology. Suddenly, he stopped. Standing at a window, with his left elbow in his open right hand and his chin on his closed left hand, he asked himself:

  “Were they really insane? And did I really cure them? Or …”

  And digging deeper, he concluded that he really could not claim to have added anything to his patients’ already existing mental faculties. The apparent cures had simply revealed an underlying mental imbalance that was present all along—latent, perhaps, but present.

  This conclusion produced in the spirit of the illustrious alienist two contrary reactions: gratification and discouragement. He felt gratified that, after such arduous labors and prolix investigations, he could at long last affirm the following truth: Nobody was crazy in Itaguaí, nobody at all. But no sooner had this idea refreshed his soul, than another sprang forth to discourage him. The second idea was doubt. Was it possible that Itaguaí possessed not a single perfectly balanced mind? Must not such a conclusion be, ipso facto, erroneous? And did it not, therefore, invalidate all his theories and destroy the majestic scientific edifice that he had so patiently erected?

  According to the old chroniclers of Itaguaí, the affliction experienced by the egregious Simão Bacamarte at that moment figures among the most awesome spiritual tempests in the annals of mankind. Tempests terrify only the weak, however. The strong confront the thunder and do not tremble, but only grow stronger. After twenty minutes, a gentle light illuminated the face of the alienist.

  “Yes, it must be that,” he thought.

  And “that” was this. Simão Bacamarte had found all the characteristics of a perfect mental and
moral equilibrium within himself. Patience, sagacity, tolerance, veracity, perseverance, loyalty—all the qualities, in other words, that defined madness. He had reservations about this conclusion, too, of course, and almost discarded it as illusory. Prudent man that he was, however, he assembled a jury of his friends and asked for a frank opinion. Their verdict was affirmative.

  “No defects?”

  “None,” they replied with one voice.

  “No vices?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Utterly perfect?”

  “Utterly.”

  “No,” cried the alienist, “impossible! I do not feel that sort of magnificent superiority. Your affection for me has skewed your judgment. I cannot find in myself anything to justify your excessively kind assessment.”

  The jury insisted, the alienist resisted, and Father Lopes finally clinched the matter:

  “You cannot recognize in yourself the superior qualities that we all admire because … you are too modest.”

  The observation was decisive. Simão Bacamarte bowed his head, both sad and happy, but a bit happier than sad. Immediately, he interned himself in the Casa Verde. His wife and his friends begged him not to do it. There was absolutely nothing wrong with him, they said. But pleading and tears were to no avail.

  “This is a scientific question,” he affirmed. “A new approach to alienism in which I embody both theory and practice.”

  “Simão! Simão, my love!” said his wife, her face bathed in tears.