Teach Us to Sit Still

by Tim Parks

  In the event, the encounter was so similar to that of twenty years before as to be uncanny. The waiting room at the London clinic was polished and quiet. The secretary was discreet, polite. I was ushered into the doctor’s surgery only three or four minutes after the appointed hour. My seat was comfortable and the elderly doctor, on the further shore of an impressively old-fashioned desk, was lean, accommodating and avuncular.

  The doctor listened to my story with attention. He looked carefully at the various test results that I had brought and remarked on the excellent quality of the X-ray images. Having absorbed all the facts, or as many as anyone can absorb in just a few minutes, he took me into a small side room, invited me to remove my trousers and performed a manual inspection of testicles and prostate. The finger he inserted was experienced and respectful. He then had me lie down and carried out an ultrasound scan. Well-equipped and diligent, he was doing as much as one man in a single appointment can possibly do. Yet when we sat down again, each side of his leather-topped desk, I knew he had nothing to tell me and that I had come, in fact, precisely to confirm that this experienced man at the top of his profession would have nothing to tell me. Or just in case, as it were. I had come just in case by some miracle he had something to tell me.

  He didn’t.

  I was right, the doctor said, to hesitate before undergoing surgery. Aside from some mild calcification, the prostate seemed healthy. My problem, judging from his ultrasound and the hospital X-rays, was very likely one of bladder-neck dyssynergia, a failure, that is, of the urinary sphincter to relax and dilate fully on urination. How this then provoked the many pains I was having he couldn’t say. He smiled. The solution, he went on, despite my previous unhappy experiences, was an alpha blocker; this would encourage the sphincter to relax; and he suggested I try first Alfuzosin and, if I wasn’t happy with that, Tamsulosin. He wrote a legible prescription. Both drugs could cause retrograde ejaculation and mild postural hypotension (call it dizziness), but I would get over that and could carry on taking them indefinitely. I could also use saw palmetto, if I so desired, and should achieve orgasm daily ‘in one way or another’. Occasional impotence, he reassured me, was a passing phenomenon and typical of these conditions and the anxieties they aroused. Tall and erect, he shook my hand firmly and told me not to hesitate to be in touch were my condition to alter in any significant way. It was probably the most civilised encounter I ever had with a doctor. And the most expensive.

  Outside, instead of heading towards the pharmacy his secretary had courteously directed me to, I crossed the Euston Road and found a seat in Regent’s Park, feeling extremely uncomfortable. ‘Medicines are not the answer,’ I said out loud. I was depressed and resigned. At no point, as I recalled, had the doctor suggested that the medicines he prescribed would reduce the pains I was having, only the night-time trips to the bathroom. Without evidence of organic damage, pains were perhaps unimportant. At least to doctors. ‘That is the last time,’ I said, even louder, ‘the very last time that I will go to a doctor about this condition.’ Hadn’t everything I had read on the net confirmed the pointlessness of such visits? Wasn’t it weird, in fact, the way everybody imagined that when you were ill all you had to do was go to a doctor and get yourself prescribed a medicine? How did that happen? Dr Piggott was the name of our family doctor in Blackpool. He wore a large overcoat and pulled a gleaming stethoscope from the traditional black bag. I can remember its cold touch on my chest. When you had measles, or chicken pox, or bronchitis, he prescribed a medicine and you got better. Whether you got better because of the medicine was another matter but the sequence of events was dependable. Even my brother had got better from his polio, in a way, despite the damage it left him with. This was because the body was something that could be represented by diagrams in textbooks and the doctors had understood everything about it.

  My evangelical parents reinforced this belief in conventional science and medicine. My father, in particular, was eager for his children to study the sciences and was intensely disappointed when first my sister dropped out of school, then my brother abandoned maths and physics for art, and finally I dropped all sciences after O levels and studied literature. A matter-of-fact believer, my father didn’t trust literature. Science was a manifestation of God’s unerring, rational laws; it was respectable to study those laws and manipulate them to the benefit of mankind. Literature all too often was the product of man’s interminable bellyaching about his fallen condition. ‘Bellyaching!’ he fumed. It was the word he used to dismiss any attempt to quibble with the perfection of creation. I wondered whether, alive today, Dad would associate this bellyache I had with my agnosticism.

  There was, of course, another kind of intervention which could cure an illness if medical science failed. When I was in my early teens my parents became involved in the ‘charismatic movement’. They were ‘baptised in the spirit’, ‘spoke in tongues’, were ‘given prophesies’ and ‘words of wisdom’; they performed exorcisms and celebrated the laying on of hands. Perhaps, trusting firmly in science, they were well-disposed to acknowledge miracles, if only to cover those occurrences that official medicine can’t account for. Like the doctor’s syrups, divine healing required no effort or self-knowledge on the part of the sufferer; neither my father nor mother paid much attention to their bodies. On the other hand, it was not available on the National Health and you couldn’t get it on demand. It was up to God. You could pray, intercede, beseech (what lovely words), but you couldn’t count on God’s intervention, nor systematise it afterwards. The thing about a miracle was that it left nature’s (rational) laws unchanged. ‘Rational’ was a very important word for my father, and absolutely beyond criticism. So was faith. In the best Cartesian tradition, these two mental dispositions divided the world between them, without needing to communicate with each other: science was not invited to cross-examine the miraculous, nor did the miracle seek to force its way into anyone’s academic publications. Each ruled supreme in its separate dimension. Everything else – astrology, yoga, hypnotism, dream interpretation, meditation, mesmerism, marijuana, rock music, psychedelic design, the whole of the paranormal or the merely oriental – was the work of the devil.

  In this regard, I remember how once, in a fit of adolescent enthusiasm, I tried to read my mother some lines from The Four Quartets.

  ‘To communicate with Mars . . .’ I began – she was on the sofa knitting and I at the table doing my homework – ‘. . . converse with spirits,

  To report the behaviour of the sea monster,

  Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,

  Observe disease in signatures . . .

  I had chosen the passage carefully, sure that when we got to the closing lines

  . . . are usual

  Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:

  she would be pleased with Eliot’s irony at the expense of pagan superstition and thus reconciled to the study of literature. I was looking for Mum’s approval, trying to bring our worlds together, not seeking to provoke.

  We never got to those lines. ‘. . . evoke Biography,’ I read on,

  from the wrinkles of the palm

  And tragedy from fingers; release omens

  By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle—

  ‘What a lot of hocus-pocus,’ my mother interrupted. She shook her head over a dropped stitch. ‘Very unhealthy, Timothy.’ No, she didn’t want to hear any more T.S. Eliot, thank you very much. Just the naming of these irrational practices had upset her. I should never have studied literature.

  On the bench in Regent’s Park I smiled, remembering my mother’s impatience and those troubled charismatic years. Failing at school, my sister had taken my parents’ side, was more fundamentalist than they. Hippy-haired and rebellious, my brother made ferocious fun of them, pretending to be demonic, pronouncing curses and casting spells with a wave of the arm. I oscillated. At school there was much sniggering over page three of the Sun; on the way home I played football in the twi
light, sweating and swearing. Then, closing the door behind me, there would be the commotion of an exorcism in the sitting room, my mother speaking in tongues, my father praying loudly, my sister’s fingers pounding blind belief on the piano. I might join in, or I might hurry upstairs to play Subbuteo with a friend and listen to Leonard Cohen. When I withdrew from it all, at sixteen or seventeen, science seemed to me the sole sane explanation of the world. Literature was our response to the fact that, thus explained, life had no meaning. I had fallen in love with Beckett. He seemed a man inoculated against all religion.

  The charismatic gifts did not serve my parents well. They tried to exorcise my brother and heal his polio. He was not changed. My sister gave birth to a severely handicapped daughter. The power of prayer did not transform her. Nor a trip to Lourdes. My father’s cancer was not healed by the laying on of hands. He lost his mind and died in pain. Afraid of anything that reminded us of their spiritual aberration, my brother and I counted entirely, perhaps aggressively, on official learning and official medicine; perhaps the only opinion we now had in common with my mother and sister was that all alternative therapies were boloney. Even today, if you mention acupuncture to my atheist brother, he will declare it hocus-pocus. Just like my mother.

  So where was I to turn, now that I had washed my hands of the doctors and they of me? The previous week, at the university, I had had to interrupt a lesson; for the first time the pain had obtruded on my teaching. On Sunday afternoon at the stadium – for I was still an avid football goer – I was barely able to sit down during the second half of the game. I had to keep jumping to my feet as if excited by what was going on on the pitch. ‘Arbitro di merda!’ I yelled, when nothing much was happening. My stadium friends laughed, but someone behind asked me to sit down.

  On the bench in Regent’s Park, among the pleasant trees and lawns, I shouted: ‘Something’s got to change! Please!’ and a young man turned and glanced at me and hurried on.

  That evening I went out with an old friend, drank heavily, talked about the two girlfriends he was playing off against each other and didn’t visit the bathroom once or speak a word of my troubles for three or four hours.

  This was another thing about this odd condition, a symptom almost: I was absolutely determined not to talk about it. I wanted to come out of it without anyone having known. Aside from Carlo in Milan. With ‘a clean record’, as it were. My manhood intact. Only to my wife had I confided everything, making her swear she wouldn’t mention it to the children. The attraction to the net, I’d often thought, was so strong because this was the only place where people could, in anonymity, get together and bellyache.

  Il bell’Antonio

  EVERYTHING CONSPIRED. ON my return to Italy, having landed in Milan and gone directly to the university to teach, I opened an email inviting me to write a preface to a new English edition of Vitaliano Brancati’s novel Il bell’Antonio. I should have turned this work down. Between writing and going back and forth from Verona to Milan, not only to teach but to run the whole degree course, I was doing too much. I wondered at what point, with this intensifying condition, something would finally give: I would miss an important deadline, start forgetting appointments, take to my bed like Hardy, writhe on the floor like Benito. Instead, I accepted at once. I love these commissions. They allow me to extend my knowledge of matters Italian while making some extra money. I was aware that Il bell’Antonio was considered a masterpiece. I knew the film had starred Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale, but I had no idea what it was about.

  Impotence.

  Who would have thought there was an Italian novel about impotence?

  With a mixture of amusement and dismay, I read the book over the following week on the train back and forth to Milan. Sicilian Antonio is gorgeous. Sent by his parents to make his fortune in Mussolini’s Rome, he finds men and women flocking to him; the women to drool, the men to be near the drooling women. Everybody assumes Antonio is enjoying a hectic sex life and that this explains his failure to make a career for himself in the Fascist bureaucracy. Eventually, his parents recall him to Catania; they have found a girl for him to marry. Antonio isn’t happy, he had wanted to choose his own bride. But Barbara is ravishing and he falls in love. To the chagrin of other hopefuls, the couple marry and go off to live together in the country.

  Brought up by nuns, Barbara is as innocent as she is irresistible. It is a year before she realises why the babies aren’t arriving. At last the scandal hits town: Antonio can’t get it up. The bride’s parents are outraged and demand an annulment. Antonio’s father is so ashamed he makes well-advertised visits to prostitutes to ‘save the family’s honour.’ The book is a brilliant comedy and, for any man, a disquieting reminder of just how much hangs on your sexual potency. Once the truth is out, Antonio can forget a political career. ‘He never had the stuff of a real Fascist,’ comments a local official. ‘My son is dead,’ his father declares.

  But why does Antonio have this problem? It’s not that he has never had sex. There’s nothing physically wrong with him. Is it because the women who chase him are so predatory and demanding, his parents and in-laws so pushy, or because Sicilian culture is drenched in a crass male pride? ‘My son’s got a planting stick could punch holes in rocks!’ Antonio’s father raves in the presence of his embarrassed wife; ‘I support the regime because it’s led by a man with a real cock,’ says one of his friends. Is it, then, that Antonio’s beautiful body (and beautiful mind) refuses to participate in this ugliness? Or is the Church with its insistence on purity and virginity partly to blame? When the still adolescent Antonio turns all the ladies’ heads at mass, the priest invites his worried mother to pray that God may ‘call the boy back to Himself as soon as possible’. He’ll cause havoc.

  Brancati doesn’t spoil the novel with easy answers. When Antonio emerges from shamed withdrawal to explain himself to his dying uncle, it is not a criticism of this or that aspect of society he offers, but a long, complex, highly personal story, full of odd incidents and relationships. He describes a moment when he had begun to make love to a beautiful German woman who had at last decided to betray her fiancé with him.

  We said nothing more, turned out the light and embraced. A little later, she almost fainted from happiness, opening slowly like a rose in the sunshine. Nearly out of my mind with an even greater joy than hers, I just was telling myself to tone down the cry about to explode from my throat, when . . . when a sudden dread chill crept into my flesh, starting right where I’d least have wanted it . . .

  This really wasn’t a good moment for me to be reading Il bell’Antonio; the descriptions of lost libido discouraged me even from trying to make love. I couldn’t stop thinking about Antonio. What was Brancati saying? Perhaps that when a sufferer’s complaint is one with his psychology you can never say that the cause is just this or just that, as you might with a virus or an infection: you can’t say, oh, it’s the overwork, or the long-term cross-cultural tension, or some trauma from his childhood, or this or that difficult relationship. No, a condition like this is a unique amalgam with a history all its own; it’s an enigma to pore over, and so, in a way, not unlike a work of art. Something to contemplate, over time. A puzzle without a solution. The waterseller of Seville.

  The idea of an illness being a work of art was immediately fascinating to me. Wasn’t Kafka’s Metamorphosis a case of sickness and aesthetic superimposed? The same was true of a hundred tales of Gothic decline. Don’t many novels feed on a hero with a mystery malady which in a certain sense is the book? I had perhaps created my chronic condition over the years, the way I had written my novels, or become part of a family, or changed my home and language and culture.

  This made a kind of sense and everything seemed more interesting.

  Then I was furious. What was the point, what on earth was the point, of congratulating oneself on such a sick combination of navel-gazing and literary reflection? There was, I realise now, at this worst moment of the story, a strong tempta
tion to give up. Accept it. Aestheticise it. This is you. Your life will always be like this. The interrupted nights. The constant abdominal pains. Stop looking for a cure and get on with it. Then if it helps to pretend it’s something fascinating, go ahead.

  Behind this there was also a curious fusion – confusion – of complacency and guilt: you deserve it.

  Why?

  I would reach a state of resignation, queerly gilded with self-importance, then suddenly jump to my feet, kick the wall and shout no! No no no! An illness is not a puzzle to contemplate in eternity. I want to get better. I WANT TO MOVE ON! I want a sex life, for Christ’s sake. You have none of Antonio’s excuses for impotence, I told myself on putting the novel down: you have neither the stunning looks nor the women constantly throwing themselves at your feet, neither the crass Sicilian father boasting about his sexual prowess nor a mother and wife in adoration of the Virgin. Why should this chill have entered my flesh?

  Antonio’s friends love to give him advice. Remember, they tell him, the days when you did make love and try to picture how it was. To give yourself confidence. The healing powers of positive visualisation. Returning in my frustration to the net, I found people on line offering very similar solutions for pelvic pain:

  Hi Everyone,

  Here’s a common male problem that’s relieved easily with EFT!

  No drugs or surgery involved.

  EFT? Electronic Funds Transfer? Surely not.

  ‘Emotionally focused therapy,’ Wikipedia told me, ‘proposes that emotions themselves have an innately adaptive potential that, if activated, can help clients change problematic emotional states or unwanted self-experiences.’

  ‘Clients’ sounded ominous. All the same, I thought there might be something in this. The internet post went on to offer an anecdote.