LOVE IN THE PALM OF THE HAND
It’s the sixties. A young, newly graduated psychiatrist is treating a young woman declared incurable and locked up in a mental institution. He falls deeply in love with her and, seemingly fruitlessly, attempts to cure her. Both medical authorities and her family attempt to stop him.
Their stories are rooted in the Italian tragedies of the first half of the 20thcentury: The age of extremes, an era of enormous calamities.
from LA STAMPA
(Sergio Pent)
Sometimes novels written exclusively to lavish us with the ancient, somewhat forgotten pleasure of reading have the intrinsic meanings and existential metaphors to provide answers to the reader’s own pain, experience, or missed opportunities with fate (…) Battiato’s painful, anguished story -a kind of intertwined fairy tale with a happy ending despite lasting scars- evolves and resolves mostly in its essential resourcefulness in communicating, which is the most beautiful gift a novelist can share with his hypothetical imaginary readers (...) In the end, you close the book, grateful someone can still let us linger in our armchairs to read a good story where emotions reign in a righteous, human space of belonging.
from IL GIORNALE
(Mario Santagostini)
One of the most interesting, unusual, and intense novels this year (…) The true protagonist of this novel might be silence or falsehood that omits events, erases and hides faults, and deludes us that reality can be forgotten, abolished, buried, or rewritten. And instead, silence broods, still secretly working. Truth, even if hidden or masked, leaves its mark. It remains, taking on the unexpected shapes from what has been removed. And its effects are devastating.
from SEGNALIBRO
How do you write about the pain that scrapes against your nerves and corrodes all reasoning? How do you placate the icy screams of a person betrayed without reason? How can someone who has stared pain in the face return to days of tranquillity? You don’t learn how to heal yourself from pain if you don’t give in to love. A stubborn psychiatrist, a lost girl, and an old aristocratic woman who finds the joy of living all make for an unforgettable story.
Two excerpts
Loredana’s parents were not happy their daughter was in love with me. A fine young man, yes, a graduate, a doctor, but no money to my name. And no parents. Ever since I was three, my maternal grandparents brought me up. We lived in a small apartment on the ground floor with a thumbnail of a yard in the outskirts of Milan, beyond Viale Zara. My grandfather was a factory worker for Pirelli. I remember his white mustache and blue eyes. In his blue eyes, his shame shone through every time he looked at me. My mother, his daughter, had tainted his life. He died when I was fourteen. He had answered many things for me. How a combustion engine works, how the nourishment from the soil reaches the grapes that provided us shade in our tiny garden, how the wind made the seas roil, how ants would stockpile, and how cicadas sang. He never spoke to me about the soul and its complications. Until the day he realized he was dying. I can still see him staggering in the yard towards the lettuce, holding his hand to his stomach. Intestinal cancer had already done its job. He fell into the lettuce leaves. He swore for three days in the hospital. Ultimately, the nuns got a confession out of him, and he was given the last rites. The nuns were the stingy mistresses of morphine and pain. He had always been a robust man, but he became a skeleton. I went to visit him every day. The last time, he took my face in his bony hands. He told me there were questions he didn’t know how to answer for himself or me. He implored me not to think about my mother; you can’t spend your life, he told me, hating your mother and wondering about her. Crazy people, he added, can’t be explained. You have to forgive them. Instead, I should honor my father’s memory; he admired my father very much, even if he was Sicilian. I had no memory of my parents, and I hid the grief and regret even from myself. As much as I searched, I couldn’t find any impulse to hate. I was an obedient teenager. I played defense in soccer with my school friends.
My grandfather gave me a large envelope stuffed with paper. It was a letter for me from my father. My grandfather stated I could only read it after my eighteenth birthday. My grandfather was a simple man with old-fashioned ideas on pedagogy; the contents of the letter had upset him. He handed the envelope to my grandmother, who silently cried, entrusting it to her until I came of age to read my father’s words.
I stayed with my grandmother Teresa, who worked as a seamstress, through the nights, never sleeping, so I could study. She never talked to me about my mother. When I asked her explicitly, she remained silent. She didn’t want to remember her daughter. I became convinced that such a gesture, abandonment, was capable of erasing even the most primitive and sacred of emotions from human beings and igniting deaf rancor and rage. I couldn’t understand it. It was a mystery that accompanied my daily unease; actually, it was the very stuff of my unease. I thought I was different. I was convinced that abandonment, loss, and death couldn’t upset my youth any more than thunderstorms. I dedicated all my anguish and fury to being successful in my studies. I completed my university degree years early.
As it often happened in insane asylums, untreatable cases would be dumped on the doctor who had just arrived, the youngest and weakest. That was how Elisa Pietropan’s case, among others, was entrusted to me. I was the psychiatrist in charge of ordinary therapy. I could not make any decisions because I was not allowed to stray from protocol.
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Elisa had been interned at the Institute for a year. According to her medical records, it was a case of early-onset dementia with irreversible deterioration. Whenever there were episodes of paroxysmal rage against herself or others, she would have to undergo electroconvulsive therapy (Professor Lerco would practice his beloved electroshock at strict intervals).
Considering the constant threat of her violent outbursts, they recommended she be bound. Elisa had stopped feeding herself. She had to be spoon-fed. Or fed parenterally in case she refused food, spat it out, or vomited.
Her case history painted an entirely negative, unhealthy picture where she had lost any sense of compassion, suitability, disgust, or modesty. It cited an inability to perceive space, an utter dulling of her intellect, foolish and destructive acts, and no sense of reality.
The tests excluded any neuropathological, infective, neurochemical, or genetic component that might lead to an organic cerebral origin of the disease. In short, science wasn’t telling us why Elisa was suffering or why terror had become her master. We only knew that she was sick. And that we had to incarcerate her disturbed will and anesthetize her furious brain.
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According to her parents’ account, the disease first appeared three years earlier, with inexplicable outbursts of rage. Then, the explosion: one night, Elisa attacked her mother, seriously wounding her with a knife. After this episode, she retreated into increasingly impenetrable mutism and isolation that alternated with outbursts of excitement and extreme violence. According to my superiors, the borderline between conscience and madness had been crossed by a large margin, and there was no longer any reasonable doubt that a remission of Elisa’s chronic symptoms of schizophrenia was possible.
The only element of reality that she seemed to still hang on to was the violin. Before her illness, she had studied it with passion and brilliant results. Then she stopped playing. In the Institute, according to the reports, they never heard a note out of it. But if the violin was taken from her, Elisa would throw herself into despair or fury. Considering the value of the instrument that they had once gifted her, her parents thought they could substitute it with any old piece of wood. “It was unutilized capital and was at risk,” her father declared. Elisa hurled herself against the walls of her room, wanting to bash her head in. In the end, her parents left her the violin. Hospital leadership was quick to emphasize that if the patient were freed from the restraints, the violin “could be used as a weapon; for this reason, they recommended supervision by the medical personnel.”
I had never thought of a violin as a weapon. Mozart, in a flare of jealousy, bashing a violin on Constance’s head. Paganini stabbing a bow into the eye of a German prostitute because she wanted too much money. Elisa smashing her out-of-tune Maggini on Professor Lerco’s face.
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For two years, Elisa had been a patient in a private clinic where they attempted a psychoanalytic approach without any results. But then her parents sent her to Sant’Orsola, a public hospital where their daughter could be observed and treated “without needless financial expense” and “undoubtedly” in the best way possible.
In one of the many reports on Elisa Pietropan’s case, a note informed that a gynecological exam revealed that “the patient was still a virgin.”
Professor Lerco left his ink stamp everywhere, adding in pen: “At present, there is no hope for recovery.”
A death sentence for a twenty-year-old virgin, examined and judged by psychiatrists who considered themselves the masters of order and disorder. They observed her, classified her, and then washed their hands of her. To them, Elisa, like many other aggressive, oppositional, disturbed patients, was “unacceptable.”
Elisa is beautiful.
Yes, I arrived at my second visit with her while two nurses wearing rubber boots washed her and the room. They used a hose, and it looked like they were watering a plant in summer. Elisa was lying on the floor, naked, holding up the violin. The violin wasn’t supposed to get wet. The nurses then dressed her in a white hospital gown.
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I watched her before she spread her feces over herself, adhering to a codified and bestial ritual. I saw how she was. Beautiful. I saw how she could be even more beautiful if only her eyes lost their veil of fog if only the wax that covered her skin melted away. Beautiful, if her pieces would all fit together again. If she could move the abandoned muscles around her bones. And walk and run.
A conviction took root inside me that the verdict of the higher-ranking doctors was unacceptable. I couldn’t imagine that there were no other alternatives for her life, no other hope and that the only possible future for her was to remain tied up awaiting death. I decided to suffocate the echoes of my recent studies and the still-resounding principles they aspired to: “I will never waste the time of my life in useless and futile hope searching for what cannot exist. Not even the gods fight against inevitable necessities.” I did not want to consider Elisa’s illness necessary. Almost to prove me wrong, she did not react to any of my attempts to communicate. I spoon-fed her, I washed her, I spoke to her, I rocked her. She let me do everything, but she didn’t respond. She didn’t “play” the violin anymore. I clashed with the Hospital. I did not agree with its methods. I proposed to Professor Lerco to reduce the dose of her medications and modify her therapy so that Elisa could go out without restraints. The answer: negative.