The Mind's Leprosy

War has its own crazy self, its own mad essence. You don’t believe me! Been reading too much Schloss on the insanity of peace, I see…. But think about it, friend; is it really so easy to kill another human being; a machete chop, a rifle shot, a knife into a fleshy neck, banal, are they, as buying beetroot? Don’t you have to be a little bit cracked to knock out the other man? Ennio Flaiano, A Time to Kill. When an Italian loses it in Abyssinia.

__________

This man has had a breakdown. It takes him a long time to find out. Only when returning home does he suspect this horrible truth; that the attempted murder of the doctor, the theft of the Major’s money and the sabotaging of his vehicle, in the expectation of a fatal accident, are delusions. It is a sober-side’s scepticism. Were these merely creations of his imagination? Such questions acid on his certainty, which quickly melts away. If these are not facts, what about the rest? All that lira, the proof of his crime, profit from his ‘rackets’ (to which he obliquely refers) is this false too? His sins bad genre fiction, the theft a fantasy, one mad idea, in a caravanserai of mad ideas, passing through the desert of his sanity. Once inside a mental breakdown you lose sight of it; the madness too continuous with our previous sane self for you to notice we have crossed the wild frontier: no road signs here, saying Now Entering The Kingdom of Wacko. No. It simply takes us over, like a new style of dress, or a subtle shift of vocabulary on meeting odd people. A loose crowd of fresh thoughts, that gather around us when in fine mental health - we were happy in the old country - now take on darker more aggressive, insistent, obsessive tones; this lot a mob egging us on to hate, smash, punch, kick…. Prone to extremes, we lose ourselves to idées fixes; fanatics of the fine detail, victims of a logical passion, as we strive to prove the truth of some crazy concept. It drains us of energy. Our hero grows lethargic. He is fatalistic. He may even welcome an early death: I will die a lonely man, he thinks. To him - and to us - his thoughts do not appear extraordinary. Proof that he’s not mad, that reality is not falling out of his grip? Come off it! The fact that his thoughts are so trite only shows that life itself has turned rotten; a bad society is taking its revenge on him. Nothing wrong with our young lieutenant. No! Life’s the problem. Life is doing him in.

War is not easy for civilian soldiers. It takes a long time to become indifferent to death; the effects of first contact are terrible.1 The ascetic rituals of the army, its insouciant unconcern with the soul’s sensitivities, have not, like a cauterising fire, sealed off the civilian’s being, burnt out its sentimentalities. No. The old morality remains, as does the need for comfort, pleasure and that desperate wish to be liked; to be hated the hardest thing to accept. The civilian soldier no automatic rifle, mowing down the enemy without reflection. War, with its ever present threat of the kill - your’s or somebody else’s - turns the amateur neurotic. Left alone too long a man is apt to fall apart.

An accident that sets an avalanche going.

Here, the common occurrence of a truck falling off an African road. A trope of war: nowhere is safe. This young lieutenant - our narrator - exists in a situation that is not and never will be under control; for war is always unpredictable and uncertain. There are also the problems of occupation. This country too big, too exotic, just too different - too ‘primitive’ - to submit to Italy’s crass bureaucratic ways.2 Things keep going wrong. Our hero has toothache and visits the nearest dentist in a distant town. Foolishly he listens to a colleague and takes a shortcut through the bush, losing his way. At first this seems a miracle; for he has entered paradise; it is a grove, where a beautiful black woman washes herself in spring-like water. They become friends, make love and then, awake and scared in the night, terrified of the noises, this fool shoots his lover. He compounds the mistake. Believing her dying he finishes Mariam off. Only the truly stupid to be so kind.

Horror, guilt, torment, fear (the fear of discovery) invades his sanity, and his mind disintegrates under their conquest. He reaches the town, and has his tooth removed, but he has brought his nightmares with him as well as the toothache. Losing his soldierly composure; thoughts of home and wife become stronger; while the dying Mariam flashes continually into his consciousness. A memory so painful and compulsive! Memories like wartime stills; they turn our hero into some junkie photojournalist. The world is fading out, as this young man retreats into the bunker of his mind. Could the ‘mad’ rituals of the army keep him sane? But this an occupying force in a far-out country, where discipline and order are hard to maintain. Our hero is losing his link with the army, the one relation that might keep him intact (the rituals of the body straitjacketing the mind). Poor soldier! His toothache migrates to his thoughts, this ache never to go away: how can he extract Mariam from his mind? Dissolve one’s self in excess. He meets up with another lieutenant and they visit a local brothel. Madness infects others, though the disease itself mutates; from idées fixes to morality insanity (sin to the Catholics amongst us).

When corrupt we seek to corrupt others. He gets to know a major; a stiff, too respectable man, whose respectability, grown out of repression, is brittle. Shown the sexual freedoms of Rahabat brittle swiftly becomes broken; the major is lost to sex, a different kind of mayhem. Is our hero happy? He hardly knows what he’s doing. This is a new form of life, where all the rules have changed. Nevertheless, remnants of the old psyche remain, and along with an intoxicating rush, that crack hit of transgression, there is guilt. No-one likes losing control. Addiction brings its own shame.3  The body has its retribution.

The worst is still to come.

“What pretty girls,” said the second lieutenant and he pointed at two girls standing leaning against a tree. They were talking quietly and we stopped to look at them. “Look at the dresses. They are white. What elegance.”

I could not see clearly because the evening was closing in unexpectedly. “Let’s go closer,” I said, seized by an anxiety that I could not conceal. I crossed the courtyard and stopped a few paces from the two girls. Seeing themselves observed they turned away. They reminded me of Mariam; I did not know why, but I thought that it was certain to be some trap laid by my already overtaxed imagination. “You will see Mariam everywhere and that will be the time to put an end to it,” I said. But they did remind me of Mariam. There was in their faces the same grave beauty, but veiled by centuries of obscurity, the same deep waters in which I had immersed myself for an instant and which I dd not wish to see again. They were looking at me silently without smiling, and I saw that the second lieutenant was halting to look at the facade of the church as if suddenly attracted by its architecture. “It is a very simple kind of architecture,” I thought. When I greeted them the two girls answered with a nod of the head and smiled. Then I called the second lieutenant. “Ask these girls if they have a house,” I said.

“Of course they have.” Then he added: “And it will be eternal, the best kind of all.” Then he translated my question to the two girls and they made a sign of assent and smiled again, looking at us. “Poor limbo,” I thought. Once again I recalled Mariam; in these girls there was the melancholy I had discovered in her eyes and her sleep.

“Now what do you want me to ask? That they should invite us?” I smiled. “It’s a good idea,” I said, and thought that everything is much simpler than one thinks.

The second lieutenant spoke for a long time with the girls and they shook their heads smilingly, but their smile was so different from what I expected that it filled me with sudden alarm. Why do they smile instead of hurrying to show us the way? Whey are they shaking their heads?

‘Nothing doing,” said the second lieutenant. At that same moment, as if to soften their refusal, the two girls held out their hands to us.

They were hands already devoured by horrible sores. These were the cause of their refusal. Thus they stood, serious, like children holding out their hands so that you can see that they are clean. 

The second lieutenant looked at their hands—and I, too, looked at them—and turned to me with a smile doubtless intended to conceal his perturbation. “Leprosy,” he said in a low voice. The two girls let their hands fall and followed us with their eyes until we had one more passed through the gate.

Our author likes his chiaroscuro; that knowing second lieutenant - “it will be eternal, the best kind of all” - against the innocence of our narrator, oblivious to the meaning of the white dresses. Then he sees those hands…. His mind takes a plunge, as it falls down the cliff-face of his conviction: he has leprosy: his sores the same as those sores. Under this death sentence he wilts. His mind injected with moral lunacy, he believes this is Mariam’s revenge for his fatal mistake; a mad idea that accelerates his mental decline. His life quickly collapses. Certain he has the awful disease he junks all virtue; he deserts the army; tries to illegally board a ship back to Italy. He fails. And degenerates further. A moral connection with others is broken: we exist only to be used, avoided or feared. Crazy ideas invade the mind’s territory and conquer it. He’ll try to kill the doctor, the major and the old man, Mariam’s father. Badlands plays in the theatre our minds, reminding us that murder is its own addictive drug; that first shot the start of a lifetime’s habit. There can be an appalling hunger for death, as there is for sex, drugs and alcohol. As the boundary between action, mind and body collapses, the distinction between inside and outside dissolves, until the world becomes nothing but an extension of our own thoughts; the only reality inside our head. All stability goes, as we forever sacrifice ourselves to those crazy concepts, in which we never wholly believe: they are too crazy for that. Doubt. Another intoxicant. And always the hope we will be saved. Certain he has the disease our hero hungers for a magic cure. Yet the greater the doubts (and those hopes of reprieve) the stronger becomes the obsession. A maelstrom of madness wrecks his ramshackle mind; now a helpless sailor praying to some huckster to ease these storm-driven thoughts. 

There is an extraordinary visit to the doctor.

“So you’re not coming into town ?” he asked.

“I prefer to take a turn around the camp,” and I stared at him. I was offering him the last piece of extenuating evidence—my calmness. I besought him not to believe in my leprosy, seeing me so calm and to put away any suspicion he had. The doctor thought a minute and then said what I was afraid of: “After all I won’t go to town either. It’s late already. Why don’t you come with me instead and have supper?”

It was not an order but an invitation. An invitation to accept my illness and to give up a hopeless struggle. I could not accept it because I refused to believe in my ailment before I had left the country. I was not ill and no one has the right to see if I was. The doctor repeated the invitation in a lower voice, he wanted to appear indifferent. He was trying to put some gaiety into his voice and this clumsy touch of comedy made me indignant. Why could he not make up his mind to draw his revolver and point it at my ribs? Why did he not confront me with an accomplished fact? There you were, his insolent laziness was giving way, and now he was behaving like a brother, but unfortunately like a younger brother. The feeling that I was stronger and more decided than he was taking away all my courage. He was inviting me to supper, knowing that afterwards he would have to destroy the cutlery, the glass, the plates, to keep me and meanwhile call someone from the command post and the hospital. The last supper, in fact, of our short-lived friendship, Why was he moving impatiently round me but always avoiding looking at me? He knew he had a bad part to play and he was begging my pardon, never imagining that I was already prepared to do worse without feeling myself under any obligation. “All right,” I thought, “I’ll be the stronger one.” But at that very moment the doctor had set off toward the hut. He was going in front, trusting to me. He was so calm that I followed him.

Nothing mattered to me any more, they could take me if they wanted. Always at sunset this lack of self-confidence came over me, this presentment of death and the certainty that it was useless to fight. I followed him in silence like a prisoner. He went into the hut took off his jacket, wrote something on a sheet of paper, laid down his belt. Then I saw that he was taking the revolver out of its holster. Then I fled.

“Calm”. In the mad words flip their meaning, until defined as the opposite of common sense. For our lieutenant calm means not relaxed, thus a reflex, thus natural, but an act, dissimulation, performance. Why should this be so? Because inside one’s crazy head the facts and values or ordinary society are inverted, as we try to protect ourself against it. Believing he has leprosy our hero thinks everyone knows; the paranoid believing there is window into his soul, all looking in. He can’t draw the curtains! And so he walks around constantly aware of himself and his interlocutor…. Self-conscious himself, he makes others self-conscious, thus confirming these fishbowl thoughts. And he wants this to happen. The mad need to feel important; for the world must confirm their madness, which requires they dominate it, subjugate it to their will. Inevitably this happens; eccentricity easily confused with superiority, as people become wary around him; fearing to upset him; knowing his fragility, afraid of the consequences, unsure if he’ll go wild, they tiptoe around his uneasy presence, as if evading some poisonous snake. Ha! He’s not completely cut off, but he is reading the signs wrong. For the doc, this belief in leprosy suggests insanity. His concern not about the physical matter - the disease - but that fragile mind, which can quickly collapse into self-harm and violence. 

Succumbing to a conceptual infection - everything is filtered through his fevered concepts - anything that disagrees with these ideas is dismissed as lies or nefarious attack (the cure - a dose of reality - is dismissed as the disease). To protect ourselves from such aggressive suspicion, we stop questioning his crazy notions, pretend to be on his side. Now we start to feel the unreality….

Are we misled by the narrator? The mad are liable to convince the innocent and unwary of the reality of their absurd thoughts; and who is more innocent than a reader of novels? We have to believe what the author writes, knowing it a fiction. So, are we reading too much into the doctor’s composure? Isn’t his actions the normal behaviour of an ordinary man, taking a friend to dinner? Abnormal only because our mad hero cannot conceive of an act without meaning and threat. Insouciance doesn’t exist in a lunatic’s dictionary. The greater the distance between the meaning-wracked mind and the habitual and instinctive behaviour of ordinary living, the more the latter is thought of as odd, strange, dangerous; the most banal thing in the room now a warning sign. In the army everyone carries a gun….

At this moment he is resigned to his fate. Walking behind the doctor he waits for his death sentence. But ideas are apt to vanish before the concrete. That gun, with its palpable presence of death, creates fear: our hero panics. The world is too complicated for the mad, who want the simplicities of their own conceptual caricatures. Us and them. Life or death. Friend or foe…. He flees. Our lieutenant running away from the doctor’s real diagnosis; the mad not wishing to be told they are mad. In running away he loses all contact with reality and the people in it. The gap between thought and action lost, what he feels he’s doing he believes he has done. This man invents his world.

Thinking himself a lost soul he runs from the town, that last outpost of civilisation. Returning to Mariam’s village he lives an uncomfortable existence with an old man, who resents his presence. This man is an interesting character, who embodies the ambiguities of colonial rule; proud of serving the Italians - he was a native soldier, which gave him status and self-respect - yet he dislikes having this white man in his home. That alien presence is too close; while an occasional display of colonial arrogance, increasing as our hero's identity collapses, irritates. This Italian is going native. Native! But the old man wants to look up and respect the white man; it is how he nurtures his own pride and worth. The tensions increase, and there is a climatic fight, which brings them close, producing a revelation: this man is the father of his lover. Confessing his crime he shows the old man Mariam’s grave. In recompense the old man treats his hand with herbs. He is cured!

The narrator returns to the army camp, where he confesses his crimes to a superior. This officer is sceptical - the evidence is weak or non-existent for these attempted murders. It raises doubts as to our man’s lucidity. All just a mad episode? Neither we nor our hero can be certain.4 

The novel is a brilliant parable of the war experience, when we become a different kind of person, unrecognisable even to one’s self. War itself a kind of bedlam, whose effects seem interminable and fatal; to the victims it is an infection that eats away - rots - the inside of the head, until the mind collapses under the stress of murder and mayhem.

The second lieutenant nodded and announced that he would put forward two hypotheses: “The first, “ he said, “ is that you saw the turban afterwards, when in the courtyard of the church we went up to the two girls who really had one.”

I burst out laughing, and he observed that this hypothesis ought not to surprise me. Perhaps I did not have a very clear conception of memory and the way it anticipated things? And he went on. The second hypotheses required a parallel. The woman had put on a turban to wash herself, but she knew that she was committing sacrilege, or at least an absurd act. How could she dare—and her the second lieutenant stressed the words—in this country where certain lost qualities are still persevered which other people are losing—faith, above all, and respect for the forms of religions? “Let us try,” he said, “to find a parallel. We to go along the corridors and by mistake—yes, by mistake—go into the bathroom. There we surprise the mistress of the house, naked, busy washing herself. A very common sight. It is her form of narcissism, her way of passing the time. And on her head the lady in the bath has a priest’s hat?”

‘That’s it,” I said. “But in what house will you see such an uncommon spectacle?” The second lieutenant said in a low voice: “In an asylum.” And I could not refrain from laughing. So Mariam was mad! It seemed to me useless to refute his hypothesis.

The second hypothesis is the outsider’s view; projecting a coherent belief system onto the daily activities which may have no thought but habit, custom and practice. The simple explanation is probably the truest: if she was wearing a turban it was for no other reason than to keep her hair dry, a towel in other words (this lieutenant has forgotten the European influence). Or there could be another reason, equally rational: the turban is a sign to scare intruders away from the bathing scene (if Susanna had thought of the same trick those elders wouldn’t have dared come close). But to think Mariam mad? This is a colonialist’s prejudice. The fallback position of the colonial official who doesn't understand the behaviours and beliefs of the local population. His lack of comprehension, his ignorance, is transformed into their madness; his stupidity their ‘irrational belief’. The irony cuts like a knife. This foolish man so happy to believe this sane and innocent woman is crazy. Another parable, this time of imperial rule. It was the white race who were the barbarians; creatures of power, instinct and bad ideas.

The quality of this novel resides in the prosaic dullness of the narrator, who is not an uncultured or unintelligent man.5 A typical low-level official who carries the crude conventional ideas of the well-educated in the knapsack of his mind. Here, at this place and time, the received wisdom is that the European is civilised and that the African - the primitive - has access to deep, mystical autochthonous truths released through sex. So obviously a projection of Christian difficulties with the sexual act…. Yet, being a typical low-level official, our hero does not reflect on his own experiences, which at the very least suggest a complication of this simple story. No! Best not to think too much - it drives you bonkers! Better, when back safe in town, to retreat to that simple dichotomy of civilised us versus crazy them. The truth is prosaic. We are given enough information to see that this is a poor quality mind, lacking in curiosity and unable to acquire knowledge or gain self-understanding. A second-rate individual.

Not all is symbol and insanity. The corruptions of a colonial war are everywhere evident: the brothels in town; the pervasiveness of easy sex, generating economic dependence; a low-level criminality, thus Elias, a young native boy, befriended by the soldiers, becomes a successful smuggler, while the Major, and possibly our hero, play the black market.6 War seeps into the marrow of society hollowing it out. 

A few years after this novel Curzio Malaparte wrote The Skin, which charts the infection as it crosses into Italy; there’s the same sex, the economic slavery and that moral corruption, though now it is the Americans - those heroes of civilisation - who are the spreaders of the disease. The ironies are extreme in that book; while the madness of its hero becomes the insanity of a prose style that tries to cope with the horrors it records. No matter what side you’re on - victors or victims - war will destroy your humanity. There are exceptions, we don’t want to get absolutist here, but you must be of a rare quality not to be infected by the immoral affliction. Alas, most are dull types, who follow the disintegrating crowd. Bye bye civility. Kiss my arse subtlety and sophistication….

Review: A Time to Kill

__________

1.  Norman Lewis’s account of new American recruits in Naples ’44.

2.  Compare with Gerald Hanley, The Consul at Sunset.

3.  Marvellously portrayed in Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac.

4.  Compare with Jocelyn Brooke’s The Image of a Drawn Sword.

5.  We see a resemblance to Stendhal’s Fabrizio, in The Charterhouse of Parma. The big difference due to class; the aristocrat able to rely far more on the noble idea than your typical person; such a cultivated background, with the egoism it engenders, saving Stendhal’s hero from the mental collapse suffered here. Fabrizio can always stick to the mast of his identity; able to cling to any abstract ideal, as he constantly tears away its content and meaning. Believing in sexual renunciation as he embraces the Duchessa…. 

6.  We see it again in Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin and Norman Lewis’ Naples ’42. These novels raise this suggestion: was Flaiano writing less about Ethiopia in the 1930s than Italy in the 1940s?