Read The Case of Lisandra P. for Free Online Page A

Vittorio’s instructions. She can no longer hurry. She can’t tear her gaze away from these two shelves of cassettes. Hypnotic. Lined up in a row next to each other. Vertically. A white label on each spine. With a first name on each one. Eva Maria reaches for one of them. “Bianca.” Another. “Carlos.” Twenty-three cassettes in all. In alphabetical order. She sees hers. It makes her uncomfortable. To listen to the most recent session, to listen to them again, alone, going back over each one with a clear mind, hunting through the cassettes for the sentence or the word he might have missed during a session and which would shed new light on the psyche of those people he had been trying to understand, week after week, month after month, trying to understand what made them tick, their neuroses. That was what Vittorio had explained to her when she visited him in prison. One cassette per patient. Only the most recent session, as each new session erased the previous one. He did not listen to them again systematically, but he wanted to be able to; if a thought or some words came back to him, he wanted to listen to them again in context. He called it his “delayed awakening,” because in all honesty, he didn’t always pay attention; no human being can maintain that level of extreme awareness, of maximum receptiveness, for hours on end. There were moments when his mind wandered off, moments of distraction; it would be hypocritical to claim he was always attentive, bad faith on the part of the analyst. No man can claim to possess uninterrupted attention, so the tape recorder enabled him to remedy this weakness. Eva Maria gives a start. She hears voices. She turns to the door. It’s the neighbors’ television. Quick. She puts allthe cassettes in her backpack. “Eva Maria.” She looks at her own cassette. She can’t really recall what they talked about during her last session, it was already so long ago. She could not bear to hear it, how awful! To hear herself commenting on her state of mind, gushing with feeling, circling around herself, and herself alone; for three-quarters of an hour never leaving herself behind—for a start the very principle had always embarrassed her, so fortunately she won’t have to listen to this one. She hates the sound of her own voice. Eva Maria looks at her cassette. She makes a face. She has to hurry. She has to follow Vittorio’s instructions. Get all the cassettes. Maybe they will yield a clue? A lead? Something that might have eluded him—he could no longer remember everything his patients had told him over recent weeks, thousands of words, meaningful silences, slips of the tongue, perhaps even innuendos, and what if one of them had warned him? Threatened him? Without him realizing—jealousy, revenge, after all, it was possible; in any case, it was what seemed the most probable among all the theories he was constantly rehashing in that fucking cell where soon there would be nothing left to do but count the bricks. Eva Maria closes the cupboard. She looks at her backpack. Vittorio’s treasure. And most importantly, the cops must not get hold of these cassettes; those men are far too hostile. They are perfectly capable of destroying evidence. Visibly they would rather
have a shrink for a change
than lock up the true culprit. He was already paying the price for their shortcuts, their arguments for the prosecution, their way of coming to grotesque conclusions so they wouldn’t have to fear them. Vittorio is surely right. Eva Maria frowns. She almost forgot. One more thing. She takes the box of tissues from the little table between the sofa and the leather armchair where Vittorio always sat and turns it upside down. The recorder is there, hidden in a recess where it just fits. There are no cassettes in the recorder. Eva Maria also takes the box of tissues, just to be onthe safe side, for her peace of mind. Vittorio insisted on