The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

Part 1: The Opening

‘You can feel your eyelids getting heavy,’ I said.

The pocket-watch — maker unknown but weighted by sufficient gold to keep it swaying steadily for some time — had been in the family’s possession since 1870.

‘You are feeling tired. Close your eyes.’

The silence was complete. The street-facing windows were triple-glazed, so that not even the chiming from the mighty bells of the Duomo di Milano penetrated. It was so quiet that the absence of ticking was noticeable. The hands were splayed out on each side from the moment the watch breathed its last. Now the mute object was minus the function a watch is meant for.

‘When you wake up you will not remember that you were gravid or that you’ve had an abortion. The child never existed.’

I felt suddenly on the verge of tears. When I lost my own child I also lost what we psychologists call my affective control, meaning that I could whimper and blubber over the slightest thing that reminded me of it. I pulled myself together and continued: ‘It will seem to you as though you came here to be cured of a nicotine addiction.’

Ten minutes later I carefully woke Fru Karlsson from her trance.

‘I don’t feel any craving at all,’ she said as she buttoned her mink coat and looked at me.

I was sitting behind my desk and taking notes with the Montegrappa pen I had come across many years ago in an antiques shop. Patients like to see you making notes, it makes them feel a little less like something on a conveyor belt.

‘Tell me, Dr Meyer, is hypnosis difficult?’

‘It depends what you’re hypnotising,’ I said. ‘As film directors say, the hardest to work with are children and animals. And it’s easiest with a receptive and creative spirit like yours, signora.’

She laughed.

‘There are rumours that you once managed to hypnotise a dog, Dr Meyer. Is that true?’

‘Just rumours,’ I smiled. ‘And even if I had, I have a vow of confidentiality as regards all my patients.’

She laughed again. ‘But what power it gives you!’

‘I’m afraid I’m as powerless as anyone else,’ I said, searching through the desk drawer for an ink cartridge to replace the one in the pen, now empty. The leader of a local chess club I used to belong to once said to me that the reason I always lost was not that I didn’t know what I was doing, but that I sabotaged my own chances of winning through my bewildering weakness for the weak. He suspected that I would prefer to sacrifice a castle rather than a knight because I liked the knight better. Or because I thought of myself as a knight.

‘They’re pieces, Lukas,’ he said. ‘Pieces! The knight is the least valuable, and that is a fact, not preferences.’

‘Not in every position. The knight can get himself out of some pretty tight situations.’

‘Knights are slow and always arrive too late to save anyone, Lukas.’

I found the ink cartridge, a narrow metal sleeve the same length as the pen, and with a thin steel tip like a hypodermic syringe. I realised it would be my last one, that Montegrappa pens and cartridges were no longer produced. Like so many other uselessly beautiful quality products it had vanished beneath the merciless pressure of global competition.

I wrote slowly, reverently, careful not to waste my words. Fru Karlsson would start smoking again. And she’d tell all her friends that Dr Meyer was no good so I’d spared a rush from that quarter. She wouldn’t remember she’d had an abortion. If she ever did it would be because something had overridden the hypnosis. A special word, a mood, a dream, it could be anything. As in my case. At times I’ve thought I might like to obliterate Benjamin and Maria from my memory. At other times not. Anyway, it’s been a long time now since I had the ability to hypnotise myself. One learns too much about it. Like the conjuror no longer able to enjoy being fooled, even when one wants to be.

Once Fru Karlsson had gone I packed my beautiful black leather Calvino bag. I’d bought it because it had the same name as the anti-Fascist rebel Italo Calvino. And, of course, because I could afford it.

I knotted my Burberry scarf and walked into the reception area. Linda, who was the receptionist for me and the two other psychologists in our joint practice, looked up.

‘Have a nice day, Lukas,’ she said with an almost inaudible sigh and a scarcely noticeable glance at her watch which showed, as usual, that it was still only three. She used this Americanism not, primarily, to bless the remaining hours of daylight, or until I went to bed, but to point out the injustice in the fact that my working day was so much shorter than that of my two colleagues, and therefore hers. I think she believed — or thought she believed — that my not taking on more patients showed a lack of solidarity, but there was no way she could know that in recent years the psychology practice had become secondary and functioned more or less as a cover for my other, real job. Which was to kill people.

‘Have a nice day, Linda,’ I said as I strolled out into the lovely December sunshine.