Minimal sulks of the last days: a blockage in the sink, the leak of water from the upstairs neighbor, a blunder, a skirt forgotten in the wardrobe of a hotel in Malaga and Treasury, which does not enter the return or shot. I was engrossed in these trifles when reading an email has laser cut the exact dimension of things, their importance: my friend P. has come out of depression after almost a year locked in the basement of horror, of the gray drizzle. I write “friend” for simplicity. I don’t belong to the inner circle that has been at the foot of the canyon, but I have sincere affection for P., and I admire him. A person who goes forward. An enjoyment of life.
His was an exogenous depression, caused by the work anxieties, which began manifesting itself with spikes of electrical anxiety to then fall down the depths of the well. We know black percale: sleepless nights, being confined at home, the mind turned into the propeller of a blender, loss of appetite, oxidation of the palate, smell and touch, the impossibility of putting together a modest conversation and, why not say it , think of death as the only escape.
‘THAT VISIBLE DARKNESS’
“In depression, that faith in liberation, in final recovery, is absent. The pain is inexorable […] One does not leave, even briefly, his bed of nails, but takes it with him everywhere”. I have retrieved the underlined quote from ‘That visible darkness’ (The Other Shore), the crude confession he made William Styron about his descent into horror, the best book on depression I know.
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The good news is that it comes out. Chemistry, psychiatrists and psychologists, contact with nature, the constant combat of his partner and her mother —women, always women with their sleeves rolled up in care— and the almost religious devotion of friends, who keep calling even though you don’t pick up the phone. Until, as P. says, his head made “the fucking click” and he recovered the illusion, the desire to fight.
The writer Horacio Vázquez Rial, who died ten years ago, recounted in the epilogue of ‘That visible darkness’ that “the fucking click” happened to him near Perpinyà, with a peasant woman who had inherited from his father the gift of “lever le mal”, as she said, a farmhouse where a friend dragged him to. Madame Hélène began to run her hands over his body, and then “the fucking click.” Why? No idea. But the psychiatrist asked for the healer’s address, just in case. Deep down, we know nothing.