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extract

Massagistas cegos em Clermont Ferrand,
início do séc. XX
After the patient had been immobile for a week, Mary would be sent in to start
the massage. At first, Thomas or Daisy had to take her everywhere in the
schloss, but she slowly began to find her way, feeling along the wall of the
cloister, then stabbing at the cobbles with her stick and counting off the
doorways as she went by.
She had learned her craft on Daisy's body, its modesty
preserved in cotton camiknickers, as Thomas explained the rudiments of anatomy.
They began with the small bones of the feet and toes and worked their way up,
with special attention to the joints, which were rotated through every position.
A slight young woman, Mary developed strong muscles in the forearms as she
grasped the areolar tissue, sometimes making Daisy squeal, rolled the large
muscles of the calf and thigh firmly both ways and kneaded the belly with the
heel of her hand. By the end of the treatment, Daisy was so relaxed that her
initial self-consciousness had left her and she begged to be left to sleep.
Once it had been explained to them that Mary was blind, most of the patients
allowed themselves to be massaged naked, and this allowed her to develop a
sensitivity to match her strength; she could feel where their bodies needed help
to heal, relax or break down the deposits of fat and salt from the large amount
of food they were consuming. The young women sat up with a smile when they heard
the tapping of her stick approach their door: they were allowed no visitors
apart from the doctor and the electrician, and many of them were lonely; they
talked to Mary as she worked, telling her the stories of their lives, though not
sure that she could understand. She sensed their pleasure in the way they let
fall their heavy limbs at the wordless instruction of her hands and in their
dreamy gratitude when she had finished.
Each day her consciousness of what it meant to be alive was growing.
There was the realm of speech, to which, after years of silence in the
workhouse and the asylum, she was a newcomer. Neglect had made her own voice low
and quiet, and it took many weeks before she could converse confidently even
with Daisy, in English; no sooner was she there, than another language began to
form in her brain and by simple repetition come to mean something. With no
distraction from the seen world, she could concentrate on the sounds, remember
and repeat them, wishing sometimes she had the courage to ask Thomas what some
of the phrases really meant; she grew fluent in the idiom of tired young women,
picking up their tics and idiosyncrasies as her own.
A physical world, not bound by chains or locks, was opened up to her in the
extensive grounds of the schloss, somewhere she could move at will, encountering
different sounds and surfaces and densities of air. Josef held her hand and made
her stroke the gelding's nose, then compare it to the mare's. On the other side
of the stables was a small pasture where, following Herr Leopold's suggestion,
they had put two cows, which Mary's educated hands learned how to milk. Beyond
all these new perspectives greater than all the new worlds of language and
sensation was her discovery of what it meant to feature in the thoughts of other
living beings. They knew her name; they asked her questions; she became a part
of their routines; she believed that to a small extent they even needed her.
Sometimes she wondered if there was any level at which this ascent into
awareness might end. It was like climbing from the centre of a set of Chinese
boxes: how many new worlds can I discover, she asked herself, and still be
looking at the same old life?
The End

Sebastian Faulks (born 20 April 1953) is a
British novelist, journalist and broadcaster. He is best known for his
historical novels set in France – The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdsong and
Charlotte Gray. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in
1993 and appointed CBE for services to literature in 2002. The Tavistock Clinic
in association with the University of East London awarded him an honorary
doctorate for his contribution to the understanding of psychiatry in 'Human
Traces'.
Human Traces (2005): As young boys both Jacques
Rebière and Thomas Midwinter become fascinated with trying to understand the
human mind. As psychiatrists, their quest takes them from the squalor of the
Victorian lunatic asylum to the crowded lecture halls of the renowned Professor
Charcot in Paris; from the heights of the Sierra Madre in California to the
plains of unexplored Africa. As the concerns of the old century fade and the
First World War divides Europe, the two men's volatile relationship develops and
changes.
ϟ
Human Traces
-an extract-
Sebastian Faulks
London, April 20, 2005
15.Ago.2023
Publicado por
MJA
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