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Adolfo Profumo

DANCE ME TO THE END OF LOVE

Copyright 2002
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Dance me to the children that are asking to be born.

Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn.
Raise a tent of shelter now though every thread is torn.
Dance me to the end of love.

(Leonard Cohen, 1984)

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Nine months have gone by since the attack, yet, for me, the air still reeks of the

acrid smell of the fallen towers.

A full moon shines shamelessly over New York City and Leonard Cohen's

"Everybody Knows"" blasts through my silent night. I sit quietly in my office. The

patients have gone. I am a psychoanalyst.

Today The New York Times carries a front page article about limited supplies of

smallpox vaccine. "Everybody knows that you are in trouble...Everybody knows it's

coming apart..." Leonard Cohen sings away. I worry about my children.

I am 45 years old. I was born in Europe. During my youth I traveled extensively

and lived and studied in various countries. France, Switzerland, Germany, Israel. I came

to New York City in 1981. I was 25. I have never left. In fact, I grew to love this country

more and more and, in 1991, I became a citizen.

I speak English, Italian, French, Spanish, and German, and my office is an orderly

space with hundreds of books. When I don't see patients I write fiction and poetry.

The office is located in the back of a pre-war building on Central Park West. It

looks over a courtyard with several trees. You can hear birds singing during the day and a

flutist that, for the last ten years, has practiced the same Mozart concert.

On the walls I have hung minimalist prints. And paintings of mountains, lakes,

gardens, the sea. And a portrait of my great uncle Aldo, who fought in World War I.

Uncle Aldo was very fond of the Italian war hero and writer Gabriele D'Annunzio, and,

in the painting, he makes sure to bless us with D'Annunzio's stern, probing look. I joke

with my patients that the painting represents my harsh super ego. They laugh.

I was vaccinated against smallpox in the 60s and there is a chance that if

something happens I may survive, but my children? I may have to see them die a horrible

death. I have two beautiful children, with radiant smiles, caring hearts, sharp minds. I am

blessed.
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I have a hard time sharing my Cassandra-like concern with my friends here, in

this country that has not experienced a major war on its soil in more than a century.

***

Pathology: The logic of suffering. I was always fascinated by it.

I have spent the last 20 years treating individuals who, in my field, are referred to

as "difficult patients." Drug and alcohol users, anorexics, bulimics, people with AIDS,

with obsessive-compulsive disorders.

How do I save another human being? Is it at all within my power to do so? And, if

yes, what right, really, do I have to ‘save’? To what extent should I intervene and speak

up? What do I know, really, about what this individual in front of me wants and needs?

How do I build trust? How do I listen effectively? Maybe this person needs to

suffer. How can I best support this human being, in a compassionate, constructive,

respectful way?

My areas of specialization are intense psychic suffering and death and dying. Yet,

before September 11th, I never contemplated the possibility that my children could die of

a devastating disease. Though I dread saying it, given the way things are, this possibility

is very much in the cards.

"Everybody knows the deal is rotten: Old Black Joe's still picking cotton for your

ribbons and bows." What did I do when hacked-to-death bodies of men, women and

children were flowing down Rwandan rivers? Did we not support, early on, Saddam

Hussein and Osama Bin Laden? What have I done, really, about the fact that I am part of

5% of the world population that has just about everything while the remaining 95% is

hungry? I can well imagine that many members of the starving group must be in a rage

with us, the well-fed, the spoiled.

How do I come to terms with the fear, the shame, and the anger that I feel? And,

assuming that I am right and that things will get worse before they get better, what do I
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have to say for myself now? What can I do, now, that may be of some use in negotiating

the thirst for violence and the smell of burning flesh lingering in the air?

I have been sitting with these questions in my book-filled office. I have decided to

tell you a story. It is a personal story, one that took place many years ago and that has

roots in a time of war. It is a story about death, despair, forgiveness and reconciliation.

***

In 1996, around the time I turned forty, I learned that during World War II my

father, then an eighteen year old soldier in Mussolini's dreaded Republique of Salo', was

sodomized by three of his comrades. He reported the incident to his commander who

presented the men with two alternatives: being court-martialed or being sent to the

Russian Front. The men chose the latter and all of them were killed.

My father, a man of few words who is now in his late seventies and suffering

from cancer, had never talked about the event to anybody. He revealed it to me and my

five siblings because he thought it would help us come to terms with an old history of

incest among us. If I was able to overcome this terrible event, he thought, so can you all

overcome your own trauma. Shortly thereafter my mother sent me a set of old family

photographs. In one of them she is a teen-ager wearing an M on her heart. The M stood

for Mussolini's Youth.

***

Auschwitz of my soul.

I was born in a very Catholic family in Genova, Italy, in 1956, eleven years after

the end of World War II. I remember the ruins of the bombed buildings and the little

orphans dressed in white and blue uniforms marching down the streets singing religious

songs on Liberation Day.

My parents named me, their oldest child, Adolfo, in honor of my paternal

grandfather, a revered man who had refused to join the Fascist Party and whose business

suffered because of it. Growing up with my name was a very painful experience, though
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compassionate relatives charitably reminded me that in Old German Adolfo means

"Noble Wolf of the Steppe."

Raised in Jesuit schools to a refrain of Imitatio Christi, I was taught to believe that

a true Christian must be infinitely loving and communicate Christ's bounty to everybody.

And indeed, I do feel deeply for others. And on my better days I do have faith in

the existence of an infinitely compassionate entity, a positive mystery. That is why I

chose to be a psychoanalyst and a writer. I enjoy the idea of sharing with others a

framework for dealing with mystery.

Yet there is another part of me that exists within a putrid state. The act of writing

about it helps me to squeeze the pus out of what at times looks and feels like one of

Soutine's bloody sides of beef. Bitter, angry and arrogant, that part of me, at times,

contemplates suicide and despises people. It is what is left of my childhood, of my

depression. When it raises its head I look at it intently and I hold it in the palm of my

hand. I caress it. I give it the attention it screams for. I contain the infection.

***

Around the time I was eight or nine years old, my peers in school, at the boy

scouts, and at the church where I was an altar boy, started to constantly deride me for my

name.

They made up a little song that went "Adolfo, Adolfo, you mur-de-rer and ass-

assin!"

I asked my parents about the reason for their cruelty.

"Who is Adolfo Hitler? Why are people making fun of me?" I asked at the dinner

table.

My father bristled and answered that Hitler was a very crazy man and that I was

not named after him but after my grandfather, "un uomo d'onore," a man of honor.

"What did Hitler do that was so crazy?" I inquired.

My father tensed up and said tersely: "Hitler killed people."

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"Who did he kill?"

"Hitler killed... Jews," he said impatiently. "But these are things that you are too

little to understand at your age."

"Jews like in the Bible?" I insisted.

"Yes, Jews like in the Bible," answered my father while giving me a somber look

and squirming in his seat.

As this exchange took place I remember my mother biting her lips and my

brothers and sisters watching intently as their older sibling took on Father.

"How did he kill them?"

Father's voice became a hiss. "This is not a dinner table topic young man. Stop at

once."

At this point my mother spoke up and in one of her grandstanding ways said:

"At my dinner table our children will always hear the truth. The family you come

from is used to silence and bigotry, not mine. Not ours."

My father looked at her angrily, then looked at all of us and raised his voice.

" Silence and bigotry? Very well my dear: Hitler killed the Jews by putting them

in rooms which he would fill with gas so that Jews couldn't breathe anymore and so that

they gasped and gasped and died! Happy now my dear?"

He stood up and left the dinner table.

From then on I became obsessed with learning exactly what happened, and I

began searching for answers in my parents' library. I came across Primo Levi's "Survival

in Auschwitz."

Reading about Auschwitz and the Holocaust transported me to a world that

terrified and fascinated me. I devoured Schwartz-Bart 's The Last of the Just and Levi's

The Truce, and I bought other first-person accounts of life in the camps.

I would imagine living in the camps and being a member of a Sonderkommando,

the team of prisoners in charge of cleaning the gas chambers and burning the dead bodies.
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I wondered whether I would have been able to survive in the camps, and how it

felt to be constantly hungry and to see all of your family members killed one by one

during the Selektions.

And I had fantasies of being a little kid during the war and going up to Adolf

Hitler and asking him: "Do you know that you and I have the same name? You are me, I

am you, we can understand each other! Why don't you stop killing the Jews?!" I imagined

that he would have listened to me and been moved by my words. I felt an indescribable

sorrow at having been born too late.

***

One of my earliest memories is of being in an alpine cottage with my parents, my

maternal aunt and my maternal grandmother. I have a vivid image of snowy mountain

tops out of the kitchen window. I must have been two or three years old. They served

some kind of meat and when I got to the white, fat part of it I couldn't swallow and I

regurgitated it. I was told to put it back in my mouth and again I couldn't push it down. I

started to cry and was harshly reprimanded and somebody said something about hungry

children and eating pan nero, black bread, during the war. Unless I finished my "meat" I

would find it waiting after my afternoon nap. And surely, there it was, when I woke up,

only colder then ever. My aunt was supposed to take me on a bus ride to the nearby town

and my parents methodically explained that unless I ate the fat I would not be allowed to

go.

I tried and vomited the whole lunch. My aunt left without me and I was informed

that, at my death, I would have to spend hundreds of years in purgatory, picking up that

piece of fat over and over, in un cestino senza fondo, in a basket without a bottom.

***

I am assaulted by memories of my adolescent body feeling fat and hungry.

Stuffing my face with bread and eating laxatives because I thought I was fat and ugly.

Stealing money as a boy scout from the Red Cross collection box to buy canned
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pineapple and whipped cream. I remember my body and my mind beaten into thinking

that I was selfish. Shaving my pubic hair wishing for my skin to remain smooth and soft

around the foreign appendix that hung between my legs. I remember wondering about the

notion of Joseph as putative father and Mary's impregnation by the Holy Spirit.

I imagined Joseph lacking a penis, his weak, passive hands searching between his

legs while Mary lay torn, ravaged by a ray of sun. I thought of Jesus on the Cross and

tried to imagine how he felt when he said "Eloi, eloi, lama sabactani," God, God, why

have you abandoned me. I tried to experience the feeling of having nails hammered

through my hands and, for good measure, through my penal hole. I often thought that

maybe one day men would give birth through their anus or through the tip of their penis. I

listened in awe when one of my schoolmates, son of a butcher, talked about licking

pussy. Inconceivable.

***

My mother orders my father around. He is a gentleman. He usually submits.

"You do not curse at a woman, nor ever, ever hit her, son. Not even with a

flower."

You can't touch women. You can't be angry with them. Like Menelaus standing in

front of Helen of Troy, you keep your love silent and pray that she may choose you.

Think of Genova, my hometown, as a city very much like Boston. My father is a

Brahmin. He comes from a wealthy family with a long history in the city. His grandfather

was the president of the chamber of commerce and a councilman.

My mother comes from a poor family. Her parents were farmers and sailors who

came to Genova from Piedmont and Naples. Her family counts as an ancestor Pius V, an

ascetic pope and inquisitor who died in 1572 and was made a saint in 1712, yet, she is

disliked by my father's siblings. She is not a Yankee. She is outspoken. She teases them

about their highbrow ways and their religious arrogance. She is a feminist ante litteram, a

college graduate who works full time while all the other wives sit home.
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"I would rather die then spend my days playing bridge and drinking tea."

In spite of her disdain for wealth and status she wears rubies, sapphires and

diamonds. She names me after my father's father, whom everybody adores and fears. I

am her revenge. Her cock. I must be perfect, carry on the family name and be an example

to others.

Think of my parents as speaking with self-importance and conceit. They are

snobs. They speak with their nasal cavities or their sphincters. Or their hands. They beat

me daily because I am impertinente, irreverente.

My mother is impulsive, she slaps me when I least expect it. My father beats me

in a more structured way. Pull down your pants and underwear. Lay on the bed face

down. He takes off his belt and whips me. Don't act like a fairy. If I try to escape he

loses control and strikes indiscriminately. If I act submissively he may let me know in

advance how many blows I will receive. Afterwards, he asks me to sit on his lap and I

feel the soft texture of his flannel pants grating against my ass cheeks. He talks to me

with a deep, almost questioning voice: "I am doing this for your own good, it is my duty

as your father to teach you to become a man."

I tried to kill my father when I was ten years old. With the help of a younger

sibling who also received his share of beatings I manipulated the handle of the elevator

door with which father was in the habit of playing while he waited for the lift. We hoped

he would pull the handle and that, shocked, he would lose his balance and fall down the

elevator shaft.

My father suffered from cyclical, clinical depressions. He would lay in bed all

day, for months at a time, with a blanket drawn up over his head. He was a commodity

broker and his business went down the drain. We lived mostly on my mother's salary --

she taught math at the high-school level -- and on money borrowed from the wealthy

paternal side of the family.

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Father was an avid numismatic and philatelist. My mother would catch him in the

middle of the night cataloguing the ancient coins and stamps that he maniacally bought

on credit. The night would be pierced by her screams: "Figlio di puttana! Son of a

whore! You want to see us starve? You want to see me standing at a street corner selling

my body?"

When I was thirteen years old I fought hard for the right to exchange my gray

flannel, knee-high pants for a pair of jeans. My parents refused to buy them for me: "You

are too young." I bought them with pocket money that I saved for several months. When

my father saw them on me he commented that my behind looked like a woman's ass.

I tell them that I want to study ballet. "It is not for men, people will think you are

a buliccio, a faggot" says my father.

"Please, please son cut your hair, you look like a woman," begs my mother.

I refuse and enjoy the thickness of my hair across my fingers. I cherish my

feminine looks. If I look like a woman the girls in school may feel less threatened by me

and I may be able to get my secret love, Antonia, to fall for me.

One evening mother calls me into her bedroom. I am wearing my pajamas and she

asks me to pull my pants down.

"I want to know if you are growing properly," she explains. I am so taken aback

that I comply. She takes my balls in her hand: "You are fine my son. You are becoming a

man." The morning after she looks at me with her huge Anna Magnani eyes: "My son, I

had a dream! I was searching across your pubic hair for your penis and I could not find it.

I beg you, my son: Cut your hair!"

That day, on the way back from school, I stopped at the barbershop and had my

head shaved. I will never forget the intense pleasure I felt when my mother saw me and

let out a wild scream.

***
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Ossiuro at the movies.

In my boy-scout group the time of puberty was marked by the admittance into a

secret society known as "The Totem." The ritual of entry into the society was comprised

of extensive beatings and dangerous feats such as swimming across a river in the middle

of the night. One was eventually granted an animal's name which could be spoken only

by other initiated members and which gave that person the right to savagely beat any

uninitiated who accidentally mentioned it. I was despised for my communist views and

was given the name Ossiuro, the white small worm that grows at times in human feces.

I remember going to see From Here to Eternity with both of my parents,

separately. The first time I saw it with my mother. When Burt Lancaster kissed Deborah

Kerr on the beach, with those huge waves coming and coming, my mother held my hand

and I wanted to die. When I saw it with my father, a man not prone to intense expressions

of emotions, I was struck by his deep admiration for Montgomery Clift.

I never heard my father, a man who cherished the silent act of cataloguing,

speaking so intensely about anything or anybody.

"What a handsome man, what intelligence, what courage!"

And about Monty's fight with those of his comrades who put him down: "You

never let anybody shame you, son. But most importantly, you never, ever rat on

anybody."

When he spoke of his rape a few years ago he confessed that he always felt

horribly guilty for the death of his comrades and great shame for not having been able to

defend himself.

***

I was nine or ten when I first thought of running away. My best friend and I

decided to do it together. I don't remember anything else about our plan but I do

remember waiting and waiting for him on the street at the established time.
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As the years went by I never stopped thinking about finding a way out of the hell

that was my family life and I became increasingly despondent and provocative.

My mother felt so helpless that she decided to share her Valium with me,

explaining that it would "calm me down."

Dreams of revolution and books helped me to survive. Pasolini's A Violent Life,

Hesse's Siddahrta, Under the Wheel, and Steppenwolf; and Kerouac's On the Road, and

Ginsberg's Howl. I turned twelve in 1968 and marched against the Vietnam War.

During a heated discussion about politics my mother filled a bag with food,

grabbed me by the hand and dragged me to her little red car, a FIAT 500 which was

barely bigger then her own minute body. She drove like a maniac.

"You want Communism?" she screamed during the ride. "I am going to show you

real hunger first."

She parked while ranting about my being viziato e egoista, spoiled and selfish,

and we descended into Genova's carruggi, a labyrinth of very tall and very narrow alleys

that surround Genova's port, the poorest section of the city. We climbed what seemed an

infinite set of stairs in a building that was surrounded by darkness. She knocked on a

dilapidated door. A young woman dressed in rags with a gaunt face and circles under her

eyes opened it, two or three toddlers hanging on her skirt.

"Buongiorno Signora," said my mother. "I came to bring you something."

As she took the bag of food the woman looked at her submissively and motioned

her in raising her voice in a lament: "Entri, entri Signora. Dio la benedica!"

There must have been twelve people living in those two rooms. I remember a

thick group of human beings. Kids, adults, two mattresses on the floor and body odor. As

we left followed by the woman's loud blessing, my mother resumed her dramatic

teaching. "That is it, my son. Now you have seen Christ. You have seen what hunger is.

Now grow and do something about it instead of making a fool of yourself in the streets."
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This event is branded in my memory like the dinner table incident about the gas

chambers. Both have dominated my life and for many years. I could do nothing with

them other then trying to defend myself from the feelings of incredible rage, fear and

shame that they caused me. Yet as much as these incidents caused me to suffer they also

inspired me to find concrete ways to fight injustice. I became involved with a group of

Catholics who traveled regularly to Lourdes and I made several pilgrimages there as a

boy-scout, to assist terminally ill people pray for a cure.

***

By the time I was fourteen years old I had devoured Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and

Huysmans, Nietzsche, Lenin, Stirner and Bakunin, and engaged in Luddite gestures such

as challenging one of my teachers to a duel.

I ran away from home and went to live with a group of hippies who had

established a commune in the carruggi. My parents had me arrested and locked-up for a

month in a mental health hospital for severely disturbed adolescents. At my release I

started smoking pot and taking acid and ran away to Amsterdam where I was caught by

the Interpol trying to board a bus headed to Kabul. My passport was taken away and I

was sent to school in the south of Italy, to live with Paolo, a young bachelor who was a

friend of the family.

This sensitive and intelligent man, whom to this day I love like a brother, was

very lonely and loved me dearly. He gave me a hug one night and told me that he cared

for me and that everything would be OK. I remember that moment as one of the first

experiences of closeness I ever had.

He was a strict disciplinarian, very Catholic, and forbid me to cultivate my love

for literature.

"You read too much my dear, it is bad for your mind."

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Yet we finally agreed on one book that I would be allowed to read: Shirer's

History of the Third Reich. The tome became my fateful companion during that year and

nurtured preoccupation with the Holocaust.

Good grades won me permission to return to Genova, where I enrolled in a Jesuit

school and was given permission to live in a community led by young Jesuit priests who

engaged in community work in the carruggi.

These priests taught me the difference between protesting in the streets and doing

real social work. They tutored the poorest of children and helped their mothers and

fathers to find work and to deal with addiction and mental health problems.

I was profoundly depressed by the poverty that I saw all around me and enraged

by the very limited resources available. I felt desperate, yet, under the Jesuits' spiritual

influence, I was able to remain drug free for a year and found a different way to negotiate

my suicidal instincts: I started drawing and writing poetry and short stories.

I wrote poems a' la Huysmans and Lautreamont, about hermaphrodites and

heretics. I coupled them with drawings of nude, monstrous bodies, and I distributed these

stressful concoctions to my peers as they entered the school building. A monument

should be built to the memory of my enlightened Jesuit teachers and to the school's

administrators, because no matter how provocatively I acted they always treated me with

respect and compassion.

***

Me immundum munda tuo sanguine: Cleanse my foul self with your blood. 1

I was disgusted by my body. My mother had convinced me that I was fat and

short and put me on salad diets.

I was painfully shy with women and spent hours in the bathroom masturbating,

dreaming of old matrons with large, pendulous breasts asking me to help them with their

shopping bags, and of young maidens who would allow me to hold their hands. And I fell

in love with my male friends. They were platonic loves that were not coupled with desire
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for their bodies, yet the intensity of my affection was such that my intents were often

misunderstood. My neediness pushed my friends away.

I was so paralyzed by my sexual and emotional hunger and so overwhelmingly

impotent that when I discovered heroin and morphine and cocaine I sincerely thought that

I had found the answer to all my problems.

I was in awe of the experience of watching the needle entering my engorged vein,

pulling the plunger and watching transfixedly the blood exploding in slow motion into

the body of the syringe prior to pushing the drugs in. Then I would subject myself to a

ritual which, I had decided, was the utmost form of decadence: lulled by the warm and

enveloping embrace of the drugs I laid in bed listening to Doris Day and Frank Sinatra,

reading Ferlinghetti and dreaming of traveling to Katmandu.

As my passport and my national ID card had been taken away I could not leave

the country, yet, finally overcome with an immense feeling of boredom, I stuck On the

Road in one pocket and Howl in the other and left for a six months trip throughout Italy.

Milan, Turin, Florence, Venice, Lucca, Perugia, Rome. Sleeping in train stations,

abandoned bunkers and under bridges I honored the memory of Dean Moriarty. I fell in

love with a teen-age girl who was on the road with a pitch-black dog named Paki, in

honor of the famous Pakistani hash deliciously cut with opium. We begged for food and

money and shot-up cheap cough syrup. We traveled as far as Sardinia, and, in Cagliari,

we got in trouble with local drug lords for selling fake acid.

As I became increasingly addicted I had fantasies of secluding myself in an alpine

cottage, laying on a wooden platform with a hole underneath my ass, an intravenous drip

of heroin and morphine in one arm and of cocaine in the other. A huge window in front

of me with a view of the mountains, I would lay there and wait for death.

I was so hard up for drugs that I returned home and stole all of my father's gold

coins and all the silver my parents received for their wedding. I sold everything to The

Eel, a transvestite who was the king of the caruggi and looked like Jabba the Hutt.
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Found out, I agreed to enter analytic treatment with Serena, a twenty-five year old

psychiatrist just out of medical school. Because I dreaded the idea of going into a

hospital, she helped me arrange a home-based detox. As I lay in bed crying after she

inserted an intravenous drip of sedatives in my arm, she looked at me with great

compassion. Suddenly, her eyes were also full of tears. Somehow our hands touched, and

she leaned toward me to give me a hug. I felt her tears mixing with my own, washing my

face, and we kissed.

***

Na'aseh v'Nishma: We will do and we will heed. 2

Serena helped me convince my parents to give me back my passport so that I

could pursue my dream of leaving Italy.

My guilt-ridden parents, like many post-Holocaust Christians, had developed

great fondness for the state of Israel. They had numerous Jewish friends and when Serena

and I proposed that I be allowed to go live on a kibbutz my parents were positively

thrilled by the idea.

On a splendidly sunny day in March, 1974, at age seventeen, a few months after

the Yom Kippur War had ended, I boarded with Serena a plane to Jerusalem.

I remember feeling the hot cement on my lips as I got off the plane and kissed the

ground. I could not believe it: I was free.

I was welcomed by one of my closest friends, Miki, who had made aliyah -- the

decision to live in Israel -- a few months earlier. He was a student at Jerusalem

University. Miki introduced me to his friends from the Jewish communities of Rome,

Milan and Turin, who had made aliyah with him.

I decided that I would live with Miki and look for a job. Serena agreed to tell my

parents that I was safe and sound in a kibbutz. Shortly after she left, depressed by her

departure, I bought some opium in Old Jerusalem and was promptly arrested and put in

jail for two weeks.

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At my release I spent several months recuperating in the loving arms of the

Orthodox Italian community. The community then collected $120.00 that I added to

$350.00 of my own money. I exchanged my return ticket to Italy for a ticket to Athens

and took off to pursue my dream of reaching Katmandu.

Feeling for once like a courageous, noble wolf of the steppe, I landed in Athens

and slowly but surely traveled through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India.

Back then, jeans and tee shirts were valuable commodities in the East and I sold

my clothes to buy food and large quantities of amazingly inexpensive drugs.

I crossed the Kyber Pass dressed in Afghan garb, addicted to the best heroin in

the world.

I did not ever have sex, because nobody taught me to love my dick and because I

feared vagina dentata. Instead, I smoked my mind away in opium dens in Peshawar and

stole from tourists.

Seeing the amazing poverty all around overwhelmed me. The drugs soothed my

despair. In Delhi, on the day of my 18th birthday, emancipated, I wrote to my parents that

I was in India. I told them that I loved them.

A few weeks later I received a letter from my mother at Delhi's Poste Restante. It

was written with four kinds of ink: blue, red, green and yellow. The poor woman was out

of her mind with fear yet managed to wish me good luck. "It's your life, my son," she

wrote.

On the way to Benares I remember shooting up in the train's bathroom. I placed

the cooking spoon and my only needle on a book of Rimbaud's poetry and while I

searched for matches my only needle fell on the floor in a pool of urine. I picked it up,

burned it and injected the morphine.

In Benares I slept on the shores of the holy river Ganges. I felt so overwhelmed

and ashamed by the immense hunger that surrounded me that I once kicked away a child

who would not stop begging me for money. I kicked him so hard that the toe of the foot
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with which I hit him became infected. I thought of the infection as punishment for my

rage.

I was shooting-up so much and so often that by the time I reached Katmandu I

could use only the veins on my hands. I never washed, and, obsessively, pulled films of

dirt off my skin.

I scratched my head constantly to get rid of the fleas that were nesting in my hair.

Pus leaked from my scalp. I decided that I needed a haircut.

Even the Nepalese man who cut hair on the sidewalks of Katmandu was disgusted

by my putrescent scalp. The man suggested that I shave my head and disinfect it. I

complied.

I covered my shaven scalp with a kipa.

I accidentally looked in a mirror.

I was so thin I looked like a Musulman, a slang term used in concentration camps

to describe those who had lost their will to live.

Arbeit Macht Frei. 3

***

I rented a hut in Swayambu, a village six miles from Katmandu.

The village was located at the foot of a mountain upon which stood a Buddhist

temple with hundreds of small bronze bells that monks and pilgrims rang constantly.

I would get high, sit outside my hut and listen to the bells and look at the green

valley and the white peaks of the Himalayan Mountains.

One night I injected LSD and found myself roaming the valley, following the

sound of distant drums. I came to a cluster of huts surrounding a big fire around which a

huge, man-made, colorful serpent was dancing and dancing, carried by women and

children. They looked at me first with fear and then pity. I thought that the sound of the

drums would suck me into oblivion and I was terrified.

 20

I ran away and somehow found my way back to the hut. I shot up. I probably

injected a tiny piece of cotton because I lay shaking for hours on the stone floor near the

fire. I was certain that I was going to die. It was not the first time, but, this time, my fear

was so great that I promised myself if I survived I would never use drugs again.

My body somehow stabilized and I wrote my parents to please send me $200.00

because I wanted to return home. My poor parents sent me the money and I promptly

bought enough morphine to carry me through the journey back.

I reached Italy two months later and checked into a hospital to detox. At that time,

in 1975, they still detoxed addicts by tying them to their beds for several weeks, pumping

their bodies with sleeping pills and nutrients. Substance abusers were still considered

fundamentally "incurable" and post-detox programs did not exist. As I laid unconscious

in my hospital bed my parents journeyed throughout Europe, visiting private psychiatric

clinics and begging eminent directors to accept me as a long-term patient. They all

refused and my parents were finally directed to the Sanatorium Bellevue, the oldest

psychiatric clinic in the world, founded in 1857 and located in the German part of

Switzerland. They met with its head, Dr. Wolfgang Binswanger, in March of 1975.

Wolfgang Binswanger, or "Uncle Binzi," as he later invited me to call him, was

the scion of a long generation of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. His own father,

Ludwig, a very good friend of Freud, Jung, and the Jewish mystic and philosopher Martin

Buber, developed the psychoanalytic approach known as "Dasein Analyse."

Loosely translated as "analysis of the act of being and of becoming," the

philosophical and clinical core of Dasein Analyse is the belief that the spirit and the

psyche of a human being are intimately, metaphysically, and mystically connected, and

together they aspire to transcend their own history so as to transform the future.

Uncle Binzi agreed to treat me.

Our relationship was very informal. He assigned me to Jean-Paul Roussaux, a

charming, sophisticated young analyst eight years my senior, whose first patient I
 21

became. Binzi supervised Jean-Paul's analytic work with me and pushed me to engage in

all of the other therapeutic modalities that were offered at Bellevue. Massage therapy,

dance therapy, art therapy, music therapy, yoga, meditation, group therapy.

A youthful, energetic 60 year old man, Binzi used to refer to himself as a "man of

action." A Zen master of sorts, he literally fought with that part of me that had become a

professional victim. I remember walking toward him one afternoon, in the beautiful park

that surrounded Bellevue. As we came face-to-face he said in a loud, enthusiastic voice:

"Adolfo, da bist Du! Wie gehts Dir!" Here you are Adolfo! How are you!

His joie de vivre more often than not rubbed me the wrong way. That time I

looked at him sheepishly and mumbled back: "Hmmm, so-so." As soon as I said that he

looked at me straight in the eyes, raised his fist to the level of my sternum and, while

saying outloud "Adolfo, Du musst aufwachen, aufstehen!" Adolfo you must wake up,

stand up! he punched me so hard in the sternum that I fell on the ground, on my knees,

breathless.

I looked up at him in shock while gasping for air and he patted my head and

reapeted: "Aufstehen, Adolfo. Aufstehen, aufwachen." He then resumed his walk

nonchalantly as I was kneeling on the ground, speaking to himself: "Ja, ja. Umbedingt."

Yes, yes. Absolutely.

***

The space available to me for this piece does not allow me to share the fascinating

details of my 18 months stay at Bellevue. In a nutshell, though, think of me as a young

farmer who learned that horse manure can be used to fertilize his field: I toiled through

my depression and, for the first time in my life, I experienced enthusiasm. I learned that,

if one is willing to dig into the shit of life, violence can be transformed into creative

energy. I learned to sow and to harvest.

I owe an enormous thank you to my parents, for the great financial and emotional

burden that they undertook to save my life, and for their willingness to look at themselves
 22

and to acknowledge their mistakes. And to my siblings, who, each in their own way, have

made me feel that we are all in the same boat.

It is to them, and to you, that I dedicate this story.

I hope that reading it may have helped you to realize that, at times, a person has

no choice but to pick up a gun in order to survive. The syringe was my gun, my sword. I

did not know how to use it. I turned it against myself and it almost killed me.

I was terrified and I terrorized my parents, who had terrorized me and who, in

turn, had been terrorized by others. Prey of a vicious circle of violence, our rage was so

out-of-control that it almost killed us.

Psychoanalysis provided me with the tools to understand and to contain my

despair. It taught me that I don't have to be a victim and that I don't have to choose

between Gandhi and Malcom X.

I can be a pacifist and a militant at the same time.

I have the right to protect myself, and, if necessary, to be aggressive and violent in

the process.

I have the right to demand an apology.

I have the strength to say I fucked-up.

I can offer compensation to those I hurt.

I understand those who want to kill me and my family. I know in my own heart

the very hate they feel -- a rage so great that it is simultaneously suicidal and homicidal.

I will defend myself.

I will fight for peace.

1. Prayer in the Roman Catholic Latin missal.

2. Statement made by Moses to the Jews after receiving the Commandments. (Exodus XXVI:7)
3. "Work makes you free." The sign on the entrance of Auschwitz.
 23

Adolfo Profumo is a writer and a psychoanalyst in New York City. He has published
short stories and poetry in Italy, Switzerland, and the United States.

From 1983 to 1995, Adolfo Profumo worked with people with AIDS in New York City.
He was Director of Social Services for the Minority Task Force on AIDS; Clinical
Director of Gay Men's Health Crisis; and Executive Director of New York Harm
Reduction Educators, a needle-exchange program. He has been in private practice since
1995.

E-mail: adolfo.profumo@gmail.com
Copyright Adolfo Profumo 2002