Authors: Matilde Asensi
“Are you family members of Daniel Cornwall?” the latter asked, pronouncing my brother’s whole name with a correct British accent.
“She is his wife,” I said, standing; the older one came up to my shoulder and the other was completely below my sightlines, “and I’m his brother.”
“Good, good….” the older one exclaimed, hiding his hands in the pockets of his coat. That gesture, which bore a certain similarity to that of Pilate, didn’t please me. “I’m Dr. Llor, the neurologist who examined Daniel, and this is the psychiatrist on call, Dr. Hernández.” He took his right hand out of his pocket, but it wasn’t to extend it to us, but to point the way toward the entrance to the floor. Maybe he didn’t approve of my image, with the earring, the goatee, and the ponytail; or maybe he found Ona’s orange streak deplorable. “If you would be so kind as to come into my office for a moment, we can speak comfortably about Daniel.”
Dr. Llor situated himself unhurriedly at my side, letting the young Dr. Hernández accompany Ona and Daniel a few steps behind. The whole situation had something illusory about it, something false, like virtual reality.
“Your brother, Mr. Cornwall…,” Dr. Llor started to say.
“My name is Queralt, not Cornwall.”
The doctor gave me a strange look. “But you said that you were his brother,” he muttered in irritation, like someone who’d been vilely deceived and who was wasting his valuable time on an outsider.
“My name is Arnau Queralt Sañé, and my brother is Daniel Cornwall Sañé. Any other questions?” I offered sarcastically. If I had said that Daniel was my brother, why this ridiculous suspicion? As if in the whole world there existed only one unbreakable family model!
“You’re Arnau Queralt?” the neurologist asked, surprised, suddenly stuttering.
“Last time I looked I was,” I replied, pushing a bit of hair which had come loose from my ponytail, behind my ear.
“The owner of Ker-Central?”
“I would say so, unless something unexpected has happened.”
We had arrived at a green-painted door that exhibited a small plaque with his name on it, but Llor didn’t invite us in.
“My wife’s nephew, who’s a telecommunications engineer, used to work for your company.” By his tone I guessed that the roles had just been changed: the weird-looking guy wasn’t just some slob anymore.
“Really?” I replied disinterestedly. “So, what about my brother?”
He leaned on the door handle and opened it obsequiously. "Please, come in.”
The office was divided into two distinct areas by an aluminum partition. The first, very small, had only an old school desk full of folders and papers on which rested an enormous sleeping computer; the second, much larger, exhibited a formidable mahogany desk below the window and, on the other side of the room, a round table surrounded by soft armchairs upholstered in black leather. There was no room left on the wall for more photographs of Dr. Llor with celebrities or framed press clippings in whose titles his name stood out. The neurologist, giving Dani a pat, pulled out one of the chairs from the table so that Ona could make herself comfortable.
“Please…,” he murmured.
The diminutive Dr. Hernández positioned himself between Ona and myself, dropping onto the table, with a dry thump, a bulky folder that he had been carrying under his arm. He didn’t seem very happy, but really, no one was in that place so what difference did it make?
“The patient Daniel Cornwall,” Llor began in a neutral voice, extracting a pair of glasses from the front pocket of his coat and pushing them on, “presents an unusual set of symptoms. Dr. Hernández and I agree that it could be something similar to an acute depression.”
“My brother is depressed?” I asked, shocked.
“No, not exactly, Mr. Queralt…,” he clarified, looking at the psychiatrist out of the corner of his eye. “You see, your brother presents a very confusing profile of two pathologies that do not usually occur at the same time in one patient.”
“On the one hand,” Dr. Hernández, who was badly hiding his excitement at having such a strange case on his hands, interjected for the first time, “he seems to suffer from what the medical literature calls Cotard delusion. This syndrome was diagnosed for the first time in 1788 in France. Individuals who suffer from it believe irrefutably that they are dead and they insist, sometimes even violently, on being shrouded and buried. They don’t feel their bodies, they don’t respond to external stimuli, their gazes become opaque and vacant, their bodies go completely limp…. Basically, they are alive because we know they’re alive, but they react as if they really were dead.”
Ona began to cry silently without being able to control her sobs and Dani, scared, turned toward me looking for support, but when he saw me so serious he burst into tears as well. If Jabba and Proxi didn’t get here soon to pick him up, this was going to end badly.
Since the boy’s crying got in the way of the conversation Ona, trying to calm herself, stood up and began pacing back and forth to comfort Dani. At the table, none of us said anything. At last, after several interminable minutes, my nephew stopped crying and seemed to go to sleep.
“It’s very late for him,” my sister-in-law whispered, carefully returning to her seat. “He should have been asleep a while ago and he hasn’t even had dinner.”
I crossed my hands on the table and leaned toward the doctors. “All right, Dr. Hernández,” I said, “and what solution is there for this Cotard delusion or whatever you call it?”
“Sir, solution, solution…! I recommend hospitalization and the administration of psychopharmaceuticals and the prognosis, with medication, tends to be good although I won’t lie to you, in almost all cases there are relapses.”
“The most recent studies on Cotard delusion,” observed Dr. Llor, who seemed to want to contribute his neurological two cents, “show that this syndrome tends to be associated with a certain kind of cerebral lesion located in the left temporal lobe.”
“Does that mean that he’s hit his head?” Ona asked, alarmed.
“No, not at all,” replied the neurologist. “What I’m trying to say is that even if there is no
trauma, there are one or various parts of the brain that do not react as they should or at least as they are expected to. The human brain is made of many distinct parts that all have their respective functions: some control movement, others make calculations, others process feelings, etc. To do so, these sectors use small electrical charges and very specialized chemical agents. All it takes is one slight change in one of these agents to completely change the way an area of the brain works and with it the way a person thinks, feels, or behaves. In the case of Cotard delusion, CT scans show that there’s a change in the activity of the left temporal lobe…here.” He accompanied the word with a gesture, resting his hand behind his left ear, not very high or very low and not very far back.
“Sort of like a computer with a broken circuit?”
The two doctors wrinkled their foreheads in unison, unpleasantly surprised by the example.
“Yes, okay…,” Dr. Hernández admitted. “These days it’s very common to compare the human brain to a computer because both function, shall we say, in a similar way. But they are not the same: A computer doesn’t have self awareness or emotions. This is the grave mistake that neurology is leading us toward.” Llor didn’t even blink. “In psychiatry, the approach is completely different. There’s no doubt that there’s an organic component to Cotard delusion, but it’s also true that its symptoms coincide almost completely with those of an acute depression. Moreover, in your brother’s case, we have not been able to find any alteration in the left temporal lobe.”
“Nevertheless, since he is my patient,” Now it was Hernández who didn’t move a muscle in his face, “I’ve outlined a course of intensive treatments using neuroleptics, chlorpromazine and thioridazine and I hope to be able to discharge him within fifteen days.”
“There is, furthermore, another added problem,” the psychiatrist pointed out, “which is that Daniel presents, along with Cotard delusion, which is the most striking, evident signs of a pathology called agnosia.”
I felt something inside me rebel. Until that moment I had managed to convince myself that everything that was happening was something temporary, that Daniel suffered from a “delusion” which had a cure and that once it was eliminated my brother would return to how he was before. However, it hit me painfully when they added more illnesses. I looked at Ona, and by the contraction of her face, I guessed that she was as distraught as I was. Little Dani, wrapped in the blue blanket and cuddled by his mother, had fallen at last into a deep sleep. And it was lucky he was so asleep because at that moment my phone, still tightly clutched in his hands, began to emit the musical notes denoting a call from Jabba. Fortunately, he didn’t even make a sound; he only let out a long sigh when Ona, with some difficulty, managed to extricate it from him.
By asking after Daniel in the ER, Jabba and Proxi had managed to get to the lobby that opened into the Neurology department. After finishing the short chat I told Ona and she, slowly rising, moved towards the door and went out.
“Should we wait for Daniel’s wife or should we continue?” Llor asked with some impatience. His tone made me remember something I had read once: in China, in ancient times, doctors only charged their fees if they saved the patient. Otherwise they didn’t charge or the family killed them.
“Let’s just finish it now,” I replied, thinking that the ancient Chinese were really very wise. “And I will talk with my sister-in-law.”
The little doctor began to speak. “Along with Cotard’s syndrome, your brother also suffers from a very pronounced case of agnosia.” He shoved the glasses all the way up his nose until they were touching his eyebrows and looked anxiously at the neurologist. “As Miquel…Dr. Llor
was explaining to you, agnosia, a much more common pathology, appears, generally, in patients who have suffered strokes or cerebral traumas in which they have lost part of their brain. As you can see, this is not the case with your brother nor of patients with Cotard’s, yet Daniel is nevertheless incapable of recognizing objects and people. To give you a clearer idea, your brother, who claims to be dead, lives at this moment in a world populated with strange things that move in absurd ways and make strange noises. If you showed him, for example, a cat, he wouldn't know what you were showing him, just as he also wouldn’t know that it was an animal of some sort, because he doesn’t know what an animal is.”
I rubbed my head with my hands, despairing. I felt a terrible pressure in my temples.
“He wouldn’t be able recognize you,” Dr. Hernández continued, “or his wife. To Daniel, all faces are flat ovals with a couple of black splotches where the eyes should be.”
“What’s bad about agnosia,” added Llor, rubbing his palms together repeatedly, “is that, as it is produced by a stroke or a traumatic loss of brain mass, it has neither treatment nor cure. Having said that….”
He left the phrase in the air, dripping hope.
“The CT scans that we’ve taken of your brother show that Daniel’s brain is in perfect condition.”
“I’ve already told you that we did not even find the temporal lobe dysfunction,” Hernández pointed out, for the first time exhibiting a slight smile. “Daniel only presents the symptoms, not the pathologies.”
I looked at him like he was an idiot.
“And do you want to tell me what the difference is between adding two and two and appearing to add two and two? My brother was normal this morning, he went to work at the university and returned to his house to eat with his wife and son, and now he’s hospitalized here with some symptoms which simulate Cotard’s syndrome and agnosia.” I held my breath because I was ready to let out a string of insults. “Okay, fine! I understand that you’re going to do everything possible to cure my brother, so let’s not argue that point. I only want to know if Daniel will be the same again or not.”
Llor, surprised by my sudden fit of fury, felt obligated to level with me like a life-long colleague or friend:
“Look, as a general rule, we doctors don’t like to box ourselves in, right? We prefer not to give too much hope at the beginning in case things don’t turn out well. If the sick person gets better? Perfect, we’re great! If he doesn’t get better? Well, we warned from the beginning of what could happen.” He looked at me with pity, and, resting his hands on the table, pushed the chair noisily back before standing. “I’m going to tell you the truth, Mr. Queralt: we have no idea what’s really going on with your brother.”
Sometimes, when you are most disconnected from everything, when you least expect something to happen to change your life, destiny decides to play a dirty trick on you and it hits you in the face with an iron glove. So you look around yourself, disconcerted, and you ask yourself where the blow came from and what exactly happened to make the ground sink from beneath your feet. You’d give anything to erase what has happened, you long for normality, your old habits, you’d like everything to go back to the way it was before…. But that before is another life, a life to which, incomprehensibly, you can no longer return.
That night Mariona and I stayed with Daniel. The room was very small and there was only one reclining chair for a visitor, a chair that was so decrepit that it puffed its foam-rubber stuffing into the air from its various tears. Nevertheless, it was the best room on the floor and it was
private, so we still had to be grateful.
My mother called shortly after the meeting with Llor and Hernández. For the first time in her life, she managed to remain silent for a good while and pay attention without interrupting continuously to demand her turn to speak. Really, she was paralyzed. It was not easy to explain to her what the doctors had told us. For her, everything that was not an illness of the body was unimportant so she had to make a huge effort, clear her mind, and accept the idea that her youngest son, despite being a well-built man with an iron constitution, had become mentally ill. Finally, with a shaky voice, and after asking me an infinite number of times not to tell Grandma anything, under any circumstances, if she called, she announced that Clifford was already reserving tickets for the flight leaving Heathrow at seven twenty-five the next morning.