lasted only a few seconds, but to me, it seemed an eternity.
“And you?” she finally said, swinging her legs and looking away from me.
“Me?” I said, and surprised myself wishing, inexplicably, that she’d go, that she’d leave me alone. “As you can see.”
“Busy,” she said sadly. With genuine sadness, the sadness of a little girl who asks for and doesn’t receive the attention she needs. But why had she gotten like this so suddenly? Why didn’t she go downstairs to talk with her colleagues, or help them? Certainly they would have a great deal to do.
“Paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork,” I said. “Here in the office, it’s what I must do.”
“Hmmm,” she mused. “Is that why you came to our lab, to flee your paperwork?”
“In a manner of speaking,” I laughed.
“In a manner of speaking,” she repeated very seriously, lifting her leg and grazing my elbow with the pointed heel of her shoe. “In a manner of speaking, of course.”
Then the magnetic field again and silence. This time, however, she took pity on me.
“Well,” she said, sliding smoothly off the desk to her feet, “I’m going. I’ll leave you to finish your paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork.”
“I’ll see you down there,” I said. She walked slowly to the door, paused, waved goodbye, and left. I felt enormously relieved. But then I noticed that there was something in the place she’d been sitting: small, heart-shaped, wrapped in red foil. A chocolate.
I went out after her. Luckily she’d not yet crossed the threshold out of my office.
“Mathilde,” I said. She turned.
“Yes?” she replied. Loyda stopped typing and looked at us curiously.
“You dropped this,” I said, holding out the chocolate. First, her face turned livid and then it ignited in a blazing red. She looked at Loyda. Loyda returned the look, reprimanding her with a small smile of contempt.
“Oh!” said Mathilde, brusquely grabbing the chocolate from me. “How stupid of me! Thank you.”
She hurried off. I could hear the rapid-fire echo of her heels in the hallway.
That was Mathilde: intelligent and responsible, but extremely absent-minded.
There are no emotions without a self that produces and experiences them. And vice versa: without emotions, the self doesn’t exist. The self, that presence conscious of itself, encysted in our bodies, has a dynamic existence, constantly defined and redefined by the emotions it uses to interpret stimuli received by the senses. They are not separable entities.
To “be one’s self” is our principal emotion.
Valérie’s death caused me to lose this base stimulus and threw my life into total confusion. I finished school on autopilot, doing the impossible so as not to think. Nothing mattered to me. I felt nothing. I had ceased to “be myself.” The loss, however, was not total; I could perceive, very vaguely, the need to recuperate that which had fled, not to remain forever with my arms crossed. For the time being though, I ignored the call almost completely.
I chucked the idea of preparing for entrance exams and getting back on the road to finish what was still required of me to become a doctor. I loathed the idea of investing the next two or three years reviewing material in order to obtain my license. I was horrified at the thought of then joining the mad rush of hundreds of my peers who kill themselves trying to conquer one of the only two or three vacant positions in a prestigious hospital. I wanted to get away from everything and everyone. I applied to graduate school at various universities in the United States. I was accepted to almost all of them. I chose one at random and left.
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