Visitor in Lunacy Read Online Free PDF Page B

exaggerated and grotesque while her eyes remained as lifeless as stone.
    Monastero took the photograph and replaced the lens cap. As the humming of the generator died away the woman's expression collapsed.
    “So you see, gentlemen, combine the muscles associated with joy and pain at certain degrees of contraction and you will produce a grimace.”
    “So it would seem.” I blinked away the residual light from the flash lamp and waved at the smoke. My hay fever was nettlesome enough without this additional irritation.
    Superintendent Godalming grinned from the chair next to me, the light at his back glowing red through his jug-handle ears: “Fantastic,” he said. “Fascinating.”
    I asked him when I might be allowed to continue with my inspection.
    “Soon, Doctor Renfield, soon. You'll want to hear the rest of this. Do go on, Doctor Monastero.”
    With a nod the Italian continued with his presentation: “The human face has five primary expressions: joy, misery, pain, pleasure and fear. Combinations of these five basic arrangements allow us to exhibit more complex emotions: restrained jubilation, for example, or embarrassment, or regret. If we activate them properly, as if by the spirit, the facial muscles respond in characteristic patterns, allowing them to be documented and classified.”
    Monastero had taken short-term residence in the asylum and been given his pick of the inmates to use as subjects in his studies. Godalming, it seemed, considered this work to be of unparalleled significance. I had been partway through my tour of the institution when he took me by the arm and insisted I be given a demonstration.
    “It is my hope,” said the Italian, “this photographic collection will be of practical use not only to physicians in diagnosing a patient's state of mind, but also to artists. What better way to learn how to correctly render an emotion on the human face?”
    While he spoke the German was busy consulting his notebook and rearranging the conductors. A spot of drool appeared on the inmate's bottom lip, which he distractedly wiped away using the pad of his thumb.
    “Consider the sensation of love. The difference between the expression of terrestrial love and the more sublime expression of celestial love is only slight, and something which artists have frequently failed to appreciate. Bernini's sculpture in the church of Saint Maria della Vittoria, for example, depicts Saint Theresa in what appears to be a state of base sensual pleasure rather than what we must presume the artist intended: Christian rapture. Her eyes are half closed, her lips are full and parted. The image verges on the obscene. In my own work, using only electrical pulses, I have been able to produce representations of a far purer joy. The joy of a soul devoted to a higher being.”
    Confident the subject was sufficiently sedated and posed no threat, the German unfastened her straps and crossed her hands over her chest. After pulling her shawl up over her hair he once again concealed himself behind the silk screen.
    Monastero approached his subject and, with the deftness of a conjurer, produced a silver necklace from his coat pocket: “This,” he said, placing it around her neck, “is the ideal poetry of human love.”
    Taking the sound of the generator as his cue he stepped aside to reveal the woman's suddenly altered features: her raised mouth, her widened eyes, her tightened skin. She looked exalted, rapturous. On her chest the silver cross flashed in a beam of sunlight.
    I took out my handkerchief and blew my nose: “Doctor? May we? Time is short.”
    Godalming relented: “Let's get on with it then.”
     
    I was led to Block 6, which housed the inmates considered to pose the highest risk to themselves as well as others: the violent, the suicidal, and the epileptic. As was befitting an area of this type in a hospital for the criminally insane, the corridors were prison-like and heavily staffed, the walls featureless and grey.