Page 20 of An Immaculate Deception

It has never occurred to me before that repetitive behaviors can soothe one’s mind, but I suppose there is a ring of reason to it. This doctor, so self-assured and collected, could not be more different than this nervous version of Leandro. As he swirls his drink, my eyes float to his strong hands and his cryptic dark gaze. It stirs up a kernel of sinful desire from my depths. I crumple the napkin in my hand.

“Now, tell me, Madalena…” His eyes pierce me as though he’s reading my mind and knows my darkest secrets. My skin grows hot yet I cannot look away. He evokes an intimacy that I have not felt with Leandro since I awoke in this place. “Why were you spying on him?”

“Well, I was just…He keeps a rotting cake in the kitchen, a very vile thing, did you know this? Not that it can be blamed on the accident but most disturbing still.”

“A rotting cake?”

“Yes. How do you explain that?”

“Perhaps it was forgotten.”

“You don’t understand,” I say, frustrated. “He’s lied to me about one of the rooms. It smelled of a woman’s perfume, but he said there were no recent guests. He’s lied about the renovations, there’s been no work done on the mill. How can he live in this decaying fazenda, and have done no work on the mill? Was Leandro unwell prior to the accident? Some disease of the mind if not of the body, something which he managed to keep secret from me and others?”

He frowns. I sense a resistance in him, and I fear I may have crossed a line. I know I have no right to Leandro’s medical history.

I continue desperately: “Something isn’t right with him. Maybe it is merely the shock of the accident, but I fear it is a deeper matter.”

“Perhaps you didn’t know him as well as you thought you did.”

I am silenced. He echoes my mother’s words and I want to throw my plate at him.

“He is in nervous shock, due to the accident,” he adds. “This is to be expected, a weakness of the nervous system following sudden fright. Madalena, I heard that you had an incident in one of the rooms.” Doctor Lobo appraises me. “That you nearly fainted and brought down a whole case of jewelry and broke a perfume bottle. Leandro and Maria das Dores were very much concerned about you.”

I take a sip of wine, trying to hide my irritation that Leandro told him about that. “I just felt faint and dizzy for a bit, but it went away. It was nothing.”

“I see. And have you felt any sudden bursts of intense emotion recently?”

“I am fine!” I bang my fist on the table and the force rattles the plates, the wineglass nearly topples over. “Has Leandro received this same level of scrutiny?”

He stiffens. In the silence, I realize that Leandro is standing by the table, eyeing me with no small amount of trepidation.

Maria das Dores replaces our dirty plates with fresh coffee and dessert. I gaze down at my food, reeling with shame. I can only imagine how Leandro feels about me now. Of course he had to walk in at the worst possible moment, the only moment where I (slightly) lost my temper. The very moment when I was speaking ill of him. I don’t have emotional outbursts, and I’m frustrated with Doctor Lobo for suggesting as much at the same time that he ignores all of Leandro’s painfully obvious issues. Still, perhaps my reaction was overly strong; surely Mother would say I should not speak to a man that way. I know Doctor Lobo is diagnosing me in his head with hysteria or a nervous disposition at this very moment.

Worse still is that Leandro overheard me speaking critically of him. How much did he hear? Did he overhear me speaking of the book-tearing ritual? The perfumed room? The rotting cake? The absent renovations? I can’t even remember the last thing I said. If Leandro didn’t feel antagonism toward me before, he certainly does now.

Leandro sips his coffee in silence, avoiding eye contact at all costs. When addressed, he nods and responds with one-word answers. Doctor Lobo describes the latest fashions and philosophies abroad, eccentric topics such as astrology, alchemy, numerology, Hermetic philosophy, animal magnetism, and séances. He describes recent developments in the field of alienism, ideas around the conscious and unconscious mind.

“The unconscious mind lies outside our conscious awareness,” Doctor Lobo says. “The case was made in a recent book by physicians Freud and Breuer, based on clinical work on patients with hysteria. We have trapped, suppressed memories, latent knowledge, which we are not aware of.”

Leandro stares as though spellbound. “Thoughts that are trapped in our subconscious?”

“Often it goes back to things that happened in our early years of childhood,” Doctor Lobo says. “Which we no longer remember, but which continue to affect us. Trauma that solidified in the psyche as repressed memories and thoughts. These patterns of thinking, though unconscious, can cause diseases in the mind well into adulthood.”

“Repressed memories and thoughts…” Leandro mutters. “What can be done about it?”

“As a matter of fact…” Doctor Lobo sips his wine, eyes sparkling. “There is one technique most effective at retrieving repressed thoughts. The alienist induces a mesmeric trance, and the patient enters a state where they are neither awake nor asleep, neither conscious nor unconscious. It is called hypnotism. From this place, latent knowledge can surface.”

Leandro’s eyes bulge with interest. I cannot believe that after ignoring me all night, this is what charms him.

“And what is the treatment,” I ask, “for the affliction of modern men who worship knowledge instead of God?”

They both look at me.

“ ‘You were dead in your transgression and sins,’ ” I recite, “ ‘in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh, and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.’ ”

Doctor Lobo looks dumbfounded.

“Ephesians,” Leandro says.