In the psychiatric ward
When I was twenty-one, I found a job in a psychiatric hospital. I worked there for two years as an auxiliary nurse. Auxiliary was the lowest rank in the hierarchy. Lower than that you’re just ill! I am still thinking of the people I met there… Let me introduce them to you. Mauricette was about thirty years old but she looked sixteen, the age she was trapped by schizophrenia. She wore that kind of dull clothing you wear when you’re an inmate in a psychiatric hospital, she wore socks but no shoes, she had shoulder length dark and untidy hair and she was perpetually possessed by acute anger. She spent her days walking to and fro in the doorways or turning round the tables- always anticlockwise. Her fists clenched, she was churning out an unceasing string of the angriest and crudest words… Her anger is my anger. One day Mauricette stood in front of me in the middle of the path, hands joined over her head, on one leg as if practising a yoga stance called “the tree” Sh