I had forgotten important appointments–had, to give only one example of this kind, scheduled an elderly patient for surgery but was not at the clinic by his side when the time came. How difficult it was for me to persuade him later that I had his best interests at heart, that intensive radium treatment would stand him in much better stead than a surgical procedure. He believed it all in the end and died peacefully in his bed, instead of on the operating table. But who knows, perhaps my “gentle, blessed touch” could have gained him a few more years of life after all. And this same old man had a liking for me. He remembered me in his will, if not with a proper bequest, then at least with encomia, and lauded in particular my “loving heart.” Well, peace to his ashes. In my “loving heart” there was little peace. And no love.

My waiting room became emptier and emptier every day, the telephone calls were increasingly ones of a personal nature, that is to say, they were from my expensive golden blonde mistress and her sister, to whom I was lately held by “bonds of love,” and further I was being hounded by creditors, who had abruptly begun to be troublesome. It was a natural idea to attempt to stop the gaps in my budget with winnings from gambling, given that luck had favored me early on. But regrettably this was not the case now. Perhaps I was too worn out when I came to the club, for at that time my experiments were of the greatest importance to me, requiring the closest attention and the greatest care. Nothing is more humiliating for an experimenter than to present his results to his audience of physicians, to lay himself open to the criticism of shrewd, skeptical reviewers, and then see his results unable to withstand the sharpest scrutiny. It was imperative to avoid this. Unfortunately things were very far from what they should have been.

I had cages of animals set up, initially in the basement rooms, then in other spots in my now-deserted private clinic. The clinic belonged to my wife. But, of course, she could know nothing. For her benefit I simulated a brisk business at the clinic, I sent myself fake doctor’s fees, I had my mistress and her sister (they got along very well) telephone me when I wished to get away from my wife, pretending to be patients needing my assistance. And even if this deception and many similar ones were easy to practice upon my credulous wife, I was uneasy. A nervous disquiet, a presentiment of disaster, never left me. My irritability increased day by day, I never really slept, was never really awake, and more than once vented my rage upon my innocent wife.

But when she, enlightened by her daughter and perhaps by my father too (he had hated me since I once jokingly dubbed him a “loving heart”), saw “evil” in me, she did not oppose this evil. Faithful, more than faithful, to the words of Scripture (she was religious, and a thousand times I envied her this mindless faith), she turned the other cheek when I struck her on the right. I can still see her rapidly aging face. Nature had botched the job, but an animated play of expressions had at one time lent it some life and appealing mobility nevertheless; out of vanity, she had had it elaborately enameled, hoping to still have an effect on me by some means at least. Now it was as smooth as the head of a statue made of butter that has been in the sun a while, a bleak, grotesque spectacle. On one occasion she was pressing her face close to me in her love madness. I tried to push her away, unsuccessfully. I repeated my attempt to fend her off, the ball of my left hand wedged into one of her eye sockets, from which copious tears were flowing. Through the wetness of her tears I suddenly felt something slightly bristly tickling the inside of my hand. Startled, I turned on the light (all of this was happening at night in our shared bedroom), and what did I have in my hand? False eyelashes, the latest product of the big-city beauticians’ art, miniature brushes of curving little hairs cunningly designed to adhere supraorbitally. And this in a woman of over fifty, the mother of a grown daughter! Her wrinkled neck (the neck cannot be enameled and its furrows cannot be filled) was shiny, like creased, crumpled parchment, on the sides especially.