Session Note
Confidential. For training purposes only. Do not circulate.
Date: 5.6.2002 11a.m.
Psychologist: Dr Carola Rivas, PhD
Patient: S.H., 25yo White male, cocaine and heroin user, mood disorder NOS. Session No. 5.
CR: Something you said last time – about wanting to be here.
SH: I said that?
CR: What I was wondering was – why did you have to get yourself arrested? In order to come here, I mean.
SH: I would have thought that much was obvious.
CR: No, not quite.
SH: …
CR: Please tell me.
SH: He wouldn't have come.
CR: He wouldn't have come?
SH: Otherwise. He wouldn't have come otherwise. He didn't before. Not when—
CR: What else don't I know? About you? And your brother.
SH: What do you want me to say? Do I have to say it? Honestly, doctor, I –
CR: Say what?
SH: Any number of things!
CR: …
SH: …
CR: What – what is so difficult? About saying those things?
SH: Can't you see? It means admitting –
CR: …
SH: – that I –
CR: …
SH: – that I – I want something.
CR: What do you want, Sherlock?
SH: I want everything. I want it all, and I will never be enough, never have enough, never know enough. There's too much I want, I can't –
CR: …
SH: …
CR: You can't bear it.
SH: I can't bear it. Right. The not-having.
CR: Of what are we speaking, exactly?
SH: How far back must we go? I have to start earlier, start with my childhood. So clichéd, but that's where it begins. The golden years? I wish that they were not, had not been quite so sparkling and brilliant. I wish that I had never had such times, such…Did I tell you? The summers in Spain? I thought I'd mentioned Abu—my nanny, abuela in Spanish. We went to Seville every year to stay with Abu. My mother's mother.
CR: What are the tears for?
SH: Sod the tears! The tears – I can't – I don't know – I can't say –
CR: …
SH: …
CR: You are quite moved. Something has touched you, in what you just told me now. I wish I knew what it was. Can you – can you try to put it into words?
SH: …
CR: Can you try to say, what it was? What it was that made you cry?
SH: I was never supposed to be like this. To be here. When I had those summers – I had them. Those months of Sarasate and Pergolesi and the bougainvillea in the garden. The nights that smelled like jasmine and spikenard. He – Mycroft – was so much older, so often away. Spain was mine. It was me and Mummy and Abu, and her beautiful house. There was a pool, a shallow reflecting pool, with a fountain. Statues of satyrs and nymphs, some overblown baroque nonsense. That was my grandmother's Andalusian patio. The Moorish influence, you know. Shut the family up – the women, they meant – inside the walls of the great casona. The walls were beautiful though—beautiful prisons? not to me—lined with blue-and-white tiles, and the sound of the water echoed off the tiles. Especially at night, when I would steal out of my room and wander out. I was fascinated by the patio and the archways that lined that space, the lush greens of the plants, the insects I might discover underneath. And the frogs ¡Las ranas! The noise of the frogs at night. The outdoors come indoors - that was Spain. In London they didn't let me outdoors after dark, but in Seville – free rein of the patios, of the moonlit fountain, the fawns, the night.
CR: It sounds very idyllic.
SH: Paradisiacal, in fact. Or even further back. Lost, pagan gods.
CR: …
SH: There was one night that I have tried not to remember. Put it away until I went to university and had reason to think about it again.
CR: …
SH: There was a jardinero – sorry, a gardener. And he had a son, a year older than I was, but he was short and dark, and I have always been tall and pale. A ghost, a fantasma, they liked to call me in Andalusia. Blame my father, those pale Vikings of York.
CR: And the other boy? What was he like?
SH: Have you read Lorca? The poet?
CR: Tell me.
SH: Verde que te quiero verde. I read that later, in secondary school – Heidelberg, not Edinburgh yet. Abu sent me his Romancero. And I thought of Manolo, but I could not think of Manolo. Do you understand? The thinking of him and not thinking of him, at once. The having and the not-having.
CR: Manolo?
SH: Manolo. My – friend? The gardener's son. I'm not even sure that he would remember me, all these years later. But I remember him, one of those green nights by the fountain. I went out, to collect moths or night-beetles – quite the budding entomologist, I was. And he – Manolo – was in the fountain. Not so unusual. And he was naked. Again, not so unusual. Children in Spain aren't told to cover up the way they are in England. The heat lends itself to nudity.
CR: What happened?
SH: I joined him. Surely even you could guess where the story was headed, tell that much about me.
CR: Tell what?
SH: What I am. Homosexual. I didn't know it, then, didn't know that there was a word for who I was or what I was feeling, or even that it was different from what others were feelings. I found out soon enough.
CR: That you like men?
SH: That I love men. Love being the crucial difference. Desire. I loved Manolo, I wanted Manolo. Verde que te quiero verde. I didn't have the words for it until later, when I read the poem about the bandit in the hills and girl pleading for her lover's life, and there was something in that story, something of forbidden love.
CR: You were how old?
SH: Twelve. Does that sound too young to you? Too young to know what one wants?
CR: I don't have a particular age in mind, for desire. But I wanted to understand when this was. Before your mother died? Or after?
SH: She died six months later.
CR: …
SH: Lorca was a homosexual, you know. A marica, as they said in Andalusia. What was I saying?
CR: Manolo. Your friend. You loved him.
SH: I desired him, yes, without the words for it.
CR: One does not always have the words for what we long for.
SH: ...
CR: Desire is constantly in retreat, at the edge of our awareness.
SH: So you say. Fascinating. Yes, it was at the edge of my awareness. I can say that much, now, now that I know what drove me out to the fountain, when I hoped he would be there. We met for several nights –
CR: Yes?
SH: We met – that was all. Like friends, like boys do. We swam in the fountain. We had done as much the year before, and before that. He couldn't say my name, called me 'Saulo.'
CR: Saulo?
SH: It sounded the closest to Sherlock. Saulo and Manolo. We met that night, and he asked me to show him – to touch –
CR: ...
SH: ...
CR: Yes. Did you want to?
SH: I am not quite sure of what I wanted. Sounds strange to admit that, now, when I feel like the wanting never leaves me. But even today, when I look back on it, I am not sure I knew what I was or if I was copying Manolo. Because I liked him so much, I might have done anything he suggested.
CR: Anything? Would you have let him touch you, if you didn't want that?
SH: I don't know. I'm curious, you see. I like to find things out. I might have let him, even so. But – hypotheticals aside. He wanted to see me, see mine, see whose was longer, larger -. I'd played this game before, in school, but this wasn't a changing room full of boys or a dare. It was just Manolo and I –
CR: …
SH: …
CR: Go on.
SH: I can't. I'm sorry.
CR: What brought the tears, this time?
SH: It was a beautiful thing! It was – and then he had to go and spoil it. And I wish –do you know what I would do to have that memory intact? To only remember that night, and the green water, and the sight of Manolo's body, now running away, now coming closer? What I would do if that were the only thing that I remembered of that night?
CR: Whatever – whatever happened next – do you think that you would remember that night so clearly if things had not been broken?
SH: If what had not been broken?
CR: Your innocence. Your trust in yourself, in Manolo, in – in Mycroft? Was it Mycroft who discovered you?
SH: Yes. Well-deduced, doctor.
CR: You may call me Carola.
SH: Carola. Yes. Mycroft found us. But not before – not before – we weren't just naked together, you see. And Manolo wasn't so very much older than I; certainly not so much older that they could blame him for what happened. Yes, Mycroft found us, in flagrante coitus. Well, not coitus exactly—it would be some time still before I learned how that was worked out between two men—and it wasn't even apparent to me at the time that that was what we were doing.
CR: Are you embarrassed to tell me what it was? What exactly you were doing, I mean?
SH: The third night. I sucked his cock.
CR: Is that how you thought of it?
SH: As cock-sucking? No, to tell you the truth, the phrase that comes to mind is comiéndole la verga, if I had even put words to it, then. But cock-sucking it is, in English. Do I offend you with my language?
CR: …
SH: I take that as a 'no.'
CR: Your language is interesting. Not offensive to me, but it is offensive, in general. Judgmental. Hateful. 'Sucking cock.' Cocksucker. An insult. Definitely not an endearment, though I think you were describing an act of love. Made ugly with those words.
SH: Yes.
CR: Who called you that? Did someone call you that?
SH: Of course. Who didn't call me that? That might be a better question. Yes, I was called -. By who else than Mycroft. He was the first. Then my father, just once. That first time, when he found out. Before my mother knew what had happened. She would have stopped him.
CR: You didn't mention that Mycroft was there. Is he much older than you are?
SH: Seven years. He was in university, too busy with summer employment, practica, those kinds of things. Good for the vita. Made it to Spain for just a week. I didn't know he was coming, and neither did Mummy. Just the kind of 'surprise' he liked to throw on us. And then I'd have to go around pretending that I was thrilled to see my darling brother. Even before this - even before what happened with Manolo, he was not - not welcome there. Not by me. And I think Abu disliked him, just a little bit, for all that he had the right manners, and knew the right kind of people. He wasn't like her, or like me. If he had been, if he had had any sense of decency, he would have spoken to me before telling Father what he saw.
CR: So he was the one who told your father. And then your father called you -
SH: A cocksucker. Correct. And factually, he was correct. I was a twelve-year-old cocksucker.
CR: Still so judgmental.
SH: Mycroft came to visit first, then Father. Mycroft saw us - I still don't know how, I don't know when. But he saw us, and when my father came, he told him. They were always together. Like I was always with Abu and Mummy. A house divided.
CR: Returning to something you said in the beginning. That you wanted something from Mycroft. What did you want from him? To keep your secret?
SH: That would be just the beginning. But, dear doctor - Carola - I am afraid that our time is up. Is it not?
CR: …
SH: Is it?
CR: It is. I'll see you on Friday.
SH: Thank you.
Notes:
Thanks to Roane for the quick beta job!
I was reminded of one of the earliest poems that I ever read in Spanish, Lorca's Romance Sonámbulo, by a conversation with aderyn about her fic. So, thank you to aderyn, for bringing Lorca to the forefront of my mind. This is the Andalusian chapter, after all. And Lorca had to have a place here.
For more on (my) Sherlock's Spanish roots, see my other story, "Pax americana."