The paralyses
It was a normal day at the public office. I tried, as always, to dedicate my time to what mattered, avoiding as much as possible the daily nuisance.
It was not easy — " the boss" would unexpectedly summon us to exhausting meetings in his office that dealt more with his grand ideas than with the problems and challenges of the day. He would either call me out of the blue or send a secretary to fetch me, always with an “urgent” note. There I would go, rushing through the corridors of the historic building, to attend to “the man’s” whims.
These meetings would take hours on end, filled with his foolish blabbering about the next big idea to transform the municipality into an international reference of whatever. He would very often monologue about elaborate projects that contradicted all evidence and, by far, had no connection to people's priorities. Some would listen with boredom, others, disdain, and a few, with emotional belief.
It so happened that, quite often, between one thought and another, he would get lost and freeze — his gaze distant, his face slack, the thread of his ideas unraveling — on occasion, for several minutes. A disquieting paralysis for anyone present. At first, it puzzled me. With time, however, I learnt that those moments were the opportunities I needed to please him with my presence and the fantasy that I was actually listening, while discretely doing some actually important work: writing an email, signing a couple of documents, analyzing a useful report.
“Where was I?” he would ask, suddenly, pulling me back into his world of annoyance, to which I would respond, diligently, indicating where his argument had left off before he dissociated — if it interested me. If it did not, I would simply point to the most pressing topic on the agenda and make him change direction completely.
Don’t think it was senility. "The boss" was young and energetic. These moments of mental confusion were, in my view, the manifestation of a man losing himself within himself, in the maelstrom of his own passion for his own ideas. He couldn’t recapture the threads of reality that connected him to the outside world, which always seemed too mundane, too small, too poor for his regal arrogance and his self-perceived (or imagined) brilliance.
That day, the torment started early and stretched up to the last hours. The order was for me to clear my schedule because we had to spend (or waste) the day together in "the office". And so it was. There I had breakfast, lunch, an afternoon snack, and quietly and clandestinely poked a significant part of the lower lining of his desk — it is interesting how emotional tension releases into physical compulsion; after all, as Freud said, what escapes our speech "oozes out of us at every pore" in some way.
It was 6:20 PM when I managed to escape. I had left my suit in my office that morning, and the cold corridors of the Palace at that hour caught me by surprise. Passing by the kitchen, I asked for a coffee, which came quickly, served with a smile and much more sugar than my endocrinologist would recommend.
Anna was waiting for me at her desk near my office. She looked at me with her usual understanding gaze and stood up so we could finally complete the day’s tasks — those that really mattered. “Do you want a few minutes?” she asked, attentive to my fatigue, with a slight smile and a silent complicity that showed she understood exactly what I was feeling. I waved away the kindness with my hand and we proceeded.
Signing official documents is a relatively mechanical act: once the final opinion is written by the legal team, the signee evaluates it and, if in agreement, signs it. Therefore, it wasn’t uncommon for Anna and I to talk about trivial matters while signing, stopping here and there to discuss a point of doubt or controversy in the records.
Between a retirement request and another response to a regulatory agency, I asked her how long she had been at that office. She told me it had been 20 years, climbing the ranks until being appointed to a top-level position at the agency a few years ago.
“And how was it?” I asked, refering to her last position, one similar to mine. “It was very good, until it wasn’t.” She answered and raised her hand, touching her own face.
When I first met Anna, I noticed that some of her words came out with a peculiar articulation that I initially attributed to an accent. Later, however, I came to understand that her occasional speech difficulty resulted from a marked, permanent facial paralysis — which I took a long time to notice.
As our relationship had matured and mutual trust, developed, after many nights working together and days managing the office's affairs, that day Anna opened up: she told me how the daily pressure of her former position had gradually turned into muscle tension, which turned into physical rigidity, which later transformed into real and total paralysis of her body.
“Managing so many people, dealing with the issues we handle here, thinking about the consequences of our actions on the lives of the people, trying to act on what really matters — all of this is part of our duty, you know? We signed up for it.” She explained. “What, then, led to your paralysis?” She stopped, looked up, searching for the thread of her past and her story of pain. “I reflected on that a lot during the days I was bedridden in the ICU. The risk was great because even my heart muscle could stop at any moment, you know? I realized it was the disrespect coming from the person who used to sit in that office back then. It does not hurt to do what we must. What hurts is not being seen. We can endure a lot, but only so much, then comes a time when the body says ‘no’, right?”
We remained silent for a while, a tear dropped from her eye, another from mine. I never asked for details about what she had endured. Much happens in "the boss's" office.
That moment when Anna touched her own face reminded me of an interview I had watched with one of Lacan's patients: the woman had been a victim of the Gestapo. Recalling the events with her analyst, she reflected on all the pain she had felt, when, in a sudden move, Lacan got up from his chair and walked to the couch where she was lying. He sat beside her and placed his hand on her face, a silent and tender act. No words were said, but for her, the shift in meaning Lacan proposed was clear: he made a geste à peau, transforming her former tormentor, the Gestapo, into a gesture to the skin, literally — tenderness, perhaps, being the only possible act in the face of horror.
Anna wiped her eyes and smiled. Having recovered after a year on leave, she returned to the position she had occupied before being promoted to the top job. She would arrive early at the office and almost always left last. Her diligence was inspiring: she loved that place, knew it like the back of her hand, loved her work, and performed it with humor and joy. She taught me — without ever saying a word about it, much like Lacan — that in the office, those who are dedicated are better than those who are enlightened, because the enlightened ones are normally more in love with their grand ideas than attentive to people's needs.
This was not meant as an eulogy to mediocrity: it was a deep respect for the procedures of public administration that guaranteed that things were done with care and attention for the law and the people. What I saw in her was a permanent commitment to something that was much larger than herself, a form of selflessness that made her day a sacred dedication to others.
The crisis she had endured did not stem from that dedication or from her service to "the office": it originated in someone else's crooked vision of managing people and of holding a public position. Much like "the boss" of the hour.
She looked at me with understanding eyes. “In the end, only those who sit in that chair know it, right?” she said, pointing at my seat and smiling. “Would you like some more coffee?”
