Low life | 26 January 2017

‘If life is a race, I feel that I’m not even at the starting line,’ I said to the doctor in French. (I’d composed, polished and rehearsed the sentence in the waiting room beforehand.) She was a sexy piece in her early fifties with a husky voice. She listened to my halting effort to describe my depression with a smile playing lightly over her scarlet lips as though I were relating an amusing anecdote with a witty punchline lurking just around the corner. I further explained in French that I had been properly but briefly depressed once before, about 15 years ago. Here my tenses let me down badly, and from this point in the interview, until the confusion accidentally came to light near its end, she understood me as having been frozen in a catatonic stupor for the past 15 years. By that time she had already written out in triplicate my prescription for three months’ worth of Rirex or Amusant or whatever drug it was that she had plucked from her pharmaceutical arsenal, and I’d handed over €25, and she’d rummaged through her purse for the €4 change.