TE19 Iberian Adventure

Patrícia Portela

I’m not really sure, I said. Choose another animal, what about a rabbit, that’s one of the easiest ones, so you grab the skin around the shoulder blades and massage its neck; then you grab a firm hold of it and swing it in the air, up and down and up and down twelve times, and then quickly you spread it out on a table, leaving the head hanging off the edge. And voilà! Hypnotised! To wake the rabbit up you just need to flick its ears. Lizards and toads are also easy to hypnotise, although they do tend to have convulsions before entering the catatonic state, which can be quite scary. You can even hypnotise lobsters, bet you didn’t know that? I read it in a science book: you scratch their back with your nails, and…

What about big animals? you asked.

Like Horses? Cows?

Mmm… More like tigers. Or elephants.

Well, theoretically it’s no different, you’d just need to stretch the tiger or elephant out on a table and keep it still until…

You weren’t listening anymore.

Lying there wide awake, I waited anxiously for that daily loss of consciousness, that gradual process of becoming less and less aware of one’s surroundings. The mild delirium which precedes the at once uncertain and routine journey back into darkness. Holding hands on the treetop, we kept insomnia at bay, poised between wakefulness and death, between thoughts and feelings, escaping by way of those invisible and seemingly chaotic forces, those unpredictable yet mundane bouts of nocturnal madness. 60