Aspirin

Translated from the French of Amélie Nothomb.

When I was a girl, to pronounce the word "aspirin" was tantamount to blasphemy. For all things medical, my mother had theories, or rather a religion. We had all been reared in the cult of homeopathy, or more specifically of a homeopath, whose name our sect's clandestine esoterism forbids me to give here. We shall call him Monsieur X. He lived in Brussels and we in Beijing, which made instruction all the more remote and sacred. All the more impractical, too. There were no faxes in the seventies, and whenever we came down with something, Mama always had to write Monsieur X a letter and would forbid us to take any remedy before our guru's response arrived via post, along with the salvific pills. More often than not, the mail took so long that nature had already cured us in the meantime.

My brother, my sister and I had understood that to suffer without relief was of no importance. The only crime would have been to swallow a medicine deemed allopathic, meaning foreign to homeopathy. Aspirin was allopathic, and thus satanic. I was at the age where I believed everything mother said. When I had a fever, I would sooner have died than take a hellspawn tablet. Splitting headache? Big deal. The pain would eventually go away, whereas if I betrayed the faith by ingesting acetylsalicylic acid, the horror of the sin would stain my conscience forever.

And so I reached adulthood without having so much as tried aspirin, or, for that matter, any other allopathic substance. I then left my parents and moved to Brussels.

One of my mother's first instructions was that I should finally meet Monsieur X in the flesh, which I did as dutifully as a Muslim goes to Mecca. The Belgian guru deigned to receive the young lady of seventeen who had been in his remote care since birth. I discovered, not without terror, that Monsieur X had the physiognomy of a sadistic zombie. He inquired about my habits and learned that I drank a prodigious quantity of tea. He took umbrage and forbade it. I didn't say anything, but thought that between Chinese tea and Monsieur X, the choice was clear. I did not see Monsieur X anymore, though without going so far as to lapse into the heresy of seeing another doctor. I simply decided on going without medicine of any kind, to which the sluggishness of international mail had already accustomed me.

Much later yet, while staying with a friend, I came down with one of my innumerable nasty colds. My dear friend brought me an aspirin. I looked upon it as upon the Antichrist and cried out that I would not swallow the substance of Beelzebub. She put my abjurations down to fever, dropped the tablet into a glass of water, and made me drink it all down. I had the fascinating sensation of imbibing evil itself in person. Then I discovered the first of its seductions — its sharp, bitter taste which filled me with delight. Few flavors have ever so ravished me. Soon afterward, a sweet and gentle torpor took hold of me and I sank into a restorative slumber. When I awoke ten hours later, I felt better than ever.

Since then, one might say that I have become an aspirin convert. I love it with a wild and vindictive passion. To this day I can't take it without feeling like being ill is an excuse to partake of it. And since I have meanwhile learned the etymology of "salicylic," I cannot look at a willow tree without seeing in it a diabolical ally, the very tree of transgression; I wonder if the apple tree of the garden of Eden might not really have been a willow tree, weeping from its every branch the secret remedy to the pains inflicted by the Eternal.

Image by Fia Yang.