"But you've got loads of appointments," protested her secretary.
"You don't give orders, you receive them. Do exactly as I say, and cancel the appointments."
The secretary stared at this woman with whom she had been working for nearly three years, and who had never once been rude to her before. Something must be seriously wrong with her, perhaps someone had told her that her husband was at home with his lover, and she wanted to catch them in flagrante.
She's a good lawyer, she knows what she's doing, said the girl to herself. Doubtless tomorrow she would come and apologize to her.
There was no tomorrow. That night Mari had a long conversation with her husband and described all the symptoms she had experienced. Together they reached the conclusion that the palpitations, the cold sweats, the feelings of displacement, impotence, lack of control, could all be summed up in one word: fear. Together husband and wife pondered what was happening. He thought it might be a brain tumor, but he didn't say anything. She thought she was having premonitions of some terrible event, but she didn't say anything either. They tried to find some common ground for discussion, like logical, reasonable, mature people.
"Perhaps you'd better have some tests done."
Mari agreed, on one condition, that no one, not even their children, should know anything about it.
The next day she applied for and was given thirty days' unpaid leave from the office. Her husband thought of taking her to Austria, where there were many eminent specialists in disorders of the brain, but she refused to leave the house; the attacks were becoming more frequent and lasted longer.
With Mari dosed up on tranquilizers, the two of them managed, with great difficulty, to get as far as a hospital in Ljubljana, where Mari underwent a vast range of tests. Nothing unusual was found, not even an aneurism--a source of consolation to Mari for the rest of her life.
But the panic attacks continued. While her husband did the shopping and the cooking, Mari obsessively cleaned the house every day, just to keep her mind fixed on other things. She started reading all the psychiatry books she could find, only immediately to put them down again because she seemed to recognize her own malaise in each of the illnesses they described.
The worst of it was that, although the attacks were no longer a novelty, she still felt the same intense fear and sense of alienation from reality, the same loss of self-control. In addition, she started to feel guilty about her husband, obliged to do his own job as well as all the house-work, cleaning apart.
As time passed, and the situation remained unresolved, Mari began to feel and express a deep irritation. The slightest thing made her lose her temper and start shouting, then sob hysterically.
After her thirty days' leave was over, one of Mari's colleagues turned up at the house. He had phoned every day, but Mari either didn't answer the phone or else asked her husband to say she was busy. That afternoon he simply stood there ringing the bell until she opened the front door.
Mari had had a quiet morning. She made some tea, and they talked about the office, and he asked her when she would be coming back to work.
"Never."
He remembered their conversation about El Salvador.
"You've always worked hard, and you have the right to choose what you want to do," he said, with no rancor in his voice. "But I think that, in cases such as these, work is the best therapy. Do some traveling, see the world, go wherever you think you might be useful, but the doors of the office are always open, awaiting your return."
When she heard this, Mari burst into tears, which she often did now, with great ease.
Her colleague waited for her to calm down. Like a good lawyer, he didn't ask anything; he knew he had a greater chance of getting a reply to his silence than to any question.
And so it was. Mari told him the whole story, from what had happened in the movie theater to her recent hysterical attacks on her husband, who had given her so much support.
"I'm crazy," she said.
"Possibly," he replied, with an all-knowing air, but with real tenderness in his voice. "In that case, you have two options: Either get some treatment or continue being ill."
"There isn't any treatment for what I'm feeling. I'm still in full possession of all my mental faculties, and I'm worried because this situation has gone on now for such a long time. I don't haven't any of the classic symptoms of insanity, like withdrawal from reality, apathy, or uncontrolled aggression--just fear."
"That's what all crazy people say, that they're perfectly normal."
The two of them laughed, and she made more tea. They talked about the weather, the success of Slovenian independence, the growing tensions between Croatia and Yugoslavia. Mari watched TV all day and was very well informed.
Before saying good-bye, her colleague touched on the subject again.
"They've just opened a new hospital in the city," he said, "backed by foreign money and offering first-class treatment."
"Treatment for what?"
"Imbalances, shall we say. And excessive fear is definitely an imbalance."
Mari promised to think about it, but she still took no real decision. She continued to have panic attacks for another month, until she realized that not only her personal life but her marriage was on the point of collapse. Again she asked for some tranquilizers and again she managed to set foot outside the house, for only the second time in sixty days.