Marisa saw Doctor Spitzer on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays in the evening. On Fridays she wouldn't go out: her head kept stewing. What about those emotions she was so afraid of? She thought of the unconscious' black canvas. Then tried to focus on her own emotions, and all she could think of was a white canvas, just like that one in the therapist's waiting room. An immaculate white canvas. Or maybe (following Doctor Spitzer's reasoning) it was a canvas whitened by the veil of fear: a white square concealing the black square of the unconscious. A white square somehow blackened because it was dissimulating. It could hence be interpreted as a black square that masked the white square that masked the black square...

All that thinking was giving Marisa a headache.

And she hadn't even got to the circles yet.

She would lie on the divan and talk about her mother, remember her father, draw recollections from the dusty drawers of memory. Doctor Spitzer wrote and wrote in her little black notebook. Until Marisa had a cathartic dream in that end of June, a true watershed in her treatment that was torrentially interpreted by the dexterous psychoanalyst.

"It's a full moon night," narrated Marisa. "I'm following a firefly in the woods. I come to a white house on a lake surrounded by pine trees. The windows are boarded up, but the door is unlocked. I go inside... and soon find myself in a dark corridor with many doors... I try to reach the first door, and the hallway starts stretching and stretching..."

She moistened her dried out lips. Inside her chest, the heart shrunk as she recalled the scenes...

"Suddenly, the door is right before me and a cave-like voice calls... Marisa! I flee, frightened, to the second door. It gapes open, and I enter a room with a clear crystal tank.... The door squeaks at my back and a black cat appears. It meows... and instantly the tank breaks into a thousand pieces. Among the shards, I find a scrap of paper with a weird equation... V1² = V2² ± 2 g.h - ∞... The paper expands in my hands until it becomes a sliding door..."

With a shiver, Marisa interrupted herself. She didn't like to remember that part of the dream. Doctor Spitzer mumbled it was interesting and, without lifting her eyes from the notepad, pressed the patient to go on. Marisa sighed and complied:

"Then I realized... That was the formula for calculating the speed of my own falling body. I heard the physics teacher summon me with his cave-like voice: Marisa, the experiment is about to begin! Get in the elevator right now... The door slid to the side and I... I got in..."

"Then what?"

The door closed at once. Inside it felt cold and the air was a mist. Like a Holy Grail wrapped in a halo of moonlight, a bouquet of anthuriums floated in the middle of the elevator. She reached out to grab it and, as soon as her hands touched it, the light wavered. The shadows detached from the walls, towered up to the ceiling and formed a circle. Marisa frantically pressed the button to open the door, until it popped out and rolled at her feet... Darkness grew deeper. Terror dominated her, she despaired. Suddenly, Sergio emerged from the ring of shadows. Marisa's first instinct was to back off... Then she changed her mind. Oblivious to the shadows and her own fear, she raised the anthuriums and landed them on the ex-boyfriend.

By the time Marisa woke up, she had destroyed the whole bouquet on his head.

Doctor Spitzer wanted to learn more about Sergio. Marisa told her the two had met at a party and he seemed perfect: dark and tall, expansive, affectionate, a business management student. They had plans to marry once Sergio graduated, and her mother was quite fond of him. Until Marisa caught him with the diving instructor. It had been one of the most dreadful experiences in her whole life. Sergio was spending the weekend in the countryside, at a friend's bachelor party. He would be back in the early evening on Sunday.

"When we started dating, Sergio had a Beagle. He needed to be away for three days and I offered to look after the dog. Sergio lent me his spare key and I ended up keeping it even after he gave the dog away to his sister. That Sunday afternoon I headed for his apartment to wait for him and make a surprise. Oh, doctor... I wore my best lingerie and brought along a carrot cake with chocolate icing..."

Marisa waited for him in the bedroom swept by the late afternoon sun, surrounded by the silent furniture with mahogany finishing. Sprawled on the bed with her tablet, she meandered through Pinterest checking out books and recipes when the front door opened. She recognized his voice. Then hers. Debora, the diving instructor. Marisa left the tablet in the brown armchair and glued one ear to the bedroom door. She heard chuckles. A silence, a smack of lips and another silence. Footsteps approaching. In panic, she looked around and dove under the bed. Too late, she remembered about the tablet. Marisa saw the door describing an arc as it opened to allow four wobbling legs entwined. Saw shoes skidding empty along with the discarded socks, the rival's silver anklet, clothes falling on the floor like surrendered flags, each one a symbol of her defeat.

On one occasion, at the beach, Marisa had found two cockroaches copulating next to the pantry. Linked by their extremities, they formed a long insect with an indented waist and several paws that moved sideways, three erratic steps here, two steps there. Disgusting. But this now was even worse. The four legs entwined, three steps here, two steps there. Four, three, two, like in a countdown.

No, no, please. No.

One pair of jeans, two pairs of jeans, a yellow T-shirt, a pink blouse, a black bra and panties, blue boxers... a tuff! that crushed her spirit when the naked bodies rolled across the mattress. She heard everything. The kisses, moans, thrusts and the squeals from the feet of the bed against the wood flooring. She heard the release and its sticky smell. Suffocated, Marisa closed her eyes and it didn't work because she could listen better. She reopened them to the dark mattress frame and covered her ears but kept hearing. She was entombed under betrayal. The pair didn't even notice the tablet that dozed in the armchair dreaming of assorted recipes. Luckily they headed for a pizzeria after the quick yet vigorous sport. Marisa crawled out of her hiding spot, seized the tablet and ran away leaving the cake behind. Never again she spoke to Sergio. He called her several times and she didn't answer.

"Sergio ended up writing me a mile-long email, confessing that he was in love with another woman and didn't know how to tell me. He was afraid of hurting me. I felt like replying with a mile-long swear word, only in the end I didn't write anything. At the time I had the bad habit of keeping quiet." Marisa shook her head. She had actually thought of mailing him a couple of dead cockroaches. "Afterwards the anger subdued and I was left with the trauma. Today I understand, Sergio probably didn't know indeed how to tell me about the diving instructor. But I never wished to see him again. God only knows what I'd been though under that bed."

"Hmm... It seems you have regurgitated in that bouquet all the bad words you had swallowed up. That's all you needed to overcome your trauma, and now Sergio rests forgiven and buried beneath a bunch of smashed flowers." The psychoanalyst directed a speculative look at Marisa, nibbling at the cap of her golden pen." Anthuriums, you say. White?"

"No, red. More or less like that flower arrangement in your waiting room."

Doctor Spitzer probed if they were the same shade of red. Marisa wasn't sure, as the light shifted. The psychoanalyst insisted that she made an effort to remember: there were many types of red, and each might symbolize a different thing. Ruby, coral, solferino, scarlet...

"Blood red."

"Ahh!" exulted the doctor. "Fascinating."

She made an annotation followed by several exclamation marks.

Marisa forgot what she was saying and stirred on the divan, eyeing the therapist with visible anxiety. The leather upholstery underlined her words with a nervous squeak:

"What is it, doctor?"

The psychoanalyst stared at her over the brim of her glasses. She closed the notebook and straightened up. Then motioned to the painting on the wall with a meaningful expression.

"This is very good. Very good..." she concluded at last, triumphantly. "Your unconscious wishes and your conscious mind are in open confrontation. The wishes want to manifest and the conscious mind tries to repress them. Your ego could no longer mediate the conflict and collapsed."

Collapsed? Marisa became rigid. And why was the therapist saying very good? That couldn't possibly be a good thing...

For a long moment, Marisa contemplated the watercolor above the divan, in search of a sign to appease her fears. The square and the circle, however, seemed to stare back at her with the impassibility of a sphinx. She anchored her gaze there and, with a shudder, had the distinct impression of grazing the black bottom of the canvas. She even caught a glimpse of the secrets hidden there. Such impression lasted just a moment though.

"It's symptomatic," went on Doctor Spitzer "the recurrence of black and white in your dream. We have the firefly in the shadowy forest. The moon and the night. The white house with a dark corridor (the boarded-up windows are the eyes of the unconscious refusing to see). Furthermore, we have the clear crystal tank, the ebony cat, the white paper... " She concealed a yawn with the back of her hand. "Frankly, everything is so obvious even a child would see it."

"What about the red anthuriums?" Marisa asked, avoiding the word blood.

Behind her glasses, Doctor Spitzer's green eyes sprouted to life, discharging inflamed sparkles. She said:

"This is the most important part of your dream. I would even say it will change your life forever, but I don't want to sound like a movie trailer. We'll continue in the next session."

"Let me guess. Our time is up."

"Uh-uh."