From that day forward, I was tempted, possessed, overwhelmed by the mystery of the hospital nurse: nurses made me ill, perhaps incurably so, for even today, when all that is behind me, I still contradict my keeper Bruno, who flatly maintains that only men can be proper nurses, the patient’s addiction to female nurses being simply one more symptom of the disease; while the male nurse conscientiously cares for the patient and sometimes cures him, the female nurse follows the feminine path: she seduces the patient towards recovery or towards death, which she imbues with a tinge of eroticism that renders it palatable.