By Lida Prypchan
If jealousy be a sign of love, it is like a fever displayed by a sick man – a sign of life, but a sick and ill-disposed life. (Cervantes)
Jealousy, love and madness should be synonyms. After all, they share similar characteristics. Jealousy is love gone mad and love turns into madness when affected by jealousy. Sometimes madness and jealousy are confused. The three words represent the confusion inherent in subjectivity. Women and marriage suffer the same fate. Nobody can agree about it. In literature we find only a few miscellaneous witty or melancholy references on the subject. Throughout the centuries, especially in our time, regardless of the changes brought about by modernity differences in opinion have much in common with those of the past.
The life of Juana of Castile and Aragon (1479-1555), better known as Juana La Loca, or Joan the Mad, is a vivid example of how the borders that divide madness, love and jealousy can become blurred. She belongs in the “illustrious” or “distinguished” group of the insane. Daughter of the “Catholic Kings,” Juana married Philip the Handsome. His sister, the archduchess Margaret, married Juana’s brother, Prince Juan. After a long awaited and delayed honeymoon, it seems the prince was destined to die in the grips of passion, for he passed away from exhaustion caused by his wife’s extraordinary capacity for love-making. Thus was born the familiar saying, “One lost her sanity, the other his life,” in reference to the marriages of Juana and Prince Juan.
History books tell us: “After the death of her husband, Philip the Handsome, grief drove her to insanity.” However, Juana suffered from a mental illness which began shortly after she married and which manifested in a display of unhealthy jealousy. Some argue that it was jealousy that drove her mad. Today we know this was not the case. She suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, jealousy being a secondary manifestation of her illness. Others say that it was not an illness but rather rebelliousness, since she was a much more intelligent woman than her mother and at times when a decision was required displayed a great deal of lucidity, which makes one wonder whether her family invented her madness in an effort to usurp her throne. Maybe the answer to this is that the first thing one observes is the often forgotten truism that madmen are not fools. The second is that mentally sick patients do not always display abnormal behavior – this occurs only at the onset of their symptoms. What causes trouble is not their normal, but their abnormal behavior.
The legend of Joan the Mad is resurrected periodically by different generations. Her life was spent between bouts of aggressive behavior and immutable passivity, locked away in Tordesillas for forty-seven years. She was an unfortunate woman who had everything and lost it all to the hands, greedy for riches and power, of those whom she loved: her father, her husband and her son, who sought a thousand ways to usurp her throne. She was the one who bore the burden of her dead husband.
There is an important message here. Virgil said, “If you wish to know a man, give him power.” Indeed, when power is at stake, not even the noblest of sentiments stands a chance. Why should this be? It is the fear of death, for a man with power often forgets how insignificant he is.
Not to speak of madness! The despicable always take advantage of madness, often just for the sake of making others laugh. Their minds are so puny; they cannot understand that the best jokes do not use mockery to incite laughter.
Others use madness to unload their feelings of hatred, animosity and frustration, because they are too cowardly to face who is really responsible for such feelings.
Another lesson to be learned is the need to study the personalities of presidential candidates. Remember this popular refrain? “Those who are there are not all there are, neither are all those there who are.” Madness has many ways of manifesting itself, and power has a way of unleashing a madness that has been hidden for many years.
If I remember well, we had a president who at times displayed textbook maniacal phases: a man whose charm far exceeded the limits of normalcy, a man whom I should not be at all surprised to see, in the not-so-distant future, again setting foot in the Palace of Miraflores, despite the fact that he so blatantly dipped his hands into stormy waters.* (The problem is that Venezuela went into a decline and has been suffering from amnesia ever since.) This man was, and is, megalomania become reality.
Madness and power can sometimes become intertwined. The trick is in recognizing this soon enough to avoid becoming a victim of such excesses.
Oh, what madness!
