Page:The bipolarity of Alberto Santos-Dumont.pdf/4

66Cheniaux E In 1932, ASD returned to express remorse due to the use of the airplane as a weapon of war, this time in Brazil, during the Constitutionalist Revolution: “I invented a disgrace for the world”, he complained. At the suggestion of the doctor who was then assisting him, Dr. Sinésio Rangel Pestana, he will spend a season in the spa of Guarujá, in São Paulo, in the company of his nephew Jorge. In that city, on July 23 of the same year, he commits suicide. His body, extremely emaciated, is found hanging around his neck with two ties on the shower pipe in his room at the Grande Hotel La Plage. He was 59 years old.

His mother had also killed herself, in 1902, in Portugal.

Other possible psychiatric manifestations

According to a survey carried out in 1899, until that year almost two hundred people had died in accidents with balloons. Thus, the risks to which ASD underwent testing the flying machines he invented are very striking. In fact, he suffered several accidents, although he was never seriously injured. On several occasions he was seen, in mid-flight on an airship, coming out of the basket to fix a defect in the engine or cables. Once, his number 5 hit the roof of the Trocadero hotel in Paris. The balloon exploded, producing a frightening sound, and the aviator hung by a cable on the hotel’s wall, at a height of fifteen meters, until it was lifted by the firemen with a rope to the ceiling. The amazing thing is that, in these situations, ASD did not express any fear and, often, right after the fall, he returned to work on the damaged device.

Over the years, in periods when he did not seem to be depressed, ASD had several times exhibited behaviors considered inappropriate or surprising by those who witnessed them. Three episodes of this nature occur in 1916. The first was in January, at the Pan American Scientific Congress, held in the United States. During the event, the aviator, who had always been a militant pacifist, defends the use of the airplane as a weapon of war, what he would do again in his book entitled O que eu vi, o que nós veremos. In March of the same year, now at the Pan American Aeronautical Congress, in Chile, Brazilian diplomat Luís Gurgel do Amaral shocks when, unexpectedly, he asks the following question, referring to prostitutes: “Amaral, how are we here when it comes to little women?”. And, in April 1916, at Iguaçu Falls, he balances himself on a log on the edge of an abyss – the place is called “Garganta do Diabo” [“Devil’s Throat”]. People around despair, but ASD seems to be extremely calm. Years later, at a time when he resides in the city of Petrópolis, the inventor occasionally confides in young people who casually finds on the streets his “adventures in the cabarets of Paris”. Finally, in 1926, in France, he paid a visit to Gabriel Voisin, his collaborator in the creation of 14-Bis, in which he asked to marry his daughter, although he barely knew her and she was more than thirty years younger than him.

Some reports about ASD more clearly indicate the presence of changes in mood and motor activity. One of his biographers, when talking about worsening aviator’s disease, brings the following information: “... he became increasingly restless, nervous, agitated, unstable. He lived in constant motion, always traveling. Anything annoyed him, even the smallest noise”. Yolanda Penteado, lady of the São Paulo society who was a friend of ASD, in turn, makes this observation about him: “People who knew him better said that when he saw me, he would get electric. He walked a lot. He was mountain climbing, and when I met him he used to walk up and down Corcovado Hill on foot”. In 1916, when he visited the Iguaçu Falls, ASD decided to seek the president of the state of Paraná to suggest that the area be expropriated and transformed into a public park. To go from Foz do Iguaçu to Curitiba, he rides for six days in a row, covering more than three hundred kilometers of virgin forest, and then he still takes a car and a train. Finally, the description of how he was disembarking from a ship in Rio de Janeiro, coming from Europe, after a trip during which he had attempted suicide, is quite significant: “The journalists, as the others had already done on board, realized that the inventor was not the same withdrawn and discreet as always. He spoke, he was agitated, he was showing off. He wanted everyone to see and gawk”.

After abandoning aviation, ASD is dedicated to other inventions. These inventions are said to be bizarre and appear to be the expression of a mental disorder. In the 1920s, during a hospitalization, he tries to fly with feathers glued to his arms and with mechanical wings attached to an engine that is inside a backpack hanging on his back. When he goes to jump out the window, he is saved by a nurse. Other strange creations of his were: the Martian transformer, in 1928, in which a propeller placed on skiers’ backs would help them climb snow-covered mountains; a slingshot capable of launching a life jacket for a drowning person in the 1920s; a mechanism that dragged a snack in front of dogs in races, also in the 1920s; and an individual flying device, tied to the back, in 1931.

DISCUSSION

Undoubtedly, formulating an individual’s psychiatric diagnosis without examining him directly and based only on biographies about him has very limited value, especially when that individual is ASD. Firstly, because medical records about his case are very scarce. Furthermore, it is very likely that much information was deliberately hidden, since, in the case of a national hero, it would be detrimental to his image to associate it with something so stigmatized in society as a mental illness. The fraud in the elaboration of his death certificate, so that it was not known that he had committed suicide, supports this J Bras Psiquiatr. 2022;71(1):63-8