Joachim and Ferdinand’s Friendship

Joachim and Ferdinand’s friendship is a childhood alliance built from imaginative play, whispered confidences, and a mutual willingness to inhabit identities beyond the ordinary. In the basement they make a planet from stained mattresses; in Ferdinand’s drawings, bodies become elaborate landscapes of passage and transformation. Joachim does not merely observe Ferdinand’s unusual world: he believes him, answers him in kind, and keeps his gifts close.

Identity and First Impressions

Ferdinand is one of Joachim’s friends at the psychiatric hospital. Joachim’s father calls him the Prince on the Pea, or simply Prince Ferdinand, because he is exceptionally sensitive. A voice that is even slightly too loud makes his forehead crease with pain. His habits are exacting: after taking off his shoes, he ties their laces again, then takes a long time putting them back on; he picks tiny lint from the soles of his socks; and he smooths his pullovers over a white shirt. His clothes are immaculate, and he showers morning and evening with a particular soap. Joachim remembers the clean scent so strongly that, when Ferdinand walks ahead of him down the basement stairs, he follows it.

Ferdinand is also presented through claims that resist easy separation into fact and fantasy. He is skilled with both hands and draws with two pencils at once. He says that his eyes can read independently, each following a different page, or that one can read while the other watches the window. Rain brings another visible distress: he shakes his head and hates walking on wet asphalt. He repeatedly tells Joachim, without being asked, that his admission to the Hesterberg institution was a mistake. Joachim believes him. The friendship begins not with an explanation of Ferdinand, but with Joachim’s readiness to take his account seriously.

A Planet in the Basement

The two play spaceship in Joachim’s basement, although they are already somewhat too old for such games. They knowingly play at playing, making a planet called Vulcano from stained mattresses. Ferdinand is frightened by the makeshift planet and will enter only after Joachim fetches a clean tablecloth from the laundry room and spreads it over the surface. That small act of preparation matters: Joachim adapts their imagined world so Ferdinand can join him in it.

When they grow tired, Joachim sneaks upstairs and steals several cans of preserved peaches from the pantry. They punch two holes in each lid with a can opener and drink the thick juice, which tastes faintly of metal, while leaving the peaches themselves uneaten. Lying on the mattress and taking turns at the cans, they make the basement a sheltered place for Ferdinand to talk. Ordinary stolen provisions and improvised furnishings become the practical equipment of their shared fantasy.

Secrets, Signals, and Recognition

Ferdinand tells Joachim about conspiracy theories and signals he says he receives. He insists that he is only pretending to be a patient because he has a secret assignment. As he speaks, he jerks his gaze around every few seconds, as if he has heard something or someone might be listening. He often repeats Joachim’s last sentence before offering one of his own. In the dim basement, those repetitions make him seem like Joachim’s murmuring echo; the suspicion, pauses, and readiness to flee create a tension that carries Joachim through the afternoon, breath shallow and body poised to spring.

Ferdinand’s confidences expand to the underground passageways beneath Hesterberg and to his claim that the dead disappear from the mortuary. He says he can read thoughts and that no attendant, doctor, or even Joachim’s father will ever see through him: he will always be one step ahead. Joachim believes every word and says that the same is true of him. Their exchange makes the friendship reciprocal. Joachim is not simply listening to Ferdinand’s private mythology; he claims a place inside it, joining him in the conviction that each is other than people suppose.

Drawings and Gifts

Ferdinand’s most enduring gifts are his pictures. He draws nothing but cats in cross-section, and around twenty of these felt-tip drawings hang in Joachim’s childhood bedroom. They map the cat’s organs as chambers connected by tunnels, so winding that Joachim sometimes has to trace a route with his finger to get from lung to heart. In the brain cavity, Ferdinand often places a flat red racing car without wheels, with a monstrous exhaust that spits fire, floating above the floor. The lungs hold weather: angular cumulus clouds travel in precise formation, their untouched paper-white shapes carefully outlined in blue.

The scenes inside the cats follow their own strange logic. Tiny matchstick people, each rendered in a single color, march through the mouth and down the esophagus. When the passage loops, they continue upside down into the stomach, where their heads, arms, and legs fall away. Peristalsis carries the dismembered pieces onward; during digestion the figures assemble again, and the restored, now many-colored people emerge and leave in every direction. One remains whole and indigestible in the intestine. Joachim wonders who that unbroken figure is: Ferdinand, or himself. The pictures turn the friends’ shared sense of hidden identity into an image, while leaving its answer open.

Ferdinand brings Joachim a drawing whenever he visits, though Joachim no longer has any of the cross-sections. For one birthday, Ferdinand gives him a large wrapped present with a note identifying it as a cat seen from the outside. The handmade stuffed animal is sewn from pieces of other animals: it has two heads and several tails, with a lamb’s head protruding sideways from its neck. Ferdinand acknowledges its strangeness in a subdued, nearly toneless remark. The gift carries the same imaginative method as the drawings into three dimensions: Ferdinand makes a creature by joining parts that do not ordinarily belong together.

The Friendship’s Shape

Joachim’s memories present Ferdinand through small routines, extravagant claims, and crafted objects rather than through a settled account of his illness. The friendship’s intimacy is clearest in Joachim’s actions: he prepares the planet, steals the peaches, listens to the whispered theories, displays the pictures, and receives the birthday creature. Ferdinand, in turn, gives Joachim both a private imaginative world and the role of trusted confidant. The images of tunnels, uncertain identities, and the lone figure that cannot be digested do not resolve what either boy is hiding. They preserve the question at the center of their bond: who, beneath the identities others assign, might each of them be?