And from the westernmost of the two piers you could directly admire the smaller, even more western, even more private pier, reserved for the exclusive use of guests of the Vivamayr villa (which costs 3,750 euros per night). My fellow regular guests and I squinted at the private villa dock and tried to discern the facial features, or even age, of the woman we saw there. (Impossible.) Constantly, people looked at each other to see if someone was a celebrity. As beautiful and expensive as Vivamayr was, almost everyone knew of an even more beautiful and expensive place, where even the wealthiest people could pay for similar services; I heard so much about these places that I eventually found myself thinking of Vivamayr as their rundown, dumpy cousin. Was this, I wondered, the key to Vivamayr’s success? Can the ultra-rich only be convinced of the program’s validity if their destination is somehow less than ideal?
When I had recounted my relentless pursuit of sweetness to my doctor Vivamayr, his eyes glittered like polished sugar on supermarket biscuits cut into seasonal shapes. “I have something in mind,” he said at our first meeting: “Functional MioDiagnostics” tests for “food intolerances”. I had no idea what the hell it was; it sounded great.
On the appointed afternoon I climbed the steep, sunlit stairs to his office. He told me to lie down on an exam table. I had to use my thigh muscles to move my knee towards my head, overcoming its slight pressure as it pushed my knee in the opposite direction. I moved it easily. He started dabbing very small bits of substances onto my tongue with the help of a wooden depressor. After each crumb deposit, I was told to repeat the knee-to-head maneuver. If my tongue encountered a substance that my body “didn’t like,” the doctor said, my muscles would weaken for up to 20 seconds, before recovering. This way it would identify allergies, weaknesses and deficiencies in my diet. I moved my knee without any difficulty until she deposited a very fine white powder on my tongue; suddenly, I could barely push myself against her. “That’s actually what I thought,” he said.
My muscles had reacted badly to a few crumbs of yeast, the doctor reported, which meant my sweet tooth was caused by a fungal infection in my intestines. The microorganisms of the infection, he explained to me, lived on sweets and I fed them constantly. “We have to starve him,” the doctor said, referring to the thing growing inside me. “You know what that means: no sweets. No yeast. I would also have to take medication. I was baffled. What I had thought was my preference was apparently the insatiable appetite of a foreign invader. “What could cause this?” I asked. The doctor believed I had this infection “for a long time”; maybe it arose from an antibiotic I took at some point in childhood, he said. She was “absolutely amazed” that my body had not been further ravaged.
I wasn’t ready to give up sweets just because decades earlier I’d lost control of myself to an alien fungus that had taken control of my mind in its relentless pursuit of sugar. Since I was fine with the infection, I wondered aloud, wasn’t there a risk that if I tried to eradicate it, my body chemistry would spiral out of control? The only risk, the doctor said, was to continue to let it thrive unchecked. “It could interfere with your intestines” if you kept it “too long,” he said. “It could actually damage your intestines. And your sugar cravings will never end.” If I could eradicate the infection, he added, my digestion, which was already good, could, in some way, improve even further.