The Last Attempt
Posted By Chris Engelbrecht on 16 March 2007
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Pipin Ferreras was through the 1990's one of only a handful of stars in freediving, an icon in an emerging international sport. He was my own initial focus of attention when I entered the sport back in 1997. He was the first one I'd heard of. He was the idol. He was the hero. He was The Man. Once one got more into the game the negative stories about the icon were heard, and they multiplied. Now,with Carlos Serra's account of Audrey's last days, they explode.
Serra describes Pipin's and Audrey's marriage as an appalling travesty. Pipin made them look to outsiders and to the media like happy couple deeeply in love with the ocean and each other. To those close to them Pipin was, by Serra's account, a possessive monster habituated to mental and physical abuse of his wife, increasingly and desperately envious of her as she started to reach greater depths than he had.
The Audrey in The Last Attempt, on the other hand, sought only to please her husband. Profoundly infatuated with him since her first encounter with him at Los Cabos in 1996, she tried desperately to satisfy his every whim. It was, it seems, never quite enough. I was reminded of the Ike and Tina Turner story.
The Last Attempt includes an interesting psychiatric approach to the story, wherein Serra draws his former partner's behavior against the diagnostic criteria for malignant narcissism. Serra introduces comment by a prominent psychiatrist and paints a credible picture of a morbidity recalling, on a small scale, that of a number of infamous dictators.
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