“That’s right. Go and whimper in your grandmother’s skirts,” he shouted, flinging me out of the kitchen.
The doctor, setting my nose in a plaster cast and covering me with bandages, so that I looked like Phantomas, or the invisible man, said, “Why did you provoke him, petit? No one provokes Jean-Baptiste Michel and gets away with it. Learn that lesson now.”
When he was older, slower, he bought a television and would sit frozen, hypnotized by the moving screen. When he was dying he lay staring into space, with unsteady, flickering eyes, as if he was still following the shifting black and white images.
But I remember my grandfather outside, always outside, his great arms browned with heat and dust, his eyes steady on the wine vats, attaching the cylinders filled with the poison he used to treat the vines onto his tractor, testing the sprays. He employed two men, both of whom loved him unconditionally. He ignored my whispering grandmother. She spoke to him continually in a low, persuasive hum. He neither listened nor replied. I hear him leaving the house in the murky dawn, his feet heavy on the tiles in the corridor, the rustle of the dog’s chains in the dust as he passed through the gate. Then, and only then, would I settle into my bed, secure, relieved, reassured that the house was empty of his presence.
I only saw him strike a woman once. I cannot know whether this is something I have imagined because it is a scene I needed to remember, or whether I really witnessed the event.
It is late autumn and the lights are on in the house. My grandmother is in the church hearing the catechism class. I have helped her today by cleaning the family graves. There is moss under my fingernails and my hands are chapped and red. I am outside the house, coming home. I hear raised voices in the spare bedroom which I share with my mother. The front door is ajar. There is mud on the doorstep and across the flagstones. I hear my mother’s voice, deep in her throat, no, no, no, no, no. Our bedroom door is open and my grandfather, in his outdoor coat and boots, is standing over her. Her arms are rigid, her hands crisping the bedspread. She cries, again and again, no, no, no, no, no. With one muddy boot he slams the door shut behind him and I hear the flat smack of his hand against her unresisting cheek as he pushes her down. Then the pitch of her cry is horribly changed. And I stumble backwards through the kitchen, down the path, leaving the forbidden gate open behind me, out into the darkening vineyards, high above the village, gasping for clean, unheated air.
No one provokes Jean-Baptiste Michel and gets away with it. Why did I so easily comprehend that lesson of fear which my mother had never been able to learn?
You ask me what I fear most. Not my own death, certainly not that. For me, my death will simply be the door closing softly on the sounds that trouble, obsess and persecute my sleep. I never court death, as you do. You see death as your dancing partner, the other with his arms around you. Your death is the other you wait for, seek out, whose violence is the resolution of your desire. But I will not learn my death from you. You revel in a facile dream of darkness and blood. It is a romantic flirtation with violence, the well-brought-up doctor’s son dabbling in the sewers, before going home to turn it all into a Baroque polemic which will make him famous. I choose the sun, light, life. And yes, of course we both live on the edge. You taught me to inhabit extremity. You taught me that the frontiers of living, thinking, were the only markets where knowledge could be bought, at a high price. You taught me to stand at the edge of the crowd gathered around the gaming tables, to see clearly, both the players and the wheel. Cher maître, you accuse me of being without morals, scruples, inhibitions, regrets. Who but my master could have taught me to be so? I have learned my being from you.
You ask me what I fear most. Not the loss of my power to write. Not that. Composers fear deafness, yet the greatest of them heard his music with the drums of his nerves, the beat in the blood. My writing is a craft, like carpentry, coffin-building, making jewelry, constructing the walls. You cannot forget how it is done. You can easily see when it is done well. You can adjust, remake, rebuild what is fragile, slipshod, unstable. The critics praise my classical style. I am part of a tradition. It is what I say which disturbs them, and that too is rendered palatable by the undisturbed elegance of classical French prose. You can say anything, anything, if it is beautifully said. My books are like a well-known and frequently visited château. All the corridors are completely straight and they lead from one room to another, the way out to the gardens or the courtyard clearly indicated. I write with the well-swept clarity of a ballroom floor. I write for fools. But within this limpid, exquisite lucidity, that is my signature—and which I lose hair, weight, sleep, blood, to achieve—there is a code, a hidden sequence of signs, a labyrinth, a staircase leading to the attics, and finally out onto the leads. You have followed me there. You are the reader for whom I write.
You ask me what I fear most. You know already or you would not ask. It is the loss of my reader, the man for whom I write. My greatest fear is that one day, unexpectedly, suddenly, I will lose you. We never see one another and we never speak directly, yet through the writing our intimacy is complete. My relationship with you is intense because it is addressed every day, through all my working hours. I sit down, wrapped in my blanket, my papers incoherent on the table before me. I clear a space to write, for you, to you, against you. You are the measure of my abilities. I reach for your exactitude, your ambition, your folly. You are the tide mark on the bridge, the level to reach. You are the face who always avoids my glance, the man who is just leaving the bar. I search for you through the spirals of all my sentences. I throw out whole pages of manuscript because I cannot find you in them. I search for you in small details, in the shapes of my verbs, the quality of my phrases. When I can write no more because I am too tired, my head aches, my left arm is cramped with tension, and I am left irresolute, I get up, go out, drink, cruise the streets. Sex is a brief gesture; I fling away my body with my money and my fear. It is the sharp sensation which fills the empty space before I can go in search of you again. I repent nothing but the frustration of being unable to reach you. You are the glove that I find on the floor, the daily challenge I take up. You are the reader for whom I write.
You have never asked me who I have loved most. You know already and that is why you have never asked. I have always loved you.
Paul Michel
It is rare that a writer’s papers are completely without interest, but rarer still, as any historian will tell you, that they contain pure gold. I copied out these four letters, illegally, exactly as they had been written, over days, sometimes a line, a phrase at a time. They had already been paid for, bought and sold on the market in writers’ lives. Yet I believed that I was capable of reading them differently from anyone else. Under the yellow glare of dimmed and shimmering lamps specially adjusted to sensitive paper, I traced his words, in pencil marks so faint that they became a secret code. For five days I sat in the Archive reading his letters to Foucault, hiding the letter I was copying under another, disguising my papers under notes. The archivist frequently came to peer at what I was doing. I told her that I was studying his tenses, counting the times he used the conditional. She nodded, unsmiling. But I was a panhandler, a prospector, sifting my gravel and finding in my unwashed dust grain after grain of pure gold.
In the middle of the second week I stared at the clean, virgin paper of his last letter to Foucault. It was probably the last thing he had written before the darkness which he had described as a stain eclipsed his day forever. He rarely corrected himself on the page. Yet I knew that it was his habit to write draft after draft. Then I realized the truth that was staring me in the face and had been clear from the beginning. These were love letters. And they were fair copies, the only copies. The drafts had been destroyed. Foucault had never seen these letters, written over ten years ago. They had never been sent. None of them. Ever. They had been released to the Archives by Paul Michel’s “tutel.” And the publication rights had instantly been purchased by Harvard University Press in the
interests of scholarship. Whoever had stamped and ordered the letters had not always done it accurately. In all probability I was the first person to read them.
I sat staring at the pages, stupid and shaking, my skin tingling. I did not know how to react. I could not understand what I had discovered. I was sure other people were staring at me. I was afraid that if I moved I would be sick. These letters were no simple exercise in writing. They came from the heart. They were private writing. Why had they never been sent? Had he simply imagined the replies? They deserved a reply. They demanded an answer. No one should write like that and remain unanswered. I knew that I could no longer hesitate. I staggered from the Archive, clutching my stolen goods.
Paris became more and more unreal. I hardly noticed the tourists, the shuttered shops, locked for the summer. I stumbled through the water rushing in the gutters. I could not sleep at night. I lived on black coffee, rigid with sugar, and cheap cigarettes. I woke up on the Friday of my second week in the Archive with my head ringing. I heard his words as if for the first time, although by now I knew them by heart. You ask me what I fear most. You know already or you would not ask. It is the loss of my reader, the man for whom I write. My greatest fear is that one day, unexpectedly, suddenly, I will lose you. I got out of bed and dressed rapidly. My jeans, which I had washed two days before and hung up in the window, were still damp. I put them on anyway.
I had already made the most crucial decision of my life. I would reply to those letters. I had decided to find Paul Michel. Instead of taking the Metro to the Archive as usual I set out on foot for the fourteenth arrondissement and the Hôpital Sainte-Anne.
The hospital was like a city within a city. There were gardens, car parks, walkways, cafés, shops, a security barrier and a mass of huge, ancient buildings with new wings projecting outwards in black glass and concrete. The porters indicated the general reception, but I walked some distance before finding the steps leading up to bland offices and automatic doors. Hospitals are strange intermediary zones where sickness and health become ambiguous, relative states. There are people distraught, hysterical, others resigned and staring, the caretakers in white coats and comfortable shoes, utterly indifferent both to the bored and the desperate. There are three distinct groups ambling through the corridors, each designated by their dress: frightened visitors in outdoor clothes, the shuffling wounded in dressing gowns and slippers, the masters with their technological systems and washed faces. I waited in the queue at the office. Two women peered into their computer screens, ignoring the hesitant row of waiting applicants. A woman perched on a black plastic bench rebuked her whining child. Another carried an enormous bouquet of gladioli, like a peace offering.
All of them knew what service they wanted, but not how to find it. I had only a man’s name and an article in a homosexual magazine, written nine years ago. And now I had his private coded writing, his messages to himself. Hidden in my inside pocket, the copied sheets glittered against my chest.
“Je cherche un malade qui s’appelle Paul Michel.”
“Quel service?” She didn’t look up. Her fingers were already flying over the keys.
“I don’t know.”
She didn’t look up.
“When was he admitted?”
“June 1984.”
“What?” She stopped the whole process and turned around to look at me. Everyone in the queue behind me leaned forward, expectant.
“You must go to the Archives,” she snapped.
“But I think that he’s still here.” I looked at her desperately.
“He was brought in because he was mad.”
She stared at me as if I too was unhinged. Her colleague had got up and come to the counter.
“You must go to the Psychiatric Service,” she said, “and ask there. They may have a record of what was done with him. They have a separate entrance.”
She drew a massively complicated map on the back of an admissions card. As I left the general reception area all the people there stared at my every movement, warily, fascinated. The mother pulled her child back onto her knees. It was my first experience of what it meant to be connected, in any way, to the fate of Paul Michel.
It took me nearly half an hour to find the psychiatric wing of the hospital. And here there were no steps, no wide doors, no pot plants, simply a narrow entrance into a blank wall. I had to ring from outside; the door was permanently locked. As I stepped into a kind of air lock I saw the red eye of a camera mounted high on the wall, taking me in. I came out into a small lobby with a glass office exactly the same as all the administrative boxes in every bank in France. It seemed incredible that I had not come to cash my traveler’s cheques. The women there stared at me inquisitively, but did not speak. I started on the offensive.
“I’ve come to see Paul Michel.”
But the name meant nothing to either of them. One of them tried to help.
“Michel? M-I-C-H-E-L? Is he one of our regular patients? Do you know which service?”
I was confused. There were different systems even within the psychiatric wing. She looked at me speculatively.
“Does he come to the clinic? Or is he in the geriatric ward?Has he been here long?”
The other woman rummaged in the files which were clearly not yet computerized.
“There is no one here called Paul Michel,” she said definitively.
“Look. He was brought in because he was mad. And violent. Nearly ten years ago.”
“Il y a dix ans!” They sang out an incredulous chorus.
“You’ve made a mistake.”
“Are you sure it was this hospital?”
“Cal Doctor Dubé. He might know.”
“Ecoutez,” I began to insist, “he was first admitted in June 1984. But I rang just over two weeks ago and the woman I spoke to knew who he was. He must still be here. Please ask one of the doctors,” I begged them.
“Take a seat.
“I sat on a hard chair. There was no carpet on the floor. The blank cream walls smelled of bleach. There were no windows and the long white striplights gleamed in the tepid air. I waited, listening to the telephone incessantly ringing for over twenty minutes. Then, like a genie appearing from the tiles, a young, white-coated doctor appeared at my elbow.
“Vous êtes anglais?” he asked, puzzled.
“Yes. I’m trying to find Paul Michel.”
“L’écrivain?”
At last someone had heard of my lost writer. I nearly seized the doctor with excitement.
“Yes, yes. That’s right. Is he here?”
“What is your relationship to Paul Michel?” the doctor asked, giving nothing away. Panic stricken and suddenly inspired I told the truth.
“Do you speak English?” Intuitively, I sensed that this would give me back my lost advantage. The doctor smiled. “Yes. I do. A little.”
“Well, I’m his reader. His English reader.”
The doctor was completely mystified by this statement.
“His English reader? You work on his books?”
I saw my chance.
“Yes. I’m his reader. It’s crucial that I see him. I can go no further with my work until I do see him. And even if he doesn’t write anymore I am still his reader. I can’t relinquish my role.”
This was obscuring the issue with verbiage, and it was clear that the doctor did not understand the word relinquish.
“Eh bien, alors. Je ne sais pas … But in any case he is not here.He was transferred last year to the service fermé at Sainte-Marie in Clermont-Ferrand after his last escape.”
I caught my breath and froze.
“Escape?”
“Mais oui—vous savez—they often do try to escape. Even in pajamas.”
And the man whose writing I knew so well, whose scrawling hand was now indelible on my own hands, whose courage was never in question, came back to me with full force. He was still there, still present, unbroken.
“Sainte-Marie? Clermont?” I repeated his words.
“Yes. I shouldn’t think you’d be able to see him.” The doctor shook his head reflectively. But I would not now be defeated.
“Did you know him well?” I demanded.
The doctor shrugged. “You’ve never met him? Well, he’s not the kind of patient with whom you ever make much progress. It’s sad to say that. But it’s true. Why don’t you telephone the service at Clermont?”
I took the number and thanked him warmly, then carefully negotiated my exit back out through the sequence of locked doors. I felt the women’s eyes, suspicious, incredulous, attached to my back.
Jubilant, I ran most of the way back to the student residence. I had taken the room for a month in the first instance and had a terrible argument with the woman in administration who would only reimburse me for a week. I had less money, but now I knew where I was going. I scribbled a postcard to my Germanist telling her that I had found out where he was and that I was going to find him. Then I packed everything I possessed, including all the damp clothes from the windowsill and the poster, gave the pot plant to two unconvinced Americans, and caught the 5:30 train from the Gare de Lyon to Clermont-Ferrand. Paris sank behind me; the flat, cut fields of central France unfolded like a checkerboard. I had a terrible sense of urgency and fear. It was as if every second counted, as if I had only hours in which to find him, to tell him that his reader, his English reader, was still loyal, still listening, still here.
Looking back, I see now that I had become obsessed, gripped by a passion, a quest, that had not originated with me, but that had become my own. His handwriting, sharp, slanting, inevitable, had been the last knot in the noose. His letters had spoken to me with a terrible, unbending clarity, had made the most uncompromising demands upon me. I could never betray those demands and abandon him. No matter who he had become.
Clermont
I arrived at Clermont-Ferrand in the misty twilight. The station was full of displaced tourists, and one anguished, uniformed courier trying to conjure up a bus in the car park. I was one of the last off the train and the car park was discouragingly empty. Clermont is built with volcanic rock in a gulf beneath a chain of volcanoes. It is a black city, with a huge, black, Gothic cathedral. I wandered the streets with my rucksack looking for a one-star hotel. Everywhere was COMPLET. Finally a tired woman crouched behind a dried floral tribute in one of the pensions took pity on me. She was nursing a vicious poodle, which growled at my appearance.
Hallucinating Foucault Page 7