Hallucinating Foucault

by Patricia Duncker

  I danced off down the rue St Jean-Baptiste Torrilhan. I was celebrating my first real victory.

  As we stepped out of the asylum doors together, the women staring after us in disbelief, I took a deep, deep breath, as if I had been the one shut up. Paul Michel simply walked across the street and turned around, reflectively, to look up at the graffiti, written on the wall; the writer contemplating an unrevised first draft.

  “Hmmm,” he said, “no one’s tried to remove my writing. Not quite balanced on either side of the door. But I was standing on two chairs and it was the middle of the night.”

  “When did you last come out?” I asked.

  “A year ago. When I left Paris to come here. I painted the graffiti in March.”

  “Why didn’t you try to escape then?”

  He looked at me, amused. And said nothing.

  “Come on, petit,” he took my arm and we set off together, “let’s get going.”

  Paul Michel looked at the urban world from which he had been so long excluded with a detachment that no longer even amounted to curiosity. It was the glance of a disinterested observer, the indifference of a man who was no longer sitting at the table, placing his stake, absorbed in the game. He stood smoking on the street corner, watching the young men, as if they were wild animals, imprisoned, behind a wall of glass. I was disappointed, even irritated by his attitude. He was neither grateful nor pleased to have walked free from his prison. What I had achieved was of no significance. The walls were within him. We drank a beer in a café. He didn’t speak to me. Hurt, I decided to make a gesture asserting my independence. I went out and bought The Guardian and tried to catch up with the world of England for a while. He played the pin-ball machine. And there his absorption became complete. The flashing lights, electric bouncing noises and spinning mercury balls seemed to hypnotize him into absolute concentration. I glanced up from the foreign news to the sound of applause. A small group of boys had gathered around him. His total score was so enormous that he had hit the jackpot. A flood of two and five franc pieces cascaded around his knees. He laughed, turned to the bar.

  “Tu vois, petit. Je suis quand même gagneur. I still win. What would you like?”

  I melted a little and drank some more beer. I noticed that he drank hardly anything. After a while I said, “You win. But you couldn’t care less if you win or lose. Is there anything left that you do care about?”

  It came out more sharply than I had intended. I could no longer deal with his utter indifference to the world and all that therein is. And although I could not understand my own motives then, I feared that his indifference unthinkingly included me. It could have been anyone who had come to find him. I was simply a pawn in some other larger game. I had not been chosen.

  He did not answer me for a while. He simply looked out at the mass of people negotiating the traffic and the pavements in the summer sun. Then he said, “Come. I want to buy something for you.”

  We turned into the pedestrian precinct and he stopped in front of a boutique which sold, among other things, fabulously expensive hand-tailored leather jackets.

  “Oh no,” I objected at once, “I can’t let you do that.”

  “How ungracious you English always are,” said Paul Michel smiling, and pushed me into the shop.

  I had been paying for everything so far and had assumed that he had no money apart from the coins that he had coaxed out of the pinball machine. We spent an hour looking at ourselves in giant mirrors, wearing increasingly expensive creations.

  “We both need a haircut,” he pointed out. “We’ll do that next.”

  I had never in my life taken any interest at all in what I wore. My mother used to buy all my clothes. When I left home and had my own money at college, I bought whatever was neutral and fitted. The Germanist always wore jeans and heavy black Doc Martens with her laces tied three times round the ankle. She wore baggy white shirts in the summer. I had never seen her wearing a skirt and I don’t think she had one. Paul Michel on the other hand thought that every detail in the presentation was crucially important. He noticed aspects of the jackets, shirts and trousers laid out around us that suggested standards as exacting as Yves St Laurent inspecting the summer collection.

  “Have my clothes been getting up your nose?” I asked ruefully, reflecting on my transformation from frog to prince.

  “No,” he said. “I did comment the second time I saw you. But to tell you the truth I’d stopped noticing. However, as you are going out with me I want you to look magnificent. OK?”

  The shop assistant was charmed rather than rendered desperate by Paul Michel’s demands and criticisms. But the thunderbolt came when he produced a check book along with his carte d’identité and wrote out a check for more than 4000 francs. I was speechless. I was under the impression that he was penniless, had no legal existence and certainly wasn’t in possession of a valid travel document and a check book.

  “I didn’t know you had any money,” I said at last.

  “I’m rather rich,” he smiled ironically. “Didn’t you tell me that I’m a set text, petit? There aren’t any shops in the service fermé. I pay my keep at Sainte-Marie, you know. I’m not a burden on the state.”

  We stood in the street carrying plastic bags full of our old clothes. Paul Michel laughed at me out loud.

  “Well, petit. And you lavished all that love and attention upon me with no thought of a return? No one can say that you’re a fortune hunter.”

  He took the plastic bag out of my unresisting hand and flung it into a huge green municipal dustbin along with his own. The lid snapped shut.

  “Now we’ll go and get a haircut, drink an apéritif at the café in front of the cathedral and enjoy being looked at. Then we’ll eat at the crêperie.”

  I put myself in his hands.

  Quinze Treize was an ancient building in the cathedral precinct. There were many small rooms off the main restaurant space. It was dark and hot inside. All the doors and tiny lead-paned windows were open onto two small terraces beneath a squat tower containing a staircase. The entrance was almost invisible, under a low archway and past two huge nail-spattered doors. At 7:30 it was already almost full. In the vaulted basement was another bar and a piano. We heard a woman singer warming up. I looked up the lopsided staircase and heard laughter from the top of the stairs. Paul Michel chatted to the man at the bar as if they were old friends and we were immediately swept off to an excellent table in the window. The waiter suppressed the little card saying “Réservé.”

  “Did you know him?” I asked, impressed.

  “No,” smiled Paul Michel.

  “This table was reserved. Had you telephoned in advance?”

  “No,” he glittered for a second, “but I told him that we were from the Mairie and that I was one of the mayor’s assistant secretaries, and that the mayor himself would be joining us later. That’s why we’ve got a table for three.”

  I gaped.

  “You what? You told him all that?”

  “Mais bien sûr. Because if he finds out that we’ve escaped from Sainte-Marie the story will be perfectly explicable. If I am mad, I probably do think that I work for someone important.”

  “You’re impossible.” I hid my face in the menu. I didn’t want him to see that I was laughing.

  I was also delighted by the way he had spoken of us both as escaped detainees. During the meal he drank one glass of wine, and then began to tell me stories. He talked then as if we were old friends; he told me stories about his childhood. He reflected on the meanings of madness. I listened enthralled. This is all that I can remember.

  “Even in Toulouse the quartier felt like a village. There was a small community of Spanish, an even smaller band of Arabs. More live there now of course. This was in the 1950s. It was during the war in Algeria. One of them, an old grandfather, who always wore fresh white robes, sat on a bench in front of his house. He chanted the Koran, beautifully, the whole poetry of praise poured out of him, day after day.
And the children gathered around him to listen. Until six o’clock struck. Then his whole discourse and manner were transformed and he ranted about nothing but sex and fucking; one long torrent of obscenities. The children would be rapidly dispersed when his granddaughter got home at seven o’clock and hauled him inside the house. But we would have had an hour of mispronounced French filth which made us rapturous with joy. They don’t lock up their madmen. They give them fresh white robes and set them outside their doors to prophesy …

  “And in our village in Gaillac there was a man with very long fingernails who would wander between the boulangerie and the bar, demanding ten francs from anybody who came past, and threatening to tear off your face if you wouldn’t hand over the money.

  “We’re not all locked up, you know …

  “I was an only child. I used to wander among the vines above our house at sunset. I used to talk to the scarecrows draped in scarves with lumpy stuffed trousers and old flat caps. My grandfather saw me dancing around a scarecrow, urging the creature to dance with me. And he shouted that if I imagined things I would end up like my grandmother, who lost her mind early on. She hummed and muttered continuously. In fact I am not like her. I am like him …

  “All writers are, somewhere or other, mad. Not les grands fous, like Rimbaud, but mad, yes, mad. Because we do not believe in the stability of reality. We know that it can fragment, like a sheet of glass or a car’s windscreen. But we also know that reality can be invented, reordered, constructed, remade. Writing is, in itself, an act of violence perpetrated against reality. Don’t you think, petit? We do it, leave it written there, and slip away unseen …

  “Do you know what they’re trying to do to me in the asylum, petit? They’re trying to make me responsible for my own madness. Now that’s very serious. What an accusation …

  “One of my hallucinations is that I am the last man and that in front of me there is nothing but a desert where everyone is probably dead …

  “I tell stories. We all make up stories. I tell you stories that make you laugh. I love to watch you laughing. I shall never escape from this prison of endless stories …

  “Would you like a crêpe sucré, with Grand Marnier and cream? Go on, I dare you to eat one …

  “Have you read what Foucault wrote about Bedlam? Madness is theater, a spectacle. We have very few words to designate what we mean by madness in French. You, the English, you have a galaxy of words for the demented: crazy, foolish, simple, idiotic, rabid, distracted, manic, absurd, insane. It is important to traverse all those meanings. Look at you, petit, only a madman would have come all the way to Clermont to find someone who had been incarcerated for nearly ten years, with so little hope of ever finding me. Without knowing who you would find.”

  He looked at me carefully.

  “Madness and passion have always been interchangeable. Throughout the entire western literary tradition. Madness is an abundance of existence. Madness is a way of asking difficult questions. What did he mean, the powerless tyrant king? O Fool, I shall go mad.

  “Maybe madness is the excess of possibility, petit. And writing is about reducing possibility to one idea, one book, one sentence, one word. Madness is a form of self-expression. It is the opposite of creativity. You cannot make anything that can be separated from yourself if you are mad. And yet, look at Rimbaud—and your wonderful Christopher Smart. But don’t harbor any romantic ideas about what it means to be mad. My language was my protection, my guarantee against madness and when there was no one to listen my language vanished along with my reader.”

  I could not resist the moment. I took the risk.

  “May I ask you about Foucault?”

  His reply was as instantaneous as a bullet, savage, furious.

  “No.”

  I could not call back my mistake. I snatched at words, mumbled my apologies. His whole aspect had changed; his face fractured with pain, then flared alight with cruel and extraordinary rage. He stood up.

  “You disappoint me, petit. I was beginning to think that you might not be a fool.”

  What happened next took place so rapidly I never saw exactly what happened. A man appeared behind Paul Michel as he rose and jostled him slightly. The man made a comment. I didn’t catch the words but it was leering, knowing, insinuating and unmistakably aggressive. The man nodded towards me, and his meaning, even without the words, was unambiguous.

  Paul Michel hit him suddenly, twice, once in the stomach and once in the face. He crashed backwards into the table behind us. The women leaped up, clutching their handbags and screaming. The whole room shuddered into chaos as someone seized Paul Michel by the collar of his shirt. I flung myself at the man who had laid hands on him and then felt my shoulders reeling into the pots of red geraniums, which lined the windowsill. Two of them lurched onto a table outside, covering the food in damp earth and roots. By this time the man who had started the incident was on his feet again, and didn’t much care whom he attacked as long as he settled the score. He went for me. I ducked out of range. Paul Michel smashed his head open with a bottle. There was blood all over the broken, empty, pottery plates. Everyone in the room seemed to be screaming.

  And just as suddenly it was all over. A man with huge bare arms and an apron, who had clearly risen from the kitchen’s steamy depths, dragged Paul Michel and his aggressor out into the corridor. I seized our jackets and rushed after him. Surprisingly, no one insisted on explanations. The management wanted us all outside the restaurant as quickly as possible. There was a woman pushing me, jabbering. I couldn’t understand a word she said. Someone hustled her off to the toilets. All around us the clatter of Saturday night and the pounding music went straight on, as if there had been no interruption. I heard Paul Michel saying, with great aplomb, “I shall, of course, make my report to the Mayor himself …”

  And the Director of Quinze Treize apologized profusely. I staggered after Paul Michel’s rigidly dignified retreating back under the archway and out into the street.

  “Did you pay, petit?” he asked, putting his arm around me.

  “No.”

  “Good. Neither did I. You aren’t hurt?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  He dusted me down and straightened my clothes. I had dirt from the flowerpots on my new white shirt.

  “That’ll wash off. Soak it tonight. Come on. Let’s go to a bar.”

  We walked away rapidly down the hill through the darkening streets. He still had his arm around me.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m sorry …”

  “Shhhh …” He stopped my mouth with his hand and pulled me around to face him. We looked at one another for one terrible second. Then he said, “I would never hit you.”

  He drew my face towards him and kissed me hard on the mouth in the public street, ignoring the people walking past us. We strode on down to the Place de la Victoire. Paul Michel was utterly calm and I was shaking with fear.

  Three days later we were sitting smoking, side by side as usual, outside in the gardens. I was reading and Paul Michel was lying on his back, stretched out on a long stone seat, looking up into the shifting patches of light and shade in the lime trees, his eyes half closed. Neither of us heard Pascale Vaury approaching. She must have been standing there watching us for some time. I had no idea what was coming, but I think he did.

  Paul Michel was so utterly unlike any other person, woman or man, that I had ever known. He had made no specific demands upon me, and yet he demanded everything I had; all my time, energy, effort, concentration. For something had significantly changed between us since the disastrous night out at Quinze Treize. The balance of power had shifted. I was no longer in control of the affair and the outcome was radically in doubt.

  “I’ve got some news for you both,” said Pascale Vaury, her face expressionless. I started slightly at her voice and looked up. Paul Michel neither reacted nor moved. He continued to gaze up into the trees. She addressed herself to his supine indifference.

  “I
applied for a temporary release order on your behalf at the Préfecture. I should say that I was under some pressure to apply. I have had a barrage of phone calls from your legal guardian. Given his prestige within the medical establishment I haven’t had much choice. I have expressed my doubts. Nevertheless, the order has been accepted, subject to an additional report from the medical advisory committee. You’ll go before the committee tomorrow. If all goes well, you can leave on Saturday, Monday at the latest. I assume that you want to go this time.”

  She paused, looking critically at Paul Michel. He sat up.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said drily.

  “You do that,” she said, “and if you do want to go, behave better than you did last time in front of the committee.”

  I was terribly excited and anxious, crestfallen at Paul Michel’s lack of enthusiasm. Pascale Vaury went on. “I’ve mentioned your successful excursion last Saturday.” I held my breath. “It should count in your favor.”

  The fracas at Quinze Treize had gone undiscovered. The only mystery which remained, as Paul Michel gleefully pointed out to me, was an unsolicited letter of apology sent to the Mayor of Clermont by the management of Quinze Treize. This became a journalist’s joke in the local paper towards the end of the week.

  Paul Michel stood up, stretched, and yawned in her face.

  “And where do you suggest that I go, Dr Vaury?”

  She smiled ironically.

  “Wherever you like within the frontiers. You can’t leave the country. But you have to decide before Saturday so that we can register you with the police and the local clinic—and fax them your papers.”

  “Well, as I say—I’ll think about it.” Paul Michel lay down again, arrogant and self-contained, dismissing her. Suddenly she leaned towards him and, with all the tenderness of a mother, she softly stroked his cheek.

  “Ecoute-moi. Sois sage,” she said, turned on her heel and marched away. I stared after her. Paul Michel lay looking up into the trees, laughing slightly. I realized, for the first time, that all his rudeness to her face was a form of theater. There was an absolute trust and complicity between them. The hospital was his home. These were the only people he trusted, the only people he loved. I had nothing to say.