Memory cannot faithfully reconstruct the dense caprices of drunkenness, and grows weary of the attempt. I will make a long story short. I do not know what sudden change of mood made me pick a fight with the bartender who threw me out, roughly but not angrily. We moved on, maybe to another bar; I was in a sweat, unappeased under the murky sky. A few hundred meters from there, the man was waiting for me. With no apparent acrimony, his face like marble, he charged me in a low voice to “explain myself.” I was very willing to comply; sardonically, I indicated to him the closest café, where we could talk more comfortably; would the Commander care to have a drink, it was on me? A stone fist hit me in the face. I did not make a move; moreover, the alcohol rendered me insensible. But I spoke; I do not know what words he heard as blow by blow he punched me in the mouth; his fists were a balm to me, my words and laughter were to him, I believed, a rack; I was exultant; the slave was confessing, giving a mute display of the impotence of his words; to subjugate me he had to call upon the impenetrable body; he confessed his subservience like a jack knocks out his king. I fell to the ground; blood spurted through words; harder and harder, he kicked my face, twisted with pain and laughter; I suppose that he would have killed me, and that I wanted him to kill me in order to consecrate our shared victory, our shared defeat. Before I passed out, I saw the appalled face, the pain-filled face of Marianne, shrinking against the wall in her little mauve cotton dress that I loved so much. I was no more a king than my assailant was a pig, we suffered in concert under a suffering gaze; we were afraid.
He did not kill me. But his heel was still kicking my insensible and finally mute face when the police providentially made their rounds (my body has always been lucky to survive, if my life is as unlucky as I have described it). I came back to my senses on the terrace of the nearby bar, deserted and livid at that hour; I was holding Marianne; the light from above drowned the faces of the police in shadows, under the pointed visors of their caps; the chains and braiding glinted, the features in their shaded faces were indecipherable to me. A bartender, black and white imp, made me drink a cognac; a bit of my blood stained his napkin; the street lights in the square stretched toward the stars high armfuls of linden leaves, green and gold as grass and bread, immensely gentle. I was at peace, I understood nothing and that did not worry me, I longed for sleep; I was enjoying the usufruct of my death. Someone suggested I file a complaint; I declined without bitterness; I was not hurt badly, I was sure, the numbness of my face combined with my drunkenness gave me a mask of ecstasy; besides, I claimed that I knew the man, that we were friends of sorts. The gendarmes did not insist. A taxi drove us to the Villa.
Waking, I saw Marianne bent over me; she was crying; she had the inexpressibly horrified, incredulous look of a torture victim examining her own beaten body, after the bludgeon is done with it. The daylight was odious to me, I had an appalling headache. I suddenly froze in terror: whom had I killed? Petrified, I remained still, Marianne cradling her pain above me. Finally I remembered the fight from the night before; relieved, I moved, rose unsteadily, made my way to a mirror. A bad joke met me there, a moronic half-face; the left side was like a wineskin, bloated and purplish, and abjectly traced over it was the distended, purulent split of the eyelid. The right cheek and eye were intact, as if all the evil – “my sins” – had run to the sinister side with a frenzied desire to embody the confession, and had swollen to form a devil from a Romanesque lintel. And Romanesque as well was that pious wound, Manichaean, primitively symbolic, absurdly logical; I had stolen a man’s words from him, had returned them to him distorted; in return he had distorted my body, so we were all square. My face was wearing the receipt.
I threw myself on the bed, asking Marianne to forgive me, trembling as I caressed that dear face that both our ordeals made more dear to me. I had thrown up on the pillow where I lay down again; it did not matter; she spoke to me as if to a child, she offered me a kind of peace that is not of this earth (how to make it clear that her gestures were so tender that they were awkward?); everything, in her mouth and in her hands, became roses, as happens with Italian pietàs or Jean Genet’s pimps. I was hospitalized that afternoon; I had a fractured eye socket and malar bone. The eye, miraculously intact, could be saved.
I was missing something. Like a pretentious, bookish Tom Thumb, I had dropped the Gilles de Rais along the way.
A blessed stupor blanketed the first few days in the hospital. In a semi-coma, it was as if my intoxication would never come to an end; I endured the longest of hangovers, which was as it should be. I was operated on; no doubt I had not been anesthetized sufficiently, because I was conscious of the play of trephines across my cheekbone, but there was no pain, as in the midst of a light dream in which I witnessed my own autopsy, benign and reversible, for my own edification. I was opened like a book and like a book I read myself, aloud in a confused voice, to the great delight of the medical students whose laughter I could hear. I was in the Bardo, under the tooth and claw of the skullnibbling goddesses; and, as to the “noble son” of the Bardo, benevolent voices whispered to me that all this was illusion, that outside, the impalpable summer had more substance than my body, my body that only drunkenness, the multiple bodies of books, and Marianne’s eucharistic flesh rendered less illusory.
I was put in a ward opening onto an interior courtyard where the linden trees were still in blossom, as they were on the square where I had been beaten; the golden daylight was multiplied through a golden filter. Those pungent trees are beloved to bees; and their powerful murmur, which is amplified in the evening, seemed to be the very voice of the tree, its aura of solid glory; so must the angels have roared before the prostrate Ezekiel. The morgue also opened onto that courtyard; sometimes a recumbent form passed by under a sheet, and the orderlies joked with the patients through the open window; I was not under that sheet; my eyes were seeing the summer, I was at leisure to speak of the dead. I retain from those days a memory of deep enchantment. I was reading the Gilles de Rais, which Marianne had tracked down – the same bartender who had thrown me out had kindly kept it for me. I thought of the Vendée summer that was then scorching the ruins of Tiffauges, of high grass like the Ogre had once trampled, of silver rivers bordered by young trees under which he had wept, with repentance and with horror. Reading this story, nothing suited me better than the proximity of suffering flesh under pale sheets, under the triumphant laughter of July; the unsurpassed stupidity of the nurses made me absolve Gilles; the angelic patience of some of the dying made me curse him. In Marianne bent over me, all the slaughtered children wept, and the surviving children exulted in her laughter; in me, vague, irresolute ogres atoned for insufficient feasts.
Marianne came each afternoon. She turned her back to the ward and sat very close to my bed, so that my hand could excite her at leisure under her light skirt, without the patients in neighboring beds knowing, and my gaze hold her legs open and her lashes lowered; it was my reading more or less continued in this deferred pleasure. It was not all heated excitement though; we also spoke happily and we must have looked the picture of carefree lovebirds, whose antics amused or irritated my chance companions, all older. One of them, approaching my bed one day, said a few incomprehensible words to Marianne, in the awkward, rapid manner of a shy man, a throat affliction making his voice even weaker; he repeated himself, encouraged by Marianne’s kindness. Finally we understood; he needed to get in touch with his boss; he did not know how to use the telephone; could Marianne help and make the call for him?
I watched them walk away, the young chatterbox taking the old clam under her wing. I had been drawn to him since the first day, although I had not dared to speak to him; his gentle reticence intimidated me. Moreover, he was the only one whose desire not to be noticed made him noticeable. He did not take part in the conversations that floated about the room; addressed directly however, he responded quite willingly, with a manner at once eager and terse, which was disarming. He hardly laughed at our jokes, but neither did he d
isdain them; he simply, unaffectedly, kept his distance, as though it was not his own will and only something unknown, stronger and older than himself, that separated him from the rest of us.
Leaving my book, it was to him that my eyes went, to him again when it happened that I had been gazing at the obtrusive, desirable silhouette of a nurse. He occupied the bed next to the window; captivated by the daylight or by memories that for him alone moved in that daylight, he remained sitting face toward the sun for hours at a time. Perhaps for him the angels hummed, and he lent an ear to their music; but his lips offered no comment on those words of gold and honey, his hand transcribed no word of the dazzling dark. The lindens traced trembling cursive shadows over his bald, always astonished head; he contemplated his thick hands, the sky, his hands again, finally the night; he lay down to sleep stunned. Van Gogh’s seated man is no more grief-stricken, but he is more complacent, pathetic, and surely less discreet.
(Van Gogh? Some of Rembrandt’s scholars, similarly installed in windows, riveted to their seats in the shadows but with their faces bathed in the tears of the daylight, and likewise dumbfounded by their own powerlessness, resemble him more; but they are men of letters; this old man, as far as could be judged by his velour pants and coarse woolen jacket, as well as his slow gestures, was of the working class.)
His name was Foucault, and the nurses, with the indiscreet familiarity of that profession, both condescending and – who knows? – kind, called him “Father Foucault.” Saddled with the name of a trendy philosopher and a famous missionary, also a “Father,” the old man seemed only more obscure, and made you want to smile. I never knew his first name. From these same nurses (I was in their good graces; they spoke to me without distrust; no doubt that was because I used the same clever, chatty manner, teasing and empty, as the higher-ups they shamelessly served; they did not suspect that such speech can be used for insubordination toward all they idolized, for guilty absences, for escaping into an angry carelessness; moreover, I did not have to be so duplicitous; maybe I, too, really liked them: their flesh and their little weaknesses pleased me, even if their caustic conformism exasperated me; and they would probably have been good enough girls, had it not been for their role as warders, which made them all the more servile toward the learned men in white as they were viperish, patronizing, and derisive toward the humblest among their patients), from those girls then, I learned that Father Foucault had throat cancer. The condition was not yet life-threatening, but inexplicably, the patient refused to be taken to the Ville-juif Hospital, where he could have been treated; insisting on remaining in that rural hospital, which lacked the necessary medical equipment, he was signing his own death sentence. Despite all admonishments, he meant to stay there, turning his back on his death as it gathered in the shadowy corners, seated facing the great lit trees.
This refusal intrigued me; the old man’s resistance must have been strengthened by incredible will and powerful motivation; without great stubbornness, one does not withhold one’s body from medical imperatives, with their multiple, insidious pressures, certain of winning. But I thought of banal reasons, the provincial desire to stay close to one’s kin or obtuse, sentimental attachment to the land, which are so common in hospitals. It soon appeared, however, that there was something else; thanks to this telephone conversation, soon followed by many others in which she served similarly as Father Foucault’s go-between, Marianne gleaned little things. Apparently, the man did not have strong family ties, although his boss, a young miller from the neighboring county, seemed very fond of him; he seemed especially anxious to reassure the old man on one apparently insignificant point: “he had indeed filled out the papers,” and insisted that if other forms had to be completed, he should be notified, so that he could come to Clermont in due course. Then, this favor having initiated some familiarity between us (although as hesitant and parsimonious as eager on his part, intimidated on mine), I learned directly from the old man that though he had taken a wife back when he was no doubt still called “the young Foucault,” he had been widowed very early and had no children. Nor was he attached to any imaginary family land; born in Lorraine, then miller’s assistant somewhere in the south, he had ended up here, the last stage, perhaps, of a life of errancy into which some unverifiable but promising rumor, some deal between bosses, some chance domestic event throw common folk like him.
If a change in surroundings did not matter to him, why then did he refuse the standard treatment? He remained in his place, a small silhouette, withdrawn, as if in anticipation of its own disappearance; and he would have been pathetic if his irritating secret had not aggrandized him, the noble absurdity of his resolution, the finality of that deadline – it was the strange overture of his death, peopled or not by angels, that he contemplated, and the objects of his astonished gaze seemed struck by the surprise of it; the courtyard filled with its vibrant lindens, onto which opened the brightly enameled morgue, incongruous as a wash basin in a banquet hall, thus became an exemplary landscape in which I, in my turn, lost myself. Even my reading was populated with Father Foucaults, lowered hats and unfathomable looks, lightweight human rags thrown to the side of an empty road by the “make way, churl!” of a knight, haughty and sad, galloping to Tiffauges, a terrified child across his saddle; and among them, one, in appearance the most resigned, remained in the middle of the road, his hat in his humble hands, watched the knight bearing down on him, swearing, and lay down forever in the grass, a horseshoe-shaped wound bleeding at his temple. He was similarly in the path of the doctors, and no less deferent toward them than his ancestors had been toward the passing of the dark Vendée eviscerator; to those other vivisectionists, those with neither pleasure nor remorse, facing neither death at the stake nor hope of redemption, he opposed his humble, smiling protestations; modestly but intractably, he disdained being led where “his good” required that he should go. He was, himself, too insignificant to have the key to this “good” that others possessed, the use of which, they demonstrated to him, had all the appearances of a duty; he stuck to his position nevertheless, shrank from that duty, abandoned himself, body and worldly goods, to that deadly sin: contempt for the body and its good, which is worse than heresy in the eyes of medical dogma. He wanted to be accountable only to death, and gently resisted the advances of its clergy.
And thus the clerics harassed him daily. One morning I was torn from my reading by the dramatic entrance of a larger delegation than usual, like captains of a night round with all their privates; they went straight to Father Foucault’s bed: one doctor with a sharp profile, authoritative and dignified as a grand inquisitor, another younger, more athletic one, though double-chinned under his goatee, a handful of interns, a twittering swarm of nurses; the whole regiment was sent to convert the old heretic; they went right to the question extraordinary. Father Foucault was sitting in his favorite spot; he had gotten up, they had him sit down again; and the sun, which left the garrulous heads of the still standing doctors in the shadows, flooded his hard skull and his stubbornly closed mouth; you would have thought that the doctors of The Anatomy Lesson had switched canvases and were assembled behind The Alchemist at his window, filling his usual space for meditation with their powerful, starched white presences, the brouhaha of their knowledge. Intimidated by this unusual interest taken in him, and ashamed at not being able to respond, the old man hardly dared to look at them and, with quick, nervous glances, still sought advice from the lindens, the warm shade, the cool doorway, with its familiar, reassuring presence. Perhaps that was how Saint Anthony considered his cross and the small water pitcher in his hut; because surely they came very close to stirring him, if not convincing him, these tempters who spoke to him of Parisian hospitals as splendid as palaces, of recovery, of reasonable beings and those who, out of pure ignorance, are not so reasonable; moreover, the chief doctor was sincere; he had a good heart under his professional self-importance and his condottiere’s mask; he felt a sort of sympathy for the pig-headed old man. I wo
uld like to believe that it was that sympathy, more than the arguments of reason, to which Father Foucault felt an obligation to respond, because he did respond; and short as it was, his response was more enlightening and definitive than a long speech; he raised his eyes to his tormentor, seemed to waver under the weight of his astonishment, forever fresh and increased by the burden of what he was going to say, and, with the same shrug of both shoulders with which he might have lowered a sack of flour, apologetically, but in a voice so strangely clear that the whole ward heard it, he said, “I am illiterate.”
I fell back onto my pillow; an intoxicating joy and sadness transported me; a feeling of infinite brotherhood overwhelmed me; in this world of the learned and the pontificators, someone, like me perhaps, thought that he knew nothing and wished to die. The hospital ward resounded with Gregorian chants.
The doctors disbanded like a flight of sparrows that had gathered by mistake or stupidity under the arches, and that the monody now dispersed; little cantor in the aisle, I did not dare lift my eyes to the unbending choirmaster, unknowing and unacknowledged, whose ignorance of neumatic notation made the song more pure. The lindens hummed; in the shade of their sonorous columns, between two laughing orderlies, a corpse under its cover rolled toward the high altar of the morgue.
Small Lives Page 11