Reflections on myself and on what had happened to me. Simple personal observations. Poems that, more than songs, were fulgurations issuing sometimes from the heart and sometimes from the brain. Plans having to do with my getting back into the saddle, both by my own efforts—by working—and by medical means: psychoanalysis (quite disheartening, for I could not imagine myself, without a feeling of nausea, once again stretched out on the confessional couch); psychosomatic medicine (which had been attracting me for a long time, with its gleams illuminating the strange match that is played between body and mind until the first drags the second along with it in its downfall); to decide nothing, in any case, without having consulted the friend who throughout the past months had been occupied with restoring the health of my liver and purifying my blood. In the notebook, a few pages of which were thus covered with flyspecks not always very legible, I thus delineated some plans, tried to understand them, and accumulated some lines of verse. On the very day after my failed liquidation a choice had been enacted, almost without my knowledge and without my having had to debate about it: I had simply fastened onto it. How should I live? Live doing what and doing it how? These two questions were the only burning ones, and if, in the background, coiled another question mark—why live?—it was in a manner purely formal and almost ornamental.
When I go back now to that singular period, I note it as happy despite the deplorable physical state in which I found myself, the quasi-reclusion implied by my status as hospital patient, and the anguish that filled me when, instead of envisaging the future from the almost scholarly viewpoint of a program to be determined, I contemplated it without veiling the conflict that had not been resolved by my descent into the abysses. A certain calm had come after the turbulence, supplanting little by little the excitation, unconscious in the very beginning, that had caused them to tie me down, as I have mentioned, and then, when I was freed of the ties, once provoked the rough intervention of two night nurses, who, using a sheet folded several times, strapped me tightly to my bed as though they were preparing to fight me. However, the sort of torrid serenity to which I acceded, that joy in itself, if I can call it that—a joy that was completely bare, or, at least, lacking in attributes that were actually pleasant—soon revealed itself to have been only a circumstantial reaction and not the consecration of any wisdom: it was the straining of every fiber of my being toward healing, at the same time as a response to the straightforward devotion of those who had revived me and whose conduct seemed dominated by the idea that human life is worth a struggle to prolong it. What marked the turning point was—at the time when I was acknowledged to be nearly convalescent—my transfer into the “men’s gallery,” a part of the wing that (like its counterpart, the “women’s gallery”) was theoretically occupied by patients for whose health one no longer had to fight inch by inch.
Objectively, I had gained by this change of locale: I had at my disposition a room with a single bed, a sort of box whose partitions did not reach the ceiling but formed an adequate separation. Despite the lack of disturbance caused me in the other room by the quasi-absent man who vegetated beside me, my solitude was now, certainly, better: it allowed me a greater freedom with my visitors and, the rest of the time, more peace than in that other room, subject to the comings and goings entailed by the many cares my companion needed. Nonetheless, in fact I experienced this change as a return to the most dismal tedium. Scarcely was I settled in before I felt boredom take the place of the ardor that, in various forms, had animated me up to then. My period of high tension was succeeded by that of a broken charm, as though I had been disillusioned, pulled from a dream or abruptly returned to profane duties after the fervor of some pilgrimage.
A room with only one bed instead of the room with three beds of which one was mine, another a resting place between life and death where an obstinate sleeper lay, the third a piece of furniture that would not have counted had I not been afraid of seeing it occupied one day by God knows what arrival! According to this arithmetic, I should have been delighted with a much improved fate. But to consider only the immediately measurable aspect would be to take a deceptive view of the thing, for in this room, where I was now alone, and relieved of too frequent intrusions, I found I was, on the other hand, at the mercy of all that might filter in through partitions whose opacity was not duplicated, unfortunately, by anything equivalent with respect to what might beleaguer my eardrums.
There were radios regularly tuned to the worst drivel in the way of programs, and remarks exchanged by my neighbors, who sometimes joked like soldiers the night before they are demobilized, sometimes bantered piteously about the state of their throats after the tracheotomies they too had undergone (for most were tetanus victims cured by the method that consists of provoking a coma by injection with curare, then “reviving”)—all this came to me through the partitions as though, morning and night, a malign Providence had given me an anthology of idiotic quotations to listen to, in order to wash my brain of any inclination toward optimism I might have had. Given what I was hearing, was I not in fact led to say to myself that this hospital work, despite its apparent “validity,” was no less aberrant than any other, since it turned out, in the last analysis, to represent a great deal of intelligence, heart, and energy expended with the sole aim of increasing the longevity of a collection of sinister cretins (almost all of them having been proved such, except for a North African whom I spotted a little later through a set of open doors and whose difference of origin or ignorance of French preserved him from the distressing colloquy)? Thus, like a believer who cannot tolerate the crumbling of his faith, I would soon accept, as a truth whose obviousness became glaringly apparent at the very moment one reached the lowest point, the following idea, calculated to recompose the drop of hope that had too quickly evaporated: even if it might be true that a doctor—likewise, also, an artist or soldier—wastes his forces for the benefit of a disgustingly mediocre public, and even if one could, at best, belong to an active elite stirring up the emptiness to which (in the main) the passive masses are reduced, this would not discredit such efforts and would only show the urgency of connecting them to the education of these masses, which one could not say were doomed by fate to a constant futility. A rather dopey philosophy but one that, at the time, was likely to be welcome, since by liberating me from a logical despair it would silence my scruples concerning my lack of courage to repeat, this time without any possibility of failure, my attempt to put an end to it all.
Removed from that line of fire, as it were, the rooms of the gravely ill, one of which I had shared with a half-dead man whom they worked unceasingly at keeping alive while waiting for him to wake up, I felt like an evacuated soldier who is dragging his gloom around the hospitals behind the combat zone. There was no trace, here, of the heroic atmosphere of my former sector: for the amazons, often flushed, who relieved one another in a relentless battle against the forces of death, more anodyne creatures seemed to have been substituted, either because the convalescents no longer needed to be assisted by the very finest, or because the fact that they were out of danger led to a home-guard sort of relaxation on the part of women as valiant, when necessary, as those of the shock troop. But whether it was a matter of the people or simply of circumstances, certainly less vigilance and more detached behavior combined to give me the impression that around me, colorless cleaning women—neutral and anonymous—had taken over.
During one of my walks from hallway to hallway (I took them even at night, going to the bathroom being then my alibi), I encountered the indefatigable caregiver who, during the first few days, had seemed to me so maternal and so capable of attending to everything that I thought of course she must have had, at home, to spend herself body and soul on the needs of a burdensome brood. I liked her very much, this woman whose efficient devotion—so profound, no doubt, that it was quite unconscious—did not prevent either from putting you in your place nor from vituperating as though at that very instant she was going to give it all up. T
hus, wanting to say something nice to her, I expressed to her my boredom at being a patient in the men’s gallery now, and how much better I liked it in the sector that she looked after. Yes . . . It’s livelier where we are! she declared, laughing, without my being able to tell whether that laughter corresponded to her pure, heartfelt agreement or to a perception of the strangeness of such a judgment about the series of workshops where skillful technicians endeavored to repair creatures who, of their humanity, retained the form only.
Having moved from that place where death flew overhead to one where everything seemed calculated to make me deplore having come back among men, I had—dismaying as it was—progressed at least on one point: there was no more question, henceforth, of calmly enjoying the respite that my withdrawal had brought me; to stay even a single day longer than strictly necessary would have been to linger cravenly in the midst of a degrading stupidity. The decision to leave as soon as possible and to confront, without delay, a future concerning which I had for a moment wondered whether everything did not risk being resolved, in simple disgust, more quickly than I would have believed—such was my almost immediate reaction to these depressing surroundings. I therefore accepted, at last without deferments, the peril of returning to my life of a short time before. Would I have made this choice so easily if I had not had the virtue of hope as an intimate part of my being, despite what I might have thought at other times?
Until then I had been waiting for my wound to heal and for them to decide that I was ready to return home. However, the friend who was assisting me as my attending physician had said to me that by doing this I ran the risk of being kept there for quite a long time: what I had to do was ask for my release; they would surely grant it, because the treatments that my wound still required could be given elsewhere than in the hospital. My unhappy discovery in the men’s gallery quickly put an end to any hesitation; I expressed my desire to leave. They immediately signed me up for the next otorhinolaryngological consultation; I would present myself there during the morning on Saturday and depart in the afternoon.
Equipped with a “large curette,” the big boss ear-nose-and-throat man had removed some small excrescences that had formed on the edges of my wound, still partially open. This had hurt quite a bit and, back in my room, after leaving the subterranean lair where the consultation was held, I had lain down on my bed in order to recuperate. Then a nurse had come to apply a last dressing, and I had lunched on cakes and fruits. It was very hot, which did not help matters after the almost sleepless night I had had. My slender luggage prepared, all that remained was for me to rest until the moment when my wife would arrive to take me back to the quai des Grands Augustins, along with one of our closest friends, the very same one I have chosen (because he is appreciably younger than I) as posthumous executor of my last wishes and who, perhaps, will have to occupy himself with publishing, arranged as he will find them, the unused slips of paper for The Rules of the Game, that work which for a long time now I have been afraid of not being able to finish, for lack of time, and which this fear, by making me tense, prevents me still further from finishing quickly.
My wait was long and all the more irritating because, my goodbyes having been said, and the break effected, I would have liked to decamp at once. To sleep there yet another night, if the too tardy arrival of my escort made it unfortunately impossible for me to go through the formalities of leaving—I could not envisage this without anguish. Two or three times I even went to the duty nurses’ office to find out whether some telephone communication had not come, informing me of some hitch or modification added to the protocol envisaged. The nurses reassured me and sent me back to my room, where, too fidgety to read, write, or do anything at all, I could only begin fretting again, asking myself if I had not misunderstood what my wife had said to me the day before. Arising less from reflection than from a mad impatience, my worry was groundless, and I was able, before the afternoon was very advanced, to settle myself in my pajamas and bathrobe in the saloon car that our friend, in order to spare me a few steps too many, had taken it upon himself to bring into the small courtyard close by, where the doctors’ cars were parked.
In the intense heat of that June, the ride was tiring. A little on edge, I opened my eyes wide to a summer apparently full of violence, whose outbreak, secluded as I was (for the space of two weeks that were too full to correspond to their measurement on the calendar), I had not suspected, even when I took the air in the Eden that a cheerful physical therapist had revealed to me. The Avenue d’Aubervilliers and the street of the same name, struck by a sun I had so forgotten that it appeared to me of an extreme harshness, extended on either side of the windows, and I looked at them as I would have the arteries of an unfamiliar pattern in an exotic city that would at once have surprised and vaguely frightened me. The splendor of a light on the verge (one could believe) of exploding endowed with a marvelous brilliance this neighborhood of ill repute where, here and there, a café-bar astonished me by its glowing color and the cutthroat appearance it owed to its very tranquility. Among the rare people who walked about or stood on the sidewalks, I noticed a few men—North Africans or others—to whom I attributed, no doubt rather quickly, the profession of pimps, and I especially noted, encamped like fishwives or tragic actresses, women in cheap summer dresses that did not cover them more than dressing gowns, and which, venal or not, they seemed ready to shed in an instant for the lovemaking to which one was incited by this day so radiant that in itself it made one want to be naked. More densely populated, the Faubourg Saint-Denis presented to me, under full sail, to my left and right, its panoply of female thieves scarcely appetizing as a group and, sometimes, hideous enough to send cold shivers down one’s spine.
Having been delivered back home, I climbed my four flights of stairs without stopping, even though my breath was short and my legs had hardly any energy. Fearing the reunion with what had been, symbolically, the setting of my last day, I wanted to linger as little as possible on the threshold and plunge, as one throws oneself into the water, toward the meeting that I dreaded. This tactic, in truth, was of no use to me, and even though in the same impetus I went all the way into the study where the chest of drawers stood, from the top drawer of which I had taken my tubes of phenobarbital in order to stuff myself with their contents, I felt a great shock when, stretched out on the couch and trying to catch my breath, I allowed my eyes to alight on that chest of drawers, the other furniture, and the various ornaments of a place that had been the setting for a crisis the likes of which I had never before experienced.
Lying on my back, I faced the ceiling above me with the corner stucco figures and the other moldings of its old-fashioned decoration, whose central motif is an ellipse scarcely less long and less broad than the rectangle formed by the tops of the cornices that surmount the four walls. As is customary, the bowl of the lighting fixture—a cup of frosted glass held up by a disk of steel screwed to the lower end of a vertical axis that is not visible—included the median point of the ceiling in that protuberance, in the form of a well-rounded and discreetly bulging breast, that I sometimes like to compare to a sort of omphalos or navel of the world. But that was not what compelled my attention. Scarcely had I lain down before I perceived, with an acuity that made me almost ill, the singular relief of the ellipse, banal though it was and integrated so perfectly with my daily surroundings that in ordinary times it had, for me, almost ceased to exist. Scoured by the completely new vision I had of it, this modest product of Second Empire bourgeois style swelled with a power of fascination so precise that there undoubtedly exists no masterpiece that could have rivaled it, during the long and agitated interval that I spent there while they prepared the small bedroom which I would leave only when my return to nights of normal sleep marked the end of my convalescence.
During the last war, I once had the good fortune to drink some real coffee, and this beverage, which we had been deprived of for a long time, had almost the same effect on me, I think, as if I had taken
some hashish; in a metro filled with people, all (it seemed) astonishingly picturesque, I admired the modeling of the most vulgar sort of nose like a painter in ecstasy before a poor shanty on which the rays of the sun are playing; an antique dealer whom I know thought I was drunk, I showed such pleasure as I observed the way in which lines and colors endowed the African velvets in his collection with a vivid and constantly changing depth; that evening, in a concert hall, it seemed to me that the sounds issuing from the instruments were passing through my whole body, and, the entire time I listened to it, this music, which had turned into my own resonance, provoked in me fantastic bursts of emotion. Without the help of any excitant, it was a sensation similar to these, that the sight of the elliptical motif gave me, while I rested on the couch.
The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3 Page 22