‘Well, it’s not very scientific from the point of view of terminology, but we might as well call a spade a spade. In the end it’s not sorrow that will kill you, not directly. I imagine you’ve already started putting on weight?’
‘Yes, I think so, I haven’t really noticed, but I guess so.’
‘That’s inevitable with cortisol: you’re going to get fatter and fatter, you will frankly become obese. And once you are obese, there’s no shortage of fatal illnesses: you’ll be spoilt for choice. What made me change my opinion about your treatment was the cortisol. I was reluctant to advise you to stop taking Captorix, for fear that your cortisol rate might increase; but now, quite frankly, I don’t see how it could go any higher.’
‘So you’re advising me to stop taking Captorix?’
‘Well … that’s not an easy choice either. Because if you stop, your depression will come back, it’ll come back even more powerfully; you’re going to become a real zombie. On the other hand, if you go on, you can write off the idea of sex. What you need to do is keep your serotonin at the correct level – right now it’s OK, you’re fine – but lowering the cortisol, and maybe increasing dopamine and endorphins, that would be ideal. But I have a sense that I’m not being very clear, is that OK, you’re still following me?’
‘Not entirely, to tell you the truth.’
‘Well…’ He glanced at the page again with a slightly dazed look, giving me the impression that he no longer really believed in his own calculations, before looking back up at me and saying: ‘Have you thought of visiting prostitutes?’ I was open-mouthed, my mouth probably did actually fall open, and I must have looked completely flummoxed, because he went on:
‘OK, these days we call them escorts, but it comes down to the same thing. Financially, I don’t think you’re in too bad a way?’
I agreed that things were fine for now from that point of view at least.
‘Right…’ He seemed quite cheered by my reaction. ‘Some of them aren’t too bad, you know. In fact, to be honest, they’re the exception; most of them are cash machines in a raw state, and they feel obliged to play out a drama of desire – pleasure and love and whatever you like – and though it might work with people who are very young and very stupid, it doesn’t with people like us.’ (He had probably meant ‘like you’, but the fact is that he said ‘like us’; he was quite a remarkable doctor.) ‘In short, it can only increase despair in our case. But still, you get to fuck, that’s not to be sniffed at, and it’s better if you can fuck suitable girls; well, I guess you know that.
‘In short,’ he went on, ‘in short, I’ve drawn you up a little list…’ From a drawer in his desk he took out an A4 sheet with three names written on it: Samantha, Tim and Alice; each name was followed by a mobile phone number. ‘You don’t need to tell them I sent you. Although hang on, it might be better to say so, they’re suspicious girls; you need to understand them, their job’s not an easy one.’
It took me a while to get over my surprise. I understood that doctors can’t do everything, that you have to put one foot in front of another as they say, but, well, escorts was still quite surprising, so I said nothing, and it took him a few minutes to continue (there was no traffic in Rue d’Athènes by now; the silence in the room was complete).
‘I’m not on the side of death. As a general rule, I don’t care for death. Well, obviously, there are cases…’ (He waved his arm vaguely, impatiently, as if to sweep away a recurring and stupid objection.) ‘There are some cases when it’s the best solution, but they’re very rare cases, much rarer than people say; morphine works almost every time, and in those very rare cases of intolerance to morphine there’s hypnosis, but you haven’t got there – my God, you’re not even fifty! There’s one thing you’ve got to know, which is that if you were in Belgium or Holland and you asked to be euthanised with the depression that you’ve got, they’d let you go ahead without any difficulties. But I’m a doctor. And if a guy comes to see me: “I’m depressed, I want to top myself,” am I going to say: “OK, top away, let me give you a hand…”? Well, no, sorry but no, that’s not why I studied medicine.’
* * *
I assured him that, for now, I had no intention of going to Belgium or Holland. He seemed reassured; in fact, I think he was waiting for me to give him an assurance along these lines – was I really in such a bad way, and visibly so? I had more or less understood his explanations, but there was still one point that escaped me, and I asked him the question: was sex the only way to reduce the excessive secretion of cortisol?
‘No, not at all. Cortisol is often called the stress hormone, and not without reason. I’m sure that monks, for example, secrete very little cortisol; but that’s not really my field. So I know, it may seem weird to call you stressed when essentially you do nothing all day, but the figures are there!’ He gave the sheet with my results a vigorous tap: ‘You’re stressed; you’re stressed to a terrifying degree and it’s as if you were having a static burn-out, as if it was consuming you from within. Well, this kind of thing isn’t easy to explain. And besides, it’s getting late…’ I looked at my watch; in fact it was after nine, I’d really taken up too much of his time, and I was also starting to get a bit hungry – a thought occurred to me for a moment that I could go and eat at Brasserie Mollard, as I had done back in Camille’s day, and it was immediately dispelled by a feeling of pure terror; there is no doubt that I really was an idiot.
‘What I’m going to do,’ he said at last, ‘is give you a prescription for Captorix 10 mg, in case you decide to stop – because, I repeat, stopping abruptly is a bad idea. At the same time it’s not worth making things too complicated: you stay at 10 mg for two weeks, then zero. I won’t lie to you, there’s a risk that it’ll be hard, because you’ve been on antidepressants for a long time. It’ll be hard, but I think it’s the thing to do…’
He shook my hand for a long time in the doorway of his surgery. I would have liked to say something, find a phrase that expressed my gratitude and admiration; I searched frantically for something during the thirty seconds that it took me to put on my coat and walk to the door; but yet again words failed me.
Two or maybe three months passed and I often found myself looking at the prescription for 10 mg, the one that was supposed to help me give up; I also had the A4 sheet with the numbers of the three escorts; and I did nothing apart from watch television. I turned it on after my little stroll at a few minutes past midday, and I never turned it off – there was an ecological energy-saving measure that meant you had to press the OK button every hour, so I pressed it every hour, until sleep brought me temporary deliverance. I turned it on again shortly after eight o’clock; the debates on Politique matin undoubtedly helped me to wash; to tell the truth, I couldn’t claim to understand them perfectly and was forever getting La République en marche and La France insoumise confused; in fact, they were a bit alike; what they shared was the fact that they emanated a sense of almost unbearable energy, but that was precisely what helped me: rather than attacking the bottle of Grand Marnier straight away, I ran the soapy glove over my body, and soon I was ready for my little stroll.
The rest of the schedule was more of a blur: I slowly got drunk, zapping moderately under the predominant impression of moving from one cooking programme to the next; the number of cooking programmes had proliferated considerably – while at the same time eroticism was vanishing from most channels. France, and perhaps the whole of the West, was probably regressing to the oral stage, to use the terminology of the Austrian clown. Without a doubt, I was following the same path: I was gradually getting fatter, and a sexual alternative no longer presented itself clearly to me. I was far from being alone in this – there were probably still cocksmen and screws, but it had become a hobby, more particularly a minority hobby, reserved for the elite (the elite to which Yuzu had belonged, I briefly remembered one morning at the O’Jules, and it was probably the last time I thought of her); in a sense we had returned to the nineteen
th century, when libertinism was reserved for a composite aristocracy: a mixture of birth, luck and beauty.
Perhaps there were also young people – well, certain young people – who belonged to the aristocracy of beauty simply by virtue of their youth, and who maybe went on believing it for a few years, between two and five but certainly less than ten; it was early June, and as I went to the café every morning I was forced to admit it: it wasn’t the girls’ fault – the girls were still there while women in their thirties and forties had largely given up – that the ‘chic and sexy’ Parisienne was no longer anything but a myth without substance; well, in the middle of the disappearance of the Western libido, girls, I imagine obeying some irrepressible hormonal impulse, went on reminding men of the need to reproduce the species; objectively there was nothing to reproach them for: they crossed their legs at the appropriate moment when they sat at the O’Jules, a few metres away from me; sometimes they indulged in delicious little playlets, licking their fingers as they savoured a pistachio and vanilla ice-cream cone; well, they were doing their job of eroticising life more than adequately; they were there, but I was the one who was no longer there, not for them or for anyone else, and had ceased to imagine being so.
In the early evening, at more or less the same time as Questions for a Champion, I was seized by painful moments of self-pity. Then I thought once again of Dr Azote, and whether he behaved similarly with all his patients? I didn’t know, but if he did he was a saint, and also I thought again of Aymeric – but things had changed, I had certainly got older and wasn’t about to invite Dr Azote over to mine to listen to records; no friendship would spring into being between the two of us, the time for human relationships was over, for me in any case.
So I was in that state, stable but morose, when the receptionist gave me a piece of bad news. It was a Monday morning, and I was preparing as I did every day to set off for O’Jules; I was upbeat and even felt a certain satisfaction at the idea of starting a new week, when the receptionist stopped me with a discreet: ‘Excuse me, sir…’ She wished to inform me, she had to inform me, it was her sad duty to inform me, that the hotel would soon become 100 per cent non-smoking; it was the new rules she told me, the decision had been taken at group level, they had no way of getting out of it. It was annoying, I told her, I would have to buy an apartment, but even if I bought the first one I viewed it would take time to go through all the formalities – there are lots of checks these days, greenhouse gas energy performance or whatever; well, it takes months, two or three at the very least, before you can really move in.
She looked at me in bewilderment, as if she hadn’t understood, before asking for confirmation: I was going to buy an apartment because I could no longer stay in the hotel, was that it? Were things that bad?
Well, yes, they were that bad, what else could I tell her? There are times when modesty has to give because one is simply no longer able to maintain it. Things were that bad. She looked me straight in the eyes; I read the compassion rising to her face, gradually distorting her features; I just hoped that she wasn’t going to start crying – I could tell she was a nice girl and I’m sure she made her boyfriend very happy, but what could she do? What can we do, any of us, about anything?
She would go and talk to her superior, she told me, she would go and talk to him this very morning, she was sure they would be able to find a solution. I gave her a broad smile as I left, an entirely sincere smile as a sign of friendship, but one which was at the same time intended to convey an impression of heroic optimism – it’ll be fine, I’ll manage – that was frankly dishonest. It wouldn’t be all right, I wouldn’t manage, I knew that very well.
* * *
I was busy watching Gérard Depardieu marvelling at the manufacture of artisanal sausages in the Pouilles when the superior in question called me in. I was surprised by his physique: he looked more like Bernard Kouchner, or let’s say generally more like a humanitarian doctor, than the manager of a Mercure hotel; I couldn’t work out how his day-to-day work could have created those crows’ feet or that tan. He must have gone survival-trekking in hostile environments at the weekend, that was probably the explanation. He welcomed me while lighting a Gitane and offered me one. ‘Audrey explained your situation to me…’ he began; so her name was Audrey. He seemed embarrassed in my presence and he had trouble looking me in the eye – that’s normal when you’re dealing with a condemned man; you never know how to approach him, well, men never know, women sometimes do, but rarely.
‘We’ll work something out,’ he went on. ‘I’ll have to carry out an inspection, but not straight away; I’d say in six months at the most, but more likely in a year. That’ll give you time to find a solution…’
I nodded and confirmed that I would leave in three or four months at the most. There, it was over, and we had nothing left to say to each other. He had helped me. I thanked him before leaving his office; he assured me that it was nothing, that it was really the least he could do; I sensed that he wanted to launch into a diatribe about those idiots who spoil our lives but in the end he said nothing – he had probably launched into that diatribe too many times, and he knew it was pointless and the idiots always won in the end. For my part, before I left his office I apologised for the bother, and just as I uttered those banal words I understood that that would sum up my life from now on: apologising for the bother.
So I was now at the stage where the ageing animal, wounded and aware of being fatally injured, seeks a den in which to end its life. Furniture requirements are limited: a bed is enough, you know you’re hardly ever going to have to leave it; there’s no need for tables, sofas or armchairs, they would be useless accessories – superfluous or indeed painful remnants of a social life that will no longer exist. A television is necessary: television diverts. It all tended to guide me in the direction of a studio flat – quite a big studio, you might as well be able to move about a little, if at all possible.
The question of district turned out to be more difficult. Over time I had built up a little network of medical practitioners, each one assigned the task of keeping an eye on a different organ, so that I would not, before the time of my actual death, face exaggerated levels of pain. Most of them had practices in the fifth arrondissement in Paris; for my last life, my medical life, my real life, I remained faithful to the area of my studies, my youth, my dream life. It was natural that I should try and get close to my medical practitioners, who were now my main partners in conversation. Those trips to their surgeries were disinfected in a sense, rendered harmless by their medical nature. On the other hand, living in the same district would, I realised as I began my search for an apartment, have been a terrible mistake.
The first studio that I viewed, on Rue Laromiguière, was very pleasant: high ceiling, light, with a view of a large tree-lined courtyard; the price was high, of course, but I might be able to afford it – well, I wasn’t absolutely sure, but I had still more or less decided to conclude the deal when I turned into Rue Lhomond and was swept away by a wave of terrible, crippling sadness that winded me; I struggled to breathe and my legs barely supported me; I had to take refuge in the first café I came to, which didn’t help at all, quite the contrary, and I immediately recognised one of the cafés that I had frequented during my studies at the Agro – I had probably even gone to that café with Kate and the interior had barely changed. I ordered something to eat: a potato omelette and three glasses of Leffe gradually helped me recover – oh, yes, the West was regressing to the oral stage, and I understood why it was doing so – I thought I had more or less recovered as I left the bar but it all kicked in again as soon I came out into Rue Mouffetard; the journey was turning into a via dolorosa, and this time it was the image of Camille that came back to me; her childish joy at going to the market on Sunday morning, her wonder at the asparagus, the cheese, the exotic vegetables, the live lobsters; it took me over twenty minutes to get back to Monge metro station, tottering like an old man and panting with pain, with that in
comprehensible pain that sometimes afflicts old men, and which is nothing but the weight of life – no, the fifth arrondissement was out of the question, completely out of the question.
So I began a gradual descent along metro line 7 – a descent accompanied by a corresponding drop in price – and in early July, I was surprised to find myself viewing a studio flat on Avenue de la Soeur-Rosalie, almost opposite the Hôtel Mercure. I gave up when I realised that I was, somewhere deep inside, fostering a plan to stay in contact with Audrey; my God, hope is hard to conquer, so sly and tenacious – are all men like that?
I had to descend, descend further south, abandoning all hope of a possible life, otherwise I wouldn’t manage, and it was in that state of mind that I visited the numerous tower blocks that stretch between the Porte de Choisy and the Porte d’Ivry. I had to go in search of empty, white and bare: the environment corresponded almost perfectly to my quest: living in one of those tower blocks meant living nowhere, completely nowhere, or let’s say in the immediate vicinity of nowhere. Besides, in these areas populated by office workers, the price per square metre was very accessible; with my budget I could have planned to acquire a two- or indeed a three-room apartment, but who would I have put up in it?
All of those towers looked the same, and all of those studio flats looked the same too; I think I chose the emptiest, the quietest and the barest, in one of the most anonymous tower blocks – there at least I was sure that my move would go unnoticed, would prompt no comment – and neither would my death. The neighbourhood, largely Chinese, was a guarantee of neutrality and politeness. The view from my window was pointlessly broad across the southern suburbs – in the distance one could make out Massy, and probably Corbeil-Essonnes; that didn’t matter much, because there were roller blinds which I planned to close for ever the day after I moved in. There was a rubbish chute, which I think was what won me over once and for all; with the use of the rubbish chute together with the new food delivery service that Amazon had just launched, I could attain almost perfect autonomy.
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