Jean-dominique Bauby (7 page)

The Message

Although my own corner of the hospital has the look of an expensive private school, one would never mistake the cafeteria crowd for members of the Dead Poets Society. The girls have hard eyes, the boys tattoos and sometimes rings on their fingers. There they sit, chain-smoking and talking about fistfights and motorbikes. Their already stooped shoulders seem to bear a heavy cross. Cruel fate has cursed them, and their stay at Berck is just one more stage between an abused childhood and a jobless future. When I am wheeled through their smoke-filled lair, the silence becomes deafening; I see neither pity nor compassion in their eyes.

Through the open cafeteria window you can hear the beating of the hospital’s bronze heart: the bell that makes the firmament vibrate four times an hour. On a table cluttered with empty cups stands a small typewriter with a sheet of pink paper stuck in the roller. Although at the moment the page is utterly blank, I am convinced that someday there will be a message for me there. I am waiting.

At the Wax Museum

In a dream last night, I visited Paris’s wax museum, the Musée Grévin. It had changed. There was the same entrance, in turn-of-the-century style, the same distorting mirrors, the same chamber of horrors, but the galleries displaying contemporary figures were gone. In the first rooms, the characters on exhibit were in street clothes, and I did not recognize them until I mentally put them in white hospital uniforms. Then I realized that these boys in T-shirts and girls in miniskirts, this housewife frozen with teapot in hand, this crash-helmeted youth, were all in fact the nurses and orderlies of both sexes who took turns appearing morning and night at my hospital bedside. They were all there, fixed in wax: gentle, rough, caring, indifferent, hardworking, lazy, the ones you can make contact with and those to whom you are just another patient.

At first some of the staff had terrified me. I saw them only as my jailers, as accomplices in some awful plot. Later I hated some of them, those who wrenched my arm while putting me in my wheelchair, or left me all night long with the TV on, or let me lie in a painful position despite my protests. For a few minutes or a few hours I would cheerfully have killed them. Later still, as time cooled my fiercest rages, I got to know them better. They carried out as best they could their delicate mission: to ease our burden a little when our crosses bruised our shoulders too painfully.

I gave them nicknames known only to me, so that when they entered my room I could hail them in my thunderous inner voice: “Hey, Blue Eyes! Morning, Big Bird!” They of course remained unaware. The one who dances around my bed and strikes an Elvis pose as he asks “How are you doing?” is “David Bowie.” “Prof” makes me laugh, with his baby face and gray hair and the gravity with which he utters the unvarying judgment: “So far, so good.” “Rambo” and “Terminator,” as you might imagine, are not exactly models of gentleness. I prefer “Thermometer” her dedication would be beyond reproach if she did not regularly forget the implement she thrusts under my armpit.

In my dream, the museum sculptor was not altogether successful in capturing the smiles and scowls of Berck’s hospital personnel, northerners whose ancestors have always lived on this strip of France between the Channel coast and the rich fields of Picardy. They readily lapse into their local patois as soon as they are alone together. To get them right you would need the talent of one of those medieval miniaturists whose magic brush brought to life the folk who once thronged the roads of Flanders. Our artist does not possess such skill. Yet he has managed to capture the youthful charm of the student nurses with their dimpled country-girl arms and full pink cheeks. As I left the room, I realized that I was fond of all these torturers of mine.

Entering the next exhibit, I was surprised to find myself back in Room 119, apparently reproduced down to the last detail. But as I got closer, the photos, drawings, and posters on my walls turned out to be a patchwork of ill-defined colors. Like an Impressionist painting, it was a pattern intended to create an illusion at a certain distance. There was no one on the bed, just a hollow in the middle of the yellow sheets bathed in pallid light. And here I had no problem identifying the watchers on either side of the bed: they were members of the personal bodyguard that spontaneously sprang up around me immediately after the disaster.

Michel, seated on a stool and conscientiously scribbling in the notebook where visitors set down all my remarks. Anne-Marie, arranging a bouquet of forty roses. Bernard, holding a memoir of diplomatic life in one hand and with the other executing a theatrical barrister’s gesture that was pure Daumier. Perched on the end of his nose, his steel-rimmed glasses completed the picture of a distinguished courtroom orator. Florence, pinning children’s drawings on a corkboard, her black hair framing a sad smile. And Patrick, leaning against a wall, apparently lost in thought. Looking almost ready to leap into life, the group projected great tenderness, a shared sorrow, an accumulation of the affectionate gravity I feel whenever these friends come to see me.

I tried to continue the tour and see what fresh surprises the museum had in store, but in a gloomy corridor a guard turned his flashlight full on my face. I had to shut my eyes tight. When I awoke, a real nurse with plump arms was leaning over me, her penlight in her hand: “Your sleeping pill. Do you want it now, or shall I come back in an hour?”

The Mythmaker

On the benches of the Paris school where I wore out my first pair of jeans, I made friends with a skinny, red-faced boy named Olivier, whose runaway mythomania made his company irresistible. With him around, there was no need to go to the movies. Olivier’s friends had the best seats in the house, and the film was a miracle of invention. On Monday he would amaze us with a weekend saga straight out of
A Thousand and One Nights.
If he had not spent Sunday with Johnny Hallyday, it was because he had gone to London to see the new James Bond, unless he had been driving the latest Honda. (Japanese motorbikes, just then arriving in France, were all the rage in schoolyard discussions.) From morning to night our friend fed us small lies and gross fabrications, brazenly inventing new stories even when they contradicted preceding ones. An orphan at 10:00 a.m., an only son at noon, he could dig up four sisters by midafternoon, one of them a figure-skating champion. As for his father—in reality a sober civil servant—he became, depending on the day, the inventor of the atom bomb, the Beatles’ manager, or General de Gaulle’s unacknowledged son. Since Olivier neglected to give coherence to the dishes he served up, we would have been the last to expect consistency of him. When he came out with some utterly outlandish fable we would voice tentative doubts, but he defended his good faith with such indignant protests of “I swear!” that we would swiftly back down.

When I last checked, Olivier was neither a fighter pilot nor a secret agent nor adviser to an emir (careers he once considered). Fairly predictably, it is in the advertising world that he wields his inexhaustible faculty for gilding every lily.

I should not feel morally superior to Olivier, for today I envy him his mastery of the storyteller’s art. I am not sure I will ever acquire such a gift, although I, too, am beginning to forge glorious substitute destinies for myself. I am occasionally a Formula One driver, and you’ve certainly seen me burning up the track at Monza or Silverstone. That mysterious white racer without a brand name, a number, or commercial advertisements is me. Stretched out on my bed—I mean, in my cockpit—I hurl myself into the corners, my head, weighed down by my helmet, wrenched painfully sideways by gravitational pull. I have also been cast as a soldier in a TV series on history’s great battles. I have fought alongside Vercingetorix against Caesar, turned back the invading Arabs at Poitiers, helped Napoléon to victory, and survived Verdun. Since I have just been wounded in the D-day landings, I cannot swear that I will join the airdrop into Dien Bien Phu. Under the physical therapist’s gaze, I am a Tour de France long shot on the verge of pulling off a record-setting victory. Success soothes my aching muscles. I am a phenomenal downhill skier. I can still hear the roar of the crowd on the slope and the singing of the wind in my ears. I was miles ahead of the favorites. I swear!

“A Day in the Life”

Here we come to the end of the road—that disastrous Friday, December 8, 1995. Ever since beginning this book, I have intended to describe my last moments as a perfectly functioning earthling. But I have put it off so long that now, on the brink of this bungee jump into my past, I feel suddenly dizzy. How can I begin to recall those long futile hours, as elusive as drops of mercury from a broken thermometer? How can I describe waking for the last time, heedless, perhaps a little grumpy, beside the lithe, warm body of a tall, dark-haired woman? Everything that day was gray, muted, resigned: the sky, the people, the city, collective nerves on edge after several days of a transport strike. Like millions of Parisians, our eyes empty and our complexions dull, Florence and I embarked like zombies on a new day of punishment amid the indescribable chaos caused by the strike. I mechanically carried out all those simple acts that today seem miraculous to me: shaving, dressing, downing a hot chocolate. Weeks earlier, I had chosen this day to test the latest model of a German automobile: the importer had put a car and driver at my disposal for the whole day. At the appointed hour, a most businesslike young man was waiting outside, leaning against a gunmetal-gray BMW. Through the apartment window I eyed the big sedan, solid and sleek. I wondered how my old Levi’s jacket would look in so sophisticated a vehicle. I pressed my forehead against the windowpane to gauge the temperature outside. Florence softly stroked the nape of my neck. Our farewells were brief, our lips scarcely brushing together. I am already running down stairs that smell of floor polish. It will be the last of the smells of my past.

I read the news today, oh boy…

Between crisis-fraught traffic reports, the radio plays a Beatles song, “A Day in the Life.” Crossing the Bois de Boulogne, the BMW glides like a flying carpet, a private world of luxury and comfort. My driver is pleasant. I tell him of my plans for the afternoon: to pick up my son from his mother’s place, twenty-five miles outside Paris, and bring him back to the city in early evening.

He didn’t notice that the lights had changed…

Théophile and I have not had a heart-to-heart talk, a man-to-man exchange, since I moved out of the family home in July. I plan to take him to the theater to see the new Philippe Arias play, then to eat oysters at a restaurant on Place Clichy. It’s all set: we are spending the weekend together. I only hope the strike will not frustrate our plans.

I’d love to turn you on…

I love the arrangement of this number, in which the whole orchestra reaches a crescendo and holds it until the explosion of the final note. Like a piano crashing down seven floors. We reach Levallois. The BMW stops outside my office, and I arrange to meet the driver at 3:00 p.m.

There is only one message on my desk, but what a message! I have to put in an immediate return call to Simone V., former minister for health, once the most popular woman in France, tenured for life at the top spot on the magazine’s imaginary honor roll. Since this kind of call is rare, I first ask around to find what we might have said or done to provoke this quasi-divine personality. “I think she’s unhappy with her photo in our last issue,” my assistant tactfully suggests. I skim through the issue and reach the offending photo, a montage that ridicules rather than glorifies our idol. It is one of the mysteries of our trade. You work for weeks on a subject, it goes back and forth among the most skillful pairs of hands, and no one spots the glaring blunder that a neophyte would spot in a second. I am pitched into an authentic long-distance tornado. She is convinced that the magazine has been plotting against her for years, so I have the greatest difficulty persuading her that, on the contrary, she is a cult figure at
Elle
. Normally such damage control is the job of production chief Anne-Marie, who handles all celebrities with kid gloves, whereas as a diplomat I am more akin to Tintin’s friend Captain Haddock than to Henry Kissinger. When we hang up after a forty-five-minute exchange, I feel exactly like a trampled doormat.

Although the editorial staff likes to dismiss our chief’s luncheons as “rather a bore,” they wouldn’t miss them for anything in the world. Our boss, known variously to his supporters as Geronimo, Louis XI, and the Ayatollah, regularly hosts luncheons in order to “take stock,” as he puts it. It is here on the top floor of the magazine, in the biggest executive dining room, that our generalissimo offers his subjects clues about where they stand in his affections. His remarks range from praise couched in velvet tones to the most lacerating of rebukes, and he possesses a whole repertoire of gestures, scowls, and beard scratchings, which over the years we have learned to decipher. Of that final meal I remember very little, except that the condemned man’s last drink was water. I think the main course was beef. Perhaps we all caught mad cow disease, which nobody at that time talked about. Since it incubates for fifteen years, we still have time left. The only illness reported that day was President Mitterrand’s. The whole of Paris had been hanging on his medical reports, wondering whether he would last the weekend. As it turned out, he had another whole month to live. The worst thing about these lunches is that they go on forever. To save time, I sneaked out afterward through my office, without saying goodbye to anyone. When I met my driver, evening was already falling on the glass facades. It was well past four.

“We’re going to be caught in this mess, sir.”

“I’m truly sorry—”

“It’s you I’m thinking about, sir.”

For a second I feel like chucking the whole thing: canceling the theater, postponing my weekend with Théophile, retreating to my bed with a plate of cheese and the crossword puzzle. I decide to fight this sense of utter exhaustion that has come over me.

“We’ll just have to avoid the freeway.”

“Whatever you think…”

Despite its power, the BMW bogs down in the traffic milling on the Pont de Suresnes. We drive past the Saint-Cloud racecourse and then the Raymond-Poincaré Hospital at Garches. I cannot pass this spot without recalling a quite sinister childhood episode. When I was at the Lycée Condorcet, a gym teacher used to take us to the Marche Stadium at Vaucresson for outdoor sports of the kind I detested. One day our bus ran smack into a man who had dashed out of the hospital without looking where he was going. There was a strange noise, the sound of brakes, and the man died instantly, leaving a bloody streak along the bus windows. It was a winter afternoon, like today. By the time the police finished asking questions, it was evening. A different driver took us back to Paris. At the rear of the bus they were singing “Penny Lane” in shaky voices. Still the Beatles. What songs will Théophile remember when he is forty-four?

After an hour and a half of driving, we reach our goal, the house where I spent ten years of my life. Fog hangs over the garden, which once rang with so many yells and so much helpless, happy laughter. Théophile is waiting for us at the gate, sitting on his backpack, ready for the weekend. I would have liked to phone Florence, my new girlfriend, but it is Friday and she is at her parents’ place for the Sabbath. I expect to speak to her after the play. Only once have I participated in that Jewish ritual—here at Montainville, in the house of the old Tunisian doctor who brought my children into the world.

From this point onward, everything becomes blurred. Nevertheless, I get behind the wheel of the BMW, focusing on the orange-tinted dash-board lights. I am functioning in slow motion, and in the beam of the headlights I barely recognize turns I have negotiated several thousand times. I feel sweat beading my forehead, and when I overtake a car I see it double. At the first intersection, I pull over. I stagger from the BMW, almost unable to stand upright, and collapse on the rear seat. I have one idea in my head: to get back to the village and to the home of my sister-in-law Diane, a nurse. Half conscious, I ask Théophile to run and get her as soon as we reach her house. A few seconds later, Diane is there. Her decision is swift. “We have to get to the clinic. As quickly as we can.” It is ten miles away. This time, the driver tears off grand-prix style. I feel extremely strange, as if I had swallowed an LSD tablet, and I reflect that I am too old for such fantasies. Not for a second does it occur to me that I may be dying. On the road to Mantes, the BMW purrs along at top speed and we overtake a long line of cars, honking insistently to force our way through. I try to say something like “Slow down. I’ll get better. It’s not worth risking an accident.” But no sound comes from my mouth, and my head, no longer under my control, wobbles on my neck. The Beatles and their song of this morning come back into my memory.
And though the news was rather sad…I saw the photograph.
In no time we are at the clinic. People are running frantically about. I am transferred, limp and sprawling, into a wheelchair. The BMW’s doors click softly shut. Someone once told me that you can tell a good car by the quality of that click. I am dazzled by the neon lighting in the corridor. In the elevator, strangers heap encouragement upon me, and the Beatles launch into the finale of “A Day in the Life.” The piano crashing down from the seventh floor. Before it hits the ground, I have time for one last thought: We’ll have to cancel the play. We would have been late in any case. We’ll go tomorrow night. Where could Théophile have got to? And then I sink into a coma.