Paris Is Always a Good Idea (18 page)

The nicest moment of the day:

This morning a little boy smiled at me in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

 

Seventeen

Ultimately it was all Blaise Pascal's fault.

If Max Marchais hadn't taken the book down from the shelf that Friday and then (to escape Madame Bonnier) read it under the trees in the garden—disturbed only by the low humming of the vacuum cleaner and a rather strange telephone conversation with Mademoiselle Rosalie—then he wouldn't have had any reason to put it back on the high shelf in the library after reading it, which as always had given him great pleasure. And if the place where the
Pensées
belonged had not been on the very top shelf, then Max would not have had to climb up the library ladder.

A stable wooden ladder, movable sideways on rollers, which enabled its users to reach any book on the shelves with very little trouble, no matter how high up it might be.

Unfortunately Blaise Pascal's book was
very
high up—or rather
had been
very high up.

That Saturday Max had read the last pages over a peaceful breakfast, and, being the tidy man he was (Madame Bonnier had a completely false impression of him), he was hovering a little later beside the library shelves, his leather slippers on the third highest step of the ladder, his silver-gray hair almost brushing the ceiling. As he reached upward to the right to put the book back in its proper place among the philosophers, pesky Blaise Pascal somehow managed to slip out of his hand. In the attempt to prevent the inevitable fall of this first edition (he hated dog-eared pages, which is why he seldom lent books out) Max grabbed out into thin air. The ladder moved sideways under this unexpected impulse, and the tall man in the blue cardigan and light cotton pants lost his balance, slipped out of his left slipper, tried to stop the ladder sliding sideways (without success), and a few seconds later—like Blaise Pascal—crashed to the parquet floor.

He fell directly on his back, and the shock of the first impact winded him. If it had been a stone floor, he would probably never have drawn another breath. He stared up at the wall of books, tried to breathe, and panicked when he felt that his chest just would not expand, denying oxygen to his lungs.

An excruciating pain shot though his hip and deep into his right leg, and his head rang as if the bells of Notre-Dame were ringing their knell inside his skull.

At least I'm dying surrounded by books,
thought Max, before falling into merciful unconsciousness.

*   *   *

WHEN HE CAME ROUND,
the light seemed to be shining into the room from a different angle—but he wasn't sure. It could have been three hours or just a quarter of an hour—he wouldn't have known. Stupidly, his watch was in the bathroom. And he was still lying on his back like a helpless beetle, and any movement, no matter how careful, was painful.

The telephone rang several times, but it was impossible for him to cross the few yards to his desk—the pain was so strong that everything went black every time he tried to sit upright. Later he heard the trilling ring tone of his cell phone, which always made him think of Hitchcock's
Dial M for Murder
. He could really have used the damned thing right now—but it was in the pocket of his summer jacket, which was hanging in the hall.

He groaned. If he'd only had a little luck, the jacket would have remained where he took it off the day before—over the arm of the sofa, an arm's length from him. But unfortunately Marie-Hélène, with her love of tidiness, had—before she left for her vacation in the early afternoon—taken it out into the hall and hung it in the closet. It was enough to make you weep!

When his landline rang again, Max tried to roll over onto his stomach and push himself toward the desk. But once again he was struck by that stabbing pain, and he had to gasp for breath. He'd definitely broken something—his leg was sticking out at an awkward angle from his hip.

An old villa in Le Vésinet was many people's dream. But if you lived alone and something happened, a house like this could become a trap. The gardens were big, the houses detached—the chances of being heard by a neighbor were very slim, unless you were playing a saxophone or a trumpet, which Max had never learned to do, and at this particular moment he couldn't have done so even if he had been able to play either of those instruments.

Marie-Hélène would come back in ten days' time. First she would be surprised that none of the meals she'd prepared had been touched, and then she'd find his rotting body lying beside the bookshelves.

The first thing she would probably say would be that this proved it wasn't good for a man to be alone in the house.

When the doorbell rang a little later, Max Marchais thought, in spite of all reason, that his housekeeper had returned to save her “Monsieur Proust.” He needed her more than he ever had in his life.

But no key turned in the lock, no dark voice called, “Monsieur Marchais? Are you there?” He straightened up and shouted for help with all his strength, but there was obviously no one to hear him. Then he remembered that no one who rang his bell did so right at the front door; they did so using the bell on the outside wall of the front garden, which itself was not small. The cast-iron gate could admittedly be opened relatively simply by reaching through the bars and pressing the latch—but who was aware of that?

Oh well,
thought Max with a certain degree of fatalism before he slipped back into unconsciousness.
Now the only thing that can save me is a burglary.

*   *   *

THE SUN WAS ALREADY
low in the sky and the gnats were dancing at the big living-room window, which was slightly open, when Max suddenly heard the sound of a lawn mower. He turned his head toward the window and peered out into the garden.

A man in green overalls was walking up and down the lawn with the lawn mower. Max had never been so glad to see his gardener. Sebastiano—a Costa Rican, who was living proof of a study claiming that people from Costa Rica were the happiest in the world—had his own key to the back gate of the garden and to the shed behind the wall where the gardening tools were stored. Among them the lawn mower.

For years Max had refused to acquire an electric lawn mower. It wasn't because of avarice—Marchais had always been an extremely generous man, even in the days when he had been a freelance journalist and was only just making ends meet. It was just that he somehow liked the smell and the loud rattle of the gasoline motor. It reminded him of his childhood in the country near Montpellier, where every Saturday his father had with shouts, curses, and bitter pulling of the starting cord set the mower in motion: its contented puttering then rang in the weekend.

So you could see that nostalgia was of little use; quite the opposite—in many cases it could even be life threatening. He lay on the parquet floor, shouting in vain against the crazy clatter of the mower which came and went in rhythmic waves, as the evening air filled with the smell of newly mown grass.

And then suddenly it was still.

“Help! Help!” shouted Max as loudly as he could in the direction of the living-room window. “I'm here … here in the library!”

He twisted his neck and saw Sebastiano stopping and looking over toward the house. Hesitantly, he came nearer, looking with surprise at the table on the terrace, where the breakfast dishes had not been cleared.

“Hola? Señor Marchais? Hola? Hola?”

A few hours later Max Marchais was lying on a smooth green operating table in the nearby private clinic in Marly, slipping into the gentle, pain-free embrace of a general anesthetic. As well as a minor concussion and a big wound on the back of his head, which had been stitched up straight away, he had bruises on his hip and leg and a compound fracture of the thigh.

“You've been very lucky indeed, Monsieur Marchais. This could all have ended very differently. How old are you? It would be best if we fit you with a new hip at once,” the surgeon in the emergency room had said. “Otherwise you'll be lying in hospital too long. And then—bang!—pneumonia.” He gave him a knowing look. “In the old days elderly people died by the dozens after a fracture like this. Of pneumonia. But today it's not such a big deal. A new hip and—bang!—you'll be able to walk around again very soon, Monsieur Marchais. Should we let anyone know? The man who found you said you live alone. Do you have any next of kin?”

“My sister. But she lives in Montpellier,” groaned Max, still dazed with the pain. “Am I really in such a bad state?”

The thought that Thérèse—always disappointed with her life—and her know-it-all husband and their appallingly spoiled son might turn up in the hospital turned him even paler.

Monsieur Bang, who actually answered to the name of Professeur Pasquale, smiled. “Not at all! Don't worry, Monsieur Marchais. It's a routine operation. Not life threatening at all. In a few hours you'll be as good as new—and that's a promise.”

*   *   *

WELL, MAX WASN'T EXACTLY
feeling like new. The operation had been three days ago, but there was still a hellish pain in his skull and his hip and his leg hurt as well. But thanks to the drug that was patiently dripping from the thin tube over his bed, ending in a needle in the back of his hand, things were getting steadily better.

Everyday life in the hospital was not exactly designed to help a sick person recover. He had less peace here than on the days when Marie-Hélène was whirling through the house. Even at night the door was opened every two hours, blood pressure was taken, the drip was changed, his arm was pulled about so that they could take blood—they seemed to take pleasure in doing the latter as often as possible—and if this didn't wake him up they would shine a glaring flashlight in their patient's face to make sure he was still alive.

Well, Max Marchais was still alive, but he wasn't getting any sleep. At six o'clock in the morning the cleaners reached his room. A couple of delightful women from the Ivory Coast laughed and gossiped as they cleaned the floor, constantly knocking against his bed, said, “Oh, sorry! Sorry!” and then continued chatting in convoluted sentences that he couldn't understand, giggling all the while.

The delightful ladies from Africa had slept well, it was easy for them to be in such a good mood,
thought Max grimly, wondering if he would ever be granted that privilege again.

After the cleaners came, Julie, the trainee nurse, arrived with a smile, a frugal breakfast, and the weakest coffee he'd ever drunk. As she left, she would always point to the dish of tablets. “Don't forget those, Monsieur Marchais!”

Then came the ward sister. “Well, Monsieur Marchais, how are we today? Have we slept well?”

“I don't know how you slept, Sister Yvonne,” growled Max. “For my part, I haven't slept at all—how could I when they keep waking me up?”

“That's fine. So we'll take a little walk today, Monsieur Marchais, then we'll feel a lot better,” said Sister Yvonne with a broad smile.
“On y va?”
She seemed to be relentlessly cheerful.

Hadn't she been listening? Was she deaf? Or was the hospital using intelligent robots that looked like women but kept on playing the same script?

Max looked dubiously at the nurse with the short blond hair who now tightened the blood-pressure sleeve around his arm, pumping it like mad to fill it with air. She narrowed her eyes, stared at the display, and pumped again. “Hmm, your blood pressure seems a little high—but we'll soon get it down again.”

She nodded and smiled her relentless smile and Max was absolutely sure that no blood pressure on earth would ever dare to resist Sister Yvonne's orders. “We'll soon get it down again.” In spite of all her annoying familiarity, that at least was reassuring.

He hadn't believed his eyes when a wiry little physiotherapist had arrived to take him for a “little walk.”

“There must be some mistake,” he had said. “I've only just had an operation.”

He frowned, a vertical wrinkle appearing between his eyebrows. You were always hearing about patients being mixed up in hospital. He supposed that in that case he could be pleased that he'd been given a new hip and not a new heart valve.

“No, Monsieur Marchais, there's no mistake.” She looked at him pertly from under her short Jean Seberg bangs and smiled. “Nowadays we get our patients out of bed straight after the operation. You were allowed a little more rest than normal because of your concussion.” Was he imagining it, or could he discern a trace of sadism in her smile? “Come along then, Monsieur Marchais—we can do it.”

However, only one of them walked behind the walker that she put in front of him—and it was him.

*   *   *

SO, IN BRIEF—AFTER
three days in hospital Max Marchais was longing for nothing so much as his own bed and people who were not hospital personnel. When he'd had him taken to hospital, Sebastiano had shown the presence of mind to grab his employer's trench coat—with his cell phone in the pocket. On Monday evening Max had used the last reserves of his battery to call Rosalie Laurent, who had promised to come and visit him.

Still, Monsieur Bang aka Professeur Pasquale had held before him the prospect of returning home at the end of the next week if he did his exercises properly and his blood pressure was acceptable.

“Our blood pressure is still a little too high, Monsieur Marchais,” he had said on his round that morning, looking with concern over the rims of his little spectacles at the chart, and Max had replied, “No wonder, if we don't get any sleep at night,
hein?
”

He noticed that he was developing an allergic reaction—to the careless way they used the word
we,
to doors that opened every couple of minutes, to light switches that were always turned on and never off, and more than anything to the permanent squelching of rubber soles as they walked around him, seeming to stick to the linoleum floors like Spiderman's webs (what did they clean the place with?), only then to come unstuck with a squeaking noise.