Small Lives (14 page)

The others gone, we must have remained in that bar for a long time still, Marianne exhausted and me sentimental. My earlier intoxication was no longer anything more than a dead drunkenness, the state that flattens out all individual characteristics to the advantage of a dark metaphysics shared by all men, and which I had seen transform the Mourioux farmers into weak-willed old grumblers on Sunday evenings. I had forgotten the incident, or rather I had retained of it, held in the depths of my stupor, only a backdrop of remorse and infamy, a pasteboard Mouth of Hell or underground prison scene on the painted cardboard of the night. Marianne possessed the flaw of listening to me too much; and no doubt for her, witness and judge who acquitted me in advance, I entangled myself in a complicated, self-indulgent, clever retraction, protesting my innocence; I wanted her to confirm it for me: I had not attacked that man; did I not have, for him as for myself, infinite pity? Had not this pity alone inspired my venomous repartees? Were we not equally unfortunate users of words, handled with too little skill to become, for us, the sovereign weapon that always attains its mark, for him the capitulation of the flesh and for me the completion of a book? The white flesh escaped him, the equally white pages of my, alas, unapproachable book escaped me no less; neither of them would be filled nightly with raw pleasure or written words; we did not know the passwords.

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 disdain 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.