life hunched in upon themselves. One of them caught my eye, and I ventured a smile. He responded by sticking out his tongue, and I felt myself blush stupidly scarlet, as if caught out in some crime. Meanwhile, Josephine, in pink sneakers, pink jeans, and pink sweatshirt, strode delightedly ahead through the midst of a somber mass (every French priest who still dressed like a priest seemed to have turned up for the occasion). Josephine was nearly ecstatic when the chorus of robes took up the words “Appear to us, Madonna, we beg you on our knees,” the chant of her childhood years. So fervent was the atmosphere that a casual observer might have thought himself outside Parc des Princes during a European Cup match.
A queue half a mile long, chanting Ave Marias, wound across the broad esplanade in front of the entrance to the grotto. I had never seen such a queue, except perhaps outside Lenin's tomb in Moscow.
“Listen, there's no way I'm going to wait in this!”
“Pity,” Josephine snapped. “It would do a sinner like you a lot of good!”
“Not at all. It could even be dangerous. What if someone in perfect health happened to be here when the Madonna appeared? One miracle, and he'd end up paralyzed.”
A dozen heads turned to see who could have uttered these disrespectful words. “Idiot,” muttered Josephine. Then a rain shower diverted attention from me. At the very first drops, we witnessed the spontaneous generation of a forest of umbrellas, and the smell of hot dust floated in the air.
We were borne forward into the underground Basilica of St. Pius X, a gigantic prayer barn where Mass is celebrated from 6:00 a.m. to midnight, with a change of priest every two or three services. I had read in the guidebook that the concrete nave could accommodate several jumbo jets. I followed Josephine to a bay with empty seats beneath one of the countless echoing loudspeakers that transmitted the ceremony. “Glory be to God in the highest…in the highest…in the highest…” At the elevation of the Host, the man next to me, a well-prepared pilgrim, pulled racegoer's binoculars from his backpack to watch the proceedings. Other believers had makeshift periscopes of the kind you see at parades. Josephine's father had often told me how he started out in life selling these kinds of gadgets outside metro stations. This did not prevent him from becoming a giant of broadcasting. Now he made use of his barker's skills to describe royal weddings, earthquakes, and prizefights for his audience. Outside, it had stopped raining. The air was cooler. “Shopping,” said Josephine. Anticipating this eventuality, I had already marked out the main thoroughfare, in which souvenir shops jostled one another as intimately as in an Oriental bazaar, offering the most extravagant smorgasbord of devotional objects.
Josephine was a collector: old perfume bottles, rustic canvases complete with cattle (singly or in herds), plates of make-believe food of the kind that substitute for menus in Tokyo restaurant windows. In short, during her frequent travels she bought everything unspeakably kitsch she could lay her hands on. In Lourdes, it was love at first sight. There she sat in the window of the fourth shop on the left, surrounded by a jumble of religious medals, Swiss cuckoo clocks, decorated cheese platters, and—apparently waiting just for Josephine—an adorable stucco bust haloed with winking bulbs, like a Christmas tree decoration.
“There's my Madonna!” Josephine exulted.
“It's my present,” I said at once, with no inkling of the exorbitant sum the shopkeeper would soon extort from me (alleging that it was one of a kind). That evening, in our hotel room, we celebrated our acquisition, its flickering holy light bathing us and casting fantastic dancing shadows on the ceiling.
“Josephine, I think we're going to have to split up when we get back to Paris.”
“Do you think I don't realize that?”
“But Jo…”
She was asleep. She had the gift of falling into instant sheltering slumber when a situation annoyed her. She could take a vacation from life for five minutes or several hours. For a while I watched the wall behind our pillows jump into and out of darkness. What demon could have induced people to line a whole room with orange fabric?
Since Josephine was still sleeping, I cautiously dressed and left to engage in one of my favorite pastimes: night walking. It was my personal way of battling misfortune: just walking until I dropped. Out on the street, Dutch youths guzzled beer from big mugs. They had torn holes in garbage bags to make raincoats. Stout bars blocked the way to the grotto, but at intervals I saw the glow of hundreds of guttering candles. Much later, my wanderings brought me back to the street with the souvenir stores. In the fourth window, an identical Mary had taken the place of ours. Then I turned back to the hotel; from very far away I saw the window of our room twinkling in the gloom. I climbed the stairs, careful not to disturb the night watchman's dreams.
I recognized Josephine's writing. A huge “I” was scrawled across page 168. It was the start of a message that took up two whole chapters of the book and left them totally unreadable.
Luckily I had read these pages already.
When I switched off the Holy Virgin, day was just breaking.
Through a Glass, Darkly
Hunched in my wheelchair, I watch my children surreptitiously as their mother pushes me down the hospital corridor. While I have become something of a zombie father, Theophile and Celeste are very much flesh and blood, energetic and noisy. I will never tire of seeing them walk alongside me, just walking, their confident expressions masking the unease weighing on their small shoulders. As he walks, Theophile dabs with a Kleenex at the thread of saliva escaping my closed lips. His movements are tentative, at once tender and fearful, as if he were dealing with an animal of unpredictable reactions. As soon as we slow down, Celeste cradles my head in her bare arms, covers my forehead with noisy kisses, and says over and over, “You're my dad, you're my dad,” as if in incantation.
Today is Father's Day. Until my stroke, we had felt no need to fit this made-up holiday into our emotional calendar. But today we spend the whole of the symbolic day together, affirming that even a rough sketch, a shadow, a tiny fragment of a dad is still a dad. I am torn between joy at seeing them living, moving, laughing, or crying for a few hours, and fear that the sight of all these sufferings—beginning with mine—is not the ideal entertainment for a boy of ten and his eight-year-old sister. However, we have made the wise collective decision not to sugarcoat anything.
We install ourselves at the Beach Club—my name for a patch of sand dune open to sun and wind, where the hospital has obligingly set out tables, chairs, and umbrellas, and even planted a few buttercups, which grow in the sand amid the weeds. In this neutral zone on the beach, a transition between hospital and everyday life, one could easily imagine some good fairy turning every wheelchair into a chariot. “Want to play hangman?” asks Theophile, and I ache to tell him that I have enough on my plate playing quadriplegic. But my communication system disqualifies repartee: the keenest rapier grows dull and falls flat when it takes several minutes to thrust it home. By the time you strike, even you no longer understand what had seemed so witty before you started to dictate it, letter by letter. So the rule is to avoid impulsive sallies. It deprives conversation of its sparkle, all those gems you bat back and forth like a ball—and I count this forced lack of humor one of the great drawbacks of my condition.
But we can certainly play hangman, the national preteen sport. I guess a letter, then another, then stumble on the third. My heart is not in the game. Grief surges over me. His face not two feet from mine, my son Theophile sits patiently waiting—and I, his father, have lost the simple right to ruffle his bristly hair, clasp his downy neck, hug his small, lithe, warm body tight against me. There are no words to express it. My condition is monstrous, iniquitous, revolting, horrible. Suddenly I can take no more. Tears well and my throat emits a hoarse rattle that startles Theophile. Don't be scared, little man. I love you. Still engrossed in the game, he moves in for the kill. Two more letters: he has won and I have lost. On a corner of the page he completes his drawing of the gallows, the rope, and the condemned man.
Meanwhile, Celeste is doing cartwheels on the sand. Perhaps some compensatory mechanism is at work, for ever since the act of blinking became the equivalent of weight lifting for me, she has turned into a genuine acrobat. With the flexibility of a cat, she does a back flip, a handstand, a somersault, and a whole series of daring leaps and twists. She has recently added tightrope walker to the long list of professions she envisions for her future (after schoolteacher, supermodel, and florist). With the onlookers at the Beach Club won over by her display, our budding
