wasn't plunged into darkness. He carefully packed away his sewing kit in padded tin boxes. Then, in the tones of a prosecutor demanding a maximum sentence for a repeat offender, he barked out: “Six months!” I fired off a series of questioning signals with my working eye, but this man—who spent his days peering into people's pupils—was apparently unable to interpret a simple look. With a big round head, a short body, and a fidgety manner, he was the very model of the couldn't-care-less doctor: arrogant, brusque, sarcastic—the kind who summons his patients for 8:00 a.m., arrives at 9:00, and departs at 9:05, after giving each of them forty-five seconds of his precious time. Disinclined to chat with normal patients, he turned thoroughly evasive in dealing with ghosts of my ilk, apparently incapable of finding words to offer the slightest explanation. But I finally discovered why he had put a six-month seal on my eye: the lid was no longer fulfilling its function as a protective cover, and I ran the risk of an ulcerated cornea.
As the weeks went by, I wondered whether the hospital employed such an ungracious character deliberately—to serve as a focal point for the veiled mistrust the medical profession always arouses in long-term patients. A kind of scapegoat, in other words. If he leaves Berck, which seems likely, who will be left for me to sneer at? I shall no longer have the solitary, innocent pleasure of hearing his eternal question: “Do you see double?” and replying—deep inside—'Yes, I see two assholes, not one.”
I need to feel strongly, to love and to admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe. A letter from a friend, a Balthus painting on a postcard, a page of Saint-Simon, give meaning to the passing hours. But to keep my mind sharp, to avoid descending into resigned indifference, I maintain a level of resentment and anger, neither too much nor too little, just as a pressure cooker has a safety valve to keep it from exploding.
And while we're on the subject,
“Damn! It was only a dream!”
My Lucky Day
This morning, with first light barely bathing Room 119, evil spirits descended on my world. For half an hour, the alarm on the machine that regulates my feeding tube has been beeping out into the void. I cannot imagine anything so inane or nerve-racking as this piercing
Our Very Own Madonna
When friends jokingly ask whether I have considered a pilgrimage to Lourdes, I tell them I've already made the trip. It was the end of the seventies. Josephine and I were in a relationship that was a little too complicated to weather a traveling vacation together. It turned out to be one of those unstructured holidays that contain as many germs of potential discord as a day has minutes. We set out in the morning without knowing where we would sleep that night (and without knowing how we would reach our unknown destination). For two people to get along on such a trip requires a high degree of tactfulness. Josephine was the kind of person who was prepared to do what it takes to get her own way. I tend to be like that too. For a whole week, her pale-blue convertible was the theater of an ongoing mobile domestic crisis. I had just finished a hiking trip in Ax-les-Thermes—an incongruous interval in a life devoted to everything except sport! The hike concluded at the Chambre d'Amour, a little beach on the Basque coast where Josephine's uncle had a villa. From there, we made a tempestuous and magnificent crossing of the Pyrenees, leaving behind us a long trail of remarks on the order of “First of all, I never said any such thing!”
The prime bone of this quasi-marital contention was a fat book six or seven hundred pages long, with a black-and-white cover and an intriguing title.
The next day, after having crossed a mountain pass on the Tour de France route whose incline struck me as exhausting even by car, we rolled into Lourdes. The heat was suffocating. Josephine was driving; I sat beside her. And
While Josephine took her turn in the bathroom, I pounced, clad only in a towel, on that supreme oasis of the thirsty: the minibar. First I downed a half-bottle of mineral water at one swallow. Divine bottle, never will I forget the touch of your glass neck on my parched lips! Then I poured a glass of champagne for Josephine and a gin and tonic for myself. Having thus performed my barman duties, I was furtively considering a strategic withdrawal to the adventures of Charles Sobraj. But instead of the hoped-for sedative effect, the champagne restored all Josephine's tourist zeal. “I want to see the Madonna,” she said, jumping up with her feet together, like Francois Mauriac in a famous photo.
So off we went, under a heavy, threatening sky, to see the holy site. We passed an unbroken column of wheelchairs led by volunteers who were clearly experienced at shepherding paraplegics. “Everyone into the basilica if it rains!” trumpeted the nun leading the procession, her headgear whipped by the wind, her rosary clasped firmly in her hand. I surreptitiously studied these invalids, their twisted hands, their closed faces, these small parcels of