THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

Jean-Dominique Bauby

'Read this book and fall back in love with life.' Edmund White
After suffering a massive stroke, Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor-in-chief of French Elle and the father of two young
children, found himself completely
paralysed, speechless and able only to
move one eyelid. With his eyelid he
'dictated' this remarkable book.
'Vibrantly, insistently, a tale for our times . . . This is a memoir where the man speaks for the moment, and
it is one of the great books of the century.' Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times
'We listen, because what he has to say goes to the
core of what it means to be human.'
Robert McCrum, Observer
'A staggering piece of work. It represents an almost
inconceivable act of generosity, the gift of the mind
and spirit for which writing was designed.'
A.L.Kennedy
Fourth EstateThe Diving-Bell

and
the Butterfly

The Diving-Bell

and
the Butterfly


Jean-Dominique Bauby


Translated by Jeremy Leggatt


Fourth Estate London


For my children Theophile and Celeste

And my deepest gratitude to Claude Mendibil.

whose all-important contribution to these

pages will become clear as my story unfolds.

The Diving-Bell
and
the Butterfly

Jean-Dominique Bauby was born in Paris in
1952. In 1996 he set up ALIS (Association du
Locked-In Syndrome). Bauby died on 9 March
1997.

For more information on Jean-Dominique
Bauby's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly and
to download a reading guide visit
www. 4th estate. com/jeandominiquebauby
Prologue



Through the frayed curtain at my window a
wan glow announces the break of day. My
heels hurt, my head weighs a ton, and something
like a giant invisible diving-bell holds my whole
body prisoner. My room emerges slowly from the
gloom. I linger over every item: photos of loved
ones, my children's drawings, posters, the little
tin cyclist sent by a friend the day before the
Paris-Roubaix bike race, and the IV pole overhanging
the bed where I have been confined
these past six months like a hermit crab dug into
his rock.
No need to wonder very long where I am, or to
recall that the life I once knew was snuffed out
on Friday, 8 December, last year.
Up until then I had never even heard of the
brain-stem. I've since learned that it is an essential
component of our internal computer, the
inseparable link between the brain and the

ii

spinal cord. I was brutally introduced to this
vital piece of anatomy when a cerebrovascular
accident put my brain-stem out of action, hi the
past it was known as a 'massive stroke', and you
simply died. But improved resuscitation techniques
have now prolonged and refined the
agony. You survive, but you survive with what is
so aptly known as 'locked-in syndrome'. Paralysed
from head to toe, the patient, his mind
intact, is imprisoned inside his own body, but
unable to speak or move. In my case, blinking
my left eyelid is my only means of communication.
Of
course the sufferer is the last to hear the
good news. I myself had twenty days of deep
coma and several weeks of grogginess and somnolence
before I fully appreciated the extent of
the damage. I did not fully awake until the end of
January. When I finally surfaced, I was in Room
119 of the Naval Hospital at Berck-sur-Mer on
the French Channel coast - the same Room 119,
infused now with the first light of day.
An ordinary day. At seven the chapel bells
begin again to punctuate the passage of time,
quarter-hour by quarter-hour. After their
night's respite, my congested bronchial tubes
once more begin their noisy rattle. My hands,
lying curled on the yellow sheets, are hurting,
although I can't tell if they are burning hot or ice
cold. To fight off stiffness I instinctively stretch,
my arms and legs moving only a fraction of an
inch. It is often enough to bring relief to a painful
limb.
My cocoon becomes less oppressive, and my
mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so
much to do. You can wander off in space or in
time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King
Midas's court.
You can visit the woman you love, slide down
beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face. You
can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden
Fleece, discover Atlantis, realize your childhood
dreams and adult ambitions.
Enough rambling. My main task now is to
compose the first of these bedridden travel notes
so that I shall be ready when my publisher's
emissary arrives to take my dictation, letter by
letter. In my head I churn over every sentence ten
times, delete a word, add an adjective, and learn
my text by heart, paragraph by paragraph.Seven thirty. The duty nurse interrupts the
flow of my thoughts. Following a well
established ritual, she draws the curtain, checks
tracheostomy and drip-feed, and turns on the
TV so I can watch the news. Right now a cartoon
celebrates the adventures of the fastest frog in
the West. And what if I asked to be changed into
a frog? What then?

The Wheelchair



I had never seen so many white coats in my
little room. Nurses, orderlies, physiotherapist,
occupational therapist, psychologist,
neurologist, interns and even the department
head - the whole hospital had turned out for the
event. When they first burst in, pushing the
device ahead of them, I thought it meant that
I was being ejected to make room for a new
patient. I had already been at Berck a few weeks,
and was daily drawing nearer to the shores of
awareness, but I still could not imagine any
connection between a wheelchair and me.
No one had yet given me an accurate picture of
my situation, and I clung to the certainty, based
on bits and pieces I had overheard, that I would
very quickly recover movement and speech.
Indeed, my roving mind was busy with a
thousand projects: a novel, travel, a play, marketing
a fruit cocktail of my own invention.The Wheelchair





(Don't ask for the recipe; I have forgotten it.)
They immediately dressed me. 'Good for the
morale,' pronounced the neurologist in sententious
tones. And in truth I would have been
pleased to trade my yellow nylon hospital gown
for a checked shirt, old trousers and a shapeless
sweater - except that it was a nightmare to put
them on. Or rather to watch the clothes manipulated,
after endless contortions, over these
uncooperative deadweight limbs, which serve
me only as a source of pain.
When I was finally dressed the ritual could
begin. Two attendants seized me by the shoulders
and feet, lifted me off the bed and dumped
me unceremoniously into the wheelchair. I had
graduated from being a patient whose prognosis
was uncertain to an official quadriplegic. They
didn't quite applaud, but they came close. My
caretakers made me travel the length and
breadth of the hospital floor to make certain that
the seated position did not trigger uncontrollable
spasms, but I was too devastated by this brutal
downgrading of my future hopes to take much
notice. They had to place a special cushion
behind my head: it was wobbling about like the
head of one of those African women upon
removal of the stack of rings that has been
stretching her neck for years. 'You can handle
the wheelchair,' said the occupational therapist
with a smile intended to make the remark sound
like good news, whereas to my ears it had the
ring of a life-sentence. In one flash I saw the
frightening truth. It was as blinding as an atomic
explosion and keener than a guillotine blade.
They all left.
As three orderlies laid me back down, I
thought of movie gangsters struggling to fit the
slain informer's body into the boot of their car.
The wheelchair sat abandoned in a corner, with
my clothes tossed over its dark-blue plastic
back-rest. Before the last white coat left the
room I signalled my wish to have the TV turned
on low. On screen was my father's favourite quiz
show, Letters and Numbers. Since daybreak an
unremitting drizzle had been streaking the
windows.Prayer



Oddly enough, the shock of the wheelchair
was helpful. Things became clearer. I gave
up my grandiose plans, and the friends who had
built a barrier of affection around me since my
catastrophe were able to talk freely. With the
subject no longer taboo, we began to discuss
locked-in syndrome. First of all, it is very rare. It
is small consolation, but the chances of being
caught in this hellish trap are about as likely as
those of winning the lottery. At Berck, only two
of us were locked in, and my own case was not
classic. I am perverse enough to be able to swivel
my head, which is not supposed to be part of the
clinical picture. Since most victims are abandoned
to a vegetable existence, the evolution of
the disease is not well understood. All that is
known is that if the nervous system makes up its
mind to start working again, it does so at the
speed of a hair growing from the base of thebrain. So it is likely that several years will go by
before I can expect to wiggle my toes.
In fact it is in my respiratory passages that I
can hope for improvement. In the long term, I
can hope to eat more normally: that is, without
the help of a gastric tube. Eventually, perhaps I
could breathe naturally, without a respirator,
and muster enough breath to make my vocal
cords vibrate.
But for now, I would be the happiest of men if
I could just swallow the overflow of saliva endlessly
flooding my mouth. Even before first light
I am already practising sliding my tongue
towards the rear of my palate in order to provoke
a swallowing reaction. What is more, I have
dedicated to my larynx the little packets of
incense hanging on the wall, amulets brought
back from Japan by pious globetrotting friends.
Just one of the stones in the thanksgiving monument
erected by my circle of friends during their
wanderings. In every corner of the world the
most diverse deities have been solicited in my
name. I try to organize all this spiritual energy. If
they tell me that candles have been burned for
my sake in a Breton chapel, or a mantra chanted
in a Nepalese temple, I at once give each of the
spirits invoked a precise task. A woman I know
enlisted a Cameroon holy man to procure me the
good will of Africa's gods: I have assigned him
my right eye. For my hearing problems I rely on
the warm relationship that my devout mother-in-law
enjoys with the monks of a Bordeaux
brotherhood. They regularly dedicate their
prayers to me, and I occasionally steal into their
abbey to hear their chants fly heavenward. So far
the results have been unremarkable. But when
seven brothers of the same order had then
throats cut by Islamic fanatics my ears hurt for
several days. Yet all these lofty protections are
merely clay ramparts, walls of sand, Mmaginot
Lines, compared to the small prayer my daughter
Celeste sends up to her Lord every evening
before closing her eyes. Since we fall asleep at
roughly the same hour, I set out for the kingdom
of slumber with this wonderful talisman which
shields me from all harm.
Bath Time



At eight thirty the physiotherapist arrives.
Brigitte, a woman with an athletic figure
and an imperial Roman profile, has come to
exercise my stiffened arms and legs. They call
the exercise 'mobilization', a term whose martial
connotations contrasts ludicrously with the paltry
forces thus summoned, for I've lost sixty-six
pounds in just twenty weeks. When I began a
diet a week before my stroke I never dreamed of
such a dramatic result. As she works, Brigitte
checks for the smallest flicker of improvement.
'Try to squeeze my hand,' she asks. Since I
sometimes have the illusion that I am moving my
fingers, I focus my energy on crushing her
knuckles, but nothing stirs and she replaces my inert hand on its foam pad. In fact the only sign
of change is in my neck. I can now turn my head ninety degrees, and my field of vision extends Worn the slate roof of the building next door tothe curious tongue-lolling Mickey Mouse drawn
by my son Theophile when I was still unable to
open my mouth. Now, after regular exercise, we
have reached the stage of slipping a lollypop into
it. As the neurologist says, 'We need to be very
patient.' The session with Brigitte ends with a
facial massage. Her warm fingers travel all over
my face, including the numb zone which seems
to me to have the texture of parchment, and the
area that still has feeling where I can manage the
beginnings of a frown. Since the demarcation
line runs across my mouth, I can only half-smile,
which fairly faithfully reflects my ups and
downs. A domestic event as commonplace as
washing can trigger the most varied emotions.
One day, for example, I can find it amusing, in
my forty-fifth year, to be cleaned up and turned
over, to have my bottom wiped and swaddled
like a newborn's. I even derive a guilty pleasure
from this total lapse into infancy. But the next
day, the same procedure seems unbearably sad,
and a tear rolls down through the lather a nurse's
aide spreads over my cheeks. And my weekly
bath plunges me simultaneously into distress
and happiness. The delectable moment when I
Bath Time

sink into the tub is quickly followed by nostalgia
for the protracted wallowings that were the joy
of my previous life. Armed with a cup of tea or a
Scotch, a good book or a pile of newspapers, I
would soak for hours, maneuvering the taps
with my toes. Rarely do I feel my condition so
cruelly as when I am recalling such pleasures.
Luckily I have no time for gloomy thoughts.
Already they are wheeling me back shivering to
my room on a trolley as comfortable as a bed of
nails. I must be fully dressed by ten thirty and
ready to go to the rehabilitation centre. Having
turned down the hideous jogging-suit provided
by the hospital, I am now attired as I was in my
student days. Like the bath, my old clothes could
easily bring back poignant, painful memories.
But I see in the clothes a symbol of continuing
life. And proof that I still want to be myself. If I
must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere.The Alphabet



I am fond of my alphabet letters. At night,
when it is a little too dark and the only sign of
life is the small red spot in the centre of the
television screen, vowels and consonants dance
to a Charles Trenet tune: 'Dear Venice, sweet
Venice, I'll always remember you ... ' Hand in
hand the letters cross the room, whirl around the
bed, sweep past the window, wriggle across the
wall, swoop to the door and return to begin
again.

ESARINTULOMDPCFBVHGJQZYXKW

The jumbled appearance of my chorus line stems
not from chance but from cunning calculation.
More than an alphabet, it is a hit parade in which
each letter is placed according to the frequency
of its use in the French language. That is why e
dances proudly out in front while w labours to
hold on to last place, b resents being pushed backnext to v, and haughty j - which begins so many
sentences in French - is amazed to find itself so
near the rear of the pack. Roly-poly g is annoyed
to have to trade places with h, while t and u, the
tender components of 'to', rejoice that they have
not been separated. All this reshuffling has a
purpose: to make it easier for those who wish to
communicate with me.
It is a simple enough system. You read off the
alphabet (esa version, not abc) until with a blink
of my eye I stop you at the letter to be noted. The
manoeuvre is repeated for the letters that follow
so that fairly soon you have a whole word, and
then fragments of more or less intelligible sentences.
That at least is the theory. But the truth
is that some visitors fare better than others.
Because of nervousness, impatience or obtuseness,
performances vary in the handling of the
code (which is what we call this method of
transcribing my thoughts). Crossword fans and
Scrabble players have a head start. Girls manage
better than boys. By dint of practice, some of
them know the code by heart and no longer even
turn to our special notebook - the one containing
the order of the letters, and in which all my words are set down like the Delphic oracle's.
Indeed, I wonder what conclusions anthropologists
of the year 3000 will reach if they ever
chance to leaf through these notebooks, haphazardly
scribbled with remarks like 'the physiotherapist
is pregnant', 'mainly on the legs',
'Arthur Rimbaud', and 'the French team played
like pigs' are interspersed with unintelligible
gibberish, misspelled words, lost letters, omitted
syllables.
Nervous visitors come most quickly to grief.
They reel off the alphabet tonelessly, at top
speed, jotting down letters almost at random;
and then, seeing the meaningless result, exclaim:
'I'm an idiot!' But in the final analysis their
anxiety gives me a chance to rest, for they take
charge of the whole conversation, providing
both questions and answers, and I am spared the
task of holding up my end. Reticent people are
much more difficult. If I ask them, 'How are
you?' they answer 'Fine,' immediately putting
the ball back in my court. With some the alphabet
becomes an artillery barrage, and I need to
have two or three questions ready in advance in
order not to be swamped. Meticulous peoplenever go wrong: they scrupulously note down
each letter and never seek to pierce the mystery
of a sentence before it is complete. Nor would
they dare dream of finishing a single word for
you. Unwilling to chance the smallest error, they
will never take it upon themselves to provide the
'room' that follows 'mush,' the 'ic' that follows
'atom', or the 'nable' without which neither
'intermi' nor 'abomi' can exist. Such scrupulousness
makes for laborious progress, but at least
you avoid the misunderstandings in which
impulsive visitors bog down when they neglect to
verify their intuitions. Yet I understood the
poetry of such mind games one day when,
attempting to ask for my glasses (lunettes), I was
asked what I wanted to do with the moon (lune).
Not many places in France still nurture the
cult of Empress Eugenie. In the main hall of
the Naval Hospital, a vast echoing space in which
trolleys and wheelchairs can advance five abreast,
a stained-glass window depicts the wife of Napoleon
III, the hospital's patroness. The two chief
curiosities of this micromuseum are a white marble
bust which restores to the glory of her youth
this fallen highness who died at ninety-four; and
the letter in which the deputy station-master of
Berck's railroad depot describes to the editor of
the Correspondant Maritime the brief imperial
visit of 4 May, 1864. Through his words I can see
the special train pull in, the troupe of young ladies
of Eugenie's retinue, the joyful procession through
the town, and the introduction of the hospital's
little patients (Berck began life as a children's
hospital) to their illustrious protectress. For a
while I seized every chance I had to pay myrespects to these relics.
A score of times I read the railwayman's
account. I mingled with the chattering flock of
ladies-in-waiting, and whenever Eugenie progressed
from one ward to another I followed her
hat with its yellow ribbons, her silk parasol and
the scent of her passage, imbued with the eau de
Cologne of the court perfumer. On one particularly
windy day I even dared draw near and
bury my face in the folds of her white gauze dress
with its broad satin stripes. It was as sweet as
whipped cream, as cool as the morning dew. She
did not send me away. She ran her fingers
through my hair and said gently, 'There there,
my child, you must be very patient,' in a Spanish
accent very like the neurologist's. She was no
longer the empress of the French but a compassionate
divinity in the manner of Saint Rita,
patroness of lost causes.
And then, one afternoon as I confided my woes
to her likeness, an unknown face interposed
itself between us. Reflected in the glass I saw the
head of a man who seemed to have emerged from
a vat of formaldehyde. His mouth was twisted,
his nose damaged, his hair tousled, his gaze full of fear. One eye was sewn shut, the other goggled
like the doomed eye of Cain. For a moment I
stared at that dilated pupil before I realized it
was only mine.
Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me.
Not only was I exiled, paralysed, mute, half deaf,
deprived of all pleasures and reduced to a jellyfish
existence, but I was also horrible to behold.
There comes a time when the heaping-up of
calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous
laughter - when, after a final blow from fate, we
decide to treat it all as a joke. My jovial cackling
at first disconcerted Eugenie, until she herself
was infected by my mirth. We laughed until we
cried. The municipal band then struck up a
waltz, and I was so merry that I would willingly
have risen and invited Eugenie to dance had
such a move been fitting. We would have whirled
around miles of floor. Ever since then, whenever
I go through the main hall, I detect a hint of
amusement in the Empress's smile.Cinecitta



The Naval Hospital must be a striking sight
to the noisy microlight aircraft which buzz
the Berck shoreline at an altitude of 300 feet.
With its massive, over-elaborate silhouette and
the high red-brick walls typical of northern
France, it seems to have foundered on the sands
between the town and the grey waters of the
Channel. On the facade of its most imposing
annexe, as on the fronts of schools and public
baths in the French capital, are the words 'City
of Paris'. Created during the Second Empire for
sick children in need of a climate healthier than
that of Paris's hospitals, the annexe has retained
its extraterritorial status.
For while cold reality places us in the Pas-de
Calais region, as far as the medical bureaucracy
is concerned we are still on the banks of the
Seine.
Linked by endless corridors, the hospitalbuildings form an authentic maze, and one routinely
runs into patients from Menard hopelessly
lost in Sorrel - wards named after eminent surgeons.
Like children who have wandered from
their mothers, these unfortunates mutter 'I'm
lost!' as they wobble about on their crutches.
Being what the stretcher-bearers call a 'Sorrel', I
am more or less at home here, but the same
cannot be said of newcomers. I could try to
signal with my eyes whenever my wheelchair is
pushed in the wrong direction, but I have taken
to looking stonily ahead. There is always the
chance that we will stumble upon some unknown
corner of the hospital, see new faces, or
catch a whiff of cooking as we pass. It was in this
way that I came upon the lighthouse, on one of
the very first expeditions in my wheelchair,
shortly after swimming up from the mists of
coma. As we emerged from a lift, having got off
on the wrong floor, I saw it: tall, robust and
reassuring, in red and white stripes that reminded
me of a rugby shirt. I at once placed myself
under the protection of this brotherly symbol,
guardian not just of sailors but of the sick - those
castaways on the shores of loneliness.

The lighthouse and I remain in constant
touch, and I often call on it by having myself
wheeled to Cinecitta, a region essential to my
imaginary geography of the hospital. Cinecitta is
the perpetually deserted terrace of Sorrel ward.
Facing south, its vast balconies open on to a
landscape heavy with the poetic and slightly
offbeat charm of a movie set. The suburbs of
Berck look like a model train layout. A handful
of buildings at the foot of the sand-dunes give
the illusion of a Western ghost town. As for the
sea, it foams such an incandescent white that it
might be the product of the special-effects
department.
I could spend whole days at Cinecitta. There, I
am the greatest director of all time. On the town
side, I reshoot the close-ups for Touch of Evil. Down at the beach I rework the dolly shots for Stagecoach, and offshore I recreate the storm
rocking the smugglers of Moonfleet. Or else I
dissolve into the landscape and there is nothing
more to connect me to the world than a friendly
hand stroking my numb fingers. I am Pierrot le
Fou, my face smeared blue and a garland of
dynamite-sticks entwining my head. The temptationto strike a match drifts by, like a cloud.
And then it is the hour when the day fades, when
the last train sets out for Paris, when I have to
return to my room. I wait for winter. Warmly
wrapped up, we can linger here until nightfall,
watch the sun set and the lighthouse take up
the torch, its hope-filled beams sweeping the
horizon.

Tourists



After devoting itself to the care of young
victims of a tuberculosis epidemic after the
Second World War, Berck gradually shifted its
focus away from children. Nowadays it tends to
concentrate more on the sufferings of the aged,
on the inevitable breakdown of body and mind;
but geriatrics is only one part of the picture I
must paint to give an accurate idea of the hospital's
denizens. In one section are a score of
comatose patients, poor devils at death's door,
plunged into endless night. They never leave
their rooms. Yet everyone knows they are there,
and they weigh strangely on our collective
awareness, almost like a guilty conscience. In
another wing, next door to the colony of elderly
and enfeebled, is a cluster of morbidly obese
patients whose substantial dimensions the doctors
hope to whittle down. Elsewhere, a battalion
of cripples forms the bulk of the inmates. Survivors of sport, of the highway, and of every
possible and imaginable kind of domestic accident,
these patients remain at Berck for as long
as it takes to get their shattered limbs working
again. I call them 'tourists'.
To complete the picture a niche must be found
for us, broken-winged birds, voiceless parrots,
ravens of doom who have made our nest in a
dead-end corridor of the neurology department.
Of course we spoil the view. I am all too conscious
of the slight uneasiness we cause as, rigid
and mute, we make our way through a group of
more fortunate patients.
The best place to observe this phenomenon is
the rehabilitation room, where all patients
undergoing physiotherapy are congregated.
Garish and noisy, a hubbub of splints, artificial
limbs and harnesses of varying complexity, it is
an authentic Court of Miracles. Here we see a
young man with an earring, who suffered multiple
fractures in a motorbike accident; a grandmother
in a fluorescent nightgown, who is
learning to walk after a fall from a stepladder;
and a homeless man whose foot was somehow
amputated by a subway train. Lined up like a

row of onions, this human throng waves arms
and legs under minimal supervision, while I lie
tethered to an inclined board which is slowly
raised to a vertical position. Every morning I
spend half an hour suspended this way, frozen to
attention in a posture that must evoke the
appearance of the Commendatore's statue in the
last act of Mozart's Don Giovanni. Below, people
laugh, joke, call out. I would like to be a part of
all this hilarity, but as soon as I direct my one eye
towards them, the young man, the grandmother
and the homeless man turn away, feeling the
sudden need to study the ceiling smoke-detector.
The 'tourists' must be very worried about fire.The Sausage

After every day's session on the vertical
board, a stretcher-bearer wheels me from
the rehabilitation room and parks me next to my
bed, where I wait for the nurse's aides to swing
me back between the sheets. And every day,
since by now it is noon, the same stretcher
bearer wishes me a resolutely cheerful 'Bon
appetit!', his way of saying 'See you tomorrow.'
And of course, to wish me a hearty appetite is
about the same as saying 'Merry Christmas' on
15 August or 'Goodnight' in broad daylight. In
the last eight months I have swallowed nothing
save a few drops of lemon-flavoured water and
one half-teaspoon of yoghurt which gurgled
noisily down my windpipe. The feeding test - as
they grandly called this banquet - was not a
success. But no cause for alarm: I haven't
starved. By means of a tube threaded into my
stomach, two or three bags of a brownish fluidprovide my daily calorific needs. For pleasure I
have to turn to the vivid memory of tastes and
smells, an inexhaustible reservoir of sensations.
Once I was a master at recycling leftovers. Now I
cultivate the art of simmering memories. You
can sit down to table at any hour, with no fuss or
ceremony. If it's a restaurant, no need to book. If
I do the cooking, it is always a success. The
bourguignon is tender, the boeuf en gelee translucent,
the apricot pie possesses just the requisite
tartness. Depending on my mood I treat myself
to a dozen snails, a plate of Alsatian sausage with
sauerkraut, and a bottle of late-vintage golden
Gewurztraminer, or else I savour a simple soft
boiled egg with fingers of toast and lightly salted
butter. What a banquet! The yolk flows warmly
over my palate and down my throat. And indigestion
is never a problem. Naturally, I use the
finest ingredients: the freshest vegetables, fish
straight from the water, the most delicately
marbled meat. Everything must be done right.
Just to make sure, a friend sent me the recipe
for authentic home-made sausages, andouillettes
de Troyes, with three different kinds of meat
braided in strips. Moreover, I scrupulously observe the rhythm of the seasons. Just now I am
cooling my taste buds with melon and red fruit. I
leave oysters and game for the autumn - should
I feel like eating them, for I am becoming careful,
even ascetic in matters of diet. At the outset
of my protracted fast, deprivation sent me constantly
to my imaginary larder. I was gluttonous.
But today I could almost be content with a good
old proletarian hard sausage trussed in netting
and suspended permanently from the ceiling in
some corner of my head. A knobbly Lyons
rosette, for example, very dry and coarsely chopped.
Every slice melts a little on your tongue
before you start chewing to extract all its flavour.
The origin of my addiction to sausage goes back
forty years. Although still at an age for sweets, I
already preferred delicatessen meats, and my
maternal grandfather's nurse noticed that whenever
I visited the gloomy apartment on the
Boulevard Raspail I would ask her in a beguiling
lisp for sausage. Skilled at indulging the desires
of children and the elderly, she eventually pulled
off a double coup by giving me a sausage and
marrying my grandfather just before he died. My
joy at receiving such a gift was in direct proportion to the annoyance these unexpected nuptials
caused my family. I have only the vaguest picture
of my grandfather: supine and stern-faced
in the gloom, resembling Victor Hugo's portrait
on the old five-hundred-franc notes in use at that
time. I have a much clearer memory of the
sausage lying incongruously among my Dinky
toys and children's books.
I fear I will never eat a better sausage.

Guardian Angel



The identity badge pinned to Sandrine's
white tunic says 'Speech Therapist', but it
should read 'Guardian Angel'. She is the one
who set up the communication code without
which I would be cut off from the world. But
alas! while most of my friends have adopted the
system, here at the hospital only Sandrine and a
female psychologist use it. So I usually have the
skimpiest arsenal of facial expressions, winks
and nods to ask people to shut the door, turn on
a tap, lower the volume on the TV, or fluff up a
pillow. I do not succeed every time. As the weeks
go by, this forced solitude has allowed me to
acquire a certain stoicism and to realize that the
hospital staff are of two kinds: the majority, who
would not dream of leaving the room without
first attempting to decipher my SOS messages;
and the less conscientious minority, who make
their getaway pretending not to notice mydistress signals. Like that heartless oaf who
switched off the Bordeaux-Munich football
game at half-time, saying 'Goodnight!' with a
finality that left no hope of appeal. Quite apart
from the practical drawbacks, this inability to
communicate is somewhat wearing. Which
explains the gratification I feel twice daily when
Sandrine knocks, pokes her small chipmunk
face through the door and at once sends all
gloomy thoughts packing. The invisible and
eternally imprisoning cocoon seems less
oppressive.
Speech therapy is an art that deserves to be
more widely known. You cannot imagine the
acrobatics your tongue mechanically performs
in order to produce all the sounds of a language.
Just now I am struggling with the letter T, a
pitiful admission for an editor-in-chief who
cannot even pronounce the name of his own
magazine! On good days, between coughing fits,
I muster enough energy and wind to be able to
puff out one or two phonemes. On my birthday
Sandrine managed to get me to pronounce the
whole alphabet more or less intelligibly. I could
not have had a better present. It was as if those
twenty-six letters had been wrenched from the
void; my own hoarse voice seemed to emanate
from a far-off country. The exhausting exercise
left me feeling like a caveman discovering language
for the first time. Sometimes the phone
interrupts our work, and I take advantage of
Sandrine's presence to be in touch with loved
ones, to intercept and catch passing fragments of
life, the way you catch a butterfly. My daughter
Celeste tells me of her adventures with her pony.
In five months she will be nine. My father tells
me how hard it is to stay on his feet. He is
fighting undaunted through his ninety-third
year. These two are the outer links of the chain of
love which surrounds and protects me. I often
wonder about the effect of these one-way conversations
on those at the other end of the line. I
am overwhelmed by them. How dearly I would
love to be able to respond with something other
than silence to these tender calls. I know that
some of them find it unbearable. Sweet Florence
refuses to speak to me unless I first breathe
noisily into the receiver which Sandrine holds
glued to my ear. 'Are you there, Jean-Do?' she
asks anxiously over the air.
And I have to admit that at times I do not
know any more.

The Photo






The last time I saw my father I shaved him. It
was the week of my stroke. He was unwell,
so I had spent the night at his small apartment
near the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. In the morning,
after bringing him a cup of milky tea, I
decided to rid him of his few days' growth of
beard. The scene has remained engraved in my
memory. Hunched in the red-upholstered armchair
where he sifts through the day's
newspapers, my dad bravely endures the rasp of
the razor attacking his loose skin. I wrap a big
towel around his shrivelled neck, daub thick
lather over his face, and do my best not to irritate
his skin, dotted here and there with small dilated
capillaries. From age and fatigue, his eyes have
sunk deep into their sockets and his nose looks
too prominent for his emaciated features. But,
still flaunting the plume of hair - now snow
white - that has always crowned his tall frame,he has lost none of his splendour. All around us,
a lifetime's clutter has accumulated; his room
calls to mind one of those old persons' attics
whose secrets only they can know -- a confusion
of ancient magazines, records no longer played,
miscellaneous objects. Photos from all the ages of man have been stuck into the frame of a large
mirror. There is Dad, wearing a sailor suit and
playing with a hoop before the Great War; my
eight-year-old daughter in riding gear; and a
black-and-white photo of myself on a miniature
golf course. I was eleven, my ears protruded, and
I looked like a somewhat simple-minded schoolboy.
Mortifying to realize that at that age I was
already a confirmed dunce.
I complete my barber's duties by splashing my
father with his favourite aftershave lotion. Then
we say goodbye; this time, for once, he neglects
to mention the letter in his writing-desk where
his last wishes are set out. We have not seen each
other since. I cannot quit my seaside confinement.
And he can no longer descend the
magnificent staircase of his apartment building
on his ninety-two-year-old legs. We are both
locked-in cases, each in his own way: myself in
my carcass, my father in his fourth-floor apartment.
Now I am the one they shave every
morning, and I often think of him while a nurse's
aide laboriously scrapes my cheeks with a week
old blade. I hope that I was a more attentive
Figaro.
Every now and then he calls, and I listen to his
affectionate voice, which quivers a little in the
receiver they hold to my ear. It cannot be easy for
him to speak to a son who, as he well knows, will
never reply. He also sent me the photo of me at
the miniature golf course. At first I did not
understand why. It would have remained a mystery
if someone had not thought to look at the
back of the print. Suddenly, in my own personal
movie theatre, the forgotten footage of a spring
weekend began to unroll, when my parents and I
had gone to take the air in a windy and not very
sparkling seaside town. In his strong, angular
handwriting, Dad had simply noted: Berck-sur
Mer, April 1963.If you asked readers which of Alexandre
Dumas's literary heroes they would like to be,
they would pick D'Artagnan or Edmond Dantes.
No one would dream of choosing Noirtier de
Villefort, a somewhat sinister character in The
Count of Monte-Cristo. Described by Dumas as a
living mummy, a man three-quarters of the way
into the grave, this profoundly handicapped
creature summons up not dreams but shudders.
He spends his life slumped in a wheelchair, the
mute and powerless possessor of the most terrible
secrets, able to communicate only by
bunking his eye: one blink means yes; two means
no. In fact dear grandpapa Noirtier, as his
granddaughter affectionately calls him, is literature's
first - and so far only - case of locked-in syndrome.
As soon as my mind was clear of the thick fog with which my stroke had shrouded it, I began tothink a lot about grandpapa Noirtier. I had
recently re-read The Count of Monte-Cristo, and
now here I was back in the heart of that book,
and in the worst of circumstances. Ironic -- but
that re-reading had not been purely by chance. I
had been toying with the idea of writing a modern,
doubtless iconoclastic, version of the Dumas
novel. Vengeance, of course, remained the driving
force of the action, but the plot took place in
our era, and Monte-Cristo was a woman.
So I did not have time to commit this crime of
lese-majeste. As a punishment I would have
preferred to be transformed into Baron Danglars,
Franz d'Epinay, the abbe Faria or, at the
very least, to copy out one thousand times: I
must not tamper with masterpieces. But the gods
of literature and neurology decided otherwise.
Some evenings I have the impression that
grandpapa Noirtier patrols our corridors in a
century-old wheelchair sadly in need of a drop of
oil. To foil the decrees of fate, I am now planning
a vast saga in which the key witness is not a
paralytic but a runner. You never know. Perhaps
it will work.

The Dream



As a rule I do not recall my dreams. At the
approach of day their plots inevitably fade.
So why did last December's dreams etch themselves
on my memory with the precision of a
laser beam? Perhaps that is how it is with coma.
Since you never return to reality, your dreams
don't have the luxury of evaporating. Instead,
they pile up one upon another to form a long
ongoing pageant whose episodes recur with the
insistence of a soap opera. This evening, one
such episode has come back to me.
In my dream thick snow is falling. It lies a foot
deep over the car graveyard my best friend and I
we walking through, numb with cold. For three days, Bernard and I have been trying to get back
to a France paralysed by a general strike. We
ended up in an Italian winter-sports resort,
we found a small local train heading for
. But at the French border a strikers' picketline interrupted our journey and bundled us out
of the train and into this desolate landscape,
without overcoats and wearing thin city shoes. A
lofty overpass straddles the scrapyard, as if vehicles
falling from the bridge one hundred and fifty
feet above our heads have piled up here, one on
top of another. Bernard and I have an appointment
with an influential Italian businessman
who has installed his headquarters in a massive
pillar of the viaduct, far from prying eyes. We
knock at a yellow steel door with a sign saying
'Danger: High Voltage' and an instruction chart
for treating electric shock. The door opens. The
entrance is reminiscent of a clothes factory outlet:
jackets on a mobile rail, piles of trousers,
boxes of shirts rising to the ceiling. I recognize
the surly watchman who admits us by his shock
of hair: Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian
Serbs. 'My friend is having trouble breathing,'
Bernard tells him. Laying down his machine
gun, Karadzic performs a tracheotomy upon me
on a hastily cleared table. Then we walk down
ornate glass stairs to a study in the cellar. Its
walls are lined with tan leather; deep armchairs
and muted lighting give it the feel of a nightclub.
Bernard confers with the owner, a clone of Fiat's
elegant administrator Gianni Agnelli, while a
hostess with a Lebanese accent sits me down at a
small bar. Instead of glasses and bottles, rows of
plastic tubes dangle floorward like oxygen
masks in an aircraft in distress. A barman
motions me to put one in my mouth. I comply,
and an amber ginger-flavoured fluid begins to
flow, flooding me with warmth from my toes to
the roots of my hair. After a while
I want to stop drinking and to get down off
my stool. Yet I continue to swallow, unable to
make the slightest move. I look frantically at the
barman to attract his attention. He responds
with an enigmatic smile. Around me voices and
faces become distorted. Bernard says something
to me, but the sound emerging in slow motion
from his mouth is incomprehensible. Instead, I
hear Ravel's Bolero. I have been completely
drugged.
Eons later I become aware of an alarm sounding.
The hostess with the Lebanese accent hoists
me on her back and climbs the staircase with me.
'We have to get out: the police are on their way.'
Outside, night has fallen and the snow hasstopped. An icy wind takes my breath away. The
dazzling beam of a searchlight mounted on the
overpass probes the forlorn car carcasses.
'Give up, you're surrounded!' blares a loudspeaker.
We manage to get away, and I wander
about, utterly lost. I long to escape, but every
time the chance arises a leaden torpor prevents
me taking even a single step. I am petrified,
mummified, vitrified. If just one door stands
between me and freedom I am incapable of
opening it. Yet that is not my only terror. For I
am also the hostage of a mysterious cult, and I
fear that my friends will fall into the same trap. I
try desperately to warn them, but my dream
conforms perfectly with reality. I am unable to
utter a word.

Voice Off



I have known gentler awakenings. When I
came to that late-January morning the hospital
ophthalmologist was leaning over me and
sewing my right eyelid shut with a needle and
thread, just as if he were darning a sock. Irrational
terror swept over me. What if this man got
carried away and sewed up my left eye as well,
my only link to the outside world, the only
window to my cell, the one tiny opening of my
cocoon? Luckily, as it turned out, I 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. 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. Physically he looked like Dennis
the Menace, with a big round head, short body
and a fidgety manner. Already 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 slumping 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, The Pressure
Cooker could be a title for the play I may write
one day, based on my experiences here. I've also
thought of calling it The Eye and, of course, The
Cocoon. You already know the plot and the
setting. A hospital room in which Mr L, a family
man in the prime of life, is learning to live with
locked-in syndrome brought on by a serious
cerebro-vascular accident. The play follows Mr
L's adventures in the medical world and his
shifting relationship with his wife, his children,
his friends, and his associates from the leading
advertising agency he helped to found. Ambitious,
somewhat cynical, heretofore a stranger toit
failure, Mr L takes his first steps into distress,
sees all the certainties that buttressed him collapse,
and discovers that his nearest and dearest
are strangers. We could carry this slow transformation as far as the front seats of the balcony,
where a voice off would reproduce Mr L's unspoken
inner monologue as he faces each new
situation. All that is left is to write the play. I
have the final scene already. The stage is in
darkness, except for a halo of light around the
bed in centre-stage. Night-time. Everyone
sleeps. Suddenly Mr L, inert since the curtain
first rose, throws aside sheets and blankets,
jumps from the bed and walks around the eerily
lit stage. Then it grows dark again and you hear
the voice off - Mr L's inner voice - one last
time:
'Shit! 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
beep beep beep pecking away at my brain.
To make matters worse, my sweat has unglued the tape that keeps my right eyelid closed, and
the stuck-together lashes are tickling my pupil
unbearably. To crown it all, the end of my
urinary catheter has become detached and I am
drenched. Awaiting rescue, I hum an old song by
Henri Salvador: 'Don't you fret, baby, it'll be all
right.' And here comes the nurse. Automatically,
she turns on the TV. A commercial, with a
personal computer spelling out the question:
'Were you born lucky?'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. My relationship with Josephine
had become a little too complicated to weather a
travelling vacation together. It turned out to be
one of those unstructured jaunts 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 theatre
of an ongoing mobile domestic crisis. I had just
come from a hiking trip in Ax-les-Thermes - anincongruous interval in a life devoted to everything
except sport! The hike finished 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. Trail of the Snake told the tale of
Charles Sobraj, a kind of wayfaring guru who
charmed and robbed Western travellers around
Bombay and Kathmandu. The story of Sobraj,
the half-French half-Indian 'snake' of the title,
was true. Apart from that, though, I am quite
unable to provide the slightest detail; it is even
possible that my summary is inaccurate. But
what I recall perfectly is the spell Charles Sobraj
cast over me. On the way back from Andorra I
was still willing to lift my nose from the book to
admire a landscape, but by the time we reached
the Pic du Midi in southern France, I refused
point-blank to leave the car long enough for the stroll to the observation point. Admittedly, a
dense yellowish fog had rolled in over the mountain,
reducing visibility and the attractions of
such a stroll. Nevertheless, Josephine dumped
me there for a couple of hours while she sulked
alone among the clouds. Was it to exorcize the
serpent's spell that she insisted on a detour to
Lourdes? Since I had never been to this world
capital of miracles, I readily agreed. In any case,
to my fevered brain, Charles Sobraj had blended
into Bernadette, and the waters of the Adour
river had mingled with those of the Ganges.
The next day, 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 Trail of the
Snake, swollen and dog-eared, was relegated to
the back seat. I had not dared lay a finger on it
since morning, Josephine having decided that
my passion for the exotic saga masked a lack of
interest in her. It was the height of the pilgrim
season, and the city was jam-packed. Nevertheless,
I undertook a systematic hunt for a hotel
room, only to encounter - depending on thecalibre of the hotel - dismissive shrugs or murmurs
of 'We're really sorry'. Sweat had glued my
shirt to my ribs, and the prospect of a fresh
quarrel was looming by the time the receptionist
at the Hotel d'Angleterre - or d'Espagne, or des
Balkans, or whatever - informed us of a cancellation
in the portentous tones of a lawyer
announcing to a group of heirs the unexpected
demise of a rich uncle. Yes, they had a vacancy.
I refrained from saying 'It's a miracle,' for
instinct told me that in Lourdes you did not joke
about such things. The elevator, designed to
accommodate stretchers, was vast, and in the
shower ten minutes later, I realized that our
bathroom was also equipped for the handicapped.
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 half a 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 Frangois 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 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 sombre 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 Pare 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
during an apparition? One miracle and he'd end
up paralysed.'
A dozen heads turned to see who could have
uttered these disrespectful words. 'Idiot,' hissed
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 huge prayer-barn where
Mass is celebrated from 6 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 a present,' I said at once, with no inkling
of the exorbitant sum the shopkeeper would
soon extort from me, alleging that it was oneofakind.
That evening, in our hotel room, we
celebrated our acquisition, its nickering holy light bathing our frolics 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 retreat 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 favourite
pastimes: nightwalking. It was my personal way
of battling misfortune: just walking until I dropped.
Out on the street, Dutch youths guzzled
beer from big tankards. They had torn holes in
rubbish bags to make rain-capes. Stout bars
blocked the way to the grotto, but through them
I saw the glow of hundreds of guttering candles.
Much later, my wanderings brought me back to
the street with the souvenir shops. 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. Trail of
the Snake sat on my pillow like a jewel in its
setting. 'Well, well,' I murmured, 'Charles
Sobraj! I'd forgotten all about him.'
I recognized Josephine's writing. A huge T
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.
I love you, you idiot. Be kind to your poor
Josephine?
Luckily I had read beyond that point.
When I switched off the Holy Virgin, day was
just breaking.

Through a Glass, Darkly



Hunched in my wheelchair, I surreptitiously
watch my children 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 unpredictable animal. As
soon as we slow down, Celeste cradles my head in her bare arms, covers my forehead with noisy
tosses 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
no need to fit this made-up holiday into our
"Iemotional calendar. But this time we spent the
whole of this 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 humour one of the great
drawbacks of my condition.
But we can certainly play hangman, the
national pre-teen 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 is 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 weightlifting for me she has
turned into a genuine acrobat. With the flexibility
of a cat she does a backflip, 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 envisages
for the future (after schoolteacher,
super-model and florist). With the onlookers at
the Beach Club won over by her display, our
budding entertainer now launches into a songanddance
act, to the great dismay of Theophile,
who more than anything hates drawing attention
to himself. As shy and reclusive as his sister
is outgoing, he wholeheartedly hated me the day
I sought and obtained permission to ring the
school bell for the first day of class. No one can
predict whether Theophile will be happy; but it
is certain that he will live in the shadows.
I wonder how Celeste has managed to accumulate
such a repertoire of Sixties songs. Johnny
Hallyday, Sylvie Vartan, Sheila, Clo-Clo, Francoise Hardy - all the stars of that golden
era. Alongside universally familiar numbers,
Celeste sings forgotten hits that trail clouds of
nostalgia in their wake. Not since I was twelve,
when I endlessly played it on my record-player,
have I heard the Clo-Clo Francois 45 rpm 'Poor
Little Rich Girl'. Yet as soon as Celeste begins it
- somewhat off-key - every note, every verse,
every detail of back-up and orchestration comes
back to me with startling precision, right down
to the sound of the sea that filters through the
opening bars. Once again I see the album cover,
the singer's photo, his striped button-down
shirt. I longed for a shirt like his, but for me it
was unattainable: my mother considered it
tacky. I even relive the Saturday afternoon when
I bought the record. My father's cousin kept a
tiny record shop in the lower level of the Gare du
Nord. He was a good-natured giant with a yellow
Gitane cigarette dangling eternally from the corner
of his mouth. 'Poor little rich girl, alone on the beach, alone and so rich ... ' Time marches
00, and people have since disappeared. Mama died first. Next, Clo-Clo electrocuted himself. Then my father's gentle cousin, whose businesshad gone downhill, gave up the ghost, leaving an
inconsolable tribe of children and animals
behind. My wardrobe is now full of button-down
shirts, and I believe the small record shop now
sells chocolates. Since the Berck train leaves
from the Gare du Nord, perhaps one day I shall
ask someone to check on their way through.
'Well done, Celeste!' cries Sylvie. 'Mama, Pm
bored,' Theophile at once complains. It is 5 p.m. The chimes of the hospital clock, which usually
strike me as cheerful, assume funereal tones as
the time for farewells draws near. Wind begins to
whip up the sand. The tide has gone out so far
that swimmers are nothing but tiny dots on the
horizon. The children run to stretch their legs on
the beach once more before leaving, and Sylvie
and I remain alone and silent, her hand squeezing
my inert fingers. Behind dark glasses that
reflect a flawless sky, she softly weeps over our
shattered lives.
We return to my room for the final leavetaking.
'How do you feel, buddy?' asks Theophile.
His buddy's throat is tight, his hands are sunburnt,
and his coccyx hurts from sitting on it too
long, but he has had a wonderful day. And what about you kids, what will you carry back from
this field-trip into my endless solitude?
They have left. The car will already be speeding
towards Paris. I sink into contemplation of a
drawing brought by Celeste, which we immediately
pinned to the wall: a kind of two-headed
fish with blue-lashed eyes and multicoloured
scales. It has the shape of the mathematical
symbol for infinity. Sun streams in through the
window. It is the hour when its rays fall straight
upon my pillow. In the commotion of departure I
forgot to signal for the curtains to be drawn. A
nurse will be in before the world comes to an
end.Paris



I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the
sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life
still burns within me, but more and more of it is
reduced to the ashes of memory.
Since taking up residence in my cocoon I have
made two brief trips to the world of Paris medicine
to hear the verdict pronounced on me from
the diagnostic heights. On the first occasion, my
emotions got the better of me when my ambulance
happened to pass the ultramodern
high-rise where I once followed the reprehensible
calling of editor-in-chief of a famous
women's magazine. First, I recognized the building
next door - a Sixties antiquity, now
scheduled to be demolished, according to the
billboard out front. Then I saw our own all-glass
facade airily reflecting clouds and planes. On the
pavement were a few of those familiar-lookingfaces that one passes every day for ten years
without ever being able to put a name to them.
When I thought I glimpsed someone I actually
knew, walking behind a woman with her hair in
a bun and a burly man in work clothes, I nearly
unscrewed my head to see. Fate decreed otherwise.
Perhaps someone had caught sight of my
ambulance from our fifth-floor offices. I shed a
few tears as we passed the corner cafe where I
used to drop in for a bite. I can weep discreetly.
People think my eye is watering.
The second time I went to Paris, four months
later, I was unmoved by it. The streets were
decked out in summer finery, but for me it was
still winter, and what I saw through the ambulance
windows was just a movie background.
Film-makers call the process a rear screen projection,
with the hero's car speeding along a road
which unrolls behind him on a studio wall.
Hitchcock films owe much of their poetry to the
use of this process in its early, unperfected stages.
My own crossing of Paris left me indifferent. Yet
nothing was missing - housewives in flowery
dresses and youths on rollerblades, revving
buses, messengers cursing on their scooters. The
Place de l'Opera, straight out of a Dufy canvas.
The treetops foaming like surf against glass
building fronts, wisps of cloud in the sky. Nothing
was missing, except me. I was elsewhere.The Turnip
On 8 June it will be six months since my
new life began. Your letters are piling up
on the dresser, your drawings on my wall, and
since I cannot hope to answer each one of you I
have decided to issue these samizdat bulletins to
report on my life, my progress and my hopes. At
first I refused to believe that anything serious
had happened. In my semi-conscious state following
the coma, I thought I would shortly be
back in my Paris stamping-grounds, with just a
couple of canes to help me along.'
Those were the first words of the first mailing
of my monthly letter from Berck, which I
decided in late spring to send to my friends and
associates. Addressed to some sixty people, that
first bulletin created a mild stir and repaired
some of the damage caused by rumour. The city,
that monster with a hundred mouths and a
thousand ears, which knows nothing but sayseverything, had written me off. At the Cafe de
Flore, one of those base camps of Parisian snobbery
which send up rumours like flights of
carrier pigeons, some close friends of mine overheard
a conversation at the next table. The
gossipers were as greedy as vultures who have
just discovered a disembowelled antelope. 'Did
you know that Bauby is now a total vegetable?'
said one. 'Yes, I heard. A complete vegetable,'
came the reply. The word 'vegetable' must have
tasted sweet on the know-it-all's tongue, for it
came up several times between mouthfuls of
Welsh rarebit. The tone of voice left no doubt
that henceforth I belonged on a vegetable stall
and not to the human race. France was at peace.
One couldn't shoot the bearers of bad news.
Instead I would have to rely on myself if I wanted
to prove that my IQ was still higher than a
turnip's.
Thus was born a collective correspondence
which keeps me in touch with those I love. And
my hubris has had gratifying results. Apart from
an irrecoverable few who maintain a stubborn
silence, everybody now understands that he can
join me in my cocoon, even if sometimes the
cocoon takes me into unexplored territory.
I receive remarkable letters. They are opened
for me, unfolded and spread out before my eyes,
in a daily ritual that gives the arrival of the post
the character of a hushed and holy ceremony. I
carefully read each letter myself. Some of them
are serious in tone, discussing the meaning of
life, invoking the supremacy of the soul, the
mystery of every existence. And by a curious reversal, the people who focus most closely on
these fundamental questions tend to be people I
had known only superficially. Their small talk
had masked hidden depths. Had I been blind
and deaf, or does it take the glare of disaster to
show a person's true nature?
Other letters simply relate the small events that
punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at
dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child
crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment,
these small slices of life, these small gusts of
happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest.
A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern
stamp or a suburban postmark ... I hoard all
these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten
them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float inthe wind like a banner raised to the glory of
friendship.
It will keep the vultures at bay.

Outing



Stifling heat. But I would like to get out. It
has been weeks, perhaps months, since I last
left the hospital grounds for my wheelchair ride
on the promenade along the shore. Last time it
was still winter. Icy gusts whipped up clouds
of sand, and the few thickly-muffled strollers
leaned purposefully into the wind. Today I
would like to see Berck in summer attire, to see
the beach - which was deserted all winter packed
with carefree July crowds. To reach the
street from Sorrel, one has to cross three parking lots whose rough uneven surface sorely tries the
buttocks. I had forgotten how gruelling this
route was with its puddles and its potholes, its
cars inconsiderately parked on the pavements.
And then at last the sea. Beach umbrellas,
sailboats, and a human rampart of swimmers
complete the postcard effect. A holiday sea,
gentle and unthreatening. Nothing like the steelreflection visible from the hospital terraces. And
yet these are the same troughs, the same swell,
the same misty horizon.
We thread our way through a moving forest of
ice-cream cones and crimson thighs. Easy to
imagine licking a drop of vanilla from young
sun-reddened skin ... No one pays me any real
attention. Wheelchairs are as commonplace in
Berck as Ferraris in Monte Carlo, and poor dislocated
wheezing devils like me are everywhere.
This afternoon Claude, the young woman to
whom I am dictating this book, and Brice are
with me. I have known Claude for two weeks,
Brice for twenty-five years. It is strange to hear
my old partner in crime telling Claude about me.
My quick temper, my love of books, my immoderate
taste for good food, my red convertible nothing
is left out. Like a storyteller exhuming
the legends of a lost civilization. 'I didn't realize
you were like that,' says Claude. Henceforth my
life is divided between those who knew me
before and all the others. What kind of person
will those who only know me now think I was? I
do not even have a photo to show them.
We stop at the top of a big stairway that goes down to the beach bar and to a long line of
pastel-coloured cabanas. The stairs remind me
of the entrance to the Porte d'Auteuil metro
station in Paris. I used to climb them as a child
when returning from the old Molitor swimming
pool, my eyes red with chlorine. The pool was
demolished a few years ago. As for stairs, they
are now just dead-ends for me.
'Want to turn back?' asks Brice. I protest,
shaking my head vigorously. No question of
turning around until we have reached our real
goal. We move quickly past an old-fashioned
wooden carousel whose shrieking steam organ
pierces my eardrums. We pass a well-known
hospital character we call Fangio. Tall, dark
haired, athletic-looking, Fangio is rigid as a
poker. Unable to sit, he is permanently condemned
either to a vertical or horizontal
position. He gets about at amazing speed, lying
flat on his stomach on a vehicle he operates
himself, parting the crowds with yells of 'Look
out, here comes Fangio!' I know who he is, but
who is he really? I have no idea. Finally we reach
the farthest point of our journey, the very end of
the promenade. I have not insisted on coming allthis way just to gaze at the flawless seascape. I
have come to gorge on the aromas emanating
from a modest shack by the path leading away from the beach. Claude and Brice bring me to a
halt downwind. My nostrils quiver with pleasure
as they inhale a robust odour - intoxicating to
me, but one that most mortals cannot abide.
'Ooh!' says a disgusted voice behind me. 'What a
stench of grease!'

But I never tire of the smell of frying potatoes.

Twenty to One



That's it, it's come back to me. The horse's
name was 'MithraGrandchamp'.
Vincent must be on his way through Abbeville
by now. If you are driving from Paris, this is the
point when the trip begins to seem long. You
have left the unencumbered autoroute for a two
lane road choked by endless lines of cars and
lorries.
When this story takes place, more than ten
years ago, Vincent, myself, and a few others, had
the extraordinary good fortune to be putting out
a daily newspaper. It has since disappeared. The
owner at that time, a press-infatuated industrialist,
had been brave enough to entrust his
baby to the youngest editorial team in Paris, at
the very moment when dark political and financial
forces were plotting to snatch its controls.
Without our knowing it, we were the last cards
he was to lay on the table, and we hurled ourselvesone thousand per cent into the fray.
By now Vincent has reached the junction
where he leaves the Rouen and Crotoy roads on
his left and takes the minor road leading through
a string of small townships to Berck. Drivers who
don't know the way get lost in its twists and
turns. But Vincent, who has already come to see
me several times, keeps his bearings. To his
sense of direction he adds - carried to the
extreme - a sense of loyalty.
We worked seven days a week. Arriving early,
leaving late. We worked at weekends and sometimes
all night, blissfully doing the work of a
dozen with five pairs of hands. Vincent had ten major ideas every week: three brilliant, five
good, and two ridiculous. It was part of my job to
force him to choose among them, which went
against his impatient grain. He would have preferred
to act at once on every one of them, good
and bad.
I can hear him now, fuming at the steering
wheel and cursing the highway department. In
two years the autoroute will reach Berck, but
right now it is just an endless construction site,
pushing slowly forward behind its screen of bulldozers and heavy-duty vehicles.
We were inseparable. We lived, ate, drank,
slept, and dreamed only of and for the paper.
Whose idea was that afternoon at the racetrack?
It was a fine winter Sunday, blue, cold
and dry, and the horses were running at Vincennes.
Neither of us was a racing fan, but the
track correspondent valued us highly enough to
treat us to lunch at the Vincennes restaurant and
to give us the password to the Aladdin's cave of
racing: a tip. Mithra-Grandchamp was a sure
thing, he told us, a guaranteed winner, and since
the odds on him were twenty to one, a fat little
profit - much better than municipal bonds seemed
likely.
Now Vincent is on the outskirts of Berck and like
all my visitors - is wondering what the hell
he is doing here.
We had eaten an enjoyable lunch that day in
the restaurant overlooking the race-track. The
big dining room was frequented by gangsters in
their Sunday suits, pimps, parolees and other
shady characters who gravitate naturally to
horse racing. Sated, we puffed greedily on long
cigars and awaited the fourth race. In that hothouse atmosphere, criminal records bloomed
like orchids all around us.
Reaching the seafront, Vincent turns and
drives along the promenade. The throng of summer
visitors eclipses his winter memories of a
frigid deserted Berck.
At Vincennes we lingered so long in the dining
room that we became oblivious to the racing.
The betting counter slammed shut under our
noses before I had time to pull from my pocket
the roll of banknotes the people back at the
paper had entrusted to me. Despite our attempts
at discretion, Mithra-Grandchamp's name had
made the rounds of the newspaper. Rumour had
turned him into a mythic beast everyone was
determined to bet on. All we could do was watch
the race and hope ... At the last turn MithraGrandchamp
began to pull away. Entering the
final stretch he had a lead of five lengths, and we
watched in a dream as he crossed the finish line a
good forty yards ahead of his closest pursuer.
Back at the paper they must have been going
wild around the TV screen.
Vincent's car slips into the hospital parking
lot. Brilliant sunshine. This is where my visitors,
hearts in mouths, need fortitude to brave the few
yards that separate me from the world: the automatic
glass doors, lift number seven, and the
horrible little corridor leading to Room 119. All
you can see through the half-open doors are
bedridden wretches whom fate has cast to the far
edge of life. Some visitors probably stand for a
moment outside my room so that they can greet
me with firmer voices and drier eyes. When they
finally come in, they are gasping for air like
divers whose oxygen has failed them. I even
know of some who turned tail and fled back to
Paris, their resolve abandoning them on my very
threshold.
Vincent knocks and enters soundlessly. I have
become so inured to the look on other people's
faces that I scarcely notice the transient gleam of
fear. Or, in any case, it no longer shakes me quite
so much. I try to compose features atrophied by
paralysis into what I hope is a welcoming smile.
Vincent answers this grimace with a kiss on my
forehead. He hasn't changed. His crest of red
hair, his sullen expression, his stocky physique,
his habit of shifting from one foot to the other,
give him the look of a Welsh shop-steward visiting a mate injured in a mine explosion. His
guard held a little low, Vincent bobs forward like
a prizefighter in the tough-tenderweight division.
On Mithra-Grandchamp day, after that
disastrous win, he had simply muttered: 'Idiots!
We're complete idiots! When we get back to the
office we'll be history!' His favourite expression.
Frankly, I had forgotten MithraGrandchamp.
The memory of that event has
only just come back to me, now doubly painful:
regret for a vanished past, and above all remorse
for lost opportunities. Mithra-Grandchamp is
the women we were unable to love, the chances
we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we
allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that
my whole life was nothing but a string of those
small near-misses: a race whose result we know
beforehand, but in which we fail to bet on the
winner. By the way, we managed to pay back all
our colleagues.

Loaded for Duck



On top of the various discomforts that
accompany locked-in syndrome, I suffer
from a serious hearing disorder. My right ear is
completely blocked and my left ear amplifies
and distorts all sounds farther than ten feet
away. When a plane tows an ad for the local
theme park over the beach I could swear that a
coffee-mill has been grafted on to my eardrum.
But that noise is only fleeting. Much more disturbing
is the permanent racket that assails me
from the corridor whenever they forget to shut
my door, despite all my efforts to alert people to
my hearing problems. Heels clatter on the linoleum,
carts crash into one another, hospital
workers hail one another with the voices of
stockbrokers trying to liquidate, radios nobody
listens to are turned on, and on top of everything
else a floor-waxer sends out an auditory foretaste
of hell. There are also a few frightful patients. Iknow some whose only pleasure is to listen to the
same cassette over and over again. I had a very
young neighbour who was given a velveteen
duck equipped with a sophisticated detection
device. It emitted a reedy, piercing quack whenever
anyone entered the room, in other words
twenty-five times a day. Luckily the little patient
went home before I could carry out my plan to
exterminate the duck. But I am keeping it in
readiness: you never know what horrors tearful
families may bestow on their young. However,
the first prize for eccentric neighbours goes to a
woman patient who emerged demented from a
coma. She bit nurses, seized orderlies by their
genitals, and was unable to request a glass of
water without screaming 'Fire!' At first these
false alarms had everyone dashing to action
stations; then, wearied by the struggle, they
ended up letting her yell her fill at all hours of the
day and night. Her antics gave our neurology
section a heady cuckoo's nest atmosphere, and I
was almost sorry when they removed our friend
to yell 'Help! Murder!' elsewhere.
Far from such din, when blessed silence
returns, I can listen to the butterflies that flutter
inside my head. To hear them, one must be calm
and pay close attention, for their wingbeats are
barely audible. Loud breathing is enough to
drown them out. This is astonishing: my hearing
does not improve, yet I hear them better and
better. I must have the ear of a butterfly.Sunday



Through the window I watch the reddish
yellow hospital buildings light up under the
sun's first rays. The brickwork takes on exactly
the same shade of pink as the Greek grammar
book I had at school. I wasn't a brilliant Hellenist
(to put it mildly), but I love that warm deep
shade: for me it still conjures up a world of books
and study, in which we consorted with Alcibiades'
dog and the heroes of Thermopylae.
'Antique pink' is what hardware shops call it. It
has absolutely no resemblance to the candy-floss
pink of the hospital corridors. And even less to
the mauve that coats the skirting boards and
window frames in my room, which makes them
look like the wrapping on a cheap perfume.
Sunday. I dread Sunday, for if I am unlucky
enough to have no visitors there will be nothing
at all to break the dreary passage of the hours.
No physiotherapist, no speech pathologist, noshrink. Sunday is crossing the desert, its only
oasis a sponge bath even more perfunctory than
usual. On such days the nursing staff is plunged
into gloomy lethargy by the delayed effects of
Saturday-night drinking, coupled with regret at
missing the family picnic, the trip to the fair, or
the shrimp-fishing denied them by the Sunday
duty roster. The bath I am given bears more
resemblance to drawing and quartering than to
hydrotherapy. A triple dose of the finest eau de
toilette fails to mask the reality: I stink.
Sunday. If the TV is turned on, it is vital to
choose the right channel. It is a matter of strategy.
For three or four hours are likely to go by
before the return of the kindly soul who can
change channels. Sometimes it is wiser to forgo
an interesting programme if it is followed by a
tearful soap opera, a silly game show or a raucous
talk show. Violent applause hurts my ears.
I prefer the peace of documentaries on art, history
or animals. I watch them without the sound,
the way you watch flames in a fireplace.
Sunday. The bell gravely tolls the hours. The
small Health Department calendar on the wall,
whittled away day by day, announces that it is already August. Mysterious paradox: time, motionless
here, gallops out there. In my contracted
world the hours drag on but the months flash by.
I can't believe it's August. Friends, their wives
and children, have scattered to the summer
winds. In my thoughts I steal into their summer
quarters - never mind if doing so tugs at my
heart. In Brittany a pack of children returns
from the market on bikes, every face radiant
with laughter. Some of these kids have long since
entered the age of major adolescent concerns,
but along these rhododendron-lined Breton
roads, everyone rediscovers lost innocence. This
afternoon they will be boating around the island, the small outboard labouring against the current. Someone will be stretched out in the bows, eyes closed, arm trailing in the cool water. In the
South a burning sun insists you retreat into the
cool depths of the house. You fill sketchbooks
with watercolours. A small cat with a broken leg
seeks shady corners in the priest's garden, and a
little farther on, in the flat Camargue delta country,
a cluster of young bulls skirts a marsh that
gives off a smell of aniseed. And all over the
country activities are under way for the greatdomestic event of the day. I know mothers everywhere
are tired of preparing it, but for me it is a
legendary forgotten ritual: lunch.
Sunday. I contemplate my books, piled up on
the windowsill to constitute a small library; a
rather useless one, for today no one will come to
read them to me. Seneca, Zola, Chateaubriand
and Valery Larbaud are right there, three feet
away, just out of reach. A very black fly settles on
my nose. I waggle my head to unseat him. He
digs in. Olympic wrestling is child's play compared
to this. Sunday.

The Ladies of Hong Kong



I loved to travel. Fortunately I have stored
away enough pictures, smells and sensations
over the course of the years to enable me to leave
Berck far behind on days when a leaden sky
rules out any chance of going outdoors. They are
strange wanderings. The sour smell of a New
York bar. The odour of poverty in a Rangoon
market. Little bits of the world. The white icy
nights of Saint Petersburg, or the unbelievably
molten sun at Furnace Creek in the Nevada
desert. This week has been somewhat special. At
dawn every day I have flown to Hong Kong
where the international editions of my magazine
are holding a conference. Note that I still say 'my
magazine', despite the misleading nature of the
words, as if that possessive pronoun were one of
the fragile threads linking me to the living
world.
In Hong Kong I have a little trouble findingmy way, for unlike many other of my destinations,
this city is one I have never actually
visited. Every time the opportunity arose, malicious
fate kept me from my goal. When I did not
fall sick on the eve of a departure, I lost my
passport, or a reporting assignment sent me
elsewhere. In short, chance always turned me
back at the border. Once I gave up my seat to
Jean-Paul K, who had not yet been taken hostage
by the Hezbollah. He would spend several
years in a darkened Beirut dungeon, endlessly
reciting the wines of the Bordeaux Classification
of 1855 to keep from going mad. On his return
from Hong Kong, he brought me back a cordless
phone, at that time the very latest thing. I
remember his laughing eyes behind their round
glasses. I was very fond of Jean-Paul, but I never
saw him again after his release from Beirut. I
suppose I was ashamed of playing at being
commander-in-chief in the frothy world of fashion
magazines while he wrestled with life on its
most brutal terms. Now I am the prisoner and he
the free man. And since I don't have the chateaux
of the Medoc region at my fingertips, I
have had to choose another kind of litany to fill my empty hours: I count the countries where my
magazine is published. There are already
twenty-eight members in this United Nations of
international glamour.
And where are they now, all my beautiful
colleagues who worked so tirelessly as ambassadors
of the French style? They would stand in
the conference rooms of international hotels,
fielding a day-long barrage of questions in Chinese,
English, That, Portuguese or Czech as they
tried to answer that most metaphysical of questions:
'Who is the typical Elle woman?' I picture
them now wandering about Hong Kong, walking
down neon-bright streets where pocket computers
and noodle soup are sold, trotting behind
the eternal bow-tie of our Chief Executive Officer
as he leads his troops to the charge.
Part Cyrano, part Bonaparte, he slows his pace
only before the highest skyscrapers, and then
just to scowl as though about to devour them.
Which way, General? Should we take the
hydrofoil and gamble away a handful of dollars
in the stews of Macao or should we repair to the
Felix Bar in the Peninsula Hotel, decorated by
the French designer Philippe S? Vanity impelsme towards the second option. The fact is, my
likeness adorns the back of a chair in that lofty
luxurious watering hole. I, who hate to have my
photo taken, was one of dozens of Parisians
whose portraits Philippe S incorporated into the
decor. That photo of me, of course, was taken
some weeks before I turned into a scarecrow. I
have no idea whether my chair is more or less
popular than the others, but if you go there for
God's sake don't tell the barman what happened
to me. They say that all Chinese are superstitious,
and if my true fate were known, not one
of those charming little Chinese miniskirts
would ever dare sit on me again.

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, chainsmoking
and talking fistfights and motorbikes. Their
already-stooped shoulders all 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 rollers. Although at the
moment the page is utterly blank, I am convinced
that one day there will be a message there
for me. I am waiting.

At the Wax Museum





In a dream last night I visited Paris's wax
museum, the Musee Grevin. 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 uniform.
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
in fact the nurses and orderlies who take 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 the
ones 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, left me all night long with the TV on,
let me lie in a painful position despite my protests.
For a few minutes or a few hours I would
cheerfully have killed them. And 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 grey hair and the
gravity with which he utters the unvarying
judgement: '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. They are
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. Some of the figures were very
poor likenesses. 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 colours.
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. His steel-rimmed glasses,
perched on the end of his nose, completed
the picture of a court-room prima donna. Florence,
pinning children's drawings on a cork
board, 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 that affectionate
gravity I feel whenever these friends
come to see me.
I tried to continue the tour to 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 the 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 a.m., anonly son at noon, he could dig up four sisters by
mid-afternoon, 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 himself 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, number and advertising
slogans 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 Napoleon to
victory, and survived Verdun. Since I have just
been wounded in the D-Day landings I cannot
swear that I will join the air-drop into Dien Bien
Phu. Under the physiotherapist's gaze I am a
Tour de France long-shot on the verge of pulling
off a famous 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 favourites. 'I swear!'A Day in the Life'



Here we come to the end of the road - that
disastrous Friday, 8 December, 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 girl?
Everything that day was grey, 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
which 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 car; the importer had put a car and
driver at my disposal for the whole day. At the
appointed hour a businesslike young man was
waiting outside, leaning against a gunmetal
grey 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 Theophile and I have not had a heart-to-heart, a man-to-man exchange, since I moved out of the family home in July. I plan to take him to the theatre 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 band reaches a crescendo and
holds it until the explosion of the final note. Like a piano crashing down seven floors. We arrive at Levallois. The BMW stops outside my office. I arrange to meet the driver at 3 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, formerly the most popular woman in
France, tenured for life at the top spot on the
magazine's imaginary roll of honour. 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 which
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 skilful 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 three-quarter-hour 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 beardscratchings
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 death expected 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 for
ever. To save time I sneaked out through myoffice without saying goodbye to anyone. By the
time 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: cancelling the theatre, postponing my
weekend with Theophile, retreating to my bed
with a plate of cream 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 autoroute.'
'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-Poincare Hospital at Garches. I cannot
pass this spot without recalling a sinister
childhood episode. When I was at the Lycee
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 many 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 Theophile
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. Theophile 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 shall try 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
junction 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
Theophile 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,
Well I just had to laugh, I saw the photograph. In
no time we are at the clinic. People are running
about frantically. 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. In any case, we would have got
there late. We'll go tomorrow night. Where could
Theophile have got to? And I sink into a coma.Season of Renewal

Summer is nearly over. The nights grow chilly,
and once again I am snuggled beneath thick
blue blankets stamped 'Paris Hospitals'. Each
day brings its assortment of familiar faces: linen
maid, dentist, postman, a nurse who has just had
a grandson, Thomas, and the man who last June
broke his finger on a bedrail. I rediscover old
landmarks, old habits: and this, the start of my
first autumn season at the hospital, has made
one thing very plain -I have indeed begun a new
life, and that life is here, in this bed, that wheelchair
and those corridors. Nowhere else.
September means the end of holidays, it
means back to school and to work, and here at
the hospital it's time to start a new season. I've
made some progress. I can now grunt the little
song about the kangaroo, musical testimonial to
my progress in speech therapy:The Kangaroo escaped the zoo.
'Goodbye zoo!' cried Kangaroo ...
Cleared the wall with one clean jump,
Leapt across with a great big thump ...

But here at Berck I hear only the faintest echoes
of the outside world's collective return to work
and responsibility ... its return to the world of
literature and journalism and school, to the
workaday world of Paris. I shall hear more about
it soon, when my friends start journeying back to
Berck with their summer's worth of news. It
seems that Theophile now goes around in sneakers
whose heels light up every time he takes a
step. You can follow him in the dark. Meanwhile
I am savouring this last week of August with a
heart that is almost light, because for the first
time in a long while I don't have that awful sense
of a countdown - the feeling triggered at the
beginning of a holiday that inevitably spoils a
good part of it.

Her elbows on the small mobile formica table
that serves as her desk, Claude is reading out these
pages we have patiently extracted from the void
every afternoon for the past two months. Some pages I am pleased to see again. Others are disappointing.
Do they add up to a book? As I listen
to Claude I study her dark hair, her very pale
cheeks which sun and wind have scarcely touched
with pink, the long bluish veins on her hands, and
her things scattered about the room. I will put
them in my mind's scrapbook as reminders of a
summer of hard work. The big blue notebook
whose pages she fills with her neat, formal handwriting;
the pencil case like the ones
schoolchildren use, full of spare ballpoints: the
heap of paper napkins ready for my worst
coughing-and-spitting fits; and the red raffia
purse in which she periodically rummages for
coins for the coffee machine. Her purse is half
open, and I see a hotel-room key, a metro ticket
and a hundred-franc note folded in four, like
objects brought back by a space probe sent to
earth to study how earthlings live, travel and trade
with one another. The sight leaves me pensive and
confused. Does the cosmos contain keys for opening
up my cocoon? A metro line with no terminus?
A currency strong enough to buy my freedom
back? We must keep looking. Ill be off now.
Berck-Plage, July-August 1996The Association du Locked-In Syndrome (ALIS),
set up by Jean-Dominique Bauby. is at:
38 Boulevard JeanJaures
92100 BoulogneBillancourt
France