Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [94]
“I’m not fixating, doctor, life put me in the fix I’m in, I have to stay in my room at one end of the street, it shut me up, it hammered me down, and you’re at the other end, one foot in my grave and the other among the fortunate of the earth. I’m stuck with the whole length of this street that’s locked away behind surrounding walls oozing with misery and pain. Only cemetery walls look that much like the walls of asylums and prisons. You don’t know who these walls separate from whom, the living from the dead, the normal from the abnormal, honest people from criminals, the sick from the healthy, animals from human beings—they separate some from others, that’s all you have to know. All you have to do is imagine that behind the walls it’s more than a zoo, it’s a jungle, Africa, hell, and the ghetto of living. Nobody walks on rue de la Santé, and car traffic is rare. People who live here are invisible, protected by their anonymity. Their children don’t play on the sidewalk. Nobody would get the idea of moving here, facing the walls, except for Samuel Beckett who chose to live right across from the prison. He used to say he’d always be on the prisoners’ side, but most of the prisoners never read Beckett; he lived on the other side of the street, the other side of the walls. The walls have the thickness of reality, but on both sides of the walls life has the consistency of a fantasy. On rue de la Santé you can’t see anything but you can hear voices, groans, and shouts, moans, calls, frenzies, revolts, and death throes. You’re never sure. It’s like being at the edge of a deep forest. It’s like a no-man’s-land, the Mexican border or the Berlin wall. Good happy honest normal people never go near asylums, prisons, or hospitals. They have no idea the centuries-old convents even exist. They don’t know what kind of life is lived there, what vices are practiced, or what types of surprises they’re cooking up for us there.
“Life here is not Parisian, no sidewalk cafés, no shops, no strolling around in the sun. It’s a life of shadows. The banks of the Seine and the Champs-Élysées are elsewhere, but the Seine is a bland sauce and the Champs-Élysées is paved with soft stones. The History of France is declaimed out there, under l’Arc de Triomphe. Paris is a grandiloquent city; it shines but leaves everyone in the dark, and the featherless Gallic Rooster is disguised as a phosphorescent peacock. The history of the French people is no longer written in newspapers or books, it went to sleep somewhere between long ago and formerly, between elsewhere and further away, but rue de la Santé is the bottom you hit before you bounce up again. De Gaulle and Mitterrand were treated in Cochin, all the great criminals made a stay in the prison, and in Sainte-Anne the pathways are called Maupassant, Baudelaire, or Antonin Artaud. Rue de la Santé is a black knife, a cutthroat alley, a cold trench, a fault, a slit, a scar, a short silence, and a draft of cold air. Every particle of air is a piece of shrapnel slashing through your brain. Far from the crowd, the passerby you encounter is an escapee, a survivor on suspended sentence, a jailbird, an abnormal person, or even an anchorite. At any rate a foreigner, not a citizen. He can’t be a tourist, an employee, or a storekeeper. A neighbor, perhaps, but from what side? He can’t ignore you, there’s nowhere he can look, he wants to hug you—or bump you off. He seems to know you, or recognize you. He already saw you in good company when he was in the padded cell, or solitary, or on a gurney, in prayer or