Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [96]
Esophagus
“I ended up at Cochin Hospital. Not really ended. Not really continued. I stopped there. The Achard wing is a huge blue thing that would bring anybody down, but from the ninth floor you can look out over all of Paris. At night it looks like the scintillating sea. I had become the ghost of a big crow and I had a rotten egg in my esophagus. A bodyguard never left my side: It was a kind of giraffe or gibbet from which a goiter was hanging, a bladder, a belly heavy from chemotherapy. I also had a syringe on my lap, and in my chest a tube between a vein and pipes through which substances were flowing. Every morning a stretcher bearer would come get me and take me to an ambulance that crossed the city toward the Place Gambetta. In a sci-fi-setting I was bombarded by X-rays to the music of Keith Jarrett. In the big waiting room where a horde of frightened paupers were waiting, I would smoke Craven “A”s while waiting for the ambulance drivers to come back. I no longer thought about downing large quantities of alcohol, I was much calmer. I had no desire to get out of there and into a café, didn’t feel like picking up girls either. I had all I needed, because on the one hand I could see my life like a real thing and not a beautiful piece of fruit, and on the other my life was an object of care for all the people who surrounded me, and that gave it a certain reinforced substance. I was naked in my life but that life was an air cushion. The weight I’d lost was the weight of guilt, bad fat. I felt unbelievably forgiven. Of course I was wrong, but as long as I was in the hospital or even in the ambulance listening to the drivers’ bullshit, I was untouchable—admirably lucid, but only relevant on one side of the wall, nine stories higher than other peoples’ lives.”
Adoration
“I looked out over rue de la Santé—I think I’ve said the main things about it already—and the square courtyard of a little Ursuline convent. At 10 in the morning a window in the building would open and a woman would appear in smiling majesty, and the memory of her majestic smile would accompany me all day through the obedient time at the hospital, for I rediscovered in her slow, secluded life the secret impatience of childhood time, when there is a century from one Christmas to another and two hundred thousand palpitations of the heart between two kisses.
“‘She’s not smiling, she’s making a face,’ my roommate would say. He was really nasty in his unhappiness, and his company was a nasty face behind my back.
“I knew that once I fell out of my observatory down there, driven out of the asylum parenthesis, everything would move very quickly between two fatal accidents and from sequels to metastases, from personal bankruptcy to planetary cataclysm, everything would go bust, irremediably, from day to day for centuries and centuries, with no ritual to consecrate the moment or drunkenness ever again to sublimate it, no surprise would shake up the exhaustion of living when the memory and consolation I had found was erased, not near that Ur-suline nun I couldn’t see very well with my own eyes from so far away, my eyes fucked up by the drugs, but I could have walked at least once barefoot into emptiness halfway to the sky to meet her, barefoot, in pajamas, light, on the invisible tightrope of my desire, even after her arms get tired of opening and sorry that my late lamented desire is worn out and dangles down, defeated by medication and other things in my mental constitution, this being noted well