she is, on the balcony with her bare breasts rising up to the sun. And she has breakfasted, and so have I, on three cups of coffee and a buttered croissant.
Her breasts have remained younger than the rest of her body. When I see her rub them with oil and point them toward the fierce sunlight, I think of the Zubaran painting in the museum at Montpellier which shows a young and rather daft-looking St. Agatha cheerfully holding out a platter on which her two severed breasts are arranged, ordinary and bloodless as jam pastries.
One morning something odd happened to my wife. She was sitting on the balcony working on her new translation of Valéry’s early poems and she had a cup of coffee before her. I should explain that the dishes and cutlery and cooking things in the flat are supplied, and that this particular coffee cup was made of a sort of tinted glass in a pattern that can be found in any cheap chain store in France. Suddenly, or so she told me later, there was a cracking sound, and her cup lay in a thousand pieces in the saucer.
It had simply exploded. She wondered at first if she had been shot at with an air rifle. There was another apartment building opposite under construction, and at any time of the day workmen could be seen standing on the roof. But clearly it would have required an extraordinary marksman to pick off a cup of coffee like that from such a distance. And when she sifted through the slivers of glass, which she did with extreme care, she found no sign of a pellet.
The incident unnerved her. She put on her blouse when she went out on the balcony later in the day, but I noticed she kept a cup of coffee in the middle of the table as though daring a second explosion to occur.
I knew, though I’m not a scientist, that occasionally tempered glass fractures spontaneously. It’s thought to come about by a combination of heat, light and pressure. It happens sometimes to the windshields of automobiles, though it is extremely rare and not entirely understood.
I told all this to my wife. “I still don’t understand how it could have happened,” she said. I explained again, knowing my explanation was vague and lacking in precision. I was anxious to reassure her. I reached down and put my arms around her, and that was how my accident occurred. She turned to look at me, and as she did so, the back of her earring tore the skin of my face.
It was surprising how long the tear was, about four inches in all, and it was deeper than just a scratch, although the blood oozed out slowly, as though with reluctance. We both realized I would require stitches.
The doctor in the Montpellier clinic spoke almost perfect English, but with a peculiar tonelessness, rather like one of those old-fashioned adding machines clicking away. “You will require a general anesthetic,” he told me. “You will be required to remain in the hospital overnight.”
My wife was weeping. She kept saying, “If only I hadn’t turned my head just at that moment.”
The doctor explained that since the hospital was full, I would have to share a room. Always, he said, gesturing neatly with both hands, always at vacation time there were accidents. A special government committee, in fact, had been established to look into this phenomenon of accidents de la vacances, and someone had suggested that perhaps it might be the simplest solution if vacations were eliminated entirely.
I speak French fluently, having grown up in Montreal, but I have difficulty judging the tone of certain speakers. I don’t know when someone—the doctor, for example—is speaking ironically or sincerely; this has always seemed to me to be a serious handicap.
While still under the anesthetic I was put into a room occupied by a young man who had been in a motorcycle accident. He had two broken legs and a shattered vertebra and was almost completely covered in white plaster. Only his face was uncovered, a young face with closed eyes and smooth skin. I put my hand on my own face, which was numb beneath the dressing, and wondered for the first time if I would be left with a scar.
My wife came to sit by my bed for a while. She was no longer crying. She had, in fact, been shopping and had bought a new pale yellow cardigan with white flowers around the neck, very fresh and springlike. I was touched to see that she had removed her earrings. On her ear lobes there was nothing but a faint dimple, the tiny holes made, she once told me, by her own mother when she was fourteen years old.
There seemed little to talk about, but she had bought a Herald Tribune, something she normally refuses to do. She scorns the Herald Tribune, its thinness and its effete news coverage. And it’s her belief that when you are in another country you should make an attempt to speak and read the language of that country. The last time she allowed herself to buy a Herald Tribune was in 1968, the week of Trudeau’s first election.
The young man with the broken legs was moaning in his sleep. “I hope he doesn’t go on like this all night,” she said. “You won’t get any sleep at this rate.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’ll be fine tomorrow.”
“Do you think we should still plan to go over to Aigues Mortes?” she asked, naming the place we try to visit every summer. Aigues Mortes is, as many people have discovered, an extraordinary medieval port with a twelfth-century wall in near-perfect condition. It has become a habit with my wife and me to go there each year and walk around this wall briskly, a distance of a mile. After that we take a tour through the Tower of Constance with an ancient and eccentric guide, and then we finish off the afternoon with a glass of white wine in the town square.
“It wouldn’t feel like a holiday if we didn’t do our usual run to Aigues Mortes,” my wife said in a rather loud cheerful voice, the sort of voice visitors often acquire when they come to cheer the sick.
The man with the broken legs began to moan loudly and, after a minute, to sob. My wife went over to him and asked if she could do anything for him. His eyes were still closed, and she leaned over and spoke into his ear.
“Am I dead?” he asked her in English. “Did you say I was dead?”
“Of course you aren’t dead,” she said, and smiled over her shoulder at me. “You’re just coming out of the anesthetic and you’re not dead at all.”
“You said I was dead,” he said to her in clear carrying British tones. “In French.”
Then she understood. “No, we were talking about Aigues Mortes. It’s the name of a little town near here.”
He seemed to need a moment to think about this.
“It means dead waters,” my wife told him. “Though it’s far from dead.”
This seemed to satisfy him, and he drifted off to sleep again.
“Well,” my wife said, “I’d better be off. You’ll be wanting to get to sleep yourself.”
“Yes,” I said. “That damned anesthetic, it’s really knocked me for a loop.”
“Shall I leave you the Herald Tribune?” she asked. “Or are you too tired to read tonight?”
“You take it,” I told her. “Unless there’s any Canadian news in it.”
That’s another thing we don’t like about the Herald Tribune. There’s hardly ever any news from home, or if there is, it’s condensed and buried on a back page.
She sat down again on the visitor’s chair and drew her cardigan close around her. In the last year she’s aged, and I’m grieved that I’m unable to help her fight
