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.
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 ‘tu’, 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 Eugénie. 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 Napoléon 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 Eugénie’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 Eugénie 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 Eugénie, 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 Eugénie 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.
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 façade 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
