Small Lives (15 page)

If a change in surroundings did not matter to him, why then did he refuse the standard treatment? He remained in his place, a small silhouette, withdrawn, as if in anticipation of its own disappearance; and he would have been pathetic if his irritating secret had not aggrandized him, the noble absurdity of his resolution, the finality of that deadline – it was the strange overture of his death, peopled or not by angels, that he contemplated, and the objects of his astonished gaze seemed struck by the surprise of it; the courtyard filled with its vibrant lindens, onto which opened the brightly enameled morgue, incongruous as a wash basin in a banquet hall, thus became an exemplary landscape in which I, in my turn, lost myself. Even my reading was populated with Father Foucaults, lowered hats and unfathomable looks, lightweight
human rags thrown to the side of an empty road by the “make way, churl!” of a knight, haughty and sad, galloping to Tiffauges, a terrified child across his saddle; and among them, one, in appearance the most resigned, remained in the middle of the road, his hat in his humble hands, watched the knight bearing down on him, swearing, and lay down forever in the grass, a horseshoe-shaped wound bleeding at his temple. He was similarly in the path of the doctors, and no less deferent toward them than his ancestors had been toward the passing of the dark Vendée eviscerator; to those other vivisectionists, those with neither pleasure nor remorse, facing neither death at the stake nor hope of redemption, he opposed his humble, smiling protestations; modestly but intractably, he disdained being led where “his good” required that he should go. He was, himself, too insignificant to have the key to this “good” that others possessed, the use of which, they demonstrated to him, had all the appearances of a duty; he stuck to his position nevertheless, shrank from that duty, abandoned himself, body and worldly goods, to that deadly sin: contempt for the body and its good, which is worse than heresy in the eyes of medical dogma. He wanted to be accountable only to death, and gently resisted the advances of its clergy.

And thus the clerics harassed him daily. One morning I was torn from my reading by the dramatic entrance of a larger delegation than usual, like captains of a night round with all their privates; they went straight to Father Foucault's bed: one doctor with a sharp profile, authoritative and dignified as a grand inquisitor, another younger, more athletic one, though double-chinned under his goatee, a handful of interns, a twittering swarm of nurses; the whole regiment was sent to
convert the old heretic; they went right to the question extraordinary. Father Foucault was sitting in his favorite spot; he had gotten up, they had him sit down again; and the sun, which left the garrulous heads of the still standing doctors in the shadows, flooded his hard skull and his stubbornly closed mouth; you would have thought that the doctors of
The Anatomy Lesson
had switched canvases and were assembled behind
The Alchemist
at his window, filling his usual space for meditation with their powerful, starched white presences, the brouhaha of their knowledge. Intimidated by this unusual interest taken in him, and ashamed at not being able to respond, the old man hardly dared to look at them and, with quick, nervous glances, still sought advice from the lindens, the warm shade, the cool doorway, with its familiar, reassuring presence. Perhaps that was how Saint Anthony considered his cross and the small water pitcher in his hut; because surely they came very close to stirring him, if not convincing him, these tempters who spoke to him of Parisian hospitals as splendid as palaces, of recovery, of reasonable beings and those who, out of pure ignorance, are not so reasonable; moreover, the chief doctor was sincere; he had a good heart under his professional self-importance and his condottiere's mask; he felt a sort of sympathy for the pig-headed old man. I would like to believe that it was that sympathy, more than the arguments of reason, to which Father Foucault felt an obligation to respond, because he did respond; and short as it was, his response was more enlightening and definitive than a long speech; he raised his eyes to his tormentor, seemed to waver under the weight of his astonishment, forever fresh and increased by the burden of what he was going to say, and, with
the same shrug of both shoulders with which he might have lowered a sack of flour, apologetically, but in a voice so strangely clear that the whole ward heard it, he said, “I am illiterate.”

I fell back onto my pillow; an intoxicating joy and sadness transported me; a feeling of infinite brotherhood overwhelmed me; in this world of the learned and the pontificators, someone, like me perhaps, thought that he knew nothing and wished to die. The hospital ward resounded with Gregorian chants.

The doctors disbanded like a flight of sparrows that had gathered by mistake or stupidity under the arches, and that the monody now dispersed; little cantor in the aisle, I did not dare lift my eyes to the unbending choirmaster, unknowing and unacknowledged, whose ignorance of neumatic notation made the song more pure. The lindens hummed; in the shade of their sonorous columns, between two laughing orderlies, a corpse under its cover rolled toward the high altar of the morgue.

Father Foucault would not go to Paris. Already this provincial town, and no doubt even his own village, seemed to him inhabited by the erudite, fine connoisseurs of the human soul and users of its common currency, which was written; teachers, door-to-door salesmen, doctors, even farmers, all knew, signed, and decided, with varying degrees of boastfulness; and he did not question that learning, which others possessed in so flagrant a fashion. Who knows, perhaps they could name the date of their deaths, those who knew how to write the word, “death.” He alone understood nothing, hardly decided
anything; he could not bear that vaguely monstrous incompetence, and perhaps with good reason; life and its authorized annotators had certainly made him well aware that to be illiterate, today, was some kind of monstrosity, and to admit to it, monstrous. What would it be like in Paris, where every day he would have to repeat that admission, without a young, obliging employer at his side to fill out the famous, formidable “papers”? What new disgraces would he have to swallow, ignoramus without equal, and old, and sick, in that city where even the walls were lettered, the bridges historic, and the merchandise and signs in the shops incomprehensible? This capital where the hospitals were parliaments, the doctors the most learned in the eyes of the learned doctors here, the lowest nurse a Madame Curie? What would he be in their hands, he who could not even read a newspaper?

He would stay here, and die of it; there perhaps, he could be cured, but at the cost of his shame; above all, he would not have atoned for, magnificently paid with his death for his crime of not knowing. That view of things was not so naïve; it helped me to understand myself. I too had hypostatized learning and letters into mythological categories, from which I was excluded; I was the forsaken illiterate at the foot of Olympus where all the others, the Great Authors and Difficult Readers, read and made child's play of incomparable pages; and the divine language was forbidden to my rough tongue.

I also was told that in Paris awaited me, perhaps, a kind of healing; but alas I knew that if I went there to offer my immodest, parsimonious writings, my bluff would immediately be called; they would see that I was, in some way, “illiterate.” The editors would be to me what the implacable typists would have been to Father Foucault, pointing
with a marble finger at the vertiginous blank spaces on a form; guardians of the gates, omniscient Anubises with their long teeth, editors and typists would have disgraced us both before devouring us. Under the imperfect trompe-l'oeil of the letter, they would have guessed that I was steeped in a lack of knowledge, chaos, profound illiteracy, an iceberg of soot of which the visible part was only a decoy; and they would have denounced the charlatan. For me to judge myself worthy of confronting Anubis, the invisible part too would have to be polished with words, perfectly frozen like the unalterable diamond of a dictionary. But I was alive, and since my life was not a dictionary, since the words of which I had wanted to be constituted from head to foot always escaped me, I thus lied in claiming to be a writer; and I chastised my imposture, demolished my few words in the incoherence of drunkenness, aspired to mutism or to madness, and aping the “hideous laugh of the idiot,” I delivered myself up, still lying, to a thousand sham deaths.

Father Foucault was more a writer than I was: in the absence of the letter, he preferred death.

As for me, I hardly wrote; nor did I dare to die; I lived in the imperfect letter, the perfection of death terrified me. Like Father Foucault however, I knew that I possessed nothing; but, like my aggressor, I had wanted to please, to live voraciously with that nothing, provided that I could conceal the void behind a cloud of words. My place was very much beside the show-off, of whom I had so justly declared myself the rival, and who, having thrashed me, had consecrated our equality.

I left the hospital shortly thereafter. I do not know if we said goodbye to one another; we were both fleeing; he was ashamed of his
public confession, although he would not have had to wait long for the cancer to destroy, along with his vocal chords, any confession rising in his throat; I was ashamed of avowing nothing, whether it be through publication, death, or resignation to silence. Then too, on that last day, my face was still deformed by the wound; I feared being disfigured; I was harsh with Marianne, who tried tenderly to reassure me; vaguely wrathful, I took with me the
Gilles de Rais
, the vision, still, of the great trees, and Father Foucault's silence.

The disease would do its work; he would become mute in the fall, before the red lindens; in those copper hues tarnished by evening, all speech confiscated by advancing death, he would be more faithful than ever to Rembrandt's ruined old men of letters; no pathetic writing, no poor claim scribbled down on paper would corrupt his perfect contemplation. His amazement would not diminish. He would be dead with the first snows; his last look would recommend him to the great white angels in the courtyard; a sheet would be drawn over his face, as astonished by the insignificance of death as it had been by the insignificance of life; the mouth that had never opened much would be closed for good; and stilled forever, virginal, closed around the void of the slow metamorphosis into which it has now disappeared, that hand, which never traced a letter.

to Louis-René des Forêts

In fall 1972, Marianne left me. She was rehearsing for a second-rate production of
Othello
at the theater in Bourges; I was spending several months at my mother's house, stupidly aspiring to the grace of Writing and not receiving it: bedridden or high on various drugs but constantly inattentive to the world, indolent and furious, a demented stupor riveting me satisfied to the barren page without requiring me to write a single word. Moreover, how to write, when I no longer knew how to read? At worst, miserable science fiction translations, at best ingratiatingly flashy American titles from the 60s and heavily avant-garde French ones from the 70s were my only sustenance; but as low as
my reading sank, these models were still too difficult for me to imitate. Mesmerized by inertia, I became rooted in failure, and in deception as well; my daily letters to Marianne shamelessly lied; I gave accounts of brilliant pages, miraculously inspired; I was the Fabulous Opera and each night was Pascalian to me, the heavens moved my pen, filled my page. This boasting was bathed in a mixture of crude lyricism and sentimental cunning. I could not reread my words without laughing and I despised myself passionately; I wonder if my style has changed since those inaugural letters to a deceived reader.

Marianne was no reader of novels; there was no nobility in deceiving her; each day she sent me impassioned letters, she had faith in me, she had only agreed to this separation, so painful for her, so that I could write. She had supported me in my plans to escape Annecy where I was writing nothing (she did not know, though I guessed, that awaiting me in Mourioux was just as blank a page, which no journey or pedantic retreat is enough to fill), and where I had spent a disastrous winter; in that easy-going city, right for the romantic effusions and garish grind of winter sports, I fretted and fumed more than in larger cities where misery is more bearable for being constantly in evidence, and shared. Then, since Marianne had joined a local theater company, I had fool-hardily accepted a minor position with the local arts center; the close relations I had to maintain with those good apostles dedicated to their civilizing mission and state employees with lots of hobbies, constantly competing in their devotion to creativity, exasperated me. I remember certain literary evenings; above, they talked about poetry and desire, the ineffable pleasure, they called it, of writing books; below, having found the key to the basement with its stock of beer for the center's
small bar, I got shamelessly drunk. I remember the snow, all light blossoms in the halo of the street lamps, and black and heavy around the building, trampled by so many feet and tires, where I would have liked to fall. I remember, with tears, the strained smile of the painter Bram Van Velde, invited one evening and lost there in his too-long trench coat from another era, his fedora, which he held awkwardly the whole time he remained sitting exposed to the enthusiasm of his admirers, gentle, kindly old man, taken aback as a stylite at the foot of a maypole, ashamed of the stupid questions he was being asked, ashamed of only knowing how to answer them in monosyllables of feigned assent, ashamed of his work and the fate the world holds for everyone, the ludicrous talk it inflicts upon the talkers, the ludicrous silence into which it abolishes the mutes, the shared vanity, which is the shared misfortune of talkers and mutes alike.