Travesty (9 page)

Can you understand the peace and satisfaction I
felt in that place? The visit was perfectly routine, nothing happened out of
the ordinary. And yet from entrance to exit I could not have felt more at home
amidst all the paradoxes of this establishment: the unused instruments and archaic
machines of medical science located within medieval walls; the sound of birds
roosting somewhere amongst surgical knives and old books; the faint smell of cooking
food which the antiseptic chemical could not disguise; the doctor himself, who was
skilled but thought to be unsavory, and who in his own affliction exemplified the
general pomposity and backwardness of our nation’s corps of butchering
physicians and who in his broken marriage exemplified the soundness of our sexual
mores. Then too, I knew for a fact that once every week this poor, ruined man sat
entirely alone for precisely two hours in a little nearby movie house devoted only
to the showing of so-called indecent films. Understandably, it was this habit rather
than the missing leg or absent wife that accounted for his unsavory reputation. No
wonder I admired and enjoyed his crippled presence.

As I say, there were no surprises. The doctor, as usual, forced
himself to walk the length of the corridor to greet me, thrusting to the side one
fat, startled hand for balance and swinging in great arcs from the hip his
artificial limb, the use of which typically he had never mastered. We met with
effusion; he consulted his files; he enquired about my general health and the health
of my wife; unbidden I removed my shirt and
undershirt; he
disappeared; he returned to his desk; the artificial leg obtruded between us in full
and menacing view. Again I welcomed silently the trembling hand, the mucus thick in
his throat, the cigarette that was burning his fingers. Again I appraised the
awkwardness of the ill-fitting leg, noting as usual that our nation is simply not
adept at the crafting of artificial limbs because we are not concerned with the
needs and imperfections of the individual human body. Again I realized that in the
middle of every night the doctor now puffing and coughing beside me, fumbling over
my naked chest with his cold and unsteady hands, must lie awake listening to this
same artificial leg walking to and fro on the other side of his bedroom door. He was
devoting what remained of his life to this hollow leg which wore a green sock and
dusty shoe. But dominated or not by the ugly leg, nonetheless he was listening to
the strength of my absolutely reliable heart. I regretted that I had never sat
beside him in the old movie house.

I waited, I enjoyed the chilly air on the skin of my chest, shoulders,
arms; I surveyed the diseased palm tree below in the public garden; I nodded in
pleased recognition when the crippled and perspiring doctor knocked one of his full
ash trays to the floor, as he always did. I was pleased with the appearance of the
nurse-secretary, whose body had the shape of a girl’s and the texture of an
old crone’s. While she drew as usual a handsome quantity of blood from the
thick blue vein in my left arm, I listened to the doctor who
was
breathing wetly through his nose, his mouth, his nose and mouth together. I listened
with pleasure; with pleasure I perceived once more that the old nurse-secretary had
dabbed herself not with perfume but with the overpowering antiseptic that killed
flowers and defined our circumstances.

Time passed like ivory beads on a black thread. My own blood climbed
inside the glass. Again I had my brief affair with the old X-ray machine which,
after clanking and groaning, rewarded my patience with its sound like a flock of
wounded geese in uncertain flight. And I passed exactly the required amount of
urine, watched the doctor himself wrapping up the small warm flask with a string and
paper, once again marveled that so much painful incongruity could be assembled so
awkwardly into a single person.

Well, once again the doctor pronounced me in perfect health, as you
would imagine. And of course he suspected nothing, nothing. In all his discomfort
and disproportion he retained his purity. Little did he know that in several days
and on the other side of the city a laboratory technician, unshaven and smoking a
yellow cigarette, would analyze the blood of a man already dead; or that the hazy
image of ribs and single lung on the photographic plate would represent only as much
reality as the white organs lubricating each other in one of his weekly films.

But there is no justice in the world, since we may safely say that
that poor one-legged creature has finally
lost his only patient,
and through no fault of his own. But what, you ask, if even this wretched man
continues to live, why shouldn’t we? Why does your closest friend not have
within himself that cripple’s determination to remain alive? Well, let me
answer you slowly, quietly. The problem is that you are being emotional again,
rather than rational. You must remember that both my legs are sound and that my wife
is faithful. Do you understand?

Yes, she is vomiting. But you need not have mentioned it. I have
perfect hearing and am just as sensitive as you to those faint, terrible noises. Do
you think I am not listening? That I have not been listening? After all, there is
nothing worse than painful human sounds unattached to words. And the contents of my
own daughter’s stomach . . . Even you will concede that my bitterness
would be all the more justified. But I am not bitter. And despite all our so-called
natural inclinations, why should we not agree that poor Chantal has earned her
vomiting? It is the best she can do. And surely it is no worse than your
wheezing.

Actually, the music of melodrama (had you allowed us the pleasures
of my superb car radio) would not have been a sodden orchestration of wave upon
wave of uninteresting feeling but rather a light, sinuous
background of muted jazz. The detached and somewhat popular syncopation would have
cushioned our every turn while the clear tones of, say, a clarinet would have
prevailed and, had he been able to hear them, would have given greater poignancy to
the distance between the sleepless goatherd and the momentary, cruel appearance of
our headlights in the righthand corner of the wet night. Do you hear that black
clarinet? Do you hear the somewhat breezy quality of this dry and sophisticated
music? The melody is pleasing, there is even a certain elegance and occasionally a
dash of humor in the glassy accompaniment of the invisible piano. How perfect such
easy lyricism is for us. What splendid, impersonal sweetness it would have
contributed to the tensions of our imaginary and deliberately amateurish film. Well,
the radio is already tuned. You have only to extend your arm, reach out with your
fingers, touch the knob. But still you are not tempted? Of course you are not. I
understand.

A trifle faster? Yes, you are quite right that we are now traveling
a breath or two faster than we were. Now is the moment when I must make my ultimate
demands. As you can see, my arms are stiffening, my fingers are flexing though I
never remove my palms from the wheel, my concentrating face is abnormally
white, and now, like many men destined for the pleasures and
perils of high-speed driving, now my mouth is working in subtle consort with eyes,
hands, feet, so that my silent lips are moving with the car itself, as if I am now
talking as well as driving us to our destination. And we are approaching it, that
final destination of ours. We are drawing near. Soon we shall be entering the
perimeter of Honorine’s most puzzling and yet soothing dream. And now beneath
the hood of the car our engine is glowing as red as an immense ruby. How unfortunate
that to us it is invisible. How unfortunate that the rain is determined to keep pace
with our journey.

But while we are on the subject of invalid doctors and vomiting
children, and since tonight we seem to be taking our national inventory, so to
speak, allow me to say in passing that generally our physical institutions are
indeed a match for the inadequacies or eccentricities of our professional personnel.
In other words, our buildings of public service are as bad as the people who occupy
them. Take the hospital nearest La Roche, for instance. I have not had any firsthand
experience with this ominous and in a way amusing place, and in fact have never seen
it. But on good authority and thanks to my theory of likenesses, which I have
already described to you at length, I know for a certainty that this dark and drafty
little place of about twenty beds is
not equipped with any
separate or special entrance for the reception of emergency cases. None at all. A
few lights are burning; several cooks are smoking their stubby pipes in the kitchen;
the entire drab interior of the place smells like a field of rotting onions. And
there is no emergency entrance. No means of swift and ready access between the
narrow cobbled street outside and that small whitewashed room to the right and rear
where simple first aid may be administered. No access to this small room for
bleeding truck driver or possibly his corpse except through the kitchen. The
kitchen. It is a scandal. Even our own remains, such as they may be, will be hurried
on rattling litters through the steamy kitchen of the miserable hospital near La
Roche, that kitchen in which the cauldrons of soup for the coming day will provide a
fitting context for the shoeless foot at dawn. Do you see the humor of it, the
outrage? But everywhere it is the same: rooms without doors, sinks without drains,
conduits that will never be connected to any water supply, corpses or bleeding
victims forever passing through the kitchens of our nation’s hospitals.

But why, you ask, why this terrible and at the same time humorous
correspondence between physical building and human occupant? The answer is obvious:
it is simply that there is no difference between the artist, the architect, the
workman, the physician, the bloody victim and the cook slicing his cabbage. One and
all they share our national psychological heritage. One and
all they are driven by the twin engines of ignorance and willful barbarianism. You
nod, you also are familiar with these two powerful components of our national
character, ignorance and willful barbarianism. Yes, everywhere you turn, and even
among the most gifted of us, the most extensively educated, these two brute forces
of motivation will eventually emerge. The essential information is always missing;
sensitivity is a mere veil to self-concern. We are all secret encouragers of
ignorance, at heart we are all willful barbarians.

But indeed, these qualities also account for our charm, our good
humor, our handsome physiques, our arrogance, our explosive servility. We are as we
wish to be. We would have it no other way. Our national type is desirable as well as
inescapable. You and I? You and I are two perfect examples of our national type.

The reason we make such a perfect pair, such an agreeable match, is
that you are a full-fledged Leo, while through the marshes of my own stalwart Leo
there flows a little dark rivulet of Scorpio. You were unaware of it? But then
naturally you could not have suspected anything of my Scorpio influence since I
deliberately though casually concealed even the slightest shade of that
all-too-suspect influence from your detection. You see how capable I am of
deception, at least of any deception which in my judgment is for our mutual
good. But thus we have one more scrap to toss on the heap of
our triumphant irony. Because in our case it now appears that the poet is the
thick-skinned and simple-minded beast of the ego, while contrary to popular opinion,
it is your ordinary privileged man who turns out to reveal in the subtlest of ways
all those faint sinister qualities of the artistic mind. Yes, you are the creature
who roars in the wind while I am the powerful bug on the wall. But you are not
interested? You are not amused? And yet if only you would pause a moment to think,
cher ami
, then you would realize that behind my coldest actions and
most jocular manner there lies not hostility but the deepest affection. After all,
my Scorpio influence inspires me to unimaginable tenderness.

I applaud the dark night. I love the darkness. Not merely for
regressive pleasures: for comfort, security, the peace of the dream. No, I am much
too active a person to stop with mere sensual immobility, though I am not at all
denying my proclivities in that direction as well. No, it is simply that the night
is to my eye as is the pair of goggles to the arc-welder. Through the thick green
lens of the night I see only the brightest and most frightening light.

For instance, the cemetery we are about to pass— yes, a
cemetery, as luck would have it, along with the
rabbit and
gentle syncopation of the muted jazz which, at this moment, naturally intensifies
and quickens—the cemetery we shall shortly pass is already clear to my eye,
brilliant, rock-hard, motionless. You would see nothing even if you looked, so
don’t bother. I see quite well enough for the two of us. At any rate the
cemetery—and now, as a matter of fact, we are abreast of it, just there on
the left—the cemetery stands now before my eyes, small, rising in tiers, a
very old and typically well-ordered arrangement of crosses and crypts and mausoleums
of black marble, white marble, some kind of deep gray stone, and it is quite as if
we were staring at that small village of the dead (the likeness is most appropriate,
cher ami)
from a stationary vehicle parked in our empty wind-blown,
golden field directly across from that small, excellent example of our morbid
artistry. Yes, that is precisely how totally and clearly I see our cemetery, thanks
to the night. And there is sunlight but no sun, a quality of deadened daytime colors
that could only be perceived in the blackest and, I might add, the wettest of
nights. The white vases, the red flowers composed of wax, the sagging ribbons, the
tiny photographs that might have been stripped from an album depicting all the
participants in the last great war, and the rows of gravel and little barred windows
and stone rectangles constructed to the dimensions of the human body, and, thank
goodness, not a single mourner to be seen in that entire conglomerate of piety and
bad taste—well, now you have an idea of the true
reason I
so enjoy driving at night. It is not merely because the roads are generally unused
at night. Not at all.