“Is so bad, the food. Please to sign the declaration.”
Mayevski, a Pole, accompanied by Manniez and Glou-Glou, was visiting all the rooms in search of signatures.
“This will be the sixth petition that I’ve signed since I’ve been here,” said Paul with a smile. And as he wrote his name, he added: “And it will be my last.”
“Because we will get better food?”
“No—because I’m leaving here in a month!”
New patients invariably believed that corporate action must lead to an improvement in the diet. It took a long time before they gained some insight into the workings of the organisation to which the sanatorium belonged.
Initially M. Halfont never failed to accord each complaint and petition his sympathetic attention. Sometimes, as had been his custom with the students, he would expound the difficulty of providing a satisfactorily international cuisine; sometimes he would blame the chef and claim that he was scouring the whole continent for a suitable replacement; sometimes he would say (as once he had said to Paul): “Always please remember, before complaining, that this is the cheapest sanatorium in the Europa!”
On one occasion when a whole deputation had come to complain about some particularly offensive rissoles, he had said: “I do not deny that they tasted a little strange, but listen to the explanation. The chef—he’s a good fellow really—wanted to give you all a special treat. He chose a celebrated recipe of Escoffier which required prime beef, truffles, fresh cream and abundance of three-star cognac. If anything was wrong, then the fault was Escoffier’s—probably the ingredients were far too rich!”
“We never got near enough to taste them,” replied the leader of the deputation. “Our complaint was about the way they stank!”
When the relatives of patients wrote letters of protest, M. Halfont would reply that there were no real grounds for complaint, at the same time discreetly pointing out that consumptives were notorious grumblers, and that their attitude was a recognised facet of their disease.
And now the close of Paul’s stay at Les Alpes was marked by a total loss of appetite and a consequent decrease in weight. In order to tempt his palate he went, one day, to a restaurant in the village, but found to his dismay that he could eat barely anything that he had ordered. In Michèle’s room he sat silent and still: sudden movement or speech made him feel very sick.
Dr. Vernet correlated the symptoms which Paul at last described to him, and said: “Monsieur, you are sickening for a cold or a grippe—it will be very interesting to see which.” Two days later, the symptoms having intensified, Dr. Bruneau said: “Monsieur, as ever I incline before the opinion of my esteemed patron, but I humbly advance the opinion that it is less a question of a cold than of a good bout of ’flu.” In the afternoon of the same day Paul visited the sanatorium dentist, who took one look at him and said: “My poor monsieur, you are quite yellow. Has no one told you that you are suffering from jaundice?”
“Cold or grippe?” Dr. Vernet demanded cheerfully in the evening.
“According to the dentist, jaundice.”
“Tiens!” said Dr. Vernet, genuinely surprised, at the same time raising Paul’s eyelid with his forefinger. “In future, when in doubt, I’ll send my patients to have their teeth examined. Did he advise you about treatment?”
“I urged him to.”
“But he feared a breach of professional etiquette?”
“I suppose something of the sort.”
“A pity. I am sure you would have found his ordinances more agreeable than mine.”
Jaundice—probably of an infectious nature. Sentence: back to bed, solitary confinement, diet of unseasoned, unthickened, strained soup and boiled, unflavoured rice or macaroni.
When Michèle heard the news she hurried to Paul’s room, but was turned back by Sœur Miriam, who had just pinned ‘Visites Interdites’ notices to the inner and outer doors (that on the inner door being emphasised by the addition of a skull and cross-bones).
And on narrow tables between the doors were the lugubrious concomitants of suspected infection—spirit stoves, bowls, soap, basins of water, towels, gowns, masks and hoods.
There then occurred one of those changes which, under any circumstances, leave an invalid breathless with incredulity and indignation—Sœur Yvette was suddenly transferred to another sanatorium of the Société. To replace her came Sœur Valérie, a small, sluttish bigot who was lazy and officious. She irritated everyone—staff and patients; she rampaged up the corridors, she slammed the doors, she abused the femmes-de-chambres.
The tedium of personal disinfection soon discouraged the doctors from visiting Paul more than once or twice a week. The femmes-de-chambre, fearing contagion, gave up cleaning the room. Sœur Valérie rarely called to make the bed before the evening, and a waiter would periodically remove from between the double doors one tray of unspeakable, untasted food, and substitute for it another.
Each morning Paul looked at himself in the mirror. Yellow eyes blinked from yellow sockets at a yellow chest, a yellow stomach and yellow genitals from which flowed yellow urine. And when Sœur Miriam came to carry out a sedimentation test, the syringe filled with yellow blood.
He slept and woke, lay for hours in the same position. Dust lined the tables and chairs, the battle-dress (which, days before, he had tossed on to the marble-topped commode), the interior of his nostrils, of his throat, and of his lungs. It radiated at him out of the wireless set, out of his blankets and pillow-cases, settled on his food and crammed the hollows of the macaroni. With each breath all the dust in his area of the room rose and redistributed itself. Where it had become adherent it preserved in outline the base of any object which had been moved or displaced.
Impossible to work, impossible to read—the least movement and he vomited. And in under two weeks he was supposed to be returning to England! He began to wonder whether he had ever really anticipated returning. He had made no plans, had given no thought to where or how he should live.
By his bedside he kept a small photograph of Michèle (abstracted without her knowledge from her album). He sought no information about her condition from visiting doctors, because in isolation he could not have borne bad news.
His one regular visitor was Sœur Rose, the dim-witted night nurse. She would pad up the corridor at six o’clock each morning, wearing tennis shoes, smock, mask and hood, and carrying a tumbler of Sels de Carlsbad. Paul would drink the luke-warm water, the ‘sels’ undissolved, congealed, hard as rock, remaining fixed to the bottom of the glass to do service on each subsequent occasion. And in the last days of September, when he should have been packing his bags, he was yellower than at the outset.
Even within the enforced limitations of the régime, the food was trumpery. The soup was the lachrymal secretion of empty heads and empty larders; the pasta, in its centimetre of cloudy exudation, looked like a dish of etiolated, disintegrating octopus; the permitted daily ration of fruit was composed solely of grapes of the size and rigidity of small marbles, testicular pellets taut with a surfeit of seeds set in a glutinous and bitter fluid.
He wrote intemperately to M. Halfont; he had skirmishes with Dr. Vernet; he tried to dust the room with an old pair of pyjamas, till, retching and exhausted, he collapsed upon his bed. All he had achieved were fresh, crazy dust patterns, faces, shapes and every nuance of symbolic physical allusion, a trap for the eyes and, when he was drowsy, an additional source of disorientation.
And all his despair lay in the conscious recognition of the fact that in some way the situation was as native to him as well-being to another; not to be yellow, unshaven, sick, isolated, unable to work, deficient in physical and moral resources, was to counterfeit, to cheat, to court and merit retribution.
This was a life which should be ended, should be over, it marched on its knees, it was trash. A few more weeks and the dust would rise above the level of the bed and he would be suffocated; a few more weeks and he would have excreted himself into his bedpan; a few more weeks and he would dispose of himself as waste pasta, no longer consumptive because unfit for consumption. He would run amok, throw the sterilisers out of the window, spread contagion like yellow butter up and down the arteries, alleyways and bolt-holes of the sanatorium-madhouse.
He found some outlet for his feelings by systematically indulging a fantasy which had dominated his mind since the beginning of the new illness—the total destruction of Les Alpes. Utilising what he remembered of his military training, he planned the gun positions in the surrounding countryside from which the sanatorium could best be assailed; he reviewed in detail every aspect of the sanatorium’s architecture in order to determine the most telling points at which to direct his fire.
Assuming three medium field guns with only two rounds apiece, where and in what order should they fire? Assuming no artillery, but a troop of men with grenades, where and what should they attack? Assuming neither artillery nor troops, but one reckless partisan armed with charges of dynamite and a knife … The unconvincing problems set in O.C.T.U. test papers now provided infinite scope for his obsession.
Closing his eyes he saw the collapse of pillar after pillar, wall after wall, the main staircase blocked, the lift shaft full of rubble, the corridors and bedrooms strewn with the débris of fallen ceilings, of corpses, fragments of corpses, blood, hair and teeth.
“Of course you may well not be contagious at all,” said Dr. Vernet reassuringly.
“Not contagious!” cried Paul incredulously.
“On the other hand you may be contagious.”
“You mean it’s possible that all these precautions were unnecessary?”
“Oh yes, quite possible.” Dr. Vernet flicked the corner of the window-ledge free of dust and leaned up against it. “To tell you the truth, the liver has never been my fort—it is the one organ in the body which has failed to capture my imagination. I prefer something one can get at easily, and take out if necessary. Kidneys aren’t bad like that—you take out one and the other swells to twice the size and compensates entirely. And lungs will be the next to come out, you mark my words ….”
“And if the liver had managed to capture your imagination, then I might not have had to spend six weeks of isolation?”
Dr. Vernet laughed. “I told you you should have entrusted your case to the dentist. No, but seriously, your jaundice has gone on for too long, and I begin to suspect other complications. Now I’ve arranged a little test for tomorrow—not painful but extremely disagreeable. We will insert a tube into your stomach and take an extraction of your gastric juices. And at the same time we’ll clear up the little matter of whether you are or not contagious.”
“I’m not going to have any more tests.”
“This is our stock conversation. If you were writing a novel about our relationship you would have difficulty in sustaining much interest in the dialogue.”
“I would concentrate on descriptive passages.”
“Then you would make it still more tedious. Why ever don’t you try to get better?”
“I’m told that jaundice is the consequence of bad food.”
“And of about twenty other things. In your own case it is probably attributable to some of the medicaments you received during your relapse. Or then again, it may be the symptom of a spread of the disease to the liver. But whatever the apparent cause, let us not overlook a certain psychosomatic proneness to infection. Still, we shall know more about it tomorrow. Test at half-past nine!”
“Have you any idea of what these six weeks have been like to me?”
“I don’t know,” said Dr. Vernet, going to the door. “You must have had a lot of time for reading.”