I hadn’t been in Les Invalides since I was a child, and didn’t know that there was a hospital there. I thought there was only a museum, a large courtyard, and a tomb. The great courtyard was dominated by the statue of Napoleon, and the tomb was his. That was appropriate: he had been my hero until I was told that he’d “put Europe to fire and the sword.” He came from a big picture book entitled Napoléon raconté aux enfants (The Story of Napoleon for Children), and, despite my later readings in history and multiple humanistic injunctions, truth forces me to say that he hasn’t really fallen, probably thanks to La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma), Le Colonel Chabert (Colonel Chabert), and Chateaubriand’s description of the fat Louis XVIII and his band of émigrés parading, after his return, among Napoleon’s old guard: literature, that indefatigable carriage, makes us travel among intimate desires that resist obligatory admiration. I was not now reading much literature, but I was thinking about it a lot. My parents had taken me to see the tomb when I was seven or eight years old. That was the period when the cemetery at Eylau and Grouchy’s late arrival at Waterloo made me inconsolable. I detested the Germans, those Nazis who won in soccer, but I detested the English still more, because they had defeated and imprisoned the hero. It could be said that the child was angry with history. It might also be thought that he understood, better than anyone, to what point history is suspended, repetitive, obsessive, and as chronological as it is circular; to what point it resembles the patient’s situation.
My new room was on the second floor of the hospital, at the end of a long corridor lined with old windows. From my bed, I could see trees and, standing out against the sky, the dome over the tomb. I was going to live for seven months in this place, which soon became my castle. The visitors were my guests. I was concerned to behave like a chatelain toward them, to do the honors of the place, like an old Russian noble wearing, in addition to his clothes, an old rifle and the traces of a long-lost era. Wasn’t I exiled from my own life?
I was happy to receive these friends at the entrance gates, with my policemen, or, if their names had been announced at the sentry box, at the hospital’s reception desk. A few of them came directly to my room, but they sometimes got lost in the labyrinth of corridors. I was happy to hug them in my arms, to show them the fine views, the recesses, the courtyards, and the hidden points of view, the cannon taken from the Turks on which could be read loads of inscriptions. I was happy to introduce them to each other, I who had up to that point tended to compartmentalize my life. They came with bottles, cakes, sometimes little dishes. I liked to watch them drinking and eating and talking at dusk in the foyer’s almost deserted courtyard, which was also dominated by the dome over the tomb. The policemen took up position in a corner, silent, smiling, and armed. Conviviality descended on the stone of the old buildings. It was warm, time stopped, for my friends and for me, and, when they went away into the night, I returned, exhausted, to my little room, my Vaseline, my sleeping pill, my ultra-soft toothbrush, and my individual life under the tomb’s dome. I was here, I was elsewhere, a phantom of Les Invalides, I was not the only one, and I had a hard time leaving. My little room was the bark on which I was making the rest of a crossing whose end I neither foresaw nor could entirely wish. And I connected my last bag of Fresubin.
The room was in the Ambroise Paré sector; the corridor was named Laon. The first day, when she saw our group coming in, a young nurse, Laura, who had a shrill voice and long red hair, “looked for the bandage” to know which of us was the patient. I had a large and partly transparent bandage that went from my lip to my chin. I saw her gaze hesitate, then focus on me. I soon learned that Laura’s husband, a Libyan soldier whose legs had been seriously wounded by a rocket, had been going from one graft to the next for years. She talked about it without going on and on, just as she sometimes talked in the same tone about her religion, Islam, and about the cartoon images of the Prophet, which she’d found pointless and inappropriate. We weren’t there to accuse each other, or to complain. The world of the hospital is the world of observation. At Les Invalides, contrary to La Salpêtrière, patients rubbed shoulders, hung out with each other: they weren’t in the emergency room but in reeducation. The sufferings of some of them put those of the others in perspective. Solitudes and wheelchairs circulated in silence through the broad hallways and in the shadow of buildings constructed under Louis XIV, ending up in the foyer, the gymnasium, or the workshops. It was a calm, ancient place, empty when it was not visiting hours, a place where the power of the site and of History tempered the patient’s lack of tranquility. To a certain extent, it helped the patient heal.
I asked Laura if she knew the Laon cathedral, which is so beautiful, reminded me of Vezelay, and seemed, like the latter, to live between two worlds, the Romanesque and the Gothic, the South and the North, the Muslim and the Christian. She did not know that there was a city called Laon. “I thought it was the name of a military doctor,” she said, and after all, I said to myself, that may be true, even if the name of the hallway undoubtedly came from the battle of Laon won in 1814 by Napoleon. I retained an inner image of that cathedral, and also of what Commander Ernst Jünger wrote about it in his Journal when he occupied Laon with the German army. On June 11, 1940, in the dark, he entered the city’s library through a gate that had collapsed:
We walked through the rooms, where I occasionally turned my flashlight on a book—for example, a priceless edition of Monumenti antichi. It filled a whole bookcase. Partly on the floor, partly on a long table, a collection of handwritten documents arranged in about thirty large volumes; I opened one of them at random. It contained letters from famous botanists of the eighteenth century; some in a very neat and gracious hand. From a second bundle I took a letter from Alexander I, notes written by Eugène de Beauharnais and Antommarchi, Napoleon’s personal physician. Feeling that I had entered a mysterious cavern, opened by a “Sesame,” I returned to my billet.
I, too felt that on entering Les Invalides I had penetrated a cavern that, despite the assonance, its past, and its military administration, in no way resembled a caserne (barracks); but this cavern had become my billet.
I arrived on the second floor accompanied by the ambulance paramedics and the policemen. While I was getting settled in my room, my brother had gone to register me at the admissions desk. When he was asked under what name I should be registered, he gave mine. Here, the woman on the admissions desk said, he needed a pseudonym. Taken off guard, my brother thought of our father’s origin in the Pyrenees, in the city where our aunt and our uncle the surgeon lived, and he said “Tarbes.” That was how I came to be, in the world of Les Invalides, Monsieur Tarbes. My brother’s choice delighted me, even if at the moment I didn’t understand why. It was in the Pyrenees, traveling to the lakes, that I had come closest to the state to which it seemed to me rather pointless to aspire: happiness. It was a state close to dissolution—in the landscape, light, sound, and air. It was not to be achieved without exhausting effort or anxiety: these rocky lakes, located below the summits, had a perfection and virginity that was similar to death. You had only to look at the clear, dark water to feel that, once you were in it, you would never come out again. That was an excellent reason to dive into it and emerge from it again in order to feel alive, in the sun, like a kind of survivor.
The city of Tarbes has few charms; but in addition to my family ties, in my view it has at least two: the magnificent Massey garden, which dates from the nineteenth century, where I used to like to walk under the big trees after a rain, and the fact that the childhoods of three writers I like are connected with it: Théophile Gautier, Jules Laforgue, and Isidore Ducasse. The first of these, who was born in Tarbes, quickly left it. The other two were born in Montevideo, but like many French immigrants to Latin America, their families had ties with Southwest France and they grew up there. The fact that these two great poets spent their childhood in Tarbes had made it an imaginary place. From it, I could go back to distant countries, to that Latin America I’d dreamed about so much, and now I was to go down the river toward a new life, depending on efforts made and circumstances, under this intimate and exotic flag.
In Les Invalides, I was never called by any other name. Very soon, Monsieur Tarbes was living his own life within these walls from the classical age; he was the phantom of Les Invalides. He was composed of discipline and peace, reeducation and tears in consolation, of walks at dawn and still more at night. Monsieur Tarbes was neither Philippe Lançon nor a pseudonym of Philippe Lançon. He was a heteronym, such as Fernando Pessoa had no doubt imagined in creating his work under different lives, and not only names. Monsieur Tarbes did not speak and act entirely like Philippe Lançon. He was less loquacious, slower, more distant, more attentive, more benevolent, too; probably much older, but of an age relieved of an excess of presence. Monsieur Tarbes metabolized his sorrow under the golden tints of the tomb. He was thin, wore a big hat, could not smile, gobbled down his milky, mashed meals, never in the presence of others, to spare them the sight, plop plop plop, of his spills. There was an element of Montevideo in him, a city where Philippe Lançon had never gone, and he became increasingly attached to this element that made him fragile and uncertain confronted by life, sensitive to the breath and manners of the dead. Monsieur Tarbes was suspended, he floated. He became increasingly attached to a city where Philippe Lançon had never gone.
However, memories of dreams had returned, and with them, Philippe Lançon took another, unpleasant step toward life. Thus during the night preceding my departure for Les Invalides, I had a dream that for some time extended its shadow over the first two weeks of Monsieur Tarbes.
I’m staying at Gabriela’s, in a big American house. She has taken me in after I was wounded. Today is the children’s party. The neighbors’ children come, play, make noise, then some of hem get into an immense bathtub full of foam, after a bath has been drawn for them. I take off my clothes, like them, and sit down across from them at the other end of the bathtub. I feel great pleasure in the hot water and in looking at them. Suddenly, an American “mom” comes into the bathroom and screams, frightened and disgusted on seeing me: “What are you doing there, in the bathtub, with the children?” I look at her and struggle to speak to her: “But . . . I’m taking a bath, I live here. And it’s not bothering them. I’m not a pedophile.” I articulate badly, but that’s not the problem. She refuses to listen to me and shouts, “You’re disgusting! I’m going to tell the other parents and the police. We’re leaving this place immediately. Children, get out of the bathtub!” I try to speak: “But . . . but . . . but . . . ,” without being able to say anything more. They all leave and I remain in the tub, devastated. They’re going to accuse me of everything, that’s what I think, even though I was just trying to find a little well-being where it was. I hear them talking, slamming doors, roaring, getting indignant, leaving. What will Gabriela think and say? Will she, too . . . A man comes in, a solid American, ready to reprimand and arrest me. But suddenly he sees my face, and frightened, he says to me: “What’s happening to you? That hole has been stopped up since January 7 . . . ” Then I see myself through his eyes: my right cheek is visibly turning black, a hole is appearing through which my last teeth pop out and fall, one by one. The dream ends, and waking, I panic, confronted by my mouth that is leaking and through which my whole body, behind the teeth, is emptying out.
Before the attack, I was thin and athletic; I was 5’9” tall, I had my father’s delicate frame and my usual weight was about 160 pounds. When I arrived at Les Invalides, I weighed about 125 pounds. I didn’t have a bone to lose, so to speak, but one had already been taken from me, and that was quite enough. The time when the graft of the fibula onto my jaw might have necrosed had passed, and it was not planned to take any more. However, the body hadn’t stopped helping the body, like a do-it-yourself survival and reconstruction kit, like the magical hold of Robinson Crusoe’s shipwrecked vessel. It had given about all it could. It was at the end of its rope, but reeducation began after the end of this rope. Was there another one behind it? At the moment when I discovered it, I regretted having to inventory it, as the doctors inventoried their patient’s ills when I arrived at Les Invalides.
I was beginning to speak again, but I no longer knew whether my voice was my voice: it came from a place in the body that seemed to me mysterious, cavernous, and I didn’t recognize it. This nonrecognition worried me. When I spoke, I had the impression that gibberish was coming out of my mouth, mashed up by teeth I no longer had. I didn’t understand why people seemed to know what I was saying and sometimes wondered if they weren’t feigning. I didn’t know, either, if my mouth, which was still not reconstructed, was my mouth: this strange, split lower lip, asymmetrical and hanging down, that slowly and with difficulty pushed toward the toothless inside the few liquid foods that it was given—that lip disgusted me and I distanced myself from it by calling it the membrane. The graft on my calf became inflamed and resembled a poor-quality ground beef patty, dripping with grease. The graft made by Hossein was “smoked,” meaning that it didn’t take. I had to return a week later for another try. As for my right little finger, an X-ray had just shown that its first phalanx had become fused. “An operation will be necessary,” the radiologist told me, “there are excellent hand surgeons.” I began to feel dizzy when I stood up: my right inner ear was acting up, and I was told that calcium crystals must have moved. Gabriela had started calling me on FaceTime again. Our connection was poor. She suggested that we shift to sign language.
Patients often fall silent when faced with impatient people. I understand them, and I also keep silent; but it seems to me that we’re wrong. It would be better to plunge other people’s heads in what they can’t or won’t see, know, or imagine. That has to be done regularly, concretely, gently, coldly, at the risk of seeming disagreeable, self-indulgent, aggressive, whining, oversensitive, and inclined to harp on things—in short, someone who makes others deaf. And it is all the more important to do it because those who listen understand, at most, a third of what they hear—if they listen in good will: words communicate poorly to the healthy people a labor performed by the body that worries them and is, for the most part, foreign to them. Words don’t seem to come from the body they’re trying to describe, and they have no chance of connecting with it if the patient doesn’t persist. Modesty, pride, stoicism? Just so many celebrated virtues that I believe I’ve practiced sufficiently to sense their limits, their ambiguity, and to what point they allow people to forget the suffering of those whom they pretend to respect at the price of their silence. Proust was ill during much of his life, and that may be why, not without a certain situational comedy, he saw only pretense, solitude, poses, and misunderstandings all around him. Illness is not a metaphor; it is life itself.
Let’s continue. Doctor, are you listening to me? My right leg and foot hurt, and my right thigh does too, even more at night than during the day. Simple contact with the sheet irritates my whole foot and prevents me from sleeping. The nerves seem to be raw. The malleolus is particularly painful. Day and night, I put support hose over the dressings: if I forget them, I immediately swell up. My chin tingles increasingly, it’s alive. I’ve come to believe that I think through my chin. Fortunately, I don’t think much. When I do, it seems to say to me, as the ant says to the grasshopper: shut up and work on your reeducation, getting ready for the winter that’s coming. Winter is the return to ordinary life. As far off as it may be, it terrifies me. I know, Doctor: The Les Invalides hospital is intended to limit that terror by bringing me closer to the winter that inspires it. But I will need time, if you will grant it. In the meantime, Malebranche’s philosophy will do me a world of good, especially when he writes:
All these things show that we constantly have to resist the effort that the body makes against the mind, and that we must gradually accustom ourselves to not believing the reports that our senses make to us about all the bodies that surround us, which they always represent as worthy of our application and our esteem, because there is nothing sensible that we should linger on, or with which we should busy ourselves.
But I hadn’t already read Malebranche when I entered Les Invalides. Even if I had, I wouldn’t have been able to accept his view, precisely because my mind was increasingly subordinated to my body, to the extent to which this body was leaving the zone where it had invaded everything. The mind resisted the body insofar as both of them were living in the ruins. Now, the body was waking up to life again, but it did so through unprecedented, unforeseeable, painful sensations that the mind was unable to assimilate, and that it perceived as intruders. It no longer rose above symptoms and signs; it kept an eye out for them, like a shopkeeper.
The areas of the graft were oozing. The failed graft took on a dark color and its odor entered my nose at night. My right little finger, which was still stiff, was painful and its swelling did not go down, making my hand almost impotent. The long scar on my arm didn’t stretch well. My forearm was hollow like a dead branch. My neck was a periscope. I turned my whole torso to look to the right or to the left. Except that I lacked a monocle, you’d say I looked like Erich Stroheim in La Grande Illusion. I dreamed about putting a geranium in a pot in front of my new window. I would cut it on the day of my departure, which I hoped was as far off as possible. The scars around the flap were fragile. Every time I shaved they were in danger. I spent a ridiculous amount of time in the bathroom dealing with their asperities. I drooled when I talked, when I slept, when I ate. When my pains left me in peace, I was awakened ten times, sometimes by a desire to take a piss, sometimes by snoring that degenerated into apnea. The soft palate must have been damaged; I have regular sniffing fits like an old man’s, and they degenerate into coughing, as if my throat wanted to compete with my sinuses. Everything is connected in there, despite good sense. It’s anarchy. The melting away of my muscles hasn’t helped my back, I who never had back trouble.
And to wind this up, this new phenomenon: hairs from my leg grew out of my mouth and established themselves on my reconstituted lower lip: they looked like minuscule black algae that water has stuck on a seashell or coral. They had been there since the graft of the fibula. Since they were shaved off, it took them some time to grow back in their new milieu, which was liquid and warm. They began to form little tufts that I felt when I ran my tongue over them. So long as they stayed inside, it was bearable. But I didn’t much like them to accompany my meals, my outings, and my discussions. On this point, I insisted on my modesty. I didn’t want to be, in the eyes of outsiders, an ape inside. I had not been warned of this little problem. For the surgeons, whatever is not a matter of treatment or necessity is a matter of comfort, that’s the word they use. Leg hair in my mouth is a matter of comfort. It forced me a little more to conceive of my body differently, in accord with the exploded forms of one of Picasso’s Harlequins. How should I cope with and feel this insensitive skin from my leg on my chin, this skin from my thigh on my calf, this leg hair in my mouth, this inside-out, poorly vascularized mucous membrane that serves me as a lip, this Integra graft based on horse or pig tissue placed along a substitute gum that is irritated by the slightest contact? Sometimes, I wake up with a milk tooth in my nostril, a fingernail in my right ear, eyebrow hairs on the second navel formed by the feeding tube. I also have a foot incarnated in place of the little finger, and a knee covered with scabs, as when I was a child, between the joints of my hand. I have become a discreet monster with staples on the upper part of my ass, but that is not a product of the imagination: it’s the bedsore taking advantage of my skinniness and the delicacy of my skin to grow larger. What’s that you say, Doctor? Here you have dressings that are more effective or better suited to the wounds than the ones at La Salpêtrière? The army is better endowed than Public Assistance? I can only rejoice in that: any relief is welcome.
My mental state was no better. I emerged from two months of intensive care as from a long dream, with multiple hangovers at once. The delicate moment, Doctor, is the one when the patient regains consciousness of the metamorphosed body in the living world that surrounds him. It’s then that he really begins his rebirth, and this rebirth, which was up to this point manifested by physical shocks of an almost magical violence, is now accompanied by a certain sadness: I’m leaving the cycle of Hell’s cauldrons to enter the cold bath of Purgatory, which is hardly better. I weep over my lost life, I weep over my future life, I weep over my obscure life, but you won’t see me weeping. There you are, Doctor, that’s where I am. I see you’re taking notes, that’s good. But is it enough?
Philippe Lançon fell silent and Monsieur Tarbes moved in.
The room was small, old, with an old-fashioned charm, and at the heart of my suffering, I immediately felt comfortable there. I’d been told that a writer had lived in it, and I know that Edgar Pisani followed me there. The view was also a large part of its attraction, and probably also the memory of a memory: it resembled a chambre de bonne I’d lived in when I was a student, on the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. That attic room belonged to two old ladies who lived together a few floors below, and whom I sometimes went to see at teatime. The window of the room at Les Invalides had a broad sill where I put my books and CDs. It was like the one where, more than thirty years earlier, I sat to read Proust, already Proust, while looking out over the roofs. The bathroom was almost as large as the bedroom. When I opened my eyes, what I saw from my new bed was no longer La Salpêtrière’s gray roll-up shutter or its dark pine, but rather, beyond the tall, wooden lattice window, beyond the trees in a courtyard that dated, like the other buildings, from the age of Louis XIV, this illuminated cupola. In the daytime, its gold shone in the sky which, that spring and that summer, was almost always blue. At night, it was even better: the illuminated gold stood out against the black sky and I fell asleep looking at it. I still had neither telephone nor television. One of the policemen sat in front of my door, the other at the end of the corridor. As at La Salpêtrière, they changed every eight hours, and I was beginning to see again the men who had guarded me once or twice in what was already becoming my earlier hospital life. One of them accompanied me wherever I went.
The first policeman came from Cherbourg, and he was very young. It was with him that I slowly explored the main courtyard and all the gardens, in particular the lawns that dominated the grand esplanade. You get there from the main courtyard through a door from which the spectacular view of the Alexandre III bridge and, in the distance, the Grand Palais, opened my heart and my life by dissolving me in a painting by Manet. In the dark, it was even more beautiful. Despite my condition, my fatigue, despite the early March cold and sometimes despite the rain, I did not give up a single one of my nocturnal rounds. I wanted to return to that view, that sky, the Seine sensed beyond the row of trees, the roofs of the great museums, and far on, the slopes of Montmartre, all the centuries of this city that I loved and in the heart of which a handful of cartoonists had been unexpectedly massacred. I wanted to enter into that view, as I had entered a valley in the Pyrenees, and every morning and every night I entered Manet’s Jardin d’hiver. An elegant woman was sitting on a bench, pensive, and she was me. A standing man was leaning over her, bearded, and he was me. Around them were plants and pink flowers, and they were me. Manet seen from Les Invalides was not solely an atmosphere. The gaze of its figures, that slight absence, that suspension above being, was what Philippe Lançon was looking for and what Monsieur Tarbes, without looking for it, found; but it would soon be around another painter that the union of the two would take place.
For the moment, I was limping across the disjointed paving stones of the courtyard of Les Invalides in the company of the little police officer from Cherbourg. We stopped in front of the two tanks parked to the right and left of the gate. He looked at them attentively and told me their history; he constantly read books about the two world wars and the armies that had fought in them. Several times, I encountered encyclopedic policemen. Then we advanced toward the lawns bordered with trimmed boxwood and were delighted to find lots of rabbits there. They came out especially in the morning and the evening, when Les Invalides was closed to the public. This was then their domain, and they took advantage of it, in all positions, shamelessly. Some stretched out on the grass like Lolitas, their asses in the air. Others remained upright, absolutely immobile, for several minutes, then started running madly around in the absence of any hunter.
Monsieur Tarbes was slowly being born, but Philippe Lançon felt alone and scared. He’d left the world of surgeons, those artists of emergency, for that of the reeducators. The Les Invalides hospital had been, since it was created by Louis XIV, a military hospital, dedicated to soldiers wounded in combat, and now to victims of terrorist attacks; but gueules cassées, those soldiers disfigured in the First World War, were no longer to be seen there—even though a beautiful blue poster reminded visitors that there was an association that brought them together. Above all, there were now amputees, paralyzed patients, stroke victims, victims of cranial trauma—and two of my wounded and surviving companions from Charlie: Simon, the webmaster, and, more episodically, Fabrice, a journalist committed to the ecological battle, who had already been wounded in an attack thirty years earlier.
When I arrived, Fabrice had gone home for a few days: he had young children and, despite his crutches and his leg pains, he wanted to be with them, I think, as much as possible. For his part, Simon had emerged from a coma and was beginning a slow reeducation. He could speak and move his arms, but he couldn’t walk. His room was near mine. One of the first things he said to me when I went into his room was “Now we’re blood brothers.” Another friend from Charlie, Zineb, was there. During the Wednesday editorial meetings, which might also have been called reaction meetings, her bellowing tirades against the condition of women in Muslim countries would have awakened the dead that most of us were not yet. She had been lucky enough to be absent the morning of the massacre. The Islamists had put a price on her head, and like me, she was protected: our bodyguards made a real crowd in the hallway. In Simon’s room, she wept a little, not too much. Neither Simon nor I were weeping, at least not in public. Tears brought us nothing except a loss of pride and energy. On that day, he was eating a cake that looked excellent. He offered me some, but my mouth was in no condition to accept it, and I gave it a baleful look, thinking: “You get the cakes, I get the walks!” The paralytic and the gueule cassée, observed by our slightly mad Arab Amazon, who was savagely feminist, infinitely alive, and who was soon to go to live in a country on the Persian Gulf: all three of us had ended up laughing at the situation, as if we were going to be in a cartoon.
Looking very small on his bed, Simon was living like a marmot in the depths of his burrow in winter. He was thirty years old, but now seemed ageless, or rather, the bullet that had struck his neck and then slowly made its way through his back had given him every age. He was as young as a newborn and, when he thrust his head out a little, as old as a gargoyle. His intelligence, irony, and vanity gave him a layer of fat that protected him from himself and from intruders. I say: his vanity; but aside from the fact that I was no less vain, I didn’t see it as a defect but rather as a quality important for survival that was certainly as good as any other, and did not deserve to be judged. At La Salpêtrière, I myself had redeployed an old habit of seduction, not to flirt with the nurses, but to maintain the best possible relationships with the ward’s personnel. That was the alchemy of long-stay hospitalization: survivors were allowed all their defects if they made good use of them. Here, we weren’t in a bourgeois salon; we fought with each other without judging, without limits, but with all our little weapons. In that respect the spirit of Charlie, the paper that fussy people wrapped in virtue, wherever they came from, had never ceased to detest or despise, was well-suited to the occasion: it allowed us to laugh at everything, and first of all at ourselves, using all available means. We hadn’t deserved our fate, but that was no reason to suffocate us with principles or take us seriously. For that, there would always be enough people who didn’t like us, and they weren’t going to be slow about it.
When he wasn’t sleeping, Simon was fighting: against pain, for meditation, seeking out each new movement and, later, each new pleasure. He listened to minimalist music, in particular Steve Reich. His future wife, Maisie, discreetly carried on around him a mad, concrete activity: I sometimes met her in the great deserted corridors with a bag of linen, sometimes clean, sometimes dirty, and good quality food. Simon had necessarily become a tactical hero in his burrow. He could not afford the luxury of ordinary altruism any more than I could. So he obtained from caregivers, friends, and institutions everything he might not have been allowed. Les Invalides was a well-protected harbor, with its unchanging beauty, its courtyards, its gardens, its top-flight centers for physical therapy and ergotherapy, where the hull, the sails, the rudder, and the morale of the albatrosses we were could be repaired; but even here, where good will was the rule and keeping your word was a principle, people, places, teams, and the situation had to be analyzed and you had to learn to fight in order to last. It’s unfair, but that’s how it is: the victim has to be intelligent, obstinate, unscrupulous, and armed: he doesn’t have the right, unlike those on whom he depends, to be weak.
Simon and I quickly understood, together, that we had to avoid either exposing ourselves to or believing too much in the political discourses that sanctified us. What we had to do instead was to learn to use them to strengthen our situations when we could: victims don’t live in the short term in which contemporary strongmen prosper. We advised and supported each other almost daily for months, and we flattered each other, of course, and even to excess, but, I believe, without lying. There was no question of failing in our reeducation, either for him, or for me, or for either of us with respect to the other. That is why, having begun as allies, we became friends.
I was now going to be cared for and monitored in accord with Chloé’s directives, but in her absence. However, she wasn’t far away. Once the initial tests and samples were taken, I opened my computer and found the e-mail that she had just sent me:
Hello,
So here you’ve gone off to Les Invalides—I got out of the operating room too late to be able to say goodbye. I’m convinced that your new place of hospitalization will be able to meet your need for rest. In any case, we’ll see each other next Monday for your new skin graft.
The 20th seems to me doable—to do it, I just have to call in sick for a boring meeting, another one, that is planned for that morning. I’ll have to leave the museum by 2:30 at the latest for the rest of the day.
See you very soon.
For me, Friday March 20 was an important date: I was going to visit the Velásquez exhibit at the Grand Palais. Ever since my first days at La Salpêtrière, it had been an obsession. I knew that it would take place in the spring, with the spring, and saw in this the sign of my rebirth. I’d said to myself and to my brother, my parents, Claire, and the caregivers that I’d be up for writing a review of it in Libération. It would announce my return, and I’d invited Chloé to go to the exhibit with me. It was, after the gift of Chandler’s works, another way of thanking her. She had accepted.
Velásquez was not only a painter whom I would enjoy writing about. He was one of the painters who had fed my imagination. Ever since my first visit to the Prado Museum twenty years earlier, I’d never gone back to Madrid without spending time there, alone, in the rooms with Las Meninas, Goya’s Pinturas negras, and El Greco’s paintings. This trio had shaped my way of seeing, fed my love for Spain, illuminated joys, pleasures, and depressions. One day, I’d had to rush out of the room where the Pinturas negras were; I was on the brink of fainting, I took refuge upstairs in front of Velásquez’s jesters, those intense and marginal samples, intense because they’re on the margins of humanity: their infirmities had always reassured me. Now they resembled me. The courts of the kings of Spain, with their suffocating ceremonials inherited from the Dukes of Burgundy, ultimately seemed to me more open to disgraces than the society in which I lived, even if it was in order to transform those who suffered from them into entertainers or pets.
El Greco’s elongated expressionist figures, which seemed to stretch unduly toward the heavens, had filled me with enthusiasm for an even longer time. I saw them as figures in a comic strip, but also as a species of extravagant, mystical greyhounds in whose company I could go for walks against a background of tropical green under a stormy sky. I wanted to throw my arms around the necks of his saints, caress their wrists and hands as if to elongate them still further. I wanted to see and see again The Burial of the Count of Orgaz and leave, as I did on each trip there, part of myself in Toledo, in that spiritual and physical splendor, among the bouquets of beards and angels. A year earlier, the four hundredth anniversary of El Greco’s death had been celebrated in Spain. I’d joined Gabriela in Madrid, and from there we went to Toledo, where works from all over the world had been assembled alongside the ones in the permanent collection. Seeing Velásquez again in Paris a year later, two and a half months after the attack, had become of vital importance for me, without my knowing precisely why. The challenges that we set for ourselves are also issued in accord with our reveries. And this exhibit might bring me closer to one of those moments whose nervous distance caused me so much sorrow; it might bring me closer, through the visit and the article, to my past.
I’d been at Les Invalides for ten days, and the second graft, which Chloé herself had just carried out by making a brief round trip between the two hospitals, had failed in turn. On the morning of Friday March 20 they came into my room one after the other, the people from La Salpêtrière and those from Les Invalides, as if to rehearse a play during a set change: the head doctor of the reeducation department, the intern, a nurse, Chloé, and the woman who, for the next two and a half years, was to become a force in my life almost as dominant as Chloé: Denise, my future physical therapist. I’d chosen her on the advice of one of my physiotherapists at La Salpêtrière, for two reasons. She had more or less created the job in the 1960s and did more demanding work with her patients. Her office was a hundred meters from Les Invalides. She was seventy-two years old, and immediately reminded me of one of my grandmothers, the third one, the one who did exercises every morning with a broomstick while she listened to cantatas. Denise looked at me and, with a cheery air and a booming voice, as the head doctor watched circumspectly, she began to explain the first exercises, in other words, the first grimaces I was going to have to make. Her beautiful face with bright eyes twisted with extraordinary ease when she imitated an ape, a rabbit, a hamster, all the animals that were going to become regular parts of my mandibular menagerie. She was capable of jutting her chin or sticking out her tongue farther than you might have imagined, and her face, in this little room, suddenly resembled the Romanesque gargoyles at Vézelay and Autun.
Chloé had come to accompany me to the Grand Palais, but also to inform me that I was returning to her department the following Monday: “This time,” she told me, “we’re not going to let you go as long as this isn’t entirely fixed.” I asked her how long that would take. It was one of those stupid questions that I continued to ask in spite of everything, knowing that I would receive no answer: a surgeon doesn’t reply if he’s not absolutely certain of the response, and he almost never is. She answered with a sort of smile that drove the question out of the room like a fly: “I don’t know, a week, ten days . . . ” I looked at the head doctor with concern: could I keep my room until I returned? He understood my worry and said: “If it’s a week or ten days, no problem, we’ll wait for you, you can leave your stuff here.” We continued to talk for a good half an hour. We were all standing, and once we were outside, Chloé said to me: “We all have backaches, except you, standing ramrod straight. Basically, you’re in better shape than we are.” I said to her: “It’s because I do sports . . . ” I’d begun the stationary bicycle and the treadmill in the gymnasium at Les Invalides, under supervision by the physical therapists. Resuming physical effort relieved my jaw by distributing the pain. The bicycle was across the room from a machine behind which either a paralytic or very old man positioned himself to strengthen his arm muscles by working a double crank. Our eyes scarcely ever met.
Since the weather was good, though a little cool, I put on my mask and we went on foot to the Grand Palais over the Alexandre III bridge. The gold of the statues shone violently. The air whipped my face. The two policemen walked, as usual, a short distance behind us. Florence, my friend at the National Museums, had had a little difficulty organizing this visit: the officials at the Grand Palais were nervous about the idea of being visited by a potential target, and in any case a protected one, and still more about the idea of allowing other policemen to take charge of security in their domain. Florence had overcome the obstacles and had hidden it from me, of course. At the entrance to the Grand Palais, the head of the security service, a dark-haired slender woman with an ironic expression, was waiting for us: the policemen had told me that she didn’t want to miss the opportunity.
Certain e-mails written that same evening indicate that I had reservations about the exhibit. Today, I have no critical memories of it at all: they disappeared in the seminal feeling it elicited. The sensation of being reborn by joining together the two ends, before and after, dates from that visit; and with it, the moment when painting took precedence over literature in the physical thrust toward life.
We were walking in the silent, deserted rooms, far apart from each other, suddenly moving closer to look at one of the portraits of jesters, nobles, or inquisitors that gave you all at once, from birth to death, from farce to tragedy, all that was dull and all that was brilliant, all the perspectives on life. I was drooling a little, my nerves were terrifying my chin, but I felt almost good, as if these men, these women, these animals, who had long been dead, and whose destiny hadn’t been rosy, were looking at me and saying: “You’re going to live.” They were there, I was there, I was looking at them, four centuries were equivalent to a minute and we were living.
The paintings had just been hung. The labels hadn’t all been attached. A restorer was using a flashlight to examine the scars on Venus at Her Mirror, which a Canadian suffragette had damaged with a hatchet in 1914. The policemen had taken out their cameras. They were photographing everything they saw and admiring it with the care of an investigator on a crime scene. You’d have thought they were looking for clues. Chloé fixed her lynx’s eye on certain details: I wondered what she could discern in these patients who had escaped her. She pointed out that the Bourbons, and in particular the Infanta Margarita in blue, were suffering from Crouzon’s syndrome, a genetic illness whose consequences were part of her specialty: an underdeveloped upper jaw, protruding eyes, excessively far apart, a face giving the impression of a prominent forehead, and an oversized clog chin. I told her that these symptoms were accentuated in the descendants of Philip IV’s family, who were painted by Goya. They could all have ended up in the stomatology department. She showed me the foreheads, the noses, the jaws, the eyes. The surgeon’s eye joined with that of the painter in making an inventory of human illnesses. Farther on, she stopped in front of Three Musicians, which had come from Berlin. The painting made me think of the concerts painted by Caravaggio. Chloé showed me a long, slender black knife planted like a pin in a big brown, round cheese. I looked at the stringed instruments, thinking of the visit Gabriel the violinist made to my hospital room. The knife pierced the rind of the cheese and I heard the Chaconne again.
The exhibit followed the painter’s development, from his formative predecessors to his heirs. The farther I went, the more the portraits gave me life, either because I’d already seen them or because I’d dreamed of seeing them, and because in this way time and my suffering would be abolished. They represented dead people who were communicating their life to me. Of the court jesters that surround Las Meninas in the Prado, only Pablo de Valladolid had made the trip to Paris. Dressed like a gentleman, whose role he is playing at that moment, he is an actor seen on deserted stage, like a bull in the ring, as if in the void. About him, Manet said: “The background disappears. It’s air that surrounds the figure, dressed in black and full of life.” His left hand is folded over his breast in a noble gesture that suggests that he’s about to make a speech. Space is defined by his gestures, and nothing else. His direct, dark eyes have an indeterminate expression. Manet was right: I could breathe the air that he displaced, and that blew away, from the Castilian plateau, the air that I had so often lacked. Through the jester’s body, I entered into the painting and I came out of it again in the Prado, twenty years before, at a time when sadness was not justified by the event. It led me through the cold streets of the Madrid winter as far as the Retiro park, which was soon going to close. It was through the body of Pablo de Valladolid that I felt for the first time, not the memory, but the presence of a man I had been. The patient was the jester of the monarch executed on January 7, and the monarch of the jester whom he had been up to the same date. This silent and massive jester now told me that the cards had been reshuffled. I had to play my role, laugh about it, fabricate the air that surrounded me.
There was a traffic jam of presences, sensations, and another portrait suddenly tugged at my sleeve: that of the poet Luis de Góngora, the master of culteranismo, painted by Velásquez in Madrid at the request of his teacher, Francisco Pacheco. It dates from 1622. Half bald, with a long, hooked nose, the corners of his mouth turning down, Góngora looks like what he was: a bitter genius who had gotten old and fallen out of grace. I had discovered his poems in his native city, Córdoba, on June 19, 1994: on that day a Spanish friend, a young professor, gave me an anthology of Góngora’s works in which the date appears, written in my friend’s hand. Góngora was his favorite poet, and he gave me the book in a bar near the Plaza de la Corredera. It was a friendly but solemn moment; Tomás took the trouble to explain to me the incomprehensible opening of the first of the Solitudes: “It was the flowering season of the year / When Europa’s false-hearted abductor . . . ” Velásquez’s portrait was reproduced on the cover. I’ve never been to Boston, where the picture is in the Museum of Fine Arts. At the Grand Palais, I pointed out to Chloé the detail that attracted me: a large beauty spot on the lower part of the right temple. That is what led me toward the void through which I had to pass. She looked at the beauty spot, then at the man, and said to me: “He doesn’t look easy to get along with.” He wasn’t. In 1622, ruined, his protectors dead, he could scarcely leave home, for lack of a horse and carriage. He thought of returning to Cordóba. Finally, he was driven out of his home, which his great rival, the poet Francisco de Quevedo, had secretly bought. He died in his native city, alone, five years later. I entered his poems as if they were a labyrinth without an exit.
A majestic riderless horse closed the exhibit. I began my article, published a few days later in Libération, with a description of this painting:
The tour ends in a dark rotunda where there stands an enormous, matte white horse in majesty, so potbellied he could no longer jump the slightest obstacle, terribly anti-El Greco, his tail long and floating like the end of a reign. He is harnessed, but has no rider. Velásquez made the painting between 1634 and 1638; experts say it is unfinished. In the upper part of the large brown and gray background, one can make out the body of a naked man, a hero or a god—or simply a man. His mass faces the pictural dusk, the abstraction of a power that dominates and is about to flicker out: that of the Spanish monarchy, or, perhaps, the power everyone thinks he has over his life when the sun is not setting on it.
We returned as we had come, by crossing the Seine. The sun was still a little high. It was colder than on the way there. Chloé walked straight ahead, cheerfully, into the wind. On the Alexandre III bridge, we talked about euthanasia. I was still thinking about joining the Death with Dignity Association. Chloé was not at all in favor of euthanasia. She looked at the sky, the Seine, the gilded statues, and said to me: “You never know what tomorrow will bring. If you had been told on January 6 what was going to happen to you on the 7th, and the state in which you’d arrive at the hospital, you might have jumped out the window . . . and you would have been wrong, because, you see, here you are, on this bridge, you’ve just seen that exhibit and now you’re going to write about it.” I sighed: “It’s going to be rather tight. Monday I’m going back to the hospital and it’s off to the operation rooms. I’ll have to write my article before I go. I don’t know if I can do that.” She stopped in her tracks and looked at me: “So what? You’ve got the whole weekend and you don’t have anything else to do: that’s more than enough!” I thought: she’s right, and she could have been an editor in chief. The man from the security service had left us. The two policemen were now walking with us. They were listening to Chloé, speaking to her a little, and looking at her: she had charmed them. Her little round, red car, very chic, was parked alongside Les Invalides. She took out her keys and played with them as they looked on covetously and obliquely. Then she said to me: “See you Monday!” and got into the car. The policemen accompanied me back as far as the Laon corridor, where the two uniformed guards and the peaceful Monsieur Tarbes were waiting for me.
The next day, after an early walk around the deserted Les Invalides, and after the morning rounds, I wrote a first draft of the article. Philippe Lançon told Monsieur Tarbes what he had seen, how he judged it. Monsieur Tarbes tried to lend weight to his enthusiasm, to keep him from taking off toward phrases in which the words would have overflowed him. He wanted to make him avoid any judgment likely to debase the experience he’d had. I was drooling as I wrote. Every forty-five minutes, I gave the tingling in my jaw a rest by stretching out on the bed and breathing, but the article was soon written, and I sent the more than mediocre result to Chloé, who did not reply: she was my surgeon, not my department head. I finished the article on Velásquez on Sunday, thinking that I could return to La Salpêtrière in peace.
A few days earlier, my parents had come to see me. We’d gone from statue to statue in the gardens of the Rodin Museum, then walked as far as a bar on the Boulevard de La Tour-Maubourg, where my uncle and my aunt from Tarbes were waiting for us. The weather was gray and cold. I was exhausted and worried. I was walking as slowly as a robot. On the way to the bar, I suddenly thought of the Chilean embassy, which was nearby. It was in a splendid house from the 1920s to which I’d gone, if not regularly, at least off and on. Two and a half years earlier, I’d interviewed there the former ambassador, Jorge Edwards, a writer and a man I liked. In the 1960s, he’d often talked with Pablo Neruda and Louis Aragon there. Later on, I had gone there for a few “tiendas de vinos,” informal receptions where people met old friends who were artists, writers, and also a few diplomats. Now, Jorge was ninety-two years old. He lived in Madrid and had written me a note after the attack. He was what people call a bon vivant and a humanist: a distant, warm, amused, refined person whom life seemed to cradle and death to forget. I thought of him—where was he with his memoirs? How was he? I felt sad and said to my mother: “Do you remember the Chilean embassy? I talked to you about it when I went to see Jorge Edwards. He’s no longer there, now, but it would give me pleasure to show you the place.” We walked up the sidewalk toward the embassy. I was telling her Jorge’s story when, about twenty meters in front of us, I saw the silhouette of an old man, upright and a little hesitant, who had his back to us and was heading toward the door that I had several times passed through. I thought I was hallucinating, and if I wasn’t, I was going to faint, fall into a hole in time. Were we there, in March 2015, on a gray day, or was I there alone in the summer of 2012? I shouted, “Jorge!” and the man turned around: it was he, visiting Paris. We walked up to one another. He looked at my body, my bandage, and it was only on meeting my eyes that he recognized me. His eyes filled with sympathy and terror, in equal parts, we exchanged a few words, my bandage was leaking, and after having shaken my hand and hemmed and hawed, he quickly escaped through the door behind which there was a very small part of my past.