In 1973, while my sister Norah was wandering through the dusty stacks of small but famous Marseille libraries, public and private, on the trail of Mary Magdalen’s lesser-known apocrypha, I spent most of my time absorbing the general aspect of the Old Port, either from our two big windows above the Rive Neuve or down on the waterfront. I was largely silent. Opening a conversation there can be either provocative or impolitic, depending upon where it is done, and I chose to remain inaudible and thus somewhat unseen. I have been fairly conditioned, though, to love to talk, perhaps especially in French, and that is why it was good for me to meet the doctor down our street.
Norah disliked him immediately, for several reasons including the fact that he had something like fourteen children, and was therefore a selfish Catholic (she occasionally sounds oddly like her Irish grandmother!), and also because sometimes I would go to report to him on basic matters such as how one of his pills was performing, and instead of being back at the apartment in half an hour, I would come in three hours later, my head humming with his well-educated volubility. I was tiddly on his good talk, like a child drunk on fruit juice after too long a thirst.
My sister, naturally more anxious about why a pill was necessary than what possible effect it might have, took out her uneasiness by being coldly disapproving of my lackadaisical manner, and indirectly of my sparkle. I told her Dr. Gabillaud was talkative. “Plain gabby!” she said. And he is still Gabby Gabillaud, high on my list of therapeutic spellbinders. I would like to see him again. I feel averse, though, to taking up a doctor’s time unless I need his trained help, and three years after I swallowed the man’s capsules in Marseille, when I returned there, I could neither cough nor creak commendably enough to ring his doorbell.
I think often of him, as I do of a few other medicos in France and Switzerland and England, and it both interests and saddens me that with them I feel a stronger bond than I do with their peers in my own country. This is not because I was a foreigner, thus calling out their extra compassion, their fleeting amiability. On the contrary, I was probably an interruption in their familiar rounds of office and house calls, and obviously a transient and unprofitable investment in the kind of energy that a good doctor spends beyond his professional obligations.
And Gabby Gabillaud and some of those other Europeans did spend it on me. It was more valuable to my adrenalin supply, my loyally pumping heart, my occasional aches and quakes, than any injections or suppositories yet devised. When they had finished their explorations, both verbal and manual, and scribbled their lingua franca prescriptions for what may or may not have ailed me, they would sit back with a small sigh, look at me as if I had suddenly come into focus as a person and not a problem, and begin to talk, about Paul Valéry, or German-Swiss dumplings, or a former student of Maillol who had just fallen off her unfinished statue of a ninety-foot phallus. I would respond like the proverbial old firehorse to the whiff of conversational smoke. I would feel younger, more like a human being. And when the unknown man sitting with apparent enjoyment behind his desk looked suddenly at his watch, I would stand up as if I must leave a good dinner before its end, and walk out in a heady cloud of silly jokes and puns, epigrams, criticisms, all playing like firelight over language, language used as it should be used: a prime means of communication.
Gabby talked that way. Sometimes I wondered cynically if he really did, or if he merely sounded fine because I was so hungry for French from somebody besides a Marseille waiter or cabdriver, but by now I know that he was an intelligent, well-educated man, and that he needed to talk to me. What is more, he let me talk too, and I heard my rusty accent grow smoother, and felt my mind stretch. I asked him questions, sensing that he wanted me to. He would rise like a wily old trout, recognizing my bait, and knowing how to escape it with a flick and a neat flash.
Once I heard someone come into his untended waiting room and begin to walk around, sigh, drop a magazine. I finally said something polite about not staying. He glanced at his schedule on his big flat desk, said, “That’s old Fantoni. He’s in for his shot. He’ll be all right for a while,” and went right on about the need for men in high office to have their own escape hatches. He told me graphically about a schoolmate of his, now a famous political leader, who since puberty has hidden at regular times to listen day and night to recorded music. “It’s like periodic alcoholism,” I said. “Yes, but this is restorative, not destructive,” Gabby said. “And by now, it is a double game with him. It works up his glands to fool the journalists, who link him with international starlets, secret rendezvous with nuclear-physicists. Even his wife believes that he has at least one mistress. He comes back from the three days of Baroque music, or 1930s jazz, a renewed man.”
In the waiting room, Fantoni banged open a window, and groaned a little. I stood up again. “Doctor, do you wish to see me next week?” He looked as if he was trying to remember why I was there, and then permitted himself a small grin as he bowed perfunctorily to me. “Of course,” he said. “Monday at eleven, when the office is not so crowded.”
Old Fantoni, the only other soul around, looked crosswise at me, and held his stomach gently with one hand. I felt sheepish but exhilarated; Norah would be chilly with me, and nobody would notice how much better my French sounded, and I wondered why this did not happen at home. Why could not my wits, if not my American accent, be sharpened by my monthly visit to a trusted friend’s office? Why would I come out feeling as dull as when I went in? I would have an impression of the doctor’s real fatigue, of being rushed through a hideously crowded schedule, of needing more than the routine checks of pulse, blood pressure, respiration. I needed to have more than my prescriptions renewed. And what was perhaps most tonic of all in my visits to Gabby and his French peers was that in some ways I felt that I too had been good medicine.…
Maybe our doctors at home, I thought as I headed for the apartment above the Vieux Port, are so overcrowded and harried that they cannot permit themselves to be more than healers to their patients. They choose, in self-survival, to have little sustained contact with the sick, in their training and then in the clinics and huge hospitals and busy groups they graduate to. Now and then a handful will break away, to try in an idealistic fashion to recapture the old spirit of “the country doctor” in a rural community. They must learn to make house calls, and to drive into the hills in storms to deliver babies. They must think about their own children’s chancy schooling and about their frustrated bored wives. They must make annual contact with “the outside,” at some exhausting medical conference, and try not to listen to their classmates wondering how to cope with income taxes, nor to the blandishments of great pharmaceutical laboratories, nor to their in-laws suggesting they give up this person-to-person nonsense and specialize in ophthalmology or psychopodiatry, in an affluent suburb where they will, first thing, put in swimming pool and tennis court.…
I wondered how French or English or Swiss G.P.s found the nerve to avoid all this pressure. How did they raise fourteen children? How did they keep their wives? The first time I saw Gabby, for instance, he came to our lower-class, shabby flat at almost ten at night, after his rounds. He had been called at perhaps five o’clock by our concierge, who “went” to him for some female trouble but knew he would cure my wild coughing. He looked like a tired, quiet, middleaged businessman. He listened to my story, gave me about six prescriptions to be filled the next day, did nothing about immediate relief of what I felt was a cosmic whoop, and stood up as if he would like to dust off his trousers. When I asked him his fee, he said, “Two thousand francs.” I was horrified until I realized that he was pre-de Gaulle and meant twenty, and he put the bills, worth about four dollars, into his coat pocket, and asked me to see him in three days.
I cannot remember any late house calls before in my lives in Europe, nor do I remember paying money to a doctor. They would send a bill annually, after I had forgotten that on August 4 the younger girl had thrown up after a bee sting and that on November 29 the older had gashed her leg in an awkward slalom.… But Gabillaud lived in a blue-collar part of the quarter, and perhaps it was easier that way. Certainly the fee did not seem to interest him one way or another. I thought he was a cold fish, and felt peevish that he had not left some magical pill to make me stop coughing.
Three days and two shots later (given by a licensed nurse sent from the neighborhood pharmacy where I had all the prescriptions filled), I went a couple of blocks down our ugly street to his apartment house. His office was on the ground floor, and he lived on the one above, according to the mailboxes. The waiting room was grim and dark, perhaps a former mean, measly dining room. There was an inadequate but elegant desk in the little hallway, with a telephone, and I learned later that one or another of the doctor’s attractive daughters occasionally marked appointments there. A half-open door showed the former kitchen, now with an examination table crowded into it. Then Gabby opened the final door, and I went into a room that in a flash reminded me of other forgotten doctors’ offices: London, Berne, Dijon, all completely different from the professional cubbyholes at home, so antiseptic and impersonal.
It was big, once the salon of the apartment, with tall windows opening onto a neglected green garden, shabby and tranquil. There were good armchairs and a chaise longue and plenty of books and reading lights, and there was a general feeling that the family used the room whenever it was not a hospice for the dying and the sickly. It felt clean, healthy, and receptive. I sank into a fine chair upholstered in worn silk, and forgot to cough.
The doctor looked freshly shaved, and almost dapper, compared with the rumpled man of the night call. I deduced, early in our game, that he was hipped on allergies: he started out by tracing my chronic bronchial cough to a lifelong predilection for living near the sea, the ocean, even lakes and ponds. His logical questions proved him right, at least to himself. Then he used his own case to strengthen mine, and bared his weak defenses in unwitting betrayal.
His whole career, his life in Algeria as head surgeon in a big civil hospital after years of study and practice in Bordeaux and Paris, had ended abruptly, tragically: he told me that in 1961, during the Mutiny, he had developed a violent reaction to rubber. “Had this ever happened before?” I asked with guileful innocence, thinking of that time of wild revolt and of the thousands of people fleeing Algeria and of all the scandal and anguish there and in France. “No,” he said, almost serenely. “Within a few days it became obvious that never again could I wear rubber gloves. And that meant giving up surgery forever. It meant leaving a country I loved, abandoning my patients, uprooting my children from their schools. An allergy, Madame … a simple twist in the metabolic pattern, the body chemistry of a mature man! I was finished!”
He tried to use this sad story as a proof that once back in California I must undergo a long series of tests to decide what it was about sea air that made me cough. I pretended to consider all this seriously for the next few months, but his apparent unwillingness to track down his own sudden inability to tolerate rubber gloves seemed quizzical to me, and I sniffed out what I could of his neurotic nature.
I noticed that his hands were strong and firm-skinned, but that he held a pen as if it hurt him. He touched doorknobs with care. He never shook hands, as so many people do in southern France. Once he decided to examine some of my orifices in the converted kitchen. To do it he rinsed his hands from a bottle and put on mittens of thin clear plastic; afterward he washed his hands very gently with two kinds of soap, powdered them, and ran a sterilized orangewood stick under his nails and around the cuticle, in a slow preoccupied way. When he saw me watching him, he asked me curtly to wait for him in his office, but when he came in he did not seem anything but bland and interested in me-the-patient.
Over the next weeks I asked him questions that were so obvious as to make me feel ridiculous: were allergic conditions slow in building; was there any proven connection between them and emotional stress; could they be cured or merely alleviated, with the possible causes and cures dictated by chemistry or by circumstance? The doctor never seemed aware of my game: I was a “case” to him, and he himself was not. He was an extraordinary example of the quirkiness of Fate, or Providence, or perhaps God. People like me could have series of injections in their bottoms, or move to a new climate, or stop eating eggs. He was a surgeon cut down in his prime, a victim of the sudden curse of wearing rubber gloves. There was no remedy for any punishment as unique as his. He shrugged, laid his strong, somewhat hairy hands on his desk as if they were made of porcelain, and went into another casual story about his famous schoolmate who played records instead of having a mistress, or about a former patient who raised cheetahs (Gabby was given one every New Year, and sent it to the Longchamps zoo), or the rise in heroin addiction in Western Europe.…
He talked with somewhat the same self-enjoyment, somewhat the sensuality he showed in cleaning his nails, but with more animation. We both enjoyed it. I talked too (another vocal voluptuary!), and he seemed to enjoy what I asked and occasionally stated. Once he lost his usual ironical detachment, when we were talking about the way young people, his in Marseille and mine in Pittsburgh or Berkeley, young people anywhere, can be pushed into drug abuse. He turned very pale, and said, “I have spent my life learning how to save lives, and I am ready to die to oppose capital punishment, but I am also ready to kill anyone who sells drugs. Kill!” He forgot his hands, and raised them to make a violent gesture of pressing them unto death around a throat.…
And only once did he permit himself to touch me except professionally. That was the day after I fell on my face, when he put one hand for a minute on my shoulder, as if in his concern he must silently pat me, commend me, encourage me.
And that was the Monday after Palm Sunday, which is a special holiday in France and perhaps most so in Marseille. It is almost the end of Lent, almost spring. People swarm out of their nests like lustful bees, helpless lemmings, and walk or ride into the countryside. If they own cars, they throw grandparents and children into the back, and drive as fast as they can along the nearest and preferably the most crowded highways. They head, afoot or on wheels, for good food and open air, preferably with a view thrown in.
My sister and I felt the fever of Palm Sunday along with countless other Marseillais, and after a remarkably good lunch up on the Rue des Catalans we started the interminable trek on the curving Corniche J. F. Kennedy, which is very wide, very ugly, built along the wild coast outside the city. To our left were six lanes of cars full of people going anywhere as fast as possible. To our right was the Mediterranean, looking pale blue except on the surly rocks below the high cement curve of the roadway. We began to trudge instead of walk. Finally we sighted a little café across the way, and far from coincidentally it was located by one of the rare stop-and-go lights. We decided to cross and sit down.
We grabbed a green light, ran to the pedestrian island just as the yellow went on, and unlike us in every way except on Palm Sunday, 1973, we decided to run for the curb before the red went on.
The island was shaped somewhat like a badly designed throat lozenge, larger at one end, and sloping on the six-inch sides, and I misjudged by about an inch, and instead of taking one hurried step across the little raised platform, I plunged off it, straight forward, five feet and seven-plus inches, into the path of the nearest of three lanes of happy carefree well-fed celebrants getting up speed again as fast as possible with their green light.
I heard Norah cry “Oh!” and felt her pull me back onto the soft warm welcoming asphalt of the pedestrian island, where I would have liked to take a long nap. But there was a general screech of brakes, and a dozen people slowed and called out, “Can we help? Do you need help? Can we take her to a doctor?” “No, no, thank you,” Norah called back, and she began to look at my face, while the motorists gathered new speed. Then two young men ran from the sea edge of the Corniche, and bent over me. They were interns at Ste. Marguerite, they said to my sister, and one picked up my face from its lovely cushion and said, “Hospital. Now,” and the other ran back (Norah said he simply waltzed between the long lanes of traffic), and wheeled their car around toward the café we’d been heading for.
“Can she walk?” “Yes, she can,” and I was mopping off my face with wet paper towels the barman brought me in the toilet. People looked compassionately at me as I drifted in and out of the café, but there was no disgust at my ugliness, my bloodied clothes.
Outside, the two young men folded me into the back of a ratty old deux-cheveaux with its cloth top down. The older more decisive one sat beside me looking as wary as a pointing setter, with one hand on my wrist. I said, reorganizing my mind and mouth to be polite or at least conscious, “This is a boring way for you to celebrate Palm Sunday,” and he said, “Oh, we were just cruising. Nice sun today.”
We drove a long time, I thought, and then were in a huge collection of grubby old buildings and half-finished sidewalks, and I was in Emergency Surgery while Norah thanked the two young men and tried vainly to pay for their gas, endow a new clinic, send them to the Shah of Iran, anything to thank them.
The emergency room was cluttered. I felt cozy. A table covered with bloody sheets stood waiting for attention. On another table a long black man, with a towel over his genitals and a crushed leg lying crookedly down from his live body, smiled at me. I sat on a stool while a tiny nurse with enormous black eyes swabbed efficiently at my face. She was alluring, and passionately skillful. A young doctor poked and cut at the dead black leg on the table, and the man laughed softly.
“Does it hurt?” I asked while the nurse got more supplies. “Not on your life,” he said in an amused way. “Second time I’ve done this. My old leg between a stone wall and my motorbike. Then toubibs fix me so I don’t hurt a-tall.”
“Shut up, now,” the tiny nurse said, and started to pin my forehead together. “Last time you had a tetanus shot?” I could not remember, so nodded when she shook my shoulder a little and snapped, “Within two years?” She gave me a booster anyway. Two men came in to take me across the hall for X-rays, and as I went out, the Black said laughingly to me, while his toubib sliced out a piece of useless old flesh, “Don’t worry, Sister!”
There was a lot happening. In my quick trip to the X-ray room, perhaps fifteen feet from the bloody one, I saw two corpses, a child heaving under a sheet on a gurney, several dazed battered people like me. There was no more confusion than there was any effort at all to make the place quiet, attractive, reassuring, as it would be in my country. No potted plants stood in niches, and in the waiting room where my sister sat, there were not enough chairs and children leaned silently against the walls.
I got a quick look at three or four X-rays before they were rushed across the hall to Emergency Surgery: yes, my nose had snapped very neatly; no need to set it; there would be swelling. No concussion.
In Emergency, another young man was clipping the former leg into some semblance of such, and the long Black had snoozed off. The ferocious little nurse was talking with some passion about stitches. “Use plastic clips,” the intern said. “Scar,” she said, and when he said clips again, she came over to me and with a few keen looks into my eyes, onto my face, she dutifully clipped shut the long vertical gash on my forehead. Now and then she felt my wrist. The man with the chopped-up leg was snoring. “Doctor, look here,” she said in a peculiar blend of business and sex. He looked, said warmly, “Superb, magnificent!” and went on with his own chore, stitch-snip-stitch. I felt happy that they might sleep together later.
So, on instruction from a tired desk orderly in the huge old hideous hospital, I went the next morning to Dr. Gabillaud. I could barely see his door, much less read the information on it, and did not realize until later that it was not his “office day.”
I rang the apartment several times, and heard girls calling, “Papa! Papa!” Finally he opened the downstairs door, looking fussily scrubbed, in a natty suit and with a dot of shaving soap in one ear.
“My God,” he said. “What has happened to you?”
He put his hand to my shoulder, as he steered me into the pleasant big room, and when he looked appraisingly at me I knew, for the first time really, that I was a mess. A three-inch square of gauze and tape covered most of my forehead, and another held my nose in place. Both my eyes were squinty and puffed, with dark bruise marks halfway down my cheeks: two shiners. My lips were swollen. I smiled carefully at him.
“Well,” he said, “at least you have all your teeth! Were you mugged? Did you fall out of a window?”
So I told him, and increasingly I wondered at the unhesitating kindness of Frenchmen in a dozen cars, out for a yearly holiday ritual, who stopped or slowed down on the hectic Corniche to ask if they could help. There I lay on the pedestrian island, I told Gabby, bloody and dazed, my sister bending over me, people in cars sounding concerned-generous-helpful. There we were, on a festive day. And there were the two young interns, out for some sunshine.…
“Of course. Why not?” The doctor sounded testy. I told him that at home people seemed afraid of becoming involved, scared of lawsuits, of malpractice. “Heathen,” he said. I said that forty citizens could stand watching a woman be raped and murdered, and not lift a finger to help. “Barbaric,” he said. “In France we have lived with the law for so long that we know how and when to make use of it. We are not afraid of it. In your country you are still so inexperienced, that you are in awe of it. The law is your stern parent, like God, and you fear its punishment. Here we respect it, but only if we respect ourselves more. We use it when we need it.”
“But those two young men—they looked thin and poor. They needed a rest. They spent half their free afternoon helping us.”
Gabby brushed that away with a surprisingly relaxed gesture of his immaculate hands. “It’s their job,” he said. “They’ve already spent years with sick, injured, dying people. In the United States—” and he was off on what became weeks of talk between us, mostly a dialogue about medical problems in our two countries. French students started active patient-care before they opened their first textbooks, he said, and were in the home the minute they enrolled in a school. In my country an ambitious intelligent young medical aspirant worked in abstractions, in theories, before he ever delivered a baby or set a bone. By the time an American did his internship he had already decided what branch of medicine he would follow, and by then he might well be wooed by money and power into advanced research.…
“We’ll never have a Nobel for medicine,” Gabby said with some bitterness. “By the time a Frenchman qualifies as a doctor, he has spent a lot of his creative energy on day-and-night care of the sick and is too poor to stop work for further study. Professionally we are a breed of superb-to-piddling country doctors, enslaved by poverty and plain exhaustion.”
Gabillaud had two sons and several French protégés in Canada, all medical students. There they would be freer to choose their paths in medicine: they could go from Toronto into the northern wilds of Ontario if some instinctive urge forced them to be frontier bonesetters, and if they wanted the excitements and fat salaries of laboratory research they could head for Detroit, Dallas … “In France,” he said, “nine out of ten young doctors like the ones you met on Palm Sunday will end up in poor country districts, killing themselves to keep a few ignorant peasants alive.”
“But what about those interns and residents at the hospital? They were handsome, skillful, experienced, so young,” I said, and he interrupted me. “Ah,” he said triumphantly. “They were the pick of the crop! You just happened, my dear friend, to be rescued by two kids doing their last year with Jacques Tatin, one of the finest doctors in Marseille—in France! That was his own pavilion they took you to.”
“But it was in a big municipal—”
“Ah! Here, aside from having private clinics, very expensive and stylish, many doctors as renowned as my highly respected colleague have their own pavilions in public hospitals, where they train their most promising students from the university school of medicine. The Tatin pavilion is uniquely emergency, to sound out the interns. All famous doctors in a town like Marseille, or Paris or Bordeaux, consider it part of their duties to teach on the local faculty. In your case, by neat coincidence, your rescuers happened to be studying under my friend Tatin. He is still fairly young, and brilliant, and he grooms a stable of the most promising colts in French medicine, including his own son. Of course he has his private clinic—no need for Junior to head for Toronto! Tatin is a magnificent kidney man—”
“But my nose,” I said. “And the young doctor working on that leg! Urology?”
“Precisely!” Gabby said. “Men who can intern with Tatin have already spent several years, perhaps their best ones, working in every branch of the art of medicine. Half of them will never go much further than their own practices in provincial towns. A special few will end by being rich, covered with decorations, safe with their own famous patients in their own elegant clinics. A few will be like me, or rather the way I was, head surgeons in big hospitals and still with their own practices. I’m now a gynecologist, you know from my little sign. But I can recognize an allergic bronchial cough when I hear it. And I am very good at stitchery, thanks to two years in an emergency pavilion in Bordeaux, much like Tatin’s. And I wish that young rascal had not put clips on your forehead. I could have made that scar as unimportant as a wrinkle. Now it’s a scowl. But of course I’d have to charge you.”
By then this was a quiet joke with us, well along in our dialogue. His first fee, the night he came to the apartment, had so plainly startled me that from then on he somewhat sardonically translated every sum for me, in “old francs” and then “de Gaulle.” The day he stared from across his desk at my poor crumpled face, he waived any fee. The others were all unpredictable: about two dollars when he wrote prescriptions, a dollar now and then, once about eight when I had to undress and go into the converted kitchen for probings. (This was when housewives of low means did not blink at paying five or six dollars a pound for the Sunday roast.) I suppose that in almost five months, while I gratefully renewed some contact with the French language, I spent about thirty dollars.
Prescriptions were costlier. The corner pharmacist continued his first disapproval of me, when I firmly paid cold cash for his magic elixirs, potions, pastilles. I tried to explain to him that I did not feel entitled to French Medicare, since I was a transient foreigner and paid almost no taxes. “It’s there, Madame,” he said reprovingly. “Take it. Make the most of a good thing,” and every time that I did not, he shrugged as if with fatalistic disapproval of my stupidity. And to my continuing astonishment there seemed to be almost none of the maze of paperwork (paperasserie, which sounds funnier in English than in French) that is accepted as a necessary and routine evil at home—and of course in some branches of French officialdom like the postal service.
When I went to Emergency at the big public hospital in Marseille, the desk orderly asked for my name and address as I left. The sexy wee surgical nurse had already told me to return at once if I felt feverish, and in ten days if not, and had dismissed me fiercely as another bloody body was rolled into her room. When I went back, the second Wednesday after Palm Sunday, she spotted me at once in the hall and said angrily, “Oh, you! This is not your day! Oh, yes—it is!” She stood on tiptoe to rip the old tired bandage off my head, nodded with a dazzling smile, and pushed me into her room, which was gorier than before, but empty.
I sat again on the low stool, and she swabbed at me as fast as a bird pecking for grain. It hurt a little, but I knew that she was in no way careless or ignorant. She stood back to take a long satisfied look. “Superb! Magnificent,” she murmured, since the handsome intern was not there to say it. “Now out! Don’t come back!” And I was in the hall before I could even try to thank her. I thought, she is like a delicious Provençal olive, firm, small, succulent, with a forthright bite to her flavor.…
The desk orderly asked, “Dismissed? Name, address?” He gave me an indecipherable written description of my outpatient care noted by l’Assistance Publique de Marseille, number CICH 1428, and asked me to sign it, so that my social insurance could pay the bill. He looked with frank astonishment at me when I explained that since I was a temporary resident, and a foreigner, I myself wanted to pay. Finally he said, “You mean you are a tourist?” He shrugged as if I were therefore mad. “The bill [you poor benighted nitwit, his voice added without words], Madame, is forty-four hundred ninety francs!” Thanks to Dr. Gabillaud, and a few fish-women on the Quai des Belges who liked to startle visitors with the “Old and New,” I did not even blink, and handed out forty-four francs and ninety centimes, and he signed my receipt and bowed sadly at me from his chair.
I had thus rashly paid about nine dollars for two visits to Emergency, a booster shot against tetanus, a lot of bandage and tape, and several X-rays and six clips. When I told Gabby all this, he smiled and said casually, “You are obviously either idealistic or merely stubborn. But here in the office, my poor lady, you must pay and pay! I milk the rich tourists, to treat for nothing a handful of penniless pieds noirs from Algeria.…”
And not long ago, on the radio in California, I heard a newscast by a bedazzled young reporter who told of having broken his leg in Marseille. He was hospitalized for two nights, in a cast, and then allowed to hop around until the bone was correctly healed, with several visits to the municipal clinic where it had been set. Finally he was discharged, and apologetically required to pay an extra sum of almost four dollars for a special metal brace the doctors had put into the plaster with his permission, so that he could go back to his work sooner. That was all, he reported dreamily, and I smiled with complicity and thought of all the American doctors who must be tut-tutting his subversive socialistic message.…
This report of mine could be a chatty incident about the avaricious cold scheming cheating lying Frenchman so often described by us tourists, but it is really about what happened to me on Palm Sunday, 1973, on the Corniche Kennedy. Or perhaps is it more truly about how I managed subconsciously to prolong my official visits to a doctor who spoke beautiful gabby French?
By the time my sister and I had to leave Marseille, she was philosophical about my lengthy visits to Gabillaud, and by now she feels as I do, that we’ve all met before, in Simenon’s stories about Commissioner Maigret. Maigret’s best friend has always been Dr. Pardon. The Maigrets and the Pardons dine together once a week or so, and know exactly what favorite dishes to serve each other, and when the two men can find an evening free from murders and childbirths, they talk and talk … about puzzling cases, even about themselves. And we listen, delighted Peeping Toms.…
Yes, Gabby is another Pardon, a true “neighborhood doctor,” after all his less constricted years. He is concerned about his patients, and deliberately involved in what is happening to them, what will happen next, why, where. I would like to see him again, but there is no excuse to. I still scowl, and always shall. But I still have all my teeth, and could smile at him. And then we could slide into a delicious little Gabby-fest about the authenticity of Rodin’s head of Cézanne on the fountain in Aix, or about the increasing ambiguity of the AMA toward socialized medicine, or or or.…