“Mom died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know. But I know she died today. Or maybe yesterday, I didn’t know. What does it matter? Yesterday, today, dead or not, her or me? Last night I reread Camus’s The Stranger to fall asleep. Result: I didn’t sleep at all. I dreamed that a dog who was allowed to go anywhere was dragging me by the sleeve through the sleaziest places you could think of, dungeons of passing time, the bottoms of which you could never get out of since the social elevator’s broken and the competition is international, I was in a nine-square-yard cell with two other inmates, I was on a hospital bed next to a cancer of the liver, I was like an overmedicated zombie in a cafeteria in Sainte-Anne and the dog was telling me to hurry up, we still had to visit the Catacombs and the Montparnasse cemetery. That dog finally left me alone but I began thinking about our appointment. I really shouldn’t have done that, because I hold you completely responsible for making me come here and then leave without getting anything. It would have been better not to come and not to think about it.
“At 9:30 a.m. I left the house at the last minute to see if I had any mail. There was that letter from the eviction officer about my unpaid rent and the eviction notice. My father died penniless and my mother worse, all alone, she’d even lost her mind. Paris was off limits for her, because of her blood pressure and the high rents. For her, Paris was no way to live. For me, that’s all there was. In the ’60s I’d already burned down all the projects outside Paris with napalm the way cobalt can get rid of your cancer.”
“When I was a kid I always dreamed of the Champs-Élysées, the banks of the Seine, and the Quartier Latin. I lived twenty miles from Paris in low-income housing. My father was general-in-chief of the middle class and a representative of smalltown France. That just shows you he didn’t exist. He used to bike back from the station and into the parking lot in front of the neighbors’ cars and their wives’ windows. Of course he had battle plans and naval maps in his pockets but he wouldn’t spread them out in front of his family who had homework to do or dinner to make. In the ’50s and ’60s the son of a modest wage earner in the southern suburbs could consider a career as a teacher in Paris. Paris was a conquerable citadel. The kind of target you could hit. It seemed to me the right spot for a young man with some French culture to have the firm illusion he’d be living in the center of the world. But it wasn’t a target made of concentric circles, it was more like a spiral with a constantly moving center. The more Parisian I was, the more of a stranger I was. An immigrant. I didn’t even give myself the right to vote, or a work permit. I would settle into apartments without paying the rent until I got evicted. I could always manage to melt into the city, I looked like seaweed, the spitting image of the crowd. I lived by writing and lying; in other words I lived on nothing. Most of the time I lived underwater, in the fog, but with the technique of the flying fish, I had flashes of scintillating lucidity that lead me to say I actually did live. Or at least I think so.”
“It seemed to me that in the ’70s, as I emerged in Paris, I was reproducing the fate of all humanity, I was like that fish with legs coming out of the ocean and becoming a monkey in a few million years, then a man; I was on dry ground, the promised land. I came from the southern suburbs, I didn’t realize I was leaving that impalpable, infinite, slimy old-people’s home to its economic stagnation and unemployment, hopelessness and mindlessness. I landed at the Porte d’Orléans, and I stuck there, all around Denfert, Montparnasse, and Port-Royal, without ever crossing the Seine. At least back then, the people of the 14th looked middle class and not yet like a bunch of chickenshits sliding into impoverishment. But I didn’t want to be prosperous. I wanted to be Verlaine or François Villon. Verlaine ended his life here, in the hospital neighborhood, going from sleazy hotel to hospice, from the arms of Eugénie Krantz and Philomène Boudin, well-known prostitutes, to the less tender arms of the hospital sisters in their habits.”
“I ended up at Cochin Hospital. Not really ended. Not really continued. I stopped there. The Achard wing is a huge blue thing that would bring anybody down, but from the ninth floor you can look out over all of Paris. At night it looks like the scintillating sea. I had become the ghost of a big crow and I had a rotten egg in my esophagus. A bodyguard never left my side: It was a kind of giraffe or gibbet from which a goiter was hanging, a bladder, a belly heavy from chemotherapy. I also had a syringe on my lap, and in my chest a tube between a vein and pipes through which substances were flowing. Every morning a stretcher bearer would come get me and take me to an ambulance that crossed the city toward the Place Gambetta. In a sci-fi-setting I was bombarded by X-rays to the music of Keith Jarrett. In the big waiting room where a horde of frightened paupers were waiting, I would smoke Craven “A”s while waiting for the ambulance drivers to come back. I no longer thought about downing large quantities of alcohol, I was much calmer. I had no desire to get out of there and into a café, didn’t feel like picking up girls either. I had all I needed, because on the one hand I could see my life like a real thing and not a beautiful piece of fruit, and on the other my life was an object of care for all the people who surrounded me, and that gave it a certain reinforced substance. I was naked in my life but that life was an air cushion. The weight I’d lost was the weight of guilt, bad fat. I felt unbelievably forgiven. Of course I was wrong, but as long as I was in the hospital or even in the ambulance listening to the drivers’ bullshit, I was untouchable — admirably lucid, but only relevant on one side of the wall, nine stories higher than other peoples’ lives.”
“I looked out over rue de la Santé — I think I’ve said the main things about it already — and the square courtyard of a little Ursuline convent. At 10 in the morning a window in the building would open and a woman would appear in smiling majesty, and the memory of her majestic smile would accompany me all day through the obedient time at the hospital, for I rediscovered in her slow, secluded life the secret impatience of childhood time, when there is a century from one Christmas to another and two hundred thousand palpitations of the heart between two kisses.
“‘She’s not smiling, she’s making a face,’ my roommate would say. He was really nasty in his unhappiness, and his company was a nasty face behind my back.
“I knew that once I fell out of my observatory down there, driven out of the asylum parenthesis, everything would move very quickly between two fatal accidents and from sequels to metastases, from personal bankruptcy to planetary cataclysm, everything would go bust, irremediably, from day to day for centuries and centuries, with no ritual to consecrate the moment or drunkenness ever again to sublimate it, no surprise would shake up the exhaustion of living when the memory and consolation I had found was erased, not near that Ursuline nun I couldn’t see very well with my own eyes from so far away, my eyes fucked up by the drugs, but I could have walked at least once barefoot into emptiness halfway to the sky to meet her, barefoot, in pajamas, light, on the invisible tightrope of my desire, even after her arms get tired of opening and sorry that my late lamented desire is worn out and dangles down, defeated by medication and other things in my mental constitution, this being noted well before I was freed from the cancer wards.
“But who was she smiling at twelve months out of twelve all the goddamn day between her four walls and the arcades of her little convent? Was she cloistered there forever? Was she really as I saw her when she stood against the wall in her window frame, Ava Gardner and the Mona Lisa, and if not, then who?