Marie is on a chair by the bed doing something to the fire. He does not wish to move his head to see. Any quick movement of his head sends the world jittering and juddering. ‘Ziguette?’ he asks.
‘Why?’ she says. ‘Afraid she’s going to visit you again?’ Then, when he does not answer her, she says, ‘It was me what saved you.’
Light is a white sheet at his window, a dull white sheet that is folded each evening and hung out again the next dawn. They no longer watch him all the time. Unwatched, he steals out of bed, sits ten minutes on the chair, clinging to the seat. The following day, he sits for half an hour. Sitting becomes his practice. Sometimes, when swept by squalls of pity — for himself, his bullying father, the haunted lives of strangers, the cold bones in the cemetery — he makes odd shapes with his mouth, a type of dry weeping. Other times he is blank, calm and perfectly blank, until the world’s rawness, his own breath, the edges of the air, rouse him again. He studies his hands, looks at the fire, peers quizzically at the picture of the bridge. He lifts his eyes to the window: the clouds are coloured like the sea at Dieppe. Who are you? asked the doctor. He is Adam alone in the garden. He is Lazarus rousted out of his tomb, one life separated from another by a slack of darkness.
Guillotin comes to bleed him; phlebotomy a standard precaution in such cases. First, he carries out his usual examination of the wound. ‘You Normans have nice thick skulls,’ he says. ‘You wouldn’t care to leave me your head, would you?’
‘What makes you think you will outlive me?’
‘Your taste in women,’ says the doctor, turning his attention to the engineer’s right arm and cutting him close to the elbow. The blood slopes into a tin bowl. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘I won’t take much.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Your assailant?’
‘No one will tell me where she is.’
‘She was here until two days ago, in the house. Now she is sent away. Elderly relatives in Dauphiné. People of strict religion. I hope you will not object, but I gave the scheme my approval. There can be no more effective cure for a young woman’s ardency than a year or two muttering novenas in a cold house in a remote province. I assumed you would have no wish to prosecute her. A man would only make himself ridiculous prosecuting a woman in such circumstances. Had you succumbed, of course, then the matter would have been beyond any purely private solution. You were lovers?’
‘No.’
‘I shall believe you,’ says the doctor, balling a scrap of lint, pressing it over the cut and carefully folding his patient’s arm. ‘But if it was not love or jealousy or desire, what do you imagine made her walk into your room and try to split your head in two?’
‘Les Innocents.’
‘The cemetery? To keep you from destroying it? She may be madder than I thought. Let us hope she does not butcher her relatives in Dauphiné. One would feel a certain responsibility.’
‘How long has it been?’
‘Since the attack? Two weeks. A little over.’
‘I must return to the work.’
‘A month in the good air of Normandy would be a better prescription.’
‘I am well enough.’
‘You were struck a very considerable blow to the head. The effects of any such blow are both unpredictable and of long duration. You have noticed anything unusual? Hallucinations? Lapses in memory?’
‘Nothing,’ says Jean-Baptiste, lying.
The doctor wipes the blade of his lancet. ‘In that case,’ he says, ‘how would it be if we endeavour to get you down to the drawing room tomorrow? The Monnards will no doubt be anxious to afford you every comfort.’ He grins. ‘In the meantime, you have the Comte de Buffon to keep you company.’ He takes the book from the table, drops it onto the bedcovers. ‘You are aware, I suppose, that there are another thirty volumes of this?’
When the doctor has gone, Jean-Baptiste looks at the book and, after a moment, opens it. It is not the first time since the assault that he has tried it. He shuts his eyes, opens them, summons himself, the engine of his concentration, which has, in the past, served him so well. He puts a finger on the top left-hand side of the left-hand page. The first four words present no difficulty: ‘Now let us consider. .’ The next word he cannot read. The next is, he thinks, ‘instance’. The next nothing but a shape, meaningless as an ink blot. So too the one after it and the one after that. And it is not just words in books, it is the words in his head that have gone. Names of things, quite ordinary things, objects a child could name. Like and .
And if this, this blindness, should become common knowledge? If Lafosse and then the minister discover it, what then? Who in the world would employ such a man even to destroy a cemetery?
He shuts the book, pushes it onto the floor, rolls out of bed, stands experimentally, waits for his blood to arrange itself, then shuffles to the mirror. He has a nightcap on his head, a dressing of some sort beneath it. He looks — what? — foolish and saintly and slightly frightening. He fingers the hair on his chin, touches his skull as though it was a shelled egg and any sharp movement might pierce it, make a hole for the yolk of his brains to run through. .
He is twenty minutes easing off the nightcap, then the bandage with its damp, pink underside. His hair has been chopped, clumsily tonsured, but however he angles his head, he can see almost nothing of the wound itself except an ugly patch of discoloured skin and, poking from it like a single gross hair, a strand of black thread.
He looks for his clothes, the working suit he was wearing the day before the night Ziguette Monnard came in to murder him. He cannot see it. It has been tidied away or taken away. Spoiled? Splashed with his blood, with blood from the weapon, the thing, the metal thing, the name of which (a spark of panic in his chest) he has also lost? How can a man think at all if he does not have the words to think with? What can guide him if not the words?
He goes to his trunk, lifts the lid. The shock of colour, of light off colour, makes him flinch, but he is relieved to hear ‘green’ in his head, and ‘silk’, and even ‘pistachio’. He carries the suit to the bed, lays it there, regards it a while, then climbs wearily inside it. Let this be the answer, then. He will simply follow the world. The world, the things of the world, will prompt him. He will do what they suggest. It will not matter if he can name them or not. He will be like a child running after a ball bouncing down steps. Perhaps that is what he always did. He cannot quite remember.
When he is dressed, he looks for the banyan, the tarboosh, the rented wig, the paper they were all wrapped in, wraps them again, a large, clumsy parcel. He puts on his shoes, his riding coat. With teeth clenched he settles his hat on his head as if the wound might be oppressed simply by a shadow. He goes downstairs. No one sees him. The kitchen door is open but the room is empty. He glances at the cellar door, resists the urge to try it, opens the street door, narrows his eyes against the light, stands a full minute with his back against the wall of the house, gathering energy, courage, whatever he will need to go on. He dreads being recognised, stopped, spoken to. He assumes some version of the story is already in circulation, that he is not just the engineer now but the man the Monnard girl attacked, the man who must, in some way, have provoked her. He watches two boys come up the street whipping a toy, a hollow circle of wood. He lets them pass, then shoves off from the wall, launches himself.
At Gaudet’s he gets a shave. He is the only customer. When he comes in the barber is sitting in his chair reading the Mercure de France and nibbling a fingernail. The shave is simple sensual pleasure. The wound, of course, is not mentioned, though Gaudet has ample time to study it. Instead, the barber speaks of the town, the quarter, the price of things, the recent strikes. None of it requires any comment from Jean-Baptiste. He lets the man chatter, lets him work, is grateful to him.