The Ladies of Hong Kong

I loved to travel. Fortunately I have stored away enough pictures, smells, and sensations over the course of the years to enable me to leave Berck far behind on days when a leaden sky rules out any chance of going outdoors. They are strange wanderings: The sour smell of a New York bar. The odor of poverty in a Rangoon market. Little bits of the world. The white icy nights of Saint Petersburg or the unbelievably molten sun at Furnace Creek in the Nevada desert. This week has been somewhat special. At dawn every day I have flown to Hong Kong, where there is a conference for the international editions of my magazine. Note that I still say "my magazine," despite the misleading nature of the words, as if that possessive pronoun were one of the fragile threads linking me to the living world.

In Hong Kong, I have a little trouble finding my way, for unlike many of my other destinations, this city is one I have never actually visited. Every time the opportunity arose, a malicious fate kept me from my goal. When I did not fall sick on the eve of a departure, I lost my passport, or a reporting assignment sent me elsewhere. In short, chance always turned me back at the border. Once, I gave up my seat for Jean-Paul K., who at that time had not yet been taken hostage by the Hezbollah. He would spend several years in a darkened Beirut dungeon, endlessly reciting the wines of the Bordeaux Classification of 1855 to keep from going mad. On his return from Hong Kong, he brought me a cordless phone, at that time the very latest thing. I remember his laughing eyes behind their round glasses. I was very fond of Jean-Paul, but I never saw him again after his release from Beirut. I suppose I was ashamed of playing at being editor in chief in the frothy world of fashion magazines while he wrestled with life on its most brutal terms. Now I am the prisoner and he the free man. And since I don't have the châteaux of the Médoc region at my fingertips, I have had to choose another kind of litany to fill my empty hours: I count the countries where my magazine is published. There are already twenty-eight members in this United Nations of international glamour.

And where are they now, all my beautiful colleagues who worked so tirelessly as ambassadors of French style? They would stand in the conference rooms of international hotels, fielding a daylong barrage of questions in Chinese, English, Thai, Portuguese, or Czech, as they tried to answer that most metaphysical of questions: "Who is the typical Elle woman?" I picture them now wandering about Hong Kong, walking down neon-bright streets where pocket computers and noodle soup are sold, trotting behind the eternal bow tie of our chief executive officer as he leads his troops to the charge. Part Cyrano, part Bonaparte, he slows his pace only before the highest skyscrapers, and then only to scowl at them as though about to devour them.

Which way, General? Should we take the hydrofoil and gamble away a handful of dollars in Macao, or should we repair to the Felix Bar in the Peninsula Hotel, decorated by the French designer Philippe S.? Vanity impels me toward the second option. The fact is, my likeness adorns the back of a chair in that lofty luxurious watering hole. I, who hate to have my photo taken, was one of dozens of Parisians whose portraits Philippe S. incorporated into the decor. That photo, of course, was taken some weeks before fate turned me into a scarecrow. I have no idea whether my chair is more or less popular than the others, but if you go there, for God's sake don't tell the barman what happened to me. They say that all Chinese are superstitious, and if my true fate were known, not one of those charming little Chinese miniskirts would ever dare sit on me again.

The Message

Although my own corner of the hospital has the look of an expensive private school, one would never mistake the cafeteria crowd for members of the Dead Poets Society. The girls have hard eyes, the boys tattoos and sometimes rings on their fingers. There they sit, chain-smoking and talking about fistfights and motorbikes. Their already stooped shoulders seem to bear a heavy cross. Cruel fate has cursed them, and their stay at Berck is just one more stage between an abused childhood and a jobless future. When I am wheeled through their smoke-filled lair, the silence becomes deafening; I see neither pity nor compassion in their eyes.

Through the open cafeteria window you can hear the beating of the hospital's bronze heart: the bell that makes the firmament vibrate four times an hour. On a table cluttered with empty cups stands a small typewriter with a sheet of pink paper stuck in the roller. Although at the moment the page is utterly blank, I am convinced that someday there will be a message for me there. I am waiting.

At the Wax Museum

In a dream last night, I visited Paris's wax museum, the Musée Grévin. It had changed. There was the same entrance, in turn-of-the-century style, the same distorting mirrors, the same chamber of horrors, but the galleries displaying contemporary figures were gone. In the first rooms, the characters on exhibit were in street clothes, and I did not recognize them until I mentally put them in white hospital uniforms. Then I realized that these boys in T-shirts and girls in miniskirts, this housewife frozen with teapot in hand, this crash-helmeted youth, were all in fact the nurses and orderlies of both sexes who took turns appearing morning and night at my hospital bedside. They were all there, fixed in wax: gentle, rough, caring, indifferent, hardworking, lazy, the ones you can make contact with and those to whom you are just another patient.

At first some of the staff had terrified me. I saw them only as my jailers, as accomplices in some awful plot. Later I hated some of them, those who wrenched my arm while putting me in my wheelchair, or left me all night long with the TV on, or let me lie in a painful position despite my protests. For a few minutes or a few hours I would cheerfully have killed them. Later still, as time cooled my fiercest rages, I got to know them better. They carried out as best they could their delicate mission: to ease our burden a little when our crosses bruised our shoulders too painfully.

I gave them nicknames known only to me, so that when they entered my room I could hail them in my thunderous inner voice: "Hey, Blue Eyes! Morning, Big Bird!" They of course remained unaware. The one who dances around my bed and strikes an Elvis pose as he asks "How are you doing?" is "David Bowie." "Prof" makes me laugh, with his baby face and gray hair and the gravity with which he utters the unvarying judgment: "So far, so good." "Rambo" and "Terminator," as you might imagine, are not exactly models of gentleness. I prefer "Thermometer" her dedication would be beyond reproach if she did not regularly forget the implement she thrusts under my armpit.

In my dream, the museum sculptor was not altogether successful in capturing the smiles and scowls of Berck's hospital personnel, northerners whose ancestors have always lived on this strip of France between the Channel coast and the rich fields of Picardy. They readily lapse into their local patois as soon as they are alone together. To get them right you would need the talent of one of those medieval miniaturists whose magic brush brought to life the folk who once thronged the roads of Flanders. Our artist does not possess such skill. Yet he has managed to capture the youthful charm of the student nurses with their dimpled country-girl arms and full pink cheeks. As I left the room, I realized that I was fond of all these torturers of mine.

Entering the next exhibit, I was surprised to find myself back in Room 119, apparently reproduced down to the last detail. But as I got closer, the photos, drawings, and posters on my walls turned out to be a patchwork of ill-defined colors. Like an Impressionist painting, it was a pattern intended to create an illusion at a certain distance. There was no one on the bed, just a hollow in the middle of the yellow sheets bathed in pallid light. And here I had no problem identifying the watchers on either side of the bed: they were members of the personal bodyguard that spontaneously sprang up around me immediately after the disaster.