Joséphine was a collector: old perfume bottles, rustic canvases complete with cattle (singly or in herds), plates of make-believe food of the kind that substitute for menus in Tokyo restaurant windows. In short, during her frequent travels she bought everything unspeakably kitsch she could lay her hands on. In Lourdes, it was love at first sight. There she sat in the window of the fourth shop on the left, surrounded by a jumble of religious medals, Swiss cuckoo clocks, decorated cheese platters, and—apparently waiting just for Joséphine—an adorable stucco bust haloed with winking bulbs, like a Christmas tree decoration.
"There's my Madonna!" Joséphine exulted.
"It's my present," I said at once, with no inkling of the exorbitant sum the shopkeeper would soon extort from me (alleging that it was one of a kind). That evening, in our hotel room, we celebrated our acquisition, its flickering holy light bathing us and casting fantastic dancing shadows on the ceiling.
"Joséphine, I think we're going to have to split up when we get back to Paris."
"Do you think I don't realize that?"
"But Jo…"
She was asleep. She had the gift of falling into instant sheltering slumber when a situation annoyed her. She could take a vacation from life for five minutes or several hours. For a while I watched the wall behind our pillows jump into and out of darkness. What demon could have induced people to line a whole room with orange fabric?
Since Joséphine was still sleeping, I cautiously dressed and left to engage in one of my favorite pastimes: night walking. It was my personal way of battling misfortune: just walking until I dropped. Out on the street, Dutch youths guzzled beer from big mugs. They had torn holes in garbage bags to make raincoats. Stout bars blocked the way to the grotto, but at intervals I saw the glow of hundreds of guttering candles. Much later, my wanderings brought me back to the street with the souvenir stores. In the fourth window, an identical Mary had taken the place of ours. Then I turned back to the hotel; from very far away I saw the window of our room twinkling in the gloom. I climbed the stairs, careful not to disturb the night watchman's dreams. Trail of the Snake sat on my pillow like a jewel in its setting. "Well, well," I murmured. "Charles Sobraj! I'd forgotten all about him."
I recognized Joséphine's writing. A huge "I" was scrawled across page 168. It was the start of a message that took up two whole chapters of the book and left them totally unreadable.
"I love you, you idiot. Be kind to your poor Joséphine."
Luckily I had read these pages already.
When I switched off the Holy Virgin, day was just breaking.
Through a Glass, Darkly
Hunched in my wheelchair, I watch my children surreptitiously as their mother pushes me down the hospital corridor. While I have become something of a zombie father, Théophile and Céleste are very much flesh and blood, energetic and noisy. I will never tire of seeing them walk alongside me, just walking, their confident expressions masking the unease weighing on their small shoulders. As he walks, Théophile dabs with a Kleenex at the thread of saliva escaping my closed lips. His movements are tentative, at once tender and fearful, as if he were dealing with an animal of unpredictable reactions. As soon as we slow down, Céleste cradles my head in her bare arms, covers my forehead with noisy kisses, and says over and over, "You're my dad, you're my dad," as if in incantation.
Today is Father's Day. Until my stroke, we had felt no need to fit this made-up holiday into our emotional calendar. But today we spend the whole of the symbolic day together, affirming that even a rough sketch, a shadow, a tiny fragment of a dad is still a dad. I am torn between joy at seeing them living, moving, laughing, or crying for a few hours, and fear that the sight of all these sufferings—beginning with mine—is not the ideal entertainment for a boy of ten and his eight-year-old sister. However, we have made the wise collective decision not to sugarcoat anything.
We install ourselves at the Beach Club—my name for a patch of sand dune open to sun and wind, where the hospital has obligingly set out tables, chairs, and umbrellas, and even planted a few buttercups, which grow in the sand amid the weeds. In this neutral zone on the beach, a transition between hospital and everyday life, one could easily imagine some good fairy turning every wheelchair into a chariot. "Want to play hangman?" asks Théophile, and I ache to tell him that I have enough on my plate playing quadriplegic. But my communication system disqualifies repartee: the keenest rapier grows dull and falls flat when it takes several minutes to thrust it home. By the time you strike, even you no longer understand what had seemed so witty before you started to dictate it, letter by letter. So the rule is to avoid impulsive sallies. It deprives conversation of its sparkle, all those gems you bat back and forth like a ball—and I count this forced lack of humor one of the great drawbacks of my condition.
But we can certainly play hangman, the national preteen sport. I guess a letter, then another, then stumble on the third. My heart is not in the game. Grief surges over me. His face not two feet from mine, my son Théophile sits patiently waiting—and I, his father, have lost the simple right to ruffle his bristly hair, clasp his downy neck, hug his small, lithe, warm body tight against me. There are no words to express it. My condition is monstrous, iniquitous, revolting, horrible. Suddenly I can take no more. Tears well and my throat emits a hoarse rattle that startles Théophile. Don't be scared, little man. I love you. Still engrossed in the game, he moves in for the kill. Two more letters: he has won and I have lost. On a corner of the page he completes his drawing of the gallows, the rope, and the condemned man.
Meanwhile, Céleste is doing cartwheels on the sand. Perhaps some compensatory mechanism is at work, for ever since the act of blinking became the equivalent of weight lifting for me, she has turned into a genuine acrobat. With the flexibility of a cat, she does a back flip, a handstand, a somersault, and a whole series of daring leaps and twists. She has recently added tightrope walker to the long list of professions she envisions for her future (after schoolteacher, supermodel, and florist). With the onlookers at the Beach Club won over by her display, our budding entertainer now launches into a song-and-dance act, to the great dismay of Théophile, who more than anything else hates drawing attention to himself. As shy and reclusive as his sister is outgoing, he wholeheartedly hated me the day I sought and obtained permission to ring the school bell for the first day of class. No one can predict whether Théophile will be happy; but it is certain that he will live in the shadows.
I wonder how Céleste has managed to accumulate such a repertoire of sixties songs. Johnny Hallyday, Sylvie Vartan, Sheila, Clo-Clo François, Françoise Hardy—all the stars of that golden era. Alongside universally familiar numbers, Céleste sings forgotten hits that trail clouds of nostalgia in their wake. Not since I was twelve, when I endlessly played it on my record player, have I heard the Clo-Clo François 45-rpm "Poor Little Rich Girl." Yet as soon as Céleste begins it—somewhat off-key—every note, every verse, every detail of backup and orchestration, comes back to me with startling precision, right down to the sound of the sea that filters through the opening bars. Once again I see the album cover, the singer's photo, his striped button-down shirt. I longed for a shirt like his, but for me it was unattainable: my mother considered it tacky. I even relive the Saturday afternoon when I bought the record. My father's cousin kept a tiny record store in the lower level of the Gare du Nord. He was a good-natured giant with a yellow Gitane cigarette dangling eternally from the corner of his mouth. "Poor little rich girl, alone on the beach, alone and so rich…" Time marches on, and people have since disappeared. Mama died first. Next, Clo-Clo François was electrocuted. Then my father's gentle cousin, whose business had gone downhill, gave up the ghost, leaving an inconsolable tribe of children and animals behind. My closet is now full of button-down shirts, and I believe the small record store now sells chocolates. Since the Berck train leaves from the Gare du Nord, perhaps one day I shall ask someone to check on the way through.