A Void (3 page)

vision starts haunting him again, it brutally assails him, it swims

into but also, sad to say, out of focus. For a capricious, all too

capricious, instant light dawns on him.

At that point Vowl would hastily hunch down on his rug,

but only to confront a conundrum: nothing, nothing at all, but

irritation at an opportunity knocking so loudly and so vainly,

nothing but frustration at a truth so dormant and frail that, on

his approach, it sinks away into thin air.

So, now as vigilant as a man who has had an invigorating nap,

abandoning his pillow, pacing up and down on his living-room

floor, drinking, staring out of his window, taking down a book,

switching his radio on and off, putting on his suit and coat, Vowl

would go out, would stay out all night, in a bar, or at his club,

or, climbing into his car (although driving was hardly his strong

point), would motor off around Paris's suburbs on a whim,

without having any particular goal in mind: to Chantilly or

Aulnay-sous-Bois, Limours or Rancy, Dourdon or Orly, and as

far as Saint-Malo - but to no avail.

Half out of his wits with insomnia, Vowl is willing to try almost

anything that might assist him in dozing off - a pair of pyjamas

with bright polka dots, a nightshirt, a body stocking, a warm

shawl, a kimono, a cotton sari from a cousin in India, or simply

curling up in his birthday suit, arranging his quilt this way and

that, switching to a cot, to a crib, a foldaway, a divan, a sofa and

a hammock, lying on his back, on his stomach, or with arms

akimbo, casting off his quilt or placing a thick, hairy tartan rug

on top of it, borrowing a plank of nails from a fakir or practising

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a yoga position taught him by a guru (and which consists of

forcing an arm hard against your skull whilst taking hold of your

foot with your hand) and finally paying for a room in lodgings

- but without anything satisfactory to show for it.

It's all in vain. His subconscious vision starts buzzing around

him again, buzzing around and within him, choking and suffocat-

ing him.

Sympathising with his unusual condition, a good Samaritan living

two doors away opts to accompany him to a local hospital for a

consultation. A young GP jots down his particulars and insists on

his submitting to palpations, auscultations and X-rays, a diagnosis

with which Vowl is happy to comply. "Is your condition painful?"

this young GP asks him. "Sort of," Vowl blandly informs him. And

what is its principal symptom? Chronic insomnia. What about

taking a syrup last thing at night? Or a cordial? "I did," says Vowl,

"but it had no impact." Conjunctivitis? No. A dry throat?

Occasionally. An aching brow? And how! A humming sound in

his auditory ducts? "No, but all last night, an odd kind of wasp

was buzzing around my room." A wasp - or possibly an imaginary

wasp? "Isn't it your job to find out," asks Vowl laconically.

At which point Vowl pays a visit to an otolaryngologist, Dr.

Cochin, a jovial sort of chap, balding, with long auburn mutton-

chops, bifocals dangling on a chain across his plump stomach, a

salmon pink cravat with black polka dots, and, in his right hand,

a cigar stinking of alcohol. Cochin asks him to cough and say

"Ahhhh", puts a tiny circular mirror into his mouth, draws a

blob of wax out of his auditory organs (as doctors say), starts

poking at his tympanum and massaging his larynx, his naso-

pharynx, his right sinus and his nasal partition. It's a good,

thoroughgoing job and it's a pity that Cochin can't stop irritat-

ingly whisding throughout.

"Ouch!" moans Anton. "That hurts. . ."

"Shhh," murmurs his doctor soothingly. "Now what do you

say to our trotting downstairs for an itsy-bitsy X-ray?"

8

Laying Vowl flat on his back along a cold, shiny, clinical-

looking couch, pushing a pair of buttons, flicking a switch down

and turning off a lamp so that it's pitch dark, Cochin X-rays him

and lights up his laboratory again. Vowl instandy shifts back to

a sitting position.

"No, don't sit up!" says Cochin. "I'm not through with you,

you know. I ought to look for hints of auto-intoxication."

Plugging in a circuit, Cochin brings out what a layman would

call a small platinum pick, akin to nothing so much as a humdrum

Biro, puts it against Vowl's skull and consults, on a print-out,

an X and Y graph, its rhythmic rising and falling charting his

blood circulation.

"It's too high, much too high," says Cochin at last, tapping

his apparatus, noisily sucking on his cigar and rolling it around his

mouth. "It shows a constriction of your frontal sinus. A surgical

incision is our only solution."

"An incision!"

"'Fraid so, old boy. If not, don't you know, you'll finish up

with a bad croup."

Although all of this is said so flippandy that Vowl starts to

think Cochin is joking, such gallows humour in a doctor cannot

fail to disturb him. Bringing his shirt-tail up to his lips and spit-

ting blood on to it, our invalid snorts with disgust, "Fuck you,

you . . . you quack! I ought to go to an ophthalmologist!"

"Now now," murmurs Cochin in a conciliatory mood. "With

an immuno-transfusion or two I'll know what prognosis to adopt.

But first things first - I must obtain an analysis."

Cochin rings for his assistant, who turns up clad in a crimson

smock.

"Rastignac, go to Foch, Saint-Louis or Broca and bring back

an anti-conglutinant vaccination. And I want it in my laboratory

by noon!"

Now Cochin starts dictating his diagnosis to a shorthand

typist.

"Anton Vowl. Consultation of 8 April: a common cold, an

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auto-intoxication of his naso-pharynx, which could possibly put

his olfactory circuit out of action, and a constriction of his frontal

sinus with a hint of mucal inflammation right up to his sublingual

barbs. As any inoculation of his larynx would bring about a

croup, my proposal is an ablation of his sinus in such a way as

to avoid damaging his vocal chords."

Vowl, according to Cochin, shouldn't worry too much, for if

ablation of a sinus is still a ticklish proposition, it's had a long

history dating as far back as Louis XVIII. It is, in short,

an incision any physician worth his salt can carry out. Within

10 days, should Vowl hold firm, his throat won't hurt him

at all.

So Vowl stays in hospital. His ward contains 26 cots, most of

its occupants striking him as, frankly, mortuary carrion. To calm

him down Cochin drugs him with such soporifics as Largactyl,

Atarax and Procalmadiol. At 8 a.m. an important consultant starts

doing his round, with a cohort of aspiring young doctors

accompanying him, drinking in his words of wisdom, dutifully

chuckling at his
bons mots.
This lofty individual would accost a

visibly dying man and, airily tapping him on his arm, solicit from

him a lugubrious smirk; would comfort anybody incurably ill

with an amusing or a consoling word; would charm a sick child

with a lollipop and his fond mama with a toothy grin; and,

confronting a handful of almost moribund invalids, would pro-

pound an instant diagnosis: malaria, Parkinson's, bronchitis, a

malignant tumour, a postnatal coma, syphilis, convulsions, palpi-

tations and a torticollis.

Within two days or so Vowl, laid out flat, swallows a drug, a

kind of liquid chloroform, that knocks him unconscious. Cochin

slowly and cautiously installs a sharp nib up his right nostril. This

incision in his olfactory tract producing a naso-dilation, Cochin

profits from it by quickly scarifying Vowl's partition with a

surgical pin, scraping it with a burin and closing it up with a

tool thought up not long ago by a brilliant Scotsman. Now our

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otolaryngologist taps his sinus, cuts out a malign fungus and

finally burns off his wound.

"Good," - this said to his assistant, who is almost numb with

fright - "I think our oxydisation is going to work. Anyway, I

can't find any sign of inflammation."

Cochin briskly starts swabbing Vowl's wound, stitching it up

with catgut and bandaging it. For 24 hours a slight risk subsists

of trauma or shock; but, promisingly, his scar knits up without

complication.

Vowl has to stay in hospital for six days, until, at last, a grinning

Cochin allows him to go. I might add, though, that his insomnia

is still as chronically bad, if not now so agonisingly painful, as it

always was.

11

1

In which luck, God's alias and alibi, plays a callous

trick on a suitor cast away on an island

Laid out languorously, all day long, on a couch or on a sofa, or

on occasion rocking to and fro in his rocking chair, stubbornly

trying to copy out on an old visiting-card that indistinct motif

that had sprung at him from his rug, as frail as an infant but not

now, thanks to Cochin's surgical skills, in all that much physical

pain, our protagonist starts hallucinating, blowing his mind.

As though in a slow-motion film, Vowl is walking down a corri-

dor, its two high walls dwarfing him. To his right is a mahogany

stand on which sit 26 books - on which, I should say, 26 books

normally ought to sit, but, as always, a book is missing, a book

with an inscription, "5", on its flap. Nothing about this stand,

though, looks at all abnormal or out of proportion, no hint of a

missing publication, no filing card or "ghost", as librarians

quaintly call it, no conspicuous gap or blank. And, disturbingly,

it's as though nobody knows of such an omission: you had to

work your way through it all from start to finish, continually

subtracting (with 25 book-flaps carrying inscriptions from "1"

to "26", which is to say, 26 — 25 = 1) to find out that any

book was missing; it was only by following a long and arduous

calculation that you'd know it was "5".

Vowl is avid to grasp a book, any book at all, in his hand, to

study its small print (with a possibility of chancing across an

important fact, a crucial tip) but in vain; his groping hand is,

alas, too far away for any physical contact. But what (his mind

12

runs on), what would such a book contain? Possibly a colossal,

a cosmic dictionary? A Koran, a Talmud or a Torah? A magnum

opus, a Black Book of black magic, cryptograms and occult

mumbo jumbo . . .

A unit is lacking. An omission, a blank, a void that nobody but

him knows about, thinks about, that, flagrantly, nobody wants to

know or think about. A missing link.

Now, still hallucinating, Vowl scans his
Figaro
and finds it full

of startling information, both significant and trivial:

BANNING OF CP

NOT A C O M M U N I S T IN P A R I S !

*

If you wish to wrap anything up — no ribbon, no strings

BUY S C O T C H !

F I N A N C I A L SCANDAL I M P L I C A T I N G

A R I N G OF S P I V S

A vision now assails him: of a filthy sandwich-man, practically a

tramp, his clothing in rags, handing out tracts with a myopic and

haggard air, mumbling to nobody in particular and buttonholing

any unlucky individual crossing his path with a rambling story

of how consumption of fruit will cut down lust - a typical crank,

in short, a madman, a pitiful laughing-stock. An urchin, warming

to his cry of "A million, a billion birds will vanish from our sky!",

pins a baby chick on to his mackintosh.

"Oh, how idiotic," murmurs Vowl. But just as idiotic, now, is

his vision of a man going into a bar:

MAN,
sitting down and barking (with gruff and, as you might

say, military incivility)
: Barman!

13

B A R M A N
(who knows a thing or two):
Morning, mon

Commandant.

C O M M A N D A N T
(calming down now that, although in mufti, his

rank is plain to this barman):
Ah, good morning to you, my boy,

good morning!

B
ARMAN
(who has a slight but distinct hint of Oirishry about

him):
And what, pray, can I do for you, sir? Your wish is my

command.

C O M M A N D A N T
(licking his lips)
: You know what I fancy most

of all - a port-flip.

B A R M A N
(frowning)-.
What? A port-flip!

C O M M A N D A N T
(vigorously nodding):
That's right, a port-flip!

Any port-flip in a storm, what? Ha ha ha!

B A R M A N
(as though in pain):
I . . . don't . . . think . . . any

. .. in .. . stock . . .

COMMANDANT^
jumping up off his stool):
What, no port-flips!

But only last month I had
(laboriously counting out)
1, 2, no,

3 port-flips in this bar!

B A R M A N
(almost inaudibly):
But now . . . now . . . you

can't. . .

C O M M A N D A N T
(furiously pointing in front of him):
Now look,

that's port, isn't it?

B A R M A N
(in agony):
Uh huh . . . but. . .