Hallucinating Foucault (13 page)

“Could we go out, then? For a day, I mean. Could you get permission?”

“Why don’t you ask Pascale Vaury?” said Paul Michel, without looking up.

I couldn’t tell if he really wanted to go out of the asylum or if he would merely come to please me. His tone indicated nothing but careful indifference. As I left the hospital that evening I made an appointment to see Dr Vaury.

Back in her cold clean room with the black couch lurking in the corner I suddenly felt too young, too irresponsible an amateur for this particular game. Her keys fell silent as she sat down. She was the mistress of the labyrinth and I was the servant of the Minotaur.

“You wanted to see me?” She gave nothing away.

“Yes. I wondered—that is—it’s just that Paul Michel seems so much—well, not better—I wouldn’t know—he’s never seemed disturbed to me—or at least not really. I wondered if I could take him out for the day. I’d bring him back of course.”

Pascale Vaury laughed out loud.

“Paul Michel isn’t let out,” she smiled at me. “He gets out.”

I looked blank. I didn’t understand.

“Listen,” she said, “he has a disease which stabilizes, gets calmer over time. But there are dangers even when he seems reasonable enough. You’ve done wonders for him. I won’t deny that. I wasn’t at all convinced when you first came. I didn’t think you’d stick it out. Neither did he. But you did. He’s attached to you.”

She picked up her pencil again and then her tone changed completely.

“I’m not at all convinced that what you are doing will be good
for him in the end. If you hadn’t asked to see me when you did, I would have insisted on seeing you. You’ve been here all day every day for over two weeks. Most people are afraid of Paul Michel. Even some of the nurses are cautious when they deal with him. He can be very dangerous. Now he seems transformed. Oh yes, the humor, the energy is all there and gaining strength. But his aggression appears to have melted away. And it’s that which I find sinister. We haven’t altered his drugs. You’ve come here, courting him like a lover. What is going to happen to him when you go? Have you thought about that?”

I blushed uncontrollably at the implications of what she had said. I saw that my hands were shaking. But I held my ground.

“Would it have been better if I hadn’t come? And he’d stayed here—violent, frustrated, locked up? Is that what you want for him?”

“The man is ill. He’s not a prisoner. He is sick. And answer my question. Have you considered what will happen when you go? What—after all this attention and devotion—his life will be like? You’re not going to spend your life in a chambre d’hôte at Clermont-Ferrand.”

All the questions that I had never asked rose before me. But by then I was no longer rational either. For years my life had already been dominated by Paul Michel. I was simply forcing my commitment towards the last point on the map. I went on the offensive.

“It’s not your aim to keep your patients locked up forever. It can’t be. If he’s sick, you want him cured. You’ve said I’ve made a difference. Even I can see the difference in him. How can he leave here if he has no one to support him? And nowhere to go? Let me take him out with me. For a day. Then a month maybe? On holiday. Anywhere. When did he last have a holiday? This is the chance. I’m his chance. Are you going to refuse him that chance?”

She gazed at me despairingly.

“I would need some kind of guarantee on your part, you realize that. He would have to be registered with the clinic or the Hôpital de Jour wherever you went. And with the police. There is a mass of paperwork involved to get him out. It could take a long time. I have to apply for his release through the Préfecture. He has to go before the medical advisory committee. And they must be in complete agreement. He cannot simply walk out of here. There are many things that must be done.”

“Then do it.” I was almost rude to her. “Do it. Let him go.”

She bit back something that she was about to say. I pressed home my unexpected advantage.

“And let me take him out for the day. Tomorrow. We won’t leave Clermont. We’ll just go out for a walk. And to eat. Do you need a letter from the Ministry for that?”

Pascale Vaury got up, unsmiling.

“All right. Go and see Paul Michel. I’m making no promises, so don’t raise his hopes. I’ll see what I can do.”

I thanked her with arctic formality and fled away down the airless cream corridors, hunting for the right doors.

As I started for home that day I found that she had left a message for me in administration, which was handed over, very grudgingly, by the dragon. There were two terse lines, written in English on the hospital notepaper.

I danced off down the rue St Jean-Baptiste Torrilhan. I was celebrating my first real victory.

As we stepped out of the asylum doors together, the women staring after us in disbelief, I took a deep, deep breath, as if I had been the one shut up. Paul Michel simply walked across the street and turned around, reflectively, to look up at the graffiti, written on the wall; the writer contemplating an unrevised first draft.

“Hmmm,” he said, “no one’s tried to remove my writing. Not quite balanced on either side of the door. But I was standing on two chairs and it was the middle of the night.”

“When did you last come out?” I asked.

“A year ago. When I left Paris to come here. I painted the graffiti in March.”

“Why didn’t you try to escape then?”

He looked at me, amused. And said nothing.

“Come on, petit,” he took my arm and we set off together, “let’s get going.”

Paul Michel looked at the urban world from which he had been so long excluded with a detachment that no longer even amounted to curiosity. It was the glance of a disinterested observer, the indifference of a man who was no longer sitting at the table, placing his stake, absorbed in the game. He stood smoking on the street corner, watching the young men, as if they were wild animals, imprisoned, behind a wall of glass. I was disappointed, even irritated by his attitude. He was neither grateful nor pleased to have walked free from his prison. What I had achieved was of no significance. The walls were within him. We drank a beer in a café. He didn’t speak to me. Hurt, I decided to make a gesture asserting my independence. I went out and bought
The Guardian
and tried to catch up with the world of England for a while. He played the pin-ball machine. And there his absorption became complete. The flashing lights, electric bouncing noises and spinning mercury balls seemed to hypnotize him into absolute concentration. I glanced up from the foreign
news to the sound of applause. A small group of boys had gathered around him. His total score was so enormous that he had hit the jackpot. A flood of two and five franc pieces cascaded around his knees. He laughed, turned to the bar.

“Tu vois, petit. Je suis quand même gagneur. I still win. What would you like?”

I melted a little and drank some more beer. I noticed that he drank hardly anything. After a while I said, “You win. But you couldn’t care less if you win or lose. Is there anything left that you do care about?”

It came out more sharply than I had intended. I could no longer deal with his utter indifference to the world and all that therein is. And although I could not understand my own motives then, I feared that his indifference unthinkingly included me. It could have been anyone who had come to find him. I was simply a pawn in some other larger game. I had not been chosen.

He did not answer me for a while. He simply looked out at the mass of people negotiating the traffic and the pavements in the summer sun. Then he said, “Come. I want to buy something for you.”

We turned into the pedestrian precinct and he stopped in front of a boutique which sold, among other things, fabulously expensive hand-tailored leather jackets.

“Oh no,” I objected at once, “I can’t let you do that.”

“How ungracious you English always are,” said Paul Michel smiling, and pushed me into the shop.

I had been paying for everything so far and had assumed that he had no money apart from the coins that he had coaxed out of the pinball machine. We spent an hour looking at ourselves in giant mirrors, wearing increasingly expensive creations.

“We both need a haircut,” he pointed out. “We’ll do that next.”

I had never in my life taken any interest at all in what I wore. My mother used to buy all my clothes. When I left home and had my own money at college, I bought whatever was neutral and fitted. The Germanist always wore jeans and heavy black Doc Martens with her laces tied three times round the ankle. She wore baggy white shirts in the summer. I had never seen her wearing a skirt and I don’t think she had one. Paul Michel on the other hand thought that every detail in the presentation was crucially important. He noticed aspects of the jackets, shirts and trousers laid out around us that suggested standards as exacting as Yves St Laurent inspecting the summer collection.

“Have my clothes been getting up your nose?” I asked ruefully, reflecting on my transformation from frog to prince.

“No,” he said. “I did comment the second time I saw you. But to tell you the truth I’d stopped noticing. However, as you are going out with me I want you to look magnificent. OK?”

The shop assistant was charmed rather than rendered desperate by Paul Michel’s demands and criticisms. But the thunderbolt came when he produced a check book along with his carte d’identité and wrote out a check for more than 4000 francs. I was speechless. I was under the impression that he was penniless, had no legal existence and certainly wasn’t in possession of a valid travel document and a check book.

“I didn’t know you had any money,” I said at last.

“I’m rather rich,” he smiled ironically. “Didn’t you tell me that I’m a set text, petit? There aren’t any shops in the service fermé. I pay my keep at Sainte-Marie, you know. I’m not a burden on the state.”

We stood in the street carrying plastic bags full of our old clothes. Paul Michel laughed at me out loud.

“Well, petit. And you lavished all that love and attention upon
me with no thought of a return? No one can say that you’re a fortune hunter.”

He took the plastic bag out of my unresisting hand and flung it into a huge green municipal dustbin along with his own. The lid snapped shut.

“Now we’ll go and get a haircut, drink an apéritif at the café in front of the cathedral and enjoy being looked at. Then we’ll eat at the crêperie.”

I put myself in his hands.

Quinze Treize was an ancient building in the cathedral precinct. There were many small rooms off the main restaurant space. It was dark and hot inside. All the doors and tiny lead-paned windows were open onto two small terraces beneath a squat tower containing a staircase. The entrance was almost invisible, under a low archway and past two huge nail-spattered doors. At 7:30 it was already almost full. In the vaulted basement was another bar and a piano. We heard a woman singer warming up. I looked up the lopsided staircase and heard laughter from the top of the stairs. Paul Michel chatted to the man at the bar as if they were old friends and we were immediately swept off to an excellent table in the window. The waiter suppressed the little card saying “Réservé.”

“Did you know him?” I asked, impressed.

“No,” smiled Paul Michel.

“This table was reserved. Had you telephoned in advance?”

“No,” he glittered for a second, “but I told him that we were from the Mairie and that I was one of the mayor’s assistant secretaries, and that the mayor himself would be joining us later. That’s why we’ve got a table for three.”

I gaped.

“You what? You told him all that?”

“Mais bien sûr. Because if he finds out that we’ve escaped from
Sainte-Marie the story will be perfectly explicable. If I am mad, I probably do think that I work for someone important.”

“You’re impossible.” I hid my face in the menu. I didn’t want him to see that I was laughing.

I was also delighted by the way he had spoken of us both as escaped detainees. During the meal he drank one glass of wine, and then began to tell me stories. He talked then as if we were old friends; he told me stories about his childhood. He reflected on the meanings of madness. I listened enthralled. This is all that I can remember.

“Even in Toulouse the quartier felt like a village. There was a small community of Spanish, an even smaller band of Arabs. More live there now of course. This was in the 1950s. It was during the war in Algeria. One of them, an old grandfather, who always wore fresh white robes, sat on a bench in front of his house. He chanted the Koran, beautifully, the whole poetry of praise poured out of him, day after day. And the children gathered around him to listen. Until six o’clock struck. Then his whole discourse and manner were transformed and he ranted about nothing but sex and fucking; one long torrent of obscenities. The children would be rapidly dispersed when his granddaughter got home at seven o’clock and hauled him inside the house. But we would have had an hour of mispronounced French filth which made us rapturous with joy. They don’t lock up their madmen. They give them fresh white robes and set them outside their doors to prophesy …

“And in our village in Gaillac there was a man with very long fingernails who would wander between the boulangerie and the bar, demanding ten francs from anybody who came past, and threatening to tear off your face if you wouldn’t hand over the money.

“We’re not all locked up, you know …

“I was an only child. I used to wander among the vines above our house at sunset. I used to talk to the scarecrows draped in scarves with lumpy stuffed trousers and old flat caps. My grandfather saw me dancing around a scarecrow, urging the creature to dance with me. And he shouted that if I imagined things I would end up like my grandmother, who lost her mind early on. She hummed and muttered continuously. In fact I am not like her. I am like him …

“All writers are, somewhere or other, mad. Not les grands fous, like Rimbaud, but mad, yes, mad. Because we do not believe in the stability of reality. We know that it can fragment, like a sheet of glass or a car’s windscreen. But we also know that reality can be invented, reordered, constructed, remade. Writing is, in itself, an act of violence perpetrated against reality. Don’t you think, petit? We do it, leave it written there, and slip away unseen …