I remained impassive, feigning disinterest, with my hands in the pockets of my dressing-gown, staring off into the cold, deserted hallway.
“Did you see the foreign gentlemen?”
“Yes, and I spoke with the courier too, a poor boy just up from Albi, who doesn’t even know his way around the city.”
“Did you speak with the Spaniards?”
“Were they Spaniards?”
“I believe so,” I said rather uncertainly. “Did you speak with them?”
“A little. They were knocking at your door for a long time, it must have been around nine. You are a heavy sleeper, Monsieur Pain.”
“What did they say, Madame Grenelle?”
“Nothing in particular. They asked me if you lived here and I said yes, of course, but that you must have spent the night somewhere else; who would have guessed you were in bed? Then they asked me if you often spent the night elsewhere and I said that it was none of my business, although I did assure them that you were not a man of bohemian habits, but a scholar, and very rarely away overnight. They clearly found it hard to understand me, or didn’t know how to reply. Anyway, they stood there quietly, as if waiting to hear a noise from your room, then one of them wrote a note, put it in an envelope and gave it to me; the envelope is sealed, see. He kept saying that it had to be given to you without delay, it was urgent. He went on and on. All right, all right, I said, I understand, don’t worry. The other one kept his ear to the door; I think he still hadn’t given up hope.”
Mumbling a few words of thanks, I seized the letters and closed the door. Then, as I heard Madame Grenelle’s footsteps receding down the hallway, I remembered waking from a dream at some point during the night, a dream in which a person who wished me well (that much I could dimly sense) was covering my mouth in a gentle but determined and authoritative way. I woke to find my own hand pressed against my lips. As if I were trying to suffocate myself? As if I were trying to stop myself from speaking?
Sitting on the edge of the bed, I opened the white envelope: Monsieur Pierre Pain, your presence is requested at the Café Victor, in the Latin Quarter, at 10 pm. It is a matter of the utmost gravity. Do not ignore this request. There was no signature, of course. The blue envelope was from Madame Reynaud and the message read as follows: Dear friend, I have spoken with Madame Vallejo and arranged for the three of us to meet today, at 4 pm in the Café Bordeaux. Monsieur Vallejo’s condition is unchanged; he is still hiccupping and his fever has not abated. Madame Vallejo does not anticipate any difficulty with the doctor who is treating her husband. Nor do I. Yours, Marcelle Reynaud.
I looked at the façade of the clinic through the slightly fogged window of the taxi and understood that what lay behind it, more than anything, even more than madness, was solitude, which is perhaps the subtlest or at least the most lucid of the forms that madness can take.
It was seven in the evening on the seventh of April, and Madame Vallejo, Madame Reynaud and I had just arrived at the Clinique Arago. I had barely spoken during the taxi ride. The women seemed to have a great deal to say to each other, and in any case my thoughts had strayed into nebulous regions that were hardly compatible with chatting.
“You seem miles away,” remarked Madame Reynaud, while at the other end of the lobby, her friend exchanged a few words with the nurse in charge of reception.
“Not at all,” I replied with a smile.
Then we followed Madame Vallejo down grey and white corridors, with a metallic, phosphorescent sheen, blemished here and there by unexpected black rectangles.
“It’s like a modern art gallery,” I heard Madame Reynaud murmur.
“The corridors are circular, in fact,” I said. “If they were longer we could reach the top story without ever having noticed the climb.”
“Like the leaning tower of Pisa,” commented Madame Vallejo.
It was not an apt analogy, but I didn’t want to contradict her.
Madame Reynaud smiled at me strangely: the hospital’s atmosphere was saddening her, giving her face a serious and expectant look.
“It’s all so white,” she said.
“It’s unnatural,” added Madame Vallejo, taking her by the arm and hurrying on.
I followed them.
The two friends were walking quickly but their steps were unsteady. Watching them from behind I had the impression that the heels of their shoes were loose. I put it all down to nerves. I also noticed that the lighting in the corridors, contrived in a cunning but mysterious manner, since the illumination extended uniformly even into corners where the newcomer could see no trace of wiring or globes, was however varying in intensity; almost imperceptibly, at regular intervals, it dimmed.
Suddenly we came across a man in a white coat, the first we had seen in the course of our exploration, standing stock still in the middle of the corridor and apparently plunged in deep cogitations. As we approached, he raised his eyes, sizing us up with his lips curved in a mocking grin, and crossed his arms. He gave an impression of coldness, or at least that is what I thought at the time. At any rate, it was evident from his expression that our sudden appearance had displeased him. Madame Vallejo slowed her pace noticeably, as if to delay the inevitable encounter with that man. Clearly they knew one another and she was afraid of him. But why?
We were formally introduced:
“Doctor Lejard, my husband’s GP.”
Lejard greeted us with a nod but did not utter a word, not even when the reason for my visit was explained to him. He was focusing his attention, in a conspicuous and rather studied manner, on Madame Reynaud.
I remained silent, scrutinizing the doctor’s lean face, while Madame Vallejo said something about urine tests that had not been carried out, or perhaps the results had gone astray; Lejard, in any case, simply shrugged. Later, when I felt that the moment to speak had come, I addressed him directly, asking with ill-disguised innocence what illness, in his opinion, Monsieur Vallejo was suffering from. His cutting reply was proffered in a baritone voice:
“I’m not obliged to answer that question. Ask Madame Vallejo. She’s aware of the latest developments; I’m not. I’ve never had much time for charlatans, personally.”
“What . . . ” stammered Madame Vallejo.
Madame Reynaud took her by the arm.
“Georgette . . .”
Ignoring the women, Lejard stared at me and smiled, as if giving me time to digest what he had flung in my face. Beside me, Madame Vallejo was blushing visibly; her jaw was tense and she seemed to be about to slap the doctor. I simply sighed, vainly attempting to assume a nonchalant expression, and examined the outlines of my shoes.
As Lejard walked away, after a perfunctory salute, which turned up the corners of his ironic smile, the three of us must have formed a peculiar tableau: frozen in the hallway, dumbstruck, unable to utter even a banal remark to break the silence, our faces turned toward a space no longer occupied by anyone, as if we were expecting Lejard to materialize exactly there and proceed to excuse himself. I can confidently say that my two companions felt the humiliation far more keenly than I did. The doctor’s attitude, though particularly malicious in this case, was not unfamiliar to me.
I coughed a couple of times, looking away from the women, sensing that they would prefer not to be watched, and we were about to resume our journey when, all of a sudden, before we had time to react, a mass of figures dressed in white advanced toward us, like an avalanche unleashed by a snowball.
When they reached us, a man with messy hair and moist eyes stepped forward and took Madame Vallejo by the arm, crying:
“The eminent Doctor Lemière is here.”
His words resonated as if in a church. The light dimmed again and my hair bristled: he had simply trotted out his ritual phrase.
Confirming the assertion, a plump little man in the middle of the group smiled to the left and the right, called for silence by raising his hand, which he then stretched out, with some difficulty until it reached the gloved hand of Ma
dame Vallejo.
“A pleasure to meet you. I have just seen your husband. All his organs are in perfect working order! I can’t see what’s wrong with the man. May I?”
Madame Vallejo followed Doctor Lemière, who led her by the elbow to a door which hid the corridor’s spiral curvature. From where I was standing, they were shrunken, childlike figures. Doctor Lemière’s white mane, matching the double door behind him, was animated by a series of small jerks, marking affirmations, negations and questions; Madame Vallejo’s head moved only once, turning briefly, searching for us in vain, as if to say good-bye.
“We’d better go,” whispered Madame Reynaud.
The doctors accompanying Lemière looked at us with weary, flat eyes, devoid of hope. It was as if I had somehow become the invisible man. A tall handsome young fellow was whispering in the ear of a dark, plump girl with an intelligent face. Another young man was holding a notebook and staring up at the roof. Behind him three others stood quietly and calmly with their hands in their pockets; to their left, a blond boy was looking intently at the palm of one of his hands and holding an extinguished cigarette in the other. With his back to the blond boy, the man who had introduced Lemière and who presumably belonged to the clinic’s administrative staff was listening to the chatter of a bald fellow with an abundant moustache, who was standing very close to him and clasping at least four massive tomes with cracked spines.
Two members of the group, standing apart from the others, almost against the opposite wall of the hallway, struck me as familiar. Both were wearing stethoscopes around their necks.
“But I must see Monsieur Vallejo,” I protested softly.
The volume of my voice was so low, I couldn’t tell if I had spoken or merely thought.
“Not now. Follow me. I’ll explain outside.”
Madame Reynaud’s blue eyes seemed drained of life; it’s the whiteness, I thought, that artificial light. I was about to follow her when I noticed a slight fissure in the scene: there was a trace of alarm in the faces of the two familiar-seeming doctors. I smiled in their direction, perhaps expecting them to respond with a gesture and confirm my supposition, but they maintained an impassivity perfectly matching that of their colleagues. I walked away, following Madame Reynaud. I remember she outpaced me; with every heavy step I took, I felt as if my legs were made of lead. In the end I stopped. The sensation of being in an art gallery spread through my veins and paralyzed me. Madame Reynaud kept walking. I looked back; Madame Vallejo had taken off a glove and was glancing back and forth between her nails and Lemière’s face. My position, equidistant from both women, must have betrayed confusion and awkwardness, but no one was paying me any attention. At that moment, as if by design, the lights in the hallway flickered. I thought, Now there really will be a blackout. Madame Reynaud’s shadow seemed to crash into the wall. I turned my head again: some of the doctors were looking up at the ceiling listlessly, as if the phenomenon were not unfamiliar to them. The intensity of the illumination, once it stabilized, was considerably reduced. Now the hallway was bathed in a dim sepia light and the shadows stretched off indistinctly. Madame Reynaud was waiting for me at the other end of the corridor with her lips slightly parted, as if she had pronounced an inaudible word—my name perhaps. For the last time I turned my gaze to the group of doctors. The two I thought I knew were still there, set apart somehow, like foreign students, I thought.
The word foreign gave me the key; I understood then who they were and where I had seen them, and I ran to Madame Reynaud, who looked at me in surprise.
“Monsieur Pain, remember that we are in a hospital,” she said to me reprovingly.
Outside it had begun to rain: a fine drizzle, which though barely noticeable intensified the lonely stillness of the night. Madame Reynaud had brought an umbrella. The street was empty, as if the inhabitants of the neighborhood had all chosen to stay in their apartments. I did, however, note the following detail: the street lamps were the only sources of light. Were there people in the unlit apartments? We walked along the sidewalk arm in arm. All of a sudden, I don’t know why, everything seemed perfect. Madame Reynaud’s profile, the dripping of the rain on the umbrella, the sense of adventure, faint but shared.
“Doctor Lemière is a famous specialist, at least that is what Madame Vallejo told me yesterday. As it happens, just yesterday she was telling me how difficult it was, impossible in fact, to get the clinic’s leading physician to take an interest in her husband’s case. Someone must have put in a word for Monsieur Vallejo and finally convinced Lemière to make some room in his busy schedule. An odd coincidence, though, don’t you think? But it was exactly what Madame Vallejo had been hoping for. So, you see, we were rather in the way.”
“What you mean is that Lemière wouldn’t tolerate my presence in his patient’s room,” I protested. “The doctor and the quack are incompatible.”
“I didn’t say that, Monsieur Pain. And anyway, you’re not a quack.”
“That’s how I was treated. Have you forgotten already?”
“The business with Lejard? Are you cross about that?”
“No . . .”
“Well, stop frowning then. And watch your step, you just put your foot in a puddle.”
In fact I was happy. The rain, the night, Madame Reynaud’s scolding: the simplest things bring happiness.
“And what does it have to do with Doctor Lejard anyway?”
“Lejard is still Monsieur Vallejo’s doctor. All Lemière can do is give a second opinion, but that’s a considerable improvement on the previous situation.”
“To judge from what I saw, Lejard is not on particularly good terms with Madame Vallejo.”
“Nor with Monsieur Vallejo, as I understand.”
“Why not change doctors then?”
“Because it’s not up to them, my friend. Between you and me, Lejard let four days go by without visiting Vallejo. What do you think of that?”
“It’s appalling.”
“The problem is, the Vallejos have no money. Monsieur Vallejo’s admission was organized by a certain Monsieur García Calderón, one of his compatriots, who also arranged for his personal doctor, that is, Lejard, to take on the case.”
“When was he admitted?”
“The twenty-fourth of March.”
“It’s odd, I thought I recognized two of the doctors in Lemière’s group of followers, but I must have been mistaken; the men I was thinking of are foreigners, Spaniards, I believe, and to tell the truth, it’s hard to imagine them as doctors or medical students. They’re more like gangsters in training. But they’re not in the least frightening,” I hastened to add.
“What do they look like?”
“Thin, dark . . . I don’t think they’re familiar with the city. They’re enjoying themselves, don’t ask me how I know. I really couldn’t say. I just have the impression they like to live it up.”
“I’m not aware of any Spanish doctor having seen Monsieur Vallejo. There’s a Peruvian doctor who comes regularly. Monsieur Vallejo is Peruvian, did I tell you?”
At precisely ten o’clock at night, having taken my leave of Madame Reynaud at the entrance to a metro station, I arrived at the Café Victor, on Boulevard Saint Michel. My name was written in the headwaiter’s notebook, and I was guided without delay to one of the private rooms where the Spaniards awaited me. Although the restaurant’s lighting was in no way deficient or abnormal, I had the impression, on stepping inside, that I was entering a dark movie theater after the beginning of the show, preceded by the waiter, who for the occasion had been transformed into an usher guiding me to my seat. The bat, I thought. The path that links the man who serves and the man who sees in the dark.
“You’re punctual,” said one of the Spaniards.
I froze, with my hat in my hands, on the near side of the private room’s blood-colored door. It was difficult to recognize them without their white coats, but it was clear that the two doctors I had noticed among Lemière’s followers and the two Sp
aniards I had encountered on the stairs, who had come back the next morning to leave a message, were the same pair of men.
“A glass of wine?” asked the thinner of the two, patiently filling the third glass on the table up to the brim.
I sat down in front of them, as close to the door as I could, putting off the explanations that I should have been demanding.
“This must seem rather strange to you, I know, but it’s not,” said the other man, smiling; he was darker, although, to be honest I should say that both of them were thin and dark, and disturbingly, at certain moments, those were their sole characteristics.
My hand shook as I picked up the glass; a large portion of its contents spilled onto the tablecloth.
“We really just wanted to talk with you; don’t worry about the cloth, it doesn’t matter.”
“A chat among friends, if you’ll allow me to be so familiar.”
“An informal chat.”
“But drink, drink up, we’ve ordered some food, nothing special, cold cuts to snack on, we can go and have dinner somewhere else afterwards.”
“I’m vegetarian,” was the first thing I said.
The Spaniards looked at each other in surprise—or feigning surprise, perhaps—and then smiled indulgently, as if I had told a feeble joke and they were forgiving me.
“Gaston,” one of them called out when the waiter came in with two platters covered with slices of ham, little sections of sparerib and various kinds of cheese. “Bring walnuts and almonds for our guest.”
I tried to protest but he stopped me with a pale, wrinkled hand.
“Don’t forget the peanuts, Gaston,” he said when the waiter had already disappeared.
The dark one loosened his tie and smiled at me; his companion had fallen on one of the platters and was swallowing large chunks of cheese and washing them down with wine in the most indecorous manner.