From behind the stranger I think I can hear a muffled, intermittent roar, like a darkened backdrop, and it fills me with a sense of urgency.
I wake up. I listen attentively to the sound of the pipes. Almost imperceptibly, the walls of the room appear to be vibrating. The same phenomenon is affecting my skin.
The stranger walks away along an empty boulevard. The treetops are shedding dry leaves. Is it autumn?
Now I see myself hidden behind a curtain, peering through dirty panes of glass, watching the stranger, who is standing in the middle of the street. The stranger, in turn, is examining the windows of the building in which I am hidden, though not the particular window through which I am spying on him.
Who is he? What does he want?
The scene breaks up just as his gaze is about to fall on my window.
I hear the following sentence, pronounced very poorly by two voices in unison: “It’s hard for us to get around Paris, boss; we hardly know four words of French . . .”
“What does the word leak mean to you?”
“Leaked information?”
“Put that miniature spinal circuit away!”
“Our agents are investing energy as well as time!”
“Do you know what those words mean?”
“Time . . . Energy . . . Time . . . Energy . . .”
“A bundle of unlikely leaks.”
Murmurs of boredom and disgust. Then complaints.
“Listen, boss, I have a funny feeling.”
“As if my back were being scratched, as if time had already run out.”
“The melancholy of dreams, their absolute futility.”
“Is there anyone here, apart from us?”
I can see—as if I were down in a sewer, looking up through a drain—a man’s dark shoes and his gray trousers, but only up to the knee. When he moves away a little, his lower body is visible, up to the waist. I never see his torso, much less his face.
The man is walking— down an empty street, always following a real or imaginary edge. At no point does he move out of my visual field.
Someone whispers, right in my ear: “Watch out for the South American . . .”
Looking back over my shoulder, all I can see is darkness; I see that I am indeed in a sewer . . .
Blurry old photographs from 1920: Pleumeur-Bodou, Terzeff and I are crossing an iron bridge; when we reach the other side we turn and raise our hats—except for Terzeff who waves a white handkerchief—bidding farewell to a dim and gradually disappearing silhouette. I come to a square and see that a gallows has been set up; a new gallows, Terzeff and Pleumeur-Bodou remark, but their lips barely exhale an infrahuman sound; a mild autumnal breeze blows in through the windows, but is it autumn?
The same voice, although this time I know that it is coming from within me, insists: “Watch out for the cold South American . . .”
Cold? Cold nerves? The cold of death?
I try to say that the man is sick, that somewhere in the city there is a sick man, but although my mouth is hanging open, I cannot make any kind of sound.
“Have you heard of a nova?”
“Electrical mercury, broken thermographs, leaks . . .”
“Have you heard of a human nova?”
“All the usual quantum jokes.”
“Search me.”
My god, I think, looking at the shiny toes of the man’s shoes, just so long as he doesn’t bend down.
I wake. I am sweating, I try not to fall asleep again. For a moment I am certain that there’s someone else in the room.
At the end of a hospital corridor, a woman with her back to me is laughing (I know because that is the only audible sound). Her laughter is like a sedative. Then everything falls apart and reassembles itself.
A stranger approaches surrounded by an intermittent sound. The sound is his halo. He is standing on a staircase in the Louvre. Autumn wind swirls around the Parisian skyline. He speaks to me.
“I live in the black arcades, in a patio with a glass roof.”
“Suppose we have two panes of glass in contact with each other; if we look at them from the front, we will not notice anything unusual, but if we look at them side-on, we will see that there are indeed two panes . . .”
“Who the devil is Pierre Pain?”
“He kept our money.”
“Is there anyone here, apart from us?”
I feel that someone is scratching at the windows. I feel I am losing my voice. I wake up.
Madame Reynaud called at my lodgings very early the next morning. It was the first time she had done so since the beginning of our friendship.
Slightly disconcerted by the novelty of the situation, I begged her to take a seat while I got dressed in the adjoining room. She didn’t seem to hear me; for a few moments we stood quite still, as if observing each other from an unwonted angle, both of us held by some combination of urgency and shyness. There was not the slightest sound from outside, except perhaps the murmuring of an indecipherable presence in the air, suspended matter; and the light delineating her silhouette had the gray intimacy of certain Parisian mornings. She smiled sweetly, although with a certain reserve, and looked at everything with the curiosity of a vaguely disappointed little girl. It is true that my poor room could hardly have been untidier; in that narrow space were crammed two high-backed armchairs (family heirlooms), an old Moroccan carpet, a set of oak shelves, a chest of drawers with a gas ring on top of it, a dark table with a mahogany border on which the books I consult each day stood in somewhat haphazard piles, a microscope, a metronome, my pipes, plates and cups, a dirty knife, and so on, all adorned with a fine layer of dust, which although it had escaped my notice until then, stood out, in Madame Reynaud’s presence, like irrefutable proof of squalor. I tried to excuse myself for the state of my room; I lied, saying that recently I had been too busy for housekeeping, but she put me at ease by making a conventional remark about the absent-mindedness of intellectuals. I thanked god that the door to the other room was shut. A small framed photograph hanging on the wall caught her attention; it was a picture of a street in Clichy that a friend had given me many years before. She pointed to the photo rather nervously:
“Were you born there?”
“No, no,” I hastened to reply.
“It’s a beautiful photograph, but very sad . . .”
“There is something melancholy about it, I admit. But I hardly notice it. It doesn’t have any special significance for me. I might even have put it up to hide a damp patch.”
She looked at me for a moment and then her lips relaxed into a broad smile. She was about to say something but stopped herself. Among the innumerable things she could have said, I imagined a formal, affectionate sentence, the only one I didn’t want or didn’t have the courage to hear. I was a coward and it has cost me dearly.
Within a few minutes she was explaining what had brought her to my apartment. It was easy enough to guess. Madame Vallejo had telephoned the previous night, to tell her about the conversation with Lemière. The outcome had been disappointing. Lemière had indeed said, “All the organs are in perfect working order,” but later, alone with Madame Vallejo, he had added: “Let’s hope we find one that is diseased! I can see that this man is dying, but I don’t know what from.”
The mention of death, more devastating perhaps coming from Lemière himself, had left Madame Vallejo in a state of almost total desperation, understandably, given the days she had spent at her husband’s bedside, barely sleeping, tormented by a host of doubts; but she had reacted, Madame Reynaud told me, with an energetic resolution, and now she was requesting my presence at the hospital. It seemed, from what I was hearing, that Madame Vallejo would not rest until she had exhausted every avenue. Every avenue was, of course, a euphemism designating me.
Suddenly, like the waning moon peeping through a gap in the clouds, the scene appeared before me stripped of all semblances: two women determined to save a poor wretch from dying turn to another poor wretch when science
and medicine have failed or refused to help. It was deeply sad, almost worthy of a late 19th-century naturalist melodrama; and yet, behind what might be called the stage or the foreground, hidden by the scenery, I thought I could glimpse—it was just a hunch, and meanwhile I remained steadily attentive to Madame Reynaud’s words—the silhouette of a stranger, smoking in the wings, as it were, and I knew without a doubt that he was the South American mentioned in the dream.
I wondered if I wasn’t getting carried away. What kind of purity was Madame Reynaud laying, almost unawares, at my feet? In any case, I was unworthy of it. I had done nothing to deserve it. I probably felt, as I have felt on precious few occasions, blessed.
We arranged to meet at four in the afternoon in a café near the Clinique Arago. I spent the following hours at home, alone, smoking and drinking occasional cups of tea, but I had nothing to eat. The view from my bedroom window was of attics and chimneypots gripped by a winter reluctant to be gone.
I tried to read but found the mere activity repellent. Madame Reynaud’s presence was still quivering in the air of the apartment. At one point I remember throwing the book at the wall, but not in anger. I tried in vain to summon up a particularly troubling and revealing image engraved by Félicien Rops. The gray of the city outside became a black and white amalgam, harboring threats. I tried to tidy both rooms. I gave the suit I was wearing a brush. I contemplated my perfectly combed hair in the mirror. Impossible.
When I went out, clouds had covered the sky again, and before I had walked two blocks it began to rain. I hoped that the rain would last well into the night so that I would be able to fall asleep listening to the drops hammering on the roof. That was all I hoped for, and it was the best mental preparation for seeing my patient, at last.
Vallejo’s room had poorly whitewashed walls on one of which hung an incongruous gold-framed mirror. We arrived to find a dark man smoking in the corridor, with the lapels of his overcoat turned up; he addressed Madame Vallejo in an incomprehensible mishmash of French and Spanish. Before she could introduce him to us, he said good-bye and left; we went into the room. Monsieur Vallejo was asleep. In a corner, sitting on a white chair, was a visitor wrapped in an outsize trench coat, distractedly leafing through a sports magazine. When he saw us, he stood up, but Madame Vallejo stilled and silenced him with a peremptory gesture:
“Best not to wake him,” she whispered.
I nodded and approached the bed on tiptoe. In the mirror I could see the man returning to his chair and Madame Reynaud going to stand by a window with half-closed Venetian blinds. Madame Vallejo was the only one who didn’t move.
I went straight to Vallejo’s side. He turned over and opened his lips but was unable to articulate a word. Madame Reynaud raised one hand to her mouth, as if to stifle a cry. The silence in the room seemed to be full of holes.
I held my hand a foot above the head of the bed and prepared myself to wait. The patient’s angular face lay before me, exposed, displaying the strange disconsolate dignity shared by all those who have been confined in hospital for some time. The rest is vague: locks of black hair, the collar of the pajama top loose around his neck, healthy skin, no sign of sweat. His hiccups were the only sound in that quiet room. I know I could never describe Vallejo’s face, at least not as I saw it then, the only time we ever met; but the hiccups, the nature of the hiccups, which swallowed everything as soon as you listened carefully, that is, as soon as you really listened to them, was simply beyond description and yet was accessible to everyone, like a sonic ectoplasm or a Surrealist found object.
I referred to “the nature of the hiccups,” and one of their peculiarities, perhaps, or so it seemed to me, was that they were self-generated. A hiccup, as we all know, is a muscular contraction, a spasm of the diaphragm producing a sudden breathing in of air followed by a closing of the glottis, resulting in a characteristic sharp sound, repeated intermittently; Vallejo’s hiccups, however, seemed to be quite autonomous, foreign to his body, as if they were afflicted with him rather than the other way around. That was what I thought.
I spent two hours at his bedside. Luckily the man in the trench coat left after only a few minutes. The sound of the door closing softly behind him called me back from the speculative byways on which I had been wandering, and directed my attention to the illness, to the pit before me: my patient, Vallejo. I was delighted to discover that being with the two women and the sick man was like being alone, but alone in a harmonious buoyant solitude, swifter than clocks, as the philosopher said.
“He’s awake,” whispered Madame Reynaud.
I look at her and raise a finger to my lips as if to intimate: Quiet, Vallejo is asleep, he is hardly moving, his frailty is palpable. Madame Vallejo comes to the head of the bed, on the other side, opposite me. With a gesture I beg her to move away. As Madame Vallejo returns obediently to the foot of the bed, I notice that Madame Reynaud’s face has suddenly turned pale. Vallejo has opened his eyes, he is looking at his wife, mumbling two or three indistinct words. He is delirious. Then he shuts his eyes and seems to be sleeping calmly. I have not moved. I feel as if a tiny but formidably heavy spider were running across the back of the hand I have been holding in the air all this time.
As I walked to the door I felt utterly drained; my shoulders ached as if I had made an inordinate physical effort, and I didn’t feel like talking. I wanted to clear my throat out in the open, where I wouldn’t disturb anyone, and go for a walk on my own as night began to fall. I firmly believed that my patient would recover, and in that hope I felt at one not only with the two women who had watched me from their respective corners of that room, but also, extravagantly, with most of the inhabitants of Paris, oblivious as they were to what was happening there.
Madame Vallejo’s eyes were trained on me inquisitively.
“There is hope,” I said dispassionately as I reached the door.
Madame Reynaud was still at the window. She looked in my direction (but she was not seeing me) then opened the Venetians.
“There is hope.” I smiled, looking for some kind of sign in her bearing.
“Good-bye, Monsieur Pain,” Madame Reynaud’s lips seemed to whisper.
I understood that she was grateful and was going to stay with Madame Vallejo. That was all. The hiccupping had stopped; I didn’t realize at the time because the sound went on echoing in my head. Naturally, I felt happy.
Before leaving I glanced at the bed-ridden man. He was dark and the sheets were white and harsh. At that moment everything seemed deceptively simple, or at least open to simple solutions. I was convinced—and not entirely without reason—that I could cure Vallejo.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” I said.
The two women nodded in silence.
They were at the window, clasping each other’s hands.
“At three in the afternoon,” I said.
The door closed. I was alone. This is the moment when something should happen, I thought; and yet the people I passed as I walked down the clinic’s dimly illuminated corridors toward the exit barely even noticed me. At the reception desk I asked the nurse on duty if she could give me the names of the Spanish doctors who were working with Lejard or Lemière. She looked at me as if I were unhinged, then went to pick up a black book, but changed her mind before opening it. The only Spanish doctor was Doctor Mariano Roca, she affirmed.
“Could you describe him?” I asked with my most charming smile.
“Old and fat,” she said with disgust.
“And he’s the only Spanish doctor on the staff?”
“The only foreign doctor,” she specified. “Our medical staff is made up of French citizens, with the unfortunate exception of Doctor Roca.” It was clear that the Spaniard was not in her good books.
“Are you sure that there aren’t two Spanish or South American doctors who work here, from time to time perhaps, young men, about thirty years old?” I insisted.
“And what are you? A detective?”
“No, g
od forbid . . . Do I look like a detective? I’m just trying to return something that belongs to those two doctors.”
“What?”
I examined her carefully for the first time. Her face seemed to be undergoing a gradual transformation. Now it combined the features of a guard dog and the fearfully anticipated prostitute of my adolescent fantasies.
“It’s a personal matter, you understand.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Anyway, if you’re sure they don’t work here . . .”
In the street I decided to take a taxi and go home immediately. The air was fresh and it was no longer raining, although the paving stones in the street were shining, as if freshly polished, and some people were still walking with their umbrellas open.
When the taxi pulled up in front of my building, I told the driver to wait, but explained that I would not be getting out.
I looked through the window of the taxi. The entrance hall was a mass of pure shadow, and there was no one to be seen, although there could well have been someone hidden in the darkness. I could feel the desire to return to my apartment evaporating.
“Switch off the motor,” I said to the driver. “We’re going to wait a little.”
The driver turned around to look at me and nodded without saying a word, his hands resting compliantly on the steering wheel. I looked up and down both sidewalks—no sign of the Spaniards—but decided to wait. Fifteen minutes later, I told the driver to go. I watched through the back window to make sure that no one was following us.
“Are you following someone or is someone following you?” asked the driver.
I didn’t answer.
What have you got to lose here? one of the Spaniards had asked.
Maybe that was the heart of the matter: losing or finding something.
“What do you two have to lose?” I replied.
The thin one blinked.
“Don’t be stubborn,” he said.
I suspected they hadn’t understood, but it didn’t matter.