Hallucinating Foucault (10 page)

“Vous avez rendez-vous avec quelqu’un?” One of the women stood staring at me while the other glanced down at her appointment book.

“No. I’m English. I’ve come to see Paul Michel.” This time there was an instantaneous reaction.

“Ah, lui.” They looked at each other and the older of the two, who had her bifocals on a velvet ribbon, turned her gaze upon me with a distinct flicker of exasperation and fury.

“What is your relationship with Paul Michel?” she asked briskly. I told the truth.

“I’m his reader. Come to find him.” This time I used the French word, “lecteur,” but with such professional certainty that she posed no further questions.

“Asseyez-vous. Fill in this visitor’s card. Name. Address in Clermont. Vous avez une pièce d’identité? I’ll call Dr Vaury.”

I sat down on the bench opposite the glass box and set to work on my inevitable dossier. Then I noticed that someone had painted more graffiti on the outside of the office. It was the same hand which had written the mighty slogan above the entrance. And this time it formed an aureole over the grey head of the woman in the administrative bunker.

JE T’AIME A LA FOLIE
(
I’m madly in love with you
)

The text had been vigorously washed and scrubbed, but the letters were still there, clearly legible. The older woman saw me reading the slogan and shrugged.

“That’s Paul Michel for you. Vandal.”

I felt a shiver go through me. He was here, and the writing on the wall was written in his hand.

“May I smoke?” I asked politely. There were no ashtrays to be seen.

“No,” she said.

I sat silent, intimidated, seething with excitement.

Then, without warning, a young woman who looked hardly older than myself was standing, white-coated, beside me. She restated the facts without comment.

“You’ve come to see Paul Michel.”

I stood up. She did not shake hands.

“Please come with me.”

I followed her down impeccable, silent, empty corridors, ht only by artificial overhead striplights, yellow, muted. There was no sound. The doors were all shut. The floor was expensive soft white linoleum and smelled strongly of bleach. There was one painting, a banal green landscape hung high up, out of easy reach. She opened a door marked Dr Pascale Vaury and indicated that I should enter before her.

Her office was terrifyingly clean, but had posters, a black leather couch shunted into a corner, a huge, barred, vault-shaped window looking out onto a geometrical courtyard with long avenues of neatly pruned limes and impeccable white gravel paths. Through the thick lace curtains I saw passing strangers, some in religious habit, upright, marching briskly, others shuffling and bent, as if they were tortured, badly trimmed trees. The sun did not enter her office, but stopped short on the windowsill, so that outside, there was a glaze of bright light; inside, it was sober, muted, austere. The office was completely soundproofed. I could hear nothing but her movements and mine. She sat down on the other side of the desk and offered to speak English.

“I don’t often get a chance to practice,” she said, “only at conferences. Are you more comfortable in English or in French?”

“Well … I study French,” I admitted, “in fact I study Paul Michel.”

“Ah,” she said, as if I had explained everything, “you’re a researcher.”

“In a way.”

“Excuse me, but you are very young to be doing a research.”

“Not really.”

“Do you know why Paul Michel is here?”

“Yes. He’s said to be mad.”

She shrugged and half smiled.

“We don’t always use those terms here. Perhaps I should explain. Paul Michel was admitted as a patient under Article 64 of the Penal Code. He has been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. He was a case of H. O.—Hospitalisation d’Office—that is, he is legally restrained by an ordre préfectoral. He has been very violent in the past, dangerously so, when he was
en pleine crise.
But in fact he has not been physically aggressive towards anyone, not even himself, for quite some time.”

“It’s his writing, isn’t it? On the walls.” My fingertips were tingling. He was somewhere above me, near me.

Pascale Vaury laughed.

“Ah, yes, that’s him. To tell you the truth we were rather pleased. He got out. He always does. It’s one of his specialities, but instead of escaping this time, he painted all the walls. You should see the poems in the men’s toilets.”

“Do you know him well?”

“Know him? Yes, I suppose so. I’m his doctor here. I met him first when he was at Sainte-Anne in Paris about six years ago. He has changed a lot since then.”

“May I see him?”

“Yes of course. But I must ask you not to stay for very long. You will be supervised. I think that’s best. And I must warn you, he may not be very cooperative. He is used to us, and to the hospital, but he is often very difficult with strangers. Don’t be disappointed. He’s not the writer you are looking for. Or the person you may have read about. He’s very ill. He is in terrible pain, all the time.”

“Pain?” I had not thought of this. She looked me straight in the eye, arctic, accusing, and spoke in French.

“Yes. Pain. Madness is a greater form of suffering than any other kind of disease. Folie—it is the saddest word I know. No physical illness is like this. It is the most terrible thing that can ever happen to you. It destroys every aspect of your life. It destroys you completely.”

“Why do you work with them then? If it’s so terrible?” I suddenly asked, puzzled.

She relaxed again. And returned to English.

“It’s very exhausting. Very tiring. There’s a lot of pressure from the families. And a lot of pressure to keep them locked up. And society has a terrible fear of letting those that they call mad live among them. There’s a far greater tolerance of alcoholic behavior, which is often not very different. I’ve been working in the French psychiatric system for seven years. It’s a long time. You get attacked, abused. But you do learn to see things differently.”

She picked up a pencil and turned it over and over in her hands.

“You see things more coherently. You accept things. You are more open. More tolerant. If I have a more generous, open mind than I had when I was a medical student it is largely due to men like Paul Michel.”

I was moved, curious, disconcerted. She rose and picked up the telephone.

“Hervé? Oui. Ecoute—I have a visitor here for Paul Michel. Is he up? He is. OK. Tell him he has a visitor from England. We’ll be up in two minutes. Ring administration and security. I’ll tell the office. Yes. He may need a bit of supervision. No. They’ve never met. He’s a researcher. OK. See you in a minute.”

She looked at me. I felt two spots of red appearing in my cheeks. I was terribly excited.

“Follow me. Don’t stare. But then, you’re English. The English don’t stare at other people like we do. You have better manners.” She smiled, suddenly looking like a young girl. Her hair rustled on her collar as I followed her ringing keys back up the corridor. She kept her hands on her keys. The sound was perpetual, a soft chiming of metal as the keys turned in her grasp. She spoke a few words to the women in the glass box, then turned left into the lift.

As we went up, up into the maze of silence she talked a little about the service, the new clinic, the children’s wing. I realized that the hospital was enormous, that I was encircled by a small city, a city inhabited by the young, the middle-aged, the very old, a city of the mad. But what was uncanny was the fact that we saw no one. There were no doctors, no nurses, no patients in the corridors. The wing we entered was absolutely silent. I saw nothing but green corridors of locked doors. Dr Vaury got out her keys, and opened one green door, which she relocked from the inside behind me. A handwritten note was cellotaped to the next door before us.

ST JEAN

She unlocked this door carefully and looked around as we entered. Then she relocked the door. It was a large open space, sparsely furnished; a television muttered, high up on the wall. The windows were barred and blocked out with thick, opaque squares of reinforced
glass. There was dirt on the floor, crumpled paper flung behind chairs, the smell was unmistakable, urine and excrement. Two men, with horribly distorted purple faces and vacant stares, shuffled endlessly in the space. They were white, thin, gaunt; one of them had an arm, twisted and stiff, held against his chest. They smelled unwashed, fusty and old.

Dr Vaury greeted both of them by name and shook hands as if they were rational, living beings. But she did not introduce me, she simply nodded and I followed her into an office that was also a kitchen. A woman working among her papers looked up.

“Pascale—bonjour …” They began discussing another patient.

I looked at the filing cabinets, the begonia. The office was human, warm; but the stench persisted. It was everywhere. I felt a great wave of nausea coming up from my stomach.

“Follow me, please.” We went on, deeper and deeper, into the body of Leviathan. Two more doors, unlocked and relocked. And then we were in a corridor with separate bedrooms. The smell was unbearable, a sharp acrid gust of recent human piss. I glanced through one of the open doors; the room was in chaos, with clothes flung on the floor, against the radiator, a broken plastic pot still spinning on the floor, the walls were smeared with fresh excrement.

A large blond man in impeccable starched white stepped out of the room and greeted us. He shook hands with me. He was cordial, cheerful, reassuring.

“So you’ve come to see Paul Michel? He doesn’t have many visitors.” He smiled warmly. “This is my service. I shouldn’t think you’ve seen a unit like this before. Don’t worry. I’ve told him you’re coming. Would you like to wait in the day room at the end of the corridor?”

There was no door. I went into another sparse, dark space with
a chattering television, fixed to the wall, well out of reach. There were four heavy rubber chairs with metal tube frames. There was a large games table, bar football, screwed to the floor. And nothing else. There were no magazines, no pictures, no carpets. The walls were a dull green gloss paint. The single window was masked and barred. The sunlight was obscured. The smell of feces was overpowering.

“I’ll tell him you’re here,” said the immaculate white nurse, with a huge, glowing smile. “He’ll be right along. Dr Vaury and I are within earshot just up the corridor if you need us.”

I leaned against the wall, shaking. There was no ashtray, no ventilation. I didn’t ask for permission. I lit a cigarette. I didn’t hear him come in. At first the room was empty. Then there was a man standing terribly close to me, too close, looking straight into my face. He was thin, pale, unshaven, his T-shirt hung limp and stained against his chest. His eyes were alight—savage, glittering.

“Comment tu t’appelles, toi? You’re English, aren’t you?” He changed languages, effortlessly, faultlessly. “What’s your name?”

Never taking his eyes off my face, he took the cigarettes and lighter out of my hand, lit one for himself, then, still never looking down, took two cigarettes out of the packet and gave them back to me. He put the rest in the back pocket of his jeans. He turned my lighter over and over in his hands. Then, reluctantly, he gave it back.

“Ah-uh. I can’t risk the lighter. They won’t let me smoke unsupervised.”

“Why not?” I was horribly afraid of this thin, unshaven ghost. He laughed slightly.

“I set fire to the ward.”

“Do you mean to?” I sounded stupid, even to myself.

“Don’t be such a fool. Nobody commits arson by mistake.”

“But you could die.” This was the least of his concerns.

“Well, at least I’d take some of the other buggers with me. What did you say your name was? They did tell me. No, don’t tell me. I’ll probably never be able to remember your name.”

We stood staring intently at each other. He was my height, two long lines drawn down either side of his mouth. But it was the same brow, the same lift of the chin, the same eyes. I would still have known who he was.

“I didn’t know you spoke English.”

“Of course I speak English. I learned it at school. Everybody does. I’ve even read Shakespeare. They tell me you’re studying my writing. Why didn’t you study Shakespeare? He was just as angry as I am. In his own majestic way. And just as queer.”

“I studied French.”

“Did you? Give me another cigarette.” He snatched back one of the two I had left, ht it off his smoldering butt and ground the fag end on the floor under his heel.

“What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, don’t tell me, petit. I never ask your names. When you fuck someone’s arse you don’t ask his name.”

I recoiled slightly, startled. He grinned maliciously.

“Have you ever desired someone’s death? So much so that you feel you could kill by just unleashing your desire?”

“No.”

I bit my hp. He gazed at me, glittering.

“You look like a fool. What did you say your name was? Are you another researcher?”

“Yes.”

“And have you come to describe me in your little doctoral dissertation on the link between madness and creativity?”

He let out a hideous cackle and his expression became utterly
grotesque. I shrank a little. He leered towards me suddenly, thrusting his nose into my face. Sensing hesitation and fear he at once pressed home his advantage.

“So you’re another scrounging, whining, lying voyeur. You aren’t the first, you know. I’ve fucked dozens of you.

“Instinctively, I fought back.

“I’m not writing about madness. You may be a nasty piece of work, but I don’t think you’re mad. And I’m doing a dissertation about your writing. Your bloody fiction.” Suddenly I lost my temper and shouted. “I’m not even writing about you.”

Instantly, Pascale Vaury and the nurse appeared in the doorway.

“Everything OK?” she asked.

Paul Michel spun around to stare at her contemptuously. Then he said, mocking her. “Oh yes, Dr Vaury. Of course, Dr Vaury. Everything’s just fine. Absolutely fine. No problem. Ne t’inquiète pas. Tout va bien.”

The nurse shrugged and they withdrew.