Monsieur Pain

by Roberto Bolaño

  While I was waiting I picked up a morning paper that someone had left open on a table, and my eyes wandered from the headlines to the filler stories and then to the photographs, unhurriedly searching for something undefined.

  I must have appeared downcast, because Raoul asked, from behind the bar:

  “Bad news?”

  The news was about the war in Spain: the latest on the bombing raids, the shelling, and new weapons that we hadn’t known in the Great War.

  “The damned Germans are testing out their arsenal,” said Raoul.

  “Rubbish, they don’t have anything special,” remarked a mechanic in dark brown overalls, who was leaning on the bar, drinking his glass of wine.

  “So you don’t think there’s anything special about dive-bombing, Robert? The Stukas!” replied Raoul, who was well versed in military technology. “Single-engine, two-seater planes, with three machine guns, and they can carry more than a thousand kilos of bombs!”

  “The way you talk, it’s like you’re worshipping them.”

  “Of course not! Not at all . . . ! But you do have to admit . . .”

  “All right, Raoul, I didn’t really mean it, but we’re not talking about the eighth wonder of the world. People are what matters, the courage of the masses.”

  “A war is a war,” pronounced the blind boy, sitting against the wall with his white cane between his knees. “If you don’t believe me, ask Monsieur Pain.”

  “That’s right,” I said, without raising my eyes from the newspaper, with its advertisements, sports news, culture and entertainment pages, gossip columns . . .

  “Thank god I haven’t seen one.”

  Some of the clients laughed.

  “You’re a clown, Jean-Luc, that’s what you are,” said Raoul.

  “I’m serious,” the blind boy protested, half-joking.

  “It’s true,” I said. “You can count yourself lucky in that respect, Jean-Luc. The scenery of war is . . . Dantesque. No: miserable . . . squalid . . . The problem is that if a war broke out, blindness would only spare you from active service, not from all the other disasters that wars inevitably bring in their wake. However wretched your life is, war can make it worse, and I’m speaking for all of us, not just you.”

  “See, Jean-Luc?”

  “All right, all right,” said the blind boy. “You’ve convinced me.”

  “They’re building up their armament every day,” grumbled Raoul, putting my coffee on the table, “while we’re just sounding off. We need to act; we need to take a firm stand, be tough . . .”

  “But what are you proposing?” asked a small, bearded man with a spiky shock of hair, who until then had remained hidden at the other end of the bar. “Do you want our incompetent government to drag us into in an arms race, on top of everything else? For god’s sake, my friend, there are quite enough Nazis in Europe already.”

  “Listen, I don’t know about Nazis, but I do know that the Germans are a threat to our country, and we should stop dreaming and face up to them.”

  “The French bourgeoisie is a threat too,” put in the mechanic, “for the French working class.”

  “Monsieur Pain doesn’t work,” said the blind boy. “Nor do I. We can’t.”

  “How about you do us a favor and shut up, Jean-Luc?” Raoul requested patiently. “The gentlemen here are trying to have a serious discussion about the fate of our homeland.”

  “Ah, yes, the sweet homeland . . .” said Jean-Luc.

  “Anyway, it’s the poor who go to fight in the front lines, and suffer behind the lines too. Isn’t that right, Monsieur Pain?”

  “Officers get killed occasionally, too, Robert.”

  In fact I couldn’t remember seeing many dead officers. The bombs, the gas, the diseases destroyed us, a terrified, stupefied troop of farmers, factory workers and deluded petits bourgeois. No, I don’t like wars. At the age of twenty-one I had both lungs scorched at Verdun. The doctors who collected my body never understood how I managed to survive. Willpower, was my reply. As if willpower had anything to do with life, much less death. Now I know it was sheer luck. Which is no consolation. Sometimes I remember the doctors’ pale faces, tinged with a monstrous but natural green, and their weak smiles hovering, ready to accept any kind of explanation. It’s my life, I told them. Behind their faces, I remember scraps of a field hospital and, beyond, folds of grey sky, the portent of a storm.

  From then on, supported by a modest invalid’s pension, and perhaps as a reaction against the society that had imperturbably sent me forth to die, I gave up everything that could be considered beneficial to a young man’s career, and took up the occult sciences, which is to say that I let myself sink into poverty, in a manner that was deliberate, rigorous and not altogether devoid of elegance. At some point during that phase in my life I read An Abridged History of Animal Magnetism, by Franz Mesmer, and, within a matter of weeks, became a mesmerist.

  “Do you know what Mesmer’s teacher was called?” I asked Raoul out of the blue.

  “No,” he said.

  They were all quiet, looking at me with a certain apprehension.

  “Hell . . . He was the first to try to cure illnesses by means of animal magnetism. That was his name: Hell.” I laughed good-naturedly, in the stupid belief that I was immune to misfortune. “Hell was one of Mesmer’s teachers, what do you make of that?”

  Raoul shrugged his shoulders.

  “A joke?” proposed the blind boy.

  For a few moments no one said a word. A girl in a blue skirt opened the door, and a gust of cold air entered with her; it seemed to wake us all up. I remembered Madame Reynaud’s face and my egoism. The girl sat on the blind boy’s knees and whispered something in his ear. Hello Claudine, I heard Raoul say. I looked across at him: he was wiping glasses and nothing seemed to have disturbed the habitual tranquility of his face.

  “So you’re engaged in the study of mesmerism?” The question was put by the small bearded man, who had come over to my table.

  I replied in the affirmative. The use of the word engaged seemed promising.

  “I imagine you have heard of Doctor Baraduc.”

  “Indeed. I have read Vital Force.”

  “It’s interesting,” he said as he sat down beside me, “that you mentioned Hell. As an instance of synchronicity, I mean . . .”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Excuse me. It doesn’t matter. I’m not so sure I understand myself. Synchronicity, diachronicity, juggling . . . I suppose you know that Hell was a priest.”

  “A protestant minister.”

  “It’s interesting that the clergy played such an important role in the investigation of animal magnetism or vital force, as it later came to be known, thanks to Baraduc, among others. And he, of course, collaborated with a priest, Father Fortin . . .”

  “Best not to ask what he fought in.” It was a bad joke but we both smiled; the bearded man was pleasant company, resolved to make the conversation enjoyable both for himself and for his interlocutor, and I felt no hostility toward him, as opposed to most of the people I had encountered over the previous days.

  “Let me introduce myself. My name is Jules Sautreau.”

  “Pierre Pain. What were you saying about synchronicity?”

  “I fear I was too hasty in my choice of words . . . Synchronicity, blotches on the wall, messages abhorrent in their sheer impossibility . . . In any case I wasn’t referring to the clergymen associated with our friends.”

  “Do you have an interest in animal magnetism?”

  “I notice that you prefer the original name. No, I’m not an adept, if that is what you mean, but in the course of my reading I have made some incursions into that field, out of idle curiosity, I hasten to add, simply for my own amusement. I’m an amateur, who takes more pleasure from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation” for example, than from scientific treatises, for which of course I have all due respect. A careful search can sometimes turn up curiosities. Have y
ou ever had occasion to read The Human Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible?”

  “I have consulted it from time to time.”

  “Fascinating, don’t you think . . . With seventy para-photographic plates . . .”

  “But the phenomenon of the needle has been discredited, like the impression of photographic plates without contact.”

  “You don’t think it’s possible to affect them with one’s own personal vibration?”

  “I think it’s possible to do much more than that.” (I was tempted to add: by understanding mesmerism as a kind of humanism, not a science.) “In any case, what interests me is drinking from the sources.”

  “De planetarum influxu, the heavenly bodies rolling on a billiard table, all that nervous music, is that what you mean?”

  “You seem to be familiar with the mesmerist bibliography.”

  “Only the titles,” he hastened to add. “Baraduc cites some of them, and the rest, the paraphernalia, can be found in Bersot’s Mesmer, Animal Magnetism, The Turning Tables and Spirits.”

  “Yes, of course, the veils, the shabby opulence that seems to be permanently associated with mesmerism. Frivolous implements, as I’m sure you’ll agree, which serve one purpose only: to disfigure and obscure . . .”

  “And poltergeists.”

  “Poltergeists are a kind of smokescreen.”

  “Except that as a smokescreen they turned out to be ineffective and indeed drew the fire of the Royal Society of Medicine, which obliged Mesmer to give up his practice. Publicly, at least.”

  “In fact it was a way of putting hypnotism on trial, so to speak. Mesmer believed that almost every illness could be traced back to a nervous disorder. And that was unacceptable for certain individuals and pressure groups, it seems. You could say he was fighting a losing battle from the start. The Royal Society of Medicine is not known for its tolerance.”

  “And yet in 1831, they issued a statement that was favorable to the theory of animal magnetism.”

  “Yes, but Mesmer was already dead by then and his followers, as you suggested, were more interested in poltergeists than the truth. Then, in 1837, his theories were definitively condemned, and Baraduc’s later experiments could do nothing to change that. The whole business is rather like a Punch and Judy show. You could see it like this: illnesses, all of them, are produced by nervous disorders. Disorders that have been engineered, coolly planned in advance, but by whom? By the patient, the environment, god or Destiny, what does it matter? . . . Hypnotism should reverse the process and bring about a cure. Should make it possible to forget, in other words. Pain and forgetting and their causes, and us caught up in the midst of it all, think about it for a moment . . .”

  “A genuine utopia.”

  “Or a malignant illusion. When I think of those eighteenth-century doctors and healers, I can’t help feeling for them. It’s an idle sympathy, if you like, but sympathy all the same. I’m a utopian too, in fact, but a static utopian, unlike them. For me, mesmerism is like a medieval painting. Beautiful and useless. Timeless. Trapped.”

  “Trapped?”

  I kept quiet for a moment, stilled to a quiet within quietness, gazing at the table’s shining surface.

  Fascination, horror, I thought, and here I am playing Doctor Templeton, but with a poorer memory.

  “I don’t know why I said it . . . Trapped . . . A trapped idea . . . I suppose I meant trapped in time.”

  “Or trapped by someone.”

  “By Father Hell?”

  A deep-seated sense of decorum prevented us from smiling.

  It was raining when I went to leave the café. A fine rain, almost made of air, barely perceptible. I shivered with cold. Then, straight away, even before I had stepped off the threshold, I heard the howl. It sounded like the howl of a wolf. Surely it was only a dog. I froze; the street was unusually empty; I thought perhaps it was a horn that someone had sounded, a visitor to one of the buildings looming around me. A solitary, unsettled music. A foreign music (from the North Pole, I thought, or Africa), a music with its nerves on edge. I looked back through the glass door into the café. Sautreau was sitting at the same table, idly perusing the newspaper that I had leafed through. The pages touched the tip of his beard as he turned them over. Raoul, visible down to the waist behind the bar, seemed to be listening intently to the girl, whose arms were raised as if she were asking to be lifted to her feet. The others were talking, probably about the war in Spain or cycling, but I couldn’t catch even a syllable. I buttoned my coat up to the neck. After a few eternal-seeming seconds, I heard the howl again. The musician’s intention (since it was a musician, I was no longer in any doubt about that) was easy enough to construe. A cavernous yet lacerated sound, collapsing out of the vaults above and reverberating off the closed windows of the houses. A sound that swept the empty streets for a fraction of a second. Like a horn. But it wasn’t a horn. A huge and futile pity possessed me. I froze.

  At five to three in the afternoon, I reached the Clinique Arago. The rules of the institution stipulate that, before passing through the double doors that lead into the depths of the building, visitors must leave their name and the name of the patient they have come to visit, or at least the patient’s room number. Having satisfied this requirement and begun to walk away, I heard the nurse’s voice calling me to a halt.

  “You can’t go in,” I was informed.

  At first I thought that I had heard incorrectly or that there had been a misunderstanding, so I gave my name again and that of Monsieur Vallejo, adding that I had already visited him the previous day and was returning in compliance with a specific request from his wife. I stressed the specific request. The nurse seemed to hesitate for a moment and then looked at me curiously. She took a manila form from a drawer and read it twice; then she put it straight back into the same drawer, gently shaking her head.

  “No one is allowed to see Monsieur Vallejo,” she said, lying. “Those are the orders.”

  “But they are expecting me.”

  “Come back another day,” she suggested, rather uncertainly.

  “Madame Vallejo specifically asked me to come. She must be in the room now, with her husband. Tell her that I’m here. I can’t leave without seeing her. Please . . . I beg you to make an exception.”

  The nurse wavered for a moment, moved perhaps by my appeal. But she soon reaffirmed her ruling.

  “It’s impossible, those are the doctor’s orders,” she said, as if they had been handed down from God.

  “Which doctor?”

  “I don’t know, it doesn’t say here, but orders of this kind can only be given by a doctor, as I’m sure you understand.”

  I raised my hands in exasperation.

  “Will you let me see the form?”

  A weasel-like smile came over her face and I understood that she was not going to let me pass.

  “I’m afraid not, it’s against the rules, the orders are confidential, but if you think I’m lying . . .”

  I weighed up the possibility of walking down that corridor with or without authorization, but the absurdity of the situation, and sheer surprise, held me there at the reception counter with the force of a magnet. I tried another approach:

  “May I send for Madame Vallejo? I will wait for her here.”

  “I already told you. It’s out of my hands, there’s nothing to be done.” Her face was growing pale, taking on a milky quality, as if to match her uniform.

  I insisted.

  For a moment I was prey to the deluded belief that I had convinced her. She asked me to wait, opened a camouflaged door in the wall behind her, which I had not noticed until then, and vanished so quickly I could only glimpse a rectangle of reddish darkness, as if the adjoining space were a photographer’s darkroom. When she came out, she was accompanied by a tall aide with blond hair and the melancholy jaw of a boxer.

  The nurse now seemed to have taken on the role she’d been waiting to play all her life.
<
br />   “Show this gentleman to the door,” she ordered.

  I was dumbfounded.

  The aide came out from behind the counter, moved smoothly to where I was standing, and told me, in a harsh Brittany accent, to be reasonable and follow him.

  With all the resolve I could muster, I tried to ignore him. I think I failed.

  “What’s going on?” I managed to sputter.

  Sitting at her desk, the nurse was leafing through the bulky visitors’ register.

  “Calm down,” she said, without looking at me.

  Then she lifted her eyes from the tome and hissed:

  “Go on, get out, and don’t you ever set foot in here again.”

  After the first minutes of bewilderment, which I spent walking around a few neighboring blocks, unable to make up my mind to depart but not feeling brave enough to face a new skirmish with the nurse, I decided to hole up in a café, from which I could keep watch over the clinic’s main gate.

  My intention was to stay there until Madame Vallejo came out, and then explain it all to her. At six in the evening my hopes began to fade. At eight I was still there, held in place by inertia more than anything: had Madame Vallejo finally appeared, which by then seemed unlikely, I would probably not have been able to recognize her, since it was completely dark.

  At nine I decided to leave and call Madame Reynaud. With a frown of irritation, I discovered that I did not have her number with me. I would have to go home, find my notebook, and go out again to call her.

  I stopped a taxi. I had already grasped the door handle when I felt a blow on my back, almost a casual shove. The man responsible had a stitched-up eyebrow, not entirely covered by a sticking plaster.

  “I saw it first,” he said. He seemed to be speaking with his mouth full of water.

  I looked at the driver to see if he would adjudicate, but he simply shrugged his shoulders. We had to resolve the dilemma ourselves. The man with the split eyebrow was waiting. I ignored the blow and assured him in the most polite manner that he was mistaken: he could not have seen the taxi before I did, because, for a start, he was not even in the vicinity when it pulled up.