But it was as if Paul Michel was aware of what passed in my head. He knew I was jealous, disconcerted, insecure. He rolled over on his elbow and looked at me directly.
“It doesn’t do to sound too enthusiastic, petit. That’s why I wasn’t. But I do want to go. And with you.”
At one word from him my whole world was transformed from disappointment into joy. I was ashamed to be so dependent on someone else.
“What did you do to the medical advisory committee last time?” I asked suspiciously.
“I asked them to dance, insulted them when they wouldn’t and then danced on my own.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. They’ll lock you up forever.”
“Yup,” he sighed, “I felt like dancing and that’s what they felt they ought to do.”
He lit two cigarettes, gave me one and then said, “I really did have nowhere to go then, petit.”
I realized at once what a terrible thing he had said.
“But your father’s still alive …”
“He has Alzheimer’s disease.”
“Haven’t you got any family?”
“And they’d like to look after a homosexual novelist who’s abandoned his profession?” The scorn in his voice was perceptible.
I took a deep breath.
“You’ve got me.”
“I know.”
There was a pause between us.
“Can you drive, petit?” he asked casually, and the moment passed.
“Yes.”
“Do you know anything about cars?”
“Not much. A bit.”
“OK. I’ll give you a check for twenty thousand francs. Go and buy a small car that works. That couple you live with will give you a hand. I’ll make a few calls and tell you where to go. You’ll have to arrange the registration at the Préfecture and the insurance yourself. Go to Mutuelle. They’re the cheapest. I’ll get Vaury to give you my carte d’identité to sign all the papers. You can register the lot in my name but put yourself in the insurance. I’m forbidden to drive. Only remember to give them your home address in Clermont. Say that you’ve lived there a year. And don’t mention Sainte-Marie. You’ll need your driving license and your passport. You’ve got those? Good. You’ll have to buy the car in cash. But I’ll give you some blank checks for the rest. Get a 2CV or a Renault 4 if you can find one. Tell me if you need more money. I’ll think up a list of things to buy.”
The expedition began to sound like a military campaign. My only doubt was the medical advisory committee. It was suddenly clear to me that he was anxious too.
“What if we do all this and then they won’t let you go?” I asked.
“It’s no big deal. Three doctors come to see you. Vaury will be there too. She must be pretty certain she can swing it.”
“Then do as she says and behave. You’ve spent so many years acting as if you were mad …”
“And really being mad,” Paul Michel interrupted grimly.
“Well, pretend to be sane.”
“How do I present myself as sane, boy? What’s sane behavior? You tell me.”
“Say nothing.”
“But I said nothing for a year. Nothing. Total silence and they locked me up in the secure unit.”
“A year? Oh God, that is mad.”
He grinned like a wicked jester.
“Whose side are you on?”
I took hold of his shoulders and shook him.
“Yours, you bastard. Yours.”
I smiled helplessly. He was anxious and afraid that it wasn’t going to work.
“Listen. Just answer their questions calmly. They want to let you out. I’ve spoken to Dr Vaury. You’re not HIV positive …”
“Amazingly.”
“… and you haven’t been violent for a long, long time.”
“If you leave out last Saturday.”
“You were provoked. So was I. Listen. You’re not on drugs you can’t swallow. You get on well with me. We can get a month at least. Maybe more. Maybe two months. Then I suppose I’ll have to bring you back for observation or a checkup or something. But if you get through that, they’ll let you out again.”
“Will you stay with me when I see them?” he asked, his face set. My heart flinched with compassion.
“I can’t. You know I can’t. They won’t let me. You’ve got to do it on your own. Be careful. Take your time.”
We gazed at each other.
“For God’s sake, Paul Michel. Don’t, don’t, don’t provoke them.”
He laughed. And I felt then that I had passed the walls and stood alongside Sister Mary-Margaret and Pascale Vaury. Our complicity was now complete.
And if this was an opera, I would now be playing the introduction to the last act. I have replayed that summer, that year, so many times in my mind during all the summers since that it is now more than a memory. It has become a crossroads, a warning. My memory is a ghost town, still filled with heat and color, dominated by the voice of Paul Michel. People often ask me to describe him. I tell them that he was as brutally good-looking as the old photographs suggest. He was uncannily still most of the time. He would sit smoking, fixed in one pose. People noticed him because he already looked like a photograph or a painting. He had dark grey eyes, astonishingly passionless, cold. And he used to gaze at the world like an alien on a research expedition. It was there to be observed, understood and then analyzed. He was collecting data. But he was not playing, he sat outside the game. What I remember, even more intensely, was his voice, and his huge extraordinary laugh. Most of the photographs show an unsmiling man. It’s true, he was like that; moody, magnificent, the king in an exile of his own choosing. But we became friends. And he used to talk to me; often when we sat side by side, in the car, in the bars, in the gardens, on the wall above the beach. We always sat side by side. So that I was most aware of his hands, his face in profile. But I will never forget the timbre of his voice and the way he used to talk to me.
I’ll never know exactly what happened in front of the medical advisory committee. All I know is that afterwards he had a row with Pascale Vaury and she even raised her voice in the corridor. But they decided to let him go. We had two months grace, from August 9 to October 4, the week in which my term in Cambridge was due to begin. I spent two days in garages, banks and insurance offices. Monsieur and Madame Louet helped me with the paperwork. They let me use their telephone. They knew someone who knew someone who would get me a really good car, a bargain. They were anxious about the journey. I was setting forth towards no fixed address, and with Paul Michel. Madame Louet was convinced that he was unjustly imprisoned simply because he was charming to her on the telephone. She read one of his books, gripped from the very first page, and emerged two days later, scandalized and impressed. I became a figure from heroic romance in their imaginations. But they had a great deal of difficulty fitting Paul Michel into the role of persecuted maiden. Although Madame Louet said out loud what I had always thought, that if he was anything like the figure on the dust jacket he was more than good-looking, he was beautiful.
I had last written to the Germanist from Paris. She had sent back brief one-siders telling me how her research was progressing. But something strange happened. She rang me up at the Louet’s house. She was ringing from a coin box and so I never asked her how she had got hold of the number. We shouted at one another across a huge gulf. I found myself telling lies.
“I’m OK. Yes … I’ve met him. He’s amazing. We have extraordinary conversations …”
But she didn’t ask questions. She ran out of 50p pieces and the last thing I heard was this.
“Don’t forget. I’m on your side. Take care. Remember what you are there to do. Remember …”
Then the electronic buzz cut off her voice. I was left shouting promises into empty air.
I had ceased to write home. I had not sent them my address in Clermont. The letters my parents sent to Paris must have been returned. I sent them a postcard on the last day, simply saying that
I was going traveling with a friend and that I would ring them if we decided to stay somewhere for any length of time. Puzzled by her uncanny call, I bought a postcard to send to the Germanist. I stamped it. I wrote the address at Maid’s Causeway. Then I did not know what else to say. So I left it inside one of my books, unsent, unwritten.
I waited for him outside the hospital door at ten o’clock on Monday morning. He came out on time, alert, boisterous.
“Well,” he demanded, “and where are we going?”
“On holiday. Where else, you idiot? It’s August. And anyway I thought you had to tell Dr Vaury where we were going. I left it to you to decide.”
He let out a great shout.
“South. South. Let’s go to the Midi. Which car’s ours?”
He pounced on the 2CV and began rolling back the roof with the rapidity of an expert as I stowed his bags alongside mine in the boot. I looked at him carefully. He was clean-shaven, slightly sunburnt. He had put on weight. He was like a man who had escaped from the grave.
The Midi
We drove south in a heat wave. I had bought various maps, but we didn’t need them. Paul Michel simply told me which way to go. We drove down towards the A1 through the gorges of the Ardèche. There was a lot of holiday traffic and I had never driven on the right-hand side of the road before. And so we descended the green mountains, past pine forests shimmering with heat, past rough white rock, landslips, lay-bys with overflowing dustbins, rivers reduced to trickles, pursued by an infuriated tail of dangerous drivers longing to push the 2CV and its trembling novice into the ravine. Paul Michel didn’t give a damn. He climbed onto the seat and screamed abuse through the sunroof. He played rock tapes on his ghetto blaster. He even flung a Coke can at a frustrated Mercedes.
Then he said, “Pull in every so often and let them all go past, petit. Or we’ll all develop heart conditions.”
We bypassed Aubenas and suddenly swooped down off the mountains into the valley of the Rhône. We stopped in Montélimar for a drink. My T-shirt was soaking with heat, sweat and fright.
“Take it off,” said Paul Michel. I hesitated. We were standing in a busy square full of little cafés. It was nearly 37°C in the shade.
“Come on. Don’t be shy.”
I took off my T-shirt, very embarrassed. He stared at me appraisingly, then washed out my already sodden white shirt in the fountain.
“If I was as charming as you are, petit,” he said sweetly, “I wouldn’t wear shirts. In fact I don’t think I’d even bother to buy them.”
I sat, soaking wet, much cooler, drinking espresso and smoking, under a plane tree. Paul Michel was relaxed, at home. He clearly loved traveling. I realized then that he had cut himself loose from every harbor. He had no house, no flat, no room. There was no empty space with all his possessions, cowering behind him, somewhere in the city. He had no addresses. He lived in the present tense. I began to wonder if he preferred it that way. We dozed in shady grass for most of the afternoon. When six o’clock passed we drove on south, always south. The little car was a symphony of rattles.
“Stay on the motorway and we’ll drive through the night. There’ll be less traffic,” said Paul Michel, “and it’ll be cooler.”
He still hadn’t told me where we were going.
We stopped at the motorway services south of Salon-de-Provence and he made a phone call. I watched the initial numbers 93.91 … he was ringing Nice.
“Alain? Oui, c’est moi … Oui, comme tu dis … Evadé encore une fois … Non, j’ai la permission … suis pas si fou que ça … Ecoute, j’arrive avec mon petit gars … T’as une chambre? D’accord … On verra … Vers minuit? Ou plus tard … ça te dérange pas? … Bien, je t’embrasse très fort … ciao.”
“So,” I said, as he pushed open the door of the glass inferno, “we’re going to Nice.”
“About 25 kilometers the other side of Nice, my little detective.” He hugged me. “Come, let’s have a shower.”
“A shower?”
In fact the roads were so hot and so jammed that people had died in their cars. At all the service stations there were outdoor showers; a very fine, cold spray coming from concentrated jets onto a huge paved area. Some people danced into the spray wearing swimming costumes, some stark naked, some fully clothed. Paul Michel took off his watch and calmly packed his wallet and mine into the boot, pocketed the keys, took off his espadrilles and walked into the spray. It was eight o’clock in the evening. It was still 35°C. I hesitated on the brink, feeling the first fine drops covering my arms. Paul Michel joined a gaggle of shrieking, dancing Italians and invited one of the youngest girls, a lanky child of about fourteen, whose soaking black plaits were hanging down the back of her wet dress, to dance. The entire family clapped and shouted as they waltzed across the streaming stones, laughing and laughing.
When I close my eyes I see that image again. I see how much he had changed, how easily he made friends with other people, how every moment since his escape was turned into a festival, into dancing. He was not an easy man to know. He was difficult to judge. He was a mass of open plains and locked spaces. At first, day after day in the hospital gardens, I had come towards him, afraid of his moods, his sudden withdrawals, his potential violence. Now I saw him transformed. He no longer looked his age. He was present, close to me, aware of me every moment we were together. He gave me all his attention. Attention is a kind of passion. I was no longer possessed by my mission impossible: to rescue Paul Michel. I was no longer the one who was patient, waiting, giving. On that journey south he turned his face towards me.
Now they were dancing in a ring, now as a serpent, drawing everyone present into the shower, two naked boys, a fat old woman wearing a headscarf, a man with his now streaming glasses still balanced on his nose. Paul Michel reached out and pulled me into that wonderful cold spray, and into the dance. Cars slowed down beside the burnt grass verge. People gathered to watch and the circle widened as we shouted, clapped and danced into the orange light, transforming the world into gold.
It was nearly two in the morning when we pulled up in front of the huge white gates of Studio Bear. It had been one of the most advanced recording studios in Europe. It was where Pink Floyd had recorded The Wall, although Alain Legras told me later that they had actually recorded the music in the concrete mushroom that contained the swimming pool’s chlorinating unit because the acoustic was better. Paul Michel said that he ought to install a plaque on the door and have guided tours. The studio was burned out during the great fires of 1986. Alain Legras and his wife, who owned a restaurant in Monaco, had bought the place and undertaken the colossal restoration, unending rebuilding, reroofing, retiling, repainting. The huge oblong spaces, galleries, corridors, remained unfinished.
I was so exhausted I could hardly speak. As the gates swung open, I was flattened by a gigantic black sheepdog called Baloo who had slavering yellow fangs and was uncontrollably affectionate. Paul Michel poured a bottle of Badoit down my throat and put me to bed in a huge room with a balcony. I heard him closing the shutters, but I was already almost asleep.
When I awoke, the air in the room was already tepid, a swirling warm wind touched the long transparent white curtains, but the shutters were still closed. Paul Michel must have slept beside me, for I saw his watch still on the table at the other side of the huge bed. But I was alone. I could hear voices a long way off. I rolled over taking both sheets with me and peered at the watch. It was midday. I felt as if I had been drugged. I got up and went in search of the shower.
The batteries in my razor had given up the ghost. I was standing stark naked surrounded by a sad pile of dirty laundry when Paul Michel came in without knocking. He looked like a freshly brushed panther, damp, sleek and gleaming. He took the razor out of my hands and kissed me lightly on the nose.
“Bonjour, petit. This one’s dead. Use a plastic one out of my packet. Then come down and meet Alain and Marie-France. You probably don’t even know where you are. Thank you for driving. You’
re a hero.”
It was the first time he had ever thanked me for anything.
We were high up in the mountains just behind Nice. From the balcony I could see the valleys on the edge of the Alps folded into a sequence of barren precipices. If you looked closely there were traces of terracing all the way down the lower slopes. Houses hung in unlikely perpendicular places. There was a grey cement factory far away in the narrow crevasse at the bottom of the folds, overhung by a pall of dust. All sense of distance was curtailed by an opaque white glare which closed down around us. The pines already smelled pungent with the heat. I saw Baloo lolling on the terrace below with his legs stretched out across the tiles.
I didn’t feel like the guest in a house where everybody else already knew each other, for it turned out that Paul Michel had never met Marie-France either. He had known Alain for over twenty-five years, but Alain had married her during Paul Michel’s incarceration in the madhouse. I liked the look of her. She was tall, stringy, forty something, but casual and unpretentious. She wore no makeup and tied her greying blonde hair up in an enormous scarf. She smoked continuously and wandered around carrying things as if she was not quite sure where to put them. They were obviously rich people. The studio was now a gigantic unheatable space with enormous fireplaces, vast cacti in pots, a baronial dining table and eight-foot-square abstract paintings in lurid reds, blues, greens, all primary colors, coating the walls. I guessed at once that they were hers.
“You’re a painter?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said vaguely, “most of the time.”
She had a son by a previous marriage who had just had his car stolen. So there was a long sequence of phone calls to him and to the police as we sat under the sunshades wolfing coffee and brioche. Marie-France wandered about carrying the phone and occasionally saying how delighted she was to see us and how worried she was about the stolen car.
Hallucinating Foucault Page 12
