“Want to turn back?” asks Brice. I protest, shaking my head vigorously. No question of turning around until we have reached our real goal. We move quickly past an old-fashioned wooden carousel, whose shrieking calliope pierces my eardrums. We pass a well-known hospital character we call “Fangio.” Tall, dark-haired, athletic-looking, Fangio is rigid as a poker. Unable to sit, he is permanently condemned to either a vertical or a horizontal position. He gets about at amazing speed, lying flat on his stomach on a vehicle he operates himself, parting the crowds with yells of “Look out—here comes Fangio!” I know who he is, but who is he really? I have no idea. Finally we reach the farthest point of our journey, the very end of the promenade. I have not insisted on coming all this way just to gaze at the flawless seascape. I have come to gorge on the aromas emanating from a modest shack by the path leading away from the beach. Claude and Brice bring me to a halt downwind. My nostrils quiver with pleasure as they inhale a robust odor—intoxicating to me but one that most mortals cannot abide. “Ooh!” says a disgusted voice behind me. “What a stench!”
But I never tire of the smell of french fries.
Twenty to One
That's it—it's come back to me. The horse's name was Mithra-Grandchamp.
Vincent must be on his way through Abbeville by now. If you are driving from Paris, this is the point where the trip begins to seem long. You have left the unencumbered thruway for a two-lane road choked by endless lines of cars and trucks.
When this story takes place, more than ten years ago, Vincent, myself, and a few others had had the extraordinary good fortune to be putting out a daily newspaper, which has since disappeared. The owner, a press-infatuated industrialist, was brave enough to entrust his baby to the youngest editorial team in Paris, at the very moment when dark political and financial forces were plotting to snatch its controls. Without knowing it, we were the last cards he was to lay on the table, and we hurled ourselves one thousand percent into the fray.
By now Vincent has reached the intersection where he leaves the Rouen and Crotoy roads on his left and takes the minor road leading through a string of small townships to Berck. Drivers who don't know the way are led astray by its twists and turns. But Vincent, who has come to see me several times, keeps his bearings. To his sense of direction he adds—carried to the extreme—a sense of loyalty.
We worked seven days a week. Arriving early, leaving late. We worked on weekends and sometimes all night, blissfully doing the work of a dozen with five pairs of hands. Vincent had ten major ideas every week: three brilliant, five good, and two ridiculous. It was part of my job to force him to choose among them, which went against his impatient grain. He would have preferred to act at once on every one of them, good and bad.
I can hear him now, fuming at the steering wheel and cursing the Highway Department. In two years the thruway will reach Berck, but right now it is just an endless construction site, pushing forward slowly from behind a screen of bulldozers and heavy-duty vehicles.
We were inseparable. We lived, ate, drank, slept, and dreamed only of and for the paper. Whose idea was that afternoon at the racetrack? It was a fine winter Sunday, blue, cold, and dry, and the horses were running at Vincennes. Neither of us was a racing fan, but the track correspondent valued us highly enough to treat us to lunch at the Vincennes restaurant and to give us the password to the Aladdin's cave of racing: a tip. Mithra-Grandchamp was a sure thing, he told us, a guaranteed winner, and since the odds on him were twenty to one, a fat little profit—much better than municipal bonds—seemed likely.
Now Vincent is on the outskirts of Berck and—like all my visitors—is wondering what the hell he is doing here.
We had eaten an enjoyable lunch that day in the restaurant overlooking the racetrack. The large dining room was frequented by gangsters in their Sunday suits, pimps, parolees, and other shady characters who gravitate naturally to horse racing. Sated, we puffed greedily on long cigars and awaited the fourth race. In that hothouse atmosphere, criminal records bloomed like orchids all around us.
Reaching the seafront, Vincent turns and drives along the promenade. The throng of summer visitors eclipses his winter memories of a frigid, deserted Berck.
At Vincennes, we lingered so long in the dining room that the race came and went without us. The betting counter slammed shut under our noses before I had time to pull out the roll of banknotes the people back at the paper had entrusted to me. Despite our attempts at discretion, Mithra-Grandchamp's name had made the rounds of the newspaper. Rumor had turned him into a mythic beast, and everyone was determined to bet on him. All we could do was watch the race and hope…At the last turn, Mithra-Grandchamp began to pull away. Entering the final stretch, he had a lead of five lengths, and we watched in a dream as he crossed the finish line a good forty yards ahead of his closest pursuer. Back at the paper, they must have been going wild around the TV screen.
Vincent's car slips into the hospital parking lot. Brilliant sunshine. This is where my visitors, hearts in mouths, need fortitude to brave the few yards that separate me from the world: the automatic glass doors, elevator number 7, and the horrible little corridor leading to Room 119. All you can see through the half-open doors are bedridden wretches whom fate has cast to the far edge of life. Some visitors probably stand for a moment outside my room so that they can greet me with firmer voices and drier eyes. When they finally come in, they are gasping for air like divers whose oxygen has failed them. I even know of some who turned tail and fled back to Paris, their resolve abandoning them on my very threshold.
Vincent knocks and enters soundlessly. I have become so inured to the look on people's faces that I scarcely notice the transient gleam of fear. Or in any case, it no longer shakes me quite so much. I try to compose features atrophied by paralysis into what I hope is a welcoming smile. Vincent answers this grimace with a kiss on my forehead. He hasn't changed. His crest of red hair, his sullen expression, his stocky physique, his habit of shifting from one foot to the other, give him the look of a Welsh shop steward visiting a mate injured in a mine explosion. Vincent bobs forward like a prizefighter in the tough lightweight division. On Mithra-Grandchamp day, after that disastrous win, he had simply muttered: “Idiots! We're complete idiots! When we get back to the office we'll be history!” His favorite expression.
Frankly, I had forgotten Mithra-Grandchamp. The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painfuclass="underline" regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mithra-Grandchamp is the women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner. By the way, we managed to pay back all our colleagues.
The Duck Hunt
On top of the various discomforts that accompany locked-in syndrome, I suffer from a serious hearing disorder. My right ear is completely blocked, and my left ear amplifies and distorts all sounds farther than ten feet away. When a plane tows an ad for the local theme park over the beach, I could swear that a coffee mill has been grafted onto my eardrum. But that noise is only fleeting. Much more disturbing is the continuous racket that assails me from the corridor whenever they forget to shut my door despite all my efforts to alert people to my hearing problems. Heels clatter on the linoleum, carts crash into one another, hospital workers call to one another with the voices of stockbrokers trying to liquidate their holdings, radios nobody listens to are turned on, and on top of everything else, a floor waxer sends out an auditory foretaste of hell. There are also a few frightful patients. I know some whose only pleasure is to listen to the same cassette over and over. I had a very young neighbor who was given a velveteen duck equipped with a sophisticated detection device. It emitted a reedy, piercing quack whenever anyone entered the room—in other words, twenty-five times a day. Luckily the little patient went home before I could carry out my plan to exterminate the duck. I am keeping my scheme in readiness, though: you never know what horrors tearful families may bestow on their young. But the first prize for eccentric neighbors goes to a woman who emerged demented from a coma. She bit nurses, seized male orderlies by their genitals, and was unable to request a glass of water without screaming “Fire!” At first these false alarms had everyone dashing into action; then, weary of the struggle, they let her screaming fill all hours of the day and night. Her antics gave our neurology section a heady “cuckoo's nest” atmosphere, and I was almost sorry when they took our friend away to yell “Help! Murder!” elsewhere.