So off we went, under a heavy, threatening sky, to see the holy site. We passed an unbroken column of wheelchairs led by volunteers who were clearly experienced at shepherding paraplegics. "Everyone into the basilica if it rains!" trumpeted the nun leading the procession, her headgear whipped by the wind, her rosary clasped firmly in her hand. I surreptitiously studied these invalids, their twisted hands, their closed faces, these small parcels of life hunched in upon themselves. One of them caught my eye, and I ventured a smile. He responded by sticking out his tongue, and I felt myself blush stupidly scarlet, as if caught out in some crime. Meanwhile, Joséphine, in pink sneakers, pink jeans, and pink sweatshirt, strode delightedly ahead through the midst of a somber mass (every French priest who still dressed like a priest seemed to have turned up for the occasion). Joséphine was nearly ecstatic when the chorus of robes took up the words "Appear to us, Madonna, we beg you on our knees," the chant of her childhood years. So fervent was the atmosphere that a casual observer might have thought himself outside Parc des Princes during a European Cup match.
A queue half a mile long, chanting Ave Marias, wound across the broad esplanade in front of the entrance to the grotto. I had never seen such a queue, except perhaps outside Lenin's tomb in Moscow.
"Listen, there's no way I'm going to wait in this!"
"Pity," Joséphine snapped. "It would do a sinner like you a lot of good!"
"Not at all. It could even be dangerous. What if someone in perfect health happened to be here when the Madonna appeared? One miracle, and he'd end up paralyzed."
A dozen heads turned to see who could have uttered these disrespectful words. "Idiot," muttered Joséphine. Then a rain shower diverted attention from me. At the very first drops, we witnessed the spontaneous generation of a forest of umbrellas, and the smell of hot dust floated in the air.
We were borne forward into the underground Basilica of St. Pius X, a gigantic prayer barn where Mass is celebrated from 6:00 a.m. to midnight, with a change of priest every two or three services. I had read in the guidebook that the concrete nave could accommodate several jumbo jets. I followed Joséphine to a bay with empty seats beneath one of the countless echoing loudspeakers that transmitted the ceremony. "Glory be to God in the highest…in the highest…in the highest…" At the elevation of the Host, the man next to me, a well-prepared pilgrim, pulled racegoer's binoculars from his backpack to watch the proceedings. Other believers had makeshift periscopes of the kind you see at parades. Joséphine's father had often told me how he started out in life selling these kinds of gadgets outside metro stations. This did not prevent him from becoming a giant of broadcasting. Now he made use of his barker's skills to describe royal weddings, earthquakes, and prizefights for his audience. Outside, it had stopped raining. The air was cooler. "Shopping," said Joséphine. Anticipating this eventuality, I had already marked out the main thoroughfare, in which souvenir shops jostled one another as intimately as in an Oriental bazaar, offering the most extravagant smorgasbord of devotional objects.
Joséphine was a collector: old perfume bottles, rustic canvases complete with cattle (singly or in herds), plates of make-believe food of the kind that substitute for menus in Tokyo restaurant windows. In short, during her frequent travels she bought everything unspeakably kitsch she could lay her hands on. In Lourdes, it was love at first sight. There she sat in the window of the fourth shop on the left, surrounded by a jumble of religious medals, Swiss cuckoo clocks, decorated cheese platters, and—apparently waiting just for Joséphine—an adorable stucco bust haloed with winking bulbs, like a Christmas tree decoration.
"There's my Madonna!" Joséphine exulted.
"It's my present," I said at once, with no inkling of the exorbitant sum the shopkeeper would soon extort from me (alleging that it was one of a kind). That evening, in our hotel room, we celebrated our acquisition, its flickering holy light bathing us and casting fantastic dancing shadows on the ceiling.
"Joséphine, I think we're going to have to split up when we get back to Paris."
"Do you think I don't realize that?"
"But Jo…"
She was asleep. She had the gift of falling into instant sheltering slumber when a situation annoyed her. She could take a vacation from life for five minutes or several hours. For a while I watched the wall behind our pillows jump into and out of darkness. What demon could have induced people to line a whole room with orange fabric?
Since Joséphine was still sleeping, I cautiously dressed and left to engage in one of my favorite pastimes: night walking. It was my personal way of battling misfortune: just walking until I dropped. Out on the street, Dutch youths guzzled beer from big mugs. They had torn holes in garbage bags to make raincoats. Stout bars blocked the way to the grotto, but at intervals I saw the glow of hundreds of guttering candles. Much later, my wanderings brought me back to the street with the souvenir stores. In the fourth window, an identical Mary had taken the place of ours. Then I turned back to the hotel; from very far away I saw the window of our room twinkling in the gloom. I climbed the stairs, careful not to disturb the night watchman's dreams. Trail of the Snake sat on my pillow like a jewel in its setting. "Well, well," I murmured. "Charles Sobraj! I'd forgotten all about him."
I recognized Joséphine's writing. A huge "I" was scrawled across page 168. It was the start of a message that took up two whole chapters of the book and left them totally unreadable.
"I love you, you idiot. Be kind to your poor Joséphine."
Luckily I had read these pages already.
When I switched off the Holy Virgin, day was just breaking.
Through a Glass, Darkly
Hunched in my wheelchair, I watch my children surreptitiously as their mother pushes me down the hospital corridor. While I have become something of a zombie father, Théophile and Céleste are very much flesh and blood, energetic and noisy. I will never tire of seeing them walk alongside me, just walking, their confident expressions masking the unease weighing on their small shoulders. As he walks, Théophile dabs with a Kleenex at the thread of saliva escaping my closed lips. His movements are tentative, at once tender and fearful, as if he were dealing with an animal of unpredictable reactions. As soon as we slow down, Céleste cradles my head in her bare arms, covers my forehead with noisy kisses, and says over and over, "You're my dad, you're my dad," as if in incantation.
Today is Father's Day. Until my stroke, we had felt no need to fit this made-up holiday into our emotional calendar. But today we spend the whole of the symbolic day together, affirming that even a rough sketch, a shadow, a tiny fragment of a dad is still a dad. I am torn between joy at seeing them living, moving, laughing, or crying for a few hours, and fear that the sight of all these sufferings—beginning with mine—is not the ideal entertainment for a boy of ten and his eight-year-old sister. However, we have made the wise collective decision not to sugarcoat anything.