Then Honorine would open her eyes, she would laugh, she would seize both his hands in hers, with her hips and stomach she would imitate the gait of a trotting horse. Again and again she would murmur cheri and beg for a kiss, which he always refused to give her. As for me, at that moment I would wish my little Pascal a good morning, to which inevitably he replied that it was not a good morning but a bad one.
There he would sit holding us in the power of his princely manner and infant eroticism until at last and rubbing her eyes, poor Chantal would appear obediently to haul him away.
How did Honorine survive his death? How did I? But if he had lived, his little body growing and his infant eroticism maturing into impressive masculinity and his head day by day swelling to the round of the laurels, still he would have fared no better than poor Chantal. Actually, he would have fared much worse.
But I myself cloaked his little stone cross in satin. So it is not as if I have never known what it is to grieve.
But perhaps I am the man little Pascal might have become had he lived. Perhaps it is he who inhabits me now in his death. Who knows?
You will not believe it, but only this morning I visited for the last time my one-legged doctor. Yes, only hours ago and on this of all days, I held up my end of our yearly medical rendezvous. But I am attentive to your every nuance, even to the nuances of your stubborn silence, and now despite your misery and against your will you are objecting to yourself that my concern for my health on the day of my premeditated death (and yours, and Chantal's) is worse, much worse, than rabbits, rain, the invisible motion picture camera with its wet distended lens, the emotional orchestration of the radio you refused to hear. At first glance you would appear to be right: illusory circumstances are beginning to justify your horrified contempt for a man who might be engaged in committing drastic actions not from clarity and calculation but merely to satisfy his inmost urge to saw away on the tremulous violin of his self-love. And yet once again you are wrong. Wrong. Because it was not I who was responsible for this morning's appointment with the crippled physician but rather that elderly woman with the girlish body who is the doctor's nurse and secretary combined. It is true: she notified me of today's appointment long after I myself had figuratively torn today's blank page from my appointment book. And what do you think of the fact that the doctor's rooms are situated directly across from the very restaurant which you yourself happened to choose for your dinner this evening with Chantal, the doctor's rooms and the restaurant facing each other on opposite sides of that same little public garden where the lovers sit holding hands on the cold benches? In other words, this morning while waiting for my medical examination to commence, and stripped to the waist in anticipation of needles and the doctor's archaic X-ray machine, I myself stood at a dusty window in shivering contemplation of the exact same suffering old palm tree which you and Chantal regarded this evening over your soup and wine. But you are already familiar with the pleasure I take in these alignments which to me are the lifeblood of form without meaning.
At the appointed hour, then, I touched the bell button, noting as usual the pathetic opulence of the brass nameplate, and climbed the obviously little-used cold stones to the almost empty room where I inhaled the first trace of that antiseptic smell in which in a few moments I would be engulfed. I heard the air stirring in the rest of his chambers, noted in several chipped, white ceramic ash trays the week-old remains of his dead cigarettes. Of course I was well acquainted with his habit of dragging himself to this very room and seating himself and smoking his cigarettes, reading one of the ancient journals, the doctor waiting alone in the room intended for patients who were never there.
Can you understand the peace and satisfaction I felt in that place? The visit was perfectly routine, nothing happened out of the ordinary. And yet from entrance to exit I could not have felt more at home amidst all the paradoxes of this establishment: the unused instruments and archaic machines of medical science located within medieval walls; the sound of birds roosting somewhere amongst surgical knives and old books; the faint smell of cooking food which the antiseptic chemical could not disguise; the doctor himself, who was skilled but thought to be unsavory, and who in his own affliction exemplified the general pomposity and backwardness of our nation's corps of butchering physicians and who in his broken marriage exemplified the soundness of our sexual mores. Then too, I knew for a fact that once every week this poor, ruined man sat entirely alone for precisely two hours in a little nearby movie house devoted only to the showing of so- called indecent films. Understandably, it was this habit rather than the missing leg or absent wife that accounted for his unsavory reputation. No wonder I admired and enjoyed his crippled presence.
As I say, there were no surprises. The doctor, as usual, forced himself to walk the length of the corridor to greet me, thrusting to the side one fat, startled hand for balance and swinging in great arcs from the hip his artificial limb, the use of which typically he had never mastered. We met with effusion; he consulted his files; he enquired about my general health and the health of my wife; unbidden I removed my shirt and undershirt; he disappeared; he returned to his desk; the artificial leg obtruded between us in full and menacing view. Again I welcomed silently the trembling hand, the mucus thick in his throat, the cigarette that was burning his fingers. Again I appraised the awkwardness of the ill-fitting leg, noting as usual that our nation is simply not adept at the crafting of artificial limbs because we are not concerned with the needs and imperfections of the individual human body. Again I realized that in the middle of every night the doctor now puffing and coughing beside me, fumbling over my naked chest with his cold and unsteady hands, must lie awake listening to this same artificial leg walking to and fro on the other side of his bedroom door. He was devoting what remained of his life to this hollow leg which wore a green sock and dusty shoe. But dominated or not by the ugly leg, nonetheless he was listening to the strength of my absolutely reliable heart. I regretted that I had never sat beside him in the old movie house.
I waited, I enjoyed the chilly air on the skin of my chest, shoulders, arms; I surveyed the diseased palm tree below in the public garden; I nodded in pleased recognition when the crippled and perspiring doctor knocked one of his full ash trays to the floor, as he always did. I was pleased with the appearance of the nurse-secretary, whose body had the shape of a girl's and the texture of an old crone's. While she drew as usual a handsome quantity of blood from the thick blue vein in my left arm, I listened to the doctor who was breathing wetly through his nose, his mouth, his nose and mouth together. I listened with pleasure; with pleasure I perceived once more that the old nurse-secre- tary had dabbed herself not with perfume but with the overpowering antiseptic that killed flowers and defined our circumstances.
Time passed like ivory beads on a black thread. My own blood climbed inside the glass. Again I had my brief affair with the old X-ray machine which, after clanking and groaning, rewarded my patience with its sound like a flock of wounded geese in uncertain flight. And I passed exactly the required amount of urine, watched the doctor himself wrapping up the small warm flask with a string and paper, once again marveled that so much painful incongruity could be assembled so awkwardly into a single person.