Well, once again the doctor pronounced me in perfect health, as you would imagine. And of course he suspected nothing, nothing. In all his discomfort and disproportion he retained his purity. Little did he know that in several days and on the other side of the city a laboratory technician, unshaven and smoking a yellow cigarette, would analyze the blood of a man already dead; or that the hazy image of ribs and single lung on the photographic plate would represent only as much reality as the white organs lubricating each other in one of his weekly films.
But there is no justice in the world, since we may safely say that that poor one-legged creature has finally lost his only patient, and through no fault of his own. But what, you ask, if even this wretched man continues to live, why shouldn't we? Why does your closest friend not have within himself that cripple's determination to remain alive? Well, let me answer you slowly, quietly. The problem is that you are being emotional again, rather than rational. You must remember that both my legs are sound and that my wife is faithful. Do you understand?
Yes, she is vomiting. But you need not have mentioned it. I have perfect hearing and am just as sensitive as you to those faint, terrible noises. Do you think I am not listening? That I have not been listening? After all, there is nothing worse than painful human sounds unattached to words. And the contents of my own daughter's stomach …. Even you will concede that my bitterness would be all the more justified. But I am not bitter. And despite all our so-called natural inclinations, why should we not agree that poor Chantal has earned her vomiting? It is the best she can do. And surely it is no worse than your wheezing.
Actually, the music of melodrama (had you allowed us the pleasures of my superb car radio) would not have been a sodden orchestration of wave upon wave of uninteresting feeling but rather a light, sinuous background of muted jazz. The detached and somewhat popular syncopation would have cushioned our every turn while the clear tones of, say, a clarinet would have prevailed and, had he been able to hear them, would have given greater poignancy to the distance between the sleepless goatherd and the momentary, cruel appearance of our headlights in the righthand corner of the wet night. Do you hear that black clarinet? Do you hear the somewhat breezy quality of this dry and sophisticated music? The melody is pleasing, there is even a certain elegance and occasionally a dash of humor in the glassy accompaniment of the invisible piano. How perfect such easy lyricism is for us. What splendid, impersonal sweetness it would have contributed to the tensions of our imaginary and deliberately amateurish film. Well, the radio is already tuned. You have only to extend your arm, reach out with your fingers, touch the knob. But still you are not tempted? Of course you are not. I understand.
A trifle faster? Yes, you are quite right that we are now traveling a breath or two faster than we were. Now is the moment when I must make my ultimate demands. As you can see, my arms are stiffening, my fingers are flexing though I never remove my palms from the wheel, my concentrating face is abnormally white, and now, like many men destined for the pleasures and perils of high-speed driving, now my mouth is working in subtle consort with eyes, hands, feet, so that my silent lips are moving with the car itself, as if I am now talking as well as driving us to our destination. And we are approaching it, that final destination of ours. We are drawing near. Soon we shall be entering the perimeter of Honorine's most puzzling and yet soothing dream. And now beneath the hood of the car our engine is glowing as red as an immense ruby. How unfortunate that to us it is invisible. How unfortunate that the rain is determined to keep pace with our journey.
But while we are on the subject of invalid doctors and vomiting children, and since tonight we seem to be taking our national inventory, so to speak, allow me to say in passing that generally our physical institutions are indeed a match for the inadequacies or eccentricities of our professional personnel. In other words, our buildings of public service are as bad as the people who occupy them. Take the hospital nearest La Roche, for instance. I have not had any firsthand experience with this ominous and in a way amusing place, and in fact have never seen it. But on good authority and thanks to my theory of likenesses, which I have already described to you at length, I know for a certainty that this dark and drafty little place of about twenty beds is not equipped with any separate or special entrance for the reception of emergency cases. None at all. A few lights are burning; several cooks are smoking their stubby pipes in the kitchen; the entire drab interior of the place smells like a field of rotting onions. And there is no emergency entrance. No means of swift and ready access between the narrow cobbled street outside and that small whitewashed room to the right and rear where simple first aid may be administered. No access to this small room for bleeding truck driver or possibly his corpse except through the kitchen. The kitchen. It is a scandal. Even our own remains, such as they may be, will be hurried on rattling litters through the steamy kitchen of the miserable hospital near La Roche, that kitchen in which the cauldrons of soup for the coming day will provide a fitting context for the shoeless foot at dawn. Do you see the humor of it, the outrage? But everywhere it is the same: rooms without doors, sinks without drains, conduits that will never be connected to any water supply, corpses or bleeding victims forever passing through the kitchens of our nation's hospitals.
But why, you ask, why this terrible and at the same time humorous correspondence between physical building and human occupant? The answer is obvious: it is simply that there is no difference between the artist, the architect, the workman, the physician, the bloody victim and the cook slicing his cabbage. One and all they share our national psychological heritage. One and all they are driven by the twin engines of ignorance and willful barbarianism. You nod, you also are familiar with these two powerful components of our national character, ignorance and willful barbarianism. Yes, everywhere you turn, and even among the most gifted of us, the most extensively educated, these two brute forces of motivation will eventually emerge. The essential information is always missing; sensitivity is a mere veil to self-concern. We are all secret encouragers of ignorance, at heart we are all willful barbarians.
But indeed, these qualities also account for our charm, our good humor, our handsome physiques, our arrogance, our explosive servility. We are as we wish to be. We would have it no other way. Our national type is desirable as well as inescapable. You and I? You and I are two perfect examples of our national type.
The reason we make such a perfect pair, such an agreeable match, is that you are a full-fledged Leo, while through the marshes of my own stalwart Leo there flows a little dark rivulet of Scorpio. You were unaware of it? But then naturally you could not have suspected anything of my Scorpio influence since I deliberately though casually concealed even the slightest shade of that all-too-suspect influence from your detection. You see how capable I am of deception, at least of any deception which in my judgment is for our mutual good. But thus we have one more scrap to toss on the heap of our triumphant irony. Because in our case it now appears that the poet is the thick-skinned and simple-minded beast of the ego, while contrary to popular opinion, it is your ordinary privileged man who turns out to reveal in the subtlest of ways all those faint sinister qualities of the artistic mind. Yes, you are the creature who roars in the wind while I am the powerful bug on the wall. But you are not interested? You are not amused? And yet if only you would pause a moment to think, cher ami, then you would realize that behind my coldest actions and most jocular manner there lies not hostility but the deepest affection. After all, my Scorpio influence inspires me to unimaginable tenderness.