Hallucinating Foucault (16 page)

“Yield,” said Paul Michel, shaking with laughter.

He pulled back a little, grinning, his face barely an inch from my own. Then he paused for a second, intent as a cat. He kissed me very carefully, very gently.

“You never have …?”

“Not since school. And then it wasn’t like this …”

“Ah, masturbation in the showers?”

“A bit …” He undid my fly, pulling the buckle of my belt back so that it bit into my stomach.

“Got any scars? Any tattoos?” he was still grinning wickedly, like one of the goblin men offering poisoned fruit.

“Don’t think so …” He cupped my balls in his right hand. My mind went blank.

“You’d remember a tattoo, petit.” Paul Michel remained absolutely practical, utterly calm. “I’m not going to fuck you as I haven’t got any condoms. Did the big boys bugger you senseless at school?”

I sank down into his arms, every nerve alert with terror.

“Not that I remember.”

My voice came from a long way away, unrecognizable. I felt the breath of his laughter in my ear.

“You’d remember that too if they had, my love.”

I had a terrible sensation of urgency. Paul Michel took his time. He talked to me quietly. I had no idea what he was saying. I ceased to understand anything except his hands upon my body. Then I lost all control of myself. I fell headlong down a tunnel that had no end. I heard Paul Michel’s voice coming towards me down a chute.

“Steady, petit, steady, breathe.”

I felt his hands on my back. I was on the edge of a precipice. I could still see the room, smell the hot night, feel his breathing against my face. Then everything vanished as I came against his bare stomach. He caught me with all the tenderness of a concrete breakwater. I arrived on the other side, dizzy, terrified and overjoyed.

When I looked into his face, he was still laughing.

“There,” he said, “we should have done that weeks ago. But Pascale Vaury would have had us both arrested.”

We stripped off whatever we were still wearing and put out the light. He pulled the sheet up round my ears and asked me if I had plugged in the electric device for poisoning the mosquitoes. I felt aggrieved.

“How can you think of things like that?”

His laughter joined the warm night.

“OK. But don’t blame me if your beauty is marred by a mass of itching red bites.”

He held me in his arms, leaning all his weight against me. Then he said, “You deal with the mosquitoes and I’ll buy some condoms. You’re amazing, you English. You take a long time getting there, but when you do, you go all the way.”

I was frightened that something would change between us. I was terrified of losing him. I held onto him that night as if I were drowning.

He took such pleasure in things that no one else would ever have noticed. As we walked up the endless stone steps to the bar in the square, he suddenly leaned against a battered door and began laughing and laughing. I followed his glance and saw some music inscribed on glazed tiles beside a pink corridor.

It meant nothing to me whatsoever.

“Sing it, petit,” he urged, hugging me.

I slowly read the music off the wall. DO—MI—SO—LA—DO—RE. It still made no sense.

“Domicile adoré, silly,” he translated, “Perfect. Perfect kitsch. Being an SDF I enjoy other people’s uninhibited domesticity.”

“What’s an SDF?”

“Sans domicile fixe,” he laughed. “The homeless to you.”

“As long as I have a home you have one,” I snapped fiercely. I hated his assumption that he was outside every structure that ties all of us to life. He put his arm around me.

“I love you English. You’re so unexpectedly romantic. Did you know that, petit?”

“Don’t patronize me,” I retaliated.

“Good heavens. Aggressive with it,” said Paul Michel amiably.
“Have one of my cigarettes. It’s such a pleasure not to be rationed anymore.”

As we climbed upwards, always upwards, in the cool of the day, we felt that we were being watched by women hidden behind the shutters, by a black cat with golden eyes, high in an alcove. Someone else had decorated their window with tasteless erotic statues of nymphs, only just failing to cover their genitals with parted fingers. In front of this three-dimensional pornography in orange stone was a torrent of trailing geraniums.

Paul Michel stopped to coil the red and green streamers round the women, hiding their breasts and thighs in foliage. I was appalled that he dared to interfere with other people’s window boxes.

“Come on. Don’t … Please … we’ll get arrested.”

He strode after me taking the steps two at a time.

“I always cover up the women, petit. But I spend hours prying the fig leaves off Hercules.”

“Remind me never to take you to a museum. You’d probably molest all the statues.”

He laughed and took up a piece of charcoal that was oozing out under a cellar door. Before I could stop him he had written jubilantly across the wall.

VIVE MOI

I was too strongly in agreement with the sentiment expressed to object.

He always knew which way to go. I suppose that even if buildings, roads, shops, change their faces they are just the surface of things. Landscapes don’t change. At the end of August the unnatural, uncanny heat began to increase. Many of the holidaymakers went home. Paul Michel took me to a beach on the east side of the
city. It was almost hidden by the port. There were several tramps living on the steps above the port. They never asked for money. They seemed to be comfortably installed in a mass of rags and cardboard boxes which looked like a pantomime shelter. Paul Michel clambered past them, unhesitating. There were no signposts to indicate that the beach was there. You had to mount the breakwater, and only then could you see the steps, the narrow band of clean white sand and the great rocks below. Just above the beach, perched among the overhanging rocks, was a little café, bleached wooden boards balanced on huge tar barrels above the sea. The prices were affordable. It was the first time that I had bought a beer without having financial qualms throughout all the weeks we had been in the Midi, even though I had long since ceased to pay for anything substantial. We had an argument in the car. Paul Michel waved my objections aside.

“Listen petit, I haven’t spent any money for nearly ten years. You’re a poor student. I’m a rich prince. Why not lie back and let me write the checks? I owe you for all those cakes and cigarettes that you brought to me in the hospital.”

I gave in. In the end I always gave in.

It was the first week of September and the heat enclosed us in a huge humid bubble of warm air. We went to the beach every day and spent our time swimming, lying dozing on the sand or doing nothing in the café. I noticed that he didn’t give a shit what other people thought. He would walk along the promenade with his arm around me, kiss me whenever he felt like doing so, spend time watching me intently as if he wanted to remember every muscle and every bone.

It was I who posed the first questions. We were sitting with our feet through the railings, looking out at the waves and the windsurfers scudding past at terrifying angles. I was very abrupt. I didn’t know how to begin gently.

“What’s going to happen at the end of the summer? I have to take you back. But they’ll let you out again. I know they will. What should we do?”

Paul Michel looked at me for a moment. But he was wearing dark glasses so I couldn’t see his eyes.

“That’s a long way away, petit.”

“It’s three weeks.”

“Like I say. A long way ahead.”

“But it’s not.”

He shrugged. Then he said, “What do you want me to say? There is no future. You’re trying to live something that doesn’t exist.”

“But we have to have some idea. Make some kind of plan,” I insisted. He turned around to face me, but didn’t take off his glasses. He took both my hands in his own.

“Sois raisonnable, mon amour. You have a doctorate to write. I wish to be transformed into a monument of scholarly authority and you’ve undertaken the task.” He grinned again.

“So … you will take me back to the loving care of Pascale Vaury and her cohorts of sadists. You will then proceed to England, marching with military precision, and take up your studies again. You will write to me whenever your schedule allows, usually with academic queries on my texts. Is that clear?”

I lost my temper.

“No. It’s not clear. There’s no way that I’m letting you get locked up again in that inferno. We’ll get you past the medical commission and then we’ll go back to Paris. We’ll find somewhere to five. I’ll get a job or something. You have to start writing again.”

He let out a wild cackle of laughter and dropped my hands.

“Ah … well, in that case …” He lit a cigarette. “My God, petit,
you ought to be riding a white horse and bearing an ensign. You take your role of savior much too seriously.”

I got up and left him there in the café. I didn’t want him to see that I was crying, with anger, frustration and pain. He left me alone on the beach for an hour or so. Then he came down and rubbed wet sand onto my back. I hadn’t heard him approaching.

“Listen, petit,” he said gently, “you are twenty-two and very much in love. I am forty-six and a certified lunatic. You are much more likely to be insane than I am.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed.

“I’d rather be insane my way than yours,” I said. He was still wearing his dark glasses. I couldn’t see his eyes.

“You’ve got no respect,” he said easily. “Come on. Let’s go into the sea again before we go home.”

That night as we ate supper on the terrace the heat thickened, like a hand across my mouth. Marie-France had listened to the weather forecast. We were expecting a storm. In fact we saw it coming. A vast dark mass appeared in the valley beyond the city. The light became violet, lurid. It was as if we were suddenly placed on a stage, with the lights set for the final act. We could smell the damp menace of water in the humid air.

“Close all the windows—shutters too,” cried Marie-France, picking up a random sequence of objects from the table. We rushed around Studio Bear, banging all the windows shut.

I had reached our room when the first roar of wind pulled the shutter out of my hand, hurling it back against the wall of the house with a crash. I saw Alain Legras struggling with the parasols out by the swimming pool. The air was charged, apocalyptic. I had just mastered the shutters when a great snap of thunder broke over us. The glasses on the bedside table tinkled against one another and all
the lights went out. I was completely disoriented by the sudden advent of the storm and stood there stupidly, clutching the white lace of the swaying curtains. Paul Michel appeared in the doorway, holding his cigarette lighter out before him.

“Come downstairs, petit,” he said gently. “We’ve got candles. Are you frightened of thunderstorms?”

“No. Not especially.”

But I had never seen a storm like this one. We sat around three candles on the kitchen table amid a crescendo of thunderclaps. The lightning made every object around us suddenly luminous and sinister. Alain Legras took out a bottle of eau de vie to give us all courage. Then, terrifyingly close, a long serrated bolt of fork lightning cut the valley in half. We all tingled and cried out at the touch of its force, as thousands of volts entered the earth. And then came the rain.

Within seconds the terrace was awash, water poured out of the gutters, gullies appeared in the garden, all the roots of Marie-France’s iris plantations were revealed, naked and exposed as the earth washed past in a torrent of mud. We saw branches wrenched from the trees, heard something falling into the swimming pool. Baloo, lying by the doorway, raised his head and began howling. We worried about the cars, parked in a lay-by under a walnut tree opposite the gates. Alain unplugged the television and the video just in case the lightning touched the house. Paul Michel sat smoking calmly, holding my hand. He watched the world as he watched the storm, observant, indifferent: the cold gaze which I now feared.

It was more than an hour before the storm passed on, moving inland, leaving us without electric light in the dripping dark. Alain and I put on anoraks and Wellingtons and went down to the road to see what had happened to the cars. There were many branches scattered on the steps and water swirled in and around the potholes in the roadway. The cars were still there, apparently undamaged. We
had left one window of the Citroën open and the seats were soaking. There was a pond of water on the floor. Later, we heard that three people had been killed at a campsite near Cagnes-sur-Mer and that several caravans had been washed away. More serious damage occurred at a village in the Var where one of the bridges was swept away by the flash flood and all the houses in the main street had been invaded by mud. The older Roman bridge with its elegant curving arch and narrow brickwork had held, and was still there straddling the river’s brown, rushing mass. Nearly eight people were known to be dead and many more who had been on holiday at the local camping site were unaccounted for. There were harrowing pictures of destruction on the television. The area was declared a disaster area. We had got off lightly.