Hallucinating Foucault (19 page)

It was decided, without any discussion, that I should not be present at the “levée du corps.” The Germanist took me to an exhibition of Picasso’s engravings instead. For the rest of my life I shall remember those elongated satyrs playing Pan pipes, and the evil expressions of the Minotaurs. We didn’t know what to do with the few belongings he had left in the room. I packed up all his things with mine, and took them with me on my journey home.

I hadn’t quite bargained for the fact that we were taking the motorway. In Britain the hearse usually proceeds at a walking pace. But we hurtled through the bright, autumn light down the fast lane. The great jagged red mountains of the Midi rushed past, the pink folds of Mont Ste-Victoire dropped behind us. We sat in a traffic jam outside Aries and I stared at the back of the van in which his coffin was securely wedged. It could have been a police van taking
someone to jail, or a bullion haul in disguise. We even paused for lunch at a service station and left Paul Michel quietly parked under the fragrant umbrella pines. We were all very sober, very quiet. The Germanist never let go of my hand. And I was grateful for that.

The journey took us all day. We got to Gaillac just as the light was fading on the hills behind Toulouse. The van disappeared, leaving me with a sinking sensation of panic and loss. As long as I knew he was traveling with us, I was obscurely comforted. Jacques Martel bundled us into the Hôtel des Voyagers, just off the square in Gaillac.

“Where will they put him?” I demanded.

“In the church.”

“With no one there? In the dark?”

Jacques Martel stared at me.

“There are always candles,” he said.

I wanted to spend the night in the church. Jacques Martel shrugged his shoulders and walked out of our room. The Germanist sat smoking, cross-legged on our bed.

“I wouldn’t advise it,” she said. “You’ll get too tired and upset. And we have to get our flowers first thing in the morning. Then we can take them to the church and wait if you like. But you ought to pay your respects to the aunt. And you want to be on form for that. Also, I’ve got something to show you.”

I sat disconsolate, my head in my hands. Then I asked her, “What have you got to show me?”

She had written a letter to Paul Michel which she proposed to cellotape to the coffin along with our roses.

“They usually take all the flowers off and then put them on the grave afterwards. So we’ve just got to insist that they bury the roses. That’s why you’ve got to charm the wicked aunt. She has every reason to be grateful to you after all …” She had it all planned.

The letter was already sealed.

“Here you are. Here’s a copy. It’s from you. So it’s important that you know what you’ve said.”

“But I didn’t write it.”

“Doesn’t matter. Pretend you did. It will say what you wanted to say to him.”

I read the letter.

“Well?”

Behind her glasses she was no longer quite so confident that she had done the right thing. But she had written the truth. It was so simply told. I had loved him terribly. And now he was dead.

“He’ll never read this. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead.”

She rocked me in her arms for a while. Then she said fiercely, “How do you know he’ll never read it?”

There was no answer to that.

Next morning she went out with her credit card and bought 480 francs worth of roses. The letter was wound round the stalks, fastened with string and hidden inside a huge mass of accompanying foliage. Jacques Martel drove us out to the house. Suddenly I knew that I would recognize the gates, the long lines of poplars, already turning; that I would remember the house with its narrow brickwork and symmetrical row of lozenge windows under the receding dogtooth of the corniche, beneath gutterless eaves. I would already know the long lines of vines and their changing colors. His memories had become mine. I would look up to the red walls of the cemetery
on the hill, recognize the worn grey cross on the family mausoleum, occupying the highest point in the graveyard. I would know the place to which we were carrying him to lie down at last and forever alongside his mother and the man whose name he bore, the man he had called grandfather, Jean-Baptiste Michel.

His aunt was small, bent double with rheumatism, and very suspicious. She stood among the remains of the Michel family inheritance, huge old sideboards, cupboards, dressers, a cheap battered armchair with hideous nylon cushions, poised before the vast opaque screen of the television. Her face was shut and mean. She wore black. She stared up at us for longer than anyone could possibly consider polite. Then she shook my hand grudgingly and did not ask us to sit down. Instead she rummaged for her coat, her keys. Every door was carefully locked before we left the house by the back gate and took the path across the fields to the church. I followed Paul Michel back into the past. I retraced his steps.

It was a clear, fresh day with a bright wind. The tiny church was small and dark, filled with flowers. We were nearly an hour in advance of the funeral, but the undertakers were already there, slick as gangsters in dark glasses and black gloves. So were many cars, almost all of them with Paris registration plates. I shook hands with people I had never seen before. They were all young. I had not even taken in the coffin before we entered the church. It was a rich walnut brown, the color of his sunburn, with ornate, silver handles. The thing was covered in flowers.

The Germanist went into action. She took one careful measure of the aunt then bypassed her completely and addressed herself solely to the undertakers. I saw her whispering to the ghoul in charge. He gathered up the roses, bowed to the altar with the flowers in his arms, and then quietly rearranged the entire coffin so that the roses covered the plaque across Paul Michel’s chest. I had great
difficulty imagining him inside. It was as if he had been locked up permanently indoors.

She slid back into the pew beside me and put her mouth to my ear. The church around her was filling up.

“It’s OK. I’ve fixed it. They’ll bury the roses with him. I gave them 200 francs.”

She was ingenious, but without shame.

I can’t remember much about the service. I couldn’t follow what the priest said. He talked about the family and how creative Paul Michel had been and listed his numerous services to French culture. He talked about his tragically early death and never mentioned the fact that he was homosexual or that he had been locked up in an asylum. His version of Paul Michel sounded unlikely and inconsistent. But I was too distressed to care. I did notice, however, the words of the hymn he had chosen.

And I clutched at this because it was the last promise that the Germanist had made to him. I give you my word. When the moment came to say goodbye and each person present scattered holy water on the flowers covering his coffin, I realized that there were more people waiting outside the church than could enter in. The march past was without end. There were some couples, women and men together, but most of them were men.

We climbed the hill to the graveyard, the entire procession disorganized, colorful, chaotic. I was crying silently; a huge, formless grief wrapped its arms about me. The Germanist held me fiercely
round the waist, but her eyes never left the roses, bobbing ahead on the shoulders of six gasping undertakers, who were finding the hill harder to negotiate than they had expected. We couldn’t all fit into the graveyard. I looked back. In the October morning sun, stretching back down the hill, was a long, straggling line of pilgrims, following Paul Michel.

If you come from a wealthy family you are not buried in earth. A huge granite slab had been pried off the family vault. He was to be encased forever in concrete. They rest one coffin on top of another. Eventually they rot down. I clutched her hand. Unfortunately we were at the head of the procession and could see perfectly well what was happening. The priest began the chant. His words vanished into the wind. Every so often all the people around me intoned, “Pour toi, Seigneur …” I was aware of the old aunt’s tuneless whistle. But they all seemed to know what to sing. The coffin rocked against the mossy concrete walls with a grating clank as the ropes were lowered. The men had very little space in which to move. The graves pressed against one another. I could see a dark shape, sinister, fresh, waiting at the bottom. They were there, one on top of the other, his mother, his grandfather, his whispering grandmother, and Paul Michel.

“There’s no grave, no real grave, no earth,” I hissed, desperate.

“It’s OK,” she said quietly. “He liked cities. It’s just more concrete. And the roses will last longer.”

He was right about her intensity, her sense of purpose and her complete fearlessness. I realized then why he had been so drawn to the boy on the beach. They were two of a kind, watching the world with cold eyes.

We walked back to the house through a multitude of somber, concentrated disciples. A gang of smokers cowered under the cemetery wall. Jacques Martel had the aunt on his arm and the priest marched before us. The undertakers, like Caesar’s soldiers, stood
guard around the tomb. The throng parted before us. I saw nothing but a blur of faces. We were treated as family. The aunt pulled Jacques’ face down towards her.

“Who are all these people?” she demanded.

But it was the Germanist who replied. She materialized on the other side of Madame Michel.

“They’re his readers,” she said.

Madame Michel glared at the mass with undisguised mistrust. Her erring nephew had earned a lot of good money and bad publicity. She was neither fooled nor convinced.

We flew back to London from Toulouse on the following day. I had missed one week of full term. The Germanist had simply said that I was ill so everyone sympathized with my shattered state, which was attributed to viral flu and food poisoning.

In the weeks that followed I told the Germanist everything. I needed to talk. But there was one passage in the story that I never told: Paul Michel’s encounter with the boy on the beach. I never told his story because it was her secret, the secret pact she had with him. But I read and reread her letter to Paul Michel. I now understood the code. The letter could have been written by either one of us. She had kept her word. It was now up to me to keep mine.

I wrote my thesis much along the lines I had originally planned. I did not include a biographical section. I never even told my supervisor that I had known Paul Michel. I gave nothing away in my acknowledgements. That summer was like a paving stone torn out of my life, a blank square. I told my parents, of course. They were a little shocked that I had got so closely involved with someone who was clearly unstable and whom they had never met. Once again, they asked to meet the Germanist. I begged her to come home with me.
She refused, and told me, with unnecessary aggression, never to ask her again.

In the years that followed I held a Junior Research Fellowship at my old college and won the Foucault Travel Prize. I spent the money traveling in America. Eventually I got a job in the French department at one of the London colleges. And I used to lecture on Paul Michel. The Germanist went to work in the Goethe-Schiller Archive in Weimar. We wrote to each other for a year or so. Then I lost touch. Sometimes I see the tides of articles she’s published in the
Year’s Work in German Studies.
Someone once told me that she was writing a biography of Schiller and bringing out a new edition of the Goethe-Schiller
Briefwechsel.
No doubt I shall buy a copy when it appears in the catalogues.

I try not to think about him. I simply work on the texts. But there is an evil dream which comes back to me, which recurs again and again. The detail of my dream has a hallucinatory intensity, which I cannot shake off. It is winter and the maize fields have been cut. All that is left are the rough lines of yellow, brittle stalks, thick and difficult to negotiate. I am stumbling across a huge, desolate field where the remains of the crop are burning. It is bitterly cold. The fires across the stubble burn unevenly, some patches are simply smoking black ashes, some are untouched, rigid with frost, but elsewhere the wind carries the flame on down the row, through the crackling dry ranks of trampled, discarded corn. Far away at the rim of the field I see a long line of bare poplars and the sky behind, a pale, luminous, chill cream. Then through the smoke and the scattered fires I see Paul Michel standing, watching me. He does not move. It is bitterly cold. He is not wearing a coat or gloves, his shirt is open at the throat. He stands amid the fires, watching me. He neither moves nor speaks. It is bitterly cold. I never saw him in winter. I knew him for a single season. I stumble on towards him and I
never come closer. Then I see that there is someone else present in the field. The shape of a man, a long way off, behind Paul Michel, glimmers through the smoke of the stubble fires. I cannot make him out. I do not know who he is. The scene freezes before me like a painting I can never enter, a scene whose meaning remains unreachable, obscure.