Hallucinating Foucault (6 page)

“The article I read said that he was a paranoid schizophrenic.

Can you suddenly become one?”

The doctor laughed.

“No, no. Or at least I don’t think so.” He hesitated. Then he began to explain.

“It’s very rare that you find two schizophrenics who resemble each other. The symptoms vary a great deal. Paul Michel was very disturbed, very violent. That’s not unusual. But it will usually be random violence. They aren’t murderers. They don’t set out to kill anybody, plan it, do it. That’s rare. When they’re in crisis, they can enact a sort of fusion with someone else close to them, love or hate, either way. They may fall in love with you. They may even take you in their arms with a passion—with a tenderness that’s startling. Or they’re capable of killing you. It’s a terrible disease. I’m one of those doctors who think that it is a disease. You have no idea how they suffer. I can remember Paul Michel, right at the beginning. He was a very handsome man. You know that. Well, his pupils were gigantic that night when they brought him into Sainte-Anne. I was on duty. When they’re in crisis the pupil can take over the whole eye. He was completely unaware of his actions. He was very violent, possessed by an extraordinary strength—quite insane.”

“Do you … um, lock them up?” I paused. “Or tie them up?”

I had an uncanny sensation, as if Paul Michel, like a sudden dry wind, was coming closer and closer. Jacques Martel offered me a cigarette. He paused and we smoked in silence for a moment. Then he said, “Well, when I first entered the service, over twenty years ago, we did lock them up. And we really did use straitjackets. The beds in the rooms were screwed to the floors. We had guards on the wards. It was pretty brutal. And frightening. The mad-house
wasn’t a pleasant place. It was oppressive to both the staff and the patients. And we had bars on all the windows. Now we use drugs. But it boils down to the same thing in the end. We call them ‘neuroleptiques.’ I’m not sure what the word would be in English. The drugs put a straitjacket on the personality of the schizophrenic. The drugs curtail their suffering, but turn them into zombies. And their personalities degenerate. I hated watching that happen. Some of my patients would be with us for decades. Gradually they lose all their faculties. Eventually they become vegetables.” He sighed. “I think that’s one of the reasons I moved house. Changed direction a little.”

“What do you do now?” I asked anxiously.

“I work in the prison service. I’m a consultant psychiatrist for the government. So you did hear her father right. Madmen and murderers. That’s my thing.” He laughed.

“Are many of your prisoners mad?”

I could smell garlic frying in the kitchen.

“Mmmmm. Most of them are disturbed. But that’s sometimes a result of being locked up in prison.”

“Are they all murderers?” I was fascinated.

“I deal with quite a few murderers. But you mustn’t have romantic ideas about them. Murderers are ordinary people.” Jacques Martel smiled at me calmly. I watched the points on his teeth and shivered. The ice cubes clinked as they melted into my whisky. “But to return to Paul Michel. It didn’t come upon him suddenly you know. It never does. We know very little about what causes schizophrenia, but there are patterns. All schizophrenics will have, as one of their first symptoms, what we call a ‘bouffée délirante aiguë’ …” His French suddenly sounded like a language he had learned and not his mother-tongue, “… this will happen when the subject is nineteen, twenty, rarely after the age of twenty-five.”

“What is it? It sounds horrible,” asked my Germanist. She had her arms round my neck. She smelled of onions and vinegar.

“Well, it’s like a storm. A thunderstorm of madness. It just seizes the personality in its fist. They go off their heads. They may be violent, obsessive, wild. In the case of Paul Michel his lunacy was somewhat subsumed under the rubric of contemporary politics. He went quite mad in 1968.”

We all laughed. The Bank of England stood in the doorway. He was wearing a wonderful plastic apron with a pink pig’s head across his chest and a huge yellow slogan:

TODAY’S MALE CHAUVINIST PIG
IS TOMORROW’S BACON

“And you’ll never guess who gave me this for Christmas.” He did a little dance. His daughter took his hand and pirouetted into his arms.

“Nineteen sixty-eight—Dad, just think. Wasn’t it very romantic for you and Jacques?”

The doctor laughed.

“Ah, yes. So it was. Riots on the boulevards. Then we’d dash back to my apartment, all tanked up on beer and revolution, to screw each other senseless.”

I felt the carpet move under my feet.

“All very fluid in those days,” said the Bank of England, addressing himself to me by way of explanation. “I met her mother two years later and went for a walk on the wild side.”

“You mean the other side,” she giggled, kissing him. “I’m glad you did. But go on, Jacques. Don’t lose the thread. What happened to Paul Michel? And how do you know about it?”

“It’s all in his dossier. All the reports. Funny thing is of course
nobody really noticed while the revolution was in full swing. He was wild, fairly violent, drunk, talked non-stop. But so did everybody else. He attacked a policeman. That wasn’t unusual. Who didn’t? Your father and I pinned one down under his riot shield and sat on him. We had to run for our lives after that. Do you remember?”

He looked straight at her father. They exchanged glances and it was then that I realized they were still lovers, twenty-five years later, and that they could lean on their memories, a secure, tried rope across the abyss.

“I do remember,” said the Bank of England dreamily, rocking his daughter in his arms. Something hissed in the kitchen. They both turned and fled, leaving me to face the doctor alone. He lit another cigarette.

“Paul Michel was an extraordinary man. All schizophrenics are extraordinary. They are incapable of loving. Did you know that? Of really loving. They aren’t like us. They are usually very perceptive. It’s uncanny. They have a human dimension that is beyond the banality of ordinary human beings. They can’t love you as another person would do. But they can love you with a love that is beyond human love. They have flashes, visions, moments of dramatic clarity, insight. They are incapable of cherishing a grudge or of planning vengeance.”

Suddenly he looked at me very intently, his eyes widening.

“Listen,” he said, “I have the sense of my littleness before them. We are of no consequence.
Tellement ils sont grands.”

We sat in silence for a while, listening to the bubbling crashes in the kitchen. He went on, with the same peculiar intensity.

“They are a people who are excessively egotistical. They are also beyond egotism. They are like animals. They know who doesn’t love them. They are very intuitive. And in that they are always right. They preserve themselves against evil. Instinctively, wonderfully.”

He paused. “Paul Michel is like that. It was the source of his writing.”

I stared at the lines on his face.

“You must remember. I have warned you. They cannot love as we do. You could say to one of them—your mother is dead. And they wouldn’t react. It would mean nothing. Even without the drugs.”

“Do the drugs change their personalities?” I asked anxiously. Paul Michel now seemed horrifyingly close, an ambiguous, towering, indifferent presence, like a colossus, against whom I weighed nothing.

“Yes,” said Jacques Martel heavily, “they do. We adapt the dose according to the person and the gravity of their illness. We work out a regular dose. They have an injection once a month. But after ten or fifteen years …”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Yes. They are transformed. They lose all sexual desire, all sense of themselves.”

Then he said fiercely, “They sometimes do as he did. They refuse to take the treatment. They prefer their suffering.”

I took a deep breath.

“Then he’s still there. Who he is, I mean. But mad.”

Jacques Martel nodded.

“He has no legal rights. He has an administrative trustee. The system in France is called ‘la tutelle.’ There’s always a legal representative. Someone who takes care of their property, possessions, money, papers. It is someone who does this voluntarily, a ‘bénévole.’ There’s an association. They are usually people with some sort of status in the community: priests, doctors, retired headmasters. They don’t get paid to do it. Just their expenses.”

“Would I need his permission? Or hers, it could be, I suppose.
To go and see Paul Michel?” I asked suddenly. The moment was electric, but I could not understand why.

“No. Why should you? He’s not a prisoner. You are going to see him then?” Jacques Martel’s eyes never left my face. “You’ve decided to go?”

“I’m flying out to Paris on Thursday.”

He let out his breath quietly.

“Ah … good,” he said. It was the right answer.

“Dinner’s ready. It’s delicious.” The Germanist danced in and embraced me. One of her curls caught across my mouth. She kissed me and took back her curl.

“Come and eat,” she said.

The table was laid out in red and white, like a gladiator’s feast.

She came down to Heathrow on the tube to wave me off. I sat next to her, a little quiet and sad, clutching my bags. My parents had asked to meet her. She refused point-blank, without giving a reason. All her affection, which had bubbled so encouragingly and unexpectedly during the past weeks, appeared to evaporate. She was tense, preoccupied, alert. I watched her disengaging a trolley from the long line of attached metal L-shapes, which stretched before the automatic doors like a fence across the prairie, with a sharp flick of her boot. We wandered aimlessly across the concourse, gazing up at the turning panels. My flight was on the board, but had not been called. She stacked my bags deftly on to the conveyor belt at the check in. It was then that I noticed how strong she was. The narrow shoulders and light build that made her look so fragile beneath the black jacket and jeans were illusory. I stared at her, seeing a stranger all over again. The owl eyes turned upon me.

“I’m going to buy you an orange juice,” she said. “It’s hot. Fresh orange is better than chemicals.”

And away she strode.

Just as the flight was called she turned to me and took my hand.

“It’s only two months,” I said, “two and a bit.” But I said this to comfort myself. I was by now quite convinced that she wouldn’t have cared if I never came back. “I’ll write. Will you?”

“Yes, of course I’ll write to you. Good luck. And don’t lose sight of what you have gone out to do. Promise me that.”

She hovered like a giant, white-faced bird, her eyes magnified, golden.

“I promise.”

She kissed me once, not on my lips, but on my neck, just below my ear. A long shiver went through me, as if I had been scratched. Then she took my arm and marched me away through the shining window frame of the metal detectors. As I passed the threshold into Departures I had one last glimpse of her, unsmiling, watching. She didn’t wave. She simply watched me go. I sat down on a plastic chair and cried silently, like a bereaved child, for the next twenty minutes.

M
y memories of those first days in Paris are like a sequence of postmodern photographs. I see the patterned metal grilles around the base of the trees on the boulevards. I see the axes of the city unfolding in one long glimmering line of bobbed trees and massive symmetrical buildings. I smell the water rushing in the gutters, hear the rhythmical swish of the plastic brooms, shaped like witches’ sticks, as the street cleaners pass in luminous green. The streets stank of Gauloises and urine. I lived on pizza slices and Coca Cola. I trod in dog shit and fag ends.

My room was on the fifth floor of a student residence in the eleventh arrondissement. It had cracked cream walls and a stained basin. The vomit green lino had been carefully tortured with cigarette burns. It smelled of musty trainers and bleach. I amassed all my books, papers and courage and then went out to waste good money on a poster and a pot plant as suicide preventatives. There was an American summer school from Texas installed at the other end of the corridor. They divided into two sexes, but looked like clones, for they were all massive, blonde, sunburnt and cheerful.

On Sunday morning I walked straight through the Marais peering into the windows of incredibly expensive antique shops and came out on the rue de Rivoli. I watched the sun making long straight lines on grey stone, the waiters in floor-length white aprons sweeping out the bars and taking the chairs down from the tables. Some of the shops were open, shirts and cheap jewelry stretched out
on the pavements. I picked my way past a mass of empty birdcages. In the window a flotilla of tropical fish in an illuminated tank circulated miserably, suspended in long flights of bubbles. They stared stupidly out through thick glass. I stared back, equally trapped and wretched. I had no idea where I was going. The traffic gathered heat and force. By ten o’clock it was already nearly thirty degrees under the awnings.

I crossed into a white block of sun, passed a battered builder’s hoarding and found myself facing the glittering black triangles of the Pyramids in the courtyard of the Louvre. The gravel was swept carefully clean of rubbish. Tourists peered down into the galleries below. The new entrance had not been completed when I had last been in Paris. I stared at the sinister pointed shapes. As I stood before the largest of the triangles the shape began to make sense, hardened into the form of my promise to her. I was facing a prism that remained masked and simply reflected rather than refracted the light. I found myself at the base point of two interlocking triangles. It was then that I had the peculiar sensation that something was being shown to me, explained, but that I had as yet no way of breaking into the code, no means of understanding the blank, flat surfaces. It was like seeing a new language written down for the first time. I stood watching a sign that would not yield up its meaning. I remember this because it had seemed uncanny at the time.

I turned away and walked down to the quays.

Two tramps were sitting on the steps, clutching one full bottle of red wine between them and talking very seriously. As I picked my way past them they let out a series of muffled grunts. I turned and looked into their faces. One of them, despite his red, troubled forehead, was clearly a young man; he was not much older than I was. They stared back. I walked away down the warm stones, peering into the grey water, searching for an empty patch of shade. High
above me the traffic soared past. Finally, I found a corner on the island, looking out towards the Pont des Arts, now reopened, repainted, rebuilt. Just out of range, as I cowered inside the shadow of swaying green, the sun turned the paving stones into a thick wash of savage white light. I sat down to read Paul Michel.