Hallucinating Foucault (8 page)

“She’s lazy, that’s all,” he snapped. “She thinks that she’s too fine to work.”

But even I noticed the whispering and silences surrounding her exhaustion, the terrible yellowing crackle
of her shriveling skin. She aged and shrank before my frightened glance. Her full breasts ebbed and her buttocks sagged. It was a spell working from within.

I came home from school. The bedroom door was shut fast. My father was slumped weeping across the table. Anne-Marie, her face set and ruthless, her hands clasped, stood before me.

“Your mother has left us at last, mon petit. She is rejoicing in heaven with Our Lady and the angels.” She spoke every word with measured and devastating certainty.

I won a scholarship to the Benedictine school attached to the monastery and my father sent me away to board during the terms. In the holidays I was handed over to my grandparents in Gaillac. I never went home again. And I took my grandfather’s name.

Bien à vous,

Paul Michel

Paris, 1 June 1984

Cher Maître,

No, I very seldom draw upon my own memories directly. But it is my past which provides the fixed limits of my imagination. Our childhoods, our several histories, lived in the bone, are not the straitjackets we think they are. I rework the intensity of that capacity to perceive, the shifts in scale, color; the silences around the table as a family lays down their forks, the howl of a dog chained to the woodpile as the sleet forms in a winter sky, the years when the autumn never comes, but the winter grey, the mass of wet leaves, coats the gravel long before Toussaint.

I still see the chrysanthemums, huge white blooms, gleaming on my mother’s grave in the pathetic cemetery above our village among the vineyard slopes. I used to carry my own pot of barely opening lilac buds to lay on the green gravel of her grave. “Buy the pot which has the flowers still in bud,” ordered my grandfather. He grudged her even the colors achieved. But up there in the empty, walled graveyard, the flowers will open, in a gesture of consent, when there is no one to see.

You asked about the men in my family, my father, my grandfather, my cousins. I must be cynical—and honest. They were what I have become—moody, taciturn, violent. Mealtimes were mostly a silent affair, interrupted only by demands for more bread. My grandfather was brutally good-looking, a huge barrel-chested man with his mind adjusted firmly in the direction of profit. He knew how to delegate responsibility, but he trusted no one. He had his fingers on every root in the vineyard. He understood his accounts. He bargained with the wholesalers. He bullied the inspectors. He quarreled with the neighbors. He sent away to another region for his barrels, where he got a better deal. He made the tonneliers pay the transportation costs. He was one of the first in Gaillac to invest in the modern mechanical systems. He spent two years in Algeria and came back convinced that France should abandon the territory, despite its wealth and beauty, simply on the grounds that we had no business to occupy another man’s land.

I see him walking the length of his vines, his old blue jacket stretched across his huge back, bending over the twisted stakes, the clippers in his reddened hands, touching
the mute, rough bark, his boots heavy with earth. Everyone in the house was afraid of him.

One of his dogs bit a child in the face. I was ten years old. I see the child, white, weeping, two deep purple marks on the side of her nose, her upper hp, pierced, with the dark blood bubbling into her mouth. My grandfather did not shoot the animal as he could easily have done. His loaded gun stood against the door of the lavoir. He beat the dog to death with a cudgel in the chicken yard. We heard a terrible sequence of howls and thuds. My grandmother closed the window. When he came in, his hands covered in blood, the child’s blood, the dog’s matted fur, I said that the child, a neighbor’s child, had been responsible. She had teased the dog. With one stride he was beside me and had seized my hair. Before my grandmother could intervene he had broken my nose.

“That’s right. Go and whimper in your grandmother’s skirts,” he shouted, flinging me out of the kitchen.

The doctor, setting my nose in a plaster cast and covering me with bandages, so that I looked like Phantomas, or the invisible man, said, “Why did you provoke him, petit? No one provokes Jean-Baptiste Michel and gets away with it. Learn that lesson now.”

When he was older, slower, he bought a television and would sit frozen, hypnotized by the moving screen. When he was dying he lay staring into space, with unsteady, flickering eyes, as if he was still following the shifting black and white images.

But I remember my grandfather outside, always outside, his great arms browned with heat and dust, his eyes
steady on the wine vats, attaching the cylinders filled with the poison he used to treat the vines onto his tractor, testing the sprays. He employed two men, both of whom loved him unconditionally. He ignored my whispering grandmother. She spoke to him continually in a low, persuasive hum. He neither listened nor replied. I hear him leaving the house in the murky dawn, his feet heavy on the tiles in the corridor, the rustle of the dog’s chains in the dust as he passed through the gate. Then, and only then, would I settle into my bed, secure, relieved, reassured that the house was empty of his presence.

I only saw him strike a woman once. I cannot know whether this is something I have imagined because it is a scene I needed to remember, or whether I really witnessed the event.

It is late autumn and the lights are on in the house. My grandmother is in the church hearing the catechism class. I have helped her today by cleaning the family graves. There is moss under my fingernails and my hands are chapped and red. I am outside the house, coming home. I hear raised voices in the spare bedroom which I share with my mother. The front door is ajar. There is mud on the doorstep and across the flagstones. I hear my mother’s voice, deep in her throat, no, no, no, no, no. Our bedroom door is open and my grandfather, in his outdoor coat and boots, is standing over her. Her arms are rigid, her hands crisping the bedspread. She cries, again and again, no, no, no, no, no. With one muddy boot he slams the door shut behind him and I hear the flat smack of his hand against her unresisting cheek as he pushes her down. Then the pitch of her cry is horribly
changed. And I stumble backwards through the kitchen, down the path, leaving the forbidden gate open behind me, out into the darkening vineyards, high above the village, gasping for clean, unheated air.

No one provokes Jean-Baptiste Michel and gets away with it. Why did I so easily comprehend that lesson of fear which my mother had never been able to learn?

You ask me what I fear most. Not my own death, certainly not that. For me, my death will simply be the door closing softly on the sounds that trouble, obsess and persecute my sleep. I never court death, as you do. You see death as your dancing partner, the other with his arms around you. Your death is the other you wait for, seek out, whose violence is the resolution of your desire. But I will not learn my death from you. You revel in a facile dream of darkness and blood. It is a romantic flirtation with violence, the well-brought-up doctor’s son dabbling in the sewers, before going home to turn it all into a Baroque polemic which will make him famous. I choose the sun, light, life. And yes, of course we both live on the edge. You taught me to inhabit extremity. You taught me that the frontiers of living, thinking, were the only markets where knowledge could be bought, at a high price. You taught me to stand at the edge of the crowd gathered around the gaming tables, to see clearly, both the players and the wheel. Cher maître, you accuse me of being without morals, scruples, inhibitions, regrets. Who but my master could have taught me to be so? I have learned my being from you.

You ask me what I fear most. Not the loss of my power to write. Not that. Composers fear deafness, yet
the greatest of them heard his music with the drums of his nerves, the beat in the blood. My writing is a craft, like carpentry, coffin-building, making jewelry, constructing the walls. You cannot forget how it is done. You can easily see when it is done well. You can adjust, remake, rebuild what is fragile, slipshod, unstable. The critics praise my classical style. I am part of a tradition. It is what I say which disturbs them, and that too is rendered palatable by the undisturbed elegance of classical French prose. You can say anything, anything, if it is beautifully said. My books are like a well-known and frequently visited château. All the corridors are completely straight and they lead from one room to another, the way out to the gardens or the courtyard clearly indicated. I write with the well-swept clarity of a ballroom floor. I write for fools. But within this limpid, exquisite lucidity, that is my signature—and which I lose hair, weight, sleep, blood, to achieve—there is a code, a hidden sequence of signs, a labyrinth, a staircase leading to the attics, and finally out onto the leads. You have followed me there. You are the reader for whom I write.

You ask me what I fear most. You know already or you would not ask. It is the loss of my reader, the man for whom I write. My greatest fear is that one day, unexpectedly, suddenly, I will lose you. We never see one another and we never speak directly, yet through the writing our intimacy is complete. My relationship with you is intense because it is addressed every day, through all my working hours. I sit down, wrapped in my blanket, my papers incoherent on the table before me. I clear a space to write, for you, to you, against you. You are the measure of my
abilities. I reach for your exactitude, your ambition, your folly. You are the tide mark on the bridge, the level to reach. You are the face who always avoids my glance, the man who is just leaving the bar. I search for you through the spirals of all my sentences. I throw out whole pages of manuscript because I cannot find you in them. I search for you in small details, in the shapes of my verbs, the quality of my phrases. When I can write no more because I am too tired, my head aches, my left arm is cramped with tension, and I am left irresolute, I get up, go out, drink, cruise the streets. Sex is a brief gesture; I fling away my body with my money and my fear. It is the sharp sensation which fills the empty space before I can go in search of you again. I repent nothing but the frustration of being unable to reach you. You are the glove that I find on the floor, the daily challenge I take up. You are the reader for whom I write.

You have never asked me who I have loved most. You know already and that is why you have never asked. I have always loved you.

Paul Michel