The Return (15 page)

The Return

I have good news and bad news.
The good news is that there is life (of
a kind) after this life.
The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a
necrophiliac.

Death caught up with me in a Paris disco at four in the morning.
My
doctor had warned me, but some things are stronger than reason.
I was convinced,
mistakenly (and even now it’s something I regret), that drinking and dancing
were not the most hazardous of my passions.
Another reason I kept going out
every night to the fashionable places in Paris was my routine as a middle
manager at Fracsa; I was after what I couldn’t find at work or in what people
call the inner life: the buzz that you get from a certain excess.

But I’d rather not talk about that, or only as much as I have to.
When
my death occurred, I was recently divorced and thirty-four years old.
I hardly
realized what was going on.
A sudden sharp pain in the chest, her face, the face
of Cécile Lamballe, the woman of my dreams, imperturbable as ever, the dance
floor spinning in a brutal whirl, sucking in the dancers and the shadows, and
then a brief moment of darkness.

What happened next was like what you sometimes see in movies and I’d
like to say a few words about that.

In life I wasn’t especially intelligent.
I’m still not (though I’ve
learned a lot).
When I say intelligent, what I really mean is thoughtful.
But I
have a certain energy and a certain taste.
What I mean is, I’m not a philistine.
It couldn’t be said, objectively, that I’d ever behaved like a philistine.
It’s
true that I graduated in business studies, but that didn’t stop me from reading
a good book or seeing a play every now and then, or being a keener moviegoer
than most.
Some of the movies I was pressured to see by my ex-wife.
But the
others I saw for love of the seventh art.

Like just about everyone else, I went to see
Ghost
, I don’t
know if you remember it, a box office hit, with Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg,
the one where Patrick Swayze gets killed and his body is left lying on a
Manhattan street, or in an alley, maybe, on a dirty pavement anyway, while in a
special-effects extravaganza (they were special for the time, anyway) his soul
comes out of his body and stares at it in astonishment.
Well, apart from the
special effects, I thought it was idiotic.
A typical Hollywood cop-out, inane
and unbelievable.

But when my turn came, that was exactly what happened.
I was stunned.
First, because I had died, which always comes as a surprise, except, I guess, in
some cases of suicide, and then because I was unwillingly acting out one of the
worst scenes of
Ghost
.
One of the many things experience has taught me
is that there is sometimes more to American naiveté than meets the eye; it can
hide something that we Europeans can’t or don’t want to understand.
But once I
was dead, I didn’t care about that.
Once I was dead, I felt like bursting out
laughing.

You get used to anything in the end, but in the early hours of that
morning I felt dizzy or drunk, not because I was under the influence of alcohol
on the night of my death—I wasn’t; on the contrary, it had been a night of
pineapple juice and non-alcoholic beer—but because of the shock of being dead,
the fear of being dead and not knowing what was coming next.
When you die the
real world
shifts
slightly and that adds to the dizziness.
It’s as if
you’d suddenly put on a pair of glasses that don’t match your prescription;
they’re not all that different, but not quite right.
And the worst thing is you
know that the glasses you’ve put on belong to you and nobody else.
And the real
world shifts slightly to the right, down a little, the distance separating you
from a given object changes almost imperceptibly, but you perceive that change
as an abyss, and the abyss adds to your dizziness, but in the end it doesn’t
matter.

It makes you want to cry or pray.
The first minutes of ghosthood are
minutes of imminent knockout.
You’re like a punch-drunk boxer staggering around
the ring in the drawn-out moment of the ring’s evaporation.
But then you calm
down and what generally happens is that you follow the people who were there
when you died—your girlfriend, your friends—or you follow your own body.

I was with Cécile Lamballe, the woman of my dreams, I was with her and
saw her just before I died, but when my soul came out of my body I couldn’t see
her anywhere.
It was quite a surprise and a great disappointment, especially
when I think about it now, though back then I didn’t have time to be sad.
There
I was, looking at my body lying in a grotesque heap on the floor, as if, seized
by the dance and the heart attack, I’d completely fallen apart, or as if I
hadn’t died of a heart attack at all but dropped from the top of a skyscraper,
and while I looked on and walked around and fell over (because I was completely
dizzy), a volunteer (there’s always someone) gave me (or my body)
mouth-to-mouth, while another one thumped my chest, then someone thought of
switching off the music and a murmur of disapproval swept through the disco,
which was pretty full in spite of the late hour, and the deep voice of a waiter
or a security guard told them all not to touch me, to wait for the police and
the magistrate, and although I was groggy I would have liked to say, Keep going,
keep trying to revive me, but they were tired, and as soon as the police were
mentioned they all stepped back, and my body lay there on its own at the edge of
the dance floor, eyes closed, until a charitable soul put a blanket over me to
cover what was now definitively dead.

Then the police turned up along with some guys who confirmed what
everyone already knew, and later the magistrate arrived and only then did I
realize that Cécile Lamballe had vanished from the disco, so when they picked up
my body and put it in an ambulance, I followed the medics and slipped into the
back of the vehicle, and off I went with them into the sad and weary Paris
dawn.

What a paltry thing it seemed, my body or my ex-body (I’m not sure how
to put it), confronted with the labyrinthine bureaucracy of death.
First they
took me to the basement of a hospital, although I couldn’t swear it was a
hospital, where a young woman with glasses ordered them to undress me, and when
they left her on her own, she spent a few moments examining and touching me.
Then they covered me with a sheet, and moved me to another room to take a
complete set of fingerprints.
Then they brought me back to the first room, which
was empty now, and I stayed there for what seemed like a long time, though I
couldn’t say how many hours.
Maybe it was only minutes, but I was getting more
and more bored.

After a while, a black orderly came to get me and take me to another
underground room, where he handed me over to a pair of young guys also dressed
in white, who made me feel uneasy right from the start, I don’t know why.
Maybe
it was their would-be sophisticated way of talking, which identified them as a
pair of tenth-rate artists, maybe it was their earrings, the sort all the
hipsters were wearing that season in the discos that I had frequented with an
irresponsible persistence: hexagonal in shape and somehow evocative of runaways
from a fantastic bestiary.

The new orderlies made some notes in a book, spoke with the black guy
for a few minutes (I don’t know what that was about) and then the black guy went
and left us alone.
So in the room there were the two young guys behind the desk,
filling out forms and chatting away, there was my body on the trolley, covered
from head to foot, and me standing beside it, with my left hand resting on the
trolley’s metal edge, trying to think with a modicum of clarity about what the
days to come might hold, if there were any days to come, which was far from
obvious to me right then.

Then one of the young guys approached the trolley and uncovered me, or
uncovered my body, and scrutinized it for a few seconds with a thoughtful
expression that didn’t bode well.
After a while he covered it up again, and the
two of them wheeled the trolley into the next room, a sort of freezing
honeycomb, which I soon discovered was a storehouse for corpses.
I would never
have imagined that so many people could die in the course of an ordinary night
in Paris.
They slid my body into a refrigerated niche and left.
I didn’t follow
them.

I spent that whole day there in the morgue.
Every so often I went to
the door, which had a little glass window, and checked the time on the wall
clock in the next room.
The feeling of dizziness gradually abated, although at
one point I got to thinking about heaven and hell, reward and punishment, and I
had a panic attack, but that bout of irrational fear was soon over.
And, in
fact, I was starting to feel better.

Throughout the day new bodies kept arriving, but never accompanied by
ghosts, and at about four in the afternoon, a near-sighted young man performed
an autopsy on me and established the causes of my accidental death.
I have to
admit I didn’t have the stomach to watch them open me up.
But I went to the
autopsy room and listened as the coroner and his assistant, quite a pretty girl,
performed their task efficiently and quickly—if only all public servants worked
like that—while I waited with my back turned, looking at the ivory-colored tiles
on the wall.
Then they washed me and sewed me up and an orderly took me back to
the morgue again.

I stayed there until eleven at night, sitting on the floor in front of
my refrigerated niche, and although at one point I thought I was going to doze
off, I was beyond the need for sleep, so what I did was just go on thinking
about my past life and the enigmatic future (to give it a name of some kind)
that lay before me.
After ten o’clock, the comings and goings, which during the
day had been like a constant but barely perceptible dripping, stopped or
diminished considerably.
At five past eleven the young guys with the hexagonal
earrings reappeared.
I was startled when they opened the door.
But I was
beginning to get used to my ghostly state and, having recognized them, I
remained seated on the floor, thinking of the distance separating me from Cécile
Lamballe, which was infinitely greater than the distance between us when I was
still alive.
Realizations always come too late.
In life I was afraid of being a
toy (or less than a toy) for Cécile, and now that I was dead, that fate, once
the cause of my insomnia and pervasive insecurity, seemed sweet, and not without
a certain grace and substance: the solidity of the real.

But I was talking about the hipster orderlies.
I saw them come into
the morgue and although I noticed something cautious in their bearing, which sat
oddly with their oily, feline manner, like wannabe artists out clubbing, at
first I paid no attention to their movements and their whispering until one of
them opened the niche where my body was lying.

Then I got up and started watching them.
Moving like seasoned
professionals, they placed my body on a trolley.
Then they rolled the trolley
out of the morgue and along a long corridor, sloping gently upwards, which
eventually led into the building’s parking garage.
For a moment I thought they
were stealing my body.
In my delirium I imagined Cécile Lamballe, the milk-white
face of Cécile Lamballe; I imagined her emerging from the darkness of the
parking lot to give the pseudo-artists the sum they had demanded for the rescue
of my body.
But there was no one in the garage—clearly, I was still a long way
from recovering my powers of reasoning or even my composure.

To tell the truth I’d been really hoping for a quiet night.

For a few moments, as I followed the orderlies between the unwelcoming
rows of cars with a certain trepidation and disquiet, I experienced the
dizziness I had felt in my first few minutes as a ghost.
They put my body in the
trunk of a gray Renault, covered all over with little dents, and we emerged from
the belly of that building, which I was already beginning to think of as home,
into the utter freedom of the Paris night.

I can’t remember now which avenues and streets we took.
The orderlies
were high, as I was able to ascertain from closer observation, and they were
talking about people well beyond their social reach.
My first impression was
soon confirmed: they were pathetic losers, but there was something in their
attitude, something, I thought at first, like hope, and then it seemed like
innocence, which made me feel close to them somehow.
Deep down, we were similar,
not then and not in the moments leading up to my death, but they were similar to
how I imagined myself at twenty-two or twenty-five, when I was still a student
and still believed that one day the world was going to fall at my feet.