The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

"Not at all. It could even be dangerous. What if someone in perfect health happened to be here when the Madonna appeared? One miracle, and he'd end up paralyzed."

A dozen heads turned to see who could have uttered these disrespectful words. "Idiot," muttered Joséphine. Then a rain shower diverted attention from me. At the very first drops, we witnessed the spontaneous generation of a forest of umbrellas, and the smell of hot dust floated in the air.

We were borne forward into the underground Basilica of St. Pius X, a gigantic prayer barn where Mass is celebrated from 6:00 a.m. to midnight, with a change of priest every two or three services. I had read in the guidebook that the concrete nave could accommodate several jumbo jets. I followed Joséphine to a bay with empty seats beneath one of the countless echoing loudspeakers that transmitted the ceremony. "Glory be to God in the highest…in the highest…in the highest…" At the elevation of the Host, the man next to me, a well-prepared pilgrim, pulled racegoer's binoculars from his backpack to watch the proceedings. Other believers had makeshift periscopes of the kind you see at parades. Joséphine's father had often told me how he started out in life selling these kinds of gadgets outside metro stations. This did not prevent him from becoming a giant of broadcasting. Now he made use of his barker's skills to describe royal weddings, earthquakes, and prizefights for his audience. Outside, it had stopped raining. The air was cooler. "Shopping," said Joséphine. Anticipating this eventuality, I had already marked out the main thoroughfare, in which souvenir shops jostled one another as intimately as in an Oriental bazaar, offering the most extravagant smorgasbord of devotional objects.

Joséphine was a collector: old perfume bottles, rustic canvases complete with cattle (singly or in herds), plates of make-believe food of the kind that substitute for menus in Tokyo restaurant windows. In short, during her frequent travels she bought everything unspeakably kitsch she could lay her hands on. In Lourdes, it was love at first sight. There she sat in the window of the fourth shop on the left, surrounded by a jumble of religious medals, Swiss cuckoo clocks, decorated cheese platters, and—apparently waiting just for Joséphine—an adorable stucco bust haloed with winking bulbs, like a Christmas tree decoration.

"There's my Madonna!" Joséphine exulted.

"It's my present," I said at once, with no inkling of the exorbitant sum the shopkeeper would soon extort from me (alleging that it was one of a kind). That evening, in our hotel room, we celebrated our acquisition, its flickering holy light bathing us and casting fantastic dancing shadows on the ceiling.

"Joséphine, I think we're going to have to split up when we get back to Paris."

"Do you think I don't realize that?"

"But Jo…"

She was asleep. She had the gift of falling into instant sheltering slumber when a situation annoyed her. She could take a vacation from life for five minutes or several hours. For a while I watched the wall behind our pillows jump into and out of darkness. What demon could have induced people to line a whole room with orange fabric?

Since Joséphine was still sleeping, I cautiously dressed and left to engage in one of my favorite pastimes: night walking. It was my personal way of battling misfortune: just walking until I dropped. Out on the street, Dutch youths guzzled beer from big mugs. They had torn holes in garbage bags to make raincoats. Stout bars blocked the way to the grotto, but at intervals I saw the glow of hundreds of guttering candles. Much later, my wanderings brought me back to the street with the souvenir stores. In the fourth window, an identical Mary had taken the place of ours. Then I turned back to the hotel; from very far away I saw the window of our room twinkling in the gloom. I climbed the stairs, careful not to disturb the night watchman's dreams. Trail of the Snake sat on my pillow like a jewel in its setting. "Well, well," I murmured. "Charles Sobraj! I'd forgotten all about him."

I recognized Joséphine's writing. A huge "I" was scrawled across page 168. It was the start of a message that took up two whole chapters of the book and left them totally unreadable.

"I love you, you idiot. Be kind to your poor Joséphine."

Luckily I had read these pages already.

When I switched off the Holy Virgin, day was just breaking.

Through a Glass, Darkly