The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I complete my barber's duties by splashing my father with his favorite aftershave lotion. Then we say goodbye; this time, for once, he neglects to mention the letter in his writing desk where his last wishes are set out. We have not seen each other since. I cannot quit my seaside confinement. And he can no longer descend the magnificent staircase of his apartment building on his ninety-two-year-old legs. We are both locked-in cases, each in his own way: myself in my carcass, my father in his fourth-floor apartment. Now I am the one they shave every morning, and I often think of him while a nurse's aide laboriously scrapes my cheeks with a week-old blade. I hope that I was a more attentive Figaro.

Every now and then he calls, and I listen to his affectionate voice, which quivers a little in the receiver they hold to my ear. It cannot be easy for him to speak to a son who, as he well knows, will never reply. He also sent me the photo of me at the miniature-golf course. At first I did not understand why. It would have remained a mystery had someone not thought to look at the back of the print. Suddenly, in my own personal movie theater, the forgotten footage of a spring weekend began to unroll, when my parents and I had gone to take the air in a windy and not very sparkling seaside town. In his strong, angular handwriting, Dad had simply noted: Berck-sur-Mer, April 1963.

Yet Another Coincidence

If you asked readers which of Alexandre Dumas's literary heroes they would like to be, they would pick D'Artagnan or Edmond Dantès. No one would dream of choosing Noirtier de Villefort, a somewhat sinister character in The Count of Monte Cristo. Described by Dumas as a living mummy, a man three-quarters of the way into the grave, this profoundly handicapped creature summons up not dreams but shudders. The mute and powerless possessor of the most terrible secrets, he spends his life slumped in a wheelchair, able to communicate only by blinking his eye: one blink means yes; two means no. In fact, dear Grandpapa Noirtier, as his granddaughter affectionately calls him, is literature's first—and so far only—case of locked-in syndrome.

As soon as my mind was clear of the thick fog with which my stroke had shrouded it, I began to think a lot about Grandpapa Noirtier. I had just reread The Count of Monte Cristo, and now here I was back in the heart of the book, and in the worst of circumstances. Ironic—but that rereading had not been purely by chance. I had been toying with the idea of writing a modern, doubtless iconoclastic, version of the Dumas novel. Vengeance, of course, remained the driving force of the action, but the plot took place in our era, and Monte Cristo was a woman.

So I did not have time to commit this crime of lèse-majesté. As a punishment, I would have preferred to be transformed into M. Danglars, Franz d'Épinay, the Abbé Faria, or, at the very least, to copy out one thousand times: "I must not tamper with masterpieces." But the gods of literature and neurology decided otherwise.

Some evenings I have the impression that Grandpapa Noirtier patrols our corridors in a century-old wheelchair sadly in need of a drop of oil. To foil the decrees of fate, I am now planning a vast saga in which the key witness is not a paralytic but a runner. You never know. Perhaps it will work.

The Dream

As a rule, I do not recall my dreams. At the approach of day their plots inevitably fade. So why did last December's dreams etch themselves into my memory with the precision of a laser beam? Perhaps that is how it is with coma. Since you never return to reality, your dreams don't have the luxury of evaporating. Instead they pile up, one upon another, to form a long ongoing pageant whose episodes recur with the insistence of a soap opera. This evening, one such episode has come back to me.