The Happy Marriage

He was feeling ill, but thought that leaving the country would be enough to heal him. After a week, he was able to change his return ticket and arrived in Paris in bad shape. He had a dull pain between his lungs and rib cage that refused to leave him. He went to the pulmonary department at the Hôpital Cochin downtown, where he was given some strong antibiotics. His condition didn’t improve at all. Quite the opposite, he got worse — and he was admitted to the ER as he started choking. He came close to dying, although he hadn’t stared death right in the face, but instead smelled a strong odor that was like a mixture of bleach, ether, and cooking fumes. Death had to go down several hallways to strike its intended target. They’d given him oxygen, and he’d spent several hours in the ER’s waiting room because they hadn’t had any available beds in the department he needed. At night, he’d been transferred to the tropical disease ward where they had a spot for him. A lucky turn of events for him. Purely out of coincidence, a young doctor had asked him: “Have you recently traveled to Asia?” The painter had nodded. All of a sudden, he felt as though the stench of death had withdrawn, and that the shadow of death had flitted away. The young doctor, who had an air of mystery about him, had asked him: “Did you eat any raw shellfish?” The painter had then remembered seeing a shrimp in the salad at the family restaurant where he’d eaten. “You’ve got a parasite that exists only in Asia, which only affects shellfish and attacks the lungs. I think you’ve got pulmonary distomatosis, or paragonimiasis, after the parasite called paragonimus.” The doctor had immediately given him a couple of tablets to swallow. “If you can’t sleep we’ll give you some sedatives and sleeping pills,” he’d said, then he’d disappeared. That night was one of the most terrible in the painter’s life. His mattress was covered in plastic on top of which they’d put some coarse sheets. It gave off an unbearable heat. It tortured him, but they couldn’t change his bed. So he decided to sit up, although he did so extremely carefully to avoid pulling out the oxygen tubes that were allowing him to breathe. He felt as though fire were coursing through his body, that his skin was burning and his hair was falling out. He felt once again that his end was in sight, which allowed him to understand why people said death was the disease, because death in itself was nothing, and what preceded it was far worse. He remembered what his mother used to say whenever she had a bad night: “This will be one of the nights I tell my gravedigger about!” He laughed because as a child he hadn’t understood how a dead person could still speak, especially to the person digging their grave. And what would she have told him anyway? That she slept badly, had suffered from anxiety, cold sweats, that she had a feeling of impending death with its string of sufferings and uncertainties?

Unable to sleep or take his mind off his pain, he’d written down his impressions in the notebook he usually used for his sketches. In the hours between vigil and sleep, it was as though a voice had dictated those words to him:

The night of September 27th and 28th. A searing heat is setting my sore skin on fire, and this is more unbearable than the disease itself. A long ordeal. This night is like a waiting room in a cave where people are tortured. I sweat, I choke, I open the window, I’m afraid of catching a cold. I wait for the morning in front of a plastic-covered sofa that is incredibly ugly. The patients who spend the whole day here stretched out on their beds must be unable to sleep at night. Arrangements should be made to fill their time, activities or games should be organized, entertainers or mimes or clowns should be brought in, just like they do for children.