The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Sunday

Through the window I watch the reddish-yellow hospital buildings light up under the sun's first rays. The brickwork takes on exactly the same shade of pink as the Greek grammar book I had in high school. I wasn't a brilliant Hellenist (to put it mildly), but I love that warm, deep shade: it still conjures up for me a world of books and study, in which we consorted with Alcibiades' dog and the heroes of Thermopylae. “Antique pink” is what hardware stores call it. It has absolutely no resemblance to the cotton-candy pink of the hospital corridors. And even less to the mauve that coats the baseboards and window frames in my room, making them look like the wrapping on a cheap perfume.

Sunday. I dread Sunday, for if I am unlucky enough to have no visitors, there will be nothing at all to break the dreary passage of the hours. No physical therapist, no speech pathologist, no shrink. Sunday is a long stretch of desert, its only oasis a sponge bath even more perfunctory than usual. On Sundays the nursing staff is plunged into gloomy lethargy by the delayed effects of Saturday-night drinking, coupled with regret at missing the family picnic, the trip to the fair, or the shrimp fishing on account of the Sunday duty roster. The bath I am given bears more resemblance to drawing and quartering than to hydrotherapy. A triple dose of the finest eau de toilette fails to mask the reality: I stink.

Sunday. If the TV is turned on, it is vital to have made the right decision. It is almost a matter of strategy. For three or four hours are likely to go by before the return of the kindly soul who can change channels. Sometimes it is wiser to forgo an interesting program if it is followed by a tearful soap opera, a silly game show, or a raucous talk show. Violent applause hurts my ears. I prefer the peace of documentaries on art, history, or animals. I watch them without the sound, the way you watch flames in a fireplace.

Sunday. The bell gravely tolls the hours. The small Health Department calendar on the wall, whittled away day by day, announces that it is already August. Mysterious paradox: time, motionless here, gallops out there. In my contracted world, the hours drag on but the months flash by. I can't believe it's August. Friends, their wives and children, have scattered to the summer winds. In my thoughts I steal into their summer quarters—never mind if doing so tugs at my heart. In Brittany, a pack of children returns from the market on bikes, every face radiant with laughter. Some of these kids have long since entered the age of major adolescent concerns, but along these rhododendron-lined Breton roads, everyone rediscovers lost innocence. This afternoon, they will be boating around the island, the small outboards laboring against the current. Someone will be stretched out in the bow, eyes closed, arm trailing in the cool water. In the south of France, a burning sun drives you to seek the cool depths of the house. You fill sketchbooks with watercolors. A small cat with a broken leg seeks shady corners in the priest's garden, and a little farther on, in the flat Camargue delta country, a cluster of young bulls skirts a marsh that gives off a smell of aniseed. And all over the country, activities are under way for the great domestic event of the day. I know mothers everywhere are tired of preparing it, but for me it is a legendary forgotten ritual: lunch.

Sunday. I contemplate my books, piled up on the windowsill to constitute a small library: a rather useless one, for today no one will come to read them for me. Seneca, Zola, Chateaubriand, and Valéry Larbaud are right there, three feet away, just out of reach. A very black fly settles on my nose. I waggle my head to unseat him. He digs in. Olympic wrestling is child's play compared to this. Sunday.