The Hospital for Incurable Men (Five Things, 15/12/20)
1.
At 3:30am the birds in the park outside my window started singing like morning was on the way. They were loud enough to wake me, chattering noisily in the big chestnuts that are empty now of leaves, and in the evergreen bushes that line the fence between the building where I live, a 17th century former convent, and the public space that was once its private grounds. There are whole sections of this building that have fallen into disuse. They look abandoned. In the inhabited parts, studio apartments have been cheaply renovated to resemble dorm rooms for foreign artists and researchers. Then you go to the basement to do your laundry, and find yourself in the bowels of a Medieval chateau. One day I climbed the bones of a grand staircase in an entryway off the back courtyard. It had been stripped of its plaster, stripped of its embellishments, but seemed structurally sound. It led up to another staircase, and then up to a locked door. The walls were covered in graffiti, as if from squatters, but maybe also from residents such as myself. On old maps from the 19th century this building was called The Hospital for Incurable Men. This sounds more fantastic when translated literally, as if the maleness of the men was incurable, like an incurable romantic. But of course it was simply a hospice, a place for the terminally sick or injured. In its later years it became a military hospital, taking in wounded veterans. In those days the park was where the more ambulatory of these cases could walk undisturbed under the trees. I don’t know why the birds were up so early this morning. Maybe it was something to do with the new moon, or the coming solstice, or maybe the ghosts of these long dead soldiers had awakened them, as I would do, if I were a ghost, with an old favorite park to walk in.
2.
Last night I went to the rue des Rosiers in the Marais, hoping that one of the bakeries there might still be open where I could buy something fried and delicious. The street is narrow, and cobbled, and extremely romantic, especially at night, in that way that Paris is so good at being from time to time. Lemon and tangerine light spilled out of the windows of the white buildings above the shops, arrayed with sky blue shutters. None of the bakeries were open, but I bought latkes from a falafel stand. They were fatter than latkes I’m used to eating in the states, and seasoned with green herbs. When the man asked if I wanted them heated up, I said yes. I’d intended to save them until I got home, and to share them, but as I was walking back up through the nighttime streets, I found myself deciding to sit down on a bench near the National Archives in the gold-green spill of a street light and eat them all by myself. I thought about the time my father and I had made a menorah out of a Mexican ceramic alligator, and how I had not seen either of my parents for more than a year and a half. When I got home, I was lucky to have brought two Alsacian kouglof cakes, bought earlier, to dull the cruelty of my story: I went to the rue des Rosiers and got latkes, but I didn’t save any for you.
3.
It was getting late, close to curfew, and so I decided to take a taxi.
“It smells well in here,” I said in my bad French when I got in. Because it did smell nice. It smelled of oranges.
“It smells good,” the driver corrected me. “What do you smell?”
“Oranges,”I said.
“I just ate an orange!” he said. “But also I am wearing Dior.”
He then wanted to tell me about an incredible thing that had happened to him that day. To explain it, he had to begin the story a few years ago, when a famous rock musician called Johnny Hallyday had died. He was known as the French Elvis, and there are pictures of him looking like James Dean with a young Catherine Deneuve. A few months after Hallyday’s death, the driver was taking a fare to a wealthy town outside Paris, where Hallyday had once lived, or had grown up, or something like that. Right at the moment when they crossed into this town, one of Hallyday’s songs started playing on the radio. He had never heard a Johnny Hallyday song on that station before, and he’d always found this to be a remarkable coincidence. Then today, while he was telling this story to another passenger, it happened again. Another Johnny Hallyday song came on the radio, just as he was telling his story about the other Johnny Hallyday song.
“I don’t even like Johnny Hallyday!” he said, laughing.
He was slowing down now, taking his eyes off the road in order to look back at me and explain the significance of his story. He was sure that this station had never played any of Hallyday’s songs, either. He had even taken the time to look at the station’s website afterwards, and scan through their list of songs to confirm it. In the past several days, that exact moment when he had begun to tell his story was the only time that the song had played.
“It must mean something!” he told me, several times.
I wasn’t entirely sure that I understood it or what it was supposed to mean. That Johnny Hallyday was haunting him? That he was meant to listen to Johnny Hallyday?
4.
I used to wake up in the middle of the night while doing research on a woman whose death remained a mystery to me. I would wake up unable to breathe, from nightmares that bore no resemblance to my own life. For several years I was trying to find out what had happened to her, and during that time, every now and then, I would wake up like that. Then, finally, I found out how and when she died. She had been ill for a long time. I read that it was in a room swathed in blue silk, as rooms sometimes were in the 19th century, and that she had been known for her perfume smelling of violets. I found some writing by a person who had loved her, describing her death, and her burial, and what all of her friends did immediately afterwards. I went around looking for a perfume that smelled like what I thought her perfume would have smelled like, and after a while I found one. It came in an enormous purple bottle with a retro pattern of art nouveau violets on the label, and I spray my pillows with it sometimes before I go to sleep. After finding out what happened to her, and obtaining the perfume, I don’t have those kinds of nightmares anymore.
5.
Paris is a place of so many ghosts that most of the time, I think, they are placated. The darkest night of the year isn’t even here yet, but already there are little buds on the magnolia trees in the Tuileries garden.