In the Métro, at the bank, I’d look at old women, their deep wrinkles, their drooping eyelids, and say to myself, “I’ll never be old.” It wasn’t a sad thought, just a surprising one. I’d never had that thought before.
The thing that struck me most was the simplicity of it all.
•
As I crossed the threshold of the Institut Curie for the first time, Dante’s phrase came back to me: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” But once inside I felt, on the contrary, as if I were in a kind of ideal setting, unparalleled in our times, where smiling and attentive human beings gave care and kindness to other humans who were destitute. Very quickly, without thinking about it, I took the signposted route from the Luxembourg R.E.R. station, at the heart of the Latin Quarter, where, amid all the intersecting paths that led to classes, stores, lovers’ meeting spots, and tourist attractions, there was also one for cancer patients.
To say “I’ve got chemo tomorrow” became as natural as it had been the year before to say “I’ve got a hair appointment.”
•
Morning kitchen, Sunday, March 16th: On the right in the photo, pale-wood cupboards, a white dishwasher. On the countertop, on either side of the gleaming sink, behind which trays are propped against the wall, are a chopping board, various electrical appliances, a bottle of bleach with a green cap, another of fertilizer for green plants, a packet of Whiskas, a black handle, shaped like a gearshift, on a potbellied kettle, a cast-iron casserole, a dish with food in it, an open Tupperware container with a red lid next to it, as if it were waiting to receive the leftovers from the dish, a dish towel. The ceramic-tiled floor a sort of fifties blue-and-beige checkerboard. Next to the cupboard from which it has been taken, a full trash can with orange peel pressed down on top. Touching the trash can, the dark puddle of a thick garment stretches out across the checkerboard tiles like a bearskin. Beside it, a white slipper with something written on it. At the foot of the dishwasher, a small heap of crumpled, reddish-purple fabric and the other slipper, whose tip rests on a kind of blue-and-white cloth. Behind the dark heap is a chair in a strange position, perpendicular to a table on which sits a large microwave oven, as if someone had been listening to it, with an ear pressed against it, like a radio. The sun coming in through the window at the back projects jagged bands of light across the bearskin.
In another, vertical shot of the same scene, the light, more intense, illuminates the dishwasher and the countertop to the left of the sink with the fertilizer and the bleach, and projects an image of the window, long and white, onto the tiled floor.
Nothing has been put away here, neither the remains of the meal nor those of love. Two kinds of disorder.
It took me a long time to identify our bathrobes, his of dark-green terry, mine of plum-colored synthetic silk, and to make out what was written on the slippers: “Hôtel Amigo.” I no longer know what we ate the night before, the remnants of which can be seen in the dish. Nor do I remember anything of our caresses or our pleasure.
There is nothing in the photo of the smells of the kitchen in the morning, a mixture of coffee and toast, cat food and March air. None of the noises, either, the regular sound of the fridge starting up, the neighbor’s lawnmower, perhaps, a plane from Roissy. Just the light falling forever on the tiles, the orange peels in the trash, the green cap on the bottle of bleach. All the photos are mute, especially those taken in the morning sunlight.
•
I was able to put a date to the photo using my journal: the last Sunday before the United States attacked Iraq. Everyone was waiting for the war, which had been planned for months. Millions of people around the world were marching to stop it from happening, but it continued to advance, like a giant shadow over sun-scorched earth. I felt guilty for not having taken as strong a stand against the war as I had in 1991, simply hanging a white banner on my balcony as a sign of pacifist opposition, a gesture that was not so widespread in France, and whose only effect may have been to make me look crazy in the eyes of my neighbors.
One morning, I turned on the radio, and there it was: a distant horror that I could feel only through my love affair with M. It was a very hot day, the sun imperturbable, and I thought, Another beautiful spring. I was relieved of all obligations, even writing. All I had to do was live out this story with M. Waste time. The big holiday from life. The great cancer holiday.
At last, I was allowed to shirk the duties of politeness, and not reply to letters or e-mails. People’s insistence, when I refused an invitation to a debate or a reading, seemed outrageous to me, a form of persecution. Of course, my reaction had to do with the fact that I was ill, of which they were unaware. Had I told them, they would have apologized profusely. But to feel that they were ascribing my refusal to a whim, taking it as a personal affront (that is, thinking only of themselves), made me intractable. I was done with other people’s vanity. I was unreachable.
