Hallucinating Foucault (17 page)

But the effect of the storm was to transform the season. It was now inescapably September. We still went to the beach, but we came home early in the evenings. And something had changed again between us. Paul Michel now began to talk to me in a way that he had never done before. It was as if he had made a decision. He would no longer hide behind his mask of cynicism. We sat side by side in the beach café looking out to sea. It was the twenty-sixth of September.

“You asked me about Foucault, petit. And I never gave you an answer.”

He paused. I held my breath, expecting another explosion.

“I should explain. I did know him, perhaps better than many people ever did. We met once. But only once. It was during a student uprising in the University at Vincennes, where he taught philosophy. He never knew who I was. You didn’t bother with names and tides then. It was hard to tell who was a student and who was a lecturer, if they were on our side. I had already published
La Fuite.
And he was the first person to comment on my work whose opinion
I valued. It’s rare to find another man whose mind works through the same codes, whose work is as anonymous, yet as personal and lucid as your own. Especially a contemporary. It’s more usual to find the echo of your own voice in the past. You are always listening, I think, when you write, for the voice which answers. However oblique the reply may be. Foucault never attempted to contact me. He did something more frightening, provocative, profound. He wrote back, in his published work. Many people have observed that our themes are disturbingly similar, our styles of writing utterly different. We read one another with the passion of lovers. Then we began to write to one another, text for text. I went to all his public lectures at the Collège de France. He saw me there. He gave no sign. He was teaching in California when I was in America for the publication of
Midi.
I went to his seminars. There were over 170 people there. Once I was slightly late. He was standing silent at the lectern, looking at his notes, when I joined the crowd standing at the back of the hall. He looked up and we stared at one another. Then he began to speak. He never acknowledged me. He always knew when I was there.

“Our paths crossed frequently in Paris. We were often invited to the same events. We went to the same clubs, the same bars. We ignored each other’s presence. We were careful to do that. Once, by chance, we were to be interviewed together for a program about writing and homosexuality on France Culture. We both refused, giving the same reason. That we were happy to be interviewed alone but that we would not be drawn into discussion with the other. He was told of my refusal and apparently he laughed and laughed. His laugh was famous. The decision we made, to write to and for each other, was intimate and terrible. It was a secret that could never be shared. It was a strange hidden gesture of mutual consent. The disputes we had were oblique, subtle, contorted. No less passionate for
that. His history of sexuality was like a challenge to me, a fist shaken.
L’Evadé w
as to have been the first novel in a trilogy, a new departure for me. As he approached my austerity, my abstraction, I turned away towards a writing that was less perfect. I began to search for a style that would be brutal, aggressive, against serenity. I was sharpening my next set of demands, on him, on myself.

“He was the reader for whom I wrote.”

Paul Michel gazed out into the blue void. I heard joyful shouting from the beach below. Paul Michel spoke again.

“He kept the secret. He never betrayed me.”

I could restrain myself no longer.

“But it wasn’t a secret. Anybody can see it. All that’s necessary is to read you both. Side by side, page after page.”

“I know. That’s the joke. They talk of influence, threads, preoccupations. They know nothing about the unspoken pact. That was absolutely clear between us. We knew each other’s secrets, weaknesses and fears, petit. The things that were hidden from the world. He wanted to write fiction. He fretted that he was not handsome. That the boys would not flock to him, court him. I lived that life for him, the life he envied and desired. I had no authority, no position. I was just a clever charismatic boy with the great gift of telling stories. He was always more famous than I was. He was the French cultural monument. I was never respectable. But I wrote for him, petit, only for him. The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated. It can never be proved to exist. But he was the man I loved most. He was the reader for whom I wrote.”

I was silent. I never told him that I had read his letters to Foucault. I think he knew that I had.

The last day we went back to the beach was the thirtieth of September. We decided to drive north on that Friday and to take our time,
stopping at Avignon or Orange so that we would be in Clermont by Sunday night. I decided to fight the next round in Sainte-Marie itself. I had made my decision, but I had said nothing to him. There was no question in my mind that I would ever return to England. Nothing in the whole world mattered more to me now than Paul Michel. That never changed. I can remember how naïve, how unsuspecting, how happy I was. I had won all the past battles, to find him, to set him free. I would win the next one. And the next. But I had never anticipated what he still had to say to me. He was particularly gentle with me all that day. I would turn to face him and find his grey eyes upon me, no longer hooded or cautious. There was no more disguise, no pretense. He was improvident with his love, indiscreet with his desire. I know that he was now telling me the truth, all the truth.

I hung my feet over the railings and watched the sand leak out of a hole in the toe of my gym shoes. I was aware of Paul Michel’s now dark sunburnt arm balancing the back of my chair. We watched the windsurfers cutting across the slow swell in the warm wind. It was late afternoon and the beach had begun to fill with a gaggle of working people. Some arrived wearing their office clothes, negotiating the steps with their plastic bags and city shoes. For the first time, I noticed that the huge concrete blocks protecting the entrance to the port were all shaped like coffins. The mark of the cross in faint, eroded black paint was upon each one. But they were gigantic, over fifteen feet long, six feet wide, an uncanny momento mori converted into a breakwater. I pointed them out to Paul Michel. He simply nodded.

“They’ve been there for years, petit. The harbor bar is built on a natural shelf of rock. The coffins are reinforcing the wall like a breakwater. If you climb behind them there’s a way down to a promontory on the rocks which has a wonderful sequence of pools. I used to sunbathe over there.”

I turned to look at him, squinting in the bright light.

“So you know the beach? I didn’t realize that you had been here before.”

He smiled slightly.

“You’re going a lovely color.” He stroked my back affectionately. “You’re like a polished walnut table. So am I. You’ll be able to sell me off as a restored antique.”

We watched some children below filtering sand into bottles and then pushing them out to sea.

“Any messages in the bottles?” asked Paul Michel.

“I don’t think so.”

“Because if there are, you must rush down and get them. That’s what my writing was. Messages in bottles.”

“And don’t you have any more messages to send?”

“No.”

I was silent for a moment. Then he went on as if I had spoken, asking and replying to his own question.

“And what is there left for a novelist to do when he has sent out all his messages? … Rien que mourir.”

I sat up enraged.

“I wish you wouldn’t fucking well talk like that. It gets on my nerves. You’re not mad. Or doomed. You’re getting well. You are well. You’ll write again. Even better.”

He looked at me, detached, amused. I felt like the bull, watching the pointed darts in the toreador’s hands.

“Have you ever loved a woman, petit?”

I was caught off guard, and as always, both evaded the question and told the truth.

“I’d never loved a man before. Until I read you.”

He smiled at the oddness of the verb in the context of our conversation.

“No? Well … I’m flattered. Let me tell you about something which happened to me. It has never ceased to haunt me. It was fifteen years ago. In August, around the time when you and I first came to the Midi. The beaches on the front were packed so I was looking for somewhere quieter to brood and to swim. I found an empty sheet of hot rock a long way away from everybody else. Out there, beyond the coffin breakwater. It was barren, empty, a sequence of sharp rocks and pools. I took notes, slept during the hottest part of the day. I always traveled alone, lived alone. I’ve never even shared a room with anyone else, not since childhood. It’s odd sometimes, hearing your breathing in the night, when I don’t sleep. You bring back the taste of my childhood, petit. I chose solitude and the deeper dimensions of that choice, which are inevitable and necessary. I condemned myself to isolation and loneliness. It was the only way I could work, it was my way of defending myself. I used to write in complete silence. I used to spend time listening to silence.

“Even here in the Midi I spent the days alone. But I had spent only one day meditating, like Prometheus chained to the rock, when my refuge was breached. I arrived early in the morning to find a boy, pale-skinned, scrawny, curly-haired, wearing nothing but jeans cut off to frayed shorts, investigating the rock pools. We stared at one another, both clearly resentful. He had already claimed that bank of rocks for his kingdom and had set up a pattern of traps in the pools, all of which were empty apart from a few weeds. We reset the nets and I made a few suggestions. He had huge eyes, an owl-like glare. I was fascinated by the intensity of this child, his halting French and his complete, staring fearlessness.

“An odd friendship flared up between us. He spent the morning playing in the rocks or diving for objects. He brought me back whatever he found. I shared my salami, bread and apples with him.
He vanished in search of his father at one o’clock, but came back later in the day to check his traps again. I like the honesty, the knowingness of children. He told me that he was nearly eleven years old, that unsettling time of questioning, awakening. He asked me what I was writing and spelled out whole sentences in my notebook, with uncanny concentration, fighting for their meanings. I remember him telling me how much he liked reading. Everything he had read sounded too adult for his age; strange, unsuitable texts, Zola, Flaubert, T. E. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde. He was pleased that we had read all the same things. I asked him which he had liked best of all the works he had read by Oscar Wilde. Unhesitating, he replied,
‘The Picture of Dorian Gray.
‘ Then he looked at me suspiciously. ‘Not everyone who’s beautiful is honest.’

“I tried very hard to keep a straight face. It would have been proof of my dishonesty if I had laughed.

“But I asked who gave him all his books. I discovered that he had no mother and that his father had never bought any books for children. He had simply let the child loose all along his shelves.

“He never told me his name. He never asked me mine.

“I began to hope that he would already be there when I climbed over the rocks in the mornings.

“He asked me why I was always alone. I told him that I was a writer. And that most writers worked alone. He asked me if I was a famous writer. I said that I was fairly famous and had won the Prix Goncourt. He asked if it was a very important prize and if I had a big house and gardens. I told him that I rented what used to be a servant’s room in the roof of a hotel. And how I remember the way he screwed up his nose at this. And asked me why I lived like an impoverished hermit if I was in fact a rich man. I realized then that I had assumed all the clichés of austerity.

“And I remember his reply. He said, ‘Why make do with the
bare minimum? Why live on so little? If I were you I’d want everything. I wouldn’t be satisfied with so little.’

“And I remember how strange this sounded, coming from the stillness of that bony, innocent face, the salt sticking to his short, wet curls. And I laughed and said, ‘You mean I should have a big house and car and a wife and children?’

“His face clouded and aged with contempt. He took on the aspect of a dwarf and answered with devastating, terrible seriousness. ‘No. I didn’t mean that. Anybody can have all those. You should want—all of it. All this.’ And he stretched out his arm, now reddening in the sun, high above his head, indicating the limitless, overarching blue above us, the forever retreating line of the sea, stretching away to Africa.

“I stared and laughed. He shook his finger at me like a goblin. Then recited the day’s lesson with ecclesiastical solemnity. ‘It seems to me that you live in a mean and lonely way. You should live on a grander scale. You should never put up with shit if you can get cake.’

“I was utterly charmed.

“And I know what you’re thinking, petit. That I fell in love with this child who had read about buggery, castration, the class struggle, violent perverted sex and had come out upon the last page, still in possession of a breathtaking, romantic innocence and an arrogance that insisted on his own unflinching understanding of the world. You think that I’m telling you about first love. You’re right. That boy was my first love. And I was his.

“He had his own ideas. He even had ideas about the kinds of books I should write. He looked at
La Maison d’Eté
and told me that it was far too short. I should aim at greater things.

“‘Huge ones. Much longer than the things you write now. They should be vast. Not perfect. Nothing’s perfect. If you try to make it look perfect then it’s only pretending.’

“I said that he was a literary megalomaniac. He didn’t know the word. He made me spell it out and explain all its dimensions. He made me write it down. He asked me to tell him the story of
Midi,
which I was writing then. I think I made it more exciting in the retelling. He asked me why the characters could never be happy, never united. I explained, without hesitation, and without thinking, that it was an allegory of homosexuality. It was then that he amazed me.