The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly

Cinecittà

THE NAVAL HOSPITAL must be a striking sight to the noisy microlight aircraft which buzz the Berck shoreline at an altitude of 300 feet. With its massive, over-elaborate silhouette and the high red-brick walls typical of northern France, it seems to have foundered on the sands between the town and the grey waters of the Channel. On the façade of its most imposing annexe, as on the fronts of schools and public baths in the French capital, are the words ‘City of Paris’. Created during the Second Empire for sick children in need of a climate healthier than that of Paris’s hospitals, the annexe has retained its extraterritorial status.

For while cold reality places us in the Pas-de-Calais region, as far as the medical bureaucracy is concerned we are still on the banks of the Seine.

Linked by endless corridors, the hospital buildings form an authentic maze, and one routinely runs into patients from Menard hopelessly lost in Sorrel – wards named after eminent surgeons. Like children who have wandered from their mothers, these unfortunates mutter ‘I’m lost!’ as they wobble about on their crutches. Being what the stretcher-bearers call a ‘Sorrel’, I am more or less at home here, but the same cannot be said of newcomers. I could try to signal with my eyes whenever my wheelchair is pushed in the wrong direction, but I have taken to looking stonily ahead. There is always the chance that we will stumble upon some unknown corner of the hospital, see new faces, or catch a whiff of cooking as we pass. It was in this way that I came upon the lighthouse, on one of the very first expeditions in my wheelchair, shortly after swimming up from the mists of coma. As we emerged from a lift, having got off on the wrong floor, I saw it: tall, robust and reassuring, in red and white stripes that reminded me of a rugby shirt. I at once placed myself under the protection of this brotherly symbol, guardian not just of sailors but of the sick – those castaways on the shores of loneliness.

The lighthouse and I remain in constant touch, and I often call on it by having myself wheeled to Cinecittà, a region essential to my imaginary geography of the hospital. Cinecittà is the perpetually deserted terrace of Sorrel ward. Facing south, its vast balconies open on to a landscape heavy with the poetic and slightly offbeat charm of a movie set. The suburbs of Berck look like a model train layout. A handful of buildings at the foot of the sand-dunes give the illusion of a Western ghost town. As for the sea. it foams such an incandescent white that it might be the product of the special-effects department.

I could spend whole days at Cinecittà. There, I am the greatest director of all time. On the town side, I reshoot the close-ups for Touch of Evil. Down at the beach I rework the dolly shots for Stagecoach and offshore I recreate the storm rocking the smugglers of Moonfleet. Or else I dissolve into the landscape and there is nothing more to connect me to the world than a friendly hand stroking my numb fingers. I am Pierrot le Fou, my face smeared blue and a garland of dynamite-sticks entwining my head. The temptation to strike a match drifts by, like a cloud. And then it is the hour when the day fades, when the last train sets out for Paris, when I have to return to my room. I wait for winter. Warmly wrapped up, we can linger here until nightfall, watch the sun set and the lighthouse take up the torch, its hope-filled beams sweeping the horizon.

Tourists

AFTER DEVOTING ITSELF to the care of young victims of a tuberculosis epidemic after the Second World War, Berck gradually shifted its focus away from children. Nowadays it tends to concentrate more on the sufferings of the aged, on the inevitable breakdown of body and mind; but geriatrics is only one part of the picture I must paint to give an accurate idea of the hospital’s denizens. In one section are a score of comatose patients, poor devils at death’s door, plunged into endless night. They never leave their rooms. Yet everyone knows they are there, and they weigh strangely on our collective awareness, almost like a guilty conscience. In another wing, next door to the colony of elderly and enfeebled, is a cluster of morbidly obese patients whose substantial dimensions the doctors hope to whittle down. Elsewhere, a battalion of cripples forms the bulk of the inmates. Survivros of sport, of the highway, and of every possible and imaginable kind of domestic accident, these patients remain at Berck for as long as it takes to get their shattered limbs working again. I call them ‘tourists’.

To complete the picture a niche must be found for us, broken-winged birds, voiceless parrots, ravens of doom who have made our nest in a dead-end corridor of the neurology department. Of course we spoil the view. I am all too conscious of the slight uneasiness we cause as, rigid and mute, we make our way through a group of more fortunate patients.

The best place to observe this phenomenon is the rehabilitation room, where all patients undergoing physiotherapy are congregated. Garish and noisy, a hubbub of splints, artificial limbs and harnesses of varying complexity, it is an authentic Court of Miracles. Here we see a young man with an earring, who suffered multiple fractures in a motorbike accident; a grandmother in a fluorescent nightgown, who is learning to walk after a fall from a stepladder; and a homeless man whose foot was somehow amputated by a subway train. Lined up like a row of onions, this human throng waves arms and legs under minimal supervision, while I lie tethered to an inclined board which is slowly raised to a vertical position. Every morning I spend half an hour suspended this way, frozen to attention in a posture that must evoke the appearance of the Commendatore’s statue in the last act of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Below, people laugh, joke, call out. I would like to be a part of all this hilarity, but as soon as I direct my one eye towards them, the young man, the grandmother and the homeless man turn away, feeling the sudden need to study the ceiling smoke-detector. The ‘tourists’ must be very worried about fire.

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