Jean-Dominique Bauby - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Far from such din, when blessed silence returns, I can listen to the butterflies that flutter inside my head. To hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wingbeats are barely audible. Loud breathing is enough to drown them out. This is astonishing: my hearing does not improve, yet I hear them better and better. I must have butterfly hearing.

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.

I loved to travel. Fortunately I have stored away enough pictures, smells, and sensations over the course of the years to enable me to leave Berck far behind on days when a leaden sky rules out any chance of going outdoors. They are strange wanderings: The sour smell of a New York bar. The odor of poverty in a Rangoon market. Little bits of the world. The white icy nights of Saint Petersburg or the unbelievably molten sun at Furnace Creek in the Nevada desert. This week has been somewhat special. At dawn every day I have flown to Hong Kong, where there is a conference for the international editions of my magazine. Note that I still say “my magazine,” despite the misleading nature of the words, as if that possessive pronoun were one of the fragile threads linking me to the living world.

In Hong Kong, I have a little trouble finding my way, for unlike many of my other destinations, this city is one I have never actually visited. Every time the opportunity arose, a malicious fate kept me from my goal. When I did not fall sick on the eve of a departure, I lost my passport, or a reporting assignment sent me elsewhere. In short, chance always turned me back at the border. Once, I gave up my seat for Jean-Paul K., who at that time had not yet been taken hostage by the Hezbollah. He would spend several years in a darkened Beirut dungeon, endlessly reciting the wines of the Bordeaux Classification of 1855 to keep from going mad. On his return from Hong Kong, he brought me a cordless phone, at that time the very latest thing. I remember his laughing eyes behind their round glasses. I was very fond of Jean-Paul, but I never saw him again after his release from Beirut. I suppose I was ashamed of playing at being editor in chief in the frothy world of fashion magazines while he wrestled with life on its most brutal terms. Now I am the prisoner and he the free man. And since I don't have the châteaux of the Médoc region at my fingertips, I have had to choose another kind of litany to fill my empty hours: I count the countries where my magazine is published. There are already twenty-eight members in this United Nations of international glamour.

And where are they now, all my beautiful colleagues who worked so tirelessly as ambassadors of French style? They would stand in the conference rooms of international hotels, fielding a daylong barrage of questions in Chinese, English, Thai, Portuguese, or Czech, as they tried to answer that most metaphysical of questions: “Who is the typical Elle woman?” I picture them now wandering about Hong Kong, walking down neon-bright streets where pocket computers and noodle soup are sold, trotting behind the eternal bow tie of our chief executive officer as he leads his troops to the charge. Part Cyrano, part Bonaparte, he slows his pace only before the highest skyscrapers, and then only to scowl at them as though about to devour them.

Which way, General? Should we take the hydrofoil and gamble away a handful of dollars in Macao, or should we repair to the Felix Bar in the Peninsula Hotel, decorated by the French designer Philippe S.? Vanity impels me toward the second option. The fact is, my likeness adorns the back of a chair in that lofty luxurious watering hole. I, who hate to have my photo taken, was one of dozens of Parisians whose portraits Philippe S. incorporated into the decor. That photo, of course, was taken some weeks before fate turned me into a scarecrow. I have no idea whether my chair is more or less popular than the others, but if you go there, for God's sake don't tell the barman what happened to me. They say that all Chinese are superstitious, and if my true fate were known, not one of those charming little Chinese miniskirts would ever dare sit on me again.