Jean-Dominique Bauby: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Summer is nearly over. The nights grow chilly, and once again I am snuggled beneath thick blue blankets stamped “Paris Hospitals.” Each day brings its assortment of familiar faces: linen maid, dentist, mailman, a nurse who has just had a grandson, and the man who last June broke his finger on a bed rail. I rediscover old landmarks, old habits; and this, the start of my first autumn season at the hospital, has made one thing very plain—I have indeed begun a new life, and that life is here, in this bed, that wheelchair, and those corridors. Nowhere else.

September means the end of vacations, it means back to school and to work, and here at the hospital it's time to start a new season. I've made some progress. I can now grunt the little song about the kangaroo, musical testimony to my progress in speech therapy:

The Kangaroo escaped the zoo.

“Goodbye zoo!” cried Kangaroo…

Cleared the wall with one clean jump,

Leaped across with a great big thump…

But here at Berck I hear only the faintest echoes of the outside world's collective return to work and responsibility…its return to the world of literature and journalism and school, to the workaday world of Paris. I shall hear more about it soon, when my friends start journeying back to Berck with their summer's worth of news. It seems that Théophile now goes around in sneakers whose heels light up every time he takes a step. You can follow him in the dark. Meanwhile, I am savoring this last week of August with a heart that is almost light, because for the first time in a long while I don't have that awful sense of a countdown—the feeling triggered at the beginning of a vacation that inevitably spoils a good part of it.

Her elbows on the small mobile Formica table that serves as her desk, Claude is reading out these pages we have patiently extracted from the void every afternoon for the last two months. Some pages I am pleased to see again. Others are disappointing. Do they add up to a book? As I listen to Claude, I study her dark hair, her very pale cheeks, which sun and wind have scarcely touched with pink, the long bluish veins on her hands, and the articles scattered about the room. I will put them in my mind's scrapbook as reminders of a summer of hard work. The big blue notebook whose pages she fills with her neat, formal handwriting; the pencil case like the ones schoolchildren use, full of spare ballpoints; the heap of paper napkins ready for my worst coughing-and-spitting fits; and the red raffia purse in which she periodically rummages for coins for the coffee machine. Her purse is half open, and I see a hotel room key, a metro ticket, and a hundred-franc note folded in four, like objects brought back by a space probe sent to earth to study how earthlings live, travel, and trade with one another. The sight leaves me pensive and confused. Does the cosmos contain keys for opening up my diving bell? A subway line with no terminus? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom back? We must keep looking. I'll be off now.

Berck-Plage, July—August 1996