Roberto Bolano: Monsieur Pain

“You can succeed where the doctors have failed, with acupuncture.”

She put her hand on mine; I felt a faint tremor; for a moment, Madame Reynaud’s fingers seemed transparent.

“Believe me, you are the only person who can save my friend’s husband, but we must hurry; if you accept, you will have to see Vallejo tomorrow.”

“How could I refuse?” I said, not daring to look at her.

“I knew it!” Her cry caught the attention of the people sitting around us: “Oh, Pierre, I believe in you, I really do!”

“What should I do first?” I asked, cutting her off, and noticing in the mirror that my face was flushed, with pleasure perhaps, while over by the till, two tall, thin, hollow-cheeked individuals dressed in black were engaged in conversation with the waiter, as if they were settling their bill or confiding in him.

“I don’t know, Pierre, I need to speak with Georgette, with Madame Vallejo,” she said, “and arrange a time tomorrow, as early as possible.”

“I quite agree. The sooner I can gauge the condition of your friend’s husband, the better,” I declared.

The waiter and the two men in black turned to look at us. The men, who were extremely pale, nodded their heads in unison, as if to signal assent. I was momentarily under the strange impression that those men, the pair of them, were one of the possible incarnations of pity. I wondered if Madame Reynaud might know them.

“They’re watching us.”

“Who?”

“Over there, next to the till — don’t look straight away — two men in black. They look like a pair of angels, don’t you think?”

“Nonsense! Truly, Pierre! Angels are young and rosy-cheeked. Those poor men look like they just came out of jail.”

“Or out of a cellar.”

“Although they’re probably just tired office workers, or ill, perhaps.”

“True. Do you know them?”

“No, of course not,” she replied, her eyes fixed on my tie-pin.

She seemed to have shrunk.

Six months earlier, in spite of my efforts, Madame Reynaud’s husband had died, at the age of twenty-four. Exactly a week before that, Madame Reynaud had appeared at the door of my apartment with a brief letter of introduction from old Monsieur Rivette, a mutual friend, and from the very start I had known that there was nothing I could do; the doctors had long since declared the patient beyond recovery, and it was clear that only someone as young and as desperate as Madame Reynaud could have persisted in the hope that they were mistaken. Breaking with my customary practice, and, I must admit, somewhat wearily, I acceded to her pleas. That day I visited Monsieur Reynaud, who was lying on his deathbed at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, which I had been visiting for some years already, since a number of doctors there, who held me in high regard, would call from time to time upon my elementary knowledge of acupuncture to aid them in various courses of treatment.

Monsieur Reynaud had a swarthy complexion and dark green eyes — a southerner, it seemed — and was gracefully pretending to be unaware of his state of health. I took to him immediately: he was handsome and awkward and one only had to spend five minutes in his company to understand his wife’s devotion.

“They’re all crazy if they think I’m going to recover,” he confessed to me the second night, after I had recounted certain trivial details of my daily routine, to distract him, and perhaps to create a space of mutual trust.

“Don’t think like that.” I smiled.

“You don’t understand, Pain.” His face was slightly turned toward me and it shone, but his eyes were searching for something that I couldn’t see.

I stayed with him until he died.

“You shouldn’t blame yourself, we all knew it was inevitable,” said Doctor Durand that night, trying to console me.

From then on I began seeing Madame Reynaud every two or three weeks. Was it friendship? I don’t know. Perhaps it was something more, although when we met it was usually just to go for a walk and pass the time chatting about this and that, never broaching our feelings or political convictions, or at least not hers; I did almost all the talking, and much to my regret the conversations tended to revolve around my already somewhat distant youth, the Great War, in which I had fought, my interest in the occult sciences, and our common love of cats. It is true that we also went to the movies, always at my request, or took refuge in restaurants, wherever our steps had led us, and generally sat there in silence. A silence that comforted both of us. There was never the slightest allusion to matters of an intimate or emotional nature, except perhaps on those occasions when Madame Reynaud quite innocently took me into her confidence and spoke of her late husband. And finally, we never visited each other at home (except for that first time, when Madame Reynaud came to find me with the letter of introduction from Monsieur Rivette), although we had each other’s addresses.

Unhurriedly, as I walked home, I began to recompose Monsieur Reynaud’s fever-stricken face, while meditating on the hiccups afflicting Monsieur Vallejo, with whom I was still unacquainted. A recurring image, it occurred to me: during the preceding months I had found it difficult not to associate illness and even beauty with the memory of Monsieur Reynaud. It was almost midnight. After leaving Madame Reynaud I had spent the remainder of the evening in a café in Passy with an old acquaintance, a retired tailor who devoted the better part of his time to the study of mesmerism. The rain had stopped. It struck me that the deep secrets of a condition are often revealed by the person who brings us into contact with the patient. The intermediary as a kind of X-ray. As a theory, it was, of course, highly speculative, and I gave it little credence. What had Madame Reynaud revealed about my future patient? Nothing. All she had revealed was her own morbid curiosity about my competence. That is, she wanted to see me cure someone, finally, and so justify the trust she had placed in me. My role and mission when I first appeared in her life had been to save her husband, and I had failed, but now I had a second chance, with her friend’s husband; I had to save him, and so testify to a higher reality, a logical order, in which we could continue to be who we were. And perhaps come to recognize one another, finally, and having attained that recognition, change, and, in my case, aspire to happiness. (A reasonable happiness, akin to care and trust.) And yet there was something amiss, something I could sense in Madame Reynaud’s silences and the state of my own sensory apparatus, which was on the alert, although I couldn’t tell why. An extraordinary malaise was lurking in the most trivial details. I believe I sensed the danger, but had no notion of its nature.

Suddenly, as I turned the corner into my street, which is normally deserted at that time of night, my fears were vindicated by the sound of quickening steps. I walked on a few yards before stopping, in shock. I am being followed, I realized, with a blend of certitude and astonishment, like a soldier discovering that gangrene has taken hold of his leg. Was it possible?

Cautiously, I glanced over my shoulder; two men were walking abreast behind me at a distance of about twenty yards, so close together they seemed to be Siamese twins, wearing enormous broad-brimmed hats, their black silhouettes standing out against the light shed by a lamp on the other side of the street.

I knew that as they walked, they were keeping their eyes fixed on me. So intense was the sensation of being observed that it triggered a physical pain, a pain that turned me into someone else. I covered the remaining distance to my apartment building as quickly as I could. I can’t remember hearing them run, which leads me to think that my reaction took them by surprise. Once inside, having managed to close the hall door, I found that I was sweating profusely. With my back against the door, I thought: Perspiration is an unequivocal sign of good health. Later I felt deeply ashamed; I must have run, I thought, and the men must have supposed, with good reason, that I was running from them, and so on. Just as this bout of self-reproach, which had only served to humiliate me, was coming to an end, just as I was catching my breath in preparation for the steep climb up to the fifth floor, I heard two voices on the other side of the door, more or less at ear level, jabbering in Spanish.