The Art of Sleeping Alone by Sophie Fontanel

Author:Sophie Fontanel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

One December 25, I was reading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Night Flight in the emergency room of the Hôpital Cochin. I’d stepped on a pin, the tip of which had broken off in my foot, and they were going to remove it. I was waiting, and about halfway through the book. The orthopedist had come into my cubicle with two female students; he had verified the position of the foreign body on the X-ray and had checked the instruments laid out on the medical instrument cart. After slipping on his surgical gloves, he’d been summoned to a more serious case. He’d asked where I would put my pain on a scale of one to ten. I’d said two, not wanting to be a burden.

The cubicle door was open. Out in the corridor, worried people were searching for other worried people. They’d ask who I was. They’d go away disappointed. A male practical nurse wearing a Santa Claus cap tried to escort a street bum back to the reception desk, telling him, “No, I can’t possibly give you any ninety-proof alcohol. No, not even a swallow, old boy.” He had his hand flat against the bum’s back, and with each step they took, the little bell on the cap jingled. A woman with a bandaged head, lying on a stretcher next to a wall, had just been brought in and wanted some water. A hospital attendant, a young woman from Martinique, kept telling her that a doctor would have to decide. The woman would reply that she was a patient. The attendant would answer that patients had to be patient and that that was how you could tell they were patients. A man farther off was screaming. Perhaps the orthopedist was doing something to him before taking care of me.

In Night Flight, the pilot, Fabien, is exhausted from battling a storm. The shifting winds keep his hands clenched on the stick. Where the weather report had predicted smooth flying, he sees nothing but roiling sky with no horizon. The copilot keeps asking if they’re in trouble. They’ve lost radio contact with the control tower. Fabien is surrounded by difficulties. The clouds are massing together. Fabien has never wanted to plunge into the darkness; he’s tough, but he’s at the end of his tether. Through a sudden gap in the clouds he catches a glimpse of starry sky and tells himself he can make it through. And he climbs. He flies higher, up over the clouds.

Late that night, the orthopedist and the two students appear again: it’s my turn. One of the young women notices Night Flight : “I read it in school.” I say, explaining that I’ve just finished it, that it was marvelous: “The pilot escapes from the storm.” She corrects me: “Yes, but he dies.” Me: “Oh really? He dies?” I hadn’t realized. Her: “Yes, of course, he hasn’t enough fuel left to get down.” The orthopedist isn’t happy with the necrosis where the needle went in. My body is fighting to expel a foreign body.

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