Disturbance by Philippe Lançon

Disturbance by Philippe Lançon

Author:Philippe Lançon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2019-10-07T16:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 13

STATIC CALENDAR

Now that the VAC has been presented, here’s part of the calendar corresponding to our common life: the gastric feeding tube joined us the day after the installation of the VAC to form a delicate ménage à trois. This calendar is not a diary, because it is reconstituted. I wrote numerous e-mails at that time. I noted down facts, first of all practical details, physical phenomena, but I didn’t keep a diary. The only diary consists of the account I gave my visitors, with a slight delay, when I was able to speak, and when I was not able to speak, of my questions and remarks made using the whiteboard. I exhausted what I spoke about, I erased what I wrote. I resembled the artist Marcel Broodthaers in the little silent film in black and white that he made in 1969 entitled La Pluie (Rain). Broodthaers is seated behind a box on which there is an inkwell and a blank sheet of paper. He’s writing something or other with great earnestness, and he’s writing it in a pouring rain. The sentences are immediately washed away, but Broodthaers calmly continues writing others, which are immediately erased. It’s one of my favorite films.

The death of a grandmother continued to determine the rhythm of my descents to the operating room. I refer not to my maternal grandmother, who was born a peasant in Berry and had died twenty years earlier, thin and as light as a doll, six months after fainting in my arms, at her home, like a romantic heroine, and thus undernourished. Nor do I refer to my paternal grandmother, who was born in Rio, the daughter of a more or less unscrupulous businessman-adventurer and mythomaniac. She had died thirty years earlier of a heart attack suffered as she sat at her dining table, alone, and her deformed face, which had been reworked twenty times following an accident, had accompanied me as a scout and a competitor ever since January 7. Nor do I refer to my third grandmother, who was born into a bourgeois family in northern France, the young wife of my great-grandfather. She died the same year as my paternal grandmother and had, as I said above, an ironclad religious faith. Each of these grandmothers visited me during these months in the hospital, depending on her mood or on my vagaries. I consulted them regarding what they had experienced and what they were. Sometimes they answered me. They belonged to a noiseless world, in that room they were closer to me than most of my contemporaries. Every day that went by brought me closer to their smiles, their smells, their eaux de cologne, their gray and white, neatly-combed hair, plucked eyebrows, their century, their minuscule lives. Like me, they lived in a dense universe with rarefied air, where the little that entered was subjected to multiple procedures and had to obey habits. But the one who prepared me for the operating room was once again the narrator’s grandmother in Proust’s Recherche.



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