Mister Memory Page 6

  Then, Marcel stopped remembering.

  He opened his eyes, and saw a man standing next to him on stage, holding both blindfolds in his hands. The man wore Chinese costume and then he realised that it was Bishop, the illusionist, who sometimes dressed as a Chinese coolie for part of his act for some ridiculous reason, although Marcel had no idea what that might be. And standing on the other side of him was a lady with a puzzled look on her face. She giggled.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ hissed Bishop, who then turned to the audience with the widest of false smiles. ‘Lost in reverie, no doubt.’

  He got a laugh, of sorts, then hissed in Marcel’s direction. ‘You’ve been standing there for five minutes. Finish your damn act.’

  Marcel took a look at Bishop, then at the lady next to him, and remembered what he was supposed to be doing.

  He took one look at the audience, then mumbled, ‘The third champagne glass from the left on the table by the alcove.’

  He walked off stage, followed by uncertain laughter and some genuine applause, for that was indeed the object that the lady had indicated.

  Ondine tore him to pieces later that night.

  ‘You looked like an idiot!’ she said. ‘You are an idiot! What the hell were you thinking?’

  Thinking? thought Marcel. What was I thinking? I was thinking that the husband of the lady who swept the church in Étoges was sixty-nine years old when he died, which made him the eighth oldest man to be buried in that graveyard though there were many women there who were much older, that—

  But Ondine was not done shouting at him.

  ‘I felt like such a fool. When they told me what you’d done. If Bishop hadn’t come to rescue you, you’d probably still be standing there. What were you doing? What goes on in that head of yours when you stare into space?’

  And so on, and so on, and Marcel listened to it all.

  He remembers it all now again as he sits in his cell with Dr Morel who is getting tired sitting on a small wooden stool, asking questions that provoke no response. Marcel, meanwhile, remembers the cabaret. He remembers it in intricate detail, in perfection, in fact, watching it all in the cinematograph that is his mind, playing things this way, that way, forward and backward, left to right and back again and each and every time feeling everything he felt at the time, as if it were happening to him over again, for real.

  He worked many nights, Ondine worked almost every night, and very often he would go to the cabaret even if he was not working, to see the show. He watched the girls dance, and felt proud that one of them was his wife, though he found them all attractive, and they were all very pleasing to look at, for a time, until things began to change. He remembers when he started to feel less than comfortable about the attractiveness of the dancers. He arrived in the club one afternoon, looking for Ondine, and found the girls in rehearsal. Normally this would have aroused no great interest from the waiting staff, but Marcel found them standing around, the men anyway, not even pretending to work, but gazing happily at the dancers. Of the eight of them, every other girl was topless, save for a string of fake jewels dangling between their breasts. They finished a number and the piano player crunched to a halt. Chardon shouted a few insulting remarks at the girls; mostly encouraging them to smile.

  ‘If you’re going to show us, then look happy about it. That’s what they want. They want to think you want to show them your attributes. It’s quite simple, ladies, really, it’s very simple.’

  One of the girls whined back, ‘It might help if that lot weren’t ogling us.’ Covering herself with an arm, she jabbed a finger at the staff, who cheered in return.

  ‘Nonsense,’ cried Chardon. ‘You have to get used to it, and so do they. By tonight I want them selling beer, not gazing at what God gave you.’

  And he here turned and scowled at his staff, who nodded, sheepishly.

  Then the pianist struck up again, and the girls went through the number one final time, in which half of them started with thin black blouses of which they somehow became divested, and Marcel watched with mounting unease as the dancing finished and one of the topless girls, his wife Ondine, made her way over to him, half-heartedly covering her breasts as she did so.

  She kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Hello, husband,’ she said.

  Marcel didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Something the matter?’ asked Ondine.

  ‘You . . .’ he began, then stopped. ‘You were . . . I mean, you shouldn’t . . .’

  ‘That?’

  Ondine waved her hand back at the stage.

  ‘It’s nothing. Relax. It’s just what we have to do. Chardon’s right. All the other cabarets have nudes. Some way or other. We’re behind the times, he says. He says we’re losing customers. We have to do something.’

  ‘But you don’t,’ said Marcel. ‘Half of you are still covered up. You could be one of those.’

  ‘I could be,’ shrugged Ondine. ‘But I don’t care, and some of the other girls really do. Mind you, Chardon says we’ll all have to do it in the end, just to keep up with the Moulin Rouge. ’

  ‘This place is nothing like the Moulin Rouge. Why do we have to—’

  ‘Listen, just forget it, will you? I’m doing it and that’s all there is to it. We have to make ends meet, right? So get used to it.’

  But Marcel did not get used to it, and with each successive night, there were more memories about which he could feel uneasy: the allure of the dancers’ breasts, the jingling jewels, the thump of the piano, the eager faces, the leering gaze, the wide eyes of the hungry men in the crowd of the cabaret, night after night after night.

  PUNISHMENT

  One day towards the end of the month finds Inspector Petit leaving the archive room a little earlier than he should. He’s been cataloguing and collating for two weeks now and has barely managed to reassemble a couple of files on the activities of the subversives before 1870. These were files that were lost in the fires set by the Communards themselves, which was more than they could have hoped for, or even probably intended, in those fervent days of 1871. The only respite for Petit is when, under the pretext of interviewing some witness who is most likely now long since dead, he can excuse himself from his near-Sisyphean task and waste his time on the streets instead.

  It being summertime, Paris is well dressed, the trees in the avenues provide pleasant shade from the sun, and cafés spill out across the pavements in every street.

  Around five o’clock, Petit strolls down the Rue Poliveau, heading towards the hospital of Salpêtrière. He has been unable to let go of what he was told to let go of, and finds himself in an awkward position. He is young, and he has principles and, above all else, he has a strong sense of justice. He also knows that advancement in the Sûreté is procured not merely by merit, but by favour too. If he upsets the wrong people . . . Well, that goes without saying. But something, someone, has not let him rest, not accept the thought that a freely confessed murderer should be let off. And especially not just because he claims to have lost his sanity.

  Petit isn’t even sure why he’s decided to visit Després, but dimly he’s aware that perhaps he could indeed let the whole thing go if he saw this so-called insanity for himself. He might even be able to convince that voice inside him that it would be acceptable to let it go too, though of that he is less sure. The only way to know is to try it, and so that is what he does.

  On arrival at Salpêtrière, he’s immediately impressed with the hospital, with its physical splendour, but he doesn’t realise the impact of that upon him. Were he a touch more self-aware, he might have noticed that he stood a little straighter as he approached the entrance gate, and that he is already taking the concept of madness a little more seriously than he was five minutes previously.

  He’s also impressed with the efficiency of the place. At first, there seems a little hesitance when he asks to see a . . . what’s the word? He struggles for a moment until the gentleman in the kiosk at the massive stone en
trance suggests one for him: patient.

  ‘Yes, a patient. Marcel Després.’

  The upright gentleman in the kiosk starts to mention matters of visiting times and appointments, but once Petit produces his Sûreté identification card, there is a change of attitude.

  The man picks up a telephone at his right hand, something that impresses Petit even more, for despite the continued efforts of the last two chefs of the Sûreté, even they do not have a telephone system as yet. Former Chef Macé even resigned over the issue, but the Préfecture had been unmoved by this protest; a budget was a budget, and the police budget was an especially burdensome one already.

  The gentleman in the kiosk speaks to unseen parties, and in no time at all a warder arrives and conducts Petit across the grounds of the hospital a distance of a few hundred metres, unlocks the door of a cell, and invites Petit to enter. All this has deeply impressed Petit on an unconscious level. Unbeknown to him as we have said, he is already reappraising his thoughts and beliefs about the hospital, its function and its inmates.

  He has heard some wild stories about the place, but the elegance and opulence of the architecture alone has started a line of reasoning in his head. For important people to think it worthwhile to spend vast sums of money building such a place, and to employ the country’s best doctors in the search of cures for illnesses that defy easy classification, can surely only mean that these illnesses are real and present, despite his previous thoughts to the contrary. Like some Arcadian stables of stone in the grounds of a pleasure palace, the cells in which these prisoners, or patients, rest bring to Petit’s mind such words as vital, solid, commendable.

  The warder indicates that he will wait outside, and bids Petit to enter, which he does, but not before appraising his surroundings one more time. He can hear some shouts and wails from a distance that certainly speak of loosened minds and plunging souls, but the warder doesn’t bat an eyelid, so Petit decides that neither should he.

  He ducks through the doorway of the cell, mindful of the lintel for once, and it takes a moment for his eyes to adjust from the summer brightness to the crepuscular gloom in the cell. Then he sees him, his murderer, sitting on the narrow bed, staring straight ahead of him.

  Now that he is here, he realises he doesn’t know where to begin, in fact, he is not sure he has anything to say at all. But the warder is just outside, and presumably within earshot, so it won’t do to stand and be dumb. He pulls out a notebook from his pocket, and a pencil. It might be good to take notes, he thinks.

  ‘Monsieur Després? Marcel Després?’

  The man on the bed does not seem to have heard. Petit is struck by a sudden sensation that it is as if he is not there, that he is invisible and inaudible, because this is no mere act of ignoring. Després’s utter lack of reaction to his name makes it hard to feel they are existing in the same time or space.

  He shifts his voice up a notch or two.

  ‘Marcel Després?’

  ‘He can’t hear you,’ says a voice at the door that makes Petit start and spin around, during which he manages to kick a small wooden stool across the length of the cell.

  Petit sees a doctor staring at him.

  ‘May I ask what you’re doing here?’ Behind him stands the warder, with unblinking gaze as ever, and a short man carrying the hefty paraphernalia of photography equipment, which he sets down just outside the cell door.

  Petit hesitates.

  ‘I’m . . . Yes, I . . . My name is Petit, I am an inspector with the Sûreté. This man is . . . I mean to say, I have been assigned to the case of Marcel Després in respect to the murder of—’

  ‘Yes. I know who you are. I just received word of your visit. But as for your case, I would say that the case of Marcel Després is my concern now, and no longer that of anyone at the Sûreté, since his incarceration within the walls of my hospital.’

  ‘Your hospital?’

  ‘I perhaps overstate my case. I am Dr Morel, Assistant Chief Alienist of Salpêtrière. Monsieur Després is in my charge.’

  ‘A pleasure,’ says the young inspector, from well-formed habit, and old Morel responds in kind. They shake hands, without pleasure.

  Dr Morel studies Marcel for a moment.

  ‘Much the same . . .’

  He turns back to Petit.

  ‘We still have not satisfied ourselves with a conclusion to the question of what you’re doing here. Inspector.’

  Petit knows he is already on shaky ground, and decides he needs to repair the damage if he is to get anywhere.

  ‘Doctor, forgive the intrusion. While this matter is of course now primarily—’

  ‘Entirely.’

  ‘Certainly one of your concerns here at the hospital, nevertheless my duties as the officer assigned by the examining magistrate require me to have conducted an interview with the accused for the purposes of—’

  ‘Look here, my boy,’ begins Morel, and Petit wishes fervently that his elders would stop referring to him in this way. ‘You are speaking nonsense. Don’t think for one minute that you can bamboozle me with police jargon. I am probably more aware of the protocol in this case than you are, given that I have been assistant chief physician of this hospital for fifteen years, and you appear to me to be no more than sixteen years old. No doubt you will assure me that you have seen at least five more birthdays than that, but from where I’m standing I would think you should know better than to attempt to pull the wool over my eyes. The examining magistrate can have said no such thing to you because the moment a prisoner of yours becomes a patient of ours, a decision made by the Préfecture, you or he have absolutely no jurisdiction over his or her person. You have no need, and, I firmly add, no right to interview our patient, and what he may or may not have done ceased to be any concern of the police the moment he stepped foot in our little establishment. I trust I am making myself clear?’

  Petit assures the doctor that he is making himself very clear, yet the doctor is not done.

  ‘So, I say again. What is it that you want here?’

  Petit throws his arms to the side, narrowly avoiding bashing his knuckles on the doorframe.

  ‘I just wanted to see him.’

  Morel stares at him for a decently long time.

  ‘Good answer,’ he says. ‘I want to see him myself. Here he sits, and yet he may as well be a stone in the street for all the life that’s in him.’

  Morel waves at the man outside with the camera.

  ‘Shall we do him now? We may as well. Inspector, would you care to see his photograph being made? You know, you’ve surely heard, that is, about his memory?’

  ‘Some trick of his, I gather. Some club in Pigalle.’

  ‘No!’ says Morel with the zealousness of the convert. ‘No trick.’

  Petit raises an eyebrow. The warder, meanwhile, with the help of Morel, pulls Marcel to his feet and then shuffles him out of the cell to the little wooden seat that protrudes from the wall outside the door. Moving him on to the bench, Marcel sits in the dappled sunlight, while the photographer, a rather stained-looking man in his fifties, fusses about with his stuff.

  ‘You mean,’ says Petit, ‘he really can remember lots of things?’

  That appears to be the most insulting thing that Petit has said or done since he arrived in the hospital.

  ‘Lots of things?’ cries Morel. ‘No, he cannot just remember lots of things! He can remember everything! Or so I believe. At least, that is what I would like to prove. But it’s been hard going. This state you see before you now is his usual condition. I have had a few hours, here and there, where he becomes responsive, and then I have begun my work! And so far, I find that there are . . .’

  And here Morel pauses dramatically.

  ‘. . . no limits to his memory, whatsoever.’

  Petit looks at Marcel, who’s squinting slightly but otherwise shows no sign of life.

  ‘Is that unusual?’ Petit says, searching for something to say in return to the doctor.

&nb
sp; Morel seems almost to pass out.

  ‘Unusual? Do you have any idea what you’re saying? Unusual? Just think of it, for a moment, if you would. How good is your memory? You are a policeman – no doubt you think your memory is rather good. You must use it a lot in the course of your work. And you probably can remember a few other things too, like your parents’ birthdays and the address where you grew up. And you probably have wondered from time to time how it is that you can be walking along the boulevard one day and for no particular reason into your head arrives a clear and complete memory from one day when you were eleven and went to the beach and you can remember exactly what your mother said when you splashed water on her dress and what you had for lunch and so on and so on.