So he would have to seek an escape route via the mental illnesses. The booklet distinguished madness which was visible to the naked eye: torsion of limbs, loud delirium, erratic shouting, dribbling, incontinence (in such circumstances there was no doubt as to illness), from invisible mental illness, which was very difficult to detect. Such cases required particular attention; behind such a madman one would often find concealed a fraud. Thus, it was appropriate to observe the subject when he considered himself alone, away from prying eyes. For this, it was necessary to have him at one’s disposal for some considerable time in order to make a definitive assessment, to provoke him into conversation, to probe him with varied lines of questioning, to ask him numerous and hurried questions pertaining to different subject matter so as not to allow him the opportunity to prepare his responses. And if any uncertainty as to the diagnosis remained in the mind of the military doctor, this latter should not hesitate to employ vigorous and painful means, provided however that such means not be excessively cruel.
Auguste could not for a minute see himself launching into such theatrics, especially where it would involve his family, who would be summoned for interrogation as to his nervous crises. Just the thought of his brother Ferdinand in full flight before the recruitment board explaining what Ferdinand was already in the habit of calling his leftist vegetarian deliriums gave him chills down his spine.
That left homesickness. The booklet specified that this would only constitute grounds for discharge and not exemption, if, and only if, the soldier so desperately wished to return home that he was exhibiting profound organic deterioration. In other words, if there were nothing left in his poor organic reserves for the country to draw upon.
The regulation height of recruits had fallen fourteen centimetres since Louis XIV, owing to the numerous conflicts with England and Austria and especially those great consumers of young healthy males, the Napoleonic campaigns. Given the dearth of handsome, strapping lads, they’d become much less demanding: these days a young man had to measure five foot one inch, namely a minimum of one metre fifty-five centimetres, in order to be enlisted. Auguste stood at one metre seventy-seven. A magnificent dragoon.
One might wonder who, after this latest war, would be left in France to produce any babies with the women, apart from minuscule or mentally deranged men. And if these power-hungry butcheries were to carry on for some time yet, the much-vaunted beauty of the French race, of which nationalists of all persuasions were so proud, would be nothing but the stuff of dreams . . . It was with these thoughts in mind that Auguste had closed the booklet, pondering the future of France.
4
HILDEGARDE.
My best friend. My soulmate, as fools like to say.
Whenever I go out with Hildegarde, we’re taken for lesbians, doubtless because most people must think, as we’re both abnormal – each in our different way – that if we’re together, it could only be for mating purposes. Like animals.
Whenever I go out with Hildegarde, she’s the one people notice, because she’s got a pretty astonishing look with her very long hair, her magnificent Madonna-like face and her tracksuits, which she wears no matter the occasion, the only clothes capable of covering her overly tall body. Then people look at me, but their gaze doesn’t linger because my crutches and legs with their orthoses make them feel vaguely sorry for me, and then they go back to her, telling themselves something’s not quite right. And then they stare at her, trying to work out what it is; something to do with her size and her proportions . . . and the little wheels start turning; the hard drive starts whirring: could I, couldn’t I, am I disgusted, am I turned on? She couldn’t give a shit, but the shamelessness of it all drives me crazy. In addition to her long limbs, Hildegarde has a neck like a giraffe and hands like spiders, plus all the things that don’t work on the inside, but you can’t see those.
I met her at the functional rehabilitation centre in Lorient where they sent me to learn how to walk again. We were sixteen years old and we’d both just been discharged from hospital, me after my accident and her following the umpteenth operation to straighten her spinal column.
The day I arrived, when they pushed me into the dining hall for the first time and into the free spot between two patients suffering from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, two young people, crucified in their wheelchairs and at the end of their life expectancy, I started crying so hard that one of the carers came to take me back to my room, where I curled up on my bed, my face turned towards the wall. Same thing the next day. And the day after that. After three days, an improbable creature stopped by, her head encased in a metal halo held in place by pins driven into her skull and to which were attached traction splints fixed into a plaster corset: a scene of pure medieval horror.
What’s more, she was smiling, the idiot.
That’s Hildegarde!
‘Why are you crying?’ she asked me with a hint of annoyance in her voice.
What was I meant to say to that? That my tears were a cocktail of shame and disgust at the sight of the disabled people around me. Of fear at being stuck in a wheelchair forever. Of anger at being lumped in with this freakshow. Of incomprehension at seeing them not in the least bit affected by their misfortune and here I was, bawling at the injustice . . . In short, it wasn’t very pretty, as only real human emotions can be sometimes. Picture yourself suddenly disabled, especially at sixteen. I can guarantee your spirit would falter. It’s not like playing at being armless, with one limb strapped behind your back, or being blind with a blindfold over your eyes; it has to do with feelings of impotence, being a tortoise on its back . . . Banishment.
I looked at her, wide-eyed. When you find yourself in this sort of situation, a few centimetres away from a person with Marfan syndrome with nails fixed into their head, who is asking you in all seriousness but why are you crying? – you’ve got no reference point, because situations like that never happen in real life.
She called the nurse to have me put back in the wheelchair and she pushed me to the dining hall. It was fish that day, a Friday. Once again she put me between two people suffering from myopathy, saying to one of them, ‘Come on, move your wheelchair,’ with the same brutality that your regular teen would use to another. Then she sat down next to me. They served us prawns as a starter and everybody started laughing when the plates arrived at the table. At first I didn’t understand why; then I realised that the quadriplegics, myopathy patients and amputees sitting around us couldn’t peel them because their hands were too awkward, or useless, or non-existent. ‘Make yourself useful!’ Hildegarde said to me, and I started shelling the prawns in silence, my nose buried in my fingers.
With her perpetual cheerfulness, her simple good humour and her constant wish to make people happy, she served as my guide in my new world and after a fortnight
I was mucking about with the Duchenne patients just as I used to with the kids back home on the island. She helped me tame my new body. More precisely, she taught me how to sweet-talk into action that old wreck of a jalopy which, from this point forward, I’d be using for my onward journey. And none other. Never any other.
In short, when I felt ready to take all of that on, I left for boarding school and Hildegarde went home. We spoke often on the phone, and when I received my study allowance and my room at the university residence I left my island, because if I hadn’t, who knows what else would have happened to me. And so I went to live in Paris, where she was living, and ever since we’ve seen each other almost every day.