Going Through Old Notebooks Part 4: The Hospital For Incurable Men
Dear Reader,
Hello. So, here is my second “five things” that I shared here on Substack back in 2020. I had, maybe, five readers at that point? There was still a kind of haunted quality pervading my writing then; I believe it was pervading all of Paris at the time, and much of the world, still dark and shuttered by the pandemic. Maybe it was quiet enough that all the city’s ghosts could finally feel bold enough to speak up.
Some of you will have read this before, but since it is October, here are a few little ghost stories of sorts:
1.
It’s 3:30am, and the birds in the park outside my window have started to sing already. They’re acting like morning is on the way, even though it isn’t. They were loud enough to wake me, chattering noisily in the big chestnuts that are empty now of leaves, and in the evergreen bushes that line the fence between the building and the park.
I live in a 17th century former convent right now, next to a public garden that was once its private grounds. Whole sections of this building have fallen into disuse. In the inhabited parts, studio apartments have been set up and cheaply renovated, with plywood flooring, for foreign artists and researchers. Inside, these apartments look like the kind of dorm rooms you might find at an underfunded college in the 1990s, but then you go to the basement to do your laundry, and find yourself in the bowels of a Medieval chateau.
One day, I decided to climb the bones of a grand abandoned staircase. It rose from a vine-covered entryway off the back courtyard. It had been stripped of its plaster, stripped of all embellishment, but seemed structurally sound—or at least, sound enough. It led up to another staircase, and then another, and then to a locked door. The walls were covered in graffiti, as if from squatters, or maybe just from artist-residents such as myself.
On old maps from the 19th century, this building is called The Hospital for Incurable Men. This sounds more fantastic when translated literally, as if the maleness of the men was what was incurable, like an incurable romantic, but of course it was simply a hospice; a place for the terminally ill. In its later years, it became a military hospital, taking in wounded veterans. In those days, the park was where the more ambulatory of these cases could walk undisturbed under the trees.
I don’t know why the birds were up so early this morning. Maybe it was something to do with the new moon, or the coming solstice. Maybe the ghosts of these long dead soldiers had awakened them, as I would do, if I were a ghost, and had an old favorite park with chestnut trees to walk in.
2.
Last night I went to the rue des Rosiers in the Marais to buy something fried and delicious. Lemon and tangerine light spilled out of the windows of the white buildings above the shops, arrayed with sky-blue shutters. None of the bakeries were open, but I bought latkes from a falafel stand, which were fatter than latkes I’m used to eating in the states, and seasoned with green herbs, still hot from the fryer. I’d intended to save them until I got home, but as I walked back through the nighttime streets, I found myself sitting down on a bench near the National Archives in the gold-green spill of a streetlight, and eating them all myself. When I got home, I was lucky to have brought two Alsacian kouglof cakes earlier, to dull the cruelty of my story: I went to the rue des Rosiers and got latkes, but I didn’t save any for you.
3.
It was getting late, close to curfew, so I decided to take a taxi.
“It smells well in here,” I said, in my bad French. Because it did smell nice. It smelled of oranges.
“It smells good,” the driver corrected me. “What do you smell?”
“Oranges,”I said.
“I just ate an orange!” he said. “But also, I am wearing Dior.”
He wanted to tell me about a supposedly incredible thing that had just happened to him. To explain it, he had to begin the story a few years back, when a famous rock musician called Johnny Hallyday had just died.
Sometimes referred to as “the French Elvis,” there are pictures of him looking like James Dean with a young Catherine Deneuve. A few months after Hallyday’s death, this driver was taking a fare to a wealthy town outside Paris, where Hallyday had once lived, or had grown up, or something like that. Right at the moment when they were crossing over into this town, one of Hallyday’s songs started playing on the radio. The driver said that he had never heard a Johnny Hallyday song on that station before, and found this to be a remarkable coincidence. Then today, he said, while he was telling this story to another passenger, it happened again. Another Johnny Hallyday song came on the radio, just as he was telling the story about the other Johnny Hallyday song!
“I don’t even like Johnny Hallyday!” he said, laughing.
I wasn’t the right audience for this story. I’d never heard of Johnny Hallyday, but the driver didn’t care. He was slowing down, taking his eyes off the road, in order to look back at me and explain the incredible significance of his story. He was sure that this station had never played any of Johnny Hallyday’s songs before. He had even taken the time to look at the radio station’s website, and scanned through their playlist of songs to confirm it. In the past several days, that exact moment when he had begun to tell his story, was the only time when that song had been played.
“It must mean something!” he told me, several times, amazed.
I wasn’t sure that I understood it, or what it was supposed to mean. That Johnny Hallyday was haunting him? That he was meant to listen to Johnny Hallyday?
4.
Ghosts aren’t real, of course, except when they begin to haunt you.
I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I used to wake in the middle of the night while doing research on this one particular 19th century woman, whose death remained a mystery to me. I would wake up unable to breathe, from nightmares that bore no resemblance to my own life.
For several years, as I was trying to find out what had happened, every now and then I would wake up like that; strangled, half-caught in a vanishing story that didn’t belong to me. When I finally found out how and when she died, I also learned that she liked a certain perfume.
I must stress to you that I do not believe in ghosts, but even so, I went looking for this perfume, or the closest thing I could find to match it. I would sometimes spray it on my pillows before going to sleep at night, and since learning how she died, and obtaining the perfume, I didn’t have any more of those suffocating nightmares after that.
5.
Paris is a place with many ghosts, but most of the time I think they are placated. If you ever meet an agitated one, they’re probably more frightened than you are, and just want to be understood.
The darkest night of the year isn’t even here yet, but already there are little buds on the magnolia trees in the Tuileries gardens.
December 16th 2020
xo
S
I've always wondered what you were doing on my birthday five years ago, and now I know! You were writing beautifully about ghosts!
As for your Johnny Halladay story, it reminds me of an old adage I thought up: "Whenever someone tells you a weird story that concludes with th words, 'It can't be a coincidence!', it is ALWAYS a coincidence.
I came across the Incurable Hommes this summer, while trying to triangulate another ghost in the neighbourhood. I didn't realise that some of the building was still there! I like your Paris ghosts but I am glad they are easily appeased.