David Peak
9, July, 1873
Dearest,
I have written you nearly every day for six months, and I can now feel strength in the muscles of my hand, a strength previously unknown to me. My tongue feels loose in my mouth. My voice screams loudly in my head.
Hôpital Saint-Jean has never been a particularly exciting place, as you know from my previous letters. One quickly becomes inured to the inherent drama of human suffering when one works alongside it from dawn to dusk. And yet there are still those patients who arrive whose stories somehow complete our own.
There was a boy here nineteen years of age (the most beautiful I have ever seen!), brought in by his mother, who did not stay for long. He had a small circular gunshot wound on his wrist, almost like he’d been run through with a pencil. He was rather tall (six feet as near as I can tell) and had a thin, oval-shaped face, pale skin, and frightening, brilliant eyes. Oh, if only you could have seen the state of him when first he arrived. He was a mess, thin as a stork. He must have tied his tie in the dark that morning, and his clothes smelled richly of sleep and ill habits. I don’t know how else to say it. He smelled worse than that, like an untreated wound, or a corpse left out in the sun. His hair was brushed to the side, although I’m not sure that brushed is quite the right word if you know what I mean.
I dressed his wound myself, or re-dressed I should say, for his mother seemed to have beaten me to the job; he seemed to feel no pain, or at least not physical pain. It’s been my experience that those poor souls who enter our doors suffering a deeper, more human pain, do not flinch when pierced by suture needle. A pinprick of the skin is but a distraction to those with deeper conflicts.
He–his name was Arthur–sat in a white metal chair near an open window on the second floor, in a room of his own where the white walls had long ago faded to something darker, looking particularly unkempt in the neatness of the hospital. His mother paced the room; she was a brutish, ugly woman wearing thick, dark clothing, muttering to herself obscenities which I will not translate here. She spoke in what seemed a religious mania, a possession, cursing and ruing those whose names were lost upon my ears.
They had arrived shortly after five, and I gathered that nearly three hours had elapsed since the boy suffered the gunshot wound–yet no one had rushed him to care. Despite my urgings to the contrary, he and his mother seemed equally rushed to leave, desiring a proper and clean dressing and little else.
The boy spoke to me as I was nearly done with my dressing, his voice sounding far older than his face would suggest. I asked him nothing, did not address him, and yet he spoke all the same, staring at me and making my skin crawl and my heart flutter. He was so beautiful, so repulsive.
I will do my best to write down all that I remember.
The boy, Arthur, spoke quickly and quietly. “You know what he said?” he asked me. But he left no time for me to guess. He quickly went on. “He said, ‘This is for you, since you’re leaving,’ or something like that, Verlaine did, and then he fired. I was on the other side of the room with my back to the wall, maybe ten paces between us. The first gunshot filled the room with smoke, the second I heard not at all, though I saw that he’d lowered his arm, looked away from me and fired into the floorboards. The look on his face—I’ll never forget that. Eyes closed, teeth clenched. Somewhere between smile and pain.
“He pressed the revolver into my hands and told me to fire on him. It was pitiful. His face was flushed and his tears slick upon his cheeks.
“He kept begging me not to leave him, not to leave for Paris, following us all the way to Place Rouppe. I was going to give him up as the deviant he is. I was going to tell them everything.”
I felt myself blush as the boy talked about his lover, and heard his mother’s severe footsteps stop behind me. I swear to you that I felt the gravity of her gaze upon the back of my head, as if she were trying to crush in my skull with nothing more than the power of her will.
And then her footsteps continued once more and the boy continued his strange, urgent speech.
“There was a constable there, at the station. Verlaine clutched the revolver with his hand inside his coat, still loaded by my reasoning, what with only having fired off the two shots, I knew that much, with his shells in his pocket, too. I knew he’d be arrested if I spoke. But that did not make the decision any easier.
“I feel as if the life has run out of me through the hole in my arm, as if he had killed me in that room on the other side of town, as if I am already dead. I am already dead.”
It was here that he ceased speaking, closing his eyes and dropping his sharp chin onto his bony chest. He breathed deeply and whimpered like a dog. His mother’s mutterings sounded behind me and I quickly finished with the dressing, fleeing from the room.
They were both gone by eight, and I hope never to see either of them again. For their very presence I found disturbing, like a disease in an otherwise healthy body.
Near the beginning of this letter I mentioned to you that I sometimes come across patients whose story somehow completes my own, and this tale I’ve just related to you is no exception. I miss you very much and I forgive you your indiscretions and your threats. That boy seemed to be speaking directly to my soul as he sat there upon that white metal chair, describing the incident which wounded him. I too carry my scars through life, although mine are much thinner on my arm, less circular. And the same way that boy must picture his lover holding the revolver, I can picture you, my dear, holding your horn-handled knife.
For it was the way the boy described this Verlaine’s face that struck me most, the eyes closed, the teeth clenched, the lips pulled into something between smile and sad. That was precisely the look on your face too, darling, that night back in Montmartre.
Please write me back soon. I question my strength to continue these letters if I do not hear from you. I wonder each day whether you are alive or dead and how the other prisoners treat you.
All of my love,
Mme. Marie Coutard
Hôpital Saint-Jean, Brussels
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David Peak lives in New York City and blogs at davidpeak.blogspot.com.