Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker Page B

specially adjusted to sensitive paper, I traced his words, in pencil marks so faint that they became a secret code. For five days Isat in the Archive reading his letters to Foucault, hiding the letter I was copying under another, disguising my papers under notes. The archivist frequently came to peer at what I was doing. I told her that I was studying his tenses, counting the times he used the conditional. She nodded, unsmiling. But I was a panhandler, a prospector, sifting my gravel and finding in my unwashed dust grain after grain of pure gold.
    In the middle of the second week I stared at the clean, virgin paper of his last letter to Foucault. It was probably the last thing he had written before the darkness which he had described as a stain eclipsed his day forever. He rarely corrected himself on the page. Yet I knew that it was his habit to write draft after draft. Then I realized the truth that was staring me in the face and had been clear from the beginning. These were love letters. And they were fair copies, the only copies. The drafts had been destroyed. Foucault had never seen these letters, written over ten years ago. They had never been sent. None of them. Ever. They had been released to the Archives by Paul Michel’s “tutel.” And the publication rights had instantly been purchased by Harvard University Press in the interests of scholarship. Whoever had stamped and ordered the letters had not always done it accurately. In all probability I was the first person to read them.
    I sat staring at the pages, stupid and shaking, my skin tingling. I did not know how to react. I could not understand what I had discovered. I was sure other people were staring at me. I was afraid that if I moved I would be sick. These letters were no simple exercise in writing. They came from the heart. They were private writing. Why had they never been sent? Had he simply imagined the replies? They deserved a reply. They demanded an answer. No one should write like that and remain unanswered. I knew that I could no longer hesitate. I staggered from the Archive, clutching my stolen goods.
    Paris became more and more unreal. I hardly noticed the tourists, the shuttered shops, locked for the summer. I stumbled through the water rushing in the gutters. I could not sleep at night. I lived on black coffee, rigid with sugar, and cheap cigarettes. I woke up on the Friday of my second week in the Archive with my head ringing. I heard his words as if for the first time, although by now I knew them by heart.
You ask me what I fear most. You know already or you would not ask. It is the loss of my reader, the man for whom I write. My greatest fear is that one day, unexpectedly, suddenly, I will lose you.
I got out of bed and dressed rapidly. My jeans, which I had washed two days before and hung up in the window, were still damp. I put them on anyway.
    I had already made the most crucial decision of my life. I would reply to those letters. I had decided to find Paul Michel. Instead of taking the Metro to the Archive as usual I set out on foot for the fourteenth arrondissement and the Hôpital Sainte-Anne.
    The hospital was like a city within a city. There were gardens, car parks, walkways, cafés, shops, a security barrier and a mass of huge, ancient buildings with new wings projecting outwards in black glass and concrete. The porters indicated the general reception, but I walked some distance before finding the steps leading up to bland offices and automatic doors. Hospitals are strange intermediary zones where sickness and health become ambiguous, relative states. There are people distraught, hysterical, others resigned and staring, the caretakers in white coats and comfortable shoes, utterly indifferent both to the bored and the desperate. There are three distinct groups ambling through the corridors, each designated by their dress: frightened visitors in outdoor clothes, the shuffling wounded in dressing gowns and slippers, the masters with their