Читать книгу The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly - Jean-Dominique Bauby - Страница 12

I AM FOND OF my alphabet letters. At night, when it is a little too dark and the only sign of life is the small red spot in the centre of the television screen, vowels and consonants dance to a Charles Trenet tune: ‘Dear Venice, sweet Venice, I’ll always remember you …’ Hand in hand the letters cross the room, whirl around the bed, sweep past the window, wriggle across the wall, swoop to the door and return to begin again.

ESARINTULOMDPCFBVHGJQZYXKW

The jumbled appearance of my chorus line stems not from chance but from cunning calculation. More than an alphabet, it is a hit parade in which each letter is placed according to the frequency of its use in the French language. That is why E dances proudly out in front while w labours to hold on to last place, B resents being pushed back next to v, and haughty J – which begins so many sentences in French – is amazed to find itself so near the rear of the pack. Roly-poly G is annoyed to have to trade places with H, while T and U, the tender components of ‘tu’, rejoice that they have not been separated. All this reshuffling has a purpose: to make it easier for those who wish to communicate with me.

It is a simple enough system. You read off the alphabet (ESA version, not ABC) until with a blink of my eye I stop you at the letter to be noted. The manoeuvre is repeated for the letters that follow so that fairly soon you have a whole word, and then fragments of more or less intelligible sentences. That at least is the theory. But the truth is that some visitors fare better than others. Because of nervousness, impatience or obtuseness, performances vary in the handling of the code (which is what we call this method of transcribing my thoughts). Crossword fans and Scrabble players have a head start. Girls manage better than boys. By dint of practice, some of them know the code by heart and no longer even turn to our special notebook – the one containing the order of the letters, and in which all my words are set down like the Delphic oracle’s.

Indeed, I wonder what conclusions anthropologists of the year 3000 will reach if they ever chance to leaf through these notebooks, haphazardly scribbled with remarks like ‘the physiotherapist is pregnant’, ‘mainly on the legs’, ‘Arthur Rimbaud’, and ‘the French team played like pigs’ are interspersed with unintelligible gibberish, misspelled words, lost letters, omitted syllables.

Nervous visitors come most quickly to grief. They reel off the alphabet tonelessly, at top speed, jotting down letters almost at random; and then, seeing the meaningless result, exclaim: ‘I’m an idiot!’ But in the final analysis their anxiety gives me a chance to rest, for they take charge of the whole conversation, providing both questions and answers, and I am spared the task of holding up my end. Reticent people are much more difficult. If I ask them. ‘How are you?’ they answer ‘Fine,’ immediately putting the ball back in my court. With some the alphabet becomes an artillery barrage, and I need to have two or three questions ready in advance in order not to be swamped. Meticulous people never go wrong: they scrupulously note down each letter and never seek to pierce the mystery of a sentence before it is complete. Nor would they dare dream of finishing a single word for you. Unwilling to chance the smallest error, they will never take it upon themselves to provide the ‘room’ that follows ‘mush,’ the ‘ic’ that follows ‘atom’, or the ‘nable’ without which neither ‘intermi’ nor ‘abomi can exist. Such scrupulousness makes for laborious progress, but at least you avoid the misunderstandings in which impulsive visitors bog down when they neglect to verify their intuitions. Yet I understood the poetry of such mind games one day when, attempting to ask for my glasses (lunettes), I was asked what I wanted to do with the moon (lune).