(Adapted from the prose-poem, Mademoiselle Bistouri, by Charles Baudelaire)
I knew him for a doctor right away. He wasn’t tall, and he was dressed in black, from top to toe. A gentleman and a doctor. On a night visit, I shouldn’t wonder. Come with me, I said, even though he’d said he wasn’t a doctor. Not a doctor? Haha . . . Just like a doctor, that. It’s the humour. I’ll treat you, I said. I only live round the corner. You just call me Miss.
It was the middle of the night, not a bod to be seen, just me and the doctor. I put my arm in his, and there was no point his trying to wriggle free. When we got to my residence . . . well, his face said it all. I did warn you, I said. But then remembered I hadn’t. He smiled, I’m sure that’s what it was. It’s a poor light. But he was impressed by what he saw. Doctors on every wall, and he examined every face there was, each one in turn. Most of them are framed, but not all. So I sat him down and I fetched the cigar I keep for just such occasions. And brandy, a full half bottle. You put your feet up, I said. Even doctors need a rest. Didn’t take him long to remember his early days, his younger days, innocent little intern that he was. He didn’t need to say a thing. The way he held his cigar and his glass of brandy was enough to make me cry. It was his hands. To think of all the cutting and sawing and scraping and stitching and snipping they’d done through the years. Bless his fingers, every one of them. But I’m not a doctor, he said. That’s what he said, sitting there, as though he wasn’t. That’s right, I said, you go ahead. Let off steam. He was a surgeon, you see. I’m not a surgeon! he said. Of course you’re not, I said. You might’ve thought he wasn’t too, the way he said it. That’s when I knew it was time to get the scrapbooks out. The surgeons who’ve gone on to greater things are all in there. I took him with me every page. There were faces there he didn’t recognize for all the grey of the beards grown on them. Colleagues of old, grown old, but if he looked hard, I said, he’d see who they were by their eyes and their glabella and their noses. They were still there, I said, in their faces. He was being funny again, doctor-like, but he didn’t say anything, didn’t need to; he had the face. That’s what it’s like sometimes. He sat forward, like they do. Then out of the blue he said, Where did all this begin? He was looking straight at me, those brows of his all puckered and wise. Where did all what begin, I thought. But didn’t say. After a while he stood up. I’ll have to go, he said, thank you for the brandy and the cigar. All I ask, I said, is that you come visit me from time to time in your operating gown. Bring me a picture, I said. Just yourself, that’s all. Just himself was all I asked. He could be on the wall or in the scrapbook any time he liked, I said. He was free to come see himself anytime he was passing, day or night. Though night might be best.
Image: a collection of colourful leaves, pods and dried petals in pinks and purples
literally stories 
Strange and enthralling – a good Sunday Whatever – thank you. dd
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Geraint
I’ve read this three times and I still cannot decide which way I like it best. It could be sinister, but I’d rather it not be. A collection of sorts, a reward for a career pretend later on, is where I stand.
Love your way with this sort of thing!
Leila
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Hi Geraint,
I don’t know anything about this.
However with the darkness of your interpretation, it is something that peaks interest!
I’ll never understand an infatuation with doctors! Don’t know about where you are but here, their fascination with tweed and elbow pads is worrying!!
Interesting and wonderfully structured as always.
Hugh
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Geraint
You’ve done justice to Baudelaire, one of the greatest modern writers of all and one of the first two or three truly modern poets in the Western World, along with Walt Whitman, who turns 207 today. Since today is Whitman’s birthday, this is a perfect day for this piece to appear. Baudelaire and Whitman have much in common, not least the way they wrote about the modern city and city characters. Whitman’s free verse is the American English version of Baudelaire’s French prose poem.
Your tightly written language that sounds like a speaking voice is one of your hallmarks and trademarks and it sounds like Beckett made new again. And it’s like Robert Browning in its range of characterization, in the way you suddenly present these strange, fascinating, multi-faceted characters with such depth and realism and symbolism all at once. (An example would be “My Last Duchess” by Browning, his most famous piece (other than “The Pied Piper”), but he has dozens and dozens of others too.)
I can add, and it can never be said enough, that your work needs to be read MORE THAN ONCE to get the full effect out of it. It draws the reader in on a first reading, but the layers and levels that are present in it need to be gone over more than once. In this current world we inhabit, people blow through things way too fast and then pat themselves on the back thinking they’ve got it now. But literature at its best is not like that at all. One needs to linger over it, hang out with it, and THINK ABOUT IT before one can say one has given it its due.
Dale
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Seems intended to be absurdist. A communication breakdown or at the very least a misunderstanding. We get a wild sense of the character, a consistent tone. The second piece I’ve read today that reminds me of Ionesco. I can imagine Frank Zappa narrating this in one of his improvisations. Or Groucho Marx. I have never read Baudelaire.
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All comments much appreciated, thank you.
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