2023-11-12 11:59:00
The doctor writer portrays Jean, his fictional double, in “Where the tears go when they dry”.
This is not a sob story. In any case, crying is no longer for Baptiste Beaulieu, family doctor. Nor for Jean, his fictional double. He welcomes the tears of his patients – those that flow for minor ailments or for incurable illnesses. Jean listens, takes the time and treats “everyone, from the bourgeois to the drug addict, from the gypsy to the white-collar worker, from the old man to the toddler, and from the bobo to the punk to the dog – even I happened to treat the dog! » Baptiste Beaulieu, confronted with physical and psychological suffering, draws inspiration from his profession for this sixth novel: these faces which parade in his office, he remembers out of duty because he knows that to be a writer, “you must have the hands in human sludge, and not extract yourself from the world,” he said on the set of C à vous.
Where do tears come from?
Jean is dry, it gets stuck in the back of his throat, he has been unable to cry since a 6 year old child died following an epileptic seizure. “The drama ?” The mother “has the wrong address. 42 instead of 24, a mistake at all. […] With the Samu van we could disembark in six minutes, but it takes twelve.” The cause ? “The love she has for her child has blurred her discernment, she has inverted the numbers.” There is reason to think that there is still a chance, that care can still be provided to the little boy but it is too late, it is already “taken care of for the kid”. So much so that Jean, then an intern at the hospital, took “twenty days off” to go to Rome to eat “pasta carbonara” with this “ghost of a kid who sticks to the train” and have his toes “lovingly licked” in a gay sauna. Still no tears.
Where are they hiding?
In his medical office, where “the old, the young, the crooked, the straight, the athletes” pass daily. Like Mr. Soares, this “man who is no longer waterproof” bleeding on one side, sobbing on the other since the death of his wife or this 92-year-old patient who collapses on her desk. “And there, Niagara Falls.” Often lost in the face of this patient crowd, he questions himself: “If crying is showing your sorrow? […], why does mine refuse to come out? Where is he hiding? What is he hiding? His anger, no doubt. He explains it further: “I’m tired of hearing that men type, I’m tired of eyes with coquards, blue eyes, green eyes, black eyes.” Jean, a paper creature full of Baptiste Beaulieu’s anecdotes, must have had difficulty managing this inner rage. “How to get there ? So it’s true, when you can’t cry, you can punch.” But for a feminist generalist, calm and attentive, that looks bad. So he addresses the reader, tells jokes (funny, not often) to try to heal with words. Because perhaps we laugh better if we are on the verge of tears.
What’s the point of crying?
Either way, it’s out of control. In Jean’s opinion, “Tears are a useless thing against death, but one that we never stopped trying anyway.”
Baptiste Beaulieu, Where the tears go when they dry, the Iconoclast, 288 pp., €20.90 (ebook: €15.99).
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