The Hôtel-Dieu de Beaune, France. Photograph by Jebulon, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
It was in Beaune that I saw the wildest grimacer of my life. We’d been warned the place was overrun with tourists, by a tourist who was convinced we shared his self-delusion and who believed we were modern nomads on the simple grounds that we were charting our own course instead of following some travel agency’s package deal. The tourist’s hatred of other tourists is like that of the provincial for his ilk; this antipathy produces curious self-images, of which the credit-card-carrying adventurer is one of the most striking. You meet these types everywhere: they form venturesome crowds in the desert and on high mountain ranges and fleets of them descend on remote islands in the Pacific known exclusively to them. We hadn’t planned on spending the night in Beaune, overrun as it is with tourists. But once we’d visited the famous Hôtel-Dieu, we set off in search of lodgings in this sizable small city.
What the Burgundian chancellor Nicolas Roulin and his wife, Guilon de Salins, intended when they had the Hôtel-Dieu built in 1443 was, in the chancellor’s own words, nothing less than the eternal salvation of their souls through this charitable work. For more than six hundred years, the Hôtel-Dieu, built on a more generous scale than any previously known, served as a hospital for the poor, offering them religious as well as medical succor. Its Gothic sick ward is fifty meters long and fourteen meters wide, and the side walls are lined with beds from which the patients could see the chapel and altar at the front the Great Hall and so attend holy mass without having to leave the ward.
A magnificent vaulted roof of ogival arches spans the hall. This elegant ceiling’s most interesting feature are the wooden crossbeams that appear to project from the throats of spewing dragons and are decorated with droll faces mounted across from grotesque animal heads. The faces were modeled on prominent citizens of Beaune and the animal heads—each of which is associated with a particular inhabitant’s foolishly grinning face and is meant to communicate something of his or her particular character—capture their profligacy for all time. We admired the ingenious functionality with which the ward was equipped for its medical purpose and marveled at the spiritual power it commanded, oriented as it was toward the altar, but most of all we delighted in the presence of the absurdity manifest in the wood construction of the vault that sheltered the ill in a building dedicated to the solemn twofold goal of healing the body and redeeming the soul. This absurdity was nothing less than a double dose of mockery for the prosperous citizens of Beaune, who had contributed to the building and to support of the hospice, in both the ridiculous depiction of their laughing faces and in the animal heads that exposed their avarice, cupidity, obtuseness, and baseness.
It was under this vault that I saw him for the first time. He had not turned his eyes upward; he had no idea there might be anything to see there, perhaps even his own face. He was simply one of the herd, since all tourists are herded through the Hôtel-Dieu. He followed the others, and I followed him out of the ward and into the cour d’honneur, which offers the best view of the extensive wings, the colorful roof tiles, the dormer windows decorated with wood carvings, the slate tiles and, off to one side, a well decorated with filigreed ironwork. I followed him as he followed the others from the courtyard into the smaller Salle Saint-Hugues, where patients and the elderly who required extended care were housed, and from there into the Salle Saint-Nicolas, where the terminally ill and the dying faced their end. We were together in the pharmacy, the kitchens and the rooms with displays of household devices and tools of eras long past.
He was about my age, wiry, with angular features, close-cropped hair and a curious goatee that extended in a thin, white line from his lower lip to his chin like a painful nick. He seemed alert and, extending his arm to point out some feature of the façade to the woman standing next to him, he soon made a painful grimace for the benefit of a few children already alarmed at the sight of eighteenth-century amputation shears. He then joined a group of men who had lit their cigarettes in the courtyard.
That evening I saw him again. We were ambling through town after our visit to the Hôtel-Dieu, having exited the circle drawn around the town center by the old, almost perfectly preserved city walls. The rectangular Place de la Madeleine is lined with plane trees and there we found the Auberge Bourguignonne, which contained a small hotel and a restaurant within the dry-set masonry of its walls built with thousands upon thousands of pale stones. The dining room was almost completely full when we entered it a few minutes after eight. As is customary in France, the tables were placed very close together with the narrow gaps between them marking a symbolic border. Diners here do not greet those seated at neighboring tables nor do they listen in on conversations being held less than half of a meter away and they most certainly do not encroach on their neighbors’ territory by joining in, just as these neighbors also take pains not to overhear others, imperturbably minding their own business, no matter what is going on at the next table. Despite general observance of this cultural convention, French restaurants and bistros, packed tight with tables, still provide no intimate spaces.
The man with the sharply drawn line of a beard was the only single diner in the restaurant. This struck me before we had even taken our seats and I viscerally understood what this meant before I could picture any of the horrifying possibilities. He was seated diagonally to my left, about four meters away. When I glanced past my wife’s right shoulder, I looked straight into his face, which was in constant motion and displayed a panoply of emotions that were difficult to interpret. As we began our appetizers, he was already busy with his entrée and yet he was more concerned with finding someone who could free him from the constraint of eating alone. This solo diner was completely unaware of the symbolic borders that were meant to be observed in a restaurant like this. He felt free to consider spatial proximity as an invitation to camaraderie. First, he tried with the couple sitting to his left, clearly local residents, who showed little inclination to be taught new customs by the stranger. They responded brusquely to his attempts to draw them into conversation about the dishes that had just been served. They gave a laconic reply and ended the exchange, refusing to be irritated by the man at the neighboring table or to pay him the slightest attention. The man, it gradually became clear, was from Holland. His French sounded passable, his German, in which he addressed the tourists to his right, no less so. The two Germans, an elegant woman of perhaps fifty and a tall man inclined to stoutness who appeared some eight to ten years younger, let themselves be lured into an exchange of opinions regarding the cuisine and hotel industry in France but then became monosyllabic not only in conversing with their neighbor but also with each other, no longer confident that their conversation was, in fact, theirs alone. They left the restaurant before all the other guests, as befits two fugitives, without saying goodbye to the man who had been all too eager to be their companion that evening.
Now he sits alone, trying to find something to occupy him, checking the wine bottle yet again, fraternizing with the waiter, looking around the room for help, avidly seeking anyone willing to meet his eye, someone who won’t look away, but he finds no one. He remains in the restaurant’s public space with only his own company, left to his own devices, and no matter how often this may have happened to him in the past, he still seems unable to get used to it. When he is served dessert, he speaks to himself in the room’s dense emptiness, he stretches fitfully, first to one side, then the other before bending forward over the table and jerking backward so abruptly the back of his chair gives a loud creak.
Then his face undergoes a tremendous alteration. Up until now his face had been in constant motion, his expression changing every few seconds. With enormous effort, he strains every muscle in his face, which freezes in an appalling grimace. He presses his square chin against his chest so that the ridges on the nape of his neck protrude. His mouth is clamped shut, his lips pressed together as if in a spasm. From his upper lip a deeply etched wrinkle descends on either side of his mouth to his chin, which seems to swell and is riven by the white line of his goatee. His nasolabial folds extend from the sides of his nose like two long arched incisions to his mouth, where they merge with the folds descending to his chin. He wrinkles his nose so energetically that its root, together with his painfully compressed eyelids, form a single bulge from which emerge innumerable tiny crow-foot pleats.
I am witnessing a psychological natural catastrophe, a monumental spectacle of tormented nature. The room has fallen completely silent—no clatter of dishes or silverware, no laughter or clinking glasses—and in this silence I believe I can hear the man’s muscles cramping and contracting, his teeth grinding and his wheezing with the effort this oblivious self-exhibition demands.
Never before have I seen such a dramatic play of facial expressions, not in my childhood, when we staged our world grimacing championships on rainy vacation days and all the neighborhood children struggled to outdo each other making faces. The solo diner’s entire face seems at once swollen and compressed, deformed by some immense force. The expression of his frozen grimace is ambiguous. It is an expression of some unnamed despair but also of a self-contained arrogance and even though finally, after such fretfulness, he sits as immobile as if he were cast in stone, not a single twitch animating his stony face, it seems to me that his countenance still changes every few seconds. I have the impression that now he’s grinning, now weeping; now I believe I see the very picture of malevolence, now of pure suffering.
Why are you making such terrible faces? My wife asks me. Because she is familiar with my unprincipled propensity to imitation, she can tell, when she hears me talking on the telephone, who is on the other end of the line, whose tone of voice, speech pattern and dialect I have unintentionally assumed. Although I’ve never before witnessed anyone abandon himself so completely to a grimace, I was nonetheless sure I had seen this grimace before. But that evening I came no closer to an explanation than on subsequent days.
From In the Forest of Metropoles by Karl-Markus Gauß, translated by Tess Lewis, which is forthcoming from Seagull Books in December.
Karl-Markus Gauß is an Austrian essayist, editor, and literary critic, and the author of numerous books, including a number of ethnographies and travelogues.
