8

Nantes straddles the Loire River close to the sea. The seventh largest city in France, and main city in the West, it has a population of 250,000 and a wider reach of 560,000.

page 18

'A strange city,' said a travel guide, 'born unto the river, a child of the water.'

'Once a centre of European surrealism,' said another.

Its history is marked principally by contradiction: by eighteenth-century slave trading when 450,000 Africans were shipped to America, and Nantes became France's foremost and wealthiest port; and by the 1598 Edict of Nantes: Henri IV's response to the Catholic-Protestant Wars of Religion granting the persecuted Huguenots freedom of worship and civil rights—revoked after the resumption of religious hostilities following Henri IV's assassination.

Of interest to a New Zealander, there was the 1986 Rugby Battle of Nantes, when the All Blacks were beaten 16-3 and Wayne (Buck) Shelford, at the bottom of a ruck in one of the toughest test matches of his career, tore his scrotum, displacing a testicle, and insisted the physiotherapist stitch it up at the side of the field (from where it was broadcast in close-up, live to the nation) so he could return to the game.

Jules Verne recalled his hometown—'point of departure for many a long journey'—with affection, and based much of his maritime writing on his childhood adventures there.

André Breton, the 'Pope of Surrealism', remarked that 'Nantes, alongside Paris, is perhaps the only town in France where I got the feeling that something worthwhile might happen to me'.

I travelled with John, precariously, lying and standing, sitting only for take-off and landing, protecting the nerve, attempting to maintain the pain at a tolerable level until I reached Nantes. I carried a medical letter of explanation for the airlines, and another for Customs as I was well stocked with codeine.

Between sleeping and eating I read my PNE file, pausing to picture the cadavers' quiet contribution. To be reassured by the photographs and explanatory diagrams of ligaments, muscles, fascia and vascular patterns they had made possible; the absence of supposition; the irrefutable language of anatomy. John shuddered and said, 'What the eye doesn't see', but as a former nurse these were details I needed to page 19know. I wanted, moreover, to be sure of my quarry. 'If you know the fighting capability of your opponents,' the 14th Dalai Lama said of suffering, '… then you're in a much better position when you engage in the war.'

War was an apt metaphor. Be its theatre mind, body, society, or state, pain is perhaps the ultimate protection, persuasion and weapon. Aside from those rare individuals who, born without the ability to feel physical pain, tend to die young, its manifestations create the solidarity of uncertain fate and the vulnerability at the heart of life, and thereby of art, which, like the battlefields and other enduring illuminations of history, chart our struggle to define and withstand it.

We arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport at six in the morning. The reception clerk at the Sheraton, close by, astride a train station, could not check us in until noon. He gave us a key to the Club Lounge, empty, surreal, in which a buffet spread with cheeses, grapes, crackers and dried apricots, and small tables set with glasses and complimentary drinks, waited for guests who might not arrive. We opened a bottle of Badoit and watched planes take off less than 1,000 metres away.

There was an adjoining bathroom—an uncanny replica of the Warsaw scene of my fall: the same grey, mottled marble, and vertical tube lights either side of a bevel-edged mirror; the same shower over the same deep bath. I spread a towel on the floor for protection. Here, too, the hovering of unseen guests: a used ashtray and empty bottles of red raisin and grapefruit juice grouped to one side of the basin.

The suite was very quiet, with barely a hum from the air-conditioner and no hint of the workings of the airport, or of the large train station below. I lay on a narrow magazine stool with a velvet nap, my head in a soft chair. John tinkered with a samovar and tried to make tea. A lanky porter in a white jacket silently entered, and left with the empty bottles.

At twelve we took a corner table in the dining room. I stood discreetly against a wall. The pain, ever the genie, was rising, as if it knew Nantes was near, overtaking the codeine; the Australian page 20wine; the sole, potatoes and broccoli, steamed to perfection; three Englishmen at an adjacent table discussing pasta and olive oil with a hint of tarragon, and a married woman they all knew, who was having an affair.

Finally, entering our room, we found a voucher mistakenly inviting us to redeem 4,000 star points for a bathrobe or a bottle of Laurent Perrier Brut Champagne. Then, the telephone rang and a strange voice said, 'Oh darling, I've been trying to find you, where have you been?'

'France,' I said to John, 'is beginning to feel superstitiously appropriate and coincidental.'

That night we both dreamed of pigs: John's pig had a velvet shawl over its shoulders; mine was Dinah Hawken's favourite pet. John decided we had seen an animal resembling a pig in a TV report on flooding in Bangladesh the previous evening, and that the magazine stool in the Club Lounge accounted for the velvet napery. My connection was likely to be a couple of lines from 'Where We Say We Are', Dinah's poem of travel to the islands:

… I've come for the drums, and the drumming, and the drumming of the drums. I've come for the pig asleep in a ditch.

Nantes was the remembered France: melt-in-the-mouth fish, crusty breads and crisp vegetables; sweet tomatoes and impeccable peaches; the courteous French, their mellifluous language: it was impossible not to speak French, no matter how flawed, in the slipstream of the language.

I browsed in perfumeries, stood in the shop of le chocolatier where the aroma alone was sufficient, laundered our clothes using fine soaps, bought slim fitting sandals, forgot about sun block, was stopped twice in one day for directions and three times for market research.

The temperature averaged thirty degrees, but the sun had a bathing quality and the light was redemptive, golden. Our room, with its small balcony overlooking the tops of the tilleul trees in the Rue du Couedic and the potted daisies and sun-yellow awnings of the Entrecôte café, was golden. The old stone was golden. The page 21doctors, nurses and the general population and its many dogs tucked into baskets on buses and trams and in banks, were golden. Shops closed for lunch, as expected, and didn't open on Sundays. Nobody dined before seven. The shade and early morning air were dry and pleasantly cool.

I pushed pain, at will, to one side. This was the summer I had forsaken.

In the hotel lobby and lifts I scrutinised guests for signs of nerve entrapment. A woman with an American accent stumbled over 'Bonjour' at the desk and alighted on the second floor when she meant to go to the third. She looked tired. Breakfast was delivered on a tray to her room. Was she a contender?

A friend from New Zealand, holidaying in Pornic on the coast, drove through. We spent the afternoon beside a fountain sipping martinis and toasting the synchronicity of our visits.

'I'm sleeping on saffron,' I said.

'France is the land of indulgence,' she agreed, smoking her cigarettes and tossing her newly blonde hair.

I sat, calling in la douleur for the diagnostic nerve blocks and Motor Latency Tests the following day. I was aiming for the Pink 'utterly horrible' Eight on the Pain Scale—'Pain so intense you can no longer think clearly at all, and have often undergone severe personality change'—and had photographs taken to prove it.

The CT-guided blocks were no problem: an average visit to the dentist. The thirty shocks to the deep nerve were worthy of the Inquisition, but the pain caused was short term: un mauvais quart d'heure. It produced a three-page graph and the conclusion, Il existe donc des arguments en faveur d'un syndrome canalaire du nerf pudendal bilateral. It confirmed my diagnosis. It wasn't running my life. At the end of the day I left it, like a truculent customer, at the door of its clinic and took a taxi back to the hotel for a drink.