We got back to the house to find the phone out of order. It was the beginning of a long holiday weekend, and so we would be without it for three days, normally a blessing. But Brooklyn had to be called. There was one particular antibiotic, a state of the art antibiotic, that Benson said would overcome all known forms of mono. I went down to the phone booth at Les Baumettes and fed it with five-franc pieces while Brooklyn Hospital searched for Benson’s brother. He gave me the name of the wonder drug. I called a doctor and asked him if he could come to the house.
He arrived within an hour and inspected the invalid, who was resting behind his sunglasses in a darkened room.
“Alors, monsieur …” the doctor began, but Benson cut him short.
“Mono,” he said, pointing at his throat.
“Comment?”
“Mono, man. Mononucleosis.”
“Ah, mononucléose. Peut-être, peut-être.”
The doctor looked into Benson’s angry throat and took a swab. He wanted to run a laboratory test on the virus. And now, would Monsieur lower his trousers? He took out a syringe, which Benson peered at suspiciously over his shoulder as he slowly dropped his Calvin Klein jeans to half-mast.
“Tell him I’m allergic to most antibiotics. He should call my brother in Brooklyn.”
“Comment?”
I explained the problem. Did the doctor by any chance have the wonder drug in his bag? Now. We looked at each other around Benson’s bare buttocks. They jerked as Benson coughed painfully. The doctor said he must be given something to reduce the inflammation, and that side effects from this particular shot were extremely rare. I passed the news on to Benson.
“Well … OK.” He bent over, and the doctor injected with a flourish, like a matador going in over the horns. “Voilà!”
While Benson waited for allergic reactions to send him reeling, the doctor told me that he would arrange for a nurse to come twice a day to give further injections, and that the test results would be in on Saturday. As soon as he had them, he would make out the necessary prescriptions. He wished us a bonne soirée. Benson communed noisily with his handkerchief. I thought a bonne soirée was unlikely.
The nurse came and went, the test results came through, and the doctor reappeared on Saturday evening as promised. The young Monsieur had been correct. It was mononucléose, but we would conquer it with the resources of French medicine. The doctor began to scribble like a poet in heat. As prescription after prescription flowed from his pen, it seemed as though every single resource was going to be called into action. He passed over a wad of hieroglyphics, and wished us a bon weekend. That too was unlikely.
The Sunday of a holiday weekend in rural France is not the easiest time to find a pharmacy open for business, and the only one for miles around was the pharmacie de garde on the outskirts of Cavaillon. I was there at 8:30, and joined a man clutching a wad of prescriptions almost as thick as mine. Together we read the notice taped to the glass door: Opening time was not until 10:00.
The man sighed, and looked me up and down.
“Are you an emergency?”
No. It was for a friend.
He nodded. He himself had an important arthrose in his shoulder, and also some malign fungus of the feet. He was not going to stand for an hour and a half in the sun to wait for the pharmacy to open. He sat down on the pavement next to the door and started to read chapter one of his prescriptions. I decided to go and have breakfast.
“Come back well before ten,” he said. “There will be many people today.”
How did he know? Was a Sunday morning visit to the pharmacy a regular prelunch treat? I thanked him and ignored his advice, killing time with an old copy of Le Provençal in a café.
When I returned to the pharmacy just before ten, it looked as though le tout Cavaillon had gathered outside. There were dozens of them standing with their voluminous prescriptions, swapping symptoms in the manner of an angler describing a prize fish. Monsieur Angine boasted about his sore throat. Madame Varices countered with the history of her varicose veins. The halt and the maimed chattered away cheerfully, consulting their watches and pressing ever closer to the still-locked door. At last, to a murmured accompaniment of enfin and elle arrive, a girl appeared from the back of the pharmacy, opened up, and stepped smartly aside as the stampede jostled through. Not for the first time, I realized that the Anglo-Saxon custom of the orderly queue has no place in French life.
I must have been there for half an hour before I was able to take advantage of a gap in the mêlée and give my documents to the pharmacist. She produced a plastic shopping bag and started to fill it with boxes and bottles, rubber-stamping each prescription as she worked her way through the pile, a copy for her, a copy for me. With the bag at bursting point, one prescription remained. After disappearing for five minutes, the pharmacist admitted defeat; she was out of stock of whatever it was, and I would have to get it from another pharmacy. However, it was not grave, because the important medication was all there in the bag. Enough, it seemed to me, to bring a regiment back from the dead.