Unquiet World, a life of Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk

Abstract

I'm sitting in the high-backed chair of an eye surgeon and I'm tense. There's a huge meibomian abcess inside the lower lid of my left eye and the surgeon is about to carry out an unspecified procedure on it. But I think I know what the procedure is: he's sterilized an instrument which looks suspiciously like a curette. He's told me the procedure will be painless after the needle, and it's that needle, that injection of local anaesthetic, I'm waiting for. He's drawing it up out of sight, flicking the plastic barrel, expelling the air, holding it discreetly to the side of his thigh as he shines a spotlight onto my face. I stare at a smudge on the ceiling. The room is close. This is the eighth serious bacterial infection in less than a year — every six weeks an antibiotic and an angry one-sided face — and the situation is worsening. This week my eye has been hidden in swollen tissue somewhere between my mouth and my brain. The G.P. says the bug could get into my head. I wasn't aware of it at the time, but now it occurs to me that the first infection developed about a month after I started examining the contents of my cousin's archive, which I had recently repatriated from France.