--Lyon, France, 1950--
Doctor Lefevre sat at his varnished wooden desk. The lines of his face stood out in the glow of the stained glass lamp, as if etched by a master carver. His fingers twirled a gold tipped pen with deliberate dexterity. He leaned back in his chair with the relaxed posture of a man who knew beyond doubt that he was in total command of his own space, and his eyes bored into the man on the other side of the desk, taking in his features with a single, possessive flick of his eyes.
Frantz stood before his professor's desk awkwardly, waiting to be told to take a seat. He felt the doctor eyeing him, scrutinizing him with such attentiveness that he looked down at his own body to make sure he had not left his jacket unbuttoned or his shirt untucked. There were no discernable breaches of conduct, as far as Frantz could tell, apart from the poor quality of the fabric. Doctor Lefevre was taking his time, impressing upon his young apprentice that in this space, time moved according to his will, at his pace. He set down his pen in its leather case, then pulled a cigar out of his desk drawer, lit it, took a draft, and finally, spoke: "You may take a seat, Monsieur Fanon."
"Thank you, Monsieur." Frantz sat down in the wooden chair and rested his hands in his lap. He adjusted his posture, sitting up straight so as to appear tall.
"Now, I'm sure you're wondering why I called you here tonight."
"Yes, Monsieur."
"I wanted to discuss your...your future at the university."
Frantz's heart raced. Was he being praised or admonished? Behind the professor's stoic expression, he could not read any emotion. "My future?" He gulped.
"Yes," Doctor Lefevre continued. "You've done well here. Very well indeed. In fact, I'm quite impressed that a man of your...background has achieved such high levels of success."
Frantz held in a grimace. Something about the charged, pointed way the professor had said the word "background" made his skin crawl. What Doctor Lefevre had really meant lurked beneath the surface, barely concealed and laughably obvious to Frantz, who was used to this all-too-frequent game of implications by now. Doctor Lefevre did not say it directly (polite Frenchmen never did), but the implication dripped from his every syllable: the doctor was surprised that a black man from the Caribbean had excelled in his medical school.
"We do have schools in Martinique, Monsieur," Frantz responded, trying to keep his acerbic tone to a minimum.
"Yes, quite," Doctor Lefevre agreed, seeming not to register Frantz's discomfort. "Your French is excellent," he added. Again, Frantz was acutely attuned to the patronizing lilt of the doctor's voice, his naive surprise that a foreigner with Africa in his veins could possibly achieve mastery over such a subtle, sophisticated language. It did not seem to occur to him that Frantz had grown up speaking French, that he had studied it in school in Fort-de-France from day one and learned more of its particulars than many who were born in Paris. Would the professor have spoken so implicatively about his "background" had he been a foreigner from England or America, he wondered? If he and the doctor had shared in the tacit camaraderie of whiteness?
"Thank you," Frantz managed to get out. His palms were sweaty, and his insides felt hot. The doctor was giving him a compliment, he told himself. Why couldn't he just accept it?
"Indeed, you are a true testament to the power of civilization to offer opportunity to all sorts of men to rise above wildness," Doctor Lefevre prattled on, "to leave the jungle and enter the halls of the university."
Frantz kept his lips tight and did not respond to the statement, fearing that if he did, he would betray his anger.
Doctor Lefevre took a long puff of his cigar and contemplated Frantz. "I'd like you to know all this," he continued. "I'd like you to know the genuine esteem in which I hold you...before I tell you that I have decided to offer the summer residency position to Toussaint."
There it was. This was what the doctor had been gearing up to say all along: that he was impressed by Frantz's performance, that he held him in high esteem, but that he could not possibly offer him opportunities greater than that of a white man. "But Monsieur," Frantz began to argue, even though he knew it was futile, "I've performed better than Toussaint in every subject."
"I know," Doctor Lefevre sighed. "And I am sorry, but that is my decision. Toussaint's family has been at the university at Lyon for generations. You know how it is."
Frantz did know how it was. His years in graduate school in France had made the bitter contours of class and cultural alliances all too obvious. Don't get angry, he told himself. Anger would not get him anywhere. He had gotten as far as he had by reining in his emotions, by being nothing but polite, grateful, and obsequious to all the arrogant Frenchmen who assumed they had been his savior. Below the desk, his hands clenched and unclenched, but above the desk, where the professor could see him, he kept his face utterly calm. "I understand," he said. "I understand perfectly."
***
All the next day, Frantz sat grading undergraduate exams with the other graduate students in the office next door to Doctor Lefevre. To keep his mind off of his perturbation, he occupied it in the (by now frequent) pastime of trying to ascertain whether Alice Laffont, the office secretary, was flirting with him. It was an intriguing game, not because the young woman kept her emotions to herself, but because she was so up front with them that it was impossible to tell whether or not to take her seriously. She was a classic French beauty, with lush dark brown hair and a slim figure that she liked to clad in little black dresses, but that was where her ladylike manner ended. She was foulmouthed, bold, and sarcastic. Her irreverence for the authority of the institution would have lost her her job, had it not been for the convenient fact that she was sleeping with Doctor Lefevre, and that he found her boldness attractive.
She was sitting at the front desk, leaning back in her chair, her feet resting on the desk in black pointed shoes as she made notes in a log book. She kept looking up at Frantz as he sat at his own desk and tried to concentrate on the exams he was grading. Was he imagining it, he wondered, or did she look at him more often than she looked at the other men in the room? Her eyes narrowed in concentration, and her painted lips curved into a smile as she looked at him.
Frantz was just mustering up the courage to smile back at her when Doctor Lefevre walked in the room. Frantz ducked his head down and pretended to focus on the exam in front of him. He watched out of the corner of his eye as the professor walked over to Alice's desk and placed his hand on her thigh. His long fingers lingered there for a brief moment, feeling the texture of her nylon stockings, giving them a subtle but decisive squeeze. It was a brief gesture, but it was abundantly clear what it communicated to everyone in the room: Alice was his. He had her in his grasp, safely and conveniently under his thumb.
But was she really, Frantz wondered, as securely under the professor's purview as his gesture expressed? Even as Doctor Lefevre turned away from her and headed back to his study, her eyes migrated back to Frantz. Her fingers tapped the lining of her own stockings. Her lips curved into a knowing smile, as if she was in on a secret that no one else around her was in on. Yes, Frantz was quite certain that Alice belonged to no one but herself.
He finished with the stack of papers on his desk and brought it up to her to file away.
"Here you go, Mademoiselle."
In characteristic boldness, she commented, "You have great hands, Monsieur Fanon. I love a man with good hands, but only if he knows what to do with them."
Frantz flushed and looked down at his hands. They were dark, deliberate hands, with long and nimble fingers that were calloused at the tips. He had never given them much thought before, and he was not entirely sure he did know what to do with them, particularly in the manner Alice was insinuating. Not knowing how to respond, he simply told her, "Thank you." Then he collected another pile of exams to grade and returned to his desk. He tried to concentrate on the paper in front of him. It was a first-year psychology exam, and Frantz absentmindedly crossed out each mistake with a red pen.
As usual, Frantz stayed late at the office. He usually stayed past dinnertime, past the time when his classmates would leave to eat dinner together at a café, and past when Doctor Lefevre would leave to have dinner with his wife. When he finished grading his papers, he moved onto his seminar notes from the day before, which he reviewed with a colored pen, underlining important concepts. Next, he caught up on the latest issue of Psychologie Française. The article he read described a very promising step forward in the development in psychiatric drugs to treat chronic depression, and Frantz took notes dutifully in his notebook. Finally, Frantz moved on to his own personal reading: the script of the recently published play, Dirty Hands, by Jean-Paul Sartre.
It was eleven o'clock when he decided he was ready to head home. He stood up, stretched, and put his books in his backpack. Before leaving, he noticed that someone had left a light on in Doctor Lefevre's office. He peeked his head in through the half open door and saw that the professor had forgotten to turn off his desk lamp. The professor would appreciate it if he turned it off, he thought to himself.
Frantz's hand was on the cord of the lamp when something inside him made him pause. He looked around the dimly lit room, with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with dusty, leather-bound volumes. He drew in a deep breath, letting the musty scent of the books tickle his nostrils. He ran a finger along the polished wood of Doctor Lefevre's desk. He had never been in this room alone before. He was overcome by an impulse to sit down in Doctor Lefevre's chair, if only for a second. It was a childish urge, and Frantz knew it. But he did it anyway. He sat down and settled into the contours of the chair, feeling the fine varnished wood of its armrests, savoring the craftsmanship.
He picked up the doctor's pen from its case and ran his thumb over the miniature engraved letters along its gold edge--Jean Lefevre, M.D. Would he ever own a pen like that, he wondered? It was an enticing thought. For a moment, he allowed himself to linger in the fantasy: to run his fingers over his pen and feel the name, Frantz Fanon, M.D. scripted in neat cursive letters in gold.
A creak in the floorboards drew him back to him senses. Someone was in the office next door. He had just enough time to drop the pen and stand up from the chair when the door of Doctor Lefevre's office opened. Alice Laffont's head appeared.
"I'm sorry," Frantz said hurriedly, "I wasn't...I just came in to turn off the light. I was just leaving."
Alice scrutinized Frantz, seeing the guilty expression on his face. Her eyes flicked down to the doctor's desk where Frantz had dropped the pen haphazardly next to its leather case. She smiled. "It's a nice pen, isn't it?"
Frantz gave an embarrassed shrug.
Alice walked into the office. "I thought I might find you here still," she said. "You work too hard, you know that?"
"Apparently not hard enough," Frantz lamented, unable to suppress the bitter tone in his voice. "Did you hear Doctor Lefevre passed me up for the summer residency?"
Alice gave a derisive snort. "Well, he does like his material pleasures, doesn't he?"
