In Europe

tables. One of the groups is discussing prayer. How frequently does one pray? ‘I pray for an hour each day,’ an older gentleman says.‘That's enough for me and my children.’ The women at the table do it more quickly, and besides, praying for an hour, how many requests can one have for Jesus anyway? ‘Jesus?’ the man says sternly. ‘Yes, we always pray to Jesus.’ ‘And what about the Virgin?’ ‘Well, not as often.’ This raises a new question: to whom does one pray? Or rather: to whom does one pray for certain problems? And we still have the whole evening in front of us.
    At the spring, hundreds of people are waiting in line to fill their plastic bottles with holy water. The crowd in front of the cave is completely silent, there are thousands of people standing or sitting or lying there in prayer, here and there a deformed child is held up: all the better for Mother Mary to see them. A determined man trudges around with a gigantic banner for the Virgin, the huge pennant flaps all evening above his head.
    The shops of Lourdes are full of plastic Mary bottles to hold the spring water – the Virgin's head serves as a screw-on top. They also sell huge framed colour photos of Jesus on the cross – when looked at from a certain angle, he open his eyes or closes them again – and ashtrays, vases, Padre Pio and the Pope in a thousand different shapes and sizes. And, at the same time, Lourdes is a place where every franc is pinched till it bleeds. You have souvenirs starting at around five francs, less than a euro. There are cheap hotels, the food is simple and filling, the men tote groceries around in big plastic bags, the women wear cheap coats, the faces are lined, the eyes glance shyly at all this strange opulence.
    Two pilgrim trains are about to leave the station: one for Boulogne, the other for Perpignan. A few dozen young spastic people have been lined up on the platform, beside them four wooden trolleys full of worn suitcases, crutches and jerry cans of spring water. Many of the passengers are carrying fluorescent plastic Virgins and marble grave decorations, for there is no reason why the dead cannot receive gifts as well.
    Today, in 1999, the pilgrim trains are no longer the stinking, miserable carriages that Émile Zola described in his novel
Lourdes
(1894); they are mostly silver high-speed trains in which the suffering is neatly covered up. Except, that is, in the
Train Vert
; the hospital cars for the lame andterminally ill who are headed for Perpignan still exude the old-fashioned smell of illness and Lysol. Unlike in Zola's day, today there are antibiotics, TB has been eliminated, the patients are mostly well nourished and all illness and suffering has been skilfully excised from public life. Except in Lourdes. Lourdes is the clearance sale for all the suffering our society normally hides from sight, and for a few days it leaves its isolation. Is that the comfort this pilgrimage brings? I enter into a conversation with an old woman in a wheelchair, she has scarves wrapped around her head, a pair of what look like motorcycle goggles protects her eyes. She saved for this trip for eighteen months; she enjoyed herself. ‘Oh, sonny,’ she says, grabbing my hand. ‘When you're here you're close to heaven's gate for a while.’ The locomotive blows its whistle, the train begins to move. Patients wave, some of them lie on their mattresses and pray.
    The next evening there is a huge procession. First, thousands of pilgrims swarm around the enormous square before the basilica, men in their Sunday best, women in crisp dresses, old people cough, children hobble along on crutches, an incredible swarm without system or goal. But then darkness falls, the procession begins to take shape, and there they go: hundreds of men and women in wheelchairs, candles held high, moving their lips along with the ‘Ave Maria’ blasting from the loudspeakers, some of them slouching under their blankets, some with bandaged faces, a few with faces blemished from AIDS. A husband and wife try to support the head of their paralysed son: look, look at the Virgin. All the despair from all the back rooms of Europe bursts out here.
    Everyone is old, everyone is poor. The pace is overwhelming, the helpers are almost sprinting, sometimes whole human chains are formed to keep the rushing wheelchairs on course. Then come the beds, at the same pace, the patients lying beneath a red sheet, handbags resting on their stomachs, a boy