Vox Meditantis

Toulouse, France – 29th June, 1935

The examining room smelt of carbolic acid and leather, that peculiar mixture of antiseptic and the worn chair where countless aviators had sat before me. Dr. Martineau adjusted his spectacles and peered at my medical records, the pages rustling like autumn leaves in the draught from the window overlooking the airfield at Toulouse. Outside, I could see the silver wing of my aircraft catching the late afternoon sun of this twenty-ninth day of June, 1935—my thirty-fifth birthday, though I felt far older than my years.

“Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry,” the doctor said, his pen poised above a fresh form, “before I can clear you for this mail route to Casablanca, I must ask about your surgical history. Have you ever had surgery? What for?”

I leant back in the chair, feeling the familiar ache in my shoulder that the Guatemalan heat had left behind. How does one begin to explain the ways in which a body can be broken and mended, the curious alchemy by which steel and bone conspire to keep a man earthbound, even as his spirit yearns for the infinite blue?

“I have been opened twice, Doctor,” I said, watching a mechanic wheel fuel drums across the tarmac. “Once by necessity in the Sahara, once by chance in Guatemala. Both times, I learnt something profound about the fragility that connects us all.”

The doctor’s eyebrows rose slightly. “Please, elaborate.”

“The first was in nineteen thirty,” I began, closing my eyes to summon that terrible, beautiful memory. “I was flying the Tripoli-to-Benghazi mail route when my engine failed over the Western Desert. You understand, Doctor, there is no lonelier sound than silence at three thousand feet, when the propeller stops turning and the earth rises to meet you with such frightening inevitability.”

The crash itself had been almost gentle—a long, sliding embrace with the sand that left me conscious but trapped beneath the twisted metal of my aircraft. My mechanic, Prévot, had been thrown clear, dazed but whole. We had water for perhaps three days, maybe four if we were careful. The desert stretched around us like a vast, indifferent cathedral, its silence broken only by the ticking of cooling metal and our own ragged breathing.

“We walked for two days,” I continued, feeling again the burn of sand against my face, the way the horizon danced and lied in the heat. “On the third day, when we had begun to see mirages of lakes and cities, when our lips had cracked and our tongues had swollen, the Bedouins found us.”

Dr. Martineau made a note. “And the surgery?”

“Ah, yes. The crash had driven a piece of the engine cowling deep into my abdomen—a jagged wound that had been bleeding slowly, internally, for three days. The tribal chief, a man whose face was mapped with the wisdom of the desert, took us to an outpost where a French colonial doctor maintained a clinic in a building that had once been a fort.”

I could still see Dr. Rousseau’s hands, surprisingly gentle for their size, as he examined me by the light of kerosene lamps. The clinic was a single room with whitewashed walls and a crucifix that cast dancing shadows in the flickering light. There was no proper operating theatre, no modern equipment—only a wooden table scrubbed clean, a collection of instruments that looked more suited to carpentry than surgery, and the doctor’s steady courage.

“He operated without anaesthetic,” I said quietly. “There was morphine, but it had spoiled in the heat. I lay there, staring at that crucifix on the wall, feeling his hands inside me, searching for the metal that was slowly killing me. Do you know what I thought about, Doctor?”

“I couldn’t imagine.”

“I thought about the letters in my mail bag, scattered across the desert floor. Love letters, business correspondence, birthday cards—all the fragile threads that connect human beings across impossible distances. Here I was, my own thread nearly severed, whilst somewhere in France, people waited for words that might never arrive.”

The surgery had lasted two hours. Dr. Rousseau had extracted the metal fragment with tweezers and the patience of a watchmaker, his forehead beaded with perspiration in the close air of the clinic. When it was finished, when the wound was sewn with coarse thread and bandaged with strips torn from bedsheets, I had felt not relief but a strange, profound gratitude—not merely for the saving of my life, but for the reminder of how easily that life could be lost.

“I spent three weeks recovering in that clinic,” I said. “Three weeks watching the desert through a small window, seeing how the light changed from hour to hour, how the sand shifted in patterns that seemed almost like writing. The doctor and I talked each evening about books, about flight, about the curious ways in which technology brings us together even as it threatens to tear us apart.”

Dr. Martineau was writing steadily now, his pen scratching across the page like a tiny engine. “And how did this experience affect your flying?”

I considered this carefully. Outside, the shadows were lengthening across the airfield, and I could hear the evening shift of mechanics beginning their work on the aircraft that would carry the mail through the night.

“It taught me that we are all, in our way, fragments of metal lodged in soft flesh,” I said. “Flight is the human desire to transcend our limitations, to become more than the sum of our frailties. But surgery—surgery is the acknowledgement that we are, beneath it all, terribly vulnerable creatures who depend entirely upon one another for survival.”

The doctor looked up from his notes. “That seems rather philosophical for a medical consultation.”

“Perhaps. But you asked about surgery, and surgery is never merely about the body, is it? It is about trust—the surgeon’s trust in his skill, the patient’s trust in the surgeon’s hands. In the desert, I learnt that this trust extends far beyond the operating table. We are all performing surgery on one another, constantly—mending the small tears in the fabric of human connection, extracting the foreign objects that lodge themselves in our hearts.”

“The second surgery was different,” I continued, flexing my shoulder unconsciously. “Less mystical, more mechanical. I had been flying reconnaissance missions over the coffee plantations, mapping routes for the postal service, when a sudden storm caught me near Guatemala City. The aircraft was torn apart in the wind—wings folded like paper, fuselage crumpled like a discarded letter.”

This crash had been violent where the desert one was gentle. I remembered the sensation of tumbling through space, the world spinning past the cockpit in fragments of green and brown and grey. When I came to consciousness, I was hanging upside down in my harness, my left shoulder detached from its proper place, the arm hanging at an angle that spoke eloquently of broken things.

“A plantation owner found me,” I said. “Don Miguel, a man who had lost his own son in the Great War and who looked at broken aviators with the same careful attention he gave to damaged coffee plants—something that could be mended, with patience and the right tools.”

The surgery had taken place in Guatemala City, in a hospital that smelt of tropical flowers and iodine. The surgeon, Dr. Vásquez, had trained in Vienna before the war and spoke to me in careful French whilst he explained how my shoulder blade had been shattered into three distinct pieces, how the muscles and tendons had been torn away from their moorings like rigging in a storm.

“He rebuilt me,” I said simply. “Piece by piece, using metal pins and wire to hold the bones whilst they healed, stitching the muscles back into place like a tailor repairing a torn coat. I was unconscious for that surgery, thank God, but I awoke to find myself transformed—part man, part machine, like the aircraft I flew.”

The recovery had been longer this time—six months of careful movement, of learning again how to lift my arm, how to work the controls of an aircraft with hardware now permanently embedded in my flesh. But it had also been a time of writing, of putting down on paper the thoughts that had accumulated during my years in the air.

“That was when I truly began to understand the relationship between the mechanical and the human,” I said. “My shoulder became a kind of barometer—it ached before storms, grew stiff in the cold, reminded me constantly that I was no longer purely organic. I was a hybrid creature, kept aloft by the marriage of flesh and steel.”

Dr. Martineau had stopped writing and was looking at me with the expression of a man who has asked for directions and received a lecture on philosophy. “And how do you feel now? Any limitations?”

“Oh, the physical limitations are manageable,” I said, rotating my shoulder to demonstrate. “But there are other kinds of limitations, Doctor. Each surgery leaves scars, and scars are maps of where we have been broken. They remind us that we are not invincible, that the sky which calls to us so sweetly can also dash us against the earth with casual indifference.”

I stood and walked to the window, watching the last light fade from the wings of my aircraft. Soon, I would climb into that cockpit and carry letters across the Mediterranean darkness, trusting once again in the marriage of human skill and mechanical precision that kept me suspended between earth and stars.

“But here is what I have learnt from being opened and mended,” I said, turning back to face him. “Surgery is an act of profound intimacy—more intimate, perhaps, than love itself. The surgeon sees us as we truly are: fragile assemblages of blood and bone and hope, held together by the thinnest margins of chemistry and chance. To be cut open is to be reminded that we are all, beneath our clothes and our pretensions, the same vulnerable creature, longing for connection, terrified of isolation.”

“The anaesthetic they gave me in Guatemala—when I was going under, I thought about my characters, the little prince I had been writing about in my notebooks. He was a creature who moved between planets, who understood that what matters most is invisible to the eye. Lying there on the operating table, feeling consciousness slip away, I realised that surgery is perhaps the most honest thing that happens to us—the moment when all our defences are stripped away, when we must trust completely in the hands of another.”

Dr. Martineau was quiet for a long moment, his pen resting on the desk. Outside, the airfield lights had begun to flicker on, marking the runways like constellations fallen to earth.

“And you still wish to fly?” he asked finally.

I smiled, feeling the weight of the scars beneath my shirt, the metal in my shoulder catching the lamplight like a small star. “Doctor, I do not fly despite my surgeries—I fly because of them. Each time I have been broken and mended, I have understood more clearly what it means to be human. We are all walking wounded, all carrying the evidence of our encounters with the sharp edges of existence. But we are also all capable of being healed, of healing others, of rising again into the infinite blue.”

He signed the medical clearance with a flourish and handed it to me. As I walked towards the door, he called after me.

“Bon voyage, Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry. May your flights be smooth.”

“Merci, Doctor,” I replied, tucking the clearance into my jacket pocket beside my logbook and letters. “But if they are not, I know now that being broken is sometimes the first step towards becoming whole.”

The desert had taught me that survival is a collaborative art. Guatemala had shown me that healing requires both surrender and reconstruction. And both surgeries had carved into my flesh the understanding that would later flow from my pen: that we are responsible for what we have tamed, that the most important things are invisible to the eye, and that somewhere, on a small planet, there is always someone waiting for us to return safely home.

The End

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.