“Is very good place. Little girls going to has good upbringing, is nobody but French people there. Is no like in Pantin is children saying bad words in the street. Is nothing like that there.
“Little granddaughter her father he scare her, he say, ‘Is all over, we moving back to Pantin, let’s go,’ he pretending to take suitcase. She cry and cry. She no want.”
“Listen, I’ve heard about a new course that would be great for you: with a teacher just for you. You know, what they call private lessons.”
“Don’t go bother this thing now,” she says. “I going back to Morocco soon.”
“It will take you a while to prepare your departure. The paperwork for retirement takes a long time. In the meanwhile you’ll be able to take a few classes. You’ll go much faster with a real teacher. It’s free. You can start whenever you want, not only in September.”
“We’ll see,” she says.
But her tone has changed.
“You right, I gotta. Is good thing I no forgetting is write my name.”
Nicolas Sarkozy has been elected President of the Republic. “I very happy,” says Fadila. “Everyone around me they very happy. Is people they doing trafficking they no happy. Sarkozy say he gonna clean up, is right. Is what he gotta do.”
On May 10th, at eight o’clock in the morning, Fadila is hit by a car, not far from her place in Pantin. Her children don’t know what she was doing out so early: perhaps she wanted to use a public telephone to save on her cell phone minutes. All she had on her were her keys and her wallet. The driver who hit her says she didn’t see her. It was raining.
There were witnesses. Fadila cried out and fell to the ground and lost consciousness. At the hospital where she has been taken they have diagnosed a brain trauma, along with a fractured pelvis and superficial injuries. She is in a coma, with artificial respiration.
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Eleven days after the accident the doctor summons Fadila’s children to the hospital. The cerebral hematoma has resorbed somewhat, and they were able to perform a brain scan. The prognosis is not good. There are multiple cerebral lesions. If Fadila comes out of the coma, she will be severely handicapped. She will not be able to see, or hear, or speak.
“Poor thing,” says her daughter Aïcha, “and here she was about to take her retirement any day now. Bad enough that she never had any luck in life: she never even got to have any rest. She was talking about going back to Morocco. She thought she might try to spend six months there and six months here.
“I was urging her to retire, but she wanted to go on working to continue helping her son.”
She is in reanimation, in a room where, apparently, the door is always left wide open.
Édith hesitates in the doorway. She does not recognize Fadila. The woman lying there in the reclining bed, in line with the door, has several tubes in her mouth and nostrils, and it is hard to see her face. Her arms are bared, like her shoulders, and are attached along the side of her body, over a tightly pulled sheet. Her hair on the pillow is uncombed, fanned out on either side of her head.
On seeing those round shoulders and arms, her smooth golden skin, her long curly black hair, Édith thinks she is in the presence of a much younger woman. She must have gotten the wrong room.
She walks in and reads the papers posted on the wall. On one of them she finds what she was looking for: AMRANI FADILA and, underneath, severe brain trauma.
After three weeks Fadila emerges from the coma. From time to time she moves, or opens her eyes. But she has not regained consciousness for all that. She still requires artificial respiration, she cannot do without.
Édith is in the room when a woman comes in and introduces herself: she is the neurologist. The woman is categorical: they must not have any false hopes. The patient is in a vegetative state. She cannot swallow, she has no feeding reflexes and will need a feeding tube. When they ask her to make a gesture, she does not react. She cannot see anymore. She cannot hear.
“And then there is everything we can see on the scan. Irreversible lesions. But we can’t know everything,” says the doctor on leaving. “To what degree is she conscious? That’s the big question. Talk to her, above all. Touch her, take her hand.”
The room has fallen silent, save for the quiet purr of a machine and a few irregular clicking sounds. Fadila’s eyes are closed, and she is as motionless as a recumbent statue; Édith cannot even see her breathing under the sheet. Without making a sound Édith sits down beside her, on her right, and places her hand on Fadila’s. She cannot bring herself to talk to her out loud. The warmth of her skin reminds her of the rare times when she held that hand in hers, to write with her.
A cruel thought comes to her. If they were to try to communicate with Fadila by showing her one letter after the other, so that she could express herself by blinking her eyelids—one blink for A, two blinks for B, and so on, like the character in The Count of Monte Cristo or, more recently, two or three individuals who sustained severe head injuries yet managed to dictate entire books in this way—well, it would be impossible. In her palm Édith feels, achingly, the throb of the alpha and omega of her failure. She did not know how to teach Fadila the alphabet. She was not able to make her understand how to use writing to combine letters in order to make words that are legible; surely that would have given Fadila access to the language of the locked-in, a language that is neither oral nor written, a language born of the worst imaginable solitude, and the only way out of it.
About the Author
Laurence Cossé worked as a journalist before devoting herself entirely to fiction. She is the author of A Novel Bookstore and An Accident in August. She lives in France.
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