by Abdel Sellou
“No thank you. On the other hand, a cigarette would be nice.”
“No, I don’t smoke.”
“Well, I do! And could you please get me one!”
He laughs. I really look like an idiot. Luckily I don’t know anyone around here . . . I put the filter between his lips, activate the Zippo.
“What do we do about the ashes?”
“Don’t worry about it, Abdel, I’ll handle it . . . Pass me the newspaper, please.”
Apparently, the Herald Tribune is part of the morning ritual because, just before we left, the blonde slipped it into my hands without him asking. I set it on the table. I take a gulp of soda. Tetraman doesn’t say anything. He smiles, unblinking, like the day before during my “interview.” I finally figure out something’s wrong, but I don’t know what. He enlightens me.
“You have to open the paper and put it in front of me so that I can read it.”
“Oh, right! Of course!”
The number of pages, columns, and the words in each column scare me a little.
“You really going to read all of that? And it’s in English, too—that takes a long time!”
“Don’t worry, Abdel. If we’re late for lunch, we’ll run back.”
He dives into his reading. From time to time, he asks me to turn the page. He leans his head and the ash from his cigarette falls, just next to his shoulder. He handles it all right . . . I look at him like he’s an alien. A dead body disguised as a live rich man from the XVIth. A head that works by magic, and more curious than strange because this head doesn’t work like any of the others I’ve known from this milieu. I like rich people because we rip them off but I hate them because of the world they’re a part of. They usually have no sense of humor. Philippe Pozzo di Borgo laughs constantly and at himself more than anything else. I’ve decided to stay two, three days tops. I’ll need some more time to unravel this mystery.
22
I’ve said that Fleury-Mérogis was like summer camp for me. I’m stretching it a little. It’s true the guards acted like mothers to the detainees, that sexual violence didn’t exist inside those walls, that exchanges were made fairly and not as a kind of extortion. But I’m downplaying the negative aspects of prison a little. During the first days, they stuck me in a cell with two other guys. Promiscuity was the only thing I couldn’t stand. I could accept having my freedom taken away, eating out of a metal bowl like a dog, having the toilet in my room and the odors that go with it. On the condition that the odors were mine.
My roommates decided, That young one there, we’re gonna get him into line fast . . . I warned them just as fast. They had to tear me off them or there would’ve been broken bones. They didn’t listen to me: one of the guys took a trip to the ER in Ivry. Considering I’d only defended myself against two pairs of arms full of bad intentions, management, eager to erase the incident as fast as possible, gave me a single cell. From that moment on, the guards acted like mothers to me because I behaved myself like a good boy. In the courtyard, during our walk, I stayed mostly in the middle, at a safe distance from the walls where the druggies in withdrawal and the depressives negotiated their trade. The yoyo system wasn’t any good for sheets of pills—too light. So these guys took the risk of doing business in the yard—they didn’t really have a choice. A voice boomed out from the speaker:
“You in the yellow and blue jackets, next to the pillar, separate immediately.”
In prison, voices boomed out from everywhere, all of the time, though the cells were soundproofed: your neighbor had to turn the TV volume all the way up to bother the others. Strangely, the cries of men traveled through everything. I say that the guards played mother and the guys respected each other because I didn’t see anything else. But I heard.
I like the sounds of the Beaugrenelle projects, the kids who hang out on the pavement and the concierge who sweeps the cigarette butts. Frrrrt, frrrt . . . I like the sounds of Paris, the mopeds that sputter, the metro that comes up to street level at Bastille, the whistles from the scalpers and even the screaming sirens from the police cars. At Philippe Pozzo di Borgo’s, I like the silence. The apartment looks onto a garden that’s invisible from the street. I didn’t even know something like that could exist in the middle of Paris. After his coffee, he uses his chin to operate the mechanism on his chair and goes over to the bay window, where he stays for at least an hour. He reads. I discover the indispensable toolkit of the tetraplegic: a portable reading lectern. You stick the book on it—a thousand-page brick with no pictures, printed in small letters, a veritable weapon of self-defense—and a strip of Plexiglas turns the page when Mr. Pozzo tells it to by moving his chin. Staying there is part of my job. There’s no sound. I sit down on a couch, I sleep.
“Abdel? Hello, Abdel?”
I open an eye, stretch myself.
“Is the bedding no good up there?”
“Yes it is, but I went to see some buddies last night, so I’m catching up a little . . .”
“Excuse me for disturbing you, but the machine turned two pages at the same time.”
“Oh, well that’s no big deal. You missing a part of history? You want me to tell you about it? It’ll save you some time!”
I’ll do just about anything for a laugh. I like to be paid to sleep, but if I have to choose, I’d prefer to be paid to live.
“Why not? Abdel, have you read The Roads to Freedom by Jean-Paul Sartre?”
“Of course, it’s the story of little Jean-Paul, right, that one? So this little Jean-Paul, he goes for a walk in the forest, you see, he picks some mushrooms, he sings like this, a little like the Smurfs, la-la, lalalala . . . and suddenly, he reaches a bend. So he hesitates a little before going on, of course, because he doesn’t know what’s after the bend, right? Well, he’s wrong, you know, because what’s around the bend, Mr. Pozzo?”
“Well, I’m asking you, Abdel!”
“There’s freedom. That’s it. That’s why it’s called “The Roads to Freedom.” End of chapter, that’s it, now we close the book. Come on, Mr. Pozzo, let’s go for a walk.”
This guy has unbelievably white teeth. I can see them really well when he laughs. They look like the tile in my shower here.
23
I don’t remember deciding to stay. Or signing a contract, or of having said hey, high five! to the one who became my boss. The day after my arrival, and after that first bizarre bathing session and then the coffee with the Herald Tribune, I went back home to change my underwear and get a toothbrush. My mother laughed.
“So, son, are you moving in with your girlfriend? When are you going to introduce us?”
“You’re never going to believe it: I found a job. Food and a place to live! With rich people on the other side of the Seine.”
“With rich people! Now, you’re not doing anything bad, right, Abdel?”
“Well, you’re not going to believe that, either . . .”
In fact, I don’t think she believed me. I took off to find Brahim, who was now working at the Pied de Chameau restaurant (yes, Brahim also became a good boy). I told him about Philippe Pozzo di Borgo, his physical state and the place where he lived. I barely exaggerated.
“Brahim, you can’t believe it: at this guy’s place, you squat down, you pull a string between the slats of parquet, and a banknote comes out. I could see the franc signs appearing in his eyes, like gold bars do in Uncle Scrooge’s.”
“Come on, Abdel . . . you’re kidding! That’s not true.”
“Of course it’s not true. But I’m barely exaggerating, I swear!”
“And the dude, he doesn’t move at all?”
“Only his head. The rest is dead. Gone. Kaput.”
“But his heart still beats, right?”
“I don’t even know. In fact, I don’t know how a tetraplegic works . . . I mean, yeah, I do, I know that it doesn’t work!”
I can’t remember the first days at avenue Léopold II very well, probably because I was there off and on. I wasn’t trying t
o please anyone and definitely not trying to make myself indispensable. I didn’t stop for one second to think about the situation, or about what a job in this house with this strange handicapped man could bring me, or what I could bring to this family. Time had maybe done its work on me, like it does on any person, but I wasn’t aware of anything. I’d already had pretty varied experiences and had learned some things from them, but I hadn’t put all of it together, not out loud and not in my head. Even in prison, where the days are long and, you’d assume, ripe for thinking, I numbed my brain on television and news radio. I didn’t have any fear of tomorrow. At Fleury, I knew the near future looked like the present. There was nothing to worry about on the outside, either. No danger on the horizon. I had so much self-confidence that I knew I was invincible. I didn’t think I was invincible: I knew I was!
They put me in a police van to take me from the courthouse on the Ile de la Cité to Fleury-Mérogis. It’s a van equipped with two rows of narrow booths in the back. Only one detainee per booth because you can’t fit it any more than that. You can stand up or sit down on a board wedged in sideways. The handcuffs stay on. The door is part solid, part wire mesh. You don’t look out the window: you’ve got this web of steel threading in front of you, a narrow passage and then another booth holding another guy headed for the same place. I didn’t try to make out his face in the darkness of the van. I wasn’t particularly crushed, though I was not very happy either, of course. I was absent from the others and from myself.
The superheroes from the movies don’t exist. Clark Kent doesn’t become Superman when he puts on his ridiculous costume. Rambo doesn’t feel the blows to his body, but his heart is in tatters. The Invisible Man’s name is David McCallum; he wears Lycra undershirts and has a really bad bowl cut. But I didn’t know my own weakness. My gift? Insensitivity. I wasn’t born with it. I was able to spare myself all unpleasant emotions. I was a human fortress inside, impenetrable. Superman and his colleagues were nothing. I was convinced that the world counted on real, and rare, superheroes and that I was one of them.
24
Madame Pozzo di Borgo’s first name is Béatrice. I like her from the start—she is open, simple, not prudish. I call her “Madame.” It suits her well.
But this morning Pozzo tells me, “Madame is going to die soon.”
His wife is sick. Some kind of cancer. When he had the paragliding accident that put him in his present state two years ago, they told him that he could expect to live seven or eight more years. The big bonus: he might be the one to live longer.
In this house, there’s no partitioning of family on one side, personnel on the other. Everyone eats together. We eat on pretty normal dishes—I know they don’t come from the local supermarket but, still, they go in the dishwasher. Céline, the children’s nanny, takes care of the cooking. Very well, by the way. The kids don’t ask her for much more. Laetitia, the oldest, is the typical spoiled-rotten adolescent. She blows me off superbly, and I try to do the same to her. Robert-Jean, twelve, is the picture of discretion. I don’t know which of the two is suffering more from the situation. To me, rich people’s kids have no reason to suffer. I want to shake that bratty girl whenever I see her. Show her what real life is like so she’ll stop whining for two seconds because the bag she’s been eyeballing for weeks isn’t available anymore in caramel brown. I’d like to take her for a tour of Beaugrenelle for starters, then we’d go full on, to the projects in Saint-Denis, to the squats in abandoned warehouses where you find not only druggies in withdrawal but also families, kids, babies. No water, obviously, no heat and no electricity. Filthy mattresses lying directly on the ground. I wipe the sauce with a piece of baguette. Laetitia picks at her food—she’s left half of the veal. Béatrice gently scolds her son for picking out the slices of onion. He tries to regroup them, with the tip of his fork, into a corner of his plate. Soon Béatrice won’t be strong enough to sit at the table with us. She’ll be lying down in her room, here in the apartment or in the hospital.
You’ve got to admit it . . . these aristocrats are magnets for bad luck. I look around me. The paintings, the marquetry furniture, the Empire dressers with fine gold handles, the half-acre garden in the middle of Paris, the apartment . . . What good is it to have so much if you’re not alive anymore? And why is it bothering me?
The Pozzo is in pain. The Pozzo takes some painkillers. The Pozzo suffers just a little less. When he’s better, I take him to Beaugrenelle. We don’t get out of the car. I lower the window, a friend tosses a small package onto my passenger’s lap, and we leave.
“What is this, Abdel?”
“Something to make you feel better that actually works. Not sold in pharmacies.”
“For goodness sake, Abdel, you’re not going to leave it there! Hide it!”
“I’m driving. I can’t exactly let go of the steering wheel . . .”
The Pozzo doesn’t always sleep at night. He holds his breath because breathing hurts; he inhales air suddenly and it’s even worse. There isn’t enough oxygen in the room, or the garden, or in the tank. Sometimes they wake me up: you have to take him to the hospital, right away, without delay. Waiting for an ambulance equipped to transport a tetraplegic would take too long. I’m already ready.
The Pozzo suffers most from seeing his wife in such bad health and from being helpless against her illness, like he is against his own handicap.
I tell jokes, I sing, I brag about made-up things. He wears support hose. I slip one on my head and imitate a holdup.
“Stick ’em up . . . Stick ’em up, I said! You, too!”
“I can’t.”
“Oh? Are you sure?”
“Sure.”
“That’s a bummer . . . well, I want the most valuable thing in this stinking house. Not silver, not paintings, no! I want . . . your brain!”
I jump on Pozzo and pretend to cut open his skull. It tickles him. He begs me to stop.
I slip on one of his tuxedo jackets, too big for me, punch the top of his Stetson to make into a bowler hat, and walk around his bed whistling a ragtime tune, imitating Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.
Why do I bother? I don’t care about these people. I don’t know them.
But then again, why not? What does it cost me to clown around either here or back in the projects? Most of my friends are starting to get themselves together, like Brahim. I don’t have anyone to go hang out with. It’s nice and warm here, the decoration is nice—it has potential. Potential for pleasure.
The Pozzo’s body is hurting. I have the decency—what is happening to me all of a sudden?—not to ask why. The other trial-basis candidate pacing around the chair is praying furiously. He keeps a Bible in one hand at all times, looks up to the sky, forgetting that the ceiling is in the way, he says words ending in -us like in the Astérix comics and even chants for a cup a coffee. I pop up behind him singing Madonna.
Like a virgin, hey! Like a vir-ir-ir-ir-gin . . .
This candidate, Brother Jean-Marie of the Assumption of the Holy Trinity of the Cross of Notre Dame of the Blessed Waters, practically makes a cross with his finger to protect himself from me, the devil’s servant. Laurence, the secretary—we’re on a first-name basis now, everybody calls me by my first name, I’m no prude—laughs, discreetly. Okay, so maybe she’s not as uptight as I thought . . . She’s even kind of checking me out.
“He’s a defrocked priest.”
I burst out laughing.
“Defrocked? He lost his frock?”
“No, just his cassock . . . he was with the Church but decided to go back to civilian life, if you will.”
“You know, your boss isn’t gonna have much fun with a guy like that, huh?”
“What makes you think he’s going to keep you?”
In fact, the priest disappeared after eight days. He had warned the Pozzo against the Muslim devil he’d carelessly allowed into his home. Muslim, me? I’d never set foot in a mosque in my entire life. As for the devil, well . . . maybe a little s
till, but honestly: less and less, right?
25
One morning the transfer machine gets stuck. It’s impossible to get it going. The Pozzo is already half in it, but only half. We’d slid the straps under his arms and thighs, he was dangling over the bed, not yet in the shower chair. You can imagine the level of comfort . . . So we had to call emergency services. By the time they got there and got him out, and followed the necessary process to get him in his chair, it was already the afternoon . . . That whole time, the Pozzo was polite, patient, and resigned, without looking defeated. We told all kinds of jokes to keep him distracted and play down the situation. Not because the machine was stuck: we knew it would start again sooner or later. But because a man was trapped in a device that was supposed to help him and he was helpless to get out of it. We send men to the moon and we’re incapable of developing a faster, safer system for moving around a tetraplegic? The next morning, before even turning on the people-mover, I told the care assistant that I was going to carry Mr. Pozzo to his shower chair—me, Abdel Sellou, five feet, eight inches tall, with short, round arms like marshmallow sticks. She yelled at me.
“Are you crazy? This man is as fragile as an egg!”
His bones, lungs, skin: on a tetraplegic, every part of the body is vulnerable—injuries aren’t visible to the eye, and pain doesn’t sound the alarm. The blood doesn’t circulate well, wounds don’t heal, organs aren’t well irrigated, the urinary and intestinal processes are affected, the body doesn’t clean itself. Being around the Pozzo for a few days had provided me with accelerated medical training. I understood that he was a delicate patient. An egg, really. A quail’s egg with a thin, white shell. I remember the state of my GI Joes after I played with them, when I was a kid. It wasn’t pretty . . . But I was grownup now. I looked at the Pozzo, a big GI Joe made of porcelain. The guy who’d been showing his nice, white teeth a few minutes earlier was now clenching them since I’d made the announcement that I’d carry him. But I was sure I could move the egg without breaking it.