by Abdel Sellou
His ancestors are laid to rest in a chapel a few hundred feet away. Monsieur Pozzo tells me that he has a spot waiting for him. Let it wait . . . He gets really sick—exhausted from the chaotic journey, no doubt. A vesicle blockage that seems impossible to cure. For three days and three nights, I see him suffer like never before. At the work site, the men hit with their hammers. They stop now and then, surprised by the intensity of the screams coming from the tower. Seriously, I’ve never seen a man cry that much.
“Don’t you think we should go to the hospital?”
“No Abdel, please, I want to stay at home. I don’t want to miss the party.”
We’d planned to invite the people over from the village next to the chateau. They had mourned Lady Béatrice three months earlier and the count intends to thank them. But he’s stuck in bed and no painkiller has any effect. He can only get relief at the hospital. He doesn’t want to go, and I give in. The kids feel right at home at La Punta; they have memories of coming here as a family. Monsieur Pozzo remembers Béatrice in this place full of history and their history, and I can’t see myself depriving them of this rediscovery.
It seems like I did the right thing. On the morning of the party, the pain goes away. We organize a North African–style barbecue. I go get the sheep, slaughter it, and roast it like a servant from another era. The members of the polyphonic choir Alata have come. They sing in a circle, each turned toward the next one, with a hand over an ear. Their deep voices resonate in the trees and bushes. You’d have to be a fool not to appreciate it. It even does something to me . . . The party is fantastic, the lord reigns from his wheelchair, delivered from physical pain and from the slightest hint of his sadness.
We’re always together.
I take Monsieur Pozzo to the doctors at Kerpape, the physical rehabilitation center in Brittany where he was treated after his accident. He announces to the staff, jovially, “Let Dr. Abdel through.”
He’s a grateful man.
I go with Monsieur Pozzo to his dinner invitations. In restaurants, I move the chairs and tables, I arrange the cutlery so that I can feed him neatly. Sometimes, they forget to feed the care assistant—me. Monsieur Pozzo politely tells the headwaiter that I eat, too.
One Sunday, we’re eating with one of the most traditional families. The kids are wearing navy suits with white shirts, the girls in pleated skirts and Peter Pan collars. They say some kind of prayer before digging in. I burst out laughing. I quietly say, “It’s like the Ingalls family!”
Monsieur Pozzo looks at me, panicked.
“Abdel, get a hold of yourself. And who is the Ingalls family, anyway?”
“We need to work on your culture! They’re the people on Little House on the Prairie!”
Everybody at the table’s heard me. They stare at me, furious. Monsieur Pozzo has the kindness not to apologize for me.
I go with him to dinner organized by people from his world. They don’t know too many Arabs, except maybe for their cleaning ladies. They ask me questions about my life, my plans, my ambitions.
“Ambitions? I don’t have any.”
“Come now, Abdel, you seem intelligent and hardworking. You could certainly do something.”
“I take advantage. It’s not bad, taking advantage. You should all try it sometime. You’d look a lot better!”
On the way back, Monsieur Pozzo lectures me.
“Abdel, thanks to you they’re going to think all Arabs are lazy and they’re going to vote for the Nationalist party.”
“You think they waited until they knew me to do that?”
It’s the opening of the International Contemporary Art Fair, or ICAF. The boss, an occasional collector, is invited to the preshow for several galleries: the opening without the crowd. Just us folks, right . . . These people are stinking rich and reek of disdain. And most of all, what a bunch of snobs . . . Three square feet of thick carpet placed on the ground right in the middle of a booth. Hey, a red doormat! But what’s it for? Wait a minute, there’s a little tag next to it. It’s the instruction manual: you’re not supposed to walk on it, just drag your hand over it. And the work is complete until another hand transforms it or erases it. Bullshit. I’m bent over, but not to be the artist. I’m counting the zeros, lined up closely in small characters on the card. We’re in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. You’ve got to be kidding me!
“Do you like it, Abdel?”
Monsieur Pozzo has seen my surprise and is having a laugh.
“Honestly, I’ll take you to Home Depot and buy you the same thing for five francs! And you can even pick the color!”
We continue our little tour of the rip-off artists. A ball of blue wool levitates on the top of a rod. Is that for dusting in corners? An old slide projector clicks noisily every five seconds, displaying on the wall a black-and-white picture of a beach. That’s art? The photos are all bad, you can’t even see the girls’ breasts! Lines of every color intersect on a canvas. There are also some triangles here and there, all kinds of shapes, scribbling . . . I’m trying to find something clear, a subject, an animal, a character, a house, a planet . . . I tilt my head in every direction; I lean forward and I look upside down through my legs. Even in that position, I don’t see anything.
“It’s lyrical abstract art, Abdel.”
“Lyrical like music?”
“Like music!”
“Yeah. It does exactly the same thing to me! Nothing! And how much does this thing cost? Ooh, la la! Even you can’t afford this, and that’s saying something!”
“Yes, I can.”
“Yeah, but, you don’t want to, right? You don’t want to? I’m warning you, Monsieur Pozzo, don’t count on me for putting the nail in the wall so that thing can hang in our faces all day!”
No, he doesn’t want to. He keeps his money for dressers. Because they have auctions for dressers, too. Where does he get this obsession for collecting dressers? He doesn’t even know what to put in the drawers. Doesn’t matter, he has to buy dressers . . . it’s true that in a thirty-five-hundred-square-foot apartment, they fill the wall space. He finds them in auction catalogs from Drouot and others and, when he’s not feeling up to it, sends me in his place. Usually he regrets it: I always get the object, but I go over the authorized maximum amount. He sighs and kicks himself for his excessive confidence. I pretend to be the passionate buyer.
“But Monsieur Pozzo, I couldn’t let this one get away! I loved it too much!”
“Do you want to have it installed in your room, Abdel?”
“Uh, well, no . . . that’s really nice, but it’d be a shame to take it away from you.”
32
I got arrested at the wheel of the Jaguar. I wasn’t even speeding, I hadn’t run any lights. Two undercover cops pinned me on the sidewalk, flashing lights on, siren wailing. They saw a poorly shaved, poorly dressed North African in a luxury car and didn’t ask any more questions. I ended up lying face down on the hood without having had any time to explain myself.
“Easy, you’re going to scratch the paint . . . it’s my boss’s car.”
They laugh behind me.
“And what’ve you got a boss for?”
“I’m a driver and life assistant. He’s tetraplegic. You know what that means—tetraplegic? Te-tra-ple-gic! Call him if you want! His name is Philippe Pozzo di Borgo, he lives in the XVIth, avenue Léopold II. The telephone number’s on the insurance contract in the side of the door.”
They sit me up, but I still have my hands cuffed behind my back and their hateful eyes on me. After checking, they let me go and throw the car papers in my face.
Monsieur Pozzo got a kick out of my story the next day.
“So, Ayrton-Abdel, I was woken up by the police last night! Were they at least nice to you?”
“Angels!”
I wrecked the Jaguar. I said it before, that car is dangerous: you don’t notice the speed. I didn’t realize I was going too fast to take a curve at Porte d’Orléans. I spent the night in the
X-ray department of the ER and the car went straight to the scrap yard. I went home with my tail between my legs.
“So, Ayrton-Abdel, I got woken up by the police again last night . . .”
I handed the keys to Monsieur Pozzo.
“I’m sorry, that’s all that’s left.”
“Are you all right?”
I go with Monsieur Pozzo to a new luxury car auction: after all, we have to replace the Jaguar that I totaled. We’ve decided to take a navy blue Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit—so chic, with 240 horsepower, beige leather interior, and a dashboard in exotic wood. When you start the engine, the brand logo shows up by magic. It’s like a winged mermaid. At the start of the auction, I raise my own hand. Then the auctioneer figures it out and watches for nods from Monsieur Pozzo. It takes two days to settle the paperwork. I get a friend to drop me off at Porte de la Chapelle and then go back to avenue Léopold II at the wheel of this beauty.
We’re going for a drive right away. We take the banks of the Seine, we race to the frontier of Normandy, amazed by the silence in the car no matter how fast we’re going.
“It’s nice, isn’t it, Abdel?”
“Oh, it’s nice, there’s nothing nicer.”
“You’ll be careful, right?”
“Of course!”
That night, at the foot of the Beaugrenelle projects, one of my friends questions my employer’s mental health.
“He’s nuts to let you drive that thing!”
I take everybody for a ride, one after the other, just like a ride at an amusement park.
“These things aren’t for people like us!”
I say I don’t know what that means—people like us. And I add that I don’t know why it shouldn’t be for me, Abdel Sellou. She cracks up.
“That’s true, Abdel, but you’re not like us!”
She’s right. I only think about myself, I use people, I show off, I use women to have fun, I scare rich people, I look down on my brother, but I love my life with Pozzo. I play with Philippe Pozzo di Borgo like a kid plays with his parents: I try things, I always push the envelope a little further, I look for limits, I don’t find them, I keep pushing. I’m so sure of myself, so full of myself, that I don’t even realize he’s changing me, without me even noticing.
33
Céline’s left us. She’s thinking about having children. She doesn’t see herself being a cook all her life for teenagers who don’t like anything anyway, a tetraplegic eternally on a special diet, and a guy addicted to gyro sandwiches. Good-bye, Céline. I cook for a few days. Everything goes smoothly. Except that three cleaning ladies quit one after the other, tired of cleaning up after me morning, noon and night . . . We welcome Jerry, a Filipino recommended by an employment agency. We should have banned him from the washing machine. He took it upon himself to wash all the boss’ suits at 100 degrees. The result isn’t pretty. Stoic in a three-piece Dior, the last one he’s got left, Monsieur Pozzo takes in the rags that the young man hung back in his closet as if nothing were wrong.
“Abdel, you know that plaster cast by Giacometti in the living room, you know, the one next to the library? We can put the Hugo Boss jacket on him, I think it’ll fit now . . .”
“Come on, Monsieur Pozzo, it’s okay. Where we’re going, all you’ll need is a big wool cap.”
We go on a trip. Aunt Eliane, a soft, petite woman ever present since Béatrice’s death, is counting on putting her courageous Philippe in the good care of a congregation of Québécoise nuns. She’s in cahoots with cousin Antoine who spends heavily on religious souvenirs. Both of them sold us the idea with a solid argument: they talked about “love therapy.”
“Monsieur Pozzo! Love therapy! I’ve always said that’s exactly what you need!”
“Abdel, we’re not talking really talking about the same thing . . .”
Personally, I loved the idea right away. As usual, I only heard what I wanted to hear: everything about the monastery, the retreat, the seminary, and the Capuchin nuns escaped me. For me, Quebec is just an extension of America where people have the good taste to speak French. I can already see myself settling into the modernity, the big open spaces, surrounded by Betty Boop, Marilyn, and extra-large helpings of fries. And since they’re promising love on top of it all . . . Laurence, Philippe Pozzo’s faithful secretary, has invited herself: she’s very into spirituality, meditation, all that crap. She wants to “make penance,” she says. Penance for what? I always thought that girl was a little masochistic. Nice, but masochistic.
We land in Montréal, but we don’t go straight to the nuns. It’d be a shame if we didn’t have a look around first, right? I love the restaurants here. All-you-can-eat buffets everywhere! So as not to look like a pig by going back for multiple helpings, I bring the buffet trays straight to our table. But Monsieur Pozzo still hasn’t given up on teaching me manners.
“Abdel, we don’t do that . . . and you’ve been gaining weight lately, too, haven’t you?”
“All muscle! Not everybody can say that.”
“Touché, Abdel, touché . . .”
“Oh no, Monsieur Pozzo! I was talking about Laurence!”
To get around, we’ve rented a superb beige Pontiac. Superb, but not rare: here everybody’s got the same one. It doesn’t matter, I’m living my American dream, even if it’s in Canada.
On the way to the monastery, the boss asks me to stop and buy him cigarettes. He’s afraid he won’t be able to get any once we’re there. He’s kind of worrying me.
“If you run out, I’ll go buy you some, don’t worry!”
“Abdel, once we’re there, we don’t go anywhere. We adjust ourselves to the Capuchin rhythm and follow the seminary program until it’s finished. Till the end of the week.”
“Program? What program? And what? We don’t leave the hotel for eight days?”
“Not the hotel, no, the monastery . . .”
“Yeah, but it’s kind of the same, right? So, how many packs?”
I park the Pontiac in front of the drugstore window. I go buy his drug and come back to the car. I open the driver’s side door and drop into my seat. I turn my head and expect to see my boss, as usual. But he’s changed color, as well as gender. There’s an enormous black woman sitting there.
“What did you do with the little white tadpole sitting here a minute ago?”
She looks at me, raising her eyebrows up to the roots of her braids.
“Are you kidding me? And who are you, first of all?”
I look in the rearview mirror. In the Pontiac parked just behind us sits Monsieur Pozzo, hysterical, and I imagine Laurence is laid out on the backseat, dying from laughter, may God have her soul.
Suddenly, I feel like a complete idiot.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. Really, uh, really sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I’m not scared of you at all, little white man!”
White man! She called me white man! It took crossing the Atlantic to get called a white man!
I go back to the car, tail between my legs. It’s true—she didn’t look so terrified . . . It’s also true that I must weigh a hundred pounds less than she does. And apparently I’m gaining weight. I’ve got some room to grow!
The monastery looks like a chalet in the Savoy region: wood everywhere, no bars on the windows, a lake, boats. Do these ladies supply fishing rods? Philippe Pozzo is one of the very special guests: usually, the nuns only open their home to women. Like at school in the old days: girls on one side, boys on the other. No mixing! But a tetraplegic, that’s different . . . The boss has been cruelly deprived of his virility ever since his accident, but I think it’s too blunt to remind him that he can’t mix like before. As for me, I’m admitted as an “auxiliary.” I still like that word as much as ever. I’ve had the time to think about what meaning to give it: like in grammar, the auxiliary has no use by itself. You have to put it with a verb or it’s worthless. As with I have, for example. I have what? I have driven. I have eaten. I have slept. There, o
kay. I’m the auxiliary and Monsieur Pozzo is the verb. He’s the one who drives, eats, sleeps. But without me, he can’t. But what the nuns don’t know is that Abdel the auxiliary has special autonomy in the grammar of life. They’ll find out soon.
They give me a room on the ground floor, right next to my boss’s room—no, you can’t make me admit that it’s called a cell. The car is parked in the lot. I’m relaxed: tonight, my verb is “to sleep.” As soon as I’ve put Monsieur Pozzo to bed, I’m planning to sneak out through the window and drive to the nearest town. In the meantime, I play along. I observe, just like I always do when I get to a new place I don’t know. I put my employer’s wheelchair at the edge of the aisle in the church. I park myself against a pillar close by and snooze with one eye open. The seminary attendees all look a little broken down, either physically or emotionally, or both. They’re focused on their suffering; they don’t let go of it; they absorb it and try to detach themselves from it through prayer. I don’t feel like a part of this. Some are stuck in wheelchairs, like Monsieur Pozzo. I watch them: I’m absolutely certain that if the employment agency had sent me to them, I wouldn’t have stayed. They look so unhappy! All the fuses have blown, all the lightbulbs are out up there. With Pozzo, it’s blinking. This guy look nothing like them. He’s a warrior philosopher, a renegade Jedi from Star Wars . . . the Force is with him.
At the restaurant—no, I wouldn’t call that place a dining hall—nobody talks. We chew and pray at the same time, that’s the rule. Are we allowed to pray and ask that what we’re eating taste better? When I think of the buffet restaurant just twenty minutes from here . . . Monsieur Pozzo and I have decided not to meet eyes. Definitely not! We burst out laughing right away. He can read my thoughts, and I can read his. We’re not really absorbed in our meditations, he no more than I. A nun looks at me out of the corner of her eye. She has a look that would curl your hair, but if she isn’t nice, I’m taking her in the Pontiac for a wild night in the Quebec countryside.