You Changed My Life

by Abdel Sellou

  Except, I can’t get out of the room by the window. It isn’t locked, there aren’t any bars, but the emergency escape ladder lands just in front of it on the outside. If the place goes up in flames, there’ll be one fatality, just one. They’ll pray for his soul, they’ll call him Saint Abdel . . . I’m stuck. There isn’t the slightest noise, we’re lost in the sticks of Quebec, an owl hoots, a Capuchin snores, the emergency ladder is securely fastened to the wall, there’s nothing to do. I’m going to bed.

  The next day, I wink at the nun when we meet up in the hallway. She answers us directly:

  “Hi! Is it true you’ve come from France?”

  This creature is one of the faithful. She’s used to these kinds of seminaries. She calls the local nuns by their first names. If she lets herself talk this loudly, it may be because she knows the real rules. I thought talking was banned.

  “Yep, yes, we’re Parisians . . . Hey, the talking rule is strict here!”

  “Oh, well, come and sit with me tonight and we’ll get to know each other . . .”

  From three—Monsieur Pozzo, Laurence, and me—our group of whisperers has expanded to four. Then five, seven seminary attendees. Then ten, fifteen, twenty by the middle of the week. We weren’t whispering anymore, and there was loud laughter at our table. The faces on which I’d seen the most pain when we arrived suddenly seemed more relaxed. Only one group of die-hard depressives stuck together at the end of the week. I called them party poopers. The Capuchins, who weren’t even really trying to quiet us down, were laughing like hyenas.

  “Ladies, you’re going to have to rename your retreat.”

  “What do you mean, Abdel? You don’t like ‘Therapy Through Love’?”

  “I think that ‘Therapy Through Laughs’ is a lot more effective.”

  34

  Monsieur Pozzo gives stunning conferences to students from the top business schools on a regular basis, and I go with him. He talks to them about “capitalist brutality,” the “subjugation or exclusion of employees,” the “financial crises against which governments are powerless and that are pushing employees toward more misery.” He addresses the students listening to him using tu—the informal pronoun for “you”—to reach each and every of them. I’ve wedged his wheelchair against the podium facing the white twenty-somethings dressed in suits and ties. I’ve seated myself in a chair close to the side, head leaning against the wall. I’m not listening. He’s boring me. I doze. But every now and then, a power phrase, pronounced with even more conviction than the others, wakes me up.

  “Ethics are your ethics and action is your action. It’s inside of you, in your inwardness, in your mystery, in its silence that you’ll find the Other and the ground of your morals.”

  I think to myself that he does seem to know what he’s talking about. About the silence, the inwardness. The Other. I’m one. Before his accident, when he was all-powerful, when he took baths in Pommery champagne like my mother does in peanut oil, would he have just looked at me? If I invited myself to a party thrown by his annoying daughter, I definitely would have left with the laptop. Today, when she invites little shits of her kind over, I provide the security.

  The great, immobile sage, soul floating above his miserable carnal envelope, superior being delivered from flesh and earthly needs, keeps on going.

  “It’s when you’ve found that Other that your perspective and your action will align themselves.”

  Does he seriously believe this stuff? The kids sitting in front of him can already think of nothing other than eating each other alive, classmates or sons of the upper crust alike! All the big bosses would have to crash their paragliders to “find the Other” and respect people for who they are . . .

  Okay, maybe guys like me would also have to stop doing stupid things. Like Monsieur Pozzo says, to the group of words “solidarity,” “serenity,” “fraternity,” and “respect” we need to add “humility.” I hear what he’s saying, but I’m the best. It’s tested, proven, confirmed by the boss ten times a day. So as for humility . . . I go back to sleep.

  I make mistakes, clumsy moves, I get carried away, my hands hit and my mouth sometimes spits out ugly phrases. Monsieur Pozzo is moving into the top-floor apartment of a new building—but obviously also of very high standing—in the same neighborhood. The entire length of it has south-facing bay windows—an oven. It’s too hot even for him. The elevator is wide enough for his electric wheelchair and me. But if a car parks on the very narrow sidewalk in front of the door, we can’t get out.

  One morning, at our usual café time, we’re trapped. The car owner is standing there, talking to a guy on the side of the street. I tell him to move. Immediately.

  “I’ll just be one minute.”

  The minute goes by.

  “You get your car out of here, now.”

  “One minute, I said!”

  He’s close to six feet, two inches, 220 pounds. I come up to his shoulder. I punch the hood of his car. It makes a dent just where the radiator is. He starts to curse me out. I get angry.

  A few minutes later, on the way to the café, Monsieur Pozzo gives me a minimalist moral lecture, in his style.

  “Abdel, you shouldn’t have . . .”

  It’s true, and soon I’m back in court. The guy filed a formal complaint for battery and even furnished a medical certificate justifying an eight-day medical absence from work. I didn’t have much trouble convincing the judge that a little guy like me, a life auxiliary to a tetraplegic person, could never have done all that to a guy this size. I’ve been discharged. Who’s the best?

  Maybe not me. Sometimes I carry Monsieur Pozzo and let him slip. Or I’m pulled down by his weight and can’t get back on track. He hits his forehead. Or maybe I should say, I hit his forehead. I’m the only responsible party. A bump instantly appears, like an egg growing at high speed under his skin. Just like on Sylvester the cat’s head when the mouse gives him a whack with a frying pan. I can’t help laughing. I run to find a mirror, he has to see this before it disappears. Some days, he laughs with me. Others, not at all.

  He says, “I can’t take it anymore; I can’t take being hurt anymore . . .”

  And truly, sometimes Monsieur Pozzo has had enough. In his conferences, he never forgets to mention how you must never, never give in to discouragement. He can be proud of me: apart from his body, which I sometimes handle badly, I never give up on anything.

  35

  When TV producer and host Mireille Dumas suggested doing a special report on Philippe Pozzo di Borgo as well as our relationship, she contacted him first. She spoke to him like you do the Godfather, with deference and respect. It was 2002. He’d just published his first book, Le Second Souffle (“Second Wind”). He was the owner of his story and, more than that, of our story. The producer didn’t directly consult the young Abdel Monsieur Pozzo talks about in his book—and not always in flattering terms. It’s okay, it’s not always about flattering me, I know that. I don’t answer the phone when I don’t recognize the number on the screen, I don’t call back when I don’t really like the voice on the answering machine, I expertly ignore the mail that crowds my mailbox.

  It was Monsieur Pozzo himself who asked me to take part in the documentary about him. I gave the only answer possible when this man asks me a question, no matter what it is: yes.

  Mireille and her team were very nice, and the experience didn’t bother me. On the set of her show, Vie privée, vie publique (“Private Life, Public Life”), Monsieur Pozzo and I sat side by side, interviewed by the journalist as equals. I wasn’t uncomfortable, but not really proud, either. I stared at the set décor; I tried to answer correctly, naturally, without mumbling, without forcing it. I heard myself say the word “friendship.” Despite his insisting otherwise, I still used vous—the formal term for “you”—when talking to my “friend.” I called him monsieur. For some reason I can’t determine, I was incapable of calling him by his first name. It’s still the case today, by the way.

&
nbsp; The day after the show aired, the production team told us that they had an incredible peak in audience numbers for our report. I couldn’t believe it, but still wasn’t proud. As Pozzo rightly says, I’m “unbearable, vain, proud, brutal, fickle, human,” but I’m not looking for glory. I wouldn’t want to be recognized in the street and I can’t see myself signing autographs. It’s not about modesty: I don’t have any. It’s just that I didn’t do anything to deserve admiration from strangers. I pushed a wheelchair, shock-anaesthetized a man whose sufferings seemed intolerable, I was his companion for a few painful years. Painful for him, not for me. I was, as he says, his “guardian demon.” Honestly, it didn’t cost me much. It even brought me a lot, and to use the same phrase that justifies the inexplicable: we aren’t dogs, after all . . .

  Recently, when several directorial teams planned to adapt our story to the big screen, one after the other, I didn’t directly say yes. I was asked, obviously, but I could only give one answer: the same as the Godfather. I didn’t ask to read the script, I didn’t ask who’d be playing the role of the life auxiliary. I felt close to actor Jamel Debbouze, but I understood that he wasn’t the man for the job. After the film was made, I realized I had a lot in things in common with Omar Sy, who portrayed me in the film: not only did he grow up in the projects at Mantes-la-Jolie, but he was raised by parents other than his own. He was also given as a present. I met him for the first time at Essaouira, where Khadija—Monsieur Pozzo’s current companion—had organized a surprise party for Pozzo’s sixtieth birthday. He sat next to me, very simple, open, natural. We talked just as if we’d always known each other.

  The movie surprised me. During every scene up on the screen, I thought back to the moments as they actually happened. I saw myself at twenty-five again, with the cops, explaining to them that my boss was having an attack and that I had to get him to a hospital fast, a question of life or death! I wondered: Was I really that reckless? And why did he keep me? I don’t think that he or I or anyone will ever be able to understand something so insane. When I rang his doorbell, I wasn’t a generous guy yet. In fact, filmmakers Olivier Nakache and Éric Tolédano created another me. Another Abdel, but better. They made my character the star of a film just as much as Philippe’s, played by François Cluzet. It was clearly the best way to transform the drama into a comedy as well as to meet Monsieur Pozzo’s wishes: to make people laugh at his situation in order to avoid pity and cheap sentiments.

  I don’t even think I signed a contract with the movie’s production team. But why would I have? What did I, Abdel Yamine Sellou, give to them? A few jokes, at most. And even those jokes belong to Monsieur Pozzo because he’s the one who elicited them. In real life, I’m not his equal partner; I have barely a second role, I’m almost an extra. I’m not being modest: I’m the best. But what I did really was easy.

  After television, after film, the publishers approach me. Directly, this time. “We know Driss; now we want to know Abdel,” they told me. I warned them: the little potbellied Arab is maybe not as nice as the tall black guy with pearly white teeth. They laughed; they didn’t believe me. Too bad for them . . . I’m a gambler, I said banco. And so off I went to tell my story, in order, or almost. First Belkacem and Amina, whom I didn’t always treat so well, I now realize. Only now, at more than forty, good job, Abdel . . . insolence, scheming, prison. That’s good, Abdel, hold your head up high and proud. Tell them all: you can’t get me! Finally, Monsieur Pozzo. Monsieur Pozzo finally and most important. Monsieur Pozzo, intelligence gained through dignity.

  And suddenly, that’s where it goes wrong.

  Who am I to talk about him? I reassure myself, console myself, forgive myself: the things I’ve just told that are private are already in the film and in his book; he wanted it that way. He’s the one who, after their first meeting, insisted that François Cluzet sit in on the personal care sessions that he goes through every day. The bedsores, the pieces of dead flesh that we cut with scissors, the catheter . . . You can’t criticize the lack of modesty in a tetraplegic man: since he no longer controls his body, it doesn’t belong to him anymore, it belongs to the doctors, the surgeons, the auxiliary nurses, the nurses, and even the life auxiliaries who take it away. It belongs to the actor who has to play the part, to the audience members asked to understand. To understand the moral of the story: that losing your physical autonomy isn’t losing your life. That handicaps aren’t strange animals that we can stare at without blushing, that there’s no reason to avoid their gaze either.

  But who am I to talk about suffering, modesty, and handicap? I just had better luck than the tons of blind people who had never seen anything before seeing Intouchables.

  I put myself in the service of Philippe Pozzo di Borgo because I was young—young and stupid: I wanted to drive beautiful cars, travel first-class, sleep in châteaux, pinch rich women’s asses, and laugh at their little offended squeals. I don’t regret anything. Not my previous motivations, or the person I still am. But I became aware of something by telling my story in this book: that I finished growing up next to Monsieur Pozzo, from hope to an appetite for living, by way of the heart. Now it’s my turn to be lyrical, like abstract art . . .

  He offered his wheelchair for me to push like a crutch for me to lean on. I’m still using it today.

  V

  New Beginning

  36

  After a few years by his side, I had said enough to Monsieur Pozzo.

  Crossing his arms over his stomach, leaning his torso forward, unfolding his limbs like the wrapper on a chocolate bar, putting him down in the right order, putting up his running shoes with the soles that will always be new . . . I had said enough. I needed to stop.

  “Stop what? Abdel, are you leaving me?”

  “No, I’ll stay, but I can’t consider it as my job. So I’ll keep doing all of that, you can count on me, but you and me are going to do something else. We’re going to be partners.”

  “Abdel, I’m the one who needs you. Not the other way around.”

  “Of course I need you! I’d like us to start a business together. I have the strength, the talk, but I don’t have the manners. Paperwork, accounting, I don’t know anything. The same goes for bowing to bankers. I don’t know how to do it. You do.”

  “Bowing to bankers . . . my dear Abdel, you’re overestimating my flexibility a little.”

  He came up with a great idea, so great that when launching it, I told everyone it was my own: car rentals to private clients with car delivery wherever they want. No more having to go to the agency: the client calls, gives an address, we take the keys to their door, and leave by our own means. The company will be called Téléloc, it’ll belong to Monsieur Pozzo and him only, I’ll just be there to learn.

  To get started, the boss decides we won’t use bankers.

  “What do you mean? We’re going to have to buy twenty cars, you know!”

  “Don’t worry, Abdel, I have some savings.”

  “Some savings! Oh, right, what do you call it already? An eggs . . .”

  “An expression.”

  I love learning new words.

  Monsieur Pozzo makes only one and unique condition to my presence in the company: that I never get behind the wheel of one of the rentals. Because I wrecked the Rolls-Royce, too. Once again, it wasn’t my fault. The heat worked too well in the palace on four wheels, and Monsieur Pozzo was cold, as usual. We were driving at night toward the south of France, and it was easily 80 degrees inside the car. How could I have not fallen asleep? We heard a sort of crack-boom from the body of the car hitting the bumper on an old Golf. I also heard a second strange sound, more like a chong. That was the head of my passenger, thrown forward against the front seat. The rescue team arrived and first took care of me.

  “Do you feel all right, sir?”

  “Wonder . . .”

  Then they went to look at the backseat. They opened the door, saw Monsieur Pozzo’s body, and suddenly lost interest in me.

  “T
here’s a stiff in the back!”

  Nice tact. I put Monsieur Pozzo back on the seat, dabbed the bump swelling on his temple, rigged the front of the car with a crowbar, and we got back on the road.

  “Are you all right, Abdel? Did you fall asleep?”

  “Not at all! That lady in front of us fishtailed!”

  First chapter: Abdel is always right.

  Second chapter: when Abdel is wrong, please refer to chapter one.

  I never pretended to be in good faith.

  We rent offices in Boulogne where we set up Téléloc. Three rooms. The first is used as a staff dormitory: Youssef, Yacine, Alberto, Driss. They’re friends from the projects, from the pizzeria, Trocadéro. They don’t all have papers—or driver’s licenses, that goes without saying—they live there around the clock, the blankets pile up on the floor, coffee molds at the bottom of a mug, it always smells like mint tea. A second room serves as an office for Laurence, whom we’ve hired to take care of all the stuff requiring capable hands and a brain. The third room, which has a faucet, serves as a kitchen, bathroom . . . and doghouse for Youssef’s two pit bulls, who water the carpet abundantly. In this environment, poor Laurence goes nuts.

  “Abdel, you tell Youssef to take his dog to piss somewhere else or I quit!”

  “Laurence, you wanted to do penance! It’s now or never!”

  She’s got a sense of humor. She laughs.

  The adventure lasts a few months. Enough time to send a few cars to the mechanic. To get complaints from clients: the cars arrive dirty, the tank empty, and the delivery people sometimes have the nerve to ask for a lift to Boulogne . . . or somewhere else! Enough time to get complaints from the neighbors (the pit bulls water the elevator, too). The time for me to get picked up by the police.