You Changed My Life (16 page)

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.

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.

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 still, but honestly: less and less, right?

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.

“Monsieur Pozzo. I've been watching you for days now. This machine is a nightmare, and I think I've found a way to get around using it. Let me do it. I'll go very slowly.”

“Are you sure, Abdel?”

“Listen, the worst thing is I hit a leg—you get a bedsore and that's it, right?”

“Well that's nothing, I can handle—”

“Okay, enough talk. Let's go.”

I slipped my arms under his and pulled his chest against me—the rest of his body followed. He was sitting in his shower chair in hardly ten seconds. I looked at the result, pleased with
myself, and yelled to the door, “Laurence! Bring me the toolkit! We're taking down the transfer machine!”

The Pozzo said nothing; he was smiling, thrilled.

“So, Monsieur Pozzo, who's the best?”

“You, Abdel, you!”

He smiled blissfully, with all of his white teeth. The moment had come to ask for an explanation.

“Monsieur Pozzo, tell me something, your teeth—are they real?”

I could have had business cards made. ABDEL SELLOU, SIMPLIFIER.
Because in the whole we're-not-going-to-let-pain-in-the-ass-machines-ruin-our-lives process, I also got rid of the cattle wagon, a so-called ideal vehicle for transporting the handicapped. It was ugly, impractical, and, like the transfer machine, it broke down constantly.

The cattle wagon had a platform system that came out and lowered to allow the wheelchair to get in. It got stuck a lot. This was a problem when we needed to leave, because the Pozzo could miss his appointment, and on the way back, too, because the thing was too high for me to take the wheelchair—and the Pozzo in it—out by hand. Sometimes I had to get a plank and use it like a slide. In the cattle wagon, the Pozzo stayed seated in his usual spot, which was in the back on the right. The wheels weren't locked onto the floorboard and even if you pushed on the brakes, the wheelchair shifted around on turns. That was dangerous enough, even more so when the driver was named Sellou and had
learned to drive on stolen cars in suburban parking lots . . . Plus, the Pozzo only had a tiny window and the engine made ridiculous noise. When I was at the wheel, I practically had to turn around in my seat to talk to the boss. So I didn't talk, I yelled.