You Changed My Life (21 page)

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.”

I got arrested at the wheel of the Jaguar. I wasn't even speed
ing, 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.

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.