You Changed My Life (22 page)

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, okay. 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.

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.”

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.