You Changed My Life (23 page)

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.

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.

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.