I asked.
“Well, here’s something.” She folded back the page and began to read. “Gilles Villeneuve is dead.”
“Who?”
“Gilles Villeneuve. You know, the racing driver.”
“Oh?”
“Let’s see. It says ‘Canadian racing driver, killed in practice run.’ Et cetera. Always claimed racing was dangerous and so on, said a year ago that he’d die on the track.” She stopped. “Do you want to hear all this?”
“No, that’s enough.” I felt the news about Gilles Villeneuve calmly, but I hope not callously. I’ve never really approved of violent sports, and it seems to me that people foolish enough to enter boxing rings or car races are asking for their own deaths.
“It’s sad to die so young,” my wife said, as if required to fill the silence I’d left.
The young man in the next bed began to sputter and cough, and once again my wife went over to see if she could do anything.
“You mustn’t cry,” she said to him. She reached in her bag for a clean tissue. “Here, let me wipe those tears away.”
“I don’t want to die.” He was blubbering quite noisily, and I think we both felt this might weaken the shell of plaster that enclosed him.
My wife—I forgot to mention that she is still a very beautiful woman—placed her hand on his forehead to comfort him.
“There, there, it’s just your legs. You’ve been sleeping, and you’re only a little bit confused. Where do you come from?”
He murmured something.
“What did you say?”
“Sheffield. In England.”
“Maybe I can telephone someone for you. Has the hospital sent a message to your people?”
It was an odd expression for her to use—your people. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her use that particular phrase before.
“It’s all right,” he said. He had stopped crying, but my wife kept her hand on his forehead for another moment or two until he had dropped off to sleep.
I must have dropped off to sleep as well because when I opened my eyes she had gone. And after that it was morning and a nurse was opening the shutters and twittering something at me in French. The bed next to mine was empty, and she began to strip off the sheets.
“Where is he?” I asked her in my old, formal schoolboy French. “Where’s my comrade with the broken legs?”
“Il est mort,” she said in the same twittering singsong.
“But he can’t be dead. His legs were broken, that’s all.”
“The spinal cord was damaged. And there were other injuries. Inside.”
A minute later the doctor came in and had a look under my dressing. “You perhaps will have a little scar,” he said. “For a woman this is terrible, of course. But for a man …” He smiled and revealed pink gums. “For a man it is not so bad.”
“I understand that he’s died,” I said, nodding at the stripped bed.
“Ah yes. Multiple injuries, there was no hope, from the moment he was brought in here yesterday.”
“Just a young man,” I said.
He was pressing the bandage back into place. “Les accidents de vacances. Every year the same. What can one do? One should stay home, sit in the garden, be tranquil.”
When my wife comes for me in half an hour or so, I will have prepared what I’ll say to her. I know, of course, that the first thing she’ll ask me is: How is the young man from Sheffield? She will ask this before she inquires about whether I’ve had a good night or whether I’m suffering pain. I plan my words with precision.
This, luckily, is my métier, the precise handling of words. Mine is a profession that is close to being unique; at least I know of no one else who does the same sort of work on a full-time basis.
I am an abridger. When I tell people, at a party for instance, that I am an abridger, their faces cloud with confusion and I always have to explain. What I do is take the written work of other people and compress it. For example, I am often hired by book clubs to condense or abridge the books they publish. I also abridge material that is broadcast over the radio.
It’s a peculiar profession, I’m the first to admit, but it’s one I fell into by accident and that I seem suited for. Abridging requires a kind of inverse creativity. One must have a sharp eye for turning points and a seismic sensitivity for the fragile, indeed invisible, tissue that links one event with another. I’m well-paid for my work, but I sometimes think that the degree of delicacy is not appreciated. There are even times when it’s necessary to interfere with the truth of a particular piece and, for the sake of clarity and balance, exercise a small and inconspicuous act of creativity that is entirely my own. I’ve never thought of this as dishonesty and never felt that I had tampered with the integrity of a work.
My wife will be here soon. I’ll watch her approach from the window of my hospital room. She still walks with a kind of boyish clip-clop, as though determined to possess the pavement with each step. This morning she’ll be wearing her navy blazer; it’s chilly, but it will probably warm up later in the day. She’ll probably have her new yellow cardigan on underneath, but I won’t be able to tell from here if she’s wearing earrings. My guess is that she won’t be. In her hand she’ll have a small cloth bag, and I can imagine that this contains the picnic we’ll be taking with us to Aigues Mortes.
“And how is be?” she’s going to ask me in a few minutes from now. “How is our poor young friend with the broken legs?”
“He’s been moved to a different place.” I’ll say this with a small shrug, and then I’ll say, quickly, before she has a chance to respond, “Here, let me carry that bag. That’s too heavy for you.”
Of course, it’s not heavy at all. We both know that. How could a bag containing a little bread and cheese and perhaps two apples be heavy?
It doesn’t matter. She’ll hand me the bag without a word, and off we’ll be.
ONE AFTERNOON, OUT OF CURIOSITY or else boredom, Hélène wandered into an abandoned church. A moment later she found herself locked inside.
This was in France, in Brittany, and Hélène was a girl of fourteen who had been walking home from the village school to the house where she and her mother were temporarily living. Why she had stopped and touched the handle of the church door, she didn’t know. She had been told, several times, that the little church was kept tightly locked, but today the door had opened easily at her touch. This was puzzling, though not daunting, and she had entered bravely, holding her head high. She had recently, since arriving in France, come
