Lucky me, to have such a pretty woman looking after me . . .” The first time he muttered those words, she thought she had misheard and she was angry with herself. How could she transform a patient’s complaint into a compliment? If her subconscious played the trick on her again, she would go to see a psychoanalyst. It was out of the question for her complexes to keep her from working! It was already bad enough that they kept her from living . . .
Disgruntled, in the hours that followed, as soon as she had a moment of respite from her tasks, Stéphanie tried to work out what the patient in room 221 might have actually said. The beginning of the sentence must have been correct, lucky me, to have . . . but she wasn’t sure about the end. Pretty woman? No one had ever called Stéphanie a pretty woman. And with good reason, she thought.
By the time she left the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière that day, the young nurse had not uncovered the answer. She wandered thoughtfully beneath a sky heavy with rain, almost black, between tall steep towers; at their foot, the avenues bordered by thin acacia trees seemed flat and empty. She lived in a studio in Chinatown, to the south of Paris, a neighborhood with grayish green walls and red shop signs. She felt huge in these streets full of Asians, next to these small, delicate women, busy ants going about their business. Not only did her size—normal—transform her into a giant, but her curves seemed excessive next to these lithe figures.
In the evening, she could not concentrate on the endless nauseating stream of television programs, so she threw down the remote and turned to her highly suspicious, insistent thoughts.
“‘Lucky me, to have such a pretty woman looking after me!’ My poor Stéphanie, you are looking for one sentence under another because it allows you to repeat the one you liked; but he didn’t say the one you liked. So in reality, you’re not making anything clearer, you’re just rehashing your thoughts to flatter yourself and indulge.”
At that point she put in a big load of washing—something that always calmed her—and set about ironing her “backlog of laundry.” On the radio they were playing songs from her childhood, one after the other, so she turned up the volume and enjoyed a happy moment, steam iron in hand, wailing the refrains she remembered.
At midnight, after she’d done several piles of clothes, she had sung so much that her head was spinning and she saw stars dancing behind her eyelids, so she went to bed feeling serene, and thought she had forgotten everything.
However, the next morning she trembled as she crossed the threshold of room 221.
He was so handsome it made you start.
Karl Bauer had already been in intensive care for over a week, and was emerging from shock. Part of his spinal column had been crushed in a car accident, so the doctors doubted he would recover, but they wouldn’t certify anything; for the time being, they were stimulating his nerves, trying to determine the extent of the damage.
Although he was lying under a sheet and a bandage covered his eyes, everything she could see of his face or body affected Stéphanie deeply. His hands, to begin with: the long hands of a man, elegant, with oval, almost mother of pearl nails, hands made to hold precious objects or caress a lock of hair . . . And the color of him, his dark skin, the brown shadow of fine hair on his taut muscles, the luminous black of his curls. And his full, well-shaped mouth, that seemed to draw your gaze . . . And that nose above all, like a blade of flesh, precise and strong, alluring, so manly that Stéphanie could not look at it without feeling something stirring below her belly.
He was tall. Even lying down. They had had to bring a special bed up from the basement to fit his body. Despite his immobility, and the tubes hanging everywhere, his size impressed Stéphanie, because it seemed to confirm his splendid manliness.
“I fancy him so much I can’t think straight. If he were ugly, I would never have deformed his words yesterday.”
Today she kept her ears open, the better to understand him. While she was dosing the IV, and counting his pills, he woke up and sensed her presence.
“Are you there?”
“Hello, I’m Stéphanie.”
The wings of his nose were quivering. Taking advantage of her invisibility, Stéphanie observed his nostrils, so curiously endowed with their own life.
“Did you come already yesterday morning?”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad you’re here, Stéphanie.”
His lips parted in a smile.
Stéphanie stood there silently. She was touched that such a severely injured man, who must be suffering a martyrdom, could be so tactful as to voice his thanks. He was not your usual patient.
“Maybe that’s what he said yesterday,” she thought, “something nice, surprising. Yes, that must have been it.”
Calmer, she continued the conversation, talking eagerly about little things, the treatments they had in store, the organization of his day, the fact that the next day he would be allowed to have visits. After babbling for ten minutes, Stéphanie deemed that she had managed to recover her normal behavior. And so she was absolutely paralyzed when he exclaimed, “How lucky I am, to have a pretty woman looking after me.”
This time, she was sure of what she had heard. No she wasn’t crazy. The identical words, yesterday, and today. And he was talking to her.
Stéphanie leaned over Karl to check the expression on his face: a voluptuous contentment spread over his features, confirming what he had said; his lips were swelling like breasts; he even gave her the impression he was looking at her with pleasure, despite his blindfolded eyes.
What could she do? She was incapable of continuing their conversation. Respond to his compliment? What might he add? How far would it lead them?
These questions tumbling over one another upset her, and she fled from the room.
Out in the corridor, she burst into tears.
When she found Stéphanie on the floor, her colleague Marie-Thérèse, a black woman from Martinique, helped her to her feet, handed her a handkerchief, then led her into a discreet little room where bandages were stored.
“Tell me, honey, what’s going on?”
This unexpected tenderness merely doubled Stéphanie’s sorrow; she sobbed against her colleague’s soft, round shoulder. She would never have stopped if the smell of vanilla wafting from Marie-Thérèse’s skin hadn’t calmed her, reminding her of childhood happiness, birthday parties at her grandparents’, or yogurt evenings at the house of her neighbor Emma.
“So tell me, what is making you so sad?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it work or private life?”
“Both,” moaned Stéphanie, sniffling.
She blew her nose noisily to put an end to her ludicrous behavior.
“Thank you, Marie-Thérèse, I feel much better now.”
Although her eyes remained dry for the rest of the day, she did not feel better, particularly as she could not understand what this crisis was about.
At the age of twenty-five, Stéphanie had studied to become a nurse, but she did not know herself well. Why not? Because she was wary of her own self, a distance she had inherited from a mother who did not look kindly on her daughter. How could she give her own self any importance when the person who had brought her into this world, and who was supposed to love her, denigrated her? Léa, in fact, found her daughter neither pretty nor intelligent, and she never missed an opportunity to tell her so. And each time, she would add, “What do you expect, it’s not because I’m a mother that I’m not allowed to be lucid!” The mother’s opinion, slightly altered, controlled the daughter’s opinion. And while Stéphanie had managed to overcome her mother’s mockery as far as intelligence was concerned—Léa had no diploma, and continued to sell clothes, whereas Stéphanie had passed her baccalaureate and managed to complete her paramedical training—in the visual realm she had adopted her mother’s aesthetic canon without question. Since a beautiful woman had to be slender, with narrow hips and breasts like apples, just like Léa herself, well, then Stéphanie was not a beautiful woman; she figured, rather—as her mother often repeated—in the fat lump category. She weighed twenty-five pounds more than her mother, although she was only three inches taller.
As a result, Stéphanie had always rejected Léa’s offers to “make her over,” fearful that she would only add insult to injury. Convinced that lace, silk, braids, chignons, curls, jewels, bracelets, earrings, or necklaces would look as shocking on her as on a transvestite, she knew she was a woman physiologically, but she did not hold herself to be any more feminine than a man. Her white hospital scrubs suited her, and when she hung them up in the locker at the hospital, it was only to replace them with their black or navy blue equivalent, while she swapped her orthopedic clogs for a pair of thick white running shoes.
What had happened in room 221? Joy or despair? The joy of being considered pretty? The despair that her only admirer was a blind man?
In reality, Stéphanie’s emotion—she grasped this as she slid under her comforter—came above all from the shock: his words had placed her back on the market for seduction—that vast, sunny square where women are attractive to men—and here she had thought she was excluded, living off on her own the way she did, determined never to elicit a man’s gaze or a declaration of love. Stéphanie was a well-behaved young lady, if you can call “well-behaved” someone who has never known misbehaving. Her complexes left her austere, and she dared not try anything, but fled from parties, bars, and nightclubs. To be sure, she might dream about a love affair, for the duration of a film or a novel, but she remained well aware that it was merely a fantasy. Things like that didn’t happen in real life.
“At least, not in my life.”
Like an old man who is used to his retirement, she had pictured herself as peaceful, out of reach, endowed with a body that was dead, or almost, and now here was someone upsetting her, talking about her charm. It was unexpected, abrupt, jarring.
The next morning as she was walking to work she decided that if Karl started up again, she would rebuff him.
The hospital routinely filled her life. The moment she went through the door at the Salpêtrière, guarded like military barracks, she entered another world, a city within a city, her city. And behind the enclosure that protected this medical citadel with its high walls there was everything: a newspaper kiosk, a café, a chapel, a pharmacy, a cafeteria, social services, administrative offices, and meeting rooms, in addition to the numerous buildings devoted to various pathologies; in the gardens there were benches for weary strollers, and a few flowerbeds, and birds hopping in the grass; the seasons passed here as elsewhere, with winter leaving its snow, and summer its heat waves; holidays marked the passage of time—Christmas trees, the solstice; people came here to be born, to get better, to die; sometimes they even saw famous people. A microcosm in the megalopolis. Not only did Stéphanie feel she existed, here, but she also proved herself useful. One hour followed closely upon the next, busy with care, visits, trips to the infirmary, temperature taking: why should she need another life, a life elsewhere?
The feeling that she was being useful gave her a pride that made up for anything that might be missing. “I don’t have time to think about myself, I have too much to do,” she would say to herself whenever she caught a glimpse of her solitude.
“Good morning, Stéphanie,” said Karl with a smile, although she had only just come in, and hadn’t said a thing.
“Good morning. You are finally going to get some visits today.”
“So I fear.”
“Why? Aren’t you glad?”
“Sparks will fly!”
“What do you mean?”
“From your point of view, it will probably be rather amusing. Somewhat less so for them than for me.”
“Who do you mean, them?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“No.”
“Well then, be patient, you’re in for a show.”
Stéphanie decided to drop the subject and set to work.
He was smiling.
The busier she got around the bed, the bigger his smile.
After she had sworn she would not ask, she eventually gave in and exclaimed, “Why are you smiling like that?”
“A pretty woman is looking after me . . .”
“What do you know? You can’t see me!”
“I can hear you and I can sense you.”
“Excuse me?”
“From your voice, your movements, the air you displace with your gestures, and above all your smell, I can tell that you are a pretty woman. I’m sure of it.”
“You’re teasing me! What if I have a wart on my nose or a birthmark?”
“That would surprise me.”
“Will you bet on it?”
“All right: do you have a wart on your nose?”
“No.”
“A birthmark?”
“Not that either.”
“Well!” he concluded, glad that he was right.
Stéphanie gave a laugh and left the room.
Unlike the day before, she continued her day in a good mood, having recovered her cheerful nature.
That afternoon as she went from one room to the next, she understood what Karl had meant earlier that day—it was funny, no, the way he wrote his name with a K rather than a C? In the waiting room, seven young women, each one more magnificent than the next, were glaring at each other with hatred; they looked like a lineup of models competing for a shoot. Not one of them had an official tie with Karl except for the tall striking redhead, who was boasting to the head nurse that she was the “ex-wife,” and thus obtained priority. The six others—the mistresses—shrugged their shoulders as they saw her go away and continued glaring at each other in an exceedingly unfriendly way. Had they just found out about each other? Were they successive mistresses or simultaneous mistresses?
Stéphanie did what she could to go by there as often as possible, but she didn’t manage to find out anything more. The moment they left their seat to go to see Karl, they all went through the same rigmarole: in one second, as soon as they headed down the corridor, they left behind their glower to put on a face that was ravaged with anguish, eyes damp with tears, handkerchief in hand. What actresses! Besides, which was the actual performance? Their masterful self-control in each other’s presence, or the trembling arrival at their lover’s bedside? Were they ever sincere?
The last one went into the room at four o’clock and came out a minute later screaming, “He’s dead! My God, he just died!”
Stéphanie rushed out of the office, ran up to the bed, grabbed Karl’s pulse, looked at the monitors and exclaimed, “Be quiet! He’s asleep, that’s all. He’s exhausted by all these visits. In his condition . . .”
The mistress sat down squeezing her knees, as if that would make her feel better. She bit the nail on her thumb which was long and red, then she fussed, “Those bitches, they did it on purpose! They wore him out so there’d be nothing left for me!”
“Look, Mademoiselle, you don’t seem to realize, this is a man who has just survived a very serious accident. All you can think about is yourself and your rivals, it’s indecent!”
“Who do you think you are? Are you being paid to take care of him or to lecture us about morality?”
“To take care of him. Therefore, I have to ask you to leave.”
“Fuck off! I waited four hours.”
“Right. I’m calling security.”
Grumbling, the supermodel yielded to the threat, and stalked off, wobbling on her high platform heels.
Stéphanie gave a mental shout of “Bitch!”, then devoted herself to Karl, raising his bed, plumping his pillows, checking his IV, not at all sorry to have him to herself again.
“At last I can get some work done,” she sighed. Not for a moment did it cross her mind that she had just reacted like a jealous woman.
The next morning, Karl greeted her with a smile.
“Well, did you have fun, yesterday?”
“What was fun about it?”
“Making those women who hate each other sit down and wait patiently in each other’s presence. Frankly, I was sorry to be in here and not in the waiting room. Did the fur fly over there?”
“No, but they did transform the waiting room into an ice box. Did you hear me send the last one away?”
“The last one? No. Who came after Dora?”
“A brunette on platform heels.”
“Samantha? Oh, I’m sorry, I would have liked to see her.”
“Well, you couldn’t.”
“What was wrong with me?”
“You fell asleep! She thought you were dead.”
“Samantha always exaggerates.”
“I took the liberty of telling her that.”
While she was attending to him, a thousand questions assailed her brain. Which of the six mistresses was the current one? Was there one he loved? What did he expect from a woman? Was it because he only chose them for their looks, without expecting anything more, that he bounced from one to the other? Did he only go for erotic liaisons, never any lasting relationship? Did he take the initiative with women? Did he rely for a large part on his own physical powers of attraction? What type of lover might he be?
As if he had sensed all the agitation in her brain, Karl exclaimed, “You seem to be somewhat preoccupied today!”
“Me? Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. A problem with your husband?”
“I’m not married.”
“Your partner?”
“No partner, either.”
“Your boyfriend, then?”
“Yes, that’s it, a problem with my boyfriend.”
To a man who thought she must be ravishing, she did not have the heart to confess to her hopeless solitude, so she decided to invent a fiancé for herself: at least here, in room 221, she could be a normal woman.
“What’s he done?”
“Hmm . . . Nothing . . . Nothing for sure . . . I wonder if . . . I wonder if he isn’t having an affair . . .”
“Are you jealous?”
Stéphanie didn’t know what to say. Not only was she not used to being asked such a question, but she just realized that she was jealous of Karl.
She said nothing. He laughed.
“So, you are jealous!”
“Who isn’t?”
“I am not, for one, however I prefer not to talk about it. Let’s get back to you. What’s his name?”
Stéphanie would have liked to reply, but all she could think of were names of dogs, Rex, Titus, Médor, Tommy . . . In a panic, she managed to blurt, “Ralf!”
Of course, that was also a dog’s name, a Doberman that she ran into from time to time, but she hoped that Karl would not suspect anything. Ralf, that could be a human name, couldn’t it?
“Well Ralf is a fool, if you want my opinion.”
Phew, he’d swallowed it.
“You don’t know him.”
“When a man meets a woman as gorgeous as you, who smells so lovely, the first thing he does is move in with her. And you’ve just told me you don’t live together.”
“Don’t blame him! Perhaps I’m the one who doesn’t want to . . .”
“You don’t want to?”
“That’s not it either.”
“So I’ll repeat what I said, Ralf is a fool. He doesn’t deserve you. To be apart from a woman with such a scent . . .”
Stéphanie panicked. What scent? In twenty-five years, she had never imagined she gave off any odor . . . Instinctively, she moved her nose toward her arm. What scent? She couldn’t smell a thing. What was he talking about? She didn’t use perfume or eau de toilette. Could it be her soap? And yet that vanished so quickly . . . Her washing powder? The softener? No, all the hospital personnel got their laundry cleaned by the same company. Her smell? Her own smell? Was it a good or a bad smell? Above all, what did it smell like?
She could only hold back for about thirty seconds, then she asked, breathless, “What do I smell like? Sweat?”
“Now you’re being funny! No, I have no idea what your sweat is like—and good job, too, it must be divine, I’d get too excited.”
“Are you joking?”
“I assure you, you have an intoxicating scent and if Ralf never told you so, Ralf is most definitely a stupid jerk.”
That evening, when she was back in her studio, Stéphanie tried one experiment after another.
After she had drawn the curtains, she undressed and, sitting on her bed, tried to smell herself. She put her nostrils up to every part of her body she could get at. Before taking her shower, she went into contortions, and then again afterwards. In vain.
Nevertheless, although she despised being naked, she didn’t get dressed again and tried, rather, another method: she endeavored to intercept her smell in her wake, by turning around quite abruptly; the moment she had taken three steps, she spun on her heels and hurried with her nose in the air on her own trace, with the impression that she was performing a ballet. And while she didn’t manage to capture anything at all, she found great pleasure in walking like this, with her thighs and her breasts in the air.
For dinner, intimidated by the pomp of plate and cutlery, she put on a bathrobe; however as she ate, she opened it somewhat, until finally she stepped out of it, hoping once again to snatch her smell.
Finally, she investigated her wardrobe, sniffing the clothes she had worn, comparing them with what she hadn’t worn, then going back to the first . . . She did notice something, but it was almost nothing, a subtle essence, evanescent, that escaped the moment she thought she had grasped it.
She decided to sleep naked. That way when she woke up she could find her smell in the sheets. But after an hour of tossing this way and that, and feeling herself, and checking her curves, she concluded that nudity was driving her crazy, so she put on her pajamas and gradually lost consciousness.
The next morning she went silently into the room and walked up to the bed without giving Karl any warning.
After thirty seconds, he smiled. A moment later, he mumbled, a note of concern in his voice, “Stéphanie?”
She would have liked for the game to last a bit longer, but a syringe rolled on her metal tray, revealing her presence.
“Yes.”
He sighed with relief.
“You were here?”
“For a minute. I didn’t want to wake you.”
“I wasn’t asleep. Now I understand why I was obsessing about you.”
They chatted while Stéphanie examined her patient. She tried a new experiment. As she had noticed that whenever she walked up behind him, spreading her arms, he smiled, she came closer, put her breasts above his face. Victory! Karl’s features radiated with pleasure. She concluded that he wasn’t lying: she really did give off a scent that enchanted him.
She amused herself by trying again, going closer this time. At one point, her hair caressed his cheek. What would her colleagues think if they saw her bending over him like this? Who cared! She was so happy to see his superb face light up with joy.
At the end, when she told him, placing her décolleté beneath his nostrils, that she was going to look after her other patients, he mumbled as if he were in a swoon, “What bliss to have such a pretty woman looking after me . . .”
“You’re exaggerating, I’m no dream girl, far from it!”
“A dream girl is not the one a girl dreams of being, but the one a boy sees.”
On Saturday and Sunday she was off. She missed Karl. She went from one state to the next. On the one hand, she went on walking around her apartment naked to try to grow accustomed to something she’d never before been aware of: the good smells of her own body. On the other hand, she cried a great deal because a bold venture into a Chinese shop selling embroidered silk had destroyed her dream and brought her back to reality: nothing suited her, she was fat and ugly.
So to avoid the gaze of others she locked herself away, eating out of cans, talking only with her television set. Why weren’t other men as refined as Karl? Why did society continue to favor the sense of sight over others? In a different world, in the olfactory world, she was admirable. In a different world, she had the power to bewitch. In a certain room that she knew, she was “such a pretty woman.” She waited for Monday morning as if for a deliverance.
“Do you realize what you are telling yourself, my poor Stéphanie? You’re nothing but a prime cut of meat for a paralyzed blind man. What a disaster!”
After joyfulness came despondency.
And so she spent two days hovering between lamentation and ecstasy, pathos and enthusiasm. Consequently, when the hospital called her on Sunday evening to ask her to come in early the next day, she eagerly accepted.
Just after dawn, teams met at the cafeteria to take over from one another around a cappuccino, the last one for some, the first for others, while the daytime caregivers replaced the nighttime ones. There was a vague moment, blue and gray, in the buildings, a moment like a suspended silence, and then the transformation took place: in the time it took for a bitter sip while exchanging a few words, suddenly it was daytime, with the noise of carts, doors slamming, shoes squeaking, the to and fro on each floor, vacuum cleaners humming in the stairway, admissions employees opening their desks on the ground floor. Another rhythm throbbed along the corridors, time to wake up the patients, to take their temperature, hand out their pills, the sound of cups and saucers banging.
At half past seven, fresh, alert and jubilant, Stéphanie rushed into Karl’s room.
“Good morning,” she said.
“What? You, Stéphanie, already?” said the man with the bound eyes, astonished.
“Yes, me already. One of my colleagues is sick—I know, people are always surprised when a nurse or a doctor has problems with their health. So I have to take over for her.”
“And I’ll take over for myself: I’ll play at being a patient. Apparently I do it quite well.”
“You do it very well.”
“Alas . . .”
“What I meant is that you never complain.”
“What would be the point?”
The morning fog still clung to the windowpanes.
Stéphanie wrote down his temperature, changed his drip, modified a few doses then gave him a shot. She stuck her head into the corridor to call the nurse’s aide.
“Madame Gomez, come and help me with the bath!”
Behind her, Karl objected violently: “You’re not going to inflict that on me, are you?”
“What?”
“Bathe me?”
Stéphanie walked over to him, not understanding.
“Yes, we are, why?”
He grimaced, annoyed, his face turning from right to left as if he were looking for help.
“I . . . I don’t like the idea!”
“Don’t worry, I’m used to it.”
As Madame Gomez came in, he didn’t insist. Assuming that she had reassured him, Stéphanie picked up a washcloth and a bottle of liquid soap.
Madame Gomez pulled back the sheet to uncover Karl, and Stéphanie could not help but be affected. She thought he was beautiful. Completely beautiful. There was nothing to dislike about his body. It all filled her with emotion.
Although he was injured and could not move, there was nothing to indicate that he was an invalid.
She looked away. For the first time, she thought she didn’t have the right to look at a man’s nudity without his consent; with hindsight, Madame Gomez’s movements to undress Karl, sheets raised quickly by an indifferent hand, seemed violent.
Where should she begin?
Although she knew the movements by heart, for having repeated them hundreds of times, Karl’s presence intimidated her. It was his thighs, his torso, his stomach, his shoulders that she was about to touch. Ordinarily, she would clean a patient the way she would wipe a sponge over a plastified tablecloth; with him it was different, he intimidated her. Without the pretext of the hospital, she would never have seen him naked. Even if he did attribute an exquisite scent to her, he would never choose her as a mistress, would he?
Without scruples, Madame Gomez had begun to scrub on her side.
Stéphanie did not want anyone to suspect how reticent she felt, so she set to work. However, her rubbing was softer, more enveloping.
“What are you doing, poor idiot?” she thought. “He’s paralyzed. Paralyzed! That means he cannot feel your hand. Whether you pinch him or caress him, the effect is identical: that is, there is none.”
Emboldened by the thought, she concentrated on details in order to complete the job; however, she was unwise enough to look at his face and she noticed that he was grinding his teeth, his jaws clenched, and shivering all over. Then, as she was massaging his neck, he murmured in an imperceptible voice, “I am sorry.”
She heard so much distress in his whisper that she ordered Madame Gomez to reply to the bell from room 209.
“I’ll finish off, Madame Gomez, it’s okay.”
Once they were alone, she leaned over and questioned him gently.
“Sorry? Why are you sorry?”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, turning his head from right to left.
She wondered what was happening to him, and looked up and down his body and suddenly understood the reason for his distress.
His sex was standing bolt upright.
Stéphanie could not help but admire his solid member, sheathed in fine skin; such an erection was a tribute to him, and seemed to her both strong and gentle; then she went back to her chore, shook her thoughts from her mind, and understood that she had to reassure Karl.
“Don’t you worry. We’re used to it. It’s an automatic reflex.”
“No!”
“Yes, don’t worry, I know what it is.”
He responded angrily, “No, you don’t know what it is! Not for a second! And don’t say just anything: automatic reflex . . . When someone touches me below my chin, I feel nothing. When your colleague Antoinette looks after me, I’m relaxed, I don’t need to clench my teeth. Why? Because Antoinette and Madame Gomez don’t have the same smell as you do. I tried to warn you . . .”
“Oh go on . . . It’s no big deal . . .”
“If it’s not a big deal, then what is?” he exclaimed in a broken voice.
“Don’t be embarrassed, I’m not,” she lied.
“You’re not embarrassed? Thank you! Now I understand that I really am nothing more than an invalid!”
Stéphanie saw tears wetting the bandage on his eyes. She felt like holding Karl close to her to console him, but it wasn’t allowed. If she were caught like that, a naked man in the arms of a nurse, with him in that state! Not to mention that if she enveloped him in her smell, it would only get worse . . .
“What have I done, dear Lord, what have I done!” she cried.
Karl changed. His body began to shake violently. He was moaning. Stéphanie was going to call for help when she suspected what was happening.
“Are you . . . are you laughing?”
He confirmed that he was by continuing to shake.
When she saw that his sex was decreasing in size, proportionately to his growing hilarity, Stéphanie was relieved and, infected by his laughter, began to giggle uncontrollably.
She covered his body with a sheet and sat down next to him, just long enough to catch her breath.
When eventually he had calmed down, Stéphanie asked, “What was so funny?”
“The way you cried out, as if there were some catastrophe, ‘Dear Lord, what have I done?’ when in fact you had given me a hard on. Can you imagine how absurd the situation is?”
They laughed uproariously.
“Let’s be serious now. No more humiliation. No more bathing with you. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
In actual fact, Stéphanie was not sure she understood; what she had realized was that she had this power, this new power, this stupefying power to arouse desire in a man. What am I saying? To arouse desire in this man, this very man, this splendid man, this man whom women swarm over, the kind of man sublime mistresses fight over! She had such a power—a fat, ill-favored woman!
For the rest of the day she avoided room 221 because it seemed like her colleagues were on to something, because they were looking at her strangely. In spite of herself, she did feel different, she could not help but act more volubly, more exuberantly than usual, with a blush coming to her cheeks on the slightest pretext.
“My word, Stéphanie, are you in love, by any chance?” asked Marie-Thérèse in her cheerful singsong accent, rolling her r’s and drawling her vowels.
Overwhelmed by a flush of heat, Stéphanie did not answer, but smiled, and ran off to the pharmacy.
“She’s fallen in love,” concluded Marie-Thérèse, nodding her head.
And yet Marie-Thérèse was wrong: Stéphanie had not fallen in love, she had just become a woman.
That night, she got undressed. Far from hiding from her mirror, she stood right in front of it.
“You’re attractive! You can be attractive!”
She was announcing this to her body like good news, or a reward.
“This body can arouse a man,” she said to her reflection.
Her reflection didn’t look terribly convinced.
“Yes!” she insisted. “No later than this morning . . .”
She told her image what had happened that morning, relating in detail the power of her smell . . .
After she finished her story, she put on a bathrobe, had dinner, and dived into bed to think about it, and then think about it some more.
On Tuesday at dawn, as soon as she arrived in the changing room, she negotiated with Madame Gomez to get her to accept, in exchange for small favors—never suspecting a thing—to take care of bathing the patient in room 221.
And then, once Karl had been washed, she went into the room.
“Thank you for not coming,” he sighed.
“That’s the first time anyone’s ever said that to me!”
“It’s strange, isn’t it? There are some people around whom you couldn’t care less about being indecent, but others not. No doubt because you want them to like you.”
“You want me to like you?” she asked, her throat tight.
While waiting for his reply, she began to feel faint.
“Yes I’d like that. At least, I would have liked that.”
“You win! I do like you.”
She went up to him, and brushed her lips against his.
“Am I dreaming, or did you just kiss me?” he exclaimed.
“You’re dreaming.”
All day long, she kept the memory of that contact on her lips. How could it possibly be so good?
While she forced herself not to neglect her other patients, she did spend more time in Karl’s room—or was it just that time went by more quickly there. The moment she was over the threshold of room 221, she went through an invisible barrier and found herself in a different world.
At around noon, while Karl and Stéphanie were talking about trivial things, he broke off, and changed the subject.
“How do you dress when you’re not at the hospital?”
She crossed off reality with one bold stroke, thinking of her shapeless clothes waiting in the changing room, or her closets at home, and she decided to lie.
“Skirts.”
“Ah, so much the better.”
“Yes, skirts and blouses. Silk, if possible. Sometimes a skirt with a suit jacket. In summer, light dresses . . .”
“Ravishing. And in winter?”
Stéphanie blushed, thinking of the outrageous thing she was about to say.
“I like to wear leather. Not bikers’ leather, sophisticated leather, glamorous, do you know what I mean?”
“I adore that! What a pity I can’t see you.”
“Here we wear hospital scrubs for work. Not very sexy.”
“Even on you?”
“Even on me.”
“I doubt that. Anyway, you get your revenge elsewhere.”
“That’s right . . . I get my revenge . . .”
In the afternoon, on leaving the hospital, she decided to make true what only that morning had been a falsehood, and she headed for the department stores on the Boulevard Haussmann.
To get there she took the métro, which was something she rarely did, because Stéphanie liked to go places on foot. For years she had lived “behind the hospital.” A stranger to Paris would not understand the expression “behind the hospital,” because the Salpêtrière had two equally important entrances on the two boulevards that ran alongside the campus: how could one be in front and the other behind? To understand, you had to assimilate the singular geometry of Paris, a city built in a circle but which has a front and a back . . . anything that is turned toward the center, toward Notre Dame Cathedral, is “in front,” and anything facing the peripheral ring road is “behind.” Because she lived in Chinatown, in a studio on top of an apartment block, not far from the suburbs, therefore, Stéphanie lived “behind.”
To go below ground, and wedge her way onto an overcrowded train, and stew there amidst sweat and noise, and come back out to be shoved this way and that and affront an onslaught of people was already something of an adventure for her. After she had gone several times into the wrong building, because each building in the shopping complex was devoted to this or that product, she finally arrived, awestruck, in the “Women’s Fashion” department.
She overcame her shyness and managed to get help from the sales girls; after a few mistakes, she came up with four outfits that resembled what she had described to Karl, and to her utmost surprise, actually suited her rather well . . .
On Wednesday morning, Stéphanie rushed into the changing room in her leather suit; her colleagues were lavish with compliments. Blushing, she put on her usual scrubs, feeling rather different, intentionally neglecting to close the top two buttons.
In the head nurse’s office, Stéphanie was informed that Karl Bauer, the patient in room 221, would be taken into surgery for an eye operation.
When she saw Karl he was radiant.
“Do you realize, Stéphanie? I’m going to be able to see again at last.”
Stéphanie had some trouble swallowing her saliva. Let him see, okay, but see her? No doubt it would be a catastrophe, the end of the dream, the death of their relationship.
“Oh, oh, Stéphanie, do you hear me? Are you still there?”
She tried to put some cheer into her voice.
“Yes, I hear you. I will be really happy for you to get your sight back. Really happy. Happy for you.”
To herself she added, “not happy for me.” After that, she did her best to hide her bitterness and to go along with Karl’s naïve enthusiasm.
In the afternoon at four, she went off duty just as Karl, anesthetized, was going into the operating room.
On Thursday, after a night of broken sleep, she set off, with a heavy heart, for the hospital.
It was raining.
In the early morning, Paris was noisily emerging from its drowsiness. The streets belonged to giant things that hid during the day—trucks, garbage dumpsters. Vehicles splashed her with water as she went by.
The sun shone no brighter than the moon. Beneath the throbbing bridges of the elevated railway, she walked along, managing to stay dry, mumbling, “Never mind! Whether he sees me dry or soaked, he’ll be filled with dismay. No point making myself look any better.” With her eye glued to the shiny pavement, she thought that from now on she would once again be inhabiting her unattractive body, a body no one liked. Her beauty had just been a flash in the pan! A picnic in the grass! Her vacation from ugliness had been too short-lived . . .
At the same time she blamed herself for her sadness. What a selfish person! Instead of thinking about him, about his happiness, she was thinking about herself. An inconsiderate lover, an ugly woman, and an unprofessional nurse: she was really piling on the flaws. Besides, she herself was nothing but a flaw.
Limp, exhausted, she went through the hospital doors, her shoulders drooping, crushed by what seemed like an irreversibly discouraging weight.
The dark corridor that led to room 221 had never seemed so long.
Outside, the rain was slashing diagonally against the windows.
When she crossed the threshold, she immediately noticed that Karl was still wearing his bandages. When she approached him, he was startled.
“Stéphanie?”
“Yes. How do you feel?”
“I think the operation failed.”
The blood rushed to her ears. She was happy: he wouldn’t see her, ever! Now she was ready to devote her entire life to him, if he wanted her to. Yes, she would agree to become this man’s appointed nurse, provided that, from time to time, from deep within his blindness, he spoke to her of her beauty.
In the hours that followed, she was filled with inexhaustible energy, trying to boost his morale: the energy of a woman who, after a setback, has found hope again.
For more than a week, thanks to her flawlessly positive attitude, she was a great comfort to him.
One day—it was a Wednesday—he sighed.
“Do you know the worst thing about being here, that really makes me unhappy? Not hearing women’s shoes.”
“Those are the rules.”
“They’re keeping me from getting better with their rules! It’s not listening to the sound of slippers and clogs that I’ll recover. I need to be treated not just like a human being but also like a man.”
She was instantly afraid he would ask her, because she had the suspicion she would accept.
“Please, Stéphanie, couldn’t you just, for my sake, forget the rules for a few minutes and come to me wearing women’s shoes, not your work shoes?”
“But . . . but . . .”
“Would they fire you for that?”
“No . . .”
“I beg you: please give me that pleasure.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Stéphanie did indeed think of nothing else, particularly about which shoes she could possibly wear. If she went around in her usual tennis shoes, she wasn’t about to make Karl happy.
During her break she asked her most elegant coworkers for advice, and they gave her the names of a few stores.
As most of the nurses were from Martinique, when she left the hospital Stéphanie hurried underground, took the métro, and found herself in the north of Paris, in Barbès, the capital’s African neighborhood, where the shop windows overflowed with tight, sophisticated shoes, modestly priced.
She nearly went back the way she’d come more than once because it was blatantly obvious that some of the shops were intended for prostitutes: the outfits were so provocative and aggressive, with vulgar designs and flashy material.
As she had been advised, she went into the “Grand Chic Parisien,” a store that hardly deserved its name, judging by the neon lights and piles of boxes, and the sagging threadbare benches on patched linoleum.
Although she was determined to buy something, she was about as eager to try on high-heeled shoes as to go sheep-herding in the wilds of Transylvania. But the shop assistant encouraged her, and she managed to find a height where she didn’t wobble, and decided to buy two pairs.
“What do you think of these ones?”
Stéphanie walked back and forth with the pair in question.
“No, my husband won’t like them.”
“He doesn’t like patent leather?”
“He’s blind. I mean the sound they make . . . they sound like the shoes I had at my First Communion . . . I need a sexier sound.”
Delighted, the shop assistant brought a few styles with sleek curves.
“These are good,” said Stéphanie, stunned by the harmony between the sound and the appearance. “Now I just have to choose the color.”
“The color is easier because that’s just for you.”
Encouraged by her remark, Stéphanie decided on one style that she bought in two colors, red and black. In her heart of hearts she wasn’t really sure about buying the carmine pumps, because she wondered if she’d ever wear them but, that day, thanks to Karl, she experienced the joy of a little girl who dreams of going off with all her mommy’s sexy clothes.
On Thursday she hid her purchases in an old sports bag and went to the hospital.
At ten minutes past ten, when she was certain there wouldn’t be any doctors coming in, she whispered into Karl’s ear.
“I brought my shoes.”
She went back out, put her clogs in such a way that she could slip them on quickly if they were disturbed, and then she put on the black pumps.
“Time for your treatment!”
She began her work by his bed. Her pointed heels tapped vigorously on the floor, quivered when she stopped, then slipped gently.
Karl grinned from ear to ear.
“What bliss,” he murmured.
Suddenly Stéphanie felt like trying the scarlet pair.
“Wait, I brought some others. Oh, they’re not very different but . . .”
This time it was for herself alone that she put on the pair in crimson lambskin, and on she went with her chores, amused and a bit titillated.
Karl suddenly asked, “Is the strap narrower?”
“No.”
“Can you see more of your foot? Is it more cut away?”
“No.”
“Is it snakeskin?”
“No.”
“Then what color are they? They wouldn’t be red by any chance?”
Stéphanie confirmed they were, dumbfounded. Not only had the car accident damaged Karl’s optic nerve, but he was also wearing a thick bandage over his eyes. So how . . .
Almost frightened, she hurried to the door, took off the heels, put her work shoes back on, and buried the two new pairs in her bag.
“Thank you,” whispered Karl, “you spoiled me.”
“How did you guess?”
“I couldn’t see the difference but I could feel you, you were very different in the second pair: you didn’t move the same way, your hips were swaying. I bet that’s the pair you wear when you want to please Ralf. Am I right?”
“Hmm . . .”
“I adore your voice, too, you have a fruity, singing, resonant voice. It’s odd, such a full voice is usually characteristic of a black woman! But I don’t think you are black, are you?”
“No. But I do have a few things in common with my colleagues from Martinique.”
“Yes, I can hear that too. A sturdy, wide pelvis, a goddess subtly wrapped in smooth skin.”
“How did you know?”
“The way you sway on your pumps, and again, your voice. Very thin women rarely have a nice voice. As if the voice needs a layer of flesh to attain depth . . . and a wide pelvis to be well grounded, rich in harmonics . . . Isn’t it said of opera singers that they have vocal weight? So if a voice has weight, so must the woman. What bliss!”
“Do you really believe this stuff you’re giving me?”
“Absolutely! A voice feeds on flesh and resonance. If there is neither flesh nor the space to resonate, the voice remains dry. Like the woman. No?”
“Judging by your mistresses, the other day, I thought that you only went for thin women.”
“It’s a combination of circumstances: I’m a photographer by trade, so I often work with models for my fashion shoots. But I love women so much that I love what is thin in thin women and what is ample in ample women.”
As of Friday, Stéphanie again had the weekend off and was at a loss. How was she going to get through three days without him?
So she decided to do things for him: she spent several hours in a beauty salon, then she treated herself to a hairdresser, managed to get an appointment to have her nails done, and then once she was back in her studio, she opened her wardrobe to have a strict look at her clothing.
“What would he like? What couldn’t he like? I’m going to make two piles.”
She forced herself not to cheat, emptied out her shelves and on Saturday dropped several bags off outside the offices of the Red Cross.
On Sunday she decided to go back to Barbès in order to fill her empty wardrobe and think about what Karl had explained about curvy women. If he liked them, she should manage to do the same. Sitting in a sidewalk café, she watched people come and go.
What a contrast between Barbès and Chinatown! Such a distance from her neighborhood! From the Asian streets to the African streets, everything changed, not only the smells—the green and yellow smells of Chinatown, a mixture of herbs and roots, were replaced by the scarlet, spicy, demanding smells in Barbès, of roasted lamb or grilled merguez—and the life on the street—sidewalks overflowing in Barbès and deserted streets in Chinatown; but the women as well . . . The women differed in size, allure, clothing and above all in their very concept of femininity. The Barbès women emphasized their shape by wearing lycra or enhanced it with gorgeous boubous, loose and colorful; while the women in Chinatown disappeared into floppy jackets, hiding any suggestion of breasts beneath a straight, mannish row of buttons, or any trace of their hips and thighs in dull trousers.
The majestic African women were regal in their loose dresses or clinging tights; they swayed to and fro beneath warm male gazes. Not for one second did they question their powers of seduction. Not for one second would they view a wolf whistle or a wink as mocking. They walked along displaying composure, insolence, and guts, so sure of their irresistible charm that they came out winners every time. Like the men around her, Stéphanie thought they were gorgeous.
She mused that if her mother were sitting there beside her at that moment, Léa would sigh as if someone were inflicting a tank parade upon her, or a visit to an institute for the handicapped, or a ballet of whales. Stephane realized that her self-disparaging attitude came from her narcissistic mother, who was a self-proclaimed standard of beauty. And it hadn’t helped matters that she had left Léa to move into the Chinese neighborhood, only to find herself surrounded by tiny, ravishing models, who merely exacerbated her complex.
A scrawny, anemic redhead went by: she even looked like Léa. Stéphanie sniggered: a firefly among the marmots, that was all! Here, among these giant women, such thinness became dryness; a flat stomach meant bones showing through.
Stéphanie concluded that notions of attraction were profoundly relative; thus, greatly heartened, she went home, humming. As she was walking along the Avenue de Choisy, between the Tang supermarket and the Maison du Canard Laqué, she suddenly concluded that, after all, given her height and her glow, she must be perfectly magnificent.
Standing in front of her full-length mirror she contemplated a new woman. Her reflection had changed only slightly—her clothes, hairstyle, attitude—but an inner light—confidence—had changed her, made her a pretty, curvaceous girl with a generous bosom. She had Karl to thank for that, and she waited eagerly for the next day.
When on Monday she went through the door of room 221, the doctors’ presence irritated her: it was all she could do not to chase them out the way she’d chased out the mistress, so that she could be alone with Karl; but then the nature of their gathering rang an alarm bell. Stéphanie slipped into the room, pressed up against the wall behind the interns, and adopted the modest attitude appropriate for a nurse.
With his hairy forearms and his paper mask below his chin, Dr. Belfort was worried. After a few consultations in a hushed voice with his assistants, he led the team into the meeting room to discuss the situation because, like several of the top doctors at the Salpêtrière, he felt more at ease with illnesses than with patients.
Stéphanie followed the group. As they began to go over the test results, Stéphanie learned, aghast, just how serious Karl’s condition was. After several weeks, the doctors’ vital prognosis remained just as cautious, if not more so, as when he was taken from the ambulance. All their hopes rested on the operations that Dr. Belfort planned to perform soon.
Stéphanie felt not only dejected but ashamed. In that room 221 where she had been running every day to live the most magical moments of her life, Karl was living the worst moments of his, perhaps the last. Lying inert in his bed, his body hooked up to rubber tubes and pouches of liquid, all alone in a tiny room at the mercy of the interns or medical students who were analyzing and commenting, he didn’t own anything anymore, he didn’t do anything anymore, he wasn’t experiencing anything, and he was only surviving through the help of technology. She deeply resented her own selfishness; she was a monster, as childish, vain, and flirtatious as Karl’s mistresses.
Consequently, that day, to punish herself, she refrained from going to visit him, and arranged for someone else to take over his treatment.
On Tuesday, when she went back to see Karl, she found him very weak. Was he asleep? She went closer, leaned over his face, but his nostrils did not react. She eventually murmured, “Karl, it’s Stéphanie.”
“Ah, at last . . .”
His voice came from somewhere deep inside his body, trembling with emotion. Her presence seemed to affect him.
“Four days without you, that’s too long.”
Although he was blind, he turned toward her.
“I haven’t stopped thinking about you. I was waiting for you.”
“Every day?”
“Every hour.”
He was speaking gravely, without lying. She began to cry.
“Forgive me. I won’t go away again.”
“Thank you.”
She knew that such an absurd dialogue was anything but professional: she shouldn’t make such promises, and a patient does not have the right to demand them. And yet this bizarre episode enabled her to gauge the affection between them. While you couldn’t say that they loved one another, you might at least suppose that they needed each other.
“Do something kind for me, Stéphanie.”
“Yes, Karl, what do you want?”
“Take a mirror and describe your eyes to me.”
What a bad idea, she thought regretfully, I have such ordinary brown eyes. What a pity he couldn’t ask her mother on the other hand; she was so proud of her blue eyes.
Stéphanie went to get a round enlarging mirror and sat by the side of the bed, looking at her reflection.
“The whites of my eyeballs are very white.”
“Like the whites of an egg?”
“Enamel white; they look deep, consistent, like cream that’s been solidified in the oven.”
“Good. And then?”
“A black setting, with a slight twist, sets off the iris and exalts the nuances of color.”
“Ah . . . tell me about it.”
“There’s brown, bistre, beige, fauve, red, sometimes a hint of green. It’s much more varied than you’d think.”
“God is in the details. Your pupils?”
“Very black, very sensitive. They become round, and retract, freeze, and expand. My pupils are very talkative, very emotional.”
“Fabulous . . . your eyelids, now.”
The game went on. Eyelashes, brows, scalp, earlobes . . . Guided by a blind man’s gaze, Stéphanie discovered the infinite nuances of the visible world, the unsuspected treasures of her body.
In the changing room, before leaving, she noticed outside her locker a bouquet of pink and purple peonies, set in an elegant foliage, paler than celadon. She picked it up to take it to the reception, never imagining for one second that it might be for her, when a card fell out, and on it was written, in carefully inscribed letters: “For Stéphanie, the most marvelous nurse.”
Who was sending her this tribute? She searched the tissue paper wrapping, gently felt the flowers, explored the stems, in vain: she found neither signature nor clue.
Back at home, she put her present next to her bed so she could gaze at it, convinced it came from Karl.
The next morning, a new bouquet—still peonies, but yellow and red this time—was waiting for her at dawn outside her locker. The same gallant message. The same discretion on the part of the sender.
She went immediately up to room 221 and, during her conversation with Karl, she tried to verify whether he was indeed her generous purveyor. As she was unable to obtain any clues, she came right out with it: “Are you the one I have to thank for the bouquets yesterday and today?”
“I’m sorry not to have thought of it. No, it wasn’t me.”
“Do you swear?”
“To my great shame.”
“But then who?”
“What? You have no idea who your admirer is?”
“Not the slightest idea.”
“Women are insane! It takes forever to get them to open their eyes and see us. Fortunately for men, nature invented flowers . . .”
Stéphanie sulked, more out of sorts than enchanted, particularly as the gifts continued: every day, a new floral composition was left at the foot of her locker.
As a result, she felt obliged to open her eyes and look at the men who surrounded her at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, and she noticed, stupefied, that a number of them flashed smiles at her.
At first, she was terrified. What? Were there so many charmers around her, so many males who looked upon her as a woman? Was it really she who had not noticed them before? Or was it that they had only begun to notice her since her adventure with Karl? In shock, almost traumatized, she hesitated between maintaining her previous attitude—walking with her head down, avoiding people’s gazes, withholding her smile—and adopting her new warm, relaxed attitude, where she made eye contact any number of times wherever she went, offering a dozen opportunities to stop and talk.
It was in a moment like this that she first saw Raphaël among a group of stretcher-bearers. It was hard to say exactly what it was that struck her to begin with: the young man’s blazing eyes, or the peony he wore pinned to his white coat. Stéphanie shivered and realized it was a sign, and that she had just met her anonymous admirer.
She walked more slowly, batted her eyelids, opened her mouth, hunted for a sentence that didn’t come, began to doubt, thought she must be wrong after all, then hurried and rushed away.
However, she ran into Raphaël again in the company of his colleagues; every time, she felt she was burning up as they looked at each other.
What could she do? How should she behave? Stéphanie had even less of an idea how to react because she wasn’t expecting anything from this boy: he was a nuisance. Could she go up to him and say, “Thanks, but stop now”?
Marie-Thérèse offered her opinion while they were at the cafeteria.
“That stretcher-bearer Raphaël, I think he’s devouring you with his eyes, Stéphanie.”
“Oh, really? He’s not bad . . .”
“Are you joking? He’s the cutest guy in the hospital. He has long eyelashes like an Egyptian princess. We’re all crazy about him. We’ll be green with envy if you hook up with him.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Those flowers! Everyone knows about it, girl. He is just crazy about you.”
“Don’t you think he’s too young?”
“Too young for who? He’s the same age as you.”
Marie-Thérèse was right. Spontaneously, since she’d realized she could be attractive around Karl, a man of forty, Stéphanie had been considering herself to be older, classifying herself along with the fortysomethings, and initially she thought it was too bold, or even indecent, to respond to the advances of a mere youth.
The week was hectic. Stéphanie did not spend too much time with Karl; he had undergone a new operation and was easily tired; also, by chance she happened to witness his behavior with other nurses, and understood that with her he was making himself tired trying to be funny, deep, and disconcerting, and that he often made an excessive and costly effort. In addition, she dreaded walking through the floors and running into Raphaël.
The following Saturday and Sunday, although she didn’t have to go to work, she did go to the hospital. She dressed up, convinced that Karl would be sensitive to how she looked, and she even went so far as to inaugurate the lace lingerie that she had just bought. However, when she saw a few of the former mistresses waiting in the lobby, she turned around and headed back the way she’d come, swapped her Indian silk blouse and jersey skirt for her regulation scrubs, then went back upstairs as a nurse.
Her colleagues were astonished to see her there, so she explained that she was doing overtime in ophthalmology, in the ward across the way, and then she seized a moment when they weren’t paying attention to slip into room 221. The last mistress had just left, and Karl gave her some time.
“Have you noticed? I have fewer visitors as the weeks go by. They only appreciated me when I was in good health—strong, funny, somebody who made them feel good.”
“Are you angry with them?”
“No. It’s probably because that’s the way they are—voracious, eager to charm, to conquer, to live—that I liked them to begin with.”
“How many came back?”
“Two. There’ll only be one left next week. They have finally managed to get along, these women who hate each other; they’ve arranged to take turns getting news about me by coming here as little as possible. It’s funny, no? Basically, they’re impatient, in a hurry to weep for me, they’ll be dazzling at my funeral. And sincere. Yes, I mean it, really.”
“Don’t say that, you’ll get better! We’re going to fight together to get you back on your feet.”
“My mistresses don’t believe that . . .”
“I don’t even want to make fun of them. It must not have been hard to fall in love with you: you’re so handsome.”
“Male beauty is useless. What makes for a man’s attraction is not his beauty, but the way he convinces a woman that she is beautiful in his presence.”
“Blah blah blah!”
“Useless, I assure you. Physical perfection gets in the way, it’s a handicap.”
“Go on!”
“Okay, listen: the fact you think I’m decorative—what does that inspire in you? Trust or wariness?”
“It inspires desire.”
“Thank you. Now, be honest: trust or wariness?”
“Wariness.”
“You see! The first thing people are wary of—they assume that handsome men are not sincere. The second thing: handsome men inspire jealousy. I’ve only ever known jealous women.”
“Were they wrong?”
“The first time they threw a jealous fit, yes. After that, no. Since their suspicion preceded my acts, I felt obliged to prove them right.”
They laughed, relaxed.
“Let me explain, Stéphanie, why one must never be jealous. Because if you create a unique relationship with someone, it will not be reproduced. For example, in this very moment, do you think I could have this discussion with another woman?”
“No.”
“So you must consider, Stéphanie, that with me you have no rivals.”
She smiled and then brought her lips closer to his to whisper, “Yes I do.”
He shivered.
“Who?”
“Death. One day death can take away this unique thing I am living with you.”
“And so you hate death?”
“Why am I a nurse? Why do you think I am looking after you so well? I will help you to get better.”
They stayed in silence for a long while, very close to each other, sharing the same emotion. Then Stéphanie kissed him furtively and rushed out.
On Monday morning in the changing room, it wasn’t a bouquet waiting for Stéphanie, but Raphaël.
Intimidated, with the burning boldness of shy people in his eyes, he quickly handed her a spray of roses.
“Hi, I’m Raphaël.”
“I know.”
“I’m the one who . . . since . . . well . . . you understand . . .”
“Yes, I know that, too.”
She suggested they sit down on the bench next to the long sink.
The stretcher bearer murmured, as if he were in ecstasy, “You are beautiful.”
On hearing him, Stéphanie realized that she had left the world of the blind behind; this was a sighted man who was saying this, a sighted man with his eyes wide open.
“Raphaël, I’m not free.”
The young man’s face fell, instantly devastated by pain.
“That can’t be,” he murmured.
“I’m afraid so, I’m not free.”
“Are you going to get married?”
Amazed by the concrete nature of the question, Stéphanie replied in a toneless voice.
“Perhaps. Nothing is planned. I . . . I love him. It’s . . . it’s like a disease.”
Stéphanie almost confessed that Karl was sick then, at the last minute, out of caution, she turned the phrase around on herself, so her colleague would not suspect anything. She insisted, “You see, my feelings . . . it’s like a sickness. I don’t know when I’ll get better, or even if I will get better.”
He reflected. Then he looked into her eyes.
“Stéphanie, I realize that I’m not the only man who’s interested in you, I realize that I have rivals, and I realize that the world is full of men who would like to live with you. However, with my flowers, I was coming to ask you if I was in with a chance, even a tiny chance.”
Stéphanie thought about the doctors’ cautious diagnoses, and the anxiety she felt every morning going into the room where Karl lay, so weak . . . Unable to continue the conversation, she burst into tears.
Disconcerted, Raphaël wriggled from one buttock to the other, muttering Stéphanie’s name, hunting around to see what he could come up with to check the deluge of tears. Awkwardly, he put his arm around her shoulders, and encouraged her to lean against him. As she was sobbing, he smiled, because for the first time he got a whiff of her scent, and it made him giddy. Stéphanie, slumped against his chest, discovered that, while most stretcher-bearers smelled of stale tobacco, this boy had incredibly soft skin that gave off a heady perfume of hazelnut. Confused, she sat up. Trying to get a hold of herself, she remembered the operations Dr. Belfort had talked about, and she pictured herself helping Karl to sit up, to take his first steps . . . She shook her head, looked her admirer in the eye, and said, “Forget about me.”
“You don’t fancy me?”
“Never, do you hear me, Raphaël: never!”
When she went through the door of room 221, she unbuttoned the top of her blouse and saw Karl looking even paler, emaciated. As usual, he did not let his worries show through. With a brisk movement she slid the bedpan under the sheets, and hardly recognized his legs: his thighs and calves had melted away. She was eager for Dr. Belfort to begin these vital operations.
“What’s up, Stéphanie, you don’t talk about Ralf anymore.”
“It’s over.”
“So much the better, he was a jerk. So who’s your new boyfriend?”
Stéphanie felt like shouting, “You, you idiot, I love only you, there is no one as important as you,” but she knew that would not be in keeping with their relationship, for he thought that she was independent, fulfilled, happy. And so she answered, “Raphaël.”
“He’s a lucky guy, that Raphaël! Does he know it?”
Stéphanie thought back on the episode she had just experienced and declared, “Yes. He does.”
Karl registered the information at face value.
“So much the better. I want you to promise me one thing, Stéphanie, will you?”
“Yes.”
“Lend me your ear: I can only whisper this kind of request, and that way I can enjoy the way you smell better.”
Stéphanie put her ear up against Karl’s well-defined lips, listened attentively to his murmur. As soon as he had finished, she protested, “No! I won’t! Don’t even talk like that!”
He insisted. She put her ear back against his lips, then with tears flowing from her eyes, she agreed.
The medical team performed the decisive operation. Going round in circles outside the security door, Stéphanie, who was not religious, implored the heavens to make it a success. Dr. Belfort came out of the operating room rubbing his hands, looking pleased. Stéphanie clung to this detail to keep her faith.
Then, in the space of four days Karl’s condition deteriorated. He went into a coma during the night and, on the morning of the fifth day, the doctors began to doubt whether they’d be able to revive him. Stéphanie clenched her teeth, trying to hide how distraught she felt, battling with her colleagues to chase death away from where it was lurking in room 221.
At the end of the afternoon, she had to go to the distant infirmary at the other end of the compound.
The sky was a springtime blue, sharp and cloudless. The brisk air filled her lungs. Birds were chirping as if to announce a joyful event.
A bell rang out on the half hour.
Stéphanie found herself hoping: she hurried her steps to return to reanimation.
When she went through the security doors, she sensed that something was going on.
At the end of the corridor, banging the door to his room, the nurses’ aides were busily moving about.
She broke into a run and went through the door.
Karl had just died.
She leaned her back against the wall and slid slowly to the ground. There she stayed, her legs spread, without saying a word, without a cry, her eyes overflowing with tears.
Her colleagues looked at her disapprovingly: a professional must never give in to emotion, otherwise it becomes impossible to do one’s job.
Overwhelmed, she suddenly remembered Karl’s whispered words: her promise.
She jumped to her feet, ran down the corridor, drying her eyes, down to the ground floor, on to the emergency unit, then straight up to where Raphaël was standing smoking with the other stretcher-bearers.
“Have you finished your shift?”
“In ten minutes.”
“Then let’s leave together. Let’s go to your place.”
Dumbfounded, he hesitated. She misunderstood his hesitation and insisted: “It’s now or never!”
“Then it’s now!” exclaimed Raphaël, tossing his cigarette away.
He took her by the hand and led her back to the changing room. On the way, she felt the need to explain herself: “You see, I’m coming with you because . . . because . . .”
“I get it. You’re all better?”
“That’s it. I’m all better.”
One hour after Karl’s death, Stéphanie, loyal to her promise, gave herself to Raphaël. She made love with passion and rage. Not for a moment did Raphaël suspect she was a virgin. But when she let the young man embrace her, although it was to Raphaël that she parted her legs, it was for Karl that she said, “I love you.”