The cool air did me good. I leaned back against a wall, not far from the access ramp. I took several deep breaths to try to get rid of the tension inside me. In the building opposite, an old woman was smoking at the window of her room. All at once, she threw away her cigarette and withdrew her head, then a nurse appeared and abruptly closed the window.
An emergency ambulance arrived, siren screaming, and pulled up outside the main entrance of the hospital. The doors opened and the paramedics got to work. The care with which they moved the body, their faces, their general demeanor left no doubt about the gravity of the situation. I thought about my father. About the day he went into hospital, almost certainly like that, and never came out again.
He’d been admitted to the teaching hospital in Toulouse after being freed from his car, which had rolled over onto the shoulder of the highway, near Montauban. What had happened? The theory that had prevailed was that he’d fallen asleep at the wheel, having absorbed all kinds of booze. He’d been taken out of the wreck with terrible fractures, worst of all with the back of his skull smashed in, and had died after three days in a coma, without ever waking up. I’d learned the news by telephone, from my sister. I remember how she’d hated my reaction, which was too cold for her taste: she herself had burst into tears. That was the day she first told me I had a heart of stone, which was fine by me. My father had ended up in a highway ditch, close to his destination. There hadn’t been any obstacle in his path, any treacherous bend, any reckless driver picking a quarrel with him. He had been his only obstacle. His capacity for destruction, especially self-destruction.
“Monsieur Barteau?”
A voice drew me away from my thoughts. It was the child psychiatrist. She was standing against the light and I had to screw up my eyes to see her better.
“You know, Dr. Mérieux is an excellent doctor.”
“Why are you telling me that?”
“Because a good doctor doesn’t just rely on what he knows, he also uses his intuition. Have you ever heard of Asperger’s syndrome?”
“No, never. Is it a disease?”
“Not exactly. It’s a condition. A kind of mild autism that often produces exceptional people. Some great pianists have Asperger’s. In all likelihood, Einstein did as well. Bobby Fischer, the world chess champion . . . ”
“Top sportsmen?”
“Not as far as I know, but it’s quite possible. What do you do for a living, Monsieur Barteau?”
“I’m a soccer coach.”
“So you made him play soccer.”
“That’s not quite how it happened.”
“Do you mind telling me?”
Things were going much too fast for me. I felt the need to regain control, or at least try. “Do you mind telling me where Léonard is?”
“Right now he’s playing chess with Dr. Mérieux, and probably making a fool of him.”
“I need a coffee.”
“We can go to the cafeteria, as long as we sit outside. If I drink coffee, I have to smoke. It’s bad, I know.”
There were three tables on a little terrace. At one of them, a blind old man was sitting, smiling at God knows what. Dr. Vandrecken lit her cigarette and crossed her legs. Worried as I’d been about Léonard, I hadn’t realized earlier what an attractive woman she was. But she didn’t seem to attach any importance to that.
“You were telling me he’s been playing soccer.”
“We started out by saying that soccer was a simplistic game in comparison with chess.”
“And that annoyed you.”
“No, I think it’s wrong, that’s all. And since I have a video collection of the greatest matches, I gave him one to watch.”
“To make him change his mind?”
“To help him form a more informed opinion.”
It was obvious that Dr. Vandrecken was evaluating me at the same time as she was asking me questions about Léonard.
“I see. And what happened?”
“He watched the first match very attentively, then asked me for more. And then he went and helped himself from my video collection. In one night, he watched more than fifty, noting down the combinations, putting the moves into categories, calculating the probability of success depending on the players’ decisions.”
“He’s applying what he knows about chess to soccer.”
“Precisely. So I asked him what position he saw himself playing in if a soccer field was a chessboard.”
“And he said goalkeeper.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“No. But it’s logical. A goalkeeper’s movements are limited. His space easier to grasp. And so you took him to the field.”
“Yes.”
“And what happened?”
“What he did was quite amazing.”
Having reached this point in the conversation, Catherine Vandrecken lit another cigarette. She was nodding her head slightly, clearly weighing up different ideas, trying to draw conclusions.
“You need to have some idea about Asperger’s syndrome,” she resumed, “or there’s a chance you’ll misinterpret things. An Asperger’s sufferer doesn’t see things the same way you and I do. That doesn’t mean he or she is crazy or mentally defective. Quite the opposite. But an Asperger’s sufferer really is different, and we have to be constantly aware of that.”
“Give me some examples.”
“His brain isn’t constructed like ours. To oversimplify, we put our thoughts in boxes that are built into us during our first years of life and allow us to find our way. We take them for granted, we’re no longer even aware of them, but thanks to them we’re able to react in ways that are appropriate to the situations that crop up in our everyday lives. An Asperger’s sufferer doesn’t have those boxes. For genetic reasons, they aren’t built into his brain, so he has to make them up as he goes along. At least if he wants to live in society. To put it very roughly, he’s a Martian visiting earth. He’s from another planet and doesn’t understand anything about the way we function. He doesn’t sleep like us. He doesn’t like to be touched. He never tells lies. He speaks in a very pedantic way.”
“That’s Léonard.”
“In these conditions, what can he do? Either he’s himself, which means that he’ll be misunderstood, rejected, sometimes mistreated. Or else he imitates us so as not to attract attention, to be left in peace, which is his main objective.”
“How can he imitate us if he doesn’t understand us?”
“By using his mental capacities, which gives him the possibility to observe, to classify, to memorize. He’s forced to do that, since he isn’t like us. He must constantly think, look for clues, use the information he has about us to figure out what he needs to do. It’s tiring work, and that’s why he suddenly drops off to sleep when this process drains him of his energy.”
As Dr. Vandrecken went on with her explanations, I saw images pass by. Léonard’s disturbing behavior was starting to make sense.
“Is Léonard playing soccer because he’s afraid I’ll reject him?”
“Partly. But it may also come from a more complex feeling.”
“What kind of feeling?”
“It’s apparently a game he’s established with you. Asperger’s sufferers take an interest in us if we don’t act like idiots. Through soccer, he may have a relationship with you.”
“At first he suggested we play a game of chess. But I can’t play chess.”
“So, since you can’t go into his world, he comes into yours.”
“Yes, at least in his way. I didn’t ask him to cause havoc with my team.”
“Is that what he did?”
“Pretty much.”
“Part of him wants to copy, part of him refuses to . . . That’s the real question for an Asperger’s sufferer. Constructing his identity can be very painful. How’s his relationship with his mother?”
I took my time replying. To me, that was by far the most complicated question. “I don’t know. We don’t see each other very often. She asked me to keep him because she had no other way out.”
“She doesn’t think there’s anything unusual about her son?”
“No. He has his own personality. That’s what she told me.”
“She’s in denial. It’s very common. But for the child it’s more complicated. He wants to please his mother, to behave in a—quote-unquote—normal manner, and, on the other hand, he can’t help expressing his difference. You’ll have to forgive me, but I must go. I have patients to see.”
I stood up to say goodbye. She held out her hand. Then she looked in her pocket, probably for a card. Her pen fell out. I quickly picked it up. She smiled at me.
“Don’t hesitate to call me. If I’m not in the hospital, the office will know where I can be reached.”