You Changed My Life (25 page)

She asks Monsieur Pozzo: “Do you think it's a good idea for me to marry Abdel Yamine?”

He gives her his blessing like a father. But whose father? Hers or mine?

The beautiful girl's name is Amal. We have three children: Abdel Malek was born in 2005. I consider him the intellectual of the family: always well behaved, does well at school, and
doesn't hit the younger ones too much. Our second son, Salaheddine, came a year later. He had serious health problems at birth, had to have several serious operations, but he's a fighter. At home, we call him Didine, but he's more like Rocky Balboa. I see myself in him. I promise him a great career as a crook, which makes his mother crazy. Finally our daughter, Keltoum, came along in 2007. She has beautiful curly hair, is clever like a fox; she's charm and mischief all at once. I could have named her Candy. For now, Amal has decided we're stopping there. She calls the shots.

During a trip to Marrakech, Monsieur Pozzo met a rare pearl named Khadija. They live together in Essaouira, on the coast where it's never too hot or cold. They're raising two little girls whom they adopted. They're doing well. I go to see them a lot during vacation, either alone or with my family. All of the kids play together in the swimming pool; the house is filled with their screams and laughter. There's joy, there's life. If I drive on the Moroccan roads, I never drive very fast . . .

Our project for the amusement park in Saïdia never happened, but who cares.

I said enough to Monsieur Pozzo when I had my accident. I
wasn't his employee anymore. I was still by his side. I still drove him wherever he needed to go. Every day I did all the things I had had to do over the preceding years, but I was no longer his life auxiliary. I was just in his life.

In October 1997, at the beginning of the November vacation, he asked me to take his son Robert-Jean to his grandmother's in Normandy. The kid got into the backseat, as quiet and nice as ever. Yacine wanted to get some air, so he sat next to me. I got behind the wheel of the Safrane,
my
Safrane. We didn't get very far: by Porte Maillot, just at the tunnel exit going toward La Défense, the car just quit. Engine failure, just like that, with no warning, right in the middle lane. I put on the hazards. At first the other cars honked at us before figuring out that we weren't trying to ruin their lives, then they drove around us in the right and left lanes. A highway safety truck got there fast.
Two men in fluorescent jumpsuits set up the roadblocks around the Safrane to guide traffic. Now we just had to wait.

Yacine and Robert-Jean stayed in the car. I leaned against the driver's side door and looked out for the tow truck. I wasn't worried; I didn't think I was in danger. For a good ten minutes, I watched the cars passing to the left a good eight feet in front of me, just beyond the bright orange cones showing them the way. Then I saw a semi also going around us on the left. Well, I saw the back of the truck that was approaching the Safrane and me. The driver turned a little too soon. I was sandwiched between his trailer and the Safrane. I just had time to shout. I sprawled out on the ground and lost consciousness for a moment.

I vaguely remember getting loaded into an ambulance. I felt an excruciating pain when they lifted me onto the gurney and I passed out again. I woke up at the hospital in Neuilly with the promise of surgery the next day. Philippe Pozzo di Borgo quickly dredged up a new life auxiliary. I can imagine how the poor guy must have felt being welcomed into his new job! His boss was asking him to drive him to the hospital to keep his predecessor company. They sent him in search of chocolate in the cafeteria to get rid of him.

“So how's the new guy?”

“He's . . . professional.”

“He's not the king of bullshit, huh . . .”

“And you, Abdel, you're becoming the king of expressions!”

“Oh yeah . . . and who's the best?”

“You are, Abdel. You, when you're standing up!”

A hospital that doesn't give a shit about charity . . . you had to see it. The aristocratic tetraplegic and the little Arab with
his hip in pieces, side by side in their wheelchairs checking out the nurses . . .

“How long will it be, Abdel?”

“A few weeks, at least. The doctors aren't sure the outcome will last very long. I don't need a prosthetic for now, but there's some problem with the ligament or something . . .”

“You're always welcome at home, you know that?”

“Of course, I'm the best!”

It's not always so easy to say thank you . . .

I got back to work, or back to my partnership with Monsieur Pozzo, a few months after the accident. That's when we started Téléloc, then the candle auction apartments, and finally the project in Morocco. During that period, I had to stop several times for surgery, not to mention weeks of physical rehabilitation. I wasn't even thirty yet. I thought I was a little young to be a part of the second class invalids, just one rank below Monsieur Pozzo. Social Security told me I wasn't allowed to work—too dangerous for my health! I thought that was a little extreme . . . that was proof that I'd already changed. But I never would have admitted it. As usual, I talked the talk without thinking about what I was saying.

“No more messing around, Abdel. You're going to find out what life is all about,” Monsieur Pozzo told me.

“You're right, and I'm going to get all I can out of it! Now that I'm all broken, I'm going to get paid for doing nothing. The good life, here I come!”

He did everything he could to try to get me to pull it together. I tried hard to make him think he wasn't succeeding.
Being paid to stay at home was already boring to me: I couldn't sit still!

Monsieur Pozzo talked to me like a father would, an advisor, a sage. He tried to teach me order and morality, values that had always been completely foreign to me. He did it gently, with intelligence, so as not to put me on the defensive as I was with the teachers, the police, and the judges. He talked to me with kindness and detachment at the same time. He wanted me to obey the rules. It was surely partly to protect society, but mostly to protect me from it. He was afraid I'd put myself in danger, that I'd expose myself to the law again, to prison and also to my own violence. When I told him that I'd done time at Fleury-Mérogis it was in a moment of weakness or to show off. I don't know if he believed me or not, but he didn't question me about it. Ever since we first met, he'd known that I either didn't answer questions or gave ridiculous answers. He knew that you had to let me come forward on my own, and that I wouldn't necessarily do that anyway. He knew that I was uncontrollable, but he kept me on the tracks of acceptability. In his immobile hands, I was the puppet, the toy, the animal, the doll. Abdel Yamine Sellou, the first remote-control GI Joe in history.

When I talk about myself, I say what I want, when I want, if
I want. One truth hides a lie. Another truth seems so huge that it seems like a lie. The lies add up and are so huge that you end up wondering if they aren't hiding a certain truth . . . I tell the truth, I tell a lie, you've got to be pretty smart to make out the difference and hats off to the one who does. But sometimes I get tricked. The journalists who interviewed me for Mireille Dumas's show didn't get all the answers to their questions but they knew how to get around the barrier created by my stubbornness. They filmed my silences. They did close-ups on my face. They caught a look directed at Monsieur Pozzo. And these images alone said a lot. A lot more than I would have admitted in words.

When I accepted the proposal to do this book, I naïvely thought I could continue along the same road I'd always taken: no cameras, no microphones this time. I say what I want, but I shut up if I want! Before starting this exercise, I didn't realize I
was ready to talk. To explain to other people—the readers, as it happens—what I'd still never explained to myself. Once again, I'm talking about explaining, not “justifying.” You understand by now that I'm all too happy to talk for self-satisfaction, but not for self-pity. I can't stand this fascination the French have with analyzing everything and forgiving everything, even the unforgivable, on the pretext of another culture, of a problem in upbringing, an unhappy childhood. I didn't have an unhappy childhood, on the contrary! I grew up like a lion in the savanna. I was the king. The strongest, most intelligent, and most seductive. When I let the gazelle drink at the watering hole, it was because I wasn't hungry. But when I was, I pounced on it. As a child, I wasn't scolded for being violent any more than a lion cub would be for his hunting instincts. Is that an unhappy childhood?

It was simply a childhood that didn't prepare me for becoming an adult. I wasn't aware of it and neither were my parents. Nobody's to blame.