Wendy

FICTION

by Philippe Forest

          Pauline was too weak now for us to be able to consider distant departures. We could no longer do without the proximity of the respiratory equipment. There remained trips within Paris, errands in the shops on Rue Lecourbe. We visited the Parc Floral in the Vincennes gardens. A cold sun shone on the city. Clearly we had been wrong about the season. The flowerbeds were bare, the flowers were still sleeping under the dirt, they were taking their time. There was no access to the greenhouses. We were careful not to approach the playground where children congregated. We wanted to avoid having Pauline, in her weakened state, feel the sad temptation to join them. Cautiously climbing down grassy hills, running from tree to tree, we played games of hide and seek. That evening we had dinner on Rue de Wattignies. Pauline reconnected with her friends the cats, the ones who normally lived in the big summer garden. For a long time, she petted the black one, the white one, the rust-colored one, stuffed them with croquettes and meat. When it was time to leave, while I carried her down the stairs, she began to cry. The sobs in her voice, the difficulty she had in breathing, made the words she spoke almost unintelligible. We tried to console her. She did not want to leave the cats. I think she was saying something else as well.
         Alice promised Pauline that the next day we would go buy her if not a cat, at least a little animal that would be hers, that would be her baby. A few days before the operation, the time for this did not strike me as ideal. What is the life expectancy of a guinea pig? Five years. What is the life expectancy of a little girl whose cancer has metastasized to the highest degree? Yet Alice was right. Now there would be a living thing waiting for Pauline at home during the time of her hospitalization, something that would tell her, with a squeal, to come home sooner. Welcoming this insignificant little creature into our home was a way of making an unsustainable wager on the future.
         We went to one of the big department stores on the Right Bank. We took the glass elevator that goes up to the menagerie on the last floor. We walked past parakeets and fish, cats and dogs. But Pauline paid no attention to them. Her mind was now set on the acquisition of a guinea pig. “They are nicer with children than hamsters, mice, or rabbits,” she explained. “You can pet them and cuddle them, and they never bite.” We didn’t have a lot of choices. In a vast wooden cage spread with straw, only one little animal remained, a female a few weeks old, just weaned, with red eyes and strangely planted bristly white fur. “Like Papa’s hair!” remarked Alice. So that would be the one . . . The saleslady talked to Pauline a long time, she explained it was an angora rosette, that she would have to take care of its litter, feed it seeds, accustom it to a baby bottle, not forget to add a little vitamin C to its water; that she could pet it as much as she liked but would have to be careful not to scare it, because a child of four, for such a little animal, was tall and terrifying like a mountain. Pauline listened, serious, attentive, and alert, as she was each time someone explained something important to her. The animal had been put in a little cardboard box. We went down to the floor below to acquire all the requisite materials: the cage, the straw, the grain . . . Pauline announced that, since it was a girl, her guinea pig would be called Wendy. We returned home. Together, Alice and Pauline put the little animal in its cage, trying to show it where to find its food, how to drink. Wendy seemed somewhat reserved, but she let herself be picked up. Pauline would place her on her left hand while she lay on the couch, petting her for a long time with her right hand and sometimes placing her lips on the animal’s head.
         When Pauline returned to the hospital, Wendy naturally remained in her cage. I would feed her in the evening upon returning. Alice was intrigued by the strange implantation of the little animal’s hairs. One of the grandmothers was tasked with having Wendy examined by a veterinarian. The guinea pig suffered from a rather serious disease of the skin which would cause it to lose its fur by whole tufts. Patches of bare pink skin would spread, soon the animal would be entirely hairless. The veterinarian’s advice was the following: obtain a reimbursement from the store whose responsibility it was, give it a lethal shot, or possibly buy another one identical to the first to substitute it without the child’s knowing it. A treatment was available, in the form of inoculations and lotions, but it would cost much more than the animal itself. There were no guarantees. Guinea pigs are not treated much, generally. The children who want them grow weary of them in a few days, a few weeks, or at vacation time, even when they are healthy. They are often abandoned in a Paris garden, or in a highway service area. Sometimes they end up in a waste bin or a garbage chute.
         We didn’t even need to talk about it. Under the present circumstances, it was unthinkable to give the order for a lethal shot to a sweet, sick little white creature because she was losing her fur. We didn’t want to lie to Pauline, and how could we explain that her baby had died, that we would buy her another? We asked the vet to begin treatment right away. We alerted Pauline about what was happening. Using a voice that strangely resembled ours when we spoke to her with hesitation about our anxieties, she said: “You know, I am a little worried about my little pet. I’m afraid the shots might hurt.” Once Pauline was in bed, Alice spent long hours stretched out on the carpet in front of Wendy’s cage, gloomily contemplating the sweet little rat playing in her straw. It was almost as if she were seeking to read an oracle in the bizarre brightness of her two little red eyes. I have never been very sentimental about animals. But the experience we were living made much of what I had been on the inside fall apart. I was becoming superstitious. Every event seemed an omen to me. I thought Pauline’s fate and Wendy’s fate were mysteriously linked. I wanted to believe that someone somewhere would be grateful that we had spared the animal and would pose the hand of salvation upon our child. I was ready to pray to any God whatever. Mentally, I turned my eyes to the sky, I sought there the improbable face of a divinity with the head of a guinea pig, a Great Guinea Pig Totem, watching over the gentle creatures of the meadows and the fields. We soon learned that Wendy’s fur was growing back. Alice said, “Maybe we should have asked the veterinarian to take care of Pauline as well!”
         Later we returned home for two short days. Pauline was unable to shake off the leaden torpor that weighed upon her. She spoke softly and smiled a sad smile. It was almost as if she felt guilty about her insurmountable fatigue, as if her smile were some sort of half-excuse perpetually addressed to us. I took her in my arms, we went down the stairs, I put her in her stroller. We headed for the park where she used to play before her illness. It was a school-day afternoon, the place was empty. We hadn’t been there for many weeks. The children’s playground had been completely redone. There were colored slides, great constructions in many-colored wood in the shape of immobile ships stranded on a sandbar, raising their empty sails to the sky. I suggested to Pauline that she could play a little. She told me she didn’t really want to, that she would perhaps play another time, that she was fine in the stroller, that she only wanted to go for a walk like this, that we could sit for a moment in the sun. We needed to buy some things for Wendy. We turned back up Rue Lecourbe and went into the Monoprix store. It was Pauline who was supposed to choose and pay for what her little animal needed. She wanted to get up and take one of those little shopping carts, topped with a flag, which allow children to imitate their parents in a store. She pushed the cart slowly, the metallic panels of the door opened automatically, I followed her a few meters behind with the empty stroller. I can still see Pauline at this moment with all the precision of an image in a dream. She had her back to me, leaning a bit on the handle of the cart, she was wearing her orange windbreaker with images of African animals. After twenty meters, she turned and told me she was too tired to go any farther. I put her back in the stroller and we went to the section with items for pets. We bought nearly all the boxes showing a picture of a guinea pig: grain, vitamins, cookies, etc. A friend of Pauline’s grandmother was also shopping, and she saw us. With all the boxes in her lap, visibly exhausted, Pauline almost seemed to disappear into the bottom of her stroller. In a very slow, very calm voice, she began to explain at length the nature of her purchases and the way she took good care of her little baby guinea pig. We went home. It was now unthinkable for Pauline to climb the two flights on foot. I carried her. She was as light as the one-year-old child I used to pick up from day care. Pauline poured the mixture of Wendy’s favorite grains into the cage. She broke apart an egg biscuit for her. The animal squealed and rushed to the food. The grains flew around her. Using her claws, she sorted and brought to her lips the pieces she liked best. When the feast was over, she let herself be picked up and accompanied Pauline to the blue couch, where the child soon fell asleep.

         It was time to head to the clinic. The operation was scheduled for the next day. Such was the child’s fatigue that not for one instant could we ignore the stakes of this intervention. Changing hospitals was a deliverance. It was as if the past treatments were erased all at once. Pauline’s room had two beds. It was elegant and immaculate like a hotel room. One of us, most often Alice, could stay and sleep beside the child. We were not located in the pediatric surgery unit, situated two floors below in the high-rise and specializing in cardiac malformations of newborns. The eighth floor was for thoracic surgery, and the average age of the patients must have been in the vicinity of seventy. Pauline was the sole child. Quite naturally she elicited the affection of the nurses, little used to taking care of such young patients. We were glad to speak to new doctors. We harbored no negative feelings with regard to the doctors at the Institute who had been caring for our daughter for a year. We knew they had done everything to try to cure her. But we could not help feeling the skepticism, the discouragement that was taking hold of them. They saw Pauline slipping toward the abyss of death as they had seen so many other children before her, going away toward this absence. The abyss gave rise to impressions they had known many times over, which to us seemed a controlled panic, an effaced fear. Here a pulmonologist and a surgeon, in particular, took care of Pauline. They were probably a little older than I. We were happy to have these new interlocutors because for them the hope of saving the child had not disappeared. They had accepted a task they knew to be technically at the limit of the impossible but which they did not give up on. What was ending for the others was beginning for them. I think that, from the very first day, they took Pauline’s fate particularly to heart. The surgeon showed a moving solicitude at the child’s bedside, a strangely real humanity. Probably that was due to the fact that in this unit caring for children was exceptional. And the death of a child is in and of itself more distressing than the death of an adult, of an old man. Perhaps these men were themselves fathers of little girls, and it was difficult for them not to confuse their own anguish with ours. Perhaps there were still other more intimate reasons to which they alone had the key, in the secret of their lives. I also think (no doubt I am biased) that Pauline continued to express the charm of her sweetness on all who encountered her, in these last weeks. She was weak, exhausted; but she didn’t look like a little girl who was going to die. Pain did not work on her in an ordinary way. It did not tense her, did not make her withdraw. It opened her in the manner of a flower, suave and delicate. The illness had made her diaphanous but had erased nothing of her tender personality. She had not ceased smiling, ironic and mischievous, sensitive to any marks of affection, wishing to return to each one the love they offered her. The end of such a child seemed properly unthinkable.
         The day before the operation, the surgeon saw us for a longer time in his office, to discuss how things stood with us. It was impossible for him to say exactly what would happen. The information provided by the images was not precise enough. He would not be able to assess the exact feasibility of the intervention until the thorax was opened. In comparison to the child’s body, the lesion was extraordinarily voluminous. The mass of cancerous cells compressed the entire respiratory system. The tumor had started at the border of the right lung and had grown into the mediastinum. It extended to the trachea and surrounded part of the vena cava. Its margins touched a large number of vital organs. And they could not tell if it would be possible to proceed with a total ablation. Maybe the disaster inside was so great that they would have to give up on removing anything at all and immediately close up her chest. Maybe—and this was the most likely hypothesis—it would be possible to partially decompress the thorax, to remove a more or less significant part of the cancerous mass, while certain diseased regions would remain inaccessible. In that case, we would only be able to count on a brief respite, because the diseased cells would continue to grow from within their refuge and would once again, in a few weeks, threaten the entire respiratory system. Finally, there was one chance to take: the small probability that the entire tumor would be removed. In that case, counters could be reset at zero, as it were; everything would once again become possible, at least a durable respite until a hypothetical recurrence.
         We returned to Pauline’s room. I wanted to explain to her what awaited her. I didn’t want her to be ignorant. I wanted her to understand the reason for going to the operating room the following day. She knew what a “lump” was, but she didn’t really understand what a lung was. Among the toys she had brought with her were a few rubber balloons. I inflated one, I showed her how one can capture air inside the colored sphere. I told her a tube descends from the nose and mouth into our chests and leads to two balloons like this, called lungs. When you breathe in, they inflate. When you breathe out, they empty. Air is indispensable for life. Breathing is called “respiration.” The “lump” had lodged in one of these balloons and had grown so much that it was necessary, we hoped, to remove the entire lung to free her from the illness. Pauline listened without saying anything. When I was finished, she merely commented: “It’s not serious, Papa, I’ll breathe with the other lung!” She had understood perfectly, she knew exactly what I hoped to hear her say; she had guessed what I was getting at from the start. She had been way ahead of me for a long time.
         The departure for the operating room would be early in the morning. I kissed Pauline and Alice. I left them in the double room. I took the elevator. At the bottom of the high-rise, I breathed in the black air of the night for a long time. I saw the brightly-lit red and gold signs of the Chinese restaurants in the neighborhood. The streets were hemmed in by tall buildings where an irregular pattern of lighted windows shone. In front of the closed gate of the clinic, I smoked one or two cigars in a row. I didn’t want to go home. I wasn’t hungry. I just felt the missing warmth of whiskey in my stomach. I headed for the place where I had parked my car in the morning. The avenue was lit by projectors from the nearby stadium where the end of a soccer match was being fought. The car was not there. I then realized I had parked in a spot made illegal by the Vigipirate regulations. The temporary no parking sign had been sealed into the pavement twenty meters farther on. All day long I had fed coins into the meter for nothing. The car must have been impounded. I sat down on a bench and lit another cigar. I was ridiculous, breathing in my bad Havana smoke by an empty parking place. Up there in the tower, my wife was probably putting my daughter to bed, telling her a last story, kissing her, caressing her forehead while murmuring that everything would be fine tomorrow, that she didn’t need to worry about anything. I stayed like that for a long time. I no longer needed to make an effort to think about nothing. I was a watcher. I kept vigil at the foot of the high-rise, where the windows went out one by one. Finally I hailed a taxi. The driver explained that the private companies hired to tow illegally parked cars crisscrossed the area until evening. The immediate neighborhood of the clinic was one of their favorite hunting grounds. In the panic of hospitalization, many were the drivers who parked wherever they could. The taxi took me to the Bercy impound. I signed a check. I didn’t have the heart to protest, to explain the reason for my situation. The vehicle was stored with dozens of others. I went home taking the boulevards of the Maréchaux, gliding between the traffic signals and the lights, in a sleepy Paris on an indifferent March night. When the key turned in the lock, I heard high squeals coming from Wendy on the other side of the security door. I poured out a large ration of grains, I changed the water in which I dissolved half a capsule of effervescent vitamins. On the answering machine there were one or two recorded messages whose meaning I couldn’t make out. I erased them. I emptied the rest of the bottle of J & B into a glass, then went to bed. I fell asleep very quickly, and my sleep was vaguely agitated in spite of the pressure of the alcohol on my temples. I was awakened early. I didn’t want to telephone. I took the car right away to get to the clinic. I was barely moving, stuck in the morning traffic jams on the peripheral boulevards. I arrived at the moment when Pauline, lying on a white gurney, dressed in her cotton gown, was raising her hand to say goodbye to Alice. She was going down to the operating room but she wasn’t crying. She was saying see you later. And the gray doors of the elevator were closing.

(translated from the French by Armine Kotin Mortimer)