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“Where was it you found this lovely pale tone and beautiful blue lipstick?” the owner asked him.
His guests, sitting around him on the floor, also appeared relieved and terrified. He tried standing up, but the owner stopped him.
“Rest. This isn’t the first time this has happened here and it won’t be the last, I imagine. That’s why we, along with most restaurants, are required to have a first-aid kit, with bandages, disinfectant, a defibrillator in case of heart attack, and, luckily, the adrenaline injection we’ve just given you. Do you have the phone number of some relative? We’re calling an ambulance, but you’re entirely out of danger. They’re going to ask the same thing, but if there’s no one, I imagine one of your companions here can go with you.”
“The oyster?” were his first words.
“Of course not—our products are of the highest quality. But we don’t know what they eat—and, by the looks of things, this little friend of ours, rather than create a pearl, took advantage of your illness and decided to try to kill you.”
What was it then?
At that moment, the ambulance pulled up. The paramedics tried placing him on a stretcher, but he said he was all right. He needed to believe this and got up with a bit of effort, but the paramedics laid him out again, this time on the stretcher. He decided not to argue or say anything at all. They asked for a phone number for next of kin. He gave his daughter’s, and that was a good sign; he was able to think clearly.
The paramedics took his blood pressure, ordered him to follow a certain light with his eyes, to put his finger on the tip of his nose. Every order obeyed, he was itching to get out of there. He didn’t need any hospital, even if he did pay a fortune in taxes to have a health service that was excellent and free.
“It’s likely we’re going to keep you overnight for observation,” th
ey told him as they walked toward the ambulance at the door, where people peered in from the street, always happy to see someone in worse shape than they were. There was no limit to human morbidity.
On their way to the hospital, the siren turned off (a good sign), he asked whether it had been the oyster. The paramedic at his side confirmed what the owner had told him. No. Had it been the oyster, it would have taken longer, even hours.
So what was it?
“An allergy.”
He asked them to explain in more detail—the restaurant owner had said that it must have been something the oyster ate, and, again, they confirmed this. No one knew how or when such a reaction would occur—but they knew how to treat it. The technical name for it was “anaphylactic shock.” Without trying to frighten him, one of the paramedics told him that allergies can appear without any warning. “For example, you might have eaten pomegranates since you were a kid, but one day one might kill you in minutes for reasons we can’t explain. For example, a person spends years caring for his garden, the herbs are the same, the pollen hasn’t changed, until one day he begins coughing, feels a pain in his throat, then in his neck, thinks he’s catching cold and ought to go inside, but suddenly he can no longer walk. But it isn’t a sore throat, it’s the trachea closing up. Troppo tardi. And this happens with things we’ve come in contact with our entire lives.
“Insects may be more dangerous, but even so we’re not going to spend our entire lives afraid of bees, am I right?
“Don’t be afraid. Most allergies aren’t serious and don’t select their victims by age. What’s serious is anaphylactic shock, like you had—the rest mean a runny nose, red bumps on the skin, itching, that sort of thing.”
* * *
—
They made it to the hospital, where his daughter was waiting. She already knew her father had suffered an acute allergic reaction, that it could have been fatal had help not arrived in time, but that such cases were incredibly rare. They went to a private room—Marie had already given the hospital their insurance number, so it wasn’t necessary to go into one of the common rooms.
He changed clothes—in her haste, Marie had forgotten to bring his pajamas, so he wore a gown provided by the hospital. The doctor came in, took his pulse—it was back to normal; his blood pressure was still a little high, but he blamed this on the stress he’d felt in the last twenty minutes. The doctor asked Marie not to stay too long, told her the next day her father would be home.
She pulled a chair up next to the bed, took her father’s hands, and suddenly Jacques began to cry. At first, they were only silent tears, but they soon transformed into hiccups, which increased in intensity, and he knew that he had needed that release, so much so that he made no effort to control himself. The tears flowed, and his daughter simply patted his hands affectionately, half-relieved, half-scared. It was the first time she’d seen her father cry.
He wasn’t sure how long the moment lasted. He slowly became calmer and calmer, as though a weight had been taken from his shoulders, his chest, his head, his life. Marie thought it was time to let him sleep and began to remove her hand, but he held it there.
“Don’t leave. I need to tell you something.”
She laid her head on her father’s lap, like she’d done when she was a child listening to his stories. He ran his fingers through her hair.
“You know that you’re fine and can go back to work tomorrow, don’t you?”
Yes. He knew. And the next day he would go to work—not to the building where he had his office but to the headquarters. The current director had come up through the company together with Jacques and had sent a message saying he’d like to see him.
“I want to tell you something: I was dead for a few seconds, or minutes, or an eternity—I don’t have a sense of the time because things happened so slowly. And suddenly I saw myself surrounded by a loving energy I’d never felt before. It was as though I were in the presence…”
His voice began to tremble, like that of someone holding back tears. But he continued.
“…as though I were in the presence of God. Something that, as you know, I’ve never believed in. I only decided to send you to Catholic school because it was close to our house, and the education, excellent. I was required to participate in religious ceremonies, which bored me to death, filled your mother with pride, and made your classmates and their parents see me as one of them. But the truth is it was merely a sacrifice I made for your sake.”
He continued stroking his daughter’s head—it had never occurred to him to ask whether she believed in God or not, because the moment wasn’t right. As far as he could tell, she no longer followed the strict form of Catholicism she’d been raised in; she was always wearing exotic clothing and hanging out with friends with long hair, listening to music much different from Dalida or Edith Piaf.
