The judge, strangely calm, leafed through his file. Evening fell. He adjourned the trial.
I knew the instant I saw you running down that track that we would have a future together.
The stadium that drew so many athletes of all different levels was also, thanks to its proximity to the high school, the place where everyone would gather after classes ended for the day. A few school friends and I used to sit on the bleachers and watch the athletes in motion as we chatted and smoked, like we were watching the sea from up on a cliff. Sometimes we’d even share a lukewarm beer that we drank straight from the bottle, passing it from person to person.
That day, you’d been training for over an hour and I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off you. It was the first time I’d ever seen you. Your sport, pole-vaulting, was pretty rare around here, and it fascinated me. Each time you launched yourself down the track, it seemed as if you were running for your life, as if it was your last jump. After every attempt, you would turn toward your coach. He talked, you listened. Hanging on to his every word, you would silently agree with a simple nod or quick slide of your hand through your hair. There was a fierce determination about you, an unwavering obstinacy that captivated me on the spot. It was as though nothing could distract you from your objective. Everything in you, body and mind, seemed to be focused on a single goal: jump as high as possible.
When I asked my friends if any of them knew you, they all told me no. I later learned that you had just moved to the area with your parents and that both they and your coaches expected a lot from you, and that given your remarkable talent, it was unimaginable that you wouldn’t become a champion. A destiny for which your parents were willing to sacrifice their money and your coaches their time. After winning the local championship, you took first place at regionals; your exceptional scores were leading you straight to qualifying for France’s national team.
Every evening, I would look out for a glance, a small sign, but nothing. To my great despair, you stayed focused, gripping your pole as if it was an extension of you. No doubt nothing would have happened between us if I hadn’t benefited from a little nudge from my crew, who, neither stupid nor blind, had clearly noticed that my presence at our stadium meetups wasn’t solely motivated by my friendship with them but also, and especially, by how happy it made me to watch you. Of course, at first, I denied any attraction, but my unvarying objections ultimately worked against me. My friends’ reaction was amused incredulity; I was forced to admit that yes, oh, yeah, I liked you a lot.
One night, you walked into the pizza place where we were all gathered and joined our group. To my great surprise, everyone seemed to know you. They had you sit across from me, in the middle of the table, so that everyone could watch us. I couldn’t bring myself to look in your direction even once. The evening had been arranged with the sole goal of connecting us, and everything that was said, all the questions asked of you, were meant to give me information. Despite their good intentions, my friends had placed me in a terribly awkward situation. But you played along, not without a hint of mischief. Despite my discomfort, I didn’t miss a word you said. No point in adding that nothing happened that evening, and that the next day, after biting my nails all night long, I called my friends one by one to tell them how much I hated them. I was convinced that their interference had ruined everything and, most important, that I would never recover from the embarrassment.
That very afternoon I received a message on my cellphone in which you invited me to the movies the following weekend. One year later, you asked me to marry you, and of course I said yes.
Your parents didn’t look too favorably on our relationship, convinced that I was distracting you from your bright future. As a young man, your father had also attracted attention for his athletic talents, in soccer, but sadly never got a chance to play professionally because of his increasingly lackluster performance on the field. That outcome hadn’t been easy for him to accept, but the second he met your mother, he turned the page without bitterness, immersing himself in a mechanical studies program and becoming an excellent mechanic. His life as a great athlete seemed like a distant dream, and nothing since had ever made him think back to that time. A first child was born; a second followed; then you arrived, the youngest of an all-male trio. Unlike your brothers, during your school years you demonstrated rare athletic abilities to which your parents were quickly alerted.
Boosted by this new opportunity that life was offering him through you, your father felt the rekindling of an inner fire that he had thought long extinguished. Miraculously reinvigorated, he decided that you wouldn’t miss out on something he hadn’t been able to see through himself. To that end, he would commit his will, his time, and his money. That’s why when I showed up it was quickly made clear to me through constant hints that it would be criminal to divert you from your goals. I was forced to carry the weight of your failure before you had even failed. The unfairness with which I was treated was doubly painful since you never objected in the slightest to the unspoken threats your parents allowed to linger in the air between one silence and the next.
Whenever we found ourselves alone again and I’d ask you why you hadn’t said anything, you would invariably respond that I shouldn’t take your parents seriously, that you couldn’t care less what they thought, and that it was pointless to start a fight over nothing. The nothing that you wielded every time I expressed my bafflement wounded me; it was a frightening forewarning that my interloper presence would change absolutely nothing about the life you had led with your parents up till then and that whatever might happen, you would be on their side unconditionally. I even found myself wondering whether your parents’ disapproval of me actually suited you. Over time, I started to doubt your sincerity, too, and your love. But in spite of my grim prognosis, you asked me to marry you. Seeing my astonishment, you burst into such honest, transparent laughter that it instantly swept away all my uncertainty.
When our plans to wed were announced, your parents were silent and stern. As usual, you shrugged and said you didn’t care what they might think. That time, unlike in the past when those hurtful words had caused me such pain, I felt pride in hearing you say them in my favor.
It was April; we were meant to marry in October. You said that you loved me; that’s what you would whisper to me at night, after making love. I love you so so much, you would say. I’d respond, Me, too, head buried in your armpit, in the musky smell of your soft hairs that tickled my nostrils.
One day, during a practice jump, your pole bent due to a technical error—your shoulders were too far back—and pitched you violently across the track. You fell from the height it had propelled you to, which is to say nearly four yards in the air.
Even before the bones in your pelvis shattered from the force of the impact, you knew that it was over and your dreams of glory were destroyed for good.
The surgeon who saw us at the hospital explained that the state of your pelvis was like that of a broken vase and that your femur was fractured, too, and as a result, they would have to insert an artificial one with pins. Crazed with rage and pain, your father kept muttering, seemingly to himself, What the hell happened? What the hell happened with that goddamn pole?!
But you knew that these accidents occurred, that a simple miscalculation could cause what you pole-vaulters called a throwback. It was one of the worst possible scenarios, and unfortunately you hadn’t been spared.
Hands over her mouth, your mother choked back sobs. She cast me a beseeching look, as though I held the power to go back in time and erase the absurdities that the old surgeon was reeling off. I approached her and, without thinking, took her in my arms.
Like a child waiting for nothing more than a warm hug to give into her pain, she violently burst into tears. I couldn’t tell if the cause of her pain was the tragic accident that had befallen you or the fierce animosity she’d always shown me and now regretted.
Your fat
her was watching from a distance, somewhat taken aback by his wife’s reaction. But from deep within his tremendous grief, he looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time. And miraculously, he smiled.
After eight months of hospitalization and eight months of intensive rehabilitation, you walked again. Before that, you had to endure numerous complications related to the severity of your fractures. Your bladder, damaged in the fall, had to be stitched up on two occasions, and a paralysis of your sciatic nerve led to a permanent limp. You became mute and taciturn. At the hospital, all that interested you was the television screen you stared at from morning till night and, judging from the deepening circles under your eyes, well into the early hours. The only thing you refused to watch was sports. If you accidentally landed on anything related, you would immediately change the channel and the melancholy clouding your gaze abruptly transformed into silent fury. You never watched a single track-and-field competition again. For many months, you lost interest in sports entirely.
You ate very little. You would snack on the salted nuts that I bought at the hospital minimart, at your request. Convinced that your lack of appetite was related to the disgusting food being served to you, your mother would bring you home-cooked meals in still-warm Tupperware. You didn’t touch them. You would thank her with a frozen smile, then tiredly push away everything she presented. Your mother would beg softly, patting your arm, Try it, sweetheart. Come on, baby boy. She’d begun using certain words for the first time since you were a child: sweetheart, baby boy, darling. But this just annoyed you, sending you into a dull rage.
Your father would stay standing in a corner of the room, completely still, staring at you with a worried look. You weren’t eating, but he was the one wasting away, as if through symbiotic attachment, he had chosen to spare you one more misfortune by shrinking in your stead. You never talked about what you were going through; you acted as if nothing affected you. But if any mention was made of the old days, you’d stiffen and with a few biting sentences firmly let us know that you had zero interest in your former life.
On top of your depression, your body was prone to inexplicable drops in temperature. You were cold constantly. In your hands, your feet, everywhere. And long after you were discharged, at the height of summer, you continued to shiver. You didn’t understand what was happening to you and attributed the strange phenomenon to the lack of exercise. I thought that you were stuck in some kind of traumatic winter.
When you left the hospital, we moved into a small furnished apartment that belonged to my parents. They had always rented it out, but since they’d paid off the mortgage some time before, they had no objections to us moving in until, as they put it, we could stand on our own two feet. I found the expression a little insensitive when directed at someone who could barely stand. But I comforted myself by thinking that, given your distractedness since the accident, you hadn’t noticed.
Despite your sadness, which left a permanent look of pain on your face, you gradually began to feed yourself again. You didn’t know how you were meant to imagine your future yet—you hadn’t even thought about it, actually. In any case, I expected nothing from you. I was only concerned with the improvement of your overall condition and supporting you as best I could.
That fall, I began a nursing program, something we’d discussed often before your accident; you’d seemed proud to be marrying a nurse. For as long as I can remember, I had always hoped to become one, like my mother. Her whole life, she had dedicated herself to the patients she used to call my poor hurt dearies with a gentle smile. She was deeply, movingly, attached to them; when one of them died, she took the loss as a personal failure.
When I’d come home at night, we would talk about any number of things, but I never asked you how you had spent your day. I knew that you’d done nothing and that your mind was filled with sorrow and memories. One night, you told me we deserved better.
Better than what? I asked.
You clumsily swept one arm around the apartment, then dropped it to your injured hip. You were crying noiselessly.
Your father had a hard time moving past the accident. In his mind, it was all a terrible curse. How was it possible for history to repeat itself? First him, then you. Two lives devastated, two destinies crushed, some fucking life!
Your mother spent her time reasoning with him, He’s alive, that’s what matters!
But nothing worked. Your father railed, he cursed God. That son of a bitch ruined my son’s life!
He wasn’t religious, never had been, but as strange as it might sound, your terrible fall had awakened his awareness of a divine presence. To him—and this was new—human will was subject to God’s wickedness. Your tragic fate offered undeniable proof of the underhanded doings of a fucking God about whom he had never concerned himself before then. Someone had to be blamed.
His anger, which was merely the manifestation of his immense pain, upset you. At first, you acted like you always did: You didn’t pay it any attention, convinced that his rage would subside in time. But though we expected otherwise, time only intensified his feelings. The exasperated powerlessness he expressed every time he saw you fueled your sense of inconsolable loss—of the person you had been and who you would never be again.
One night, a conversation degenerated into a fight. In exasperation, you told him that you couldn’t stand his fatalistic attitude anymore, and that his anger, for all that it was legitimate, wasn’t helping you move forward. You added that you were sick of his complaining and that you didn’t understand why the situation affected him that much since, after all, he wasn’t the one whose hip had shattered into little pieces or who was suffering from unbearable pain on a daily basis.
Your father looked at you as if he was seeing you for the first time or as if he was waking up from a long coma. He didn’t object to any of your many reproaches; in fact, just the opposite—he seemed to welcome them as electrifying revelations.
Your mother was trembling on a little stool in the weak light of a lamp.
Your father didn’t say a word and with a shaky head motion invited his wife to follow him. We didn’t see them for nearly three months. Your mother continued to call you when your father was out, to inform us of the radical change your last confrontation had brought about. He didn’t talk about it at all anymore: Not a word about your accident! You felt the distance was necessary, convinced that you and he would reconcile one day when things had gone back to how they should be.
The estrangement proved beneficial. You began to look ahead again and consider a career change. But you had never pictured your life without sports, which made reframing your future more complicated than you had imagined. We would talk about it for entire evenings, and though you brought up various options, it was near impossible for you to picture anything other than athletics—that thing you had been intrinsically made for.
In the end, the solution came from elsewhere. You had stayed in close touch with your coach, who would stop by often to check on your health.
One day he told you that the regional handball team had lost its coach and they were looking to recruit a new one. At first, you dismissed the information with a sad laugh. I’ve never touched a single handball, and anyway, sports are dead to me. I’m over it.
The coach made a strategic retreat, knowing perfectly well that he would wear you down; then, after a few days had gone by, he tried again. He came equipped with a rock-solid argument to counter every single one of your doubts, fiercely determined to convince you and overcome your legendary stubbornness.
But, you said, how do you expect me to teach handball? I don’t know the rules!
You don’t need to have gone to Saint-Cyr, responded the coach. I’ll teach you. All in all, there’s only a dozen rules!
Plus I know nothing about coaching!
Same, I’ll teach you.
But I’m still limping. It’s hard for me to stand for m
ore than an hour.
That’ll pass with time, and anyway, you can train a team with your ass in a chair. And just so you don’t waste any more breath, let me add that I’ll come pick you up on nights when there’s practice, until you can get behind the wheel again.
He had an answer for everything.
You really think I could? you asked me that night, under the covers.
I answered, Yeah, why not, trying not to betray my worry. Ideally, I think I’d have rather you did something else. I was afraid that returning to the pursuit that had always given meaning to your life would foster eternal regrets and, worse, reawaken your immense grief for what you’d lost. How could you forget what you might have become if you were reminded of it every day?
You eventually gave in, and, against all odds, I witnessed an incredible rebirth. It was like the job had been created for you. You applied yourself with the fanatical determination I knew so well and that I had feared I would never see return. The melancholy that had clung to you until then disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.
And as if one good thing wasn’t enough, one day your father rang our doorbell. He fell into your arms before even crossing the threshold and cried for a long time. From the way you were holding him, one would have thought that you had become the father and he the child. I didn’t dare disturb you at first; then, sensing the embrace loosening, I invited your father inside for coffee. In the kitchen, we drank our coffee without saying a word. We were like shipwreck survivors after a storm. Your father kept smiling, his eyes fixed on you. You were stirring your coffee with one hand and rubbing my arm with the other. We could hear the rain falling through the slightly open window and the whirring of the refrigerator. The smell of wet grass emanated from the ground. We felt enveloped by euphoria; it was as if everything had been designed to honor this fresh start. When you told your father that you had been offered a coaching position and that you had accepted it, his eyes lit up and new tears fell onto his cheeks. Between two convulsions, he managed to say, When I tell your mother . . .
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