Adèle’s great body is like that of the snake that morning. It wriggles somehow or other to release the driver, it extracts the young man somehow or other and lays him down on the asphalt with a kiss on his brow (years later people who were on the bus will remember that kiss), it returns to the car but the adult is trapped, his legs and the dashboard have become fused together. The man looks at Adèle. He has big blue eyes, as blue as the sky that morning. He looks at her as one looks at one’s child for the first time, as one looks at something infinitely beautiful and miraculous. He says, and his bleeding mouth gives him a voice full of bubbles, thank you, madame.
Blue eyes.
Thank you, madame.
Her husband had dark eyes. Her husband did not call her “madame.” Adèle hears the fire department sirens and begins to weep. This is not at all what she had expected.
At the hospital two hours later the police are out in the corridor and Adèle, lying on her bed, knows they are there for her. They have given her a drip feed in her arm, she is waiting for the results of the X-ray of her back. Several people have come to congratulate her, to talk to her about what she remembers only vaguely. She recognizes skirts, mouths, handbags, pants. People stay with her for a while, some kiss her and say see you on Monday. One young man (big black earphones, white tracksuit, nylon backpack) sits beside her bed in silence for half an hour. A nurse gives her news: twenty-three people were more or less lightly injured, the children were well strapped in and the brakes on their strollers were firmly locked in place: Adèle was the only person to be flung out of the bus, several people are being kept in the hospital under observation, the driver of the car is in the operating room but “he is in stable condition,” his son has recovered consciousness, he has nothing broken, he is hungry, he has asked to see Adèle. His mother and sister are with him. The nurse says it is a miracle.
Adèle repeats the word miracle several times in a soft voice until it no longer has any meaning. She feels helpless on this bed and can already picture what will happen to her, in five minutes, or an hour from now. Is this how it will all end? The police will come into her ward, they will question her, they will take her to the police station, and a day later, a week later, she will be deported. It will be simple, done smoothly, without bloodshed, and what can she say to avoid it? I’m sorry, I didn’t come here to stay, I didn’t come here to benefit from your handouts, I never intended to deceive you, I just wanted to disappear, that’s all, I had no desire to deceive you, I had no desire to break the law, I thought it would be easier to die here. How can you explain the crazy actions of a woman who shaved her head, sold everything she possessed, paid for a two-week trip to Europe (Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon, London, Geneva), and stepped off the plane at Roissy airport one Saturday morning and never flew any further?
Deported. Up until now, in the subterranean world she inhabits, this word has been hovering above her without really touching her, as if it did not concern her, she who had burned her papers in the washroom in a hotel at Tours, or maybe it was Poitiers, she no longer recalls. A heap of gray ashes swirling around in the pan.
Up until now Adèle had done all she could not to exist, or, at least, to exist only minimally. The notion had never occurred to her that one day she would be plucked out from the hazy anonymity in which she existed and sent home (but where was it, this home, now?). She had learned to live like someone with no papers and, in truth, she realizes now, in this hospital bed, attached to this drip feed, it is thanks to this that she has survived. She has found a world parallel to that of those who are alive, who laugh, who make noise, normal people, people with identities. A soundless world where the inhabitants speak in whispers, walk by in silence, where doctors ask you neither your name nor your address, where dozens of intermediaries are there to arrange things (a place to stay, a job, a husband, a wife). A world with no contracts or signatures, no bank accounts, no vacations, no mail, a world where you are paid discreetly, a world with no plans, no dreams, no pity, no one to turn to, no friends, where everything is in cash, where everything has its price and where everybody can disappear from one day to the next. A world made for her.
Could it be that, by some kind of irony, she clings to this life? Could it be that the woman called Adèle actually exists a little?
Two policemen come in. They greet her and examine the notice attached to the foot of the bed. They
