06 · What Remains

I was in the recreation room, open to patients for the afternoon rest, the cigarette, the conversation — and to us companions, waiting to take our sick ones home. Five men and one woman, all in wheelchairs, asked how old I was, what I did, what my vocation was, and finally what I thought of politics, religion, a few public figures. Their eyes were switched off, waiting only to see the light go out. And instead I, that light, lit again.

They asked me for a story — not a polite one, and I would not have told it anywhere else. But there, the permission to laugh at what life had taken from them was theirs to give. So I told them of a man in a wheelchair, without arms or legs, who answered a dating ad from a very rich, very particular woman — and who, asked if he was well endowed, answered: “Madam… and with what do you think I knocked at the door?”

The men burst out laughing. The woman among them stayed serious — and for her alone I had a flash of inspiration, offering her the candidate’s phone number. Her eyes lit up. I had won a smile. It was all that remained of that moment, and it was enough.

People believe that what remains is a medical file, an X-ray, a phone number scribbled in haste. They are wrong. When a person leaves a facility, they take away the people, the voices, the habits, the faces that marked the time of their life. Medicine stays in the archives. Memory takes another road.