Read Happy Are the Happy for Free Online Page A

country to do an internship abroad. Everybody, including the Toscanos. The only person in on the secret is Bogdana. She persists in baking him Serbian cakes with walnuts and poppy seeds, even though he never touches them, for Jacob no longer likes what he used to like before. He remains normal physically, he doesn’t imitate a woman. His condition is something that goes much deeper than mere imitation. Lionel and I have wound up calling him Céline. In private, we sometimes even refer to him as “she.” Doctor Igor Lorrain, the psychiatric physician who’s treating our son in the clinic, tells us that Jacob’s never unhappy except when he watches the news. He’s obsessed by the arbitrary nature of his good fortune and privileged status. The nurses talk about taking away his television because he cries straight through all the evening news programs, even stories about a harvest wiped out by a hailstorm. And there’s also another aspect of his behavior that worries the psychiatrist. When Jacob goes down to the lobby of the clinic to sign autographs, he first wraps several scarves around his neck so he won’t catch cold. He has his world tour to think about, the doctor jokingly explains (I’m not crazy about that doctor). Jacob positions himself in front of the revolving door, convinced thatthe people who enter the hospital have traveled great distances just to see him. When we arrived yesterday afternoon, he was at his post. I could see him from the car before we turned into the parking lot. He was visible through the glass panels of the revolving door, bending down toward a child, looking absurdly friendly, and scribbling something in a little notebook. Lionel knows my silences well. After parking the car, he looked at the plane trees and asked, is he downstairs again? I nodded and we hugged each other, unable to speak. Doctor Lorrain tells us Jacob calls him Humberto. We’ve explained that he probably takes him for Humberto Gatica, his sound engineer – well, I mean Céline’s sound engineer. Which is logical enough, if you think about it, because both of them look like Steven Spielberg. In the same way, we’ve heard Jacob call the nurse from Martinique Oprah (as in Oprah Winfrey), whereupon she starts wriggling as though she feels flattered. Today was such a difficult day. First he said to us, using that pronunciation I’ll never be able to imitate, you don’t look very happy at the moment, Lionel and Pascaline. I have a lot of empathy for other people, and it upsets me to see you like this. Would you like me to sing something to cheer you up? We said no, he needed to rest his voice, he already had enough work to do with cutting his records, but he insisted all the same. He sat us down side by side, just the way he used to do when he was little, Lionel on a stool and me in the leatherette armchair. And then, standing in front of us and demonstrating a fine sense of rhythm, Jacob sang us a song called “Love Can Move Mountains.” When he was finished, we did what we used to do when he was a little boy: we burst into loud applause. Lionel put one arm around my shoulders to keepme from weakening. Evening came, and as we were walking down the corridor on our way out of the clinic, we heard people calling out to one another in Canadian French. Hey, David Foster, take a look at this! Has Humberto come down yet? Ask Barbra! That one should go on a two-year break, too! Then we heard them laughing, and we realized that the nursing staff was making fun of Céline and her entourage. Lionel couldn’t take it. He went into the room where the laughter was coming from and said in a solemn voice that sounded silly even to me, I’m Jacob Hutner’s father. There was a silence. Nobody knew what to say. And so I said, come on, Lionel, it doesn’t matter. And the nurses started mumbling apologies. I tugged at my husband’s sleeve. Disoriented, no longer sure where the elevator was, we went down some stairs that echoed under