After everyone had ordered, the waiter turned to Jacques: “The usual?”
The usuaclass="underline" oysters for an appetizer. He explained how they must be served alive; seeing how the majority of his guests were foreigners, they were horrified. His plan was to order snails next—the famous escargots. He’d end by asking for a plate of frog legs.
No one dared join him, and that was how he preferred it. It was part of the marketing.
All the appetizers were served at the same time. The oysters arrived, and everyone else sat waiting to see what would happen next. He squeezed a bit of lemon over the first, which moved a bit, to the surprise and horror of his guests. He popped it in his mouth and allowed it to slide down into his stomach, savoring the salt water that always remained in the shell.
Then, two seconds later, he could no longer breathe. He tried to maintain his pose, but it was impossible—he dropped to the floor, certain he was about to die, looking at the ceiling and its crystal chandeliers, possibly brought from Czechoslovakia.
His vision began to change; now he could see only black and red. He tried to sit—he’d already eaten dozens, hundreds of oysters in his life—but he no longer had any control over his own body. He tried to pull air into his lungs, but it refused to enter.
There was a quick moment of anxiety, and then Jacques died.
Suddenly, he was hovering near the restaurant ceiling looking down on a crowd that had gathered around his body. Others tried to make room for help to arrive, as the Moroccan waiter ran toward the kitchen. His vision wasn’t exactly sharp and clear; it was as though there was a transparent veil or some sort of water running between him and the scene below. Fear, and everything else, had ceased to exist—an immense peace washed over everything, and time, because time still existed, sped up. The people down below seemed to move in slow motion, in other words, in photograms. The Moroccan waiter returned from the kitchen, and the images disappeared—the only thing left was complete, white emptiness, and a peacefulness that was almost palpable. Contrary to what many said on occasions like that, he saw no dark tunnel; he felt a loving energy all around him, something he hadn’t experienced in a long time. He was a baby in his mother’s womb, nothing more—he never wanted to leave there again.
Suddenly he felt a hand grabbing him and pulling him down. He didn’t want to go; he was finally enjoying what he’d fought and waited for his entire life—peace, love, music, love, peace. But the hand was tugging him with incredible force and he was unable to fight against it.
The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the restaurant owner’s face, somewhere between worried and overjoyed. His heart was racing, he felt nauseous, like he was about to vomit, but he controlled himself. He’d broken out in a cold sweat, and one of the waiters brought a tablecloth to cover him.
“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,” they 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.