Is the COVID-19 pandemic still too fresh in our memories for us to want to immerse ourselves in it through fiction? On the contrary, with her first novel, Clara Grande demonstrates its relevance.
With her patient and attentive pen, the writer manages to capture the particularity and all the nuances of a suspended time surrounded by the unknown and unnatural rules, giving back to this health tragedy the hint of humanity necessary to get us out of the situation. torpor of denial.
In 2020, during the first wave of confinement, Clara lost her job as a waitress and decided to work as a service assistant in a CHSLD in Rosemont. Behind closed doors, she will relearn and tirelessly repeat the gestures of care, becoming for her patients haunted by an invisible threat one of the only sources of warmth, hope, and dignity.
Day after day, summoned by a succession of ringing bells and despair, she empties the basins, feeds and washes the bodies, cleans the mess, the excrement, the wounds, offers an ear, a caress, replaces a pillow with patience mechanism in which compassion will never dry up. “I wonder at what moment patients have the strength to let their modesty go,” she writes. Through routine, she observes, learns to compose and celebrate the beauty in what we desperately seek to hide; muddled minds, decay of bodies, solitude, monotony, death.
Through the story of a daily life that repeats itself tirelessly, Clara Grande cultivates the memory of forgotten gestures that we today refuse in old age. It thus reminds us that the cult dedicated to productivity is exercised to the detriment of the creation of links, well-being, encounters, precious observations, love, which only the slowing down of the frantic race of time allows.
The first-time novelist also testifies to the fatigue that accompanies dedication, often hampered by a lack of resources and recognition. “I like to open containers that are too well sealed for them, undo the skin of a cheese when the hooked fingers stop trembling, cream dry skin until the heat penetrates the epidermis which has become transparent , read the instructions for a denture glue for those whose eyes can no longer spot details. I like bruises, veins, wrinkles, bends and scars to tell me about the past. But my days are wearing me out of steam. I share my energy until my good mood cracks and my bones beg to be infused with sweetness. »
No great drama, therefore – except that of life – in this sensitive and delicate story, which extracts normality from oblivion and invisibility, and pays homage to those who held the world on their shoulders for so long, too long, and to those who, daily, recognize its value.