StoryIn a text written for “Le Monde”, the winner of the 2019 Renaudot Prize goes behind the scenes of the great Parisian hospital where a whole “army of shadows”, made up of employees and volunteers, is activated, to which he pays homage.
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“You are not an essential cog. “ On the first day of confinement, Bertrand Pivert, chief gardener of Pitié-Salpêtrière, was told that he could store his rakes in the greenhouse, north of the hospital grounds, along the path of iron from Austerlitz station. It’s mid-March, the plague wins, the whole world folds, France doesn’t need peonies. Just a few of the ten gardeners on the team are required to participate in the immense upheaval of Pity.
The sick flock, the first dead fall. The Covid is harvesting. Within hours, medical units destined for other treatments were transformed into “Covid zones”. Arms are needed to rearrange the premises because the Director General of Health, Jérôme Salomon, set the strategy“Opening beds wherever we can”.
“I inject color into the white plane,” says Pivert, who likes orange flowers “
A month later, the wave falls again and the gardeners, in small teams, start again to flower the 8 hectares of the Pitié gardens. “I inject color into the white plane”says Pivert, who likes orange flowers. A radiologist is available to provide nurse-resuscitation support. When she comes out of her dive in the middle of “Covidland” exhausted, she watches the tulips swinging in the dawn, planted along the alleys of the Parc de la Valeur. Pivert is surprised: “At La Pitié, strangely, no one suspects that there are gardeners. “
Flowers drink the sun. The gardeners remain in the shade. La Pitié-Salpêtrière, a city inside the capital, with its streets, its underground passages and its secrets kept by an enclosure, is like all organizations: it is made up of invisible parts. It’s the drama of the watch’s cogwheels. They turn by the thousands. Only the hands show the time. Who knows the organs of his own body?
The white waltz of hierarchies
At La Pitié (1,500 beds in normal times), the 10,000 employees of the Public Assistance-Hospitals of Paris (AP-HP) work in unexpected occupations. All were required to “arm Covid beds”. Not everyone is able to intubate a dying person. But all see themselves as a “link in the care chain”. The electrician, the laundry, the administrative officer, the switchboard operator, the biomedical equipment technician, the security guard, the radiological manipulator … form a troop whose disparate and compartmentalized elements rubbed shoulders without knowing each other. The virus has had the merit of blowing up the partitions.
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