Mend the Living (21 page)

T
he Margherita splats against the apartment wall and falls to the carpet, leaving the trace of a Neapolitan sunset above the television. The young woman appraises her throw with a satisfied eye and turns back to the pile of white boxes on the counter of the open kitchen, lifts the lid of a second perfectly quadrangular box, slides the burning disc of the Supreme onto her palm and turns to face the wall; elbow bent, hand held as a tray, she projects it between the room’s two windows with a quick extension of her arm: a new action painting, slices of pepperoni drawing a curious constellation on the wall. As she’s preparing to break open the third box – a blistering Four Cheese, banking on the yellowish melted mix being a reliable adhesive paste – a man steps out of the bathroom, glistening, and then – sensing a threat – stops short in the doorway; seeing the young woman wind up for a gesture of propulsion in his direction, he drops to the floor, pure reflex, then rolls from his belly onto his back to observe her from a low angle. She smiles, turns away, eyes scanning her canvas, and taking care to target a new spot, she throws the pizza against the front door. Finally she steps over the stunned young man and goes to wash her hands behind the counter. The guy gets up, checks to make sure there are no spots on his clothes, and then takes stock of the damages, turning slowly, a circular scope that brings him back to the woman stationed in front of the sink.

She’s drinking a glass of water. Her creamy white shoulders emerge from an undershirt with the green, white, and red of the Squadra Azzurra, the low-cut neckline hinting at small breasts, free and light; her incredibly long legs extend from a pair of loose blue satiny shorts, and a fine film of sweat pearls above her mouth: she’s beautiful as day, maxillaries pulsing beneath the skin of her jaw – fury – and doesn’t even look at him as she crosses and uncrosses her long arms of an ancient beauty, low to high, in order to take off her tank top, useless now, revealing a splendid bust composed of various circles – breasts, areolae, nipples, belly, navel, top of the two globes of her buttocks – formed of various triangles pointing toward the ground – isosceles of the sternum, convex of the pubis, and concave of the lower back – crossed by various lines – the dorsal median that emphasizes the division of the body into two identical halves, furrow reminiscent of the veining of the leaf and the butterfly’s axis of symmetry – all punctuated by a small diamond at the crest of the sternum – the dark hollow at the base of the throat – altogether a collection of perfect forms whose balanced proportion and ideal arrangement he admires, his professional eye valuing the anatomical exploration of the human body above all else, and of this one in particular, delighting in its auscultation, detecting with passion the least disharmony in the elaboration, the smallest flaw, the tiniest discrepancy, the twist of scoliosis above the lumbar vertebrae, this spore of a beauty mark under the armpit, these calluses between the toes at the place where the foot is compressed inside the point of the high-heeled shoe, and the light strabismus of the eyes, coquetry in one eye when she’s lacking sleep, and which gives her this distracted look, this air of a girl on the loose that he likes so much.

She pulls on a turtleneck, takes off her shorts to slide into a pair of skinny jeans, show’s over, it seems, then puts on high-heeled boots and heads for the door that drips with grease, opens and slams it behind her without a single look back at the young man standing in the middle of the sullied apartment, who watches her go, relieved.

You’ll be going to Le Havre hospital to harvest. It’s a heart, and it’s now. When he heard this phrase from Harfang’s mouth, uttered just as he’d been imagining for months, short and curt, Virgilio Breva nearly lost his voice, the combination of joy and disappointment forming a bitter lump in his throat. Sure, he was on call, and although he was excited by his mission, the news couldn’t have come at a worse time – rare conjunction of two events that were impossible to miss: a France–Italy match and a desirous Rose at home. And he wondered for a long time why Harfang had bothered to call him in person, suspecting a kind of twisted desire to mock him on a historic evening, because Harfang knew he was a soccer fan – Virgilio had long used Sunday-morning practices as a legitimate excuse to save himself from the bike excursions – torture, he would murmur, dumbfounded, seeing the swarm of polliwogs set off with their pointy helmets and multicoloured bike shorts, with Harfang at the centre, playing the queen.

Virgilio’s in the back of the taxi heading for the Pitié-Salpêtrière, he pulls his fur-lined hood down to his shoulders and gets a hold of himself. He’s all stirred up from the tension of the past hour when what he needs is to be in top form, be on top of his game as never before. Because tonight will be a big night, tonight will be
his
night. The quality of the transplant depends upon the quality of the retrieval, that’s the governing principle, and tonight he’s on the frontline.

It’s time to pull yourself together, he thinks, interlacing his fingers in their leather gloves, it’s time to call it off with this woman, this crazy broad, and to put self-preservation first, even if he has to deprive himself of her in order to do so, of her hyperactive body and the sparkle of her presence. He goes over the past hour with alarm, Rose surprising him at home when he had planned to go out and watch the game with friends, then demanding, sweet but vaguely threatening, that they stay home to watch it together and order pizza, already equipped with a playful point in her favour – this
azzurra
soccer-fan outfit; the erotic tension between them coiling gradually with that other tension, war-like and upper case, of the match to come, a madly alluring mix that seeped potential happiness, and Harfang’s call at the stroke of eight had pushed things to a fever pitch, the agitation going off the scale, penetrating the roof. He’d leapt to his feet immediately and answered I’m here, I’m ready, I’m on my way, avoiding Rose’s eyes but exaggerating a tragic look – eyebrows in circumflex accents and bottom lip pulled up over the top one, oval of the chin lengthened sadly – a look meant to convey disaster, bad luck, bad dice, a look meant for Rose, grimacing for her at this moment, hand fanning the air, guignolesque, a tragedian at the bazaar, while his eyes were radiating exultation – a heart! – she wasn’t fooled. He backed off to take a shower, get dressed again in something clean and warm, and when he came out of the bathroom, things were already spiralling out of control. A magnificent and exhausting show, one that, now that he revisits it in slow motion, now that he perceives the logical majesty of it, does nothing but increase Rose’s precellence, her incomparable splendour and her fiery temperament, the young woman releasing her fury in sovereign style and maintaining a royal mutism where so many others would have simply wailed. Splat! Splat! Splat! and the more he thinks about it, the more it becomes clear that breaking up with her would be folly, this beauty who is both highly inflammatory and entirely unique – he would never give her up, no matter what anyone said, those who took her for a madwoman, those who took her for “cray-cray” as they say, with a knowing glance, when really they would have given anything to touch that trapeze of warm skin at the back of her beautiful knee.

She had pushed open the door of the required class at the Pitié-Salpêtrière, beginning of term, the series of lectures in first-year medical school that took the form of directed studies in a particular subject: the study of clinical cases. During long sessions, real case studies from the hospital or invented, question-based scenarios were “re-enacted” for the students so they could practise their bedside manner, learn the movements of auscultation, train themselves to make a diagnosis, identify a pathology, and determine a treatment protocol. These practical sessions, structured around the patient-caregiver duo, took place in front of other students and sometimes required the presence of a larger group, in order to facilitate dialogue between different disciplines – the aim was to counteract a compartmentalization of medical specialties that cut up the human body into a series of hermetically sealed practices, leaving practitioners incapable of seeing the patient as a whole. But this new pedagogy – founded on simulation – aroused suspicion: the use of fiction in the process of acquiring scientific knowledge, the very idea of a re-enactment in the form of a game – they’d say you be the doctor, and you be the patient – was enough to make the faculty directors skeptical. And yet they consented, acknowledging that this model combined material of a great richness, including subjectivity and emotion, and gave students a chance to work on that fragile exchange, the patient-doctor dialogue (even if it was falsified and displaced), that they needed to hear and learn to decode. In this role play, it was decided that the students would take on the part of the doctors in order to exercise their future function, and so actors were hired to play the patients.

They showed up after the appearance of a small ad in a weekly magazine for theatre professionals. Most of them were out-of-work actors, beginners full of promise or eternal second fiddles in TV shows, surveyors of commercial spots, doubles, extras, silhouettes, running from casting to casting just to make enough to pay the rent – usually a roommate situation in a neighbourhood in the northeast of Paris, or in a nearby suburb – or changing gears to become coaches for training sessions in sales techniques – door-to-door or elsewhere – and sometimes they even ended up taking part in guinea pig panels where they rented out their bodies, tasters of yogurt, testers of moisturizing cream or anti-lice shampoo, experimenters of diuretic pills.

From the multitude that turned up, a handful were selected. Medical professors who were also practitioners formed a jury – some of them theatre lovers – and they took no pains to hide it. When Rose entered the audition room and walked past the benches wearing platform sneakers, burgundy Adidas leggings, and a metallic sweater in sunset colours, there was a stir – didn’t they recognize that body and that face from somewhere? They gave her a list of gestures to perform and words to say in order to become a patient who’d rushed to the gynecologist after discovering a suspicious lump in her left breast and, during the fifteen minutes that followed, her commitment to the role forced their admiration: she even stretched out topless on the floor of the room – tiles here, too – guiding the student’s hand, here, here, it hurts, yeah there; as the scene dragged on some discord ensued (and it’s true that the student did exaggerate the length of his palpation, going back and forth from one breast to the other, always starting over, indifferent to the words of the dialogue, deaf to the essential information she was still giving him – among other things, that the pain got worse at the end of her menstrual cycle), until she finally sat up, face flushed, and slapped him soundly. Bravo, mademoiselle! She was congratulated, and hired on the spot.

From the very first days, Rose secretly flaunted the terms of the contract, considering that this job she’d landed as a “patient” for the duration of the university year would be a kind of training for herself, a chance to up her game, to increase the power of her art. She disdained commonplace pathologies (those she believed to be such), and instead hogged all the madness, hysteria, and melancholia, registers she excelled at – romantic heroine or enigmatic pervert – sometimes taking unexpected bifurcations from the original scenario with a nerve that stunned the psychiatrists and neurologists directing the sessions, and created some confusion among the students (they finally asked her to tone it down just a little); she tried her hand at drowning victims, suicidal patients, bulimics, erotomaniacs, and diabetics, liked doing a limp, a deformation (a case of Breton coxalgia gave rise to an interesting dialogue about consanguinity in the North Finistère – hunchbacks – she was able to mimic the rotation of vertebrae in the rib cage) and anything that required her to distort her body; she had fun playing a pregnant woman with premature contractions, but was less brilliant as a young mother describing the symptoms of a three-month-old infant – stress pearled on the forehead of the pediatric apprentice; superstitious, she turned down cancers.

And yet, she was never better than that day in December when she had to simulate angina. The renowned cardiologist who directed the session had described the pain to her in these terms: a bear is sitting on your thorax. Rose had widened her almond eyes in awe, a bear? She had to round up childhood emotions, the huge evil-smelling cage with grossly hewn plastic rocks and the enormous animal, some five to seven hundred kilos, the triangular muzzle, close-set eyes making it seem short-sighted, rusty fur dusted with sand, and the shouts of the children when it stood up on its back paws, two metres tall at its full height; she thought again of Ceauşescu’s hunting scenes in the Carpathian Mountains – the bears rounded up by country folk, lured with buckets of food, emerging from the forest at the edge of the clearing where a wooden blind was mounted on stilts, moving forward right into the frame of the window behind which a Securitate agent was loading the gun and offering it to the dictator (once the bear was close enough that he couldn’t miss) – and, finally, she remembered a scene from
Grizzly Man
. Rose gathered momentum from the back of the room, walked toward the student who was her partner and then stopped – did she glimpse the animal, then, at the edge of some undergrowth, passing its head between two stalks of bamboo or swaying its hips on all fours, nonchalant, licorice coat, lazily scratching a stump with its non-retractable claws before turning in her direction and standing up straight like a human? Did she see the cave-dwelling monster emerging from months of hibernation, stretching, warming up the fluids that had stopped inside its body, reactivating the drop of blood in its heart? Did she glimpse it rummaging through supermarket waste bins at twilight, growling with joy beneath an enormous moon? Or was she thinking of a different weight entirely – a man? Abruptly, she fell over backwards – the sound of her body falling caused a stir in the room – and in a convulsive tension, let out a shriek of pain that quickly became a silent gasp, and then she stopped breathing. Her rib cage seemed to flatten and hollow like a basin as her face swelled, slowly turning red, lips pressed tight together and going white, eyes rolling back in her head, while her limbs began to fibrillate as though shot through with an electric current. Such realism was rare, and some people stood up to get a better look, alarmed by the crimson face and the concave abdomen; a figure rushed down the stairs of the lecture hall to Rose’s side, knocking over the student who’d begun to drone, imperturbable, through the first lines of his questionnaire, and leaned over to revive her while the eminent cardiologist dashed over in turn, aiming a pen-flashlight at her pupils. Rose frowned an eyebrow, opened one eye, then the other, and sat up energetically, peered at the crowd around her, and for the first time felt the pleasure of being applauded – she bowed flat-backed before the students in the bleachers, her first standing ovation.