Mend the Living (24 page)

Once the crate is sealed, Virgilio says goodbyes all round, but none of those who encircle Simon Limbeau’s body lift their heads, no one bats an eye, except the thoracic surgeon leaning over the lungs who answers in a loud voice you didn’t leave me much leeway, eh, asshole, letting out a staccato laugh while the champion from Strasbourg prepares to uncover the fragile liver, concentrating like the gymnast before she mounts the beam – for a moment there you expected her to plunge her hands into a bowl of magnesium carbonate and rub her palms together – and while the urologists wait to claim the kidneys.

Alice lingers. She focuses on the scene, looks one by one at each of those who are gathered around the table and the inanimate body that is the stunning centre – Rembrandt’s
The Anatomy Lesson
flashes before her eyes and she remembers that her father, an oncologist with long and twisted nails like talons, had hung a reproduction in the front hall often exclaiming as he tapped it with his index finger: there,
that
is the human being! but she was a dreamy child and preferred to see a council of witches rather than the doctors who made up her parentage; she would stand still for long moments before the strange characters beautifully spread out around the cadaver, their clothes of a deep black, the immaculate ruffs on which their learnèd heads rested, the luxury of folds as precious as wafer origami, the lace trimmings and the delicate goatees, in the middle of which there was this pallid body, this mask of mystery, and the slit in the arm through which you can see the bones and ligaments, the flesh into which the blade of the man in the black hat plunges, and more than admiring it, she
listened
to the painting, fascinated by the exchange there, and eventually she learned that piercing the peritoneal wall was considered for a long time to be a violation of the sacredness of the body of man, this creature of God, and understood that every form of knowledge contains its aspect of transgression she decided then to “do medicine,” if it can even be said that she had a choice, because after all she was the eldest of four girls, the one her father brought with him to the hospital every Wednesday, the one to whom, on the day of her thirteenth birthday, he gave a professional stethoscope, whispering in her ear: the Harfangs are idiots, little Harfanguette, you’ll fuck them all over, all of them.

Alice backs away slowly, and all that she sees becomes fixed and illuminated, like a diorama. Suddenly it’s no longer an absolute matter that she perceives on the table where the body lies outstretched, a matter that can be used and that is shared out; it’s no longer a stopped mechanism that they dissect in order to keep the best parts. It becomes instead a substance of an incredible potentiality: a human body, its power and its end, its human end – and it’s this emotion, more than any fountain of blood poured out into a plastic bin, that can finally make her look away. Virgilio’s voice is already far off behind her, you coming? What are you doing? Come on! She turns and runs to catch up to him in the corridor.

A specialized vehicle drives them back to the airport. They streak along the surface of the earth, and their eyes accompany the movement of the numbers on the dashboard clock, follow the dancing bars of light that lie down and stand up again, come and go in place of needles on their watches, show up as pixelated shapes on their telephone screens. Then a call, Virgilio’s cell lights up. It’s Harfang. How is it?

– It’s awesome.

They skirt the city to the north and take the road for Fontaine- la-Mallet, passing forms both compact and imprecise, border neighbourhoods, ghettos planted in the fields behind the city, swarms of suburban houses divided into plots around a ring of pavement, crossing through a forest, still no stars, no flash of an airplane or a flying saucer, nothing, the driver blasts along the service road well above the speed limit, he’s an experienced driver, used to this type of mission, he looks straight ahead, forearms still and tense, and murmurs into a tiny microphone linked to the latest earpiece, I’m on my way, don’t fall asleep, I’m coming. The crate is wedged into the back and Alice visualizes the different hermetic cases that encapsulate the heart, these membranes that protect it; she imagines that it is the motor propelling them through space, like the reactor of a rocket. She turns and lifts one hip to peer over the seat back, despite the dark makes out the sticker on the side of the crate, and deciphers, among the information necessary for the traceability of the organ, a peculiar note: Element or Product of the Human Body for Therapeutic Use. And just below, the donor’s Cristal number.

Virgilio leans his head back against the seat, exhales, his eyes drift over Alice’s profile, shadow puppet against the window, he’s suddenly unsettled by her presence, softens: you okay? The question is unexpected – a guy who’s been so unpleasant up until now – the radio propagates Macy Gray’s voice singing
shake your booty boys and girls, there is beauty in the world
in a loop, and Alice suddenly wants to cry – an emotion that seizes her from inside, lifts and sways her back and forth – but she holds back her tears and grits her teeth as she turns her head: yeah, yeah, I’m great. He pulls his phone out of his pocket then for the umpteenth time, but instead of checking the time, drums on the buttons, growing increasingly aggravated, it’s not loading, he mutters, damn, damn. Alice, emboldened, asks him, something wrong? Virgilio doesn’t lift his head to answer her, it’s the game, I wanted the score for the game, and without turning his head the driver says coldly it’s Italy, 1–0. Virgilio lets out a whoop, makes a fist that he lifts inside the car, then immediately asks: who scored? The guy puts his indicator on and brakes, a bright intersection lays out a whitish gap before them: Pirlo. Bemused, Alice watches Virgilio rapidly composing one or two victory texts as he murmurs, that’s great, then he lifts an eyebrow in her direction, fantastic player that Pirlo! his smile overwhelms his face, and here already is the airport, the roar of the sea right there at the bottom of the cliff, and the crate they roll along the tarmac to the steps and hoist into the cabin, this matryoshka crate that holds the transparent plastic security bag that holds the container that holds the special jar that holds Simon Limbeau’s heart – that holds nothing less than life itself – the potential for life, and that, five minutes later, flies off into the air.

M
arianne doesn’t sleep, as you might suspect, doesn’t close her eyes or doze for even a second – pain smashes her open and she sinks into an altered state, that’s where she can withstand. At 23:50 all of a sudden we see her sit straight upright on the living-room couch – could it be that she feels the instant when the blood stops flowing in the aorta? Could it be that she has an intuitive sense of this moment? Despite the kilometres that stretch out along the estuary, between the apartment and the hospital, could there be an impalpable proximity that gives the night a fantastic mental depth, vaguely terrifying, as though magnetic lineaments hurtled through a spatiotemporal rift and connected her to this restricted space where her child is, weaving a zone of wakefulness.

Polar night – it seems like the opaque sky is dissolving, the layer of clouds tearing open, woolly, and the Big Dipper appears. Simon’s heart is migrating now, it’s speeding over the orbs, along the rails, along the roads, moving inside this crate whose slightly nubby plastic walls shine in beams of electric light, escorted with an unmatched attention, the same way they escorted princes’ hearts in olden times, the way they escorted their entrails and their skeletons, the body divided up to be distributed, inhumed in a basilica, a cathedral, an abbey, in order to guarantee an entitlement to his lineage, prayers for his salvation, a future for his memory – you could hear the sounds of hooves from the furrows of the roads, on the clay of the villages and cobblestones of the cities, their slow and sovereign steps, and then you could make out the flames from torches that cast liquid shadows on the leaves, on the facades of houses, on the flickering faces, people gathered on doorsteps, napkins around their necks, they stepped out and made signs to each other in silence as they watched the extraordinary cortège pass by, the black coach drawn by six horses in full mourning attire, caparisoned with precious drapes and surplices, the escort of twelve riders in long black coats and veils, bearing torches, and sometimes also pages and valets on foot brandishing white wax votives, sometimes also Garde du Corps, and the rider in tears who leads them all is the one who accompanies the heart to its tomb, progressing toward the depths of the crypts, toward the chapel of a chosen monastery or a native castle, toward a niche carved into black marble and flanked by twisted columns, a shrine topped with a radiant crown, decorated with precious insignia and coats of arms, Latin mottos deployed on banners of stone, and the people might try to catch a glimpse through the slit in the coach curtains, to the bench where the official in charge of the sacred transaction sat – the one who would place the heart into the rightful hands of those who would watch over it and pray for it, most often a confessor, a friend, or a brother – but they could never make out this man in the darkness, nor the reliquary placed on a cushion of black taffeta, and even less the heart inside, the
membrum principalissimum
, king of the body, placed in the centre of the chest like the sovereign in his realm, like the sun in the sky, this heart nestled in gauze with gold brocade, this heart they lamented.

Simon’s heart migrated toward another part of the country; his kidneys, his liver, and his lungs reached other provinces, they rushed toward other bodies. In all this splintering, what would remain of the wholeness of her son? How to connect his singular memory to this diffracted body? What would be left of his presence, of his light in the world, of his ghost? These questions whirl around her like scalding hoops and then Simon’s face forms before her eyes, intact and irreducible – it’s him. She feels a deep sense of calm. The night burns outside like a gypsum-crystal desert.

A
t the Pitié, they encircle Claire. She’s wheeled into another room in the cardiac surgery unit that will have been completely scoured, disinfected; a transparent glazing covers the surfaces, effluvium of detergent hovers in the room. A movable bed that’s too high, a blue leatherette armchair, a barren table, and, in a corner of the room, a bathroom door, half open. She puts her bag down and sits on the bed. She’s dressed all in black – this old sweater split at the shoulders – and her form is cut out perfectly in the room, like a sketch. Texts begin to come in on her phone, her sons, her mother, her best friend, they’re all on their way, they’re racing to get there, but no message from the man of the Digitalis who has just paused to rest, leaning against a bamboo hedge among stray dogs and wild pigs in a village on the Gulf of Siam.

The nurse who comes in says chummily, hands on her hips: so, it’s your big night! She’s crowned with a helmet of salt-and-pepper hair and wears square-framed glasses; a light rosacea colours her cheekbones. Claire lifts her palms toward the sky and shrugs her shoulders, smiles, yes, tonight the sky’s the limit! The nurse holds out flat transparent sachets that shimmer like glass noodles beneath the overhead lights, leans forward, a pendant coming unstuck from her skin, brief twinkling in the void – it’s a little silver heart engraved with a promise,
today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow
, little jewel listed in mail-order catalogues; Claire follows its sway with her eyes, captivated – then the nurse straightens up, points to the sachets: these are the clothes for the O.R., you’ll need to put them on to go in, and Claire looks at them with this mixture of impatience and reluctance that is the very fabric of the feeling plaguing her for more than a year now, and the other name for waiting. She answers, feigning composure, but we’ll wait for the heart to arrive first, right? The woman shakes her head and looks at her watch, no, you’ll be heading to the O.R. in about two hours, as soon as we’ve received the results of your checkup; the heart will arrive at about half past midnight, you’ll need to be ready, the transplant will happen immediately after. She leaves the room.