Maylis de Kerangal - The Heart

The scraping of chair legs on the floor, the creak of the door, now they are walking toward the other end of the corridor, and once they are on the landing, without adding a word to their meager dialogue, Marianne turns on her heel and slowly walks away, with no idea where she is going. She passes the waiting room with its straight-backed chairs and its coffee table strewn with old magazines, where mature women with healthy teeth and shining hair and firm perinea smile at her, and soon she is back in the vast glass-and-concrete lobby, on the skating-rink floor. She walks past the cafeteria — multicolored packs of chips, candy, and chewing gum fill the display racks, brightly printed posters of burgers and pizzas are stuck to the wall, bottles of water and soda stand in glass-fronted refrigerators — then suddenly stops, staggering on her feet: Simon is lying helpless somewhere back there, how can she leave him behind like this? She wants to turn around, go back to him, but she continues on her way. She has to find Sean. She has to.

* * *

She heads to the main exit, the doors slowly opening in the distance, and four figures enter the building, move toward her. Soon the figures emerge from the blur of her myopia: it’s the parents of the other two caballeros , Christophe and Johan, walking in a line, wearing the same winter coats that weigh heavy on their shoulders, the same scarfs wrapped around their necks like braces to hold up their sagging heads, the same gloves. They recognize her, slow down, then one of the two men breaks step and comes toward Marianne, takes her in his arms. The other three wait in line to embrace her. How is he? Chris’s father is speaking. All four of them are looking at her. She is paralyzed. Whispers: He’s in a coma, no news yet. Shrugging, her mouth twisted: And you? How are the boys? Johan’s mother speaks: Chris has fractures in his left hip and fibula; Johan, fractures of both wrists and his clavicle, his rib cage was crushed but no organs were punctured — she speaks plainly, with an outrageous lack of emotion designed to show Marianne that all four of them are aware how lucky they are, how monstrously lucky, because their children are only a little broken, their children were wearing seat belts, they were protected from the collision, and if this woman is downplaying her anxiety to this degree, abstaining from all commentary, it is also to let Marianne know that they know, about Simon, they know it’s serious, very serious — a rumor that’s spread from the ICU to the Department of Orthopedic and Trauma Surgery, where their sons are — and that she would never be so indecent as to rub it in. And then there is the awkwardness she feels, the guilt that holds her back, because it was fifty-fifty between their two sons as to who got the seat belt, with Chris having one automatically as the driver — Johan might well have sat in the middle of the bench, in which case she would be standing in Marianne’s shoes at this very moment, in exactly the same situation, staring down into the same chasm of misery, her mouth twisted with the same pain, and at the mere thought of this she is suddenly dizzy, her legs weakening and her eyes rolling back in their sockets. Her husband, sensing that she is about to keel over, puts his arm under hers to steady her, and Marianne, seeing this woman on the verge of collapse, also becomes aware of the chasm between them, between the four of them and her, the abyss that separates them now, thank you, I have to go, let’s talk later.

* * *

It hits her that she doesn’t want to go home. She is not ready yet to see Lou again, to call her mother, to tell Simon’s grandparents, her friends; she is not ready to hear them panic and suffer. Some of them will scream into the phone — no, my God, I can’t believe it, no no no — some of them will sob inconsolably while others bombard her with questions, mentioning the names of medical examinations that she knows nothing about, telling her about a case involving someone they know who came out of a coma after the doctors thought it was all over, talking about all the spectacular remissions they’ve heard about, questioning the hospital, the diagnosis, the treatment, even asking for the name of the doctor in charge of Simon, ah, really, no, I don’t know him, oh but I’m sure he’s very good, insisting that she writes down the number of this famous surgeon who has a two-year waiting list, suggesting that they could call him on her behalf, because they know him or have a friend who, and maybe she’ll even get someone stupid enough, crazy enough to inform her that, hang on, it’s possible, you know, to confuse a coma dépassé with other states that resemble it, an ethylic coma, for example, or an overdose of sedatives or hypoglycemia, even hypothermia, and then, remembering that Simon surfed in cold water that morning, she will feel like throwing up, then pull herself together to remind the person who’s tormenting her that he was in a major road accident, and even if she resisted, repeating to everyone that Simon was in good hands and all they could do was wait, she knew they would want to show their love by covering her with words. No, she is not ready for that yet. What she wants is somewhere to wait, somewhere to kill time, a shelter from the storm. She reaches the parking garage, sees her car, and abruptly breaks into a run, diving inside it, and then her fists are pounding the steering wheel and her hair is lashing against the dashboard, her hands shaking so much that she can hardly fit the key into the ignition, and when the engine does finally start, Marianne has trouble controlling her speed, her tires squealing as she pulls out of the parking garage. After that, she drives straight ahead, toward the west, where the sky is brighter, while in his office, Révol does not sit down but does what the law obligates him to do when declaring brain death in the ICU: he picks up the phone and calls the Coordinating Committee for Organ and Tissue Removal. Thomas Rémige is the one who answers.

And yet he almost misses the call, he almost doesn’t hear it, and it is only as he gets his breath back after a long, turbulent phrase — a vocal polyphony, a flight of birds, Benjamin Britten, A Ceremony of Carols , opus 28—that he hears the trill of his cell phone, distorting the brilliant, delicate song of a caged goldfinch.

* * *

This Sunday morning, in a first-floor efficiency apartment on Rue du Commandant-Charcot, Thomas Rémige is making the strips of his venetian blinds vibrate; alone, and naked, he is singing. He began by standing in the center of the room — always in the same spot — his weight evenly distributed on his two feet, back straight, shoulders slightly thrown back, rib cage open in order to clear his chest and neck. Once he felt balanced, he started making slow circular movements with his head to relax his neck, repeating the same rotations with each shoulder, then focused on visualizing the column of air rising from the pit of his stomach to his throat, that internal ductwork propelling the breath and vibrating his vocal cords. He adjusts his posture and at last opens his mouth, an oven — a little odd in that moment, vaguely ludicrous — fills his lungs with air, contracts the muscles of his abdomen, then exhales like the opening of a passage, sustaining the action as long as possible, utilizing his diaphragm and his zygomatics — a deaf person could hear him simply by putting their hands on his body. Watching this scene, it would be possible to draw an analogy with the sun salutation or the morning chants of monks and nuns, the same lyricizing of the dawn. You might imagine such a ritual to be aimed at the maintenance and conservation of the body — like drinking a glass of cool water, brushing your teeth, unrolling a rubber mat in front of the television to do floor exercises — but for Thomas Rémige it is something else altogether: an exploration of self — the voice as a probe infiltrating his body and transmitting to the outside world echoes of everything that animates it. The voice as stethoscope.