Maylis de Kerangal - The Heart

* * *

She opens the door. It is dark inside, marked by the night’s excesses, smelling of cold ash. A song by Alain Bashung. “ Voleur d’amphores au fond des criques .” She approaches the bar, leans over the counter. She’s thirsty, she doesn’t want to wait. Anyone there? A guy comes out of the kitchen: he is huge, wearing a skintight sweater and baggy jeans, just-got-out-of-bed hair, yes, yes, there’s someone here, and now, standing in front of her, he asks her, formally: So, miss, what would you like to drink? A gin — Marianne’s voice barely audible, not much more than a pant. The man smooths his hair back with his hands, the fingers heavy with rings, and then rinses a glass, all the while checking out this woman, whom he knows he has seen here before. How’s it going, miss? Marianne looks away. I’m going to sit down. In the large mirror hung at the far end of the room, she sees a face she doesn’t recognize, and looks away again.

Don’t close your eyes. Listen to the music. Count the bottles above the bar. Observe the shapes of the glasses. Read the posters on the wall. “ Où subsiste encore ton écho. ” Send out decoys, divert the coming violence. She builds a dam against the flood of images of Simon that roll over her in waves, like a bombing raid, tries to push them back, to beat them back, even though she’s already organizing them in her mind, nineteen years of memories, a vast mass. Keep all of that at arm’s length. The memories that flashed through her while she was talking about Simon in Révol’s cubbyhole of an office lodged in her chest with a pain she is powerless to control or reduce. For that, she would have to situate the memory in her brain and inject some numbing fluid into that precise spot, the needle of the syringe aimed by computer, but even then that would only paralyze the driving force — the capacity to remember — because the memory itself fills her entire body, though Marianne doesn’t know this. “ J’ai fait la saison dans cette boîte crânienne .”

* * *

She has to think, to gather and order her thoughts, so she can say something clear to Sean when he arrives, relate the facts in an intelligible manner. First: Simon has had an accident. Second: He is in a coma — gulp of gin. “ Dresseur de loulous, dynamiteur d’aqueducs .” Third: The situation is irreversible — she swallows as she thinks of this word she must pronounce, “irreversible,” five syllables that freeze the state of affairs forever, a word she never utters, because she believes in the continual movement of life, the possibility of turning any situation around, nothing is irreversible, nothing, she proclaims at every opportunity — speaking the words in a lighthearted tone, gently shaking the words, the way she would the shoulders of someone who’s feeling down, nothing is irreversible, apart from death, or disability, and maybe then she might spin around, begin dancing. But Simon … no. Simon is irreversible.

* * *

Sean’s face — those catlike eyes — lights up the screen of her cell phone. Marianne, you called me? Instantly she bursts into tears — the chemistry of pain — incapable of uttering a word while he repeats: Marianne? Marianne? He probably imagines the echo of the sea in the harbor is interfering with the signal, probably hears her spit and snot and tears as so much static while she bites the back of her hand, rendered speechless by the horror she feels at hearing that voice she loves so much, that voice familiar to her as only a voice can be, but become suddenly strange, abominably strange, because it comes from a space-time where Simon’s accident never occurred, an intact world light-years away from this empty café; and now it was dissonant, this voice, it disorchestrated the world, tore apart her brain: it was the voice of life before. Marianne hears this man calling her and she weeps, filled by the emotion we sometimes feel when confronted by something that, in the past, survived unscathed, something that triggers the pain of impossible journeys back in time. One day, she must find out what direction time flows in — whether it’s linear or the quick circle of a hula hoop, whether it curls and loops or is coiled like the spiral of a snail’s shell, whether it can take the form of a tube wave, sucking up the sea, the entire universe, into its dark flip side. Yes, she needs to understand what it is that makes up the passing of time. Marianne grips her phone in her hand: fear of speaking, fear of destroying Sean’s voice, fear that she will never again be able to hear it as it is now, that she will never again be able to experience that vanished time when Simon was not in an irreversible condition, although she knows that she has to put an end to the anachronism of this voice, to bring it up to date, reinstate it in the tragic present, she knows she has to do it, and when she finally manages to speak, her words are not simple or precise, but incoherent, to the point where Sean loses his calm, he too is overcome by dread — something has happened, something serious — and he starts to question her, exasperated: Is it Simon? What about Simon? What about surfing? An accident? Where? In her mind, his face stands out from the sonic texture, as clearly as on the photograph on her cell-phone screen. She imagines he might think that Simon has drowned and corrects him, her monosyllables lengthening into sentences that gradually become more organized and meaningful. Soon she is able to tell him everything she knows in the right order, closing her eyes and placing the phone flat against her sternum as Sean cries out. Then, recovering herself, she quickly explains that, yes, his condition is life-threatening, that he is in a coma but still alive, and Sean, his voice deformed as hers was earlier, says I’m on my way, I’ll be there in two minutes, where are you? — and his voice has defected now, leaving the land of the innocent and joining Marianne, piercing the fragile membrane that separates the lucky and the damned — wait there for me.

* * *

Marianne found the strength to tell him the name of the café and its precise location. It was pouring rain the day she came here for the first time — four months ago, in October. She was working on an article, something she’d been commissioned to do by the local Heritage office; she had revisited the Saint-Joseph church, Oscar Niemeyer’s Volcan, a sample apartment in a building designed by Perret — all these buildings whose architectural movement and radicalism she loved — but her notebook had begun to get soaked, and, sitting in the bar, dripping rainwater onto the floor, she had downed a whiskey, neat; Sean had started sleeping in the warehouse back then, having left the apartment without taking anything with him.

She sees her outline in the mirror at the back of the room, then her face, which he will soon see after all this time, after so much accumulated silence; she had long imagined this moment, promising herself she would be beautiful when it came, beautiful as she still could be, and that he would be dazzled, or at least moved, but the dried tears have tightened her skin, as if covered with a clay mask, and he will hardly even be able to see her pale-green eyes, whose depths he loves to look into, because her eyelids are so puffy.

* * *

She downs the glass of gin and then he is there, standing in front of her, his face haggard, tiny particles of wood dusting his hair, encrusted in the folds of his clothes, in the stitching of his wool sweater. She stands up abruptly, and her chair tips over backward — landing with a clatter — but she doesn’t turn around: she stands facing him, one hand lying flat on the table to support her unsteady legs, the other hanging down at her side. They look at each other for a fraction of a second, then one step forward and they embrace, hug each other so hard it’s as if they’re being crushed together, heads pressed firmly enough to crack their skulls, shoulders bruised, arms aching from gripping so tightly, their scarfs, jackets, and coats merging into one, the kind of embrace you share to protect yourself from a tornado or to prepare for a fall into an abyss, an end-of-the-world type thing, and yet, at the same time, at exactly the same time, it is a gesture that reconnects them — their lips touch — that emphasizes and abolishes the distance between them, and when they free themselves from the embrace, when they finally let go of each other, stunned and exhausted, they are like shipwreck survivors.