Maylis de Kerangal - The Heart

* * *

When they sit down, Sean sniffs Marianne’s glass. Gin? Marianne’s smile turns to a pained grimace and she hands him the menu. Then she starts to read out a list of everything he could order for lunch, for example croque-monsieur, croque-madame, salade périgourdine; haddock and potatoes, a plain omelet, tartine provençale, sausages and fries, crème caramel, crème vanille, apple tart … If she could, she would read out every item on the menu and then start over again at the beginning just in order to delay the moment when they would have to face up to the misery, to the darkness and tears. He lets her do it, watching her without a word. Then, suddenly losing his patience, he grabs her wrist, pressing down on the artery. Stop. Please. He orders a gin too.

So, Marianne arms herself with courage — armed, yes, that’s exactly it: a sort of naked aggression has been growing since their embrace, and she covers herself in it, protects herself like someone brandishing a dagger — and, sitting up straight on the bench, she announces the three statements she has prepared, her eyes staring straight ahead. When he hears the last one—“irreversible”—Sean shakes his head and his face crumples, convulses, no, no, no, then he stands up heavily, knocks the table — the gin jumping inside its glass — and walks toward the door, arms hanging by his sides and his fists balled as if he were carrying something heavy, with the tread of a man who has just beaten the shit out of someone, some guy who was asking for it. As soon as he’s outside, on the doorstep, he abruptly turns around and goes back to the table they were sitting at, moving forward through the ray of sunlight painted on the floor, and his silhouette, backlit, is haloed with a grayish film — the sawdust that covers him sprayed up into the air each time his foot hits the ground. His body is smoking. He leans his torso forward, as if he’s about to charge. When he gets to the table, he grabs the glass of gin and downs it, then barks at Marianne, who is already tying her scarf around her neck. Come on.

The room is bathed in half-light, the floor reflecting the frozen sky from between the slats of the blinds. He has to wait for his eyes to adjust before he can make out the machines, the furniture, and the body that inhabit this room. Simon Limbres is there, lying on his back in a bed, a white sheet pulled up to his chest. He is on a ventilator, and the sheet lifts slightly with each inhalation, a small but perceptible movement that makes it look as if he’s asleep. The sounds of the hospital are muffled here, and the constant beeping and buzzing of the electrical equipment seems only to heighten the silence. It might easily be a normal patient’s room, were it not for the subdued lighting, that impression of withdrawal, as if the room were situated outside the hospital, in a depressurized cell where nothing more was at stake.

* * *

They didn’t speak in the car — not a word. There was nothing to say now. Sean left his car parked outside the bar — located at the end of the road where the skiffs he made and the surfboards that Simon picked up or borrowed, “shortboards” or “fishes,” dug into the water — and got into Marianne’s car, a first, and she drove, her forearms straight and rigid as matchsticks, while Sean kept his face turned to the glass, occasionally commenting on the traffic, which wasn’t too bad — a fact that helped them, carrying them hurriedly to their son’s bedside, but which also delivered them inexorably into blackness and sadness: there was nothing to hinder their progress, delay their arrival. Of course, they both think about a dramatic turnaround, the miraculous idea of this all being a mistake — the images in the scanner being accidentally inverted, an error of interpretation, a computer bug, a simple typo, these things happen, just like people sometimes take home the wrong baby from a maternity ward, or the wrong patient is taken to the operating theater: hospitals are not infallible, after all — but without really being able to believe in the possibility, and above all without being able to communicate their thoughts to each other. Soon the smooth, glass-covered buildings are growing bigger, filling the windshield of the car, and now they are fumbling through that semidark room.

* * *

Marianne approaches Simon. She is as close as possible to his body, which has never seemed so long to her before, and which she has not seen this closely in such a long time — Simon’s embarrassment causing him to lock the bathroom door, demanding that people knock before entering his bedroom, walking through the apartment wrapped in towels like a young Buddhist monk. Marianne leans over her child’s mouth to feel his breath, places her face sideways on his chest to hear his heart. He is breathing, she can feel it; his heart is beating, she can hear it. Does she think, then, of the first time she heard his heart beat, at the ultrasound center in Odéon one fall afternoon, the sound of a stampede in the speakers while the luminescent smears on the screen marked out his tiny body. She stands up. Simon’s head is bandaged, but his face is intact. But is it still his face she sees? The question haunts her while she examines her son’s forehead, his temples, the shapes of his eyebrows, the bulge of his eyeballs beneath the lids — the smooth, little concave patch of skin at the inside corner of the eye — while she recognizes the strong nose, the fleshy, prominent lips, the hollowed cheeks, the lightly bearded chin, yes, all this is familiar, but Simon’s face — everything in him that lives and thinks and moves — will she ever see that again? Her legs weakening, she staggers, grips the bed, which moves on its wheels, pulling the drip with it, and the space reels around her. Sean’s figure loses its clarity, as if behind a rain-blurred window. He has walked to the other side of the bed, standing directly across from Marianne, and now he takes his son’s hand while from the icy hollow of his guts to the edge of his barely open lips he struggles to sound his name: Simon. We’re here, we’re with you, you can hear me, Simon, my boy, we’re here. He touches his forehead to his son’s: his skin is still warm, and it smells of him, the smell of wool and cotton, the smell of the sea, and he probably begins to whisper words intended only for the two of them, words no one else can hear and that we will never know, the ancient babble of the Polynesian islands, or words of mana that have crossed unaltered through all the layers of language, reddening rocks from a still-burning fire, that dense, slow, inexhaustible matter, that wisdom — he speaks for two or three minutes, then stands up straight and his eyes meet Marianne’s and their fingers brush lightly above their child’s chest, moving the edge of the sheet, which slides off the young man’s chest, revealing the Maori tattoo that neither of them has ever touched, the drawing that comes from his shoulder, then spreads over the hollow of the clavicle and then the scapula. Simon got it done the summer he turned fifteen, at a surfing camp in the Basque Country. It was his way of saying this is my body and I do what I want with it. Sean, whose own back was completely covered with tattoos, had calmly asked him about the meaning, choice, and positioning of the image, seeking to find out if this was some expression of his mixed heritage; but Marianne had taken it badly: Simon was so young, she said anxiously, this tattoo of yours, you do realize it’s for life? And the word comes back at her, like a boomerang: “irreversible.”

* * *

Révol enters the room. Sean turns and calls out: I can hear his heart beating — the buzzing of the machines in the room seems to grow louder in that instant — then he says it again, insistent: His heart is beating, isn’t it? Yes, Révol says, his heart is beating, because of the machines. Later, as they’re about to leave the room, Sean interrogates him again: Why didn’t you operate on him when he first arrived? The doctor can sense the aggression, the tension, the despair that turns to anger, and he can also tell that the father has been drinking — he can detect the faint smell of alcohol on his breath — so he explains, carefully: It wasn’t possible to operate on him, monsieur. The hemorrhage was too widespread, too advanced, you could see it on the scan we took as soon as Simon was admitted, it was too late. Is it this certainty shown in the face of disaster, this imperturbable calm that borders on arrogance, even while the tremors are intensifying, that causes Sean to raise his voice? In any case, he yells: You didn’t even try to save him! Révol grimaces but does not blink. He wants to say something, but senses that all he can do is stay silent, and anyway there is a knock at the door. Without waiting for a response, Cordélia Owl enters the room.