Maylis de Kerangal - The Heart

* * *

The first police sirens are heard around seven-thirty. She closes the window — it’s cold outside — still an hour to go before kickoff and apparently it’s proving difficult to contain the supporters’ excitement: all these hearts together, it’s too much. She wonders who’s playing tonight. Time passes. Marthe Carrare examines the first file again, strangely satisfied by its concordance with the donor’s file. It could hardly be any more perfect — what the hell are they doing at the Pitié? Just then, the telephone rings. It’s Harfang: We’ll take it.

* * *

Marthe Carrare hangs up and immediately calls Le Havre, warning Thomas that a team from Pitié-Salpêtrière will be contacting him to organize its arrival. The recipient is a patient in Harfang’s department — do you know him? By name. She smiles. Says: They’ve got a good team there, they know what they’re doing. Thomas checks his watch and replies: Okay, we’ll get ready for the removal, we should be going into the OR about three hours from now, I’ll call you back. They hang up. Harfang. Marthe says the name out loud. Harfang. She too knows him. Knew of him before she knew him — that beautiful name, that strange name doing the rounds of hospital corridors for more than a century, so that people said simply he’s a Harfang as a way of summarizing a discussion about a practitioner’s excellence, or they talked about the “Harfang dynasty” as a way of describing the family that had provided the faculty with dozens of professors and practitioners, men named Charles-Henri and men named Louis, men named Jules, Robert, Bernard, and now men named Mathieu, Gilles, and Vincent, all doctors who had worked, were working in public hospitals — we’re servants of the state, they liked to think as they ran the New York Marathon, went skiing in Courchevel, or sailed in the Gulf of Morbihan on carbon monohulls, distinguishing themselves in this way from the grasping medical masses, many of whom, including the youngest, opened private practices in calm, leafy quarters as soon as they had completed their training, sometimes going into partnership with Harfangs in order to cover the whole spectrum of pathologies affecting the human body, and offering quick checkups to overweight businessmen, guys who worked crazy hours and worried about cholesterol levels, hardened arteries, prostate troubles, and declining libidos — among them five generations of pulmonologists following a patrilineal filiation that prioritized male primogeniture when handing out chairs and department directorships; among them one girl, Brigitte, ranked first in the internship entrance examination in Paris, in 1952, but who abandoned her studies two years later, persuaded that she was in love with a protégé of her father’s when the truth was she was yielding to surreptitious pressure ordering her to make way, to leave more room for the young males of the clan; including this one, Emmanuel Harfang, the surgeon.

She remembers that during her internship, she had hung around for a while with a gang led by two Harfang cousins. One was in pediatric cardiology, the other in gynecology. They both had the famous “Harfang cowlick,” a shock of white hair growing over their forehead which they slicked back over the dark hair that covered the rest of their head, a distinguishing feature of the clan, a legendary family seal, rally around my white plume and all the ad hoc swagger intended to loosen the panties of the girls they met; they wore 501 jeans and oxford shirts, tartan-lined beige raincoats with the collars turned up; they never went out in sneakers, always Church’s shoes, though they absolutely scorned tassel loafers; they were of medium height, wirily built, pale-skinned and golden-eyed, thin-lipped, with prominent Adam’s apples that would make Marthe involuntarily swallow whenever she saw them sliding up and down under the skin of their throats; they looked like each other, and they also resembled this Emmanuel Harfang, ten years their junior, who repairs and transplants hearts at Pitié-Salpêtrière.

Emmanuel Harfang would descend the steps of the auditorium perfectly on time for his symposiums, staring straight ahead and jumping the final steps so that his momentum would carry him up to the lectern with an athletic bound, holding a sheet of paper that he wouldn’t read, beginning his speech without even greeting his audience, favoring direct openings and abrupt attacks, getting straight to the point without bothering with the usual civilities, without bothering to state his name, as if everyone in the room was supposed to know who he was — a Harfang, son of a Harfang, grandson of a Harfang — a tactic that was also designed, in all probability, to wake up an audience who had a tendency to nod off early in the afternoon, pleasantly drowsy after eating those famous meals in the nearby restaurants reserved for the occasion, where the carafes of red wine would be lined up on paper napkins, always that modest Corbières wine that went well with red meat, because as soon as Harfang pronounced his first words, the auditorium would snap out of its digestive torpor, every person in the audience remembering, when they looked at this slender, athletic man, that he was the pillar of a first-class cycling squad, part of a team that represented the hospital in various criteriums, filled with guys capable of riding 120 miles on Sunday morning, regardless of how difficult it was to combine such endeavors with their professional lives, guys ready to get up early to race, no matter how desperately they yearned for more sleep, for the chance to caress their wives, make love, play with their children, or simply just lie around listening to the radio, the light in the bathroom always brighter, the smell of toast always more desirable on mornings like that; guys who hoped to join this elite club and who would give anything, would elbow others out of the way, to be chosen by Harfang—“singled out” was the term they used, as Harfang, suddenly noticing their presence, would point at them with his index finger and, leaning his head to one side to assess their physical condition, checking out a possible rival, would ask them, a strange smile twisting across his face: You like cycling?

Pedaling alongside Harfang, riding on his wheel for a few hours, was worth all the fury it provoked in their wives at being left alone with the kids on a Sunday until the middle of the afternoon, it was worth all the sarcastic comments — don’t worry, darling, I know you’re sacrificing yourself for the family — worth their more direct reproaches — you only ever think about yourself — worth the cutting remarks as they scornfully watched their husbands sucking in their paunches — careful you don’t have a heart attack! — worth coming home crimson-faced, exhausted, legs barely holding up their body and their backsides so sore that they dreamed of taking a sitz bath but collapsed onto the first couch they spotted, or onto their bed for a well-earned siesta — and, of course, this quickly grabbed nap would trigger their spouses’ ire once again, would fuel endless diatribes about men’s selfishness, their idiotic ambitions, their submissiveness, their fear of aging, would make the wives lift up their arms and yell loudly or put their hands on their hips, elbows out, stomach thrust forward, teasing them theatrically — and, once they had recovered from their efforts, it was worth wasting away the afternoon on their computers, buying a chamois on a specialized site, a matching bib, and all the other appropriate gear, finally screaming shut up! at the wife nagging from the other end of the apartment, making her cry, because — curiously — not a single wife ever supported this masculine obsession, not one, out of careerism or simple docility, ever encouraged her husband to straddle a bike and follow Harfang on the roads of the Chevreuse valley, to show off his speed, lightness, endurance, no, not one woman was ever fooled by this nonsense, and when they talked among themselves, the wives, deploring the insidious dragooning of their husbands, they would sometimes cite Lysistrata , plan a mass sex strike to make the men give up their extravagant toadying, or they would fall about laughing as they took turns describing how haggard their husbands looked after finishing a race, and in the end it was just funny, so let them go if they really wanted to, let them go and exhaust themselves, allies and adversaries, favorites and competitors, because soon not one woman would wake up at six in the morning to make coffee and hand the cup lovingly to her husband: instead, they would stay in bed, curled up under the comforter, hair tangled, skin warm, purring with pleasure.