Maylis de Kerangal - The Heart

* * *

The last time Marthe Carrare heard Harfang speak, he had delivered a sparkling lecture about the uses of cyclosporin in antirejection treatments that had revolutionized transplant operations in the early 1980s, setting out in just twelve minutes the history of this immunosuppressant — a product that weakened the immune system of the recipient’s body, thereby reducing the risk of the transplanted organ being rejected — after which he ran a hand through his hair, sweeping that famous white cowlick off his forehead, that distinctive shock of hair which allowed him to dispense with introductions, and barked out questions? , counted one, two, three in his head, and concluded his speech by foreshadowing the end of cardiac transplants, suggesting they would soon become obsolete because the time had come to consider the virtues of artificial hearts, technological wonders invented and developed in a French laboratory, with initial tests having already been authorized in Poland, Slovenia, Saudi Arabia, and Belgium. The nine-hundred-gram bioprosthesis, developed over twenty years by an internationally renowned French surgeon, will be implanted into patients with serious heart failure whose lives are considered to be in danger. A murmur ran through the auditorium, waking up the drowsier students. Harfang’s audience was disconcerted by this conclusion, by the idea that a prosthetic heart could rob the organ of its symbolic power, and while most of the heads obediently bowed down toward the spiral notebooks held below them, concentrating as the hands took notes of Harfang’s words, a few shook from side to side, signaling sadness, or even vague dissent, while some slid hands inside jackets, behind ties, under shirts, touching bare skin so they could feel their hearts beating.

* * *

The game has kicked off and the rumble rising from the stadium has become a ceaseless roar, growing even louder at certain moments — a shot on target, a suddenly threatening counterattack, a piece of sublime skill, a violent clash, a goal. Marthe Carrare leans back in her chair: the donor’s organs have been allocated, the trajectories calculated, the teams organized. Everything is on track. And Rémige is in control. As long as there are no unexpected problems during the removal operation, she thinks, as long as the physiognomy of the organs does not reveal something not spotted or even suspected by the scans and the ultrasounds and the analyses, it should all be fine, and she will smoke a cigarette, drink a beer, eat a cheeseburger with barbecue sauce. She chews a little harder in order to squeeze out the last atom of nicotine from the gum, even if it’s just the faintest memory of a taste, a smell, and she thinks about the security guard who by now must be bent over his tablet, following the soccer game, his pack of Marlboro Lights within reach.

Cordélia Owl is shaking a pack of cigarettes at Révol as the elevator doors close — I’m going downstairs for a break, five minutes — she gestures to him through the rapidly narrowing gap, and then her own face appears in front of her, a blur. The metal surface does not offer a clear reflection, only a vague mask, erasing her supple skin and shining eyes, the banding effect of her sleepless night, that still excited beauty: her face has turned like milk turns, features subsiding, complexion muddied, the rings under her eyes an olive gray verging on khaki, the marks on her neck almost black. Once she is alone in the elevator, she shoves the pack of cigarettes back in one pocket, takes her cell phone from the other, glances at it — still nothing — checks the bars at the top of the screen, squints, ah, no service, not even the hint of a signal. Immediately she feels hopeful again — he might have tried to call, without success — and when the elevator arrives at the first floor, she runs to a side exit reserved for hospital staff, pushes the panic bar on the door, and she’s outside. There are three or four of them there, smoking while they stamp their feet in the whitish zone that the luminous sign traces in the cold — nurse’s aids and a nurse she doesn’t know — and the air is so icy that it’s impossible to tell the cigarette smoke apart from the carbon dioxide they are exhaling at the same time. She switches off her cell phone, then switches it on again, just to make sure. Her bare arms are turning visibly bluish, and soon her whole body is shivering. Do any of you have a signal? She turns toward the group, their voices responding, merging into one another, yeah, it’s fine, I’ve got service, me too, and when her phone is on again, she checks it for messages. She does all this without hope, certain now that there is nothing on her voicemail, certain that she must stop thinking about it before anything can happen.

* * *

Strong signal, no messages. She lights a cigarette. One of the guys in the group says you’re in the ICU, aren’t you? He’s a tall redheaded guy with a crew cut, an earring in his left lobe, and long hands with bright-red fingers and neatly trimmed fingernails. Yeah, Cordélia replies, her little chin trembling. She feels weak, numb, goose bumps on her arms, stomach muscles aching from shivering under her thin blouse; she clings to her cigarette, sucks hard at the filter, and suddenly her eyes are burning, tears forming. The guy looks at her, smiling, hey, are you okay? what’s up? Nothing, she replies, nothing, I’m just cold, but the guy has moved closer to her: The ICU’s tough, isn’t it? Some of the things you see … Cordélia sniffs and takes another drag: No, it’s not that, I’m okay, just the cold, and tiredness. The tears roll down her cheeks, slowly, mascara-dyed, the eyes of a kid who’s sobering up.

All the vivacity and passion that crackled inside her, that high-speed lightheartedness, playful and ferocious, that queenly gait she’d still had this afternoon in the corridors of the ICU: all of this suddenly becomes waterlogged, dangling sodden and heavy in her brain. No sooner was she twenty-three years old than she was twenty-eight; no sooner twenty-eight than thirty-one: time is speeding past her while she examines her existence with a cold, deadly gaze that takes aim at the different areas of her life, one by one — the damp studio crawling with roaches, mold growing in the grout between tiles; the bank loan swallowing all her spare cash; close, intense friendships marginalized by newborn babies, polarized by screaming sweetness that leaves her cold; stress-soaked days and canceled girls’ nights out, but, legs perfectly waxed, ending up jabbering in dreary wine bars with a bevy of available women, shrieking with forced laughter, and always joining in, out of cowardice, opportunism; occasional sexual adventures on crappy mattresses, or against greasy, sooty garage doors, with guys who are clumsy, rushed, stingy, unloving; an excess of alcohol to make all this shine; and the only encounter that makes her heart beat faster is with a guy who pushes back a strand of her hair to light her cigarette, his fingers brushing her temple and the lobe of her ear, who has mastered the art of the sudden appearance, whenever, wherever, his movements impossible to predict, as if he spent his life hiding behind a post, coming out to surprise her in the golden light of a late afternoon, calling her at night in a nearby café, walking toward her one morning from a street corner, and always stealing away just as suddenly when it’s over, like a magician, before returning … That deadly gaze strips away everything, even her face, even her body, no matter how well she takes care of it — fitness magazines, tubes of slimming cream, and one hour of floor barre in a freezing hall in Docks Vauban. She is alone and disappointed, in a state of disgrace, stamping her feet as her teeth chatter and disillusionment invades her territories and her hinterland, darkening faces, ruining gestures, diverting intentions; it swells, this disillusionment, it multiplies, polluting the rivers and forests inside her, contaminating the deserts, infecting the groundwater, tearing the petals from flowers and dulling the luster in animals’ fur; it stains the ice floe beyond the polar circle and soils the Greek dawn, it smears the most beautiful poems with mournful misfortune, it destroys the planet and all its inhabitants from the Big Bang to the rockets of the future, and fucks up the whole world — this hollow, disenchanted world.