Maylis de Kerangal - The Heart

The child stands facing her parents while the day dies in the west, little by little plunging the city into darkness, and now they are visible only as silhouettes. Marianne and Sean walk toward her: unblinking, she remains silent as her eyes devour the darkness — the whites of her eyes like china clay — and Sean lifts her up and Marianne hugs them both, their three bodies joined together, eyes closed, like those monuments in memory of the drowned that you find in ports in southern Ireland. They stagger back to the couch and lie diagonally across it without letting go of each other, a Roman triad protecting itself from the outside world; they curl up inside their own breathing and the odors of their skin — the little girl smells of brioche and gummy bears — and this is the first time they have got their breath back since the announcement of the disaster, the first little nest they have been able to create in a quiet hollow of their devastation. And if you could only approach them, gently and silently, you would hear their hearts pumping, together, the life that remains, and hammering tumultuously, as if high-tech sensors had been placed on the valves and they were emitting infrasonic waves, those waves that run through space, plow through matter, sure and precise, zeroing in on Japan, the Seto Inland Sea, an island, a wild beach, and that wooden cabin where human heartbeats are archived, those cardiac fingerprints gathered from all over the world, deposited there by people who have made the long journey, and while Marianne and Sean’s beat in time, Lou’s is drumming fast, until she suddenly stands up, forehead damp with sweat: Why are we sitting in the dark? Catlike, she slips away from her parents’ embrace and moves around the room, switching on all the lamps, one by one, then turns to her parents and declares: I’m hungry.

Their phones beep more and more often now, alerting them to new voicemail messages. The time has come when they must think about talking, informing people — another ordeal looming into view. Marianne goes out onto the balcony, still wearing her coat, and lights a cigarette, readying herself to hear the news about Chris and Johan, then sees that she has a message from Juliette. She is paralyzed: fear of speaking, fear of hearing, fear that the words will get stuck in her throat, because Juliette was special. Simon had grudgingly introduced her one Wednesday in December when Marianne arrived home earlier than usual and found them in the kitchen. He hadn’t said “my mother,” but simply “Juliette, Marianne,” immediately muttering let’s go, we have stuff to do, as Marianne was engaging the girl in conversation: So you’re in the same school as Simon? She had been stunned to discover what she looked like, this girl who had a place in her son’s heart, this girl who looked like no one else, least of all a beach groupie, with her waiflike, flat-chested body and her strange, sweet little face — eyes so large they seemed to eat up her face, ears pierced with multiple holes, a gap-toothed smile and pale blond hair cut like Jean Seberg’s in Breathless ; that day, she was wearing slim-fit, pale-pink corduroy jeans, bright-green high-top sneakers, and a twinset Fair Isle sweater under a red oilskin. Simon had waited impatiently while she replied to Marianne, then led her by the elbow to the door; later on, he had started dropping her name here and there, scattering Juliettes through the few conversations he agreed to participate in, until in the end she was mentioned almost as often as his friends and the names of beaches in the Pacific; he’s changing, Marianne had thought, as Simon gave up McDonald’s for an Irish pub that smelled of wet dog, began reading Japanese novels, gathering driftwood from the beach, and sometimes doing his homework with her — chemistry, physics, biology: subjects he was good at and she wasn’t — and then one evening Marianne heard him telling her how a wave was formed: look (he must have been drawing a diagram), the swell moves toward the shore, it contracts as the water becomes more shallow, this is called the levee zone, that’s where the waves arch their backs, sometimes it’s quite violent, then the swell reaches the breaking zone, which can cover about a hundred yards if the sea floor is rocky, those are called point breaks, after that the waves break in the surf zone but continue to mutate toward the shore, you see? (she must have nodded), and at the end, if you’re really lucky, there’s a girl there, on the beach, a pretty girl in a red oilskin. They used to stay up late, talking into the night while the house was asleep, and maybe they would even whisper I love you, not really knowing what it was they were saying, only that they were saying it to each other, that was what mattered, because Juliette — Juliette was Simon’s heart.

* * *

Marianne stands on the balcony, the cold sealing her fingers to the metal guardrail. From here, she can see the city, the estuary, the sea. The main roads, the port, and the coastline are illuminated by the orange glow of streetlamps, cold flames creating powdery Payne’s gray haloes in the sky, the lights signaling the entrance of the port at the end of the main pier, while beyond the waterfront it is black tonight — not a single boat left stranded, not a single flashing light, only a slowly pulsing mass, only darkness. What will become of Juliette’s love when Simon’s heart starts to beat inside a stranger’s body? What will become of everything that filled that heart, its emotions slowly deposited in strata since the first day, inoculated here and there in a rush of enthusiasm or a fit of rage, its friendships and enmities, its grudges, its vehemence, its serious and tender inclinations? What will become of the bursts of electricity that rushed through his heart when a wave approached? What will become of this full, this too-full, this overflowing heart? Marianne looks out at the courtyard: the pines still, the copses retracted, the cars parked under streetlights, the windows of the apartments opposite spilling warm light into the darkness, the reddish glows of living rooms and the yellows of kitchens — topaz, saffron, mimosa, and that even brighter Naples yellow behind the misted windows — and the neon-green rectangle of a sports field. It’s almost time for Sunday supper — that reduced meal, that TV dinner of self-service snacks, leftovers, pancakes, boiled eggs, a ritual that meant: this evening, she didn’t have to cook anything, and they would all sprawl in front of the TV to watch a soccer game or a movie, and Simon’s outline appears clearly in the lamp. She turns around: Sean is there, looking at her, forehead pressed to the window, while behind him, on the couch, Lou has fallen asleep.

Another call. Another telephone trembling on a table and another hand picking it up — this one has a large, dark gold ring on one of its fingers, ribbed with spirals. Another voice succeeding the electronic growl — this one sounds nervous, and we understand why when we see the name on the cell phone’s screen: “Harfang surg.” Hello? And then another announcement — we can read the contents of this one on the face of the woman who is listening to it, emotion rushing beneath her skin, and then her features contracting again in furls.

“We have a heart. A compatible heart. A team is on its way to remove it. Come now — we’ll do the transplant tonight. You’ll go into the OR around midnight.”

* * *

She hangs up, breathing heavily. Turns toward the room’s only window and gets up to open it, both hands leaning on the desk as she struggles to her feet, walking the three steps with difficulty, and then grunting as she forces the latch. Behind the window, winter is massing: a hardened landscape, glacial and translucent. The cold turns the sounds of the street to glass, each one isolated like the murmur of evening in a provincial town; it neutralizes the screech of the elevated railroad car as it comes to a halt at the Chevaleret station; it muzzles the air’s odors and presses an icy film over her face. Shivering, she looks slowly over toward the other side of Boulevard Vincent-Auriol, to the windows of the building, directly across from where she stands, that hosts the Cardiology Department of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. She had been there, three days earlier, for exams that showed her heart to be in a state of severe deterioration, enabling the cardiologist to request she be put on the priority list of recipients at the Biomedical Agency. She thinks about what she is living through, now, at this second. I’m saved, she thinks: I’m going to live. Someone, somewhere, has died suddenly, she thinks. Now, this evening, she thinks. She experiences the full force of the announcement, thinking that she doesn’t ever want the spark of this present moment to fade into the past, into the realm of memory: she wants it to endure, sharp and new. I am mortal, she thinks.