Maylis de Kerangal - The Heart

The Margherita splats against the apartment wall, landing on the carpet and leaving a Neapolitan sunset above the television set. Having cast a satisfied glance at the effect she has produced, the young woman turns toward the pile of white boxes on the breakfast bar of the American kitchen, patiently opens a second perfectly square, flat box, slides the burning disc of Americana onto her palm, then stands facing the wall, elbow bent, hand flat, and — with a rapid extension of her arm — throws the pizza with all her strength between the room’s two windows, creating another action painting, slices of pepperoni scattered in a curious constellation across the wall. As she is preparing to open the third box, a blistered four-cheese, thinking that the yellowish sludge of melted mozzarella, parmesan, gorgonzola, and ricotta might well act as a sort of adhesive paste, a man comes out of the bathroom, face aglow, stops dead in the doorway, sensing a threat, and — seeing the young woman getting ready to send a third hot circle flying straight at him — instinctively falls to the ground. Lying prone, he soon rolls over onto his back so he can watch her from below: she smiles, turns away from him, her eyes surveying the room, and — taking care to target a new area — throws the pizza against the front door. After that, she steps over the shocked young man and goes to wash her hands behind the breakfast bar. The man gets up, checks that there are no stains on his clothes, then takes note of the damage, turning in a circle until he is once again facing the woman as she stands at the sink.

She drinks a glass of water. Her pearl-white shoulders emerge from a soccer shirt in the colors of the Squadra Azzurra with a scoop neck that gives a glimpse of the tops of her small breasts; her immensely long legs emerge in the other direction from a pair of baggy, satiny blue shorts; a delicate film of perspiration pearls above her mouth: she’s so beautiful when she’s angry, the skin below her jaw pulsing. She doesn’t even look at him as she crosses and uncrosses her long arms — things of classical beauty — lifting them as she does so, in order to remove the now pointless soccer shirt, revealing a glorious torso that is a sum of various circles (breasts, areolae, nipples, stomach, belly button, the twin bait of her buttocks), of various triangles pointing toward the ground (the isosceles of the sternum, the convex of the pubis, the concave of the hips), and of various lines (the dorsal midline that divides the body in two identical halves, and the furrow, in a woman, that is reminiscent of a leaf’s vein or a butterfly’s symmetry axis), the whole punctuated by a little diamond shape in the area of the sternal crest — the dark keel — a collection of perfect forms whose balance of proportions and ideal arrangement he admired with a professional eye, prizing the anatomical exploration of the human body above all, and of this particular human body in particular, savoring its examination, searching passionately for the slightest disharmony in its construction, the tiniest defect, the faintest discrepancy: a curve of scoliosis above the lumbar vertebrae, that sporulating beauty spot, there, under the armpit, those calluses between the toes where her feet are compressed into the sharp points of her high-heeled shoes, and the slight strabismus that made her squint when she was short of sleep, the source of that dissipated air, that look of a feral girl, which he loved so much.

She slips on a turtleneck sweater, removes her shorts and climbs into a pair of skintight jeans. The show is over. Then, having put on a pair of high-heeled boots, she heads toward the front door, where grease trickles down the wooden surface, opens it, and slams it behind her without a backward glance at the young man standing in the center of the messed-up apartment, who sighs with relief as he watches her go.

* * *

You’re going to the hospital in Le Havre for an organ removal — a heart, now. When he heard these words in Harfang’s mouth, enunciated just the way he had imagined during the past few months — brief and emotionless — Virgilio Breva almost choked on the bitter ball of happiness and disappointment that formed in his throat. Because, although of course he was on call, and although he was excited by his mission, the truth was that this announcement could hardly have come at a worse time — the rare conjunction of two unmissable events: a France versus Italy game + a horny Rose at home. All the same, he wondered for a long time afterward why Harfang had bothered to call him in person, detecting in that fact a perverse desire to humiliate him on a historic evening, knowing perfectly well that the Italian was obsessed by soccer, his Sunday-morning training sessions having given him a legitimate excuse not to join the cycling squad: torture, Virgilio had once muttered, bemused, watching the throng of tadpoles in pointy helmets and multicolored cycling shorts set off down the road, with Harfang the queen bee at their center.

* * *

Sitting in the backseat of the taxi as it heads toward Pitié-Salpêtrière, Virgilio folds his fur-lined hood back over his shoulders and gets his breath back. The tensions of the last hour have left him in a state of disturbance, when he needs to be at the top of his game, more than ever before. Because tonight will be his night; tonight will be a big night. The quality of the transplant depends entirely on the quality of the removal — it’s the fundamental law of his profession — and tonight, he is in the front line.

It’s time to get a grip, he thinks, interlacing his leather-gloved fingers, it’s time to dump that girl, that crazy bitch, time for his survival instinct to assert itself, even if that means being deprived of her hyperactive body and the glory of her presence. He relives the alarms of the previous hour: Rose surprising him at home when he had planned to go to the soccer game with some friends, then demanding — adorable yet vaguely threatening — that the two of them stay at home to watch it and order pizza, arguing her case silently with the Italian soccer outfit she wore, the erotic tension gradually insinuating itself into the belligerent, upper-case tension of the France — Italy game, this embrace of opposites exuding a possible — and incredibly intriguing — happiness, to which Harfang’s call, on the stroke of eight, had added an excess of feverish agitation, emotions shooting through the roof. Immediately, he had jumped to his feet and replied I’m here, I’m ready, I’m on my way, avoiding Rose’s eyes but putting on an exaggeratedly tragic face — eyebrows like circumflex accents, lower lip rolled up over upper lip, the oval of the chin lengthened sadly — an expression that signified disaster, rotten luck, and was intended for Rose, grimacing for her at that moment, fanning the air with his hand like a clown, a thrift-store tragedian, while his eyes lit up with joy — a heart! She wasn’t fooled. He backed out of the room to take a shower and dress in clean, warm clothes, and when he came out of the bathroom, the situation had spiraled out of control. It had been a wonderful and overwhelming spectacle, but mentally replaying it now in slow-motion, perceiving its logical majesty, only seemed to accentuate Rose’s supremacy, her incomparable beauty, and her fiery temperament, her ability to channel her rage into a regal body language, maintaining a royal silence where so many others would merely whine. Splat! Splat! Splat! The more he thinks about it, the more impossible it seems to break up with that highly flammable and utterly unique creature. No, he will never give her up, no matter what other people say, all those who think she’s insane, or “borderline,” as they put it, with a knowing look, when they would give anything to touch that trapezoid of warm skin in the hollow at the back of her knee.