Maylis de Kerangal - The Heart

Thomas washes the body, his movements calm and loose, and his singing voice takes support from the cadaver so as not to waver, just as it grows stronger by dissociating itself from language, frees itself from terrestrial syntax so as to find the exact place in the cosmos where life and death meet: it inhales and exhales, inhales and exhales, inhales and exhales; it escorts the hand as it revisits the body’s contours one last time, recognizing each hill and valley of skin, including that tattoo on the shoulder, that emerald black arabesque that Simon had inscribed into his pores the summer he realized that his body was his, that it expressed something about him. Now Thomas presses down on the puncture points in the epidermis left by the catheters, he dresses the boy in a diaper, and even arranges his hair in a way that sets off his face. The song grows louder in the operating room as Thomas envelops the corpse in an immaculate white sheet — the sheet that will then be knotted at his head and feet — and, watching him work, it is impossible not to think of the funerary rituals that conserved the beauty of the Greek heroes who deliberately died on the field of battle; that particular treatment designed to restore their image, so that they are guaranteed a place in the memory of men. To do this, the families and the poets will sing the hero’s name, commemorate his life. It is a good death, the song of a good death: not an elevation, a sacrificial offering, not an exaltation of the deceased’s soul that will rise in circular clouds toward heaven, but an edification, reconstructing the uniqueness of Simon Limbres. It brings back the young man on the dune, surfboard under his arm; it makes him run toward the shore with his friends; it makes him fight someone over an insult, his fists bouncing in front of his face, protecting it; it makes him leap into the mosh pit at a gig, pogoing like crazy and sleeping facedown in his childhood bed; it makes him spin Lou round in a circle, her little calves flying above the floorboards; it makes him sit down in the kitchen at midnight, across from his smoking mother, to talk about his father; it makes him undress Juliette, or give her his hand so that she can jump without fear from the beachside cliff; it propels him into a postmortem space where death can no longer touch him — the place of immortal glory, of mythography, the place of song and writing.

* * *

Cordélia reappears one hour later. She’s done the rounds of the department, pushed open doors, walked around the recovery room, checking vital signs, the flow of electric syringe pumps and diuresis; she leaned over the sleeping patients, looking at their faces, which sometimes grimaced with pain, observing their posture, listening to them breathe; and then she went back downstairs to see Thomas. She catches him singing, hears him before she sees him in fact, because his voice is loud now. Moved, she stands immobile, her back to the theater door, hands hanging by her sides, head tilted back, and listens.

* * *

Later, Thomas looks up: You’re just in time. Cordélia moves toward the table. The white sheet covers Simon’s body up to his sternum, chiseling the features of his face, the grain of his skin, the transparent cartilages, the flesh of his lips. How does he look? Thomas asks; perfect, she replies. They share an intense look, and together they lift up the body, inside the shroud, still heavy in spite of the night’s events, each taking one end, and slide it onto a stretcher, before calling the funeral parlor. Tomorrow morning, Simon Limbres will be returned to his family, to Sean and Marianne, to Juliette and Lou, to his loved ones, and he will be returned to them ad integrum .

The plane lands at Bourget at 12:50 a.m. Time is becoming dictatorial. With perfect logistical coordination, a car is waiting for them: not a taxi, but a thermally regulated vehicle designed specifically for this type of mission. A sign on the doors reads: Priority Vehicle — Organ Donation. Inside the car, all is calm: while the tension is palpable, there is no trace here of the kind of urgency shown in televised reports on the glory of transplant surgeons, on human-chain heroics, no hysterical pantomime, no bright-red countdown in the corner of the screen, no flashing lights or sirens, no squad of motorcyclists in white helmets and black boots opening the road in a blaze of tensed thumbs and impassive faces, jaws contracted. The process is under way, it is under control, and, for the moment, traffic is flowing freely on the highway, the rush of people going home after a weekend away already diluted: before them, Paris rises up under a dome of corpuscular light. The OR calls while they are passing Garonor: The patient is here, we’re prepping her now, where are you? Ten minutes from La Chapelle. We’re on time, Virgilio mutters, and looks over at Alice, her owl-like profile — concave forehead, beak-shaped nose, silky skin — leaning into the fur collar of her white coat. She certainly looks like a Harfang, he thinks.

* * *

Close to the stadium, they hit a traffic jam. Shit. Virgilio sits up, instantly tense. What the fuck are they doing? The driver is unfazed. It’s the game — they don’t want to go home. Many of the cars they can see have their windows open, and delirious young men swagger about, waving Italian flags on poles; there are buses chartered by supporters’ groups, and long-distance refrigerated trucks caught up in the euphoric bottleneck. They hear the news: there’s a pile-up on the road ahead. Alice cries out, Virgilio freezes. Inch by inch, the driver manages to widen the gap between the neighboring vehicles, passing through them until he reaches the emergency lane. He drives at a reduced speed for about a mile, passing the accident site, and after that the road is clear, the spaced-out spotlights on the safety barrier now forming one long line of brightness through the dark night. Another slowdown at La Chapelle: Let’s take the beltway. The city exits are strung out to the east, from Aubervilliers to Bercy, in a long bend, after which the car turns right again, entering the city, and now they can see the banks of the Seine, the towers of the National Library, then a curve to the left and they drive up Boulevard Vincent-Auriol, braking at Chevaleret and entering the hospital grounds, here we are. The vehicle stops in front of the building — thirty-two minutes, not bad. Virgilio smiles.

* * *

Inside the operating room, the team barely looks up when they arrive together, carrying the treasure to the foot of the table like an offering left at the feet of a master. Their arrival does not disturb the practitioners’ focus on the operation, which has already begun. Virgilio and Alice are barely welcomed when they enter, already dressed in sterile scrubs, arms washed, hands disinfected, and now Virgilio can see nothing of Alice but her strange eyes, slow and dense-looking, flecked with yellow, chartreuse, and honey, smoky topaz. Harfang, though, does finally ask them: So, everything go okay with the heart? And Virgilio, in the same casual tone, replies: Yeah, just some traffic on the way back.

The heart is placed in a cup, close to the bed. Alice climbs onto a small platform at the end of the table, so she can watch the transplant, her legs weakening as she hoists herself up the step. Meanwhile, Virgilio moves forward to take the place of the department’s intern: it’s all he can do not to start picking up tools, and everything in his body language and facial expression communicates his desire to be there, under the triple surgical lamps, above the thorax, across from Harfang. Now, they will work together.

Suddenly, uncovering Claire’s heart, Harfang whistles and says Christ, it’s really not in great shape, she’ll be glad to get rid of it, and there is a hum of quiet, surprised laughter around him: Harfang has a reputation for the terrifying pressure he puts on all members of his team, seemingly aware of everything, eyes in the back of his head, so this levity is unexpected. But the surgical theater is the only place in the world where he feels truly alive, where he is able to express who he is, his atavistic passion for his work, his fanatical rigor, his faith in humanity, his megalomania, his love of power; it is here that he summons his lineage and recalls, one by one, the men who created the science behind organ transplantation, the progenitors, the pioneers — Christiaan Barnard in Cape Town in 1967, Norman Shumway at Stanford in 1968, and Christian Cabrol, here, at the Pitié—the men who invented transplantation, who first conceived it, who mentally built it up and broke it down hundreds of times before performing it, those men from the 1960s, workaholics, charismatic stars, media rivals who were quick to argue and stole from each other without a qualm, Casanovas at multiple weddings, surrounded by girls in riding boots and Mary Quant miniskirts, made-up like Twiggy, insanely bold autocrats who were covered in honors but never lost their rage.