Mend the Living (18 page)

Pedalling along at Harfang’s side, following on his wheels for a few hours, was worth facing their furious wives who found themselves alone with the kids on Sunday until the middle of the afternoon, their spitefully mocking remarks – don’t worry dear, I know you’re just making sacrifices for your family – was worth suffering their reproaches – you only think of yourself – and their vexing phrases when they looked them up and down, evaluating their paunches – careful you don’t have a heart attack! – worth coming home crimson, broken, legs barely holding up their bodies anymore and backsides so sore they dreamed of a sitz bath but sank into the first couch in their path, or into their beds, a well-deserved nap – and this arrogated rest, of course, set off the wrath of the wives again, who looped a lament about the selfishness of men, their foolhardy ambition, their submissiveness, their fear of growing old, raising their arms to the sky and exclaiming out loud, or planting their hands flat on their hips with elbows wide, stomachs out, and tormenting them, an Italian comedy – and once the men had recovered from their effort, it was worth it to drag themselves to the computer for the urgent purchase of a chamois from a specialized site, matching shorts and all the right gear, and they ended up shouting shut up! at the woman grousing at the other end of the apartment, ended up making her cry; and it’s a little surprising, really, that there wasn’t a single woman who supported this masculine endeavour, not a single one who, whether careerist or simply compliant, encouraged her husband to mount a bike and follow Harfang along the paths in the Chevreuse Valley, to parade wingèd, light, hardy, yes, not a single one was fooled, and when they talked among themselves, deploring the insidious requisitioning of their husbands, they would sometimes cite Lysistrata, planning to go on strike for sex so that the men might stop their servile antics, or they might fall down laughing as they described their partners done in after the race, and in the end it was funny, fine, they should go if it makes them happy, they should wear themselves out, allies and adversaries, favourites and competitors, and soon not a single one of the women gets up at six in the morning to make coffee and hold it out to her husband with a loving hand, they all stay in bed, curled up in the duvet, dishevelled, warm, and moaning.

The last time Marthe Carrare heard Harfang speak, he was giving a brilliant report on the success of cyclosporine in anti-rejection treatments that had revolutionized transplants in the early 1980s, summing up the history of this immunosuppressive in twelve minutes – a product that lowers the immune defences in the recipient and reduces the risk of rejection of the transplanted organ – at the end of which he ran a hand through his hair and pushed back the famous white lock that excused him from having to repeat his family name, don’t wear it out, and said, abruptly, any questions? counted one, two, three in his head, and concluded his talk by alluding to the end of heart transplantations, their coming obsolescence, because it was finally time to consider artificial hearts, marvels of technology invented and developed in a French laboratory – authorization had been given to conduct the first tests in several countries, including Poland, Slovenia, Saudi Arabia, and Belgium. The bioprosthesis, weighing nine hundred grams, was developed over the course of twenty years by an internationally renowned French surgeon, and would be implanted in patients with severe heart failure in life-threatening situations. This conclusion disconcerted the room, a murmur rumbled through the audience, waking the dozers – the idea of the cardiac prosthesis that would purge the organ of its symbolic power, and even though most of the heads nodded toward spiral notebooks in order to record Harfang’s words in telegraphic style, there were a few that shook side to side, unsettled and vaguely upset, and a few attentive individuals could be seen sliding a hand beneath their jacket, behind their tie, under their shirt, and holding it against their heart to feel it beating.

The kickoff has happened and the continuous murmur emanating from the stadium has grown to a roar that sounds at regular intervals – a shot on goal, a member of the opposition suddenly threatening, an elaborate play, a violent clash, a goal. Marthe Carrare leans back in her chair – the donor’s organs have been distributed, the routes established, the teams formed, everything’s on track. And Remige has it under control. As long as there’s no unpleasant surprise during the harvesting, she thinks, as long as the physiognomy of the organs doesn’t reveal anything that the scans, the ultrasounds, and the tests couldn’t see or even suspect. She’d love to have one little smoke, with a beer and a good cheeseburger with barbeque sauce; she chews faster so she can squeeze out the last atom of nicotine from her gum, the memory of a taste, an odour, even faded, thinks of the security guard who’s following the game, no doubt, leaning over his portable screen, pack of Marlboro Lights within arm’s reach.

A
s it happens, Cordelia Owl is shaking a pack of cigarettes at this same moment while the doors of the elevator slide closed, signing to Revol through the progressively narrow opening, I’m going down for a break, five minutes, then her own face appears in soft focus against the metallic wall that isn’t exactly a mirror but gives a basic outline – the supple skin and shining eyes are gone, the sparkling trail of the sleepless night, that beauty, still aroused: her face has turned as milk turns, features slumping, complexion clouding over, an olive-grey tugging at the khaki in the circles under her eyes, and the marks on her neck have darkened. Once she’s alone in the elevator, she sticks the cigarettes back into a pocket, takes her phone out of the other, quick glance, still nothing, checks that the indicators are working, trembles, looks closer, oh, no network, not even the tiniest little stream, the tiniest little glimmer, and hope finds her again, he must have tried to call without being able to get through, and once she’s on the first floor, she runs to a side exit reserved for hospital personnel, pushes the door’s metal crossbar, and there she is outside, where three or four others are smoking, hopping from foot to foot in the compact cold, on the whitish square traced by the neon sign, orderlies and a nurse she doesn’t recognize, and the air is so freezing that it’s impossible to tell the tobacco smoke from the carbonic gas they exhale together. She turns her phone off and on again, that old story of starting over from scratch, of finding out for sure. Her bare arms go visibly blue, and soon all of her extremities are shaking. You guys have service here? She turns to the group, the voices are superimposed over each other, yeah, I do, I have service, me too, and once her device is restarted, she looks at it – she carries out these steps in disbelief, sure now that nothing has been left for her in her mailbox, sure that she has to stop thinking about it in order for something to happen.

Network in abundance, still not a peep. She lights a cigarette. One of the guys in front of her tosses out you’re in the ICU, right? He’s a tall ginger, brush cut with an earring in his left ear and long hands with reddened fingers, short nails. Yeah, Cordelia answers, lowering her little trembling chin, she’s sapped of strength, numb goosebumps, belly hurting from shivering beneath her thin shirt, she grips her cigarette tightly, smokes like someone who’s lost, eyes suddenly burning, eyes crying, the guy looks at her, smiling, hey, you okay? what’s going on? Nothing, she answers, nothing, I’m just cold, but the guy has come closer, the ICU’s hard, eh, you see some crazy things, don’t you? Cordelia sniffs and takes a drag, no, I’m fine, it’s the cold, really, and I’m tired. Tears run down her cheeks, slow, tinted with mascara, tears of a little girl who’s sobering up.

Everything bright and burning that had lashed about inside her, that full-speed-ahead lightness, playful and fierce, the queenly step she still had this afternoon in the corridors of the ICU, all of this takes on water at a rapid rate and sways inside her brain, heavy, soaking: by dint of being twenty-three, she was twenty-eight, by dint of being twenty-eight, she was thirty-one; time cavorted while she cast a cold glance over her existence, a glance that brutally stripped each area of her life, one after the other – damp studio apartment where cockroaches proliferate and mould sprouts in the joints between tiles, bank loan that sucks up luxuries, hell-or-high-water friendships reconfigured, peripheralized, as newly created families spring up, sharp-focused on cradles that leave her unmoved, days saturated with stress and girls’ nights out spent on the sidelines but impeccably epilated, gossiping in dreary lounge bars, a bevy of available females and forced laughs which she always ends up joining, pusillanimous, opportunistic; or else the rare sexual episode on a cruddy mattress, against the oily soot of a parking lot door, guys who are often clumsy, rushed, cheap – in short, not very loving – copious amounts of alcohol to give a lustre to the whole thing; the only encounter that sets her heart to beating is a guy who lifts a lock of her hair to light her cigarette, brushes her temple and earlobe, and takes the art of appearing suddenly to a whole new level – and in fact he will appear at any moment, totally impossible to predict, as though he were always standing hidden behind a lamppost and would suddenly stick his head out to surprise her in the golden light of the end of the day, calling late at night from a nearby café, or walking toward her in the morning from the corner of the street, and always vanishing in the end, with such perfect flair, before coming back again the next time – it’s the great scouring, nothing can resist, not even her face, not even her body that she takes care of all the same – women’s magazines, tubes of slimming cream and that hour of floor barre in a freezing room at the Docks Vauban rec centre – she is single and disgraced, bitterly disappointed, she stamps her feet with her teeth chattering while disillusion ravages her land and her hinterland, darkens faces, rots gestures, skews intentions; it swells, proliferates, pollutes the rivers and the forests, contaminates the deserts, corrupts the groundwater, tears the petals from the flowers and sullies the fur of the animals, it stains the ice floes above the Arctic Circle and defiles the daybreak, smears the most beautiful poems with a viscous gloom, it pillages the planet and everything that populates it from the Big Bang to the rockets of the future, and stirs up the whole world, this world that rings hollow: this disenchanted world.

I’m gonna head in, she tosses her butt to the ground, crushes it with the toe of her canvas flat, the tall ginger watches her, you feeling better? She nods her head, I’m fine, see you later, does a half-turn, hurries inside the building, and the path back is an interlude that she uses to gather herself up again before getting back to the department, where work is intensifying at this hour: edginess of the evening, restless patients, last treatments before nighttime, last intravenous drips, last pills, and this organ retrieval that will happen in a few hours – Revol had come to ask her if she could replace someone at the last minute, extend her shift and stay on in the O.R., an exceptional request, she had said yes.

She takes a detour past the caf to pick up a tomato soup from the automatic dispenser, we see her walking through the icy lobby, skinny little thing with a tense jaw, and later hitting the machine with her fist to speed up the flow; the soup is foul and so boiling hot that the cup deforms in her hand, but she drinks it in one go, immediately warmed, and suddenly she sees them passing before her – the father and the mother, the parents of the patient from room seven, the young man whose catheter she had inserted earlier this afternoon, the one who is dead and whose organs will be recovered tonight, it’s them; she follows them with her eyes, their slow walk toward the tall glass doors, leans against a pillar so she can see them better: the glass wall has become a mirror at this hour, they’re reflected there the way ghosts are reflected in the surface of ponds on winter nights; they are a shadow of themselves, you might say to describe them, and the banality of this expression would be less a reference to their internal disintegration than an affirmation of what they still were only this morning – a man and a woman standing in the world; seeing them walk side by side over the ground varnished with cold light, it would be clear to everyone that from now on these two were following a new trajectory, begun just a few hours earlier – already they didn’t live entirely in the same world as Cordelia and the other inhabitants of the earth, but were growing distant, withdrawing, moving toward another realm, which might have been the place where those who had lost a child could survive, for a short time, together and inconsolable.

Cordelia keeps their outlines in her frame of vision as they diminish at the edge of the parking lot, disappear into the night, then she lets out a cry, pushes off from the pillar, shakes herself like a colt, grabs her phone, her face falls back into place and colours return, and in an incredible pendulum movement, she enacts an interior about-face that revives her, finds a momentum that signifies recovery, speedily dials the number of the man who disappeared at five in the morning, surprising herself with this action, plinking dexterously on the keys, as though she wanted both to rid herself of the thing and to confront the subjugation she’s been confined to by her sadness, as though she wanted to counter the morbidity that assails her and remember the possibility of love. One, two, three rings, and then it’s the guy’s voice saying in three languages leave me a message – I love you, and she hangs up, curiously reinvigorated, relieved of a weight: she suddenly has her whole life ahead of her once again, tells herself she always cries when she’s tired, and that she must be low in magnesium.