Mend the Living (19 page)

L
ou. They hadn’t called Lou, hadn’t tried to talk to her, hadn’t thought of her, except to ask that her name be said into her brother’s ear at the moment when they stopped his heart. But Lou, this little seven-year-old girl, her distress at seeing her mother leave for an emergency at the hospital, her waiting, her aloneness – all this, they hadn’t thought about it, and although it’s true they were confronted with the cyclonic charge of death, drafted into tragedy, they don’t try to make any excuses, and they fly into a panic when they see the neighbour’s number on Marianne’s cellphone, along with the notification of a voicemail they don’t have the strength to listen to, and now Marianne presses on the accelerator, murmuring toward the windshield, we’re coming, we’re coming home.

The bells ring in the spire of the Church of Saint-Vincent and the sky has the rumpled look of a melting candle. It’s six thirty when they climb the turns of the Ingouville coast, plunge into the building’s underground parking lot, the return; we’ll stay together tonight, Marianne said as she turned off the engine – but could they possibly have had the strength to separate that night, Marianne staying here with Lou, Sean going back to his two-room apartment rented in a rush last November, in Dollemard? Marianne struggles to get the key into the lock, can’t manage to engage the mechanism, the metallic jiggling goes on and on inside the hole while Sean paces behind her, and when the door finally opens they’re off balance and topple inside. Don’t turn on any lights, just collapse side by side onto the couch that they found on the side of a country road one rainy day, wrapped up like a candy in a transparent tarp, and around them the walls veer toward blotting paper now, absorb this scrap-iron coffee that signals the end of the day: in the few paintings hanging there, other figures appear, other forms, the furniture swells, the patterns on the carpet are erased, the room is like a sheet of glossy paper left too long in the basin of photo developer, and this transmutation – this progressive silting-up, the darkening of all that surrounds them – hypnotizes them; the world around them absconds; the physical suffering they feel isn’t enough to lash them to the real, this is a nightmare, we have to wake up from it sometime, this is what Marianne says to herself as she stares at the ceiling – and if in fact Simon came home, here, now, if he in his turn made the lock click and then came into the apartment, slamming the door behind him with the abrupt loud gesture that was typical of his entrances, inevitably setting off his mother’s shout, Simon stop slamming that door! if he turned up in this moment, surfboard under his arm squeaking inside its cover, hair damp, face and hands bluish from the cold, exhausted by the sea, Marianne would be the first to believe it, would get up, go toward him, offer him eggs with paprika, pasta, something hot and invigorating, yes, she wouldn’t see a ghost, she would simply see the return of her child.

Marianne’s hand reaches out to touch Sean’s, or his arm, or his thigh, any place on his body it can reach, but this hand stretches out into emptiness, because Sean has just got up, shrugged off his parka, I’m going down to get Lou. He starts walking toward the door but now the doorbell rings, he opens it, Marianne lets out a cry, she’s here.

She’s excited, comes running into the apartment, has pulled on a long multicoloured T-shirt over her clothes, tied a scarf into her hair and someone has attached two iridescent tulle butterfly wings to her back with the help of some Velcro – she too has straight black hair, olive skin, and deep eyes, delicately traced – suddenly she pulls up short in front of her father, surprised to see him in a sweater inside the apartment, are you back? Behind her, the neighbour stays on the doorstep but leans a head inside the apartment – a giraffe’s manoeuvre – her face is an open sky of a question: Sean, have you come back? We just got here – he stops his sentence short, doesn’t want to talk. In front of him, Lou hops from foot to foot as she rummages in her bag, finally hands him a piece of white paper, I did a drawing for Simon, she moves forward into the living room, and finding her mother capsized on the couch, asks abruptly: where’s Simon? is he still at the hospital? Without waiting for a reply, she turns around, rushes down the hall, wings vibratile and step pounding, we hear her open a door, call out to her brother, then other doors slam, this same name is called again, and then the child reappears in the doorway, in front of her two parents standing there, distraught, waiting, unable to speak, unable to say anything other than Lou, calm down, while the neighbour, pale, backs up into the stairwell, making a sign with her index finger, showing she’s understood, doesn’t want to bother them, closes the door behind her.

The child is facing her parents while the day declines in the west, slowly plunging the city into darkness, and now they are only silhouettes. Marianne and Sean come closer, the little girl doesn’t shy away, remains silent, eyes devouring the darkness – pupils pinpoints white as kaolin clay – Sean picks her up, then Marianne wraps her arms around them both – the three bodies commingled eyelids closed like on port monuments in the south of Ireland in memory of the people drowned – then they sit back down on the couch, moving diagonally without coming unstuck, a Roman triad that protects itself from the outside; now here they curl up inside their breath and the scent of their skin – the little girl smells like brioche and Haribo candies – and it’s the first time they catch their breath since the terrible news, the first time they nest inside a cavity of withdrawal at the heart of their devastation, and if you come a little closer, if you are soft and silent, you can hear their hearts together, pumping the life that’s left, and banging, tumultuous, as though sensors have been placed on the valves or against the arteries and are emitting infrasonic lines, those lines that stretch out into space, rushing through material, sure, precise, reaching Japan, the Seto Sea, an island, a wild beach and that wood cabin where they archive the beatings of human hearts, cardiac imprints collected the world over, deposited or recorded here by the rare few who have made the long journey, and while Marianne’s and Sean’s hearts beat in rhythm, the little girl’s hammers, until she suddenly sits up, a film of sweat on her forehead: why are we sitting in the dark? A cat, she slides out of her parents’ embrace, walks around the room turning all the lamps on one by one and then turns back toward them and declares: I’m hungry.

Alert sounds multiply, signalling the messages flowing into voicemail boxes – they have to think about talking now, about telling people, this is another ordeal to face. Marianne goes out onto the balcony – she still has her coat on – lights a cigarette, prepares herself to call for news of Chris and Johan, finds a message from Juliette, suddenly doesn’t know what to do anymore, scared to speak and scared to hear, scared that it will get stuck in her throat, because with Juliette it meant a lot – Simon had introduced her begrudgingly last December, on a Wednesday, they were in the kitchen when Marianne had come home at an unusual time, he hadn’t said “this is my mother,” just “Juliette, Marianne,” immediately murmuring let’s go, we have things to do, while Marianne was starting to engage her in conversation, so you’re in the same school as Simon? startled to discover that this was what she looked like, the girl who had taken up residence in her son’s heart, and she was an original-enough model that Marianne would be surprised, didn’t look like anyone, least of all a groupie from the beach – she was frail, flat-chested, with a strange sweet little face, eyes that took up almost the whole thing, ears with multiple piercings, gap teeth and pale blond hair cut like Jean Seberg in
Breathless
; that first day she was wearing pale-pink skinny cords over bright green high-tops, a Jacquard twin-set under a red raincoat; Simon had waited with irritation while she answered Marianne, then had led her toward the door, pulling her by the elbow, and later he had started to leave her name lying around here and there, scattering it in the middle of the rare stories he consented to tell, until hers ended up rivalling the names of his friends and those of surf spots on the Pacific; he’s changing, Marianne had thought, because Simon had started abandoning McDonald’s for the Irish pub that smelled like wet dog, was reading Japanese novels, went to collect driftwood on the beach, and sometimes did homework with her, chemistry, physics, biology, subjects he excelled in, not her, and one evening Marianne heard him describe the form of the wave to her: look (he must have been drawing a diagram), the swell moves toward the shore, it gets higher as the water grows shallow, they call that the shoaling zone, that’s where the waves crest, sometimes it’s really violent, then the swell reaches the breaker zone, that can cover up to a hundred metres if the bottom of the spot is rocky, those are the point breaks, and then the waves break in the surf zone but continue to move toward the shore, get it? (she must have said yes, nodding her little chin), and at the end of the ride, if you’re really lucky, there’s a girl there on the beach, a cute girl in a red raincoat; they talked late into the night while the rest of the house slept, and maybe they even whispered I love you to each other then, not knowing what they were saying but only that they were saying it to each other, that was the important thing – because Juliette, she was Simon’s heart.

Marianne holds herself up on the balcony, fingers sealed by the cold to the metal railing. From this promontory, she overlooks the city, the estuary, the sea. Streetlights with curved covers lit by orange bulbs highlight the main streets, the port and the coastline, cold flames creating powdery Payne’s grey haloes in the sky, traffic lights signalling the entrance to the port at the end of the long jetty, while beyond the edge of coastline it’s black tonight, not a single stranded boat, not a blink, just a slow, pulsing mass – the shadows. What will Juliette’s love become once Simon’s heart starts beating in another, unknown body? what will become of all that filled this heart, its affects slowly deposited in strata from the first day, or injected here and there in a rush of enthusiasm or a fit of anger, his friendships and his aversions, his resentments, his vehemence, his solemn and tender inclinations? What will become of the electric surges that coursed so strongly through his heart as the wave came near? What will become of this overflowing heart, full, too full, what will become of it? Marianne looks at the yard, the still pine trees, the windows of the apartments across the way that pour their warm light out into the darkness, the blushings of living rooms and the yellows of kitchens – topaz, saffron, mimosa, and this Naples yellow, even more dazzling behind the steam of the windowpanes – and the rectangle of green of a stadium field, fluorescent, soon it will be time for Sunday dinner, that other kind of meal, self-serve and folding trays, bread pudding, crepes, hard-boiled eggs, a ritual signifying that just for tonight she won’t cook anything, and then there they are, sprawled out before a soccer game, or a movie they can watch together, and Simon’s profile is cut out clearly in the light of the lamp. She turns around, Sean is there, watching her, forehead pressed to the bay window, and Lou, lying on the couch, has fallen asleep.

A
nother call, another telephone that trembles on a table and a hand that picks it up – this one has a ring of gold, a large, dull ring, veined with spirals – another voice that follows the vibrational rumble – this one has been through the meat grinder, it’s plain to see, “Harfang Surg.” came up on the cellphone screen – hello? And another piece of news – it’s visible on the face of the woman who’s listening, emotion races beneath the epidermis, and then the features contract once again, furl.

– We have a heart. A compatible heart. A team is leaving immediately to harvest it. Come now. The transplant will happen tonight. You’ll be taken into the O.R. around midnight.

She hangs up, she’s out of breath. Turns toward the only window in the room and gets up to open it, pressing down on the desk with both hands in order to lift herself up, the three steps that follow are difficult, and the effort to turn the handle is even more so. Winter gathers in the window frame – a hardened panel, translucent and glacial. It vitrifies the noises of the street that ring out, isolated, like the murmur of evening in a provincial village, neutralizes the cry of the skytrain that brakes at the entrance to Chevaleret station, garrottes odours and lays a film of ice over her face, she shivers, slowly brings her eyes to the other side of boulevard Vincent-Auriol, straight across, touching the windows of the building that houses the cardiology department of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, where she’d been for tests three days before – the state of her heart had greatly deteriorated, this is why the cardiologist had called the Agency of Biomedicine to place her in a priority position on the list of recipients. She thinks about what she’s experiencing, now, in this second; she says to herself: I’m saved, I’m going to live; she says to herself: someone somewhere died a violent death; she says to herself: it’s now, it’s tonight; she feels the gravity of the news; she wishes this flash of the present would never pull back to become a representation, that it would last; she says to herself: I am mortal.