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.
She had first made her appearance at the start of the university year, during one of the classes taken by medical interns at the Pitié. The instruction given during the day-school years took the form of tutorial classes of one particular type: the study of clinical cases. The students attended long sessions, where real situations experienced by the departments or scenarios invented on the basis of particular questions that required study were “replayed,” so that they could learn to listen to the patient, become acquainted with the methods of auscultation, practice diagnoses, identify a pathology, and decide on a treatment protocol. This practical work, developed around the patient/doctor duo, took place in public and sometimes required the setting up of bigger groups, in order to encourage an aptitude for working together, for dialogues between the different disciplines. It was intended to resist the compartmentalization of medical specialties, which divided the human body into a collection of rules and practices, with no flow of knowledge between them, making it impossible to see the patient as a whole person. Because it was based on simulation, however, this new teaching method provoked a degree of mistrust: the use of fiction in the process of acquiring scientific knowledge, the very idea of “play-acting” a situation—you be the doctor and you be the patient—was enough to make the faculty skeptical. They did agree to it, though, acknowledging that this teaching technique brought together some very interesting material, including subjectivity and emotion, and emphasizing the importance, in the patient/doctor dialogue, of understanding and deciphering that fragile, often distorted communication. In this role-playing game, it was decided that the students, carrying out their future function, would take on the part of the doctor, which meant that the hospital had to hire actors to play the patients.
* * *
They turned up to the audition after a small ad appeared in a weekly paper for performing-arts professionals. Most of them were theater actors, highly promising newcomers or eternal bit-part players from television shows, commercial veterans, understudies, walk-ons, extras, doing the rounds of casting sessions in order to pick up hours, to earn enough money to pay their rent—generally a shared apartment in an arrondissement in the northeast of Paris or a nearby suburb—or reinventing themselves as coaches for training days on sales techniques (at home or elsewhere), and perhaps ending up as human guinea pigs, tasting new yogurts, testing moisturizers or lice-repellent shampoos, experimenting with diuretic pills.
There were too many, so there was a selection process. The jury was made up of medical professors and practitioners, some of them theater aficionados. When Rose entered the audition room and walked past the workbenches, wearing platform sneakers, burgundy Adidas sweatpants, and a sunshine-colored Lurex top, the men in the room were stirred into murmurs, their interest sparked by her face and her body. She was given a list of actions and words to help her improvise the part of a patient rushed to the gynecology department after the discovery of a suspicious lump in her left breast, and, during the fifteen minutes that followed, her commitment to the role elicited widespread admiration: she lay on her back, topless on the cold tile floor, and guided the student’s hand—here, here, that’s where it is, yes, there—and then, as the scene dragged on, a disturbance arose: the student, it was true, palpated her chest rather longer than was strictly necessary, moving from one breast to the other and then starting over, ignoring the dialogue guidelines, not listening to the essential information that she provided him with—including the intense pain she felt at the end of her menstrual cycle—so that she finally stood up, purple-faced, and slapped him. Bravo, mademoiselle! She was congratulated, and hired on the spot.
From the very beginning, Rose secretly disregarded the terms of the contract, believing that this job as a “patient,” which she had landed for the entire academic year, would be a learning opportunity for her, the chance to increase her range, the power of her art. Foolishly, she scorned ordinary pathologies—or what she considered ordinary pathologies—preferring to monopolize madness, hysteria, and melancholy, a register in which she excelled—romantic and mysterious heroines—sometimes allowing herself diversions not mentioned in the prescribed scenario (an effrontery that shocked the psychiatrists and neurologists who were running the classes and created confusion among the students, forcing them to ask her to take it down a notch or two); she played drowned women, attempted suicides, bulimics, erotomaniacs, diabetics, taking particular pleasure in mimicking people with limps, people in pain (a case of coxalgia in Brittany providing the opportunity for a very nice dialogue about inbreeding in Finistère Nord), people with hunchbacks (she succeeded in imitating the rotation of the vertebrae in the thoracic cage), and anything that required her to twist or unhinge her body; she liked interpreting a pregnant woman with premature contractions, but was less convincing in her incarnation of a young mother describing the symptoms of a three-month-old baby, which brought the pediatric intern out in a cold sweat; superstitious, she refused to play cancer patients.
However, she was never better than on that December day when she had to simulate angina. The renowned cardiologist who was leading the course had described the pain to her in these terms: A bear is sitting on your chest. Rose’s almond-shaped eyes had widened in awe: A bear? She had to gather her childhood memories—the vast, foul-smelling cage with its crudely modeled, cream-colored plastic rocks, and the huge animal, half a ton, with its triangular muzzle and its close-set eyes that gave a false impression of nearsightedness, the rust-brown fur dusted with sand, and the yells of the children when it stood up on its hind legs, six and a half feet tall; she recalled the scenes of Ceauşescu hunting in the Carpathian Mountains—the bears subdued by peasants and lured with buckets of food, emerging from the back of the clearing close to a log cabin mounted on pilings, moving forward until it was perfectly framed by the open window where a Securitate agent prepared a rifle before handing it to the dictator as soon as the bear was close enough that he couldn’t miss; lastly, she remembered a scene from Grizzly Man. Rose began at the back of the room, walked toward the student who was going to partner her in the scene, and then stood still. Could she make out the beast at the edge of the undergrowth, its head poking between bamboo shoots, or nonchalantly swaying its rump on four feet, cashew-colored fur, lazily scratching a stump with its nonretractable claws, before turning toward her and standing up like a man? Did she see the monster emerging from its cave after months of hibernation, stretching its muscles, reheating the stalled fluids in its body, reactivating the taste for blood in its heart? Could she discern it at dusk, rummaging through supermarket trash cans, growling happily under a huge moon? Or was she thinking about a different weight altogether—a man’s? She fell back onto the floor—the noise her body made when it hit the floor provoked a murmur in the room—and, stiffening convulsively, let out a cry of pain, soon muffled into a silent groan, and afterward stopped breathing, completely immobile. Her thoracic cage seemed to flatten and hollow out in a basin while her face swelled up, slowly reddening, her lips, held tight, soon turning colorless, eyes rolling back in her head, and her limbs began to fibrillate, as if electrocuted; such realism was not expected of these actors, and some of the students in the room stood up to get a better view, alarmed by her crimson face and concave abdomen, and a figure hurtled down the steps of the amphitheater and knelt next to Rose—knocking over the student who had begun imperturbably to read through the first lines of his questionnaire in a droning voice—and leaned over her to resuscitate her while the eminent cardiologist also rushed over, shining a penlight at her irises. Rose frowned with one eyebrow, opened one eye, then the other, sat up with a jolt, looked questioningly at the crowd gathered around her, and, for the first time in her life, felt the pleasure of being applauded. She lay flat on her back in front of the students as they stood and clapped in the bleachers.
The young man who’d rushed over to her, furious at having been fooled, reproached her for overacting: angina is not cardiac arrest, you know, the two things are not the same at all, it should have been more subtle and complex, you messed up the exercise. In order to make her understand, he listed the symptoms of angina one by one—constrictive thoracic pain, the feeling of being crushed all across your chest, of being squeezed in a vise, and sometimes other pains, typically in the lower jaw, one of the two forearms, or, more rarely, in the back, the throat, but anyway, you don’t collapse. Then he detailed the symptoms of cardiac arrest: massively accelerated pulse rate, sometimes to more than three hundred beats per minute, a ventricular fibrillation leading to respiratory arrest, which in turn causes the patient to faint, all this in less than a minute. He now began detailing the treatments, listing the medicines, the antiplatelet drugs that facilitate blood circulation and the nitroglycerin that relieves the pain by dilating the coronary arteries, he was captivated, no longer had any idea what he was saying but was unable to stop talking, throwing out sentences like lassos in order to catch her and keep her close to him. Soon his heart rate was racing, abnormally fast, a tachycardia close to two hundred beats per minute; he risked suffering the ventricular fibrillation he had just described to her, risked fainting, risked almost anything, frankly; Rose turned slowly toward him with starlike disdain, looked him up and down, and smilingly explained to him that a bear had just sat on her chest, didn’t he know? She then told him, slyly, that she was ready to go through it again, if he would agree to play the bear—he had the physique and the finesse, she would bet her life on it.
* * *
Virgilio Breva was indeed rather bearlike in his supple slowness, his explosiveness. He was a swarthy blond with a stubbly beard, his soft hair swept back, piling up in curls on the back of his neck. His nose was straight, and he had the fine features of a Friulian. He had the light-footed gait of a sardana dancer despite the fact that he was close to two hundred pounds, with the corpulence of a former fat kid, toned to the point where he was thick-chested, full-bodied, without any visible excrescences—no flab or lumps, in other words—a body that was just a little fleshy, enveloped in a layer of fat of equal compactness, thinning toward the extremities of his limbs, toward his very beautiful hands. Although transformed into this seductive and charismatic colossus—with a stature that matched the eloquence of his warm voice, his enthusiastic if occasionally excessive moods, his bulimic appetite for knowledge, his extraordinary capacity for hard work—his body was prey to painful fluctuations, an elasticity that haunted him with feelings of shame and fear (the trauma of having been mocked as pudgy, chubby, plump, or simply fat; the anger at having been looked down on for that, for the sexual difficulties it caused him; all kinds of apprehensions), his self-loathing gathered into a ball inside his stomach, like a torture device. This body was the great torment of Virgilio’s life—constantly monitored, examined for hours if he got a speck of dust in his eye, taken to the ER if he got a sunburn, questioned intensely over a sore throat, a stiff neck, a tired feeling—it was his obsession, but it was also his triumph, because women liked it now, that was indisputable: all you had to do was see Rose’s eyes as they wandered over it. Some spiteful people, jealous of his success, even said, with a snigger, that he had only become a doctor so he could learn to control that great body of his, balance his moods, tame his metabolism.
The best in his year at the internship entrance exam in Paris, he raced through his years of study, cramming everything—including spells as chief resident and surgical assistant—into twelve years, when most students in a similar situation would stretch it out to fifteen (but I also can’t afford it, he liked to tell people, with a charming smile, I’m not part of the establishment, and this outraged the wop inside him, the immigrant son, the industrious scholarship student, the boy who did not belong: he always blew things out of proportion). Creative on the theoretical side and prodigiously gifted on the practical side, flamboyant and proud, driven by vaulting ambition and inexhaustible energy, he often lost his temper, it’s true, and remained widely misunderstood: his mother, panicked by his success, connecting intellectual hierarchies to social hierarchies, ended up regarding him suspiciously, wondering how he had done it, what stuff he was made of, who he thought he was, this kid who went into a rage watching her wring her hands then wipe them on her apron, or hearing her moan, the day he defended his thesis, that her presence was completely pointless, that she wouldn’t understand anything, that it wasn’t her place, that she would rather stay home and cook a feast just for him, the pasta and the cakes that he loved.
So, he chose the heart, and then cardiac surgery. People were surprised, thinking that he could have made a fortune examining suspicious moles, injecting hyaluronic acid into frown lines and Botox into cheeks, remodeling the floppy, stretch-marked stomachs of multiparous women, X-raying bodies, developing vaccines in Swiss laboratories, giving speeches in Israel and the United States on iatrogenic diseases, becoming a high-flying nutritionist. Or he could have covered himself in glory by opting for neurosurgery, or even hepatic surgery—specialties that dazzle with their complexity, their use of cutting-edge technology—instead of which he chose the heart. The good old heart. The human engine. A creaking pump that gets clogged up, goes on the blink. I’m basically a plumber, he liked to tell people: I tap on the surface, listen to the echo, identify what’s gone wrong, replace the faulty piece, repair the machine, it’s perfect for me—hamming it up as he says this, hopping from one foot to the other, minimizing the prestige of the discipline when the truth was that all of this flattered his megalomania.
In fact, Virgilio chose the heart so he could exist at the highest level, reckoning on the idea that the organ’s kingly aura would reflect on him, just as it reflected on the cardiac surgeons rushing through the corridors of the hospital, plumbers and demigods. Because the heart is more than the heart, as he knew perfectly well. Even deposed from its former throne—the muscle continuing to pump no longer being enough to separate the living from the dead—it was, for him, the central organ of the body, the place where the most crucial operations, those most essential for life, took place, and to Virgilio its symbolic stratification was unaltered. More than that, as both a cutting-edge mechanism and the operator of mankind’s supercharged imagination, Virgilio envisaged it as the keystone to representations ordering man’s relationship with his body, with other humans, with Creation, with gods, and the young surgeon was awestruck by the idea that he would be a part of this, a recurrent presence at this magical point in language, permanently situated at the exact intersection of the literal and the figurative, of muscle and emotion; he was thrilled by the metaphors and figures of speech that made it appear as the very analogy of life and never tired of repeating the fact that, having been the first to appear, the heart would also be the last to disappear. One night at the Pitié, sitting at a table with some others in the duty room, in front of the huge mural painted by the interns—a spectacular tangle of sexual scenes and surgical operations, a sort of gory orgy, jokey and morbid, where a few representations of hospital bigwigs appeared between all the asses, breasts, and enormous erections, among them a Harfang or two, generally portrayed on the job, in obscene postures, doggy-style or missionary, scalpel in hand—he told the story of the death of Joan of Arc, his delivery theatrical, eyes sparkling like obsidian balls, slowly recounting how the captive was taken by cart from her prison to the Vieux-Marché, where a crowd had gathered to watch, describing the slim figure in the tunic that had been treated with sulfur so she would burn more quickly, the pyre built too high, Thérage the executioner climbing up to tie her to the stake—Virgilio, encouraged by his listeners’ captivated faces, mimed the scene, tying solid knots in the invisible ropes—before setting fire to the bundles of sticks with an experienced hand, lowering the torch to the coals and the oil-soaked wood, the smoke rising, the screams, Joan’s last words before she suffocated, then the scaffold blazing like a flare, and the heart that they discovered intact after the body had been consumed, red and whole in the ashes, so they were forced to rekindle the fire to be rid of it.
* * *
An exceptional student, an extraordinary intern, Virgilio intrigued the hospital’s management but struggled to find a niche for himself among groups of fellow surgeons-to-be, professing with equal vehemence an orthodox anarchism and a hatred of “families,” those incestuous casts, those biological connivances—when, in truth, like so many others, he was fascinated by all the Harfangs in white coats, attracted by the heirs, mesmerized by their reign, their health, the power of their numbers, curious about their properties, their tastes, and their idioms, their sense of humor, their clay tennis courts, so much so that he became obsessed by the idea of being invited to their homes, sharing their culture, drinking their wine, complimenting their mother, sleeping with their sisters—a raw devouring—and he intrigued like crazy to make it happen, as concentrated as a snake-charmer, then hated himself when he woke up between their sheets, suddenly rude, unpleasantly insulting, a grumpy old bear kicking the bottle of Chivas under the bed, wrecking the Limoges porcelain and the chintz curtains, and he would always end up running away, a lost soul.
His acceptance into the cardiac surgery department of Pitié-Salpêtrière sent his emotions up a notch: aware of his value, he immediately despised the petty rivalries of the medical courtiers, ignored the docile heirs and heiresses apparent, and set to work on getting close to Harfang, getting so close to him that he could hear him think, doubt, tremble, so that he could sense his decision in the very instant it was made and see it in the movement of his gesture. From now on, he knows, he is going to learn with this man what he could never learn anywhere else.
* * *
Virgilio checks the Italian team’s roster on his cell phone—makes sure that Balotelli is playing, Motta too, yes, that’s good, and Pirlo, and we’ve got Buffon in goal—then exchanges predictions and insults with two other chief residents who will be eating dinner in front of a giant plasma screen tonight and drinking his good health, both of them French guys who hate the defensive Italian style and support a team that is physically underprepared. The taxi glides in parallel with the Seine, as flat and smooth as a runway, and as he approaches the entrance to the hospital opposite the Chevaleret metro station, he tries to calm himself down. Soon he is not responding to his colleagues’ messages, only smiling, dropping out of their gamblers’ stake-raising frenzy. Rose’s face reappears in his mind, and he is about to write her a gallant text—something along the lines of: the curve of your eyes encircles my heart—then changes his mind: that girl is a nutcase, a dangerous nutcase, and tonight, nothing must disturb his concentration, his control, nothing must deflect the success of his work.