As you can imagine, Marianne cannot sleep. Torn up with pain, she has not taken sleeping pills or any other drug, but has sunk into a kind of trance; her way of coping. At 11:50 p.m., she jumps up suddenly from the couch. Is it possible she has sensed the moment when the blood ceased flowing in the aorta? Is it possible she had an intuition of that moment? In spite of all the miles stretching out across the estuary, between her apartment and the hospital, an impalpable closeness gives the night a fantastical mental depth, vaguely frightening, as if magnetic lines were hardening in a space-time fault line, and connecting her to that forbidden place where her child lay, allowing her to watch over him.

*   *   *

A polar night: the opaque sky seems to dissolve, the fleecy layer of cloud being torn away to reveal Ursa Major. Simon’s heart is migrating now, traveling on rails, on roads, inside that box with slightly bumpy plastic walls that glow in the beams of electric light, conveyed with incredible care, like the heart of a prince in times past, like his entrails and his skeleton, the body divided for distribution, interred in a basilica, a cathedral, an abbey, in order to guarantee rights to his lineage, prayers for his salvation, a future for his memory—the sound of hooves heard on sunken paths, on the dirt roads of villages and the cobblestone streets of cities, their rhythm slow and majestic, then the flames of torches were seen, making liquid shadows in the branches of trees, on the façades of houses, on the wild-eyed faces; people massed on doorsteps, towels around their necks, seeing each other and signaling silently to watch this extraordinary cortege move past, the black carriage drawn by six horses in full mourning attire, caparisoned in sheets and precious surplices, the escort of twelve knights bearing torches, long black coats and crepe hangings, and sometimes even pages and valets on foot, holding white wax altar candles, sometimes companies of guards too, and the knight in tears at the head of the procession, accompanying the heart in its tomb, advancing toward the back of the crypt, toward the chapel of a chosen monastery or the castle of his birth, toward a niche carved out in black marble and decorated with twisted columns, a shrine surmounted with a radiant crown, ornamented with escutcheons and coats of arms, Latin mottos carved into stone banners, and often people tried to look through a gap in the curtains to the inside of the carriage, where the officer of the transaction sat—the man who would hand-deliver the heart to those who would, from now on, take care of it, and who would pray for the deceased; most often this man is a confessor, a friend, a brother, but it was always too dark to see this man, or the reliquary placed on a black taffeta cushion, and certainly not the heart inside it, the membrum principalissimum, the king of the body, placed at the center of the chest like the sovereign in his kingdom, like the sun in its cosmos, this heart nested in gold-stitched gauze, this heart for which everyone wept.

*   *   *

Simon’s heart was migrating to one part of the country, his kidneys, liver, and lungs entering other regions, rushing toward other bodies. What would remain, in this fragmentation, of the unity of her son? How could she attach her singular memory to that diffracted body? What will become of his presence, of his reflection on earth, of his ghost? These questions circle her like fiery hoops, and then Simon’s face forms before her eyes, intact and unique. He is irreducible; he is Simon. She feels a deep sense of calm. Outside, the night burns like a gypsum desert.