Desirable Body
Desirable Body
Hubert Haddad
Translated from the French by Alyson Waters
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English translation copyright © 2018 by Alyson Waters. Originally published as Corps désirable. Copyright © Zulma, 2015. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
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Desirable Body
Reflection belongs to the head alone, but the entire body has memory.
—Joseph Joubert
Prologue
Soon immortality will no longer hold any secrets for humankind. It has already been found in nature, in an insignificant jellyfish, the turritopsis; this jellyfish has neither heart nor brain, and once it has reached sexual maturity its life cycle reverses and it returns to a juvenile state, before it matures yet again, and this goes on forever. Everything that science has promised us will inevitably come to pass. In probable conjunction with bionics, transplant surgery will be able to reconstitute an entire person, just as in a certain gothic novel. A chosen few—whether fortunate or martyred—will thus be able to experience several consecutive lives with one and the same head, pathfinders for a perennial humanity. However, in order to answer questions about the use of a lover’s body and the wholeness of consciousness or the soul, one must undergo the experience oneself, in the flesh, like a guinea pig for all eternity.
Perhaps some day far in the future, if biodiversity allows for it, when the human species has emerged from its coma and completely rewound the clock of the apocalypse, children and idiots will ask with complete candor what the world was like before the creation of human beings.
1.
He doesn’t really recognize this city despite its almost worrisome air of familiarity; no doubt it has something to do with the time of day, the chiaroscuro outlining the facades in the evening light. Nonetheless, it is with steady steps that he reaches the Solitude Hotel, where as far as he can recall a room has been reserved for him. In the deep blue of dusk, the neon signs stand out above the rooftops against a background of mountains.
There are still crowds, young couples and old men in mourning, disabled people of all sorts, cohorts of nuns in cornettes as excited as schoolgirls. While he is walking on a high stone bridge across a roaring river that crashes against the pillars of the arches, a black-clad individual touches his shoulder in the semi-darkness. Startled, he leaps backward. “What is it? What do you want from me?” he exclaims, wary. He thinks he noticed the man a short while ago in front of the station, both of them standing about waiting in vain for a taxi. The other man probably followed him all the way to this poorly lit bridge. “Are you Cédric Allyn-Weberson?” the man asks calmly. He then notices the man’s careful dress and the compassionate veneer of a mortician on his bluish face. “Let me introduce myself,” the man continues. “Mr. Puith, Esquire, trial lawyer. But it is not as a lawyer that I have come to . . .” Puith grabs his arm, muttering empty apologies as he drags him to the well-lit side of the city. Along the way the lawyer, incoherent and full of allusions that are cheerful and quarrelsome by turn, speaks of a transaction or deal for which he claims to be the agent. All of a sudden, with a glass in hand, he becomes very friendly in the hotel bar and explains his mission more clearly: someone wants to buy from Cédric Allyn-Weberson the rights to the exclusive use of his name. Nothing less than that. A Texas financier was offering a considerable sum for Cédric Allyn-Weberson to give his name to him. “You see,” continued the bizarrely slurred voice of the lawyer, “this name has no equivalent; you are the only one who’s had it since your father’s sudden death . . .” Long, wordy dreams are rare; normally we wake up rather quickly when distinct words reach our consciousness. His father’s sudden death! He’d hardly had time to take offense before the scene faded into an uneasy listlessness.
It was with a sense of bewilderment that Cédric found himself in his bed on rue du Regard. The earsplitting noise of a passing ambulance pulled the last of him out of that halftone nightmare without his having lost its almost intact sequencing. He hadn’t stopped laughing nervously since he’d woken up. The idea! Buying the name Allyn-Weberson because it is so rare—what gleeful presumptuousness! The ordinary absurdity of dreams had reached such a level of hilarity that it took his breath away. Was the dream linked to a secret wish to see his father die and thus free himself from the mark of an identity that was in and of itself despotic? They say all dreams conceal desires. Shortly afterward, in a sudden return to credulity but with a touch of apprehension, he turned on the television news. Obviously there was no mention of his father, except in a very roundabout way in the financial segment.
Cédric hadn’t had any contact—at least not any direct contact—with Morice Allyn-Weberson for years, and that choice had been deliberate. While the old man believed he’d finished with his excessive, even devastating generosity toward a son with no special talents, he still had the means to interfere at will in Cédric’s life and to spy on him through every keyhole. This was before fate got hold of Cédric, before the event that might horrify even a person condemned to hell and overwhelmed by its torments. Cédric readily admitted that being born rich could help overcome the most unforeseeable obstacles—for example, surviving either being abandoned or no longer having a body. But his story clearly demonstrates that there is no miracle cure against fate, even those cures concocted by the M.A.W. laboratories, the biggest in their class in the pharmaceutical industry.
2.
When, by some phenomenal accident of gametes, you happen to be the only son of Morice Allyn-Weberson and his tragic wife, née Erguson, the world seems to be a blood-red carpet that unfurls continuously at your feet. Without conceit of any sort, the protagonist of this dark tragedy could claim to have had a privileged, if not a happy childhood, despite the fact that his distressing mother had tried to hang herself on the eve of his twelfth birthday before finally throwing herself out the window in front of her husband. For a long time, Cédric’s last name had been a blessing, opening doors for him, until one day, unable to tolerate it any longer, he’d stormed out of the family home and adopted in desperation a penname that suited him, a sort of sobriquet of solitude that he took partly from his maternal side. It was under the pseudonym Cédric Erg that he would make a name for himself as an irrepressible polemicist back in the recent past when his father, without Cédric’s knowledge, was watching over him with the one hundred eyes of the divine Argos.
This story, which would simply have been a minor news item if it hadn’t put the future
of humanity at stake, incidentally poses a few literary ethical questions: What, in fact, is the point of recounting in detail these unfortunate vicissitudes of a life whose outcome can only mortify sensitive beings? Honestly, we would be very worried if the explanation didn’t count among our normal deficiencies. No one is responsible for the destiny of another, and even less so for another’s misfortunes. Yet if but one single reader can manage to conceive in the loamy depths of his brain what that unfortunate Cédric Erg had to suffer, he would find himself reconciled, on an unpredictable or at least virtual plane, to this inconceivable, or even nonexistent, side of our poor human condition. Little does it matter if this man existed in reality—let us place our bets on the existence of someone who aspires to the distractions of happiness; whatever the case, the spate of catastrophes he would have suffered would correspond to nothing that could be admitted or borne by the average person.
After majoring in law in college and some less than systematic studies in political economy and comparative literature—studies that only served to delay indefinitely his taking on responsibility of any sort—this apostate son had been writing a column for one of the most prominent news magazines for eight years. By some mysterious stroke of luck, the last of the Allyn-Webersons received his press card before he’d written a single line under his pen name. Cédric Erg was not lacking in axes to grind. Having authority over the chaos of signs and events through the use of platitudes was to his mind the ultimate delusion, but his colleagues appreciated his courage and his free spirit. While his bêtes noires were all the predatory industries, such as the Big Pharma companies or the oil corporations, the politically powerful feared him even more, for he was scathing when it came to those jesters, investors, and other fat cats.
Impressed with his new recruit, the magazine editor gave Cédric freedom to betray his caste to the full extent, provided he never, ever revealed his true identity. “You would lose all credibility, and also risk your neck,” he said to him with some alacrity.
3.
The young woman barely greeted him in the elevator. Ill at ease, Swen Geislar stood tall on the tip of his left toe and craned his neck to give himself a somewhat normal appearance. A few minutes earlier he had been sitting at the counter of the Vermont, the café across from the news agency building, and saw her drifting by in the sunlight; he had rushed in her wake with the gait of an out-of-kilter android, his eyes glued to the unyielding swell of her hips.
Lorna Leer had mobilized all Swen’s faculties—mental and sentimental—since the moment she’d distractedly introduced herself to him in the big newsroom to ask about the weather in Slovenia, where she was supposed to go to cover a bloody attack on the French Embassy. She could have asked any transcriptionist on the floor, the way one inquires about the time, but fate had chosen him. When suddenly he found himself face to face with the most beautiful woman in the world, lightning passed from her to him, reducing all his common sense to cinders. If a minuscule amount of hope suffices to give rise to love, a heavy dose of despair can also make one person fall madly for another. The woman thanked him with an unforgettable smile, a pure gem that his memory would store in its jewel box. Ever since that day, whenever she appeared out of the blue from her travels, he’d spend his time following her like a limping shadow in the hallways of the agency or down the adjacent streets, ready to light cigarettes or open doors for her.
Lorna exited the elevator on the third floor with one of those melting, barely sketched movements of shoulder and face to signify a faint acknowledgment without a glance. Her perfume filling the elevator car was equal to a communion of the flesh. When he reached the fifth floor, Swen went to his desk, deaf to the distracted words of greeting from his colleagues, who were drowning in a flood of satellite information. In front of his screen, Swen clicked on the latest news in an effort to return to consciousness.
Researchers conducting tests in the harsh environment of Mono Lake in California have discovered the first known microorganism on earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. This microorganism substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in its cell components. Upending all our knowledge about living organisms, this bacterium, which incorporates arsenical elements in its own DNA and in its cells, has just confirmed the hypothesis that previously unknown biological laws can exist on the earth and in the universe.
Discovered in flagrante, a 37-year-old man was given a suspended sentence of one month on Friday by the court of the city of Nancy for stealing from the principal cemeteries of the region dozens of cherubs and Virgin Marys that he then placed around his dog’s funeral urn.
This past Thursday the United Nations estimated that the amount of oil pollution in southern Nigeria would require the most comprehensive cleanup operation ever known. According to a study put out by UNEP, presented Thursday at Abuja: “The environmental restoration of Ogoniland could prove to be the world’s most wide-ranging and long-term oil cleanup exercise ever undertaken if contaminated drinking water, land, creeks, and important ecosystems such as mangroves are to be brought back to full, productive health.” This unprecedented project will take between 30 and 40 years.
Two years after the surprising announcement in an American scientific journal of the possibility of transplanting a human head onto a donor body, Sergio Canavero, the chief neurosurgeon in an Italian hospital and expert in neuromodulation, is preparing to carry out this historic operation in the coming weeks. Using chemical substances that allow the regeneration of the links among fascicles of myelinated axons, it will then be possible to attach the spinal cords of donor and recipient and subsequently reactivate the nerve flow. A large team of neurosurgeons, plastic surgeons, and other specialists has already been assembled for the great day.
Grinning childishly, Swen didn’t hesitate to change the neurosurgeon’s name to Cadavero; all he’d needed to do was change a single letter, which we call a “typo.” He took fiendish pleasure in adding this name to certain news items without getting into trouble, either because of leniency or blatant incompetence on the part of his superiors. His impeccable spelling allowed him these little flights of fancy at a time when he was required to correct the subjunctives, past participle agreements, and spellings of double-consonant nouns of almost all the editorial staff, including the editor-in-chief. As soon as he had some latitude, with his training in internet research and his skills in controlling sources and uncovering as much reliable information as possible, Swen would go digging around in Lorna Leer’s online private sphere; however, to his constant dismay, he could find nothing amusing, provocative, or poignant. He would have loved to see her naked in some other life, a cabaret dancer or swimming champion. After much Googling, copying, and pasting, Swen noticed the presence of the same individual at her side in a variety of settings. By targeting this newcomer, Swen ended up discovering his identity. It was indeed the polemical columnist Cédric Erg: a strapping fellow in a suit, six feet tall, who was gazing lovingly at Lorna with his dandy’s eye. Sick with jealousy, Swen immediately diverted his digital stalking from Lorna to Erg. A good detective with adequate tools can always manage to uncover some inadmissible secret on the web. Even an angel would leave a trace of feathers behind. Yet Cédric seemed to have put up a solid wall around the image he’d forged of himself as a fearless and flawless champion of justice. Swen went back as many years as he could, but all traces of Cédric Erg disappeared early on. There was nothing on alumni or other social media sites of people seeking former friends. That rare last name, the meaning of which must be related to “ergotism” and “ergot poisoning,” left Swen in the dark. By a bizarre coincidence that he wanted to attribute to some formidable system buried in his brain, Swen found a declassified document from a former patients’ association that had been financed by pharmaceutical companies. It was quite simply about the columnist and his probable family ties to Morice Allyn-Weberson. The biography of the latter in directories and yearbooks set Swen on the trail of a first wife, née Erguson,
and of an only son named Cédric. All that was left for Swen to do was compare his clippings to be sure. He had his revenge in hand. Lorna Leer would soon find out to what kind of traitor or spy she had taken a fancy.
4.
Still, it seemed as though none of Cédric’s colleagues or readers had ever established a link between him and the M.A.W. company. Cédric had burned all the bridges imaginable that tied him to his ancestry, except the totally forgotten one on his maternal side. Only a monomaniacal detective with Asperger syndrome could have connected Cédric Erg to the businessman’s wan first wife, long erased from memory. Morice Allyn-Weberson had moved close to Geneva, where his company headquarters was located, had remarried two or three times, and would certainly have divorced Cédric’s mother had she not tragically anticipated his intentions.
Thanks to a new pair of glasses and a bearded chin, Cédric the renegade had completely transformed his face. Years went by, and no one pestered him anymore with compliments in the hope of receiving a favor from a super-rich relation. He’d become poor, almost impecunious: he had just enough money to pay the rent on a thousand-square-foot apartment on rue du Regard and to buy the best single malt whiskies. Though she envied his independence, his girlfriend could find nothing to criticize about their lifestyle. A slightly reckless field reporter who did freelance work for a large Parisian news agency, Lorna Leer was not offended by Cédric’s penchant for secrets. In her opinion, her lover suffered from a kind of selective amnesia—he forgot nothing of what she confided in him. The couple lived an entire year in periodic intimacy between professional absences. The young woman understood, without its having been spelled out, the generic tragedy of Cédric’s childhood. With her thirst for freedom, Lorna was accommodating by nature and expected nothing from him other than tender friendship and passionate embraces.
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