Desirable Body

by Hubert Haddad

  There are subtle shadings in our preferences, everything fluctuates, love comes and goes like dreams or clouds. And so Cédric came to love Lorna with true passion the moment he discovered a beauty mark on her neck, just below her left ear. How can this be explained? It was a summer evening in Florence. They had made love gently, without that circumstantial savagery that lovers offer each other freely at the start of a relationship. As he lifted her heavy, amber-colored hair, Cédric was overwhelmed by unfathomable confusion, as if the meaning of the universe had suddenly been revealed to him without any other details. He kissed Lorna’s neck at this spot, with tears in his eyes and the intense feeling of already having experienced this moment as many times as eternity could have reserved coincidences in time or space for some ill-fated immortal person. The young woman didn’t notice anything; they fell asleep curled up together, skin against skin. This body breathing deeply next to him had just taken on immense sentimental value because of a beauty mark. Did he love this marvelous Lorna for herself, in whom he’d just discovered, by chance, right below her left earlobe, a sort of secret identity? Soon he too fell asleep, his face in her hair, thinking that no one is really loved because we constantly go to the wrong house or the wrong person with the same extraordinary obstinacy.

  5.

  A sudden hailstorm swept across the half-open metal shutters with the sound of a booming waterfall. Cédric Erg immediately recalled his nightmare, the poorly lit bridge and the businessman who looked like a mortician. He’d lost everything with Lorna, not just his physical appearance. She was and remained the vibrant sensitivity of his soul, or of whatever took its place somewhere inside his skull. Lying fully clothed on his unmade bed, staring at the ceiling, Cédric took in the glimmers of light outside that were blurred by the din of the downpour. How could the adventure be summed up? Ever since he’d met Lorna, he’d found stability and no longer questioned his identity. His research for his weekly column required real determination, given the various kinds of pressure and blackmailing that his revelations almost always triggered. Cédric didn’t merely content himself with reporting allegations based on vague rumors; he delivered undeniable proof. Everyone, for example, might have caught wind of the fact that entire populations were wiped out in order to exploit new uranium mines; Cédric provided quotes and names. His favorite target, the pharmaceutical companies, constantly sent unambiguous signals to this maverick of accusations. Threats of a lawsuit and other intimidations left him stone cold, or, rather, surrounded by a haze. He was certainly spied on; and unless it had been some crazy coincidence, he could swear that an attack had even been made on his person. For a while now he’d been taking certain precautions. But the fact that he’d obtained a gun permit and systematically used rental cars did little to change his usual habits. The risks of the job were simply part of the job. The minute an investigative journalist begins to deal with conspiracies involving industry, finance, and politics, he knows exactly what is in store for him. Cédric’s professional life in fact had little substance compared to his passion for Lorna, who was sensual, now madly in love and so forcefully present that all day long his mind was filled with pictures of her nakedness, her face, that beauty mark beneath her earlobe.

  His father, as accustomed to Cédric’s escapades as he was hostile to his journalistic activities, left him more or less alone from then on, even if his informants, managers, and subordinates of all kinds were still quite probably on duty.

  Everything happened during the first days of spring. Not the slightest forewarning; no star of fate ever announces ahead of time a private drama or tragedy. On the contrary, Cédric Erg was swimming in happiness. Aboard the Evasion, a five-sailed pleasure boat heading from Athens to the Cyclades for a weeklong journey in good company, he had thought he could at last relax and lay down his arms. It was evening, and they were on the bridge facing the reefs in front of the golden island of Paros.

  “We’ll get married whenever you’d like, Lorna,” he said without thinking, in the exhilaration of a charmed moment. “You are definitely the love of my life . . .”

  The young woman didn’t respond right away. Her smile was sad as she squeezed his hand, her immense blue-gray eyes turned toward him. Minuscule in the high yardarms, sailors were furling sails or repairing some minor damage caused by an inauspicious collision as they were leaving the Athens port. One could hear a rowdy chant broken up by the breeze and the cries of several gulls.

  “Actually, I believe we’re going to break up,” she responded at last, in a trembling voice.

  Cédric understood from her gaze that she was telling the truth, and it hit him with a slightly unreal, softened blow that he was still far from internalizing but that would devastate him, as if he’d glimpsed from afar the crest of some malevolent wave. Without answering her, teetering slightly because of the swell, he went to stroll around the mizzenmast on the foredeck swept with sea spray and abandoned by the pleasure boaters. Above, sailors were still maneuvering on the mast. Suddenly there was an ominous crack, up near the crow’s nest. A cigarette in his lips, Cédric heard a ripping noise accompanied by a strong hissing sound that stopped when it hit his back so violently that he felt only a sort of prodigious chill in the dull explosion of all his senses, thinking for a quarter of a second about what a beheaded person must feel when the ax falls. His cries, smothered by the sea swell, mixed with the squawking of the gulls; but the sailors, who had seen a support of wood and scrap iron fall from the crow’s nest, shouted much more loudly.

  Passengers and crew hurried to the foot of the mizzenmast. Hands reached out toward the victim, whose legs were bathing in sea foam. An officer ordered everyone not to touch the mass of steel that lay across the injured body. Luckily there was a doctor on board. Lorna, in a state of shock, had lost her hauteur and was sobbing breathlessly. A steward was asked to bring her to her cabin while Cédric was receiving first aid. An hour later, after he’d been brought to Paros on a lifeboat belonging to the maritime police, a helicopter transported Cédric Erg to a hospital in Athens.

  6.

  Anesthesiologists and surgeons took turns in the operating room, diligent but not hopeful: so much patching up seemed doomed to fail, yet the brain scan showed some cerebral activity. The patient, who was on life support, had several serious fractures and other injuries. After a host of expert opinions, two specialists of spinal cord injuries attended to what was most urgent: decompressing the spinal cord and stabilizing the vertebrae. However, the discovery of a double cervical tear had considerably slowed the choreography of useful gestures to the point where Dr. Andreas Agno, the ER surgeon, had to revive the flagging energy of the staff with some strong words. Three teams followed one after the other once the neurosurgeons had temporarily withdrawn; a fracture or a wounded organ could be just as fatal as an embolism. The patient, placed in a medically induced coma as low as possible on the Glasgow scale, would probably not pull through.

  “That would be the best outcome,” thought Andreas Agno as he removed his white coat in the sterile anteroom.

  “He’s fucked,” said his colleague Emilio Panzi, without mincing his words. Panzi was a young Sicilian doctor on loan to the Athens University Hospital for his expertise in immunology.

  The chief surgeon waved his hand in annoyance, but then immediately let his arm drop.

  “I suppose so,” Agno admitted. “If he were to survive, it would be terrible for him and his friends and family, but our role is to try to do everything possible to that end, is it not?”

  Raising his forehead, Emilio Panzi looked into the gray eyes of the Greek man and realized he wasn’t expecting an answer.

  “Do you speak English?” Agno added. “Then go find Miss Leer in the waiting room and tell her whatever you think is appropriate. There are situations in which giving people a sense of hope or one of hopelessness boils down to the same thing . . .”

  It must have been 2:00 a.m. when Cédric Erg was taken from the operating table and placed in a ro
om in the ICU from which the body of a young motorcyclist who had died the previous day had just been removed. The young surgeon assigned the dreadful role of announcing the news to a woman who was probably about to become a widow returned from that task extremely agitated. Lorna, breathlessly beautiful despite the dozens of hours she’d spent in an uncomfortable and badly ventilated room, did not flinch when she heard his verdict. Panzi had learned to show he had no illusions in critical situations, unless of course some miracle were to occur. But this time, clinical death seemed imminent to him. “I don’t think he will last the night,” he declared calmly, after giving the usual summaries about the patient’s state and the procedures that had been done. Lorna’s deep-blue eyes shone strangely.

  “He will live,” she whispered, the points of her pupils piercing the man’s heart.

  “But his is a hopeless case,” he allowed himself to say.

  “He cannot possibly die now!” said the young woman in a tone that brooked no argument.

  She asked to see her boyfriend immediately, even if only through a pane of glass. Panzi didn’t know how to counter this commanding beauty’s breach of regulations. Under her spell, he broke the rules almost unconsciously, and took her into a decontamination chamber where Lorna slipped on a smock and plastic gloves; then he led her to Room 27 in the Intensive Care unit. Cédric was in a deep coma, his eyelids squeezed tightly shut; he seemed to be meditating on the terrible nightmare of reality. Intubated and hooked up to all sorts of equipment, he was breathing by means of a kind of imposed violence, a lab rat in his own survival.

  Lorna touched his hand with her fingertips.

  “He looks like a torture victim,” she said.

  “We must be prepared for anything: a drop in blood pressure or a lack of oxygen could aggravate his wounds . . .”

  The surgeon studied the young woman. He could have explained what the future would be: total paralysis, suffocation, spasms, gradual damage to the internal organs, kidneys, bladder, lungs, sexual and sphincteric dysfunction. But his near-certainty of a fatal outcome made all words superfluous.

  “Leave us alone. I need to speak to him,” she said.

  “He’s in stage 3,” the Italian man responded. “A very deep coma. Do you know what that means?”

  “That’s my business. Leave us alone . . .”

  Dr. Panzi asked her to be brief, then thought that, really, it didn’t matter, that she could even rip out all those tubes and wires like any of the Three Fates: nothing of this man’s fate would be changed in any noticeable way.

  When she was alone, but with the door kept ajar as required in the ICU, Lorna leaned very close to her lover’s face with its look of a drowned man, so dramatically peaceful. “Can you hear me? Do you recognize my voice? I love you, Cédric, I’ve never stopped loving you, but we could no longer live together; there were too many habits between us, we could no longer fall asleep like that, blindly in our love . . .” She continued whispering like this profusely in his ear, gradually liberated by so many confessions. For the first time since the idea of breaking up with him had taken hold in her without her having realized it, Lorna was confiding in him. Her confession had a kind of brutal self-indulgence about it, as if she hoped to go back on her betrayal, reshape it into some kind of lovers’ conspiracy, but Cédric’s inert body ended up bringing her back to her solitude.

  “You’ll live!” she said softly, as she rose to leave the hospital.

  Outside, in search of a taxi, Lorna continued the diatribe in her head. A few days before the accident, she’d learned Cédric’s real identity from an anonymous and no doubt ill-intentioned email, the truth of which she had no choice but to acknowledge. That chilling revelation had so wormed its way into her that she decided to break up with him. Cédric had been cheating on her for years with himself, with a stranger. But this duality no longer existed. Paralyzed, without consciousness, the body she knew even better than her own was being abandoned to a former emptiness in which all identities merge. Lorna turned toward the front of the Metropolitan Hospital, looking for the neurological services floor. Her gaze slid across the windows of the rooms. In a voice broken by emotion or anger she exclaimed:

  “As sure as you are the son of Morice Allyn-Weberson, I know you will live!”

  7.

  A bitter wind swept through the Athens sky, revealing the surrounding low mountains and, visible from Mount Lycabettus, the port of Piraeus and its fleet of ferries. Lorna, in a taxi taking her back to the Metropolitan Hospital, contemplated the ominous blocks of concrete buildings cut at right angles from one street to the next, coiffed here and there with ancient ruins. She forced herself to pick out, in the anonymous mass of crowds mixing on the squares and the sidewalks overrun by markets, tourist restaurants, and shops selling trinkets, the face of a middle-aged man, any man, as the car slowed or stopped at a red light; she concentrated on the idea that she could have loved him, known him as intimately as she had known Cédric for years. What could differentiate this unknown man from the arbitrariness of the love of her life, if not the absurd imprint of habits? Lorna closed her eyes on that urban chaos that was so similar to the confusion of thoughts and impressions cluttering her consciousness. Twenty-seven days had passed since the accident on the Evasion off the island of Paros. How much time does such a tragedy remain suspended in reality, ungraspable? Cédric was not dead, even though he was forever pinned inside his skeleton. Still, she had to mourn the loss of the man she thought she’d known, and even more, of the man whom she’d loved physically and in every way possible. After her decision to leave him had rapidly faded on the sailboat, she became amazed at the inconsistency of human choices, which had little relation to the true anchors of feelings and passions. The taxi entered the hospital grounds, gliding beside the glass and steel building facades. An ambulance was parked in front of the Emergency entrance. Faced with the ordinary, two male nurses were cheerfully unloading an aluminum-coated stretcher. They were probably chatting about innocuous things while, beneath their grip, a life as fragile as a candle flame trembled between combustion and extinction.

  Lorna turned away. Ever since she’d discovered who Cédric’s real father was, an unpleasant sense of reality had come over her, along with bitter bewilderment and its aftertaste of pain. The Allyn-Weberson fortune had come between her and the brutality of facts. Now that she’d told him about the accident, the pharmaceutical magnate was no doubt going to take Cédric’s fractured fate into his golden hands. Thus she would be freed of unbearable obligations. “Over my dead body,” she thought, immediately frightened by the meaning of her words.

  Wandering down the hallways of the neurosurgical wing of the hospital, Lorna thought she caught a glimpse of the chief surgeon; she hurried toward him, hungry for information, but his figure slipped away before she could reach him, and he disappeared into an elevator. Panicked at the idea that he was trying to avoid her, she stopped to catch her breath, then shrugged, saying to herself that, anyway, surgeons often took pleasure in handing out bad news. She found the section she’d been looking for and went up the hallway with its doors half-open onto hospital beds where a bare foot or the draped pyramid of a knee brought to mind the terrible loneliness of abandonment. When she arrived in front of Room 27, her flesh trembled with the fierce tenuousness of the moment. Cédric was sleeping at the bottom of an abyss and his lips were moving. Quadriplegic, incapable of uttering a sound, Cédric had come out of his coma a few days earlier, and his eyes begged for deliverance. Lorna was unable to bear the sight of his bandaged hands and puffy face; she turned to walk from one end of the hallway to the other, dazed. He had just uttered some words in his sleep, how could it be doubted? She had read his lips: Help, they said.

  8.

  Cédric Erg survived the three successive operations that Dr. Andreas Agno had scheduled out of sheer professional consciousness: Agno’s sole aim had been to reduce posttraumatic complications. Having undergone the ordeal of those operations without any re
al change in prognosis, Cédric gradually went from patient to privileged guinea pig. He was in a teaching hospital, and because his spinal cord injuries showed no improvement after all that, he could practically have been the object of a pedagogical lecture on dissection. That’s what Emilio Panzi was thinking once again while viewing the images of Cédric’s cervico-dorsal junction and spine from the front and side. But that particular guinea pig had emerged from his coma and so was of no use to the laboratories of the young disciples of Galen of Pergamon and Hippocrates. Panzi didn’t really understand the chief surgeon’s anger. Wouldn’t he be freed of what was, in the end, a frightening responsibility? Top administrators had intervened to organize Cédric’s transfer to a hospital on the Italian mainland, claiming that the patient’s state necessitated operations “that required techniques not available” in the establishment where he was. According to the principle of free choice, Cédric Erg, who had recovered almost all his mental faculties, had given his agreement simply by blinking. Despite being a good surgeon and a cautious diagnostician, Agno was not nearly as capable as the potential Nobel Prize–winning surgeons in Turin and Milan.

  Emilio Panzi raised his head toward a ray of sunlight, thinking that all this was no longer his concern. His year as visiting doctor would be over in a few weeks; he would go back to Rome with much relief and a few regrets. The ray of sunlight was diffracted as it went through the hall window and then penetrated the bay window of the reception office. A mauve figure was just gliding by behind the glass. It took him some time to recognize it: attraction and annoyance were battling inside him. Coveting the girlfriend of a quadriplegic patient upset him less than having to demoralize her. But it was indeed Lorna Leer, as ravishing as ever and even more than ever, because she had fine, tiny expression lines on her forehead and lovely violescent circles under her eyes that perfectly complemented her dark blue pupils. Exhaustion and anxiety in beautiful women had the charm of surrender. Returning from Room 27, Lorna entered the office without knocking, after receiving a slight nod from behind the bay window.