“I was sent to you,” she said. “Any news?”
In a gesture of surprise as well as vanity, Panzi removed his glasses.
“What? Haven’t you been told?”
“What do you mean?” asked the young woman sharply.
“Your boyfriend is being transferred to the famous Spalline Hospital in Turin, on direct orders from the Ministry of Health.”
Lorna was relieved. She’d been afraid that Cédric had returned to his comatose state. But as long as Cédric’s brain was totally functional, it was not absurd to dare to hope.
“When will he be transported there?”
“In a matter of days. You must know in whose hands he’s going to find himself. You’re the only one who can still put a stop to this infernal machine. But I suppose you have given your consent. Am I wrong?”
“Cédric asked me to.”
“You know that a blink of the eyes is not equivalent to a signature.”
“He would prefer by far to die than to vegetate in the state he’s in now. He often spoke about this to me, as if he’d had a premonition . . .”
“Think about it! The whole thing is delusional! It belongs to the realm of science fiction. There is only the slightest chance that the operation will succeed, if indeed it takes place at all. There are too many requirements that need to be met in record time. And then, in our line of work, the first experimental procedures are generally doomed to fail, doomed to fail.”
“Dr. Georgio Cadavero and several international teams of specialists have been working on it relentlessly for two years. In any case, that’s what Cédric’s father explained to me on the phone.”
“The billionaire Morice Allyn-Weberson, right? We were all very surprised.”
“I’ve never met him. Cédric is lucky to be his heir. I would have given my life for him, even if it isn’t worth much!”
“Yet you’d wanted to leave him . . .”
“Who told you that?” cried Lorna.
“When your boyfriend began to speak, his first words were about you. He said he loved you. He begged you to spare him, and not coldly to kill him. Those were his words . . .”
9.
The private jet that landed at Turin Caselle Airport was unexpectedly delayed on the tarmac because of a bomb scare. Dr. Mirami, the neurologist from the Spalline administration, showed his annoyance in the ambulance the hospital had sent. Those bomb scares, which occurred now almost daily, would end up blocking society and ruining the economy.
“Just calculate how much time has been wasted in Italy alone,” he grumbled to the skeptical nurses. “In airports, train stations, businesses! It adds up to millions, even billions of euros.”
After a delay of more than two hours, the ambulance at last entered the hospital grounds in the evening. Dr. Servil, Morice Allyn-Weberson’s right-hand man, who’d come from Switzerland and been delegated to supervise the transfer, was becoming impatient as well in the neurosurgical services reception area. The slightest hitch could get him fired. It was with a sigh of relief that he greeted Dr. Mirami, who was climbing out of the ambulance in a rage just as the flames of sunset were spreading. The two men accompanied the stretcher to Room 7 in a special wing of the transplant department. The patient was given a powerful sedative as soon as he was settled. The Swiss doctor and Mirami, an enormous hulk of a man with a skull bumpier than the shell of an alligator snapping turtle, left the room quite satisfied.
“Missione portata a termine,” said Mirami.
“Well spoken!” sighed Dr. Servil, who now had to send his report to the disagreeable old man in Geneva.
The next morning, Cédric woke up very early, eyeing the rectangle of blue inside a high, narrow window. The sky was as deep as oblivion. Little by little he felt the crushing weight of his limbs, as if he were sinking indefinitely into soft soil. Nothing had as yet distracted him when two startlingly beautiful nurses came into the room. One of them was pushing a cart; the other immediately drew back the sheet on his nakedness.
“Buongiorno, signore! La incomodiamo soltanto per la sua toilette della mattina.”
They washed him and swaddled him in silence, seeming totally serene. Their hands, cold grass snakes, slid along his body while the women observed him as if he were some kind of transitional species, not really alive and not quite dead. He said to himself that his coma had spared him this ordeal for a long time. He could have felt less shame by pretending to be asleep, but he couldn’t keep his bulging eyes off the dancing creatures who were handling him. The emptiness of his total infirmity—he was incapable of moving a finger or controlling his sphincter—made him hostage to a hateful hygienic regimen. He’d woken up in the organism of some kind of aching newborn with a too-heavy head that retained all the consciousness of his previous life. It was nonetheless impossible for him to move his arms or legs. Only his tongue moved, without his wanting or being able to speak. After having diapered him and reconnected his feeding tube, the nurses went out, leaving behind them the odor of ether and soft soap.
What would he become like that, trapped in his lifelessness? A thing that is dragged and pushed without one’s knowledge? No one had found it necessary to explain to him the reasons he’d been transferred. He’d simply acquiesced to some bizarre stammering. In his condition, to consent was the equivalent of taking some initiative. The previous day he’d been shot full of powerful sedatives: a shot for Italy! His transfer had occurred while he was in a deep sleep. The color of the sky confirmed this more than the nurses’ language or the Intensive Care cell. Now he was waiting, useless to the world, in unfathomable despair. Would he have to endure all this paraphernalia forever? He would have liked to die the way one falls asleep, by dint of concentrating; to stop his heart, the only living organism inside a hollow, soft statue.
The very muted song of a blackbird coming through the window suddenly attracted all his attention. From the visible branch of a beech tree, the melodious sequences followed one after the other, reedy, with the silences of a muezzin between them. The bird was improvising on an endless theme. This tiny, harmonious mechanism was declaring its desire to the living space around it. That radiant palpitation of sound waves arrived at Cédric from deep within a universal secret. Was it possible that musical emotion was absent from it? Cédric closed his eyes in order not to cry. He had lost Lorna; his arms could no longer hold her. A glass wall separated them. From now on caresses were forbidden to them. She would grow weary; nothing fades more quickly than physical intimacy. In fact, he didn’t recall seeing her again here. Hadn’t she said she would leave him even before the accident? Horror and fear wouldn’t hold her to him much longer. What could a young woman hope for from an invalid? It was the end for him. He would have wanted to tear out the thread of his life with his teeth, clear out the space of his anatomical remains, and go down the liberating road toward death. Disappear! The word was pure sweetness, similar to the last drop of blood in a severed artery. But who would help him? He didn’t want to live one more day, one more night. Who would save him from the abomination of being buried in the tomb of a body?
Several steps echoed in the hallway, and the sound of voices came from behind the half-open door. A small crowd of white coats entered the room shortly afterward and surrounded the quadriplegic. The tall figure of a doctor with graying temples appeared at the foot of the bed. Around him, attentive to the doctor’s every word, a staff of surgeons and anesthesiologists with compassionate faces seemed to be posing for a class photo while a young woman with shiny skin and pursed lips typed on a laptop. Smiling broadly, Dr. Mirami agreed with all of Georgio Cadavero’s recommendations.
“We will have the patient ready when the time comes, dopodomani or entro un anno!”
“I hope it will be closer to the day after tomorrow,” the chief surgeon replied. “It’s no small feat to coordinate and keep at the ready a team of one hundred specialists . . .”
“And it costs more than a day of filming at the Cinecittà,” Dr. Ser
vil added in French.
Cédric’s eyes were mobile, and again he noticed how the doctors were using him as a clinical specimen, with a kind of paternal indulgence and little concern for his problematic condition as a human being. Even though he had some knowledge of Italian, his mind was confused by drugs and the lingering effects of the anesthesia, so he didn’t understand much of what was being said. It was the flood of white coats that really intrigued him. There were hardly any students among them; rather, they were all seasoned professionals. The one named Cadavero addressed the group with a mixture of severity and caution.
“The operating procedure isn’t very complicated,” he said. “And we’ve thought through the ethical questions. Of course, there are strict rules to follow, but I’m convinced everything will evolve positively in the future. As for the technical feasibility, despite what our French colleagues think, we have amply demonstrated . . .”
An old doctor with a chicken neck gathered in a bowtie interrupted him in English, provoking a flicker of reticence in his mentor. Was it because the patient, all ears, was manifesting his surprise with a groan?
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, dear colleague,” said Cadavero. “Mr. Cédric Allyn-Weberson obviously must renew his agreement. Everything we undertake will be perfectly legal.”
10.
Lorna had given herself twenty-four hours to make up her mind. She would spend another night in this city whose roads could lead anywhere; on a whim, she could take the train to Turin or stay a little while with Emilio at his invitation. With its palace courtyards, its alleys dug out in blue shadows, and its ruins that turned golden at dusk, to Lorna Rome had been built in a day. From the piazza Navona to the Santa Prassede, from the baths of Caracalla to the Turtle Fountain, she’d strolled for hours carrying in her mind the image of a shattered body lying on a hospital bed; a man’s body she had known so intimately. Floating above that nauseating shipwreck of flesh was her beloved’s drowned face, ethereal in the dusty light. Intermittently, the sharp pain of his physical decline shot through her, so that she almost keeled over. At sunset, halfway between the Area Sacra and the Capitoline Hill, she practically fainted, her arms and chest supported by the alabaster base of a caryatid.
When she returned to her host’s before nightfall, Lorna gave in to him without second thoughts, and, naked as on the previous day, she forgot her strolls through the city with a kind of blind vehemence. To be manhandled and penetrated without warning for once satisfied her completely. Unable to stop herself at the edge of her desire, she longed only to be worry-free and asleep, in the primal satisfaction of an embrace. The man withdrew with a movement of his hips and lay on his back, continuing to stroke his mistress between her thighs with his moist palm. With one leg and her free arm, Lorna fretfully sought out the coolness of the sheets. The cold sperm and sweat of a stranger repulsed her slightly, like a trace of death. She shivered with fatigue. There had always been for her a threshold of aversion to cross before abandoning herself to pleasure.
“Are you drifting away, Lorna?” Emilio asked.
“I’m too hot. Give me a cigarette . . .”
He picked up an ashtray, the lighter, and his pack of cigarettes. As he edged toward the night table, the muscles of his back, still shiny with sweat, bulged.
“Why don’t you stay a few more days?” he asked, sitting up.
Lorna, her shoulders resting against a pile of pillows, exhaled a long ribbon of smoke.
“The operation is scheduled for Monday. I want to see him before then; it may be the last time.”
Emilio Panzi cast a quick glance at the young woman’s profile. She’d said these words with a slightly raspy voice, but with no apparent anxiety.
“You’re a surgeon,” she continued. “Do you think he’ll make it?”
“Dr. Cadavero and his team seem entirely optimistic. But all outcomes are possible . . .”
“Be frank! What are his chances?”
“It’s impossible to say. No one has ever attempted such a crazy feat.”
“But what is his chance of surviving?” Lorna persisted, in a strangely neutral tone.
“In my opinion, almost none in the short or medium term. I have to be honest. I don’t think for a moment that they’ll succeed in reconstituting the connection of the spinal cord. Professor White’s monkeys, which are the reference point, didn’t even survive twenty-four hours.”
“That was half a century ago!” Lorna cried.
Emilio put out his cigarette in the ashtray that lay between their two naked bodies.
“That’s true. Science evolves. Today we’re able to re-create organs using stem cells. With a solution of two polymers, it may even be possible to fuse nerve cells. But you have to face facts. Those marvelous chemical substances will no doubt make it possible to repair a certain number of neural pathways, but how can one connect in record time the thousands of fibers, each with its own role to play, between a recipient in induced hypothermia and a donor who is brain dead? Can you imagine what godlike synchronization those hundreds of surgeons and their assistants must have in order to hand off to one another in squadrons with the impossible mission of not committing the slightest error? Not even to mention the consequences of total body radiation and the problems of immunosuppression and psychological rejection . . .”
“They will pull it off! Cédric’s father has paid them to succeed.”
“Your Cédric is a luxury guinea pig; his head is worth twelve million euros, a mere trifle for a pharma tycoon! But rest assured, at least he will remain alive in the annals of medical transplants . . .”
Lorna nervously squashed her cigarette butt, her eyes turned to the dark slit of the window. One word too many would suffice for there to be no possible tomorrow. She would take the train for Turin at dawn. With the sheet pulled up under her chin, she told herself that you couldn’t betray anyone with your body. People only grew apart, more foreign to each other than ever, with a slight taste of disaster in their mouths.
11.
After a psychological exam in the presence of a court officer, in the confines of his hospital room, the patient was asked whether he would agree to the operation as it had been duly explained by Dr. Cadavero. Convinced he would not survive, Cédric didn’t imagine for a moment the possible implications and consequences: anything seemed better to him than this interminable torture in the petrified space-time of the body’s prison. And if this adventure, by some miracle, ended up giving him back a tiny bit of his autonomy, at least he would then have the physical means to decide his own fate.
Once all those people had left his room, he felt an immense relief in the inaccessible zones of his mind. Everything would soon stop, and he would be finished with this wreck of a body suspended on the hook of a cervical vertebra. The great void of living about which D. H. Lawrence wrote would soon join the “vast void of the cosmos.” In the well of infinite abandonment where he found himself for centuries of seconds, he became oddly lucid at the idea of the nothingness that was so near. Without changing the axis of his gaze, he pondered the dust dancing in a ray of sunlight that caressed his left hand as it rested on the sheet. So: the creation by beheading of a new species was going to take place tomorrow or the day after. They were going to slice off his head, and that thrilled him to the core. Cédric dozed off thinking about this, and quickly fell under the spell of a dream. Why was someone letting hot candle wax drip on his face? He had been severed in two on the black flat surface of some sort of grand piano lit by two candlesticks; the panic of not knowing in which part of his body his consciousness had taken refuge drew from him an inaudible and unlocatable cry: did it come from the gaping trachea above his shoulders or from his throat, which was attached to nothing? Far away, a woman’s voice made the soundboard vibrate. When he opened his eyes again, he recognized Lorna’s face leaning over him.
“Are you sleeping?” she asked, as a hot teardrop fell on his lips.
“Thanks for coming,” he m
urmured in a voice hardly louder than his breath. “I think it’s for tomorrow.”
“The day after. I spoke with Dr. Cadavero’s assistant.”
“They talked to me about physical therapy, decompensation, psychological support . . .”
“Of course. Everything has been taken care of; you just need time and willpower after the operation.”
Cédric would have liked to lift an arm to stroke his woman’s hair, touch her living cheek. Did she actually think he would survive this crazy undertaking dreamed up in secret by a horde of surgeons in search of fame?
“I’m confident,” said Lorna, as if she could read his mind. “You’ll get back your mobility, your joie de vivre, your work . . .”
Faced with the unbearable steadfastness of her gaze, he thought that the only thing that could make him hope to survive was out of reach from now on. How would he ever be reattached to his being without losing those thousand ties that gave a distinctive face to his love? This woman had accompanied him so intently and given herself to him passionately, without hesitating, in the most graphic way. A faint smile crossed his lips at the thought of the desire running through his destroyed body like an imitation of desire.
“It can’t fail,” Lorna insisted. “There are too many scientific stakes . . .”
“And financial ones,” Cédric said, interrupting her. “You’re the one who contacted my father after the accident, aren’t you? How did you find out?”
Desirable Body Page 3