Desirable Body

by Hubert Haddad

  What had become of her lover’s tenderly affectionate body? Had it been reduced to dust like some poor broken thing, along with the rest of the human debris from the surgical wards? Along with the other man’s head? And this new body that she didn’t know, which she hadn’t yet been able to see, how would she manage to accept its monstrous nudity against her skin, accept that it would take her and penetrate her? Just the thought of it chilled her to the bone and drove her toward Emilio with the desperation of a drowning woman grasping at straws. She grabbed him, his arms, his flat breasts, the fullness of his sex, with the brand-new feeling of an unbroken wholeness, an ardent plenitude. How absurd was the Platonic myth of the androgen sliced in two like a hard-boiled egg or a sorb-apple! Emilio was not half of a complete man, nor was she half of a whole woman. And if they kissed and fused with such passion, it wasn’t out of a desire to regain their lost unity, but on the contrary to magnify their difference. Emilio’s sex placed her at a great distance from herself.

  Lorna recalled their good-byes at the airport in Rome. Would she ever see him again? The first night they were together once more, right after he’d made love to her without undressing her, he’d pronounced a barely comprehensible speech that was morbidly ambiguous and from which she was still reeling: in addition to the duly noted absence of consciousness, the lack of brain reflexes, and the inability to breathe on one’s own, a person cannot be declared dead until an arteriography and two encephalograms are performed, confirming the irrevocable ceasing of all brain function. Lorna was often stunned by the willful perversity of the best-intentioned people when it came to vital issues such as a couple’s breakup or a violent death. Because Emilio’s words were tinged with jealousy, they frightened her, especially today because of what his account about brain death could mean after her two quick visits to what remained of Cédric in a protected wing of the Rult-Milleur château.

  The establishment had been converted into a prestigious hospital by the branch of an insurance group that managed a chain of hospitals in Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe, and was covertly dependent on the M.A.W. Trust. The pharmaceutical industry had the financial means to set up a hospital and donate to charity. While Lorna was contemplating the wintry desolation of the grounds, an employee of the hotel wing of the château called to her. Lorna shivered, her mind wandering, and almost apologized for her tears, which seemed to blend into the mist on the windows. The staff’s kindness to her, oddly overplayed, only increased her uneasiness. But she had to go to Geneva for a meeting that worried her even more. During these restless days and nights near the poor dormant head of the only man she had truly loved until now, all her guilt had melted away, replaced by an icy terror. Nothing was actually her fault, unless one believed in some magical spirit. Love could not be a pact with the devil or a contract of possession. Besides, the multidisciplinary functional rehabilitation team in charge of the patient had reassured her regarding the efficacy of the anti-rejection treatment: Cédric’s chances of survival seemed to be taking on heft. As if making a promise, the doctors were now talking about a long period of convalescence, therapies of adaptation to the “graft” once the immunological problems had been resolved, the various treatments related to structural reconstruction, the massage and physical therapy sessions . . .

  Still, she felt an overwhelming and uncontrollable oppressiveness inside her. Ever since her terrifying discovery of Cédric’s duplicity, an ocean of incomprehension surrounded Lorna, a desert island floating with no anchorage point. And everything that followed, hurricanes and wicked waves, seemed to be one of Neptune’s whims.

  14.

  Lorna went to Cédric’s bedside one last time before leaving Rult-Milleur. His body was covered with a sheet and his throat bandaged, so that only the part of him she knew was visible. Yet this face was observing her oddly, as if through different eyes.

  “I’ll be back in a week or two,” she said, without being able to stop gazing at the tiny wrinkles that had appeared on his forehead.

  His lips moved around an unpronounceable word before he let out a guttural sound that gradually became clearer.

  “I’ll be back in a week or two . . .”

  “What did you say, Cédric?”

  He uttered the words with a studied slowness, as if he were inventing them. His voice had a metallic, almost artificial tone. Lorna placed her hand on the sheet, realizing suddenly that she was touching the other body.

  “So you can speak, Cédric! The doctors explained to me that your abilities would return one by one. When I come back, maybe you’ll be standing up! We’ll be able to walk in the grounds. The landscape in these mountains is sublime . . .”

  When the taxi arrived, Lorna left the room in a hurry. Cédric gazed for a long time at the door, as if he could see through it. A bad migraine was pounding his temples. But he wasn’t really suffering. It was a sharp pressure, like a hot blade, to which the word pain wasn’t really suited. The sudden appearance and disappearance of the woman whom he recognized as the one who occupied his physical memory left him in dreamy perplexity. Around him and in him, in what seemed to be him, so many enigmas followed one after the other then abruptly merged together into complete amazement. Through the diamond window, a snow-covered mountain peak altered its shimmer with the passing of the clouds. The sky soon brightened to a deep blue, and the entire mountain was illuminated. Cédric felt a sort of sympathy for this shape of the outside world. With closed eyes, he sought a precise spot of comprehension, but the meaning of things slipped away; there was a misty film covering obstinate presences like that door or that window with its sloped perspective. Which one should he choose for his escape? The sound of a hospital cart rolled through his left ear. Wearing smocks, their hair tucked tightly beneath a hairnet, two women with wide hips came into his room. He recognized them; the one who was pushing the cart wore a carnival mask smile. The other one looked at him fixedly, with a worried pout. They removed the sheet, undid his underthings, and palpated the arms and legs, the chest of this body, the stomach, the crotch, and the perineum.

  “What do you feel today?” asked the more experienced woman.

  “Your hands,” he said.

  “That’s a start! Now move your right foot, go ahead. No, not the left, the right. Your right foot corresponds to my left hand, get it? Now raise your left hand, no, not the right. But that’s good; you’ll get there. The other one now, left or right, it doesn’t matter.”

  The assistant nurse took in, one by one, the inexpressive face, the limp penis, the muscular thighs, the strength of this torso beneath the pale anterior extremity. She couldn’t help feeling a kind of religious awe mixed with disgust.

  “Miss!” said the physical therapist, annoyed by her assistant’s lack of attention.

  The assistant drew the sheet back across the naked body. She watched distractedly as her colleague’s fingers tapped the patient’s jaws to work his facial muscles. Like all the caregivers assigned to this exclusive hospital wing, she’d been sworn to secrecy. And so far, no one had spilled the beans. Besides the usual clientele, the octagonal tower of the Rult-Milleur château attracted only swarms of starlings from the mountain pastures. In fact, convalescents and terminally ill guests did not have access to this high-security wing reserved for celebrities or special cases.

  “Your responsiveness is improving every day,” said the physical therapist. “Soon you’ll be able to move about with a walker.”

  Cédric exchanged a long look with each of the two women who were about to leave the premises. He found them to be droll, almost comical, especially the nurse with the round eyes of a night bird. For all of them, the uncertainty regarding the consequences and the outcome of this difficult adventure made any communication moot. He was about to be transported in a wheelchair to the office of a certain Hans Morcelet, the psychiatrist in charge of giving him back the use of his mind and his words. Cédric let himself be conveyed like a sack, his head floating above a numb, imprecise sensation com
posed of shooting pains and twitches.

  When he found himself alone again, Cédric let out a childlike moan. The images inside his skull had lost all three-dimensionality; at times they faded away, transparent, almost abstract because they were detached from any stable meaning. When would he find the strength to pull himself out of this gangue that had no defined limits? From time to time, when he least expected it, he would experience a dreadful dizziness: there was no longer anything below him or at the end of him besides an immense suffering similar to the vanished memory of gestures and caresses. He fell spinning into the abyss of an unknown anatomy; he was going to be crushed against a tile floor of oblivion, falling so deeply—but into what grave? His entire being was torn apart; he was a great void lacerated on the inside; molten lead permeated him all the way to the tip of his heart. Cédric felt something like a quiet determination in the pit of his stomach. If body and soul were the same substance, what would remain of him?

  15.

  Adversity rarely misses an opportunity to frustrate fate. Georgio Cadavero had become the darling of scholarly journals and television shows, had received heaps of praise, almost an equal amount of scathing criticism, and a few death threats. The calls for help from families in distress, the reservations expressed by eminent theologians, the debates regarding the seat of the soul, genetic paternity, or bioethical matters, and protests from groups against euthanasia all participated in the media hullaballoo; the climate was one of noxious fascination in which hopes for survival mingled with castration fantasies. Former patients who considered themselves to have been ill-served because they’d been deprived of glory and the relatives of desperate cases attacked either Cadavero’s competence or his integrity. He was, for example, questioned about one too many operations he’d performed on an octogenarian in a coma who had suffered a brain hemorrhage. His insurance managed to settle that lawsuit out of court, but other defamatory matters from his past tainted his accountability and his honor to greater or lesser degrees. The media constantly brought up the possibility of transplant tourism, or even of a “transplant trade,” comparable to the slave trade. Thanks to Jean Dausset’s well-known research on tissue compatibility, which enabled the immune system’s reactions to be controlled, transplants had become globalized, without cultural or ethnic borders, and with the relatively overt support of governments. Whether he was despised or venerated, Cadavero had quickly become a sort of messiah of the ancient longing for eternal life. The least worthy of his contemporaries, phantoms of their former selves, half-robotized and overmedicated, did not want to believe they would die. To them, death was nothing but a virus to be neutralized, a programming error. These precarious passengers of life could not imagine that their synaptic fields were fragile and fleeting, despite their boundless wealth. Even the notion of immortality is subject to cellular corrosion! One becomes human by losing a part of one’s defenses, by fighting tooth and nail against the angel of death; experience had taught him this and he’d discussed it abundantly in his work. A world without humanity does not exist, or if it does, it does so only at the nethermost regions of a cadaverous dream.

  Nonetheless, an old, senile autocrat from the Balkans, a Russian oligarch in the terminal phase of carcinoma, quadriplegics offering themselves as guinea pigs, and a horde of wealthy impotent men had inquired about Cadavero’s services with the aim of changing bodies as fast as possible, by any means. The newspapers were teeming with speculations and dreams. Males unhappy with their gender thought it would at last be possible to adopt a female body in the most intimate way, and women didn’t hesitate to visualize taking on some permanent virility. One woman was coveting the body of an adored brother who was brain dead. An old Texas businessman with grand political ambitions suggested giving lifetime terms of office to future Abraham Lincolns or John F. Kennedys, whether they had been assassinated or not, renewing their terms for all eternity to the glory of the nation. Couldn’t we in fact imagine a world divided between simple mortals and immortal geniuses in the near future? In this scenario, the heads of Albert Einstein and Nelson Mandela could have enriched and guided successive generations ad libitum. Dependable witnesses to History would thereby be preserved. Each country would have its immortal elites, like fetishized minotaurs onto which one would transplant young, healthy, vigorous, detachable bodies every ten or twenty years. All this boastful blather had an effect on the critics of these hypothetical fairy tales who then, with equal confidence, expressed alarm at the idea of a new generation of Führers capable of wreaking havoc for a thousand years, or an anemic society stockpiling on one side the refrigerated heads of those laying claim to immortality and on the other the bodies of donors with their digitized pedigrees, kept in medically induced comas.

  It wasn’t long before Cadavero’s exploit became subject to doubts: fifty-three days after the operation, only a few photos and videos had been released in response to the uninterrupted flow of commentaries. The world wanted to see the miracle man from head to toe, preferably half naked and leaping in the air. Who could prove that this dervish with a scalpel, part fakir and part magician, had not created out of whole cloth this tallest of tall tales? Sooner or later people were bound to say that after five or six weeks the “soul had departed” from the man-with-another-man’s-heart but that no matter what, the whole thing represented considerable progress for science. Although Cadavero was aware of the harm these outpourings were causing him, he was still obliged to respect his schedule and hop a plane to Geneva. His sponsor, the CEO of M.A.W., wanted him there for financial and insurance reasons. As a result, Cadavero was planning a visit to the hospital in the Rult-Milleur château. It would be his third visit since responsibility for his patient had been transferred to his Swiss colleagues. Cadavero had been assured that the patient, whose immune system was functioning for now and who had come out of a worrisome asthenia, had regained a bit of mobility. The surgeon could at last show visual proof of his feat to the media mob. This would be the premiere of Cédric Allyn-Weberson in his starring role as medicine’s miracle man.

  16.

  Heavy snowfalls obliterated the countryside between Mount Dou, hardly distinguishable from the leaden sky, and the Isangrin Pass, which was now inaccessible. The winding road that led to the Rult-Milleur domain was continually covered by new snowfall, and two snowplows were used to keep the route clear. But the helipad near the tower allowed one to bypass the occasional road closings, and the whirring of helicopter blades accompanied for part of the day the unfamiliar din of the plows.

  Looking out through the bay windows at the desolate spectacle, Cédric was listening to Dr. Morcelet’s monotonous voice enumerating once again the obstacles to a robust rehab.

  “Your father’s office has given the orders,” he droned on. “When you have regained your executive functions, you can cater to any of Dr. Cadavero’s whims. What happened yesterday is beyond belief. It would be terribly detrimental to have you destabilized by all this chaos . . .”

  The psychiatrist’s darkened face, silhouetted against the sun, stood out against the background of snow-covered cliffs. “All this chaos!” he repeated. The press conference organized the previous day in the château theater had indeed taken the institution’s management by surprise. Dr. Cadavero seemed to hold all the power, and it wasn’t until journalists from Radiotelevisione Italiana disembarked from helicopter shuttles that a wave of panic went through the hospital administration. Cédric remained confused after what had felt like a hostage taking; it was as if he’d been a contestant in a game show that had morphed into a pre-indictment interrogation. Then the whole crowd got back on the helicopters and headed to Piedmont with the illustrious neurosurgeon. And as if the authorities in Geneva had ordered them, avalanches of snow fell during the night, seemingly to prevent any repeat offense.

  “You’ve become a public figure,” sighed Dr. Morcelet.

  Cédric avoided eye contact with the psychiatrist. He didn’t understand what such a statement was supposed to
mean to him. Never again could he embody any sort of figure whatsoever. Something essential—he didn’t know quite what—was lacking from this unique instance of being alive thanks to someone else’s anatomy. He also avoided looking at those hands (supposedly his) lying flat on the flaps of his bathrobe. The only part of him he dared examine, at times with nightmarish apprehension, was his face. He still accepted this bodily part as if it belonged to him, although suspicious grimaces appeared on it, with an indefinable expression in the gaze and mysterious coloring on the temples and chin. His head—and indeed it was his—seemed balanced precariously on the spine of some unlikely pachyderm. The psychiatrist, thinking he was reassuring Cédric, attributed these bad spells to the considerable posttraumatic effects of the transplant, which were accompanied by a disturbance of visual messages, by a likely dysfunction of the internal ear, by a variety of coenesthetic mirages, and, last but not least, by problems of posture.