Desirable Body

by Hubert Haddad

  Not thinking about the cameras, for the first time and without gagging, Cédric examined the territory of the body that spread out beneath his chin. At his request, he’d been able to observe his face in a mirror. Something in his gaze and his expression had changed, yet he’d recognized himself, the way one discovers oneself again in a hotel room after a long journey to the other side of the world. But he did not recognize this body; he’d never experienced anything with it other than passive functions like urinating or defecating, which were no longer really of his doing. It was as if someone were using his presence, this sentient configuration that he couldn’t forget. Eating, too, was a challenge for him, but of a different sort. He would chew his food for a longer time before it disappeared into the abyss. Were there two of them sharing a plate of mashed potatoes or an apple? Was he this glutton’s taster? Cédric recalled an exchange with his Swiss psychiatrist. Cédric had asked him, as a provocation, why people didn’t consider him to be the transplant rather than the body. All that remained of him was a head, and the other man’s body that linked him again to his animal life was much more imperious and invasive. “What is unique about every human being is what is contained in a skull,” the psychiatrist had responded. “Consciousness, personality.” Nevertheless, the vital impulses passed through this heart and these intestines and went back up all the way to the tips of his hair.

  He touched the left arm, crossed the fingers, slid them down to the stomach, palpated the penis and the scrotum and, sitting up, continued toward the thighs and calves, then slid back up, this time with both hands, to the chest. He noticed several beauty marks on the torso, like a constellation, and brown hairs on spots that were unusual for him, along with a scar on the groin and several others on a forearm and the thighs, no doubt from vaccinations. The penis under his palm still did not respond. The fact that it might not be able to get erect hardly bothered him; he was incapable of imagining making love to a woman one day with the organ of another man. Even though the proportions were similar to his, the creature on which his head was sitting was more muscular, stronger, more solidly built. The body was impeccable in appearance and must have been a few years younger than Cédric. And certainly it had been in perfect health before winding up in the Emergency Room and inheriting the head of a quadriplegic cuckoo bird.

  For the first time since his accident, Cédric shook with the beginning of a laughing fit, but it quickly turned into a sob as he registered the convulsions of this chest that didn’t belong to any known life form. Must one be self-aware in order to laugh and bring about the body’s mechanisms? His greatest surprise was to see his motor reflexes reacting to his thoughts.

  As he was examining every nook and cranny of skin, he noticed a small bluish tattoo on the underside of one arm: three entwined spirals with something resembling a face in the center. This marking scared him somewhat, as if it had been inflicted on him without his knowledge. Then, realizing that his suffering was still raw at the memory of his previous body, kicked out by this resolutely foreign physiognomy that he despaired of appropriating one day, Cédric experienced a sort of tenderness for the tattoo, the whim that had it inscribed, the narcissism it took to choose the design and suffer the pain of the needles.

  After a rather clumsy use of the hands as tools to explore all the minuscule bumps and ridges of the skin, he began to examine the hands themselves, palms open, and once more he was frightened at no longer recognizing, after so many years, their oval shape and their boniness. Those hands, thick and hard, didn’t resemble his at all. The life line was that of someone who would live to be a hundred; the head line, identical across both palms, would have revealed a positive spirit if one believed in palmistry. Bending and unbending the fingers, he noticed that the middle and ring fingers of the left hand were stiff. In the fleshy part of the right thumb, a scar bore witness to a rather deep wound that must have required several stitches. The fingernails were rounded, surprisingly translucent, with light pink half-moons. Each time a nurse had clipped them for him, he was reminded of the fact that nails and hair continue to grow after death. Are there manicurists for the dead, hairdressers for corpses? All the peculiarity of his new nature was contained in the collar of flesh and slightly indurated skin at his throat and neck. From time to time he would graze it with his fingertips, thinking that this huge scar alone belonged to both body and head, the border of two broken lives. Why had they not grafted, as a counterpoint, the debrained skull of his donor onto his destroyed body? Perhaps such a monster could—in solidarity—at least have attested to their previous lives.

  “Signor Cédric!” cried the nurse gaily, as she came in to give him some medicine.

  “Are you shocked that he’s naked?” Cédric answered almost spontaneously.

  “So, you’re talking about yourself in the third person now?”

  Cédric was silent while the nurse strapped his arm. He was thinking that children and monarchs speak of themselves in this way, as if in someone else’s stead. In Italian, it was a grammatical form of politeness. Surely there must have been a third person somewhere.

  20.

  From a first-class trauma center to a recovery and rehabilitation establishment, between yet another operation and the threat of a sudden increase in antibody levels, Cédric—the problematic miracle man—had to endure several more months of the ups and downs of his transplant surgery. He was surprised in an obscure, apathetic way at the strange moral abandonment in which he had been confined. Every now and again a female voice emitted words of encouragement and affection over the phone, but he had difficulty placing it. Was it his girlfriend’s? He seemed to recall that she had broken up with him once upon a time. Then the image of a large sailboat cleaving through steel-colored waters came cruelly back to him. Still under the impersonal guardianship of Dr. Servil and the maniacal attention of other physicians for whom every hour he survived was worth a fortune, he began to think that his willpower was possibly being slowly annihilated. At this point he was allowed to take so-called “comfort” drugs whenever he liked, and he swore to himself that he would discreetly eliminate all those liable to cause any biochemical imbalance. He knew that this decision had only been made once his metabolism had evolved. His sense of individuality was restored little by little with the gradual recovery of a memory that until then had been purely cerebral, without any real object. His consciousness, in regaining some authority over his sensations as they rose through his internal organs and his nerve endings, seemed to have to extricate itself from a dreamlike tenuousness that had pushed it to the side, in a bubble of unconsciousness, without a thought for the outside world. It was as if, as he was slowly freed from a mighty inhibition of a medicated sort, the road to his emancipation was taking shape: the need to understand, a desire for freedom, the intention to escape the dubious constraints of his environment. As his mind became clearer, he couldn’t help but grasp his condition as a dependent guinea pig, a unique phenomenon sequestered by medical authorities. Even if it were a privileged one, when would this institutionalized condition end?

  With this return to lucidity, it soon became obvious to him that his survival had been financed at considerable cost. One didn’t change bodies without having a fortune at one’s disposal, unless one was a laboratory animal or a subject of a covert experiment who soon wound up in a morgue. He had been chosen for this opening night, with the elites of science in the box seats and public opinion in the orchestra seats.

  One January morning, for the first time Cédric felt warmth in his loins and a sort of quivering. With a hesitant finger, and the painful impression of committing an indecent act, he touched a penile tumescence. Soon there was a full erection. He recalled that on a tortured body—hanged or strangled—such an erection pointed to imminent death. Nevertheless, he manipulated this penis for a long time, as if to tame it; even if one hadn’t undergone an almost total transplant, the most autonomous, almost uncontrollable part of the body of any ordinary man was his penis. The size of t
his penis was intriguing to Cédric’s touch, its shape a raised arc: one more absurdity that in the end made him moan in pain. He was resentful when he thought of that other man with his lovely smooth muscles who, decapitated and transplanted onto a luckier man, had nonetheless kept for himself alone, for his headless body, all his attributes, like a starfish or the immortal jellyfish. Would Cédric regain his pleasure as a parasite, a kind of sea lamprey clinging to this pelagic body? Even if he managed to accept his transplant, the promised symbiosis with his unknown host seemed to him completely repulsive and unnatural. What was he to do with this hybrid, double reality now? He had the irrepressible feeling of a duality of body and mind, a sense of a monstrous coexistence. This erect penis in no way replaced his urogenital tract; it was simply superimposed on dormant former functions. And that heart in the middle of the ribs beat to a different rhythm from the one in the temporal lobes of his brain. Those too-wide hands, so idle, had once adapted to desires of which he remained ignorant. They had experienced embraces, caresses; perhaps they had even killed. All of a sudden Cédric was overwhelmed by the despair of a searing sense of exile from and actual suffering for his broken body, the one that had most likely been incinerated with the other man’s head. If he were to survive, would Cédric perpetually have to endure the torments of that ghost?

  The telephone rang, reminding him that he was supposed to go out with his assigned nurse, a kind of mischievous governess; nevertheless, he answered after the second ring.

  “Cédric,” he heard. “Is that you? I’m back. Don’t ask me to explain anything. After Yemen, after what I’ve seen and experienced, I had to get away. Don’t ask me anything, I can’t stop thinking of you, and I’ve never stopped loving you . . .”

  21.

  The climate of civil war just about everywhere in the world, the indiscriminate terrorist attacks, and the increased police surveillance have not spared any European capital, but Paris seems to have regained its state of blissful relaxation with the first days of summer. The spring rains, which were torrential until mid-June, have ceded to beautiful sunshine. Can one imagine light without the sun? As Cédric Erg wakes up and his gaze turns to the reflections moving across his windows, he remembers having read somewhere in Nerval something like the daylight of dreams has no sun. Since he returned to Paris and rue du Regard, he has begun to dream again, and these dreams, luminous, frighten him by the absence of the celestial body and even more by the lack of awareness he has of them. Can one in fact speak about awareness in a dream?

  A clock somewhere in the apartment building, probably right upstairs from him, clangs out six o’clock with the hoarse sound of old metal springs. The warmth of a thigh reminds him of a mysterious change in peripheral sensations. Between what is not really him and this woman under the sheets, a phenomenon of extreme gentleness is diffused all the way to the depths of his eyeballs, behind his eyes, in an unlocatable point of his brain. Lorna glides her warm hand across the pectoral muscles, follows with her fingertips the outline of the abdominal muscles, and slides a palm in the hairy hollow of the groin, grasping an already erect penis. While she takes pains to masturbate it in a blind back-and-forth movement, novel images appear to him, along with old memories of when Lorna and he barely knew each other. Relationships begin in the crudest way, by an instinct of the flesh, as if the boundaries of the senses had to be crossed at all costs. Cédric cannot help comparing the way people have of touching each other and taking each other at the start, in a mixture of abandon and unease, with what he is experiencing today, between him and him, him and the other man. Getting used to this new body after so much time seems like an appropriation of a sexual kind, a disturbing usurpation, a rape almost. And Lorna’s excitement adds to his confusion. The last straw is the jealous impulse that overtakes him when he sees her writhing on top of him. She has straddled him and is moaning without for a moment looking him in the eye, given over entirely to this masculine body, her fingers grabbing onto its hips. He feels betrayed and abused at the very spot of his pleasure. No longer anything but a head resting on a narrow structure of bones, how can he identify with the other man, with his desirable body?

  “I love when you let me take control!” whispers Lorna. “Oh, I’m about to come with you . . .”

  Now she is slumped over, her face on the heart. Her lips pull playfully at the hairs around the left nipple. Not once did she kiss or touch his face, occupied only with the muscular and quivering body. What can one do with just a head? Was his own feeling at the moment of orgasm merely the idea of orgasm? Lorna’s splendid head of hair is rolled in electric rings, a python of coolness that surrounds her. She has pulled back a little, her head still bent forward.

  “I’m so happy we’re together again,” she says in her normal voice. “Even if we’ll have to live differently. Do you agree?”

  “It’s already a fact that we’re breaking up.”

  “I don’t want to lose you, Cédric. We’ll meet again from time to time at your place or somewhere else—whatever you want.”

  She was silent for a moment, fascinated as she noticed in the light the scar on his neck.

  “I came,” she says, turning her eyes away. “What about you? Did you like it?”

  He thinks for a moment about the incongruity of her question.

  “Yes. Making love sticks the pieces back together, everything moves from the sex to the brain, or the opposite. You loved me better and much less, before . . .”

  “Better and less well? What do you mean?”

  She asks this in a neutral voice that expects no response. Her beautiful heavy breasts roll upon each other as she raises her head, her chin on her fist. Two gold bracelets jingle as they slide from her wrist to the muscles tightened around her elbow. She flinches when she sees a bluish shadow on her lover’s arm.

  “A tattoo!” she cries. “It’s a triskelion, a Celtic symbol. The three legs represent the sun’s movement. Or the three worlds, those of the spirits, the living, and the dead . . .”

  He notices her expression of intense curiosity with its traces of desire, almost covetousness, as well as a kind of shocked repugnance. Embarrassed at having been caught out, Lorna looks him in the eye in spite of herself and bites her lips, shivering at the sight of this head that she no longer really recognizes. He hasn’t changed, at least his face hasn’t, with the exception of a few gray hairs around his temples and a core of distraught sorrow in his eyes, but this body that fans her desire no longer coincides with the face; it moves and reacts differently, its peppery scent excites her all the way to the small of her back. Is it possible to desire a stranger with astonishment, in the most conjoined intimacy? In Kobane, having taken refuge on the roof of her hotel with a colleague from a German magazine, she witnessed the public beheading of a young rebel by a squad armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. The head had fallen in the dust drizzled with purple vomit while the kneeling body had refrained from collapsing for a moment, as if some reflex stemming from pride had tensed its muscles. Then the assistant to the executioner, who’d been busy cleaning his ax, grabbed the bloody, dust-covered head by the hair and shoved it into a garbage bag while at the same time the shoulders of the dead body fell to the ground in a macabre prostration. Wherever she went, this scene haunted her, preventing her from seeing Cédric for a very long time. In a profession where the sight of atrocities becomes ordinary, some circumstances can lead to madness. Cédric’s head had rolled night after night in the bright glare and dust of a dream, while the body of the tortured man, wrists tied, had slumped with the same hideous slowness.

  Lorna absent-mindedly skims the tattoo with her index finger.

  As he feels her touch, Cédric lets out a short, hollow laugh.

  “Do you think he was Irish? The triskelion belongs to Irish folklore, doesn’t it? Like the harp and the Celtic cross.”

  Lorna swiftly removes her hand and sits up in bed.

  “It’s late!” she says. “I’ve got a meeting at t
he office . . .”

  As she searches for her scattered clothes, she spins around in the early morning light. Her breasts and supple hips move beneath the dark cascade of her hair. Her nudity has the splendor of a marble Venus made of one slab. Her perfection lacks nothing, not even the feet and hands of Aphrodite of Knidos. Cédric watches her go off toward the bathroom, her buttocks swaying above her long thighs. His desire overcomes him from a distance, unattached to the body, from unfathomable depths. Once again while she disappears from view, he experiences a painful, fierce kind of stump removal, a ghostly feeling in the lost regions of himself. Is his mind undergoing, symmetrically, the repercussions of an absurd surgical procedure, to the extent of becoming someone else in turn?

  Suffering from a migraine, with the image of clouds sinking into a mountain lake in his head, he falls asleep at the edge of a dream. Someone is threatening to kill him; he has just opened a multitude of anonymous letters in the shape of bird skulls quickly crushed in the hollow of a fist and thrown in the trash. As he leaves the editorial offices of the magazine, swarms of starlings fly out of the sewers, but he pays no attention to them. Dusk spreads out across the birds. Unhappy with his day, he dives into the restless, preholiday crowd. Someone shoves him violently with a shoulder for no reason. He absorbs the impact and, out of breath, continues on his way. Lorna is expecting him for dinner. His good mood returns at the mere thought of this. In a few strides he is in front of her building. Ignoring the elevator, he climbs up the darkened staircase. Remarkably beautiful, like an actress when the curtain falls, Lorna greets him in an evening gown. Her horrified look forces him to explain himself. But she doesn’t want to hear it; she’s waving her arms and is about to scream. Suddenly he realizes that she doesn’t recognize him. “But it’s me, Cédric Erg, it’s me!” He tries to make her hear him. But as he says these words, he glimpses a stranger’s face in the big hall mirror and then recalls being shoved. How can he convince Lorna that he is himself, that someone simply stole his appearance in a moment in a crowd? Panicked by the loud cries of a thousand starlings, he promises to catch the thief and flees—without the hope of ever returning—down the dark staircase where every step has the look and feel of a cetacean vertebra.