“He was so old,” she murmured distractedly, recalling the billionaire’s emaciated face and the painful notion that he could have offered himself centuries of young beheaded bodies, generation after generation, as fodder for his top-predator immortality.
24.
His face haggard behind dark sunglasses, Cédric rented an Alfa Romeo at the Turin airport in order to arrive as discreetly as possible at San Pedro Hospital. He hadn’t forgotten a thing about driving, although it did take him some time to coordinate his gestures, as if two pairs of hands were arguing over how to use the steering wheel. Dr. Aimé Ritz met with him—Cédric was a journalist after all—for yet another interview. Although he had not recognized Cédric, the director of the now famous hospital balked when his visitor began to question him about the donor’s identity. The transplant accomplished by Georgio Cadavero and his teams of surgeons at San Pedro had entered the annals of medicine. As for the rest, Ritz, caught off guard, declared that he knew nothing about the body’s origin except that it had been delivered by helicopter the day before the operation. Because the administrative services of a hospital that had opened especially for the occasion were at the time not well organized, he hadn’t had access to Cédric Allyn-Weberson’s file. In any case, doctor-patient confidentiality would have prevented him from divulging anything. “Go question il signor Cadavero at Spalline Hospital!” he declared at the end of the interview, as if he were unaware that the neurosurgeon, top sportsman that he was, had just been traded for a small fortune to the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
In Trieste, where Cédric went the next day, Dr. Emil Schoeler was hardly more forthcoming. The hospital he directed had a reputation for discretion and tight security, but because of rivalry with his colleagues in Spalline, Schoeler agreed to meet with the journalist solely on the basis of his press card. When Cédric broached the question of the donor’s identity, a circumspect silence seemed the only response possible. Schoeler, who had never ceased denouncing the “celebrification” of the heavyweights of reconstructive surgery, in the end offered a vague path between two points of bioethics. Cédric, paying close attention, allowed the man to hold forth.
“Who worries about human dignity in an era when there is speculation about setting up transplant banks? The concept of brain death does not permit just anything. We know the risks of cerebral angiography. And let’s not even talk about body donors! Today, organ-harvesting teams have total leeway to obtain transplant organs very rapidly. Do you really think donors’ families are systematically informed in Italy? Most of the time, they’re led to believe that treatment is still ongoing, whereas in reality there is no hope.”
“Are you implying that the body Georgio Cadavero transplanted could have belonged to someone who didn’t want to donate his organs, or that it was used without his family’s knowledge?”
“Don’t write that!” cried Schoeler. “In my opinion, someone must have procured for Cadavero the body of an accident victim, for example a motorcyclist whose brain had been destroyed; Emergency Rooms get them every day. Still, this body had to correspond perfectly to the criteria posted on the National Hospital Register. This is, of course, only speculation.”
Baffled, Cédric dined that evening in a tourist restaurant at the port, then returned straightway to his room in the Kempinski Palace with its immense, illuminated facade overlooking the Gulf of Trieste. With what special privileges and what hope of enlightenment could he begin to visit all the Emergency Rooms in Italy? It was the most ludicrous of whims. He said to himself that Dr. Schoeler, deep within his resentment or his jealousy, had perhaps revealed true information beneath his cautious rhetoric of ambiguous conjecture. In Cedric’s position of uncertainty and helplessness, trusting that information was certainly worth the risk.
Lying on the vast, majestic bed, Cédric Erg was overtaken by the specious thoughts and truncated images of drowsiness. He’d felt dizzy and light-headed ever since he’d left Paris. His blood pressure was fluctuating, and several physiological functions were suffering from conflicting impulses, but the ability to move freely somewhat attenuated a sedentary man’s hypochondriac obsessions, which, in his situation, were perfectly justified. How could one not have somatic symptoms when one was living with someone else’s body? Whenever he found himself alone and immobile, his entire being would begin to listen to the enigmatic turmoil of his muscles and organs, from his skin traversed by electric waves to that turbine beating in the cargo hold of night. Then a pounding tremor would pulsate through him, a kind of pain dreamed up in his legitimate body’s stead. On the edge of deep sleep, a most horrid tightness would seize him by the throat and, with all his absent strength, he would attempt to return to his former state at the expense of that almost-whole man, there, in this bed, who was demanding cuddles and caresses. Every morning the relentless battle between a ghost and a living corpse would leave him completely shattered. Like a clay figure desperate to be awoken, he would regain his senses, and daylight would catch him by surprise. Something inside him wanted him to move diligently toward an unavoidable revelation.
Having sneaked away like a thief in the night, Cédric hadn’t really prepared for a dangerous expedition where every exertion threatened him with myocardial or cerebral infarction. After he’d had breakfast brought to his room so he could swallow a huge quantity of pills in peace, he collected his thoughts in the hotel corridor. No one had recognized him as yet. He’d made sure not to take a cell phone with him. He would be left alone, in the anonymity of crowds, like any other “fetus of a primate having reached sexual maturity.” Amused at first by that turn of phrase, Cédric then became worried by the arbitrary way in which his memories were recomposing themselves. He’d lost all familiarity with them as they welled up inside him like counterfeit witnesses to an unknowable past, like previously lived lives.
***
On the road to Rome at the wheel of his rental car, he soon felt disoriented. Why was he taking this route rather than another, and what on earth was he going to do in Rome? In the late morning, the heat inside the car became unbearable; unable to figure out how to turn on the air-conditioner, Cédric removed his jacket and shirt with unaccustomed nonchalance. Wearing just a T-shirt, with his solid arms stretched to the steering wheel, he absentmindedly glanced at the scar on his neck in the rearview mirror. The puckered skin fashioned a rosy necklace, and his sweat formed its beads. After hours of driving drowsily, he was hypnotized by the dazzling Tuscan countryside. A balm of light penetrated his skin and his soul. He felt other, different, more lithe, as if he were rejuvenated despite the impression of imminent death that always accompanied him. After he passed Florence, vehicles on the highway went by in clusters, occasionally allowing him time to glance at faces, hundreds of faces passing like a flutter of foam or a cloud. A reflection of his new existence, this phantasmal spectacle shielded him from his former points of reference. Feelings of irreparable exclusion mixed with those of intense inclusion were taking on the shape of the journey. This had become obvious to him as soon as he’d left the rue du Regard. The place where one dwells soon exudes a continuous illusion; above all, that of a body. Now everything was scattered outside of him, leaving only the idea of memories, white traces like a meteor shower. The splendor of the landscape through his windows was slowly buried beneath an absence of images, an incessant dispersal of phosphenes deep in his skull. Similar to cyclonic apparitions on the road, everything continued to disappear in him.
Among these moving, kaleidoscopic fragments, Cédric caught sight of a dubious figure on the roadside. Unsure of himself, he stopped, wanting to make certain that he wasn’t dreaming. The hitchhiker ran up to his car and got in next to him without a word, placing his backpack between his legs. As they moved, the muscles of the hitchhiker’s bare arms covered in tattoos brought to life an entire population of dragons, centaurs, and other fantastic creatures.
“Sta guardando il mio tatuaggio?” asked the man. “Ne ho anche sulla schiena e sul pet
to . . .”
Since the driver indicated that he hadn’t understood, the man began to laugh and raised his shirt, pointing to the various interwoven inked chimeras.
“Un vero museo!” he went on. “Lei è inglese? No? Scusa, sarà francese allora! Io, sono siciliano, ma parlo molto bene francese . . .”
Above the man’s left breast, nestled within his chest hairs, Cédric recognized a tattoo similar to the one on his own inner arm. It was an image of three legs with a Medusa head in the middle, surrounded by twigs and stalks of wheat on a purple and ochre background. When he pointed his index finger to the drawing with a questioning look, the man had a curiously defensive response.
“Il mio paese!” he shouted. “La Trinacria, sa? Sulla bandiera della Sicilia.”
25.
When one is in a foreign country with very little knowledge of its language, one soon finds oneself outside the world. That’s what Cédric was saying to himself as he drove off the ferry in his rented car. Scylla and Charybdis had only a mythical resonance: he’d crossed through the Strait without having to choose between a whirlpool and a rock shoal. As he drove beside the high hills where the city of Messina stretches out toward the tip of Calabria, he contemplated the shipyards and military arsenals as they filed by, his mind empty of all representation. He had not really chosen this expedition in Sicily; he had been led there by the intertwining of analogies and coincidences that often accompany a solitary journey. A simple tattoo had sufficed. On the public buildings, next to the Italian flag, one could see waving in the breeze the red and gold gonfalon with its three legs wrapped around each other like an amputated swastika and, in the middle, the flesh-colored Medusa with her crown.
At a traffic circle, Cédric couldn’t decide between the road to Trapani-Marsala and the road to Syracuse, the two other tips of the island. The heat caused mists to rise above the sea that had appeared between the docks; bright light shimmered on the asphalt. His face sunburned, his shirt soaking wet, Cédric trusted in the sounds of names and headed southwest. But driving toward Catania and Syracuse, exhausted by hours behind the wheel, he bifurcated instead toward Taormina, on the coast, and inquired about a hotel once he arrived.
An hour later, lying in bed, sheltered by tall shutters through which the sounds of the port filtered, Cédric wondered at length about what he was doing in this room. A stubborn impulse had given him the strength to flee, as if it had been a question of life or death. Nonetheless, he bitterly blamed himself for leaving and for this absurd aimless wandering. From the point of view of sheer common sense, none of this concerned him at all. Without a body of one’s own, one no longer dies. He missed simple sensations, Lorna’s presence, her sleepy warmth, the morning light on the Paris rooftops, and the silence of things lost. He didn’t understand the energy that had been carrying him these past days like a decapitated rooster running away from the chopping block, any more than he did the fundamental disengagement of his mind. In the beauty of the sites he traveled through, the azure bays and the terraced gardens, the cyclopean forests, and the antique ruins on the hills, he saw only a two-dimensional diorama. He despised tourist excursions, except with Lorna, and surely he had gone on them only to please her. His brain burned with a hidden flame in which he could only make out faint glimmers, false memories, or subliminal orders. It’s as if I were parasitized, he thought. He’d read articles about the influence of pathogenic germs, arachnids, and other unwelcome guests that survive on a good majority of living species, like the flu virus that modifies human or porcine behavior to its advantage by causing a contagious cough. Or those pond worms that infect other aquatic larvae, which crickets devour once the larvae have left the water; afterward, when the worms have reached adulthood in the crickets’ intestines, they take control of the crickets and force them to drown so that the worms can casually carry on their reproductive cycle.
Cédric fluttered his eyelids at the wooden shutters’ luminous slits and soon fell to dreaming. Would the atrocious little crustacean that replaces the tongue of the fish it is parasitizing change its accent and its vocabulary? Such a bug that could speak Italian would have been very useful. Or else some polyglot bird fluttering from one mouth to another in order to facilitate universal comprehension. Flocks of sparrows of every color assailed him and tattooed a grimacing Gorgon head on his chest with their beaks.
He awoke with a start in the half-light, a pain in his side, terrified at the thought of dying in this anonymous room. With shaky steps he went to open the blinds on the setting sun. Lights sketched out the silhouette of the hills between the deep-blue sky already studded with stars and the dark shadows rising from the Ionian Sea. Who was he, really? A broken thought could not lay claim to existence, or if it could, it would be solely on the same level as artificial intelligence. He thought back to his college classes on political economy. “It is not consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Reading Karl Marx had destroyed in him any remnant of adolescent Platonism. Today he was nothing but a consciousness without any adherence to things—a state of stupor in search of some intimacy with himself or some sort of harmony. Could it be that he no longer had a soul? Before the transplant, when he was begging to be unplugged, it could only have been in the deranged desire for a world beyond. One commits suicide only for a better life. But hope no longer had any physical substance, no body! What mother or lover would ever come to tell him a tale of never-ending love and enchantment? From this point on, he would perceive death as a kind of insomnia, dreary and deaf, where one is divested of the use of one’s senses, infinitely more frightening than the eve of an execution. And in fact he waited for dawn without turning his gaze from the lights offshore.
Early the next morning, Cédric got back on the road to Syracuse, hurrying in a way that was unusual for him. His intention of visiting all the hospitals in Sicily now seemed only slightly less eccentric than his presence on the island. Before him, slipping from right to left according to the twists in the road, Mount Etna soon held all his attention: immense, similar to Mount Fuji, which he had seen in the past, with at the highest crater a bluish smoke in the shape of double horns. He thought back to other things he’d read: to the madman from Agrigento, to those slow-moving monsters with their countless hands, faces without necks, arms wandering without shoulders, unattached, and eyes straying alone, in need of foreheads; to the offspring of oxen with the heads of men and men with the heads of oxen. Empedocles’ correct prophecies before he tumbled into the eternal bath of lava! Would it not be possible from now on to “course along through one another,” to become those mixed creatures “furnished with sterile parts”?
When he reached the volcano, Cédric forgot all about Syracuse and left the highway, turning toward the coast in the direction of Catania. It was the second-largest city on the island. Why not try his luck there rather than somewhere else? Though he seemed to have lost his mind, he had regained his mobility. The sun’s strong rays no longer bothered him. He’d been warned about the risks of melanoma and carcinoma as a result of his immunosuppressant treatment, so he protected his face above all. After parking the Alfa Romeo beneath the shade of a plane tree, decked out in a panama hat he’d bought along the way and dark sunglasses, he wandered for quite some time along the deserted streets of the center city. At the emergency services of Cannizzaro Hospital, he ludicrously blurted out some words in his paltry Italian to the male nurses who were smoking between the ambulance ramps and the swinging doors that led to the operating room. One of them, who knew a few words of French, thought he was dealing with an escapee from the psychiatric ward.
“Signore, we see many, many road accident victims every day! Andate pure a richiedere all’amministrazione.”
In Vittorio Emanuele II Hospital, he was greeted with the same awkward suspicion. Cédric returned to his car and got lost in the arid hills dominated by Mount Etna. He drove aimlessly between the volcano and the sea, opp
ressed by the heat. He returned through other twisted streets in the lower city; a maze of dark alleyways around churches, theaters, and monumental fountains replaced the tiered baroque palaces. Again he drove along the piers of the port basins; the volcanic rock of the shoreline bore witness to devastating eruptions. After the black sand beaches and Ognina Gulf, he saw the muddy waters amid the marshes stretching out in front of him. An inn overlooking the water caught his eye. So he would take refuge in the Oasis at the mouth of the Simeto River. After parking the Alfa Romeo beneath the arbors, Cédric took his luggage, convinced he had reached the end of his somnambulistic circumambulation.
In the inn’s hallway, a reproduction of Piero della Francesca’s Saint Agatha carrying her severed breasts on a platter hung between the counter and the staircase. A female dwarf with enormous thighs wearing a man’s cap burst from a broom closet and found the visitor in contemplation in front of the painting.
“A Catania,” she said, “amiamo i seni di sant’Agata anche come dolci.”
26.
To keep within thy dumb heart,” muttered Cédric under his breath as he was expelled from a dream of absolute exile on a desert island. “To keep within thy dumb heart,” he repeated, sitting up and leaning on his elbows. What on earth could it mean?
After three days of lethargy behind closed shutters, naked beneath the huge ceiling fan that roared like an airplane, he admitted to himself that his reclusion had gone on long enough. Sleeping day and night between meals eaten in his room in an inn full of summer vacationers would soon make him appear suspect. And then, he was becoming stiff; the aches of an old man were plaguing his neck. The sound of the telephone woke him completely. The female dwarf with the cap said he had a call from Parigi. A voice garbled by static replaced hers a few seconds later.
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