“Cédric, can you hear me?”
He remained silent, torn between a rather affectless kernel of joy and a mixed feeling of artifice and disloyalty.
“Your father died last Monday. He was buried yesterday in Geneva. Can you hear me? You have to come back. Everyone’s looking for you.”
“My father? Dead? Is that really you, Lorna?” he exclaimed, as if he were recollecting a world that had vanished eons ago.
“You’ve got to get on a plane and come back as soon as possible. You’re in danger in Catania.”
“How did you find out where I was?”
“Turin, Trieste, Rome, Sicily? Through your credit card; it’s not complicated. And then, a missing person alert was sent out. Your picture has been in all the media since yesterday. Georgio Cadavero said on American TV that he feared you’d been abducted. He’s not mistaken. You probably have a price on your head. Now there are two teams of assassins on your heels, and they may be the same ones who . . .”
“Where are you? I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“I’ll explain everything when I see you. Hide as best you can. I’ll come to get you wherever you are. You are in grave danger, understand?”
Lorna had time to reveal what his father had told her in Versoix. The accident on the Evasion was no doubt an attempted homicide. Cédric had been a target not only because he was the heir to the M.A.W. laboratories but also because he was a polemicist, the archenemy of the pharmaceutical industry and the oil corporations. Their communication was interrupted by a piercing whistling sound after she’d said, “But there’s something else . . .”
Facing the bathroom mirror, still naked, he stared at his indurated scar, as thick as a hangman’s rope. His features had changed since the transplant. A facial plastic surgeon had spoken to him about autoplastic transformations linked to trauma, age, or madness. Cédric would end up losing any and all resemblance to himself, both physical and moral. What was happening in him could almost be a blank psychosis, a kind of factual schizophrenia. He’d become an object of study, one of those severed heads that Géricault procured from the Paris morgue in order to paint them in his studio. This virile body below him was no more than a clever prosthesis or an illusory décor. At least it would allow him to get away: he’d had enough of Catania. He would head to Syracuse as soon as possible.
In the hallway, suitcase in hand, Cédric left a generous tip for the staff, who, oddly, rushed to say good-bye to him. Emerging from her broom closet, the dwarf grabbed his forearm so forcefully that her cap fell to the floor.
“È lei, il trapiantato!” she cried. “Che onore per la nostra istituzione. Permettici di prendere una foto di voi davanti all’hotel . . .”
Cédric fled from the chaos, terrified. With the Oasis of the Simeto River behind him, he avoided going back into the city and instead took a side road that led to the highway. What had Lorna meant on the phone? What other danger must he fear besides imploding because of an asymptomatic acute rejection? A hybrid subject, a nebulous artifact of himself, he knew everything about the dirty tricks that medical science had in store for him.
Speeding through the deserted streets at the wheel of his Alfa Romeo, Cédric rapidly arrived near the volcano. The sun was at its zenith. The mountain in front of him quivered in the blazing air. At the first crossroad, a roadblock set up by the mobile brigade of the Catania Police Force obliged him to stop. The officers apologized when they discovered he was an ordinary French tourist. One of them mentioned the “bad families” in the region, the trafficking, the assassinations. They didn’t even ask to see his papers. Nonetheless the incident upset him and he made a wrong turn; now he was driving down a one-way street toward the city center. He became feverish, as if he were scalded; the sweat from the nape of his neck and his body collected around his scar. In Catania, he disappeared down the alleyways of the port where the bright light contrasted with the slices of night between the facades. When he got to via Etnae, a burning thirst forced him to park the car at the corner of a large pedestrian square where scattered groups were strolling. Without thinking, he staggered over to the dripping marble basin crowned with an elephant carrying an obelisk of volcanic rock, and he dived in halfway, torso first. He felt faint, and then lost consciousness amid the spurting fountains. The crowd, intrigued, began to form a circle around him, and it wasn’t until a child shouted that a man was drowning that someone came to his rescue. A person who claimed to be qualified to give first aid unbuttoned Cédric’s shirt, and he was naked to the waist in front of everyone, with, around his neck and throat, that awful, rubbery, wine-colored scar. When he came to, the faces leaning over him showed more curiosity than repulsion, along with a sort of mistrust of the drunkard or madman who had just made an exhibition of himself. Some people were looking at him out of the corner of their eye with an impudent, presumptuous expression. Had they recognized him as the creature of those modern Frankensteins? A young brunette wearing a fitted black dress fished his sunglasses out of the basin and placed them in his hands with a reverential air, as if the glasses were his living eyes. Cédric, on his feet again, buttoned up his shirt. Awkwardly taking leave of the impromptu audience that had formed under the spreading shade of the elephant, he fled toward via Etnae as an ambulance siren wailed nearby. His hair still dripping, he was about to reach his car, more tormented by all those gazes than by his bout of heatstroke, when the young brunette from the fountain approached him.
“I recognized you,” she murmured in halting French. “You’re the man from Turin. The one who . . .”
She was unable to finish her sentence. Her eyes, the color of gold or sulfur, grew wide, and she made a small, ambiguous gesture with her right hand, as if to signify throat slitting or decapitation. Tears streamed down her face. Was she the saint of Catania, a fugitive from the cathedral’s reliquary, the virgin with her breasts torn off come to console the poor sinner with his corpseless head? Both frightened and amused, Cédric dimly recalled a poem by Apollinaire. He asked the woman what she wanted, perturbed by her physical closeness, a few inches from his face in the scorching sun. What was that famous poem?
“I know who you are,” she said, using the informal tu before she quickly retreated to the formal vous. “In fact, in a way I was expecting you. It had to happen, it just had to . . .”
Cédric looked at her without hearing her, both moved by her vixen-like beauty and deeply saddened by the tragic, quivering light, the scent of incense and dried roses the churches exuded, and this world without reference points. Then two lines of poetry came back to him:
Farewell Farewell
Sun corpseless head.
27.
Cédric was barely conscious of what had happened to him directly after his fainting spell, as if he’d been drunk or under the influence of psychotropic drugs. He could remember it only in a diffuse way, in snatches, but these snatches had the intensity of certain dreams more radiant than any waking state. Anantha had led him through a maze of backstreets and stairways. “It’s as cool as the inside of a church at my place. You’ll be able to rest,” she whispered in his ear, as she took him by the arm. He was convinced it was absolutely vital to take his luggage with him. At last they arrived in Librino, a working-class neighborhood of Catania. Was his clouded reasoning a result of his inability to control his breathing? In order for him to regulate it, the air he breathed would have had to be his own. But nothing belonged to him by rights, no use or enjoyment of this body. His brain was dealing with another endocrine system; what can one hundred billion neurons do faced with a flood of hormones? The molecular mechanisms of pharmaceutics tended to stabilize his organ regulation systems at the expense of his mind.
He’d finally understood that the immunosuppressant treatments were targeting his head; his head was the graft, the non-self! He even had to readapt sounds for himself, turn them into magic words, like the long-drawn-out echo of some other understanding.
How many days or weeks had he be
en living cloistered in Anantha’s bedroom? The notion of time demands some control over one’s sensations. But time and space escaped him. Half unconscious, a thing watching itself become a thing among the thousand arms of a shadow, he was experiencing a kind of ecstasy or slow torture. For Anantha had seized him without scruples, madly, like a she-wolf grabs a small man. She was a tall, loose-limbed woman with firm breasts below a dark face; her eyes looked like they had been lined with ink, staring, immense. Even before glimpsing the Gorgon tattooed on his arm, she’d recognized him lying unconscious beneath the volcanic rock elephant. Blood pulsated between them at first sight. She had seized this desirable body like a carnivore, biting its skin all the way to the scar, licking, delving into the grooves of its muscles with her lips and tongue, swallowing the fingers and the penis, rubbing the offering of her moist sex against its thighs and hands. What to do in the lonely night with blind eyes? “Alessandro!” she would cry, then become silent, shuddering. She repeated this name again and again behind the haunted half-light of the shutters, in the muffled rumble of the night. Then, sitting up abruptly, her hair a-tumble, she would sob, clinging to the body, scratching the chest, her inky eyes riven to the narrow site of unstable flesh. “Mai più ci separeremo,” she would say a hundred times, shaking her head. “Mai più, amore mio!”
Stunned by the hallucinatory vision of her lover’s bare body at the base of the fountain, Anantha found refuge in the stubborn silence of sensuality. She didn’t recognize the voice as Alessandro’s, but the solid arms were indeed his; she felt his penis unfurl in her fingers, and smelled the soothing scent of his armpits. She went over every inch of his skin, the least little beauty mark, the folds and tiny wrinkles. She rubbed her full breasts against his buttocks, pressing her lips and her entire face wet with saliva in the small of his back and along the double muscular furrow on either side of the spine. She whispered unknown words against his heart, right between the ribs, and into his large open hands, to the veins beating in his wrist and groin. She begged this stiff shaft to drive into her, to penetrate her as deeply as possible, to make her a child.
Hour after hour, neck on the pillow, the abandoned head experienced a mixture of painful impulses, flashes of images, snatches of dreams or thoughts all held captive in a muck of bodily sensations. As soon as dawn broke, a continuous beating would shake the ground, like the turbines and boilers of a cargo ship on a sea to nowhere. The nights sped by and seemed to rustle with the panting of countless bats hanging from the joists. Apparently there were no neighbors. The apartment must have been located above a workshop of some sort—perhaps a blacksmith’s, or a foundry. A service staircase probably led to a finished attic. Keys in hand, naked under her fitted dress that she could quickly slip out of, Anantha came and went. She brought back food, alcohol, and cigarettes. He had never known a hungrier lover. But in her impatience to touch her hostage’s flesh with her own, a look of panic or terror disfigured her. Anantha was always slightly drunk on a dark-red wine she poured from straw-covered bottles. Whenever she would drink glass after glass in front of him, there would come a moment when she’d begin to sob, repeating over and over: “I know you don’t drink, Alessandro, che non hai mai bevuto una goccia di alcol, mai, mai . . .”
One morning when his mind was a little clearer, Cédric realized that he must be being drugged, or else a lethal process was alienating him from this body’s neurovegetative system, from this body’s idiosyncrasy, which was gradually reinstating itself in its massive primacy. What remained of Cédric’s free will? Could he still think on his own, through all the instinctive movements and inner sensations from which he was receiving bizarre, foreign signals? He had once read obscure articles on the abdomen’s intellect, the famous Japanese hara, a sort of spirit of the flesh in contrast to the cerebral firmament. Ever since he’d been under the influence of this land, dazzled prisoner of a widow or a volcano, he’d felt as if he were reflected at his own expense, the object of some unformulated intention. Can one escape from such a struggle? In a merciless battle, a part of him was being abandoned to this slow, living enterprise, to the invading hysteria of muscles and organs. How could he doubt that Alessandro’s beheaded body, as an unthinking plunderer, would make use of words and images that belonged by rights to his memory?
When his jailer Anantha left him on his own, sometimes he would pull himself out of his lethargy and totter around in the dim light of the venetian blinds. For him, the rooms had a paradoxical intimacy related to their foreignness. In one room, crowded with furniture and trunks, he found a photo album. Anantha was smiling in the pictures, cheerful, without that fever in her eyes. In other pictures, he had no trouble identifying Alessandro in biker’s clothes, a helmet under his arm, or in a bathing suit on an Italian beach. It was indeed the same body with its broad chest and narrow waist, and the arm tattooed with the bluish triskelion. Cédric’s fascination ended up changing into a fleeting sense of déjà vu. Yet the man hardly resembled him. His features were rather feminine; blue eyes and long hair, furrowed brow and slightly tensed lips. Among the numerous elements that had to correspond, such as height, girth, blood type, and allergies, the appearance of the face was quite obviously not a requirement for a compatible body. Obsessing over this face that he, in some horrible way, was replacing within strict constraints, Cédric couldn’t help falling under the spell of so much virile candor, nor could he repress an indefinable sense of annoyance—anger almost—at the sight of that face. Whenever Anantha would grab onto the living body of her beloved, she would avoid all contact with the foreign head, most often covering it with part of a sheet. Although he felt as if he were on the sidelines of this mysterious lovemaking, Cédric nonetheless experienced something of its pleasure in the recesses of his brain.
A front view of Alessandro with bare shoulders engrossed him until he lost all notion of his own presence, sinking into Alessandro with the rapt repulsion that the suicidal feel for the void or deep water. This savage back-and-forth between a head and a body made him dizzy. From now on, he was inevitably fated to be deprived of existence. Was he even alive? His skull rolled endlessly at the foot of a chopping block of flesh and bones. On an organic level, he was indeed this other who was flooding him with too-thick blood and other bodily fluids, imposing on him his cardiac rhythm and his fevers. Cédric, frantic and befuddled, wondered how to escape from such a nightmare, as horrifying when he touched his scar as it was sickly sweet in the swarthy arms of this love-struck widow with her ink-lined eyes.
Another time Cédric found a pile of old newspaper clippings in a shoebox. Anantha had kept all the articles from the Quotidiano di Sicilia that dealt with Alessandro Branci’s accident. He could be seen both smiling in his biker’s clothes and in the Emergency Room of a hospital in Catania. Cédric read every clipping attentively. The accident had occurred on a coastal road between the sea and the volcano on July 7 of the previous year—in other words, the day before the transplant in Turin; Alessandro had been taken in an ambulance to Principessa Jolanda Hospital, where the surgeons had declared him brain dead. An ordinary accident. The biker was driving in a drunken state. His blood-alcohol level was extremely high. From another box Cédric took out I.D. papers, an expired passport with Alessandro’s height, eye color, and place of birth, and two visas for neighboring Tunisia. The passport photo, sharper than the one in the newspaper, affected Cédric physically with a terrible itching around his scar.
“Non è grazioso, signore!” shouted Anantha, who, coming back home, caught him in the middle of his investigations.
As she shut the door, panic-stricken, she refrained from telling him that a woman—a journalist who’d come from France—was desperately searching for him in town; nor did Anantha mention the fact that she’d chased that woman away from the factory doorstep as if she were a criminal.
Cédric turned with open arms toward Anantha, his hands full of press clippings. He suddenly intuited that his fate depended on the goodwill of this wild-eyed vixen and th
e people around her. How had he ever managed to reach her, by what involuntary motive, what obscure meanderings of desire? He no longer even knew where he’d come from; a fever was drowning his last memories. Paris, Geneva, or Rome—the great stage sets of his memory were crumbling, vanishing around him. He would never be able to leave this island. Lorna was no longer anything but a longing inside him, without substance, barely real. The machine tools of the factory suddenly stopped shaking the ground. From the depths of the body or the night, an unfamiliar song was rising. “To keep within thy dumb heart,” he thought he heard when the evening silence breathed heavily in his ears.
“They’re coming to kill you,” the young woman whispered quickly, as she poured herself a glass of Chianti. “They’ve been paid to do it, the ones from the family, padre e figli. You have to leave now, immediately! Go as far as you possibly can!”
Anantha, nervous, her eyes dark, poured herself more wine even before her glass was empty and began to laugh bitterly. Because a dead man could be desired to the point of madness, why couldn’t he be killed? She began to tremble, and her eyes now shone with tears.
“Alessandro didn’t drink!” she cried. “Alessandro, non hai mai bevuto una goccia di alcol, mai, mai . . .”
Epilogue
Ever at his post as foot soldier, Swen Geislar was retranscribing, in his precise, covert way, today’s news as it flooded in from the entire world. None of the news agency’s correspondents who were in contact with him paid any attention to him, putting his little whims down to his concern for concision. Distracted by a flight of crows, Swen glanced at the zinc rooftops of the boulevard des Italiens. A steady rain made them shine like a mirror beneath the leaden light. And dispatches also rained down on his desktop.
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