Where My Heart Used to Beat

by Sebastian Faulks

  “But they were all syphilitics, weren’t they?” I said.

  “Not according to the papers I found in clinics in Graz and Klagenfurt. It worked less well with schizophrenia and some patients died, but it did produce cures in others.”

  “What happens next in the story?” said Céline.

  “Well,” I said, “Dr. Lenoir runs out of malarial blood, so he has to start a breeding colony of mosquitoes. Rumors start to spread about him on the island. People don’t like having mad people too near them and now to have malarial mosquitoes buzzing round the place. They might catch both malaria and madness!”

  “And what about the girl?” said Céline, noisily draining her Coca-Cola.

  “She still lives on the island,” said Pereira.

  “Is she my grandmother?”

  “No. Béatrice is a character in a novel.”

  “But she—”

  “Yes,” said Pereira with a sigh, “to all intents and purposes she’s your grandmother. But that’s not the point of the story.”

  “Were you in love with her?” said Céline.

  “It was a long time ago. She was very beautiful.”

  “And Lenoir is a version of you,” I said.

  “Some of his career is mine,” said Pereira. “The fever part of it. I didn’t bother to give him all the dull, academic stuff. I made him more of a zealot, more of a Frankenstein.”

  “Yes, I enjoyed those bits,” I said. “And did you really have patients in your hothouse here?”

  “Yes, I did. After the war.”

  “Which war?”

  “I began my experiments in the twenties, but I didn’t build the glasshouse until much later. I had twenty of them here from 1946, but the world had changed. Wagner-Jauregg had always been controversial. Some people thought it was a crime to inject sick patients with another disease. And then it turned out he had Nazi sympathies. And after the war, when everything the Nazi doctors had done began to come to light … he was disgraced, and all his ideas were discredited with him. I was persecuted by the authorities here in France, and this entire branch of research came to an end in Europe and America—it was a tragedy for the mentally ill.”

  “What should they have done?”

  “We should have carried on experimenting—with the patients’ permission of course. Some of those helped by fever therapy might have been people who were only ever going to have one severe episode anyway and then get better. There are such cases, you’d agree?”

  “Yes. But with the others, wouldn’t you have had to keep them at fever pitch all the time? Keep on reinfecting them or somehow keeping their temperature raised?”

  “We don’t know, but we should have been free to find out.”

  “And that’s when you retired?”

  Pereira sat back in his chair and put his napkin on the table. “Like everyone in your field, I was defeated. But I took some ideas back with me. I was particularly interested in how little of her psychosis Béatrice—if we can call her that—was able to remember.”

  “Why in particular?”

  “Because it raises questions of reality. If her experiences were real in the sense that her brain registered them as such—and you are very firm about this in The Chosen Few—then we accept that they are ‘real.’ But if they made such little impact on memory and if memory is such a key part, either on its own or in conjunction with other faculties, of being human, then…”

  “Then what?”

  “Then there is more than one way of being alive.”

  I smiled as I put down my glass. “I think you’ve left the world of medicine and gone into metaphysics.”

  Pereira also smiled. “And from my study of your book, that is where I thought that you and I, Dr. Hendricks, would eventually meet.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, I went down to the calanque, this time not to “clear” but to “gather” my thoughts. I had taken a small vacuum flask with some of Paulette’s powerful coffee and a notebook. As I propped myself up against a passably comfortable rock, I thought of lines from The Waste Land: “I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me / Shall I at least set my lands in order?”

  Perhaps, rather than strive for order, it would be better to relax and let the absurdities and non sequiturs of life roll over and drown me. Poetic careers and entire religions had been founded on roughly that premise. The “unexamined life” might have been, in Socrates’ view, not worth living, but at that moment I felt drained by so much examination. It was not as though I had ever opted for this ceaseless sifting; it was simply what my brain did to me each day.

  As she was leaving the night before, I had made a vague arrangement to see Céline. I apologized for talking too much and told her I would be at the calanque if she wanted to meet. “Too cold for urchin diving,” I said. “But we could go for a walk, then lunch.” She smiled her distant smile but said nothing. I had been at the calanque for half an hour when I heard a call and looked up to see her, waving at me from above. She was wearing a jacket and a short skirt with wool tights and knee-length boots, the closest she would come to winter clothes, I imagined. It seemed a long time since the day it was hot enough for her to lie naked on the rocks.

  As I climbed up to meet her I felt aware of the difference in our ages. As everyone of more than forty-five knows, older people don’t think of themselves as such; they stay locked at twenty-nine or thirty-three or some such sprightly age and view the gray hairs and flesh loosening on the bones as an aberration that a quick diet or a softer light will fix. One on one, however, with someone of the other sex who is less than half your age, a certain gruff realism pokes you in the ribs.

  “Let me buy you lunch,” I said. “Is there somewhere nice on the island?”

  “Just the old farm that’s turned into a hotel,” she said. “But it’s shut for the winter. You can meet my grandmother Béatrice. She can cook.”

  It was a twenty-minute hike to the whitewashed hamlet she’d pointed out on the first day. The grandmother, who must have been more than eighty, was still a fine-looking woman, with a humorous eye and a good posture beneath her widow’s black. Although Céline didn’t bother to introduce her, I established that her name was Françoise. The low farmhouse opened into a parlor with a good smell already coming from the range. There was a plate of opened oysters on the table from which we were told to help ourselves.

  “So you are Pépé’s new friend?” said Françoise.

  “That’s what she calls Dr. Pereira,” said Céline.

  “More or less,” I said.

  “Don’t grow too fond of him.” Her laugh was phlegmy and rich. “He’s a naughty man. He likes to be in control.”

  “So I’ve noticed. What exactly does he want?”

  Françoise put down a dish of pommes purée on the table. “Pépé? He wants to be understood.”

  Slices of pork in a mustard sauce came next, with petits pois and a glass of the island wine I’d grown to like. To begin with, I watched Françoise with a professional scrutiny: she was after all a part of medical history, one of a handful of people cured of a terrible illness by a means later discredited. I compared her to patients I’d known in my Lancashire asylum, in Silverglades or the Biscuit Factory, but I could see no trace of the disease, none of those giveaway patterns, even small things like having thoughts suggested by word associations. There was nothing but rigor and lucidity; this old woman was in good health.

  “What did you mean by Pereira wanting to be understood?” I said.

  “Well,” said Françoise, sitting down to join us, “his life began so long ago. The world has changed so much. He fought in two world wars. There were no cars when he was born, but then a rocket put a man on the moon. And his area of medicine … all the great ideas have changed. He tried to be a part of it, to be a great man, but in the end people despised him. He was persecuted. They tried to get him to leave the island. That’s why he likes to have visitors from far away—people who don’t kn
ow his reputation.”

  “Surely he was respected for his work in the big hospital departments. And his teaching.”

  “Yes. But he wanted more than that.”

  “What more did he want?”

  “It’s no use asking me, Doctor. I’m just a village girl. I don’t know about these things. I think he wanted to change the world—that was his problem. But he’s a good man. He meant no harm.”

  “And did he really cure you?”

  “Yes. At least, the malaria cured me. I was sick to the point of death. I would have killed myself. The voices were driving me to do it. I could have lasted maybe one more year. And then this miracle.”

  She crossed herself.

  I was reluctant to leave this happy house, but after I’d accepted some preserved plums she pressed on me, I felt I should let the old lady have an afternoon rest. Céline said she would walk with me, so when I’d thanked Françoise and shaken her hand, we put on our jackets and went to the door.

  “I enjoyed meeting you, Doctor,” said Françoise. “I think maybe Pépé got the right man at last.”

  We looped back a different way, and Céline asked if I would like to see the cemetery, which was down a long path beside a vineyard. Behind a low wall was an acre plot with homemade memorials: small tablets with enameled photographs of the deceased propped on a raised family tomb; a wooden skiff with a rope surround and wreaths for the seafaring dead. We walked among the graves and headstones.

  “What do you think when you look at them?” I said.

  Céline laughed. “Nothing. Poor old things.”

  “Does it strike you how much they all seem to have been loved?”

  “They have to say that.”

  “Have you ever been in love with someone?” I said.

  “Hundreds of times! What about you?”

  “Only once.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “It was … a kind of madness. I was reminded of it when your grandmother said, ‘I was sick to the point of death.’”

  Céline laughed again. “This place makes me feel…” She put her hands on my hips and kissed me on the lips.

  I was too surprised to respond.

  She stood back, smiling. “Do you want to make love to me?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I mean now.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes.”

  “But, Céline … I’m much older than you. You can’t be more than—”

  “I’m almost thirty.”

  “You look younger.”

  “I know. It’s my skin. And you’re only … fifty, or something? It’s not so very different. It’s quite all right. We can do it over there, under that tree. I’ve done it there before.”

  “I can’t, Céline.”

  It was surprisingly easy. My first view of this naked girl diving for sea urchins didn’t need to be the start of an inevitable chain of events; it could be just a single memory. As I took Céline’s elbow and steered her back towards the path, it made me almost think I had a “better nature” after all.

  * * *

  AFTER MAKING MYSELF some tea in the kitchen, I went up to my room, cup in hand, and climbed under the covers. I flipped back through my copy of La Conspiration de la Serre, amusing myself by guessing which parts were invented and which transcribed from life.

  Helped by the wine and the thick eiderdown, I fell asleep and dreamed a dream of such earthly delight that only the memory of my mother’s rule prevents me from relating it. The tea was cold on the bedside table when I awoke, crossed the landing to the bathroom, turned on the taps, and watched the water flood down over the rust marks on the side of the tub.

  There were just two of us in the library before dinner that evening. I told Pereira of my visit to his former patient and of how impressed I’d been by her health and by her character.

  “I’m delighted,” he said. “Françoise is my pride and joy. The one thing I rescued from the fire. When she was cured of her madness, she could see that it was all a delusion, but she could barely remember or imagine the texture of the reality she’d inhabited. Yet we know that the defining quality of human beings—what you dismiss as a ‘neural tic’—is our ability to connect at will a moment of physical self-awareness to the site of episodic memory. I think I remember your words more or less?”

  “I think so.”

  “And what then do we make of a uniquely human experience that lacks the human stamp? What poor Béatrice endured had no element of memory or the defining human trick, the fiction of selfhood; yet no other creature experiences it. So it is both unique to us but lacking the very quality that makes us what we are. Tell me, Dr. Hendricks, what can such a thing be?”

  No answer came to me.

  I went to the window and looked out into the darkness of the garden. I wanted another drink; I wanted another bottle; I wanted to drain the river Lethe till I was ready to be born again.

  Turning slowly back into the room, I said, “Tell me, have you got what you wanted from me? Have I passed your interview?”

  “I think so,” said the old man, levering himself up from his armchair and shuffling towards the door. “Shall we go into dinner now?”

  “And what did you want from me? It wasn’t just to see if I was the right man to be your literary executor, was it?”

  “I’m afraid not. No. I hoped to see my life in a clearer light before it ends. To talk to someone I knew could improve my understanding of the catastrophe we have all lived through.”

  “And has it helped?”

  “Oh, my God. Yes, very much indeed. Just listening to you tell me the details of the battle that night in Tunisia and how you responded. Or dropping down into the wadis at Anzio. I can’t quite describe how much it helped me, to think that another man at another time had experienced a version of what I had seen in Flanders. Just to hear your voice telling the story: things that were new to me yet strangely, terribly familiar. And then your struggles with work…”

  His voice thickened. It was the first time I had seen him register emotion; previously there had been only teasing or gaiety.

  “I’m glad I could help.”

  “There was something I wanted to give you in return,” said Pereira. “In the course of your visits I began to think that I could be of service. I started to believe that thinking about memory and how it works would help you in your great sadness. I hoped that together we could revisit your past in such a way that you could reshape it into something more bearable.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your Italian love, Luisa.”

  We were standing in the doorway. I felt an unaccustomed pressure behind the eyes. “You know nothing about Luisa.”

  “You didn’t need to tell me. I have seen the damage in others before.”

  I swallowed. “And what else?” I said.

  Pereira was a couple of halting steps ahead with his back to me, but I was certain that I caught the words, “Your father.”

  FOURTEEN

  Back in London, there was Christmas to negotiate. Every day after lunch, I’d take Max out for a walk. For a change, we sometimes went to Kensington Gardens to mingle with the tourists from the Bayswater hotels. The capital seemed to have closed down; only the shops selling plastic bobby’s helmets and Union Jack coffee mugs were still open. It was a mystery to me where people went for a period that no longer lasted a few days but seemed to grind on for at least two weeks. Some superstition made me unwilling to work on the day itself, and after a walk among the bored-looking Muslims in Hyde Park, I managed to find a Chinese restaurant on Queensway from which I ordered a selection of dishes to take away. Back at home, I opened an expensive bottle of wine given to me by a patient and divided up the food, putting some of the blander bits of chicken and rice into Max’s bowl and keeping the salt-and-pepper prawns for myself.

  I wondered—as I had every day since I’d allowed her back into my mind—what Luisa was doing. Probably with her …
grandchildren by now at a riotous Genoese table laden with truffled tagliatelle, roast fowl, panettone and tangerines, and strong Barolo, enjoying the laughter of generations.… Max, meanwhile, was an undemanding companion and after our midafternoon dinner, he climbed up on the sofa to watch a war film with me. The story was full of implausibilities, but I had drunk enough wine not to care.

  Thinking of Luisa made me go back in my mind over the other women I had known. For many years I had no lover. Luisa was every woman to me, and my endeavor was to persuade myself that I was not the most wretched man alive because I’d lost her but that I was fortunate that such a woman had once loved me. In that Sisyphean task, some days went better than others.

  While I was working those long hours at the Biscuit Factory the ideas of “love” and “romance” seemed trivial. Judith Wills and I had a closeness based on shared interests. This could be stirring, and late one evening we spontaneously hugged each other. Judith had no lover of her own and in some ways she was just the woman I “ought” to have lived with or married: the right age, the same interests, trustworthy, modest … But however much I admired her—liked her too—there was nothing erotic about her for me. Her dry hair, thick nylons, and brown shoes … I tried to push my admiration over into desire but found only a snapshot memory of Luisa in the hotel room at Pozzuoli.

  I felt ashamed of my shallowness. I looked at people who had made their lives with those who had been colleagues. From comradeship came friendship, then affection, and then love; and if you liked her well enough to hug her, surely you could manage … and obviously they did. You could see ungainly people, plump and gray, whose entwined fingers and fond glances told you that at the evening’s end they would roll home into bed and some still-functioning embrace.

  My recoil from all this sometimes made me wonder whether my desires were perhaps, at root, homosexual. Why else had they been focused on one woman only? And was it significant that my longing was for a woman whom I couldn’t have? Was it possible that I had chosen her because I couldn’t have her—that I’d “known” she was married? But then if a homosexual man was so keen to repress his true nature that he could enjoyably make love to a woman, did it mean that denial pushed you so far that it actually rewired you?