"Or because he likes Jikolas."
"Sorry?"
"Chocolates with a marzipan filling. It's one of the shop's specialties." She laughed breathlessly then wiped her tears. "In any case, it's logical enough if he doesn't recognize me, given that my face has completely changed." Then she added, in despair, "We must find it. We must uncover something about my past!"
Mathilde refrained from commenting. She was now driving up Boulevard de l'Hopital, under the iron arches of the overhead metro line.
"Where are we going?" Anna cried out.
Mathilde drove across the street diagonally, then parked in the wrong direction beside the campus of La Pitie-Salpetrière Hospital. She switched off the ignition, then turned toward the little Cleopatra.
"The only way we can understand your story is to find out who you were before. To judge by your scars, the surgery was carried out about six months ago. Somehow or other, we're going to have to go back beyond that point." She pressed her finger against her forehead. "You must remember what happened before that date."
Anna glanced up at the signpost of the teaching hospital. "You want… you want to question me under hypnosis?"
"We don't have time for that."
"So what are you going to do?"
Mathilde pushed a black lock of hair back behind Anna's ear. "If your memory can't tell us anything and your face has been obliterated, there's still one thing that remembers who you are."
"What?”
“Your body."
31
The biological research unit of La Pitié-Salpetrière was lodged in the faculty of medicine. A long six-story block, it was dotted with hundreds of windows, giving a dizzying idea of the number of laboratories it must contain. This typically 1960s architecture reminded Mathilde of the universities and hospitals she had studied in. She had a particular feeling for such places, and to her mind, their style was forever associated with knowledge, authority and learning.
They walked toward the gate, their feet clacking on the silvery pavement. Mathilde entered the security code. Inside, cold and darkness welcomed them. They crossed a huge hall to an iron elevator to the left, which looked like a safe.
Its interior smelled of grease. It felt to Mathilde that she was ascending a tower of knowledge, alongside the superstructures of science. Despite her age and experience, she felt crushed by this place, which evoked a temple for her. It was sacred territory.
The elevator continued to rise. Anna lit a cigarette. Mathilde's senses were so acute, it was as though she could hear the crackling of the burning paper.
She had dressed her protegée in some of her daughter's clothes, which had been left in her apartment after a New Year's party. The two women were the same size, and now dressed in the same shade: black. Anna was wearing a slim-fitting velvet coat, with long, narrow sleeves, silk bellbottoms and highly polished shoes. These party clothes made her look like a little girl in mourning.
At last, on the fifth floor, the doors opened. They went up a corridor covered with red tiles, punctuated by doors with frosted glass windows. A soft light was coming from the far end. They approached it.
Mathilde opened the door without knocking. Professor Alain Veynerdi was expecting them, standing beside a white bench.
This small, vigorous sixty-year-old had the dark skin of a Hindu and the dryness of papyrus. Beneath his impeccable white coat, he was clearly wearing even more impeccable evening dress. His hands had been manicured: his nails looked lighter than his skin, like little mother-of-pearl lozenges at the tips of his fingers. His gray hair was carefully combed back, held in place with Brylcreem. He looked like a painted figure straight out of a Tintin comic. His bow tie gleamed like the key of some secret mechanism, waiting to be wound up.
Mathilde took care of the introductions and went through, once more, the main points of the lie she had told the biologist over the phone. Anna had had a car accident, eight months before. Her vehicle had burned, her identity papers were inside and her memory had been obliterated. The injuries to her face had required extensive surgery. And the mystery of her identity remained entire.
The story was barely believable, but Veynerdi did not live in a rational world. All that mattered to him was the scientific challenge that Anna represented.
He pointed at the stainless-steel table. "Shall we start straightaway?”
“Hang on," Anna protested. "Maybe you'd better tell me what you're going to do first."
Mathilde turned to Veynerdi. "Can you explain. Professor?"
lie looked at the young woman. "I'm afraid we'll have to give you a little anatomy lesson…"
"Don't put on your airs and graces with me."
He smiled briefly, as bitterly as a lemon. "The elements that make up the human body regenerate according to specific cycles. The red corpuscles are reproduced every hundred and twenty days. The skin sloughs completely in five days. The lining of the intestines is renewed in just forty-eight hours. However, within this constant reconstruction, the immune system contains cells that conserve traces of contact they have had with foreign bodies for long periods of time. They are called memory cells."
He had a smoker's voice, deep and husky. Which did not fit with his immaculate looks.
"When confronted with a disease, the cells produce molecules for defense or recognition, which carry the mark of the attack. When they are reproduced, they transmit this defensive information. It's a sort of biological record, if you will. The entire principle of vaccination is based on this system. It is enough to put the human body in contact with a pathogen just once for cells to produce protective molecules for years. What applies to illness also applies to any other external element, We always keep traces of our past life, of our countless contacts with the world. It is possible to study these marks and give them a date and origin."
He bowed slightly "This as yet little-known field is my specialty"
Mathilde remembered when she had first met Veynerdi. during a seminar on memory in Majorca in 1997. Most of the guests were neurologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. They had discussed synapses, networks, the subconscious, and had all mentioned the complexity of memory. Then, on the fourth day, a biologist in a bow tie had spoken, and their horizons had completely changed. Behind his reading desk, Main Veynerdi was talking about physical not mental memory.
The specialist presented a study he had conducted on perfumes. The constant impregnation of alcoholized substances in the skin ends up "engraving" certain cells, thus forming an identifiable marker, even after the subject has stopped using the fragrance. He cited the example of a woman who had used Chanel No. 5 for ten years, and whose skin still bore its chemical signature four years later.
That day, the audience left the lecture hall in rapture. Suddenly, memory had become something physical that could be analyzed chemically, under the microscope… Suddenly, that abstract entity which constantly evaded the instruments of modern technology, had turned out to be material, tangible. observable. A human science had become an exact one.
Anna's face was lit up by the low lamp. Despite her weariness, her eyes were sparkling brightly. She was beginning to understand. "In my case, what sort of things can you find out?"
"Trust me," the biologist replied. "In the secret of your cells, your body has kept marks of your past. We are going to reveal traces of the physical environment in which you lived before your accident. The air you breathed. The sort of food you ate. The signature of the perfume you wore. One way or another, I am sure you are the same woman as before."