* * *
She goes home that evening. Her youngest son came to fetch her from the hospital; he will be the one who drives her back there. You’re going to agree, aren’t you? he asks quietly. She nods mechanically — she feels overwhelmed. Arriving at her house on the forest’s edge — this fairy-tale house where she now lives alone, her children having all grown up — she goes straight to bed: lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, fear pins her in place, infects all her future days with no possible escape. Fear of death and fear of pain, fear of the operation, fear of the postoperative treatments, fear that the organ will be rejected and she will have to start over again, fear of a foreign body intruding in hers, fear of becoming a chimera, of no longer being herself.
* * *
She has to move. She’s taking a risk, living in that village fifty miles from Paris, a long way from any main road.
Claire feels an immediate loathing for her new apartment. Too warm, in both winter and summer; the need for lights even in the middle of the day; the noise from the street. A final airlock before the operating theater, she envisages it instead as an antechamber of death, thinking she will die here because — even though she isn’t bedridden — she feels trapped in this place: she can’t leave it without what seems a superhuman effort, climbing the stairs gives her pain, each movement making her feel as if her heart is separating from the rest of her body, slipping from its perch inside the thoracic cage and falling to pieces. This feeling turns her into a shaky, limping creature, on the verge of a breakdown. Day after day, the space seems to close in around her, limiting and reducing her gestures, restricting her movements, narrowing her entire world, as if she has a stocking or a plastic bag over her head — something fibrous that stifles her breathing — as if her feet are caught in quicksand. She grows somber. To her youngest son, who comes to see her one evening, she admits that it disturbs her, the thought of waiting for someone to die so she can have their heart: It’s a strange situation, you know, and it wears me out.
* * *
To begin with, she is reluctant to really move in. What’s the point? Live or die, she won’t be staying here long — it is temporary, no matter what. But she doesn’t let her fears show — she acts tough. Her first weeks in this apartment alter her relationship with time. It’s not that it changes speed — slowed down by paralysis, by the dread of her suspended sentence, by her debilitating circumstances — nor that it stagnates, like the blood in Claire’s lungs stagnates; no, time seems rather to disintegrate in a bleak continuity. Partly due to the unending darkness of the place, the alternation of day and night soon loses its distinction: all she does is sleep, with the excuse that she is channeling the shock of this forced move. Her two eldest children gradually come to regard Sundays as her visiting day, a fact that makes her sad without her really knowing why. Sometimes they reproach her for her lack of enthusiasm: across the road from the hospital, it could hardly be better, they say to her straight-faced. The youngest, on the other hand, turns up at any time and gives her long hugs. He is a head taller than her.
* * *
Sinister winter, cruel spring (she cannot see the greenness returning to the forest, the pure colors bursting forth again, and she misses the undergrowth: the golden stumps and the ferns, the light probing in vertical rays, the multitude of noises, the foxglove scattered in semishade behind flower beds, on secret paths), hopeless summer. She is withering away (you need some sort of structure, meals at fixed times, a daily routine, repeats everyone who comes to see her, finding her depressed, distracted, vague, even a little creepy, her blond-haired black-eyed beauty altered, corroded by anxiety and the lack of fresh air), her hair is dull, eyes glassy, breath sour, and clothes shapeless. Her two eldest children try to find someone who can look after her — a home helper who can take care of the housework, the shopping, monitor her intake of medicine. When she learns about this plan, anger brings her back to life — are they trying to hack away at the little freedom that remains to her? White-faced and bitter, she rants about being under house arrest, no longer able to bear healthy people’s opinions about sickness.
* * *
The first call comes on the night of August 15. The window is open: it’s 8:00 p.m. and the room is suffocatingly hot. This is the Pitié, we have a heart for you, tonight, now — always the same phrasing. She’s not prepared. Putting her fork back on her untouched plate, she looks at her family, gathered around her, reunited for her birthday — you have to celebrate your fiftieth — they all stand with their arms dangling at their sides like birds’ wings: her mother, her three boys, the young woman who lives with her eldest and their little boy, all frozen except for the child with his garnet-colored eyes, all listening: I’m going, I have to go, chairs shoved backward, champagne flutes trembling, spurting, spilling, a bag packed with toothpaste and eau de toilette, the stairs descended with that rushed slowness that makes people trip and yell at each other — we forgot the sorbets in the kitchen, forgot the medical card, forgot the cell phone — then the sticky asphalt, the smoky sky, people leaning through open windows, a shirtless guy walking his dog, the little boy running on the sidewalk, grabbed by his mother, the tourists checking their maps as they emerge from the metro, and at last the hospital, ringed with little lamps, the admissions process, the newly scoured room where she waits again, sitting on the edge of the bed that she will never open because, finally, there is movement in the corridor, the sound of heavy footsteps, and Harfang appears. He stands before her, thin and pale, bags under his eyes: In the end, we decided to refuse the organ.
She listens as he explains his decision, her face blank: The heart wasn’t good, too small and poorly vascularized, there’s no point taking a risk like that, we’ll just have to keep waiting. Harfang imagines she must be in shock from the disappointment, her hopes dashed, but in fact she is stunned, stupefied, and soon she has only one thought in mind: to get away from here. Her feet hang in the void, her backside slips insensibly off the edge of the bed, and she lands softly on the floor, then stands up — I’m going home. Outside, her sons kick bushes that instantly give up clouds of burning dust, her mother bursts into tears, comforted by her youngest son, the eldest son’s girlfriend keeps running after the little boy, who refuses to go back to the house, and everything falls apart. The group crosses the road in the opposite direction, no longer feeling hungry: it seems impossible to start eating the meal where they had left it. But they can still drink — a pink champagne served in bubble-glass flutes — and Claire ends up lifting her full glass above the table, arm outstretched and smiling, looking beautiful now: Come on, put your heart into it! You’re not funny, you know, her youngest son mutters.
* * *
After that, the nature of time changes — it regains its shape. Or, rather, it takes the shape of waiting: hollow and stretched out. From that point on, the only purpose of hours is to be available during them, knowing that the transplant operation could suddenly become reality, a heart might appear at any moment: I must stay alive, I must be ready. Minutes become supple, seconds ductile, and finally fall arrives, and Claire resolves to bring her books and lamps to this tiny apartment. Her youngest son installs Wi-Fi for her, and she buys an office chair, a wooden table, gathers together a few objects: she wants to start translating again.