Her editor is delighted by this news, and sends her Charlotte Brontë’s first publication, a collection of poems published under her and her sisters’ masculine pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. She spends the fall in an icy cottage, battered by the wind, where three sisters and a brother write and read together by candlelight, communing with each other through books: feverish, exalted, tortured geniuses, inventing worlds, walking the moors, drinking quarts of tea, and smoking opium. Their intensity wins Claire over, and she gradually perks up. Each day spent working yields a slender batch of pages, and as the weeks pass she finds her rhythm, as if it’s a question of synchronizing the waiting — which becomes sharper and clearer as the state of her heart declines — with another kind of time: that of translating poems. Sometimes she feels she is replacing the painful contractions of her sick organ with a fluid back-and-forth, between her native French and the English she has learned, and that this reciprocal movement is digging a cradle-shaped crevice inside her, a new cavity. She’d had to learn a new language in order to understand her own, so she wondered if this new heart would allow her to better understand herself: I’m clearing a space for you, my heart, I’m making you a home.
* * *
On Christmas Eve, a man resurfaces, placing a bouquet of purple foxgloves on her bed. She has known him since childhood: they grew up together — lovers, friends, brother and sister, partners in crime. They are, for each other, almost everything a man and a woman can be.
Claire smiles and taps her chest: it’s not a good idea to surprise me, you know. In fact, she has to sit down and recover while he takes off his coat. The flowers are from her garden, she can tell from their scent. You know they’re poisonous? she says, pointing at them. One of those flowers that children are forbidden to touch, breathe, gather, taste — she remembers staring, fascinated, at her fingers, coated with fuchsia powder, alone in the street, and the word “poison” appearing in a thought bubble above her head while she lifted her hand to her mouth. The man slowly pulls off a petal and places it in the palm of her hand: Look at that. The petal is so brightly colored that it looks artificial, made of plastic. Trembling in her palm, it is covered with microscopic wrinkles. Actually, he tells her, the digitalin contained in the flowers makes the heartbeat stronger, slower, steadier. It’s good for you.
She sleeps with the flowers that night. The man carefully undresses her, removing the petals one by one, then placing them on her naked skin like the scales of a fish, a sort of organic jigsaw puzzle that he painstakingly perfects into a ceremonial gown, whispering don’t move from time to time, even though she has long been asleep, in a luxuriant catalepsy, nursed and ornamented like a queen. It was still night when she awoke, but the children in the apartment above hers were already running around excitedly, shouting, their footsteps hammering the floorboards, rushing into the living room to tear the wrapping paper from the presents that had appeared during the night around the ectoplasmic Christmas tree. Her friend had gone. She shook the petals from her body and made them into a salad that she seasoned with truffle oil and balsamic vinegar.
* * *
A T-shirt, a few pairs of underwear, two nightgowns, a pair of slippers, beauty products, laptop, cell phone, chargers. Her medical file — administrative printouts, latest exams, and those large, rigid envelopes containing scans, X-rays, and MRIs. She is glad she’s alone to pack her bag, to walk cautiously downstairs, to take her time outside. She crosses the road diagonally, trying to catch the eyes of drivers who slow down when they see her, listening to the hot rail tracks vibrating over her head; she would like to see an animal — a tiger, ideally, or a barn owl with a heart-shaped face, but a stray dog would be fine, and bees would be wonderful. She is more terrified than she has ever been; she is anesthetized by terror. But she should call to let people know, she thinks, as she enters the hospital grounds. She looks up her sons’ numbers and sends them a text — it’s now, tonight — then calls her mother, who must already be asleep, and lastly her foxglove friend on the other side of the world: signals sent in this very instant that stretch out a long way through time. She turns back one more time, looks at the window of her apartment, and suddenly all the hours that she has spent behind that pane of glass, waiting, are condensed into a single shard of time, converging at the base of her skull at the precise moment when she walks through the hospital gates, a lightning-quick finger snap that launches her into the enclosure, onto the asphalt ribbon that runs beside the buildings. Then, as the path bends to the left, she enters the Cardiology Institute: a lobby, two elevators — she forces herself not to think about choosing the one that will bring her good luck — up to the fourth floor and that corridor illuminated like a space station, the glass-walled workstation, and Harfang standing there, in a clean and neatly ironed shirt, white cowlick combed back off his forehead: I’ve been expecting you.
23
The Margherita splats against the apartment wall, landing on the carpet and leaving a Neapolitan sunset above the television set. Having cast a satisfied glance at the effect she has produced, the young woman turns toward the pile of white boxes on the breakfast bar of the American kitchen, patiently opens a second perfectly square, flat box, slides the burning disc of Americana onto her palm, then stands facing the wall, elbow bent, hand flat, and — with a rapid extension of her arm — throws the pizza with all her strength between the room’s two windows, creating another action painting, slices of pepperoni scattered in a curious constellation across the wall. As she is preparing to open the third box, a blistered four-cheese, thinking that the yellowish sludge of melted mozzarella, parmesan, gorgonzola, and ricotta might well act as a sort of adhesive paste, a man comes out of the bathroom, face aglow, stops dead in the doorway, sensing a threat, and — seeing the young woman getting ready to send a third hot circle flying straight at him — instinctively falls to the ground. Lying prone, he soon rolls over onto his back so he can watch her from below: she smiles, turns away from him, her eyes surveying the room, and — taking care to target a new area — throws the pizza against the front door. After that, she steps over the shocked young man and goes to wash her hands behind the breakfast bar. The man gets up, checks that there are no stains on his clothes, then takes note of the damage, turning in a circle until he is once again facing the woman as she stands at the sink.
She drinks a glass of water. Her pearl-white shoulders emerge from a soccer shirt in the colors of the Squadra Azzurra with a scoop neck that gives a glimpse of the tops of her small breasts; her immensely long legs emerge in the other direction from a pair of baggy, satiny blue shorts; a delicate film of perspiration pearls above her mouth: she’s so beautiful when she’s angry, the skin below her jaw pulsing. She doesn’t even look at him as she crosses and uncrosses her long arms — things of classical beauty — lifting them as she does so, in order to remove the now pointless soccer shirt, revealing a glorious torso that is a sum of various circles (breasts, areolae, nipples, stomach, belly button, the twin bait of her buttocks), of various triangles pointing toward the ground (the isosceles of the sternum, the convex of the pubis, the concave of the hips), and of various lines (the dorsal midline that divides the body in two identical halves, and the furrow, in a woman, that is reminiscent of a leaf’s vein or a butterfly’s symmetry axis), the whole punctuated by a little diamond shape in the area of the sternal crest — the dark keel — a collection of perfect forms whose balance of proportions and ideal arrangement he admired with a professional eye, prizing the anatomical exploration of the human body above all, and of this particular human body in particular, savoring its examination, searching passionately for the slightest disharmony in its construction, the tiniest defect, the faintest discrepancy: a curve of scoliosis above the lumbar vertebrae, that sporulating beauty spot, there, under the armpit, those calluses between the toes where her feet are compressed into the sharp points of her high-heeled shoes, and the slight strabismus that made her squint when she was short of sleep, the source of that dissipated air, that look of a feral girl, which he loved so much.