She slips on a turtleneck sweater, removes her shorts and climbs into a pair of skintight jeans. The show is over. Then, having put on a pair of high-heeled boots, she heads toward the front door, where grease trickles down the wooden surface, opens it, and slams it behind her without a backward glance at the young man standing in the center of the messed-up apartment, who sighs with relief as he watches her go.
* * *
You’re going to the hospital in Le Havre for an organ removal — a heart, now. When he heard these words in Harfang’s mouth, enunciated just the way he had imagined during the past few months — brief and emotionless — Virgilio Breva almost choked on the bitter ball of happiness and disappointment that formed in his throat. Because, although of course he was on call, and although he was excited by his mission, the truth was that this announcement could hardly have come at a worse time — the rare conjunction of two unmissable events: a France versus Italy game + a horny Rose at home. All the same, he wondered for a long time afterward why Harfang had bothered to call him in person, detecting in that fact a perverse desire to humiliate him on a historic evening, knowing perfectly well that the Italian was obsessed by soccer, his Sunday-morning training sessions having given him a legitimate excuse not to join the cycling squad: torture, Virgilio had once muttered, bemused, watching the throng of tadpoles in pointy helmets and multicolored cycling shorts set off down the road, with Harfang the queen bee at their center.
* * *
Sitting in the backseat of the taxi as it heads toward Pitié-Salpêtrière, Virgilio folds his fur-lined hood back over his shoulders and gets his breath back. The tensions of the last hour have left him in a state of disturbance, when he needs to be at the top of his game, more than ever before. Because tonight will be his night; tonight will be a big night. The quality of the transplant depends entirely on the quality of the removal — it’s the fundamental law of his profession — and tonight, he is in the front line.
It’s time to get a grip, he thinks, interlacing his leather-gloved fingers, it’s time to dump that girl, that crazy bitch, time for his survival instinct to assert itself, even if that means being deprived of her hyperactive body and the glory of her presence. He relives the alarms of the previous hour: Rose surprising him at home when he had planned to go to the soccer game with some friends, then demanding — adorable yet vaguely threatening — that the two of them stay at home to watch it and order pizza, arguing her case silently with the Italian soccer outfit she wore, the erotic tension gradually insinuating itself into the belligerent, upper-case tension of the France — Italy game, this embrace of opposites exuding a possible — and incredibly intriguing — happiness, to which Harfang’s call, on the stroke of eight, had added an excess of feverish agitation, emotions shooting through the roof. Immediately, he had jumped to his feet and replied I’m here, I’m ready, I’m on my way, avoiding Rose’s eyes but putting on an exaggeratedly tragic face — eyebrows like circumflex accents, lower lip rolled up over upper lip, the oval of the chin lengthened sadly — an expression that signified disaster, rotten luck, and was intended for Rose, grimacing for her at that moment, fanning the air with his hand like a clown, a thrift-store tragedian, while his eyes lit up with joy — a heart! She wasn’t fooled. He backed out of the room to take a shower and dress in clean, warm clothes, and when he came out of the bathroom, the situation had spiraled out of control. It had been a wonderful and overwhelming spectacle, but mentally replaying it now in slow-motion, perceiving its logical majesty, only seemed to accentuate Rose’s supremacy, her incomparable beauty, and her fiery temperament, her ability to channel her rage into a regal body language, maintaining a royal silence where so many others would merely whine. Splat! Splat! Splat! The more he thinks about it, the more impossible it seems to break up with that highly flammable and utterly unique creature. No, he will never give her up, no matter what other people say, all those who think she’s insane, or “borderline,” as they put it, with a knowing look, when they would give anything to touch that trapezoid of warm skin in the hollow at the back of her knee.
She had first made her appearance at the start of the university year, during one of the classes taken by medical interns at the Pitié. The instruction given during the day-school years took the form of tutorial classes of one particular type: the study of clinical cases. The students attended long sessions, where real situations experienced by the departments or scenarios invented on the basis of particular questions that required study were “replayed,” so that they could learn to listen to the patient, become acquainted with the methods of auscultation, practice diagnoses, identify a pathology, and decide on a treatment protocol. This practical work, developed around the patient/doctor duo, took place in public and sometimes required the setting up of bigger groups, in order to encourage an aptitude for working together, for dialogues between the different disciplines. It was intended to resist the compartmentalization of medical specialties, which divided the human body into a collection of rules and practices, with no flow of knowledge between them, making it impossible to see the patient as a whole person. Because it was based on simulation, however, this new teaching method provoked a degree of mistrust: the use of fiction in the process of acquiring scientific knowledge, the very idea of “play-acting” a situation — you be the doctor and you be the patient — was enough to make the faculty skeptical. They did agree to it, though, acknowledging that this teaching technique brought together some very interesting material, including subjectivity and emotion, and emphasizing the importance, in the patient/doctor dialogue, of understanding and deciphering that fragile, often distorted communication. In this role-playing game, it was decided that the students, carrying out their future function, would take on the part of the doctor, which meant that the hospital had to hire actors to play the patients.
* * *
They turned up to the audition after a small ad appeared in a weekly paper for performing-arts professionals. Most of them were theater actors, highly promising newcomers or eternal bit-part players from television shows, commercial veterans, understudies, walk-ons, extras, doing the rounds of casting sessions in order to pick up hours, to earn enough money to pay their rent — generally a shared apartment in an arrondissement in the northeast of Paris or a nearby suburb — or reinventing themselves as coaches for training days on sales techniques (at home or elsewhere), and perhaps ending up as human guinea pigs, tasting new yogurts, testing moisturizers or lice-repellent shampoos, experimenting with diuretic pills.
There were too many, so there was a selection process. The jury was made up of medical professors and practitioners, some of them theater aficionados. When Rose entered the audition room and walked past the workbenches, wearing platform sneakers, burgundy Adidas sweatpants, and a sunshine-colored Lurex top, the men in the room were stirred into murmurs, their interest sparked by her face and her body. She was given a list of actions and words to help her improvise the part of a patient rushed to the gynecology department after the discovery of a suspicious lump in her left breast, and, during the fifteen minutes that followed, her commitment to the role elicited widespread admiration: she lay on her back, topless on the cold tile floor, and guided the student’s hand — here, here, that’s where it is, yes, there — and then, as the scene dragged on, a disturbance arose: the student, it was true, palpated her chest rather longer than was strictly necessary, moving from one breast to the other and then starting over, ignoring the dialogue guidelines, not listening to the essential information that she provided him with — including the intense pain she felt at the end of her menstrual cycle — so that she finally stood up, purple-faced, and slapped him. Bravo, mademoiselle! She was congratulated, and hired on the spot.