From the very beginning, Rose secretly disregarded the terms of the contract, believing that this job as a “patient,” which she had landed for the entire academic year, would be a learning opportunity for her, the chance to increase her range, the power of her art. Foolishly, she scorned ordinary pathologies — or what she considered ordinary pathologies — preferring to monopolize madness, hysteria, and melancholy, a register in which she excelled — romantic and mysterious heroines — sometimes allowing herself diversions not mentioned in the prescribed scenario (an effrontery that shocked the psychiatrists and neurologists who were running the classes and created confusion among the students, forcing them to ask her to take it down a notch or two); she played drowned women, attempted suicides, bulimics, erotomaniacs, diabetics, taking particular pleasure in mimicking people with limps, people in pain (a case of coxalgia in Brittany providing the opportunity for a very nice dialogue about inbreeding in Finistère Nord), people with hunchbacks (she succeeded in imitating the rotation of the vertebrae in the thoracic cage), and anything that required her to twist or unhinge her body; she liked interpreting a pregnant woman with premature contractions, but was less convincing in her incarnation of a young mother describing the symptoms of a three-month-old baby, which brought the pediatric intern out in a cold sweat; superstitious, she refused to play cancer patients.
However, she was never better than on that December day when she had to simulate angina. The renowned cardiologist who was leading the course had described the pain to her in these terms: A bear is sitting on your chest. Rose’s almond-shaped eyes had widened in awe: A bear? She had to gather her childhood memories — the vast, foul-smelling cage with its crudely modeled, cream-colored plastic rocks, and the huge animal, half a ton, with its triangular muzzle and its close-set eyes that gave a false impression of nearsightedness, the rust-brown fur dusted with sand, and the yells of the children when it stood up on its hind legs, six and a half feet tall; she recalled the scenes of Ceauşescu hunting in the Carpathian Mountains — the bears subdued by peasants and lured with buckets of food, emerging from the back of the clearing close to a log cabin mounted on pilings, moving forward until it was perfectly framed by the open window where a Securitate agent prepared a rifle before handing it to the dictator as soon as the bear was close enough that he couldn’t miss; lastly, she remembered a scene from Grizzly Man. Rose began at the back of the room, walked toward the student who was going to partner her in the scene, and then stood still. Could she make out the beast at the edge of the undergrowth, its head poking between bamboo shoots, or nonchalantly swaying its rump on four feet, cashew-colored fur, lazily scratching a stump with its nonretractable claws, before turning toward her and standing up like a man? Did she see the monster emerging from its cave after months of hibernation, stretching its muscles, reheating the stalled fluids in its body, reactivating the taste for blood in its heart? Could she discern it at dusk, rummaging through supermarket trash cans, growling happily under a huge moon? Or was she thinking about a different weight altogether — a man’s? She fell back onto the floor — the noise her body made when it hit the floor provoked a murmur in the room — and, stiffening convulsively, let out a cry of pain, soon muffled into a silent groan, and afterward stopped breathing, completely immobile. Her thoracic cage seemed to flatten and hollow out in a basin while her face swelled up, slowly reddening, her lips, held tight, soon turning colorless, eyes rolling back in her head, and her limbs began to fibrillate, as if electrocuted; such realism was not expected of these actors, and some of the students in the room stood up to get a better view, alarmed by her crimson face and concave abdomen, and a figure hurtled down the steps of the amphitheater and knelt next to Rose — knocking over the student who had begun imperturbably to read through the first lines of his questionnaire in a droning voice — and leaned over her to resuscitate her while the eminent cardiologist also rushed over, shining a penlight at her irises. Rose frowned with one eyebrow, opened one eye, then the other, sat up with a jolt, looked questioningly at the crowd gathered around her, and, for the first time in her life, felt the pleasure of being applauded. She lay flat on her back in front of the students as they stood and clapped in the bleachers.
The young man who’d rushed over to her, furious at having been fooled, reproached her for overacting: angina is not cardiac arrest, you know, the two things are not the same at all, it should have been more subtle and complex, you messed up the exercise. In order to make her understand, he listed the symptoms of angina one by one — constrictive thoracic pain, the feeling of being crushed all across your chest, of being squeezed in a vise, and sometimes other pains, typically in the lower jaw, one of the two forearms, or, more rarely, in the back, the throat, but anyway, you don’t collapse. Then he detailed the symptoms of cardiac arrest: massively accelerated pulse rate, sometimes to more than three hundred beats per minute, a ventricular fibrillation leading to respiratory arrest, which in turn causes the patient to faint, all this in less than a minute. He now began detailing the treatments, listing the medicines, the antiplatelet drugs that facilitate blood circulation and the nitroglycerin that relieves the pain by dilating the coronary arteries, he was captivated, no longer had any idea what he was saying but was unable to stop talking, throwing out sentences like lassos in order to catch her and keep her close to him. Soon his heart rate was racing, abnormally fast, a tachycardia close to two hundred beats per minute; he risked suffering the ventricular fibrillation he had just described to her, risked fainting, risked almost anything, frankly; Rose turned slowly toward him with starlike disdain, looked him up and down, and smilingly explained to him that a bear had just sat on her chest, didn’t he know? She then told him, slyly, that she was ready to go through it again, if he would agree to play the bear — he had the physique and the finesse, she would bet her life on it.
* * *
Virgilio Breva was indeed rather bearlike in his supple slowness, his explosiveness. He was a swarthy blond with a stubbly beard, his soft hair swept back, piling up in curls on the back of his neck. His nose was straight, and he had the fine features of a Friulian. He had the light-footed gait of a sardana dancer despite the fact that he was close to two hundred pounds, with the corpulence of a former fat kid, toned to the point where he was thick-chested, full-bodied, without any visible excrescences — no flab or lumps, in other words — a body that was just a little fleshy, enveloped in a layer of fat of equal compactness, thinning toward the extremities of his limbs, toward his very beautiful hands. Although transformed into this seductive and charismatic colossus — with a stature that matched the eloquence of his warm voice, his enthusiastic if occasionally excessive moods, his bulimic appetite for knowledge, his extraordinary capacity for hard work — his body was prey to painful fluctuations, an elasticity that haunted him with feelings of shame and fear (the trauma of having been mocked as pudgy, chubby, plump, or simply fat; the anger at having been looked down on for that, for the sexual difficulties it caused him; all kinds of apprehensions), his self-loathing gathered into a ball inside his stomach, like a torture device. This body was the great torment of Virgilio’s life — constantly monitored, examined for hours if he got a speck of dust in his eye, taken to the ER if he got a sunburn, questioned intensely over a sore throat, a stiff neck, a tired feeling — it was his obsession, but it was also his triumph, because women liked it now, that was indisputable: all you had to do was see Rose’s eyes as they wandered over it. Some spiteful people, jealous of his success, even said, with a snigger, that he had only become a doctor so he could learn to control that great body of his, balance his moods, tame his metabolism.