The best in his year at the internship entrance exam in Paris, he raced through his years of study, cramming everything — including spells as chief resident and surgical assistant — into twelve years, when most students in a similar situation would stretch it out to fifteen (but I also can’t afford it, he liked to tell people, with a charming smile, I’m not part of the establishment, and this outraged the wop inside him, the immigrant son, the industrious scholarship student, the boy who did not belong: he always blew things out of proportion). Creative on the theoretical side and prodigiously gifted on the practical side, flamboyant and proud, driven by vaulting ambition and inexhaustible energy, he often lost his temper, it’s true, and remained widely misunderstood: his mother, panicked by his success, connecting intellectual hierarchies to social hierarchies, ended up regarding him suspiciously, wondering how he had done it, what stuff he was made of, who he thought he was, this kid who went into a rage watching her wring her hands then wipe them on her apron, or hearing her moan, the day he defended his thesis, that her presence was completely pointless, that she wouldn’t understand anything, that it wasn’t her place, that she would rather stay home and cook a feast just for him, the pasta and the cakes that he loved.
So, he chose the heart, and then cardiac surgery. People were surprised, thinking that he could have made a fortune examining suspicious moles, injecting hyaluronic acid into frown lines and Botox into cheeks, remodeling the floppy, stretch-marked stomachs of multiparous women, X-raying bodies, developing vaccines in Swiss laboratories, giving speeches in Israel and the United States on iatrogenic diseases, becoming a high-flying nutritionist. Or he could have covered himself in glory by opting for neurosurgery, or even hepatic surgery — specialties that dazzle with their complexity, their use of cutting-edge technology — instead of which he chose the heart. The good old heart. The human engine. A creaking pump that gets clogged up, goes on the blink. I’m basically a plumber, he liked to tell people: I tap on the surface, listen to the echo, identify what’s gone wrong, replace the faulty piece, repair the machine, it’s perfect for me — hamming it up as he says this, hopping from one foot to the other, minimizing the prestige of the discipline when the truth was that all of this flattered his megalomania.
In fact, Virgilio chose the heart so he could exist at the highest level, reckoning on the idea that the organ’s kingly aura would reflect on him, just as it reflected on the cardiac surgeons rushing through the corridors of the hospital, plumbers and demigods. Because the heart is more than the heart, as he knew perfectly well. Even deposed from its former throne — the muscle continuing to pump no longer being enough to separate the living from the dead — it was, for him, the central organ of the body, the place where the most crucial operations, those most essential for life, took place, and to Virgilio its symbolic stratification was unaltered. More than that, as both a cutting-edge mechanism and the operator of mankind’s supercharged imagination, Virgilio envisaged it as the keystone to representations ordering man’s relationship with his body, with other humans, with Creation, with gods, and the young surgeon was awestruck by the idea that he would be a part of this, a recurrent presence at this magical point in language, permanently situated at the exact intersection of the literal and the figurative, of muscle and emotion; he was thrilled by the metaphors and figures of speech that made it appear as the very analogy of life and never tired of repeating the fact that, having been the first to appear, the heart would also be the last to disappear. One night at the Pitié, sitting at a table with some others in the duty room, in front of the huge mural painted by the interns — a spectacular tangle of sexual scenes and surgical operations, a sort of gory orgy, jokey and morbid, where a few representations of hospital bigwigs appeared between all the asses, breasts, and enormous erections, among them a Harfang or two, generally portrayed on the job, in obscene postures, doggy-style or missionary, scalpel in hand — he told the story of the death of Joan of Arc, his delivery theatrical, eyes sparkling like obsidian balls, slowly recounting how the captive was taken by cart from her prison to the Vieux-Marché, where a crowd had gathered to watch, describing the slim figure in the tunic that had been treated with sulfur so she would burn more quickly, the pyre built too high, Thérage the executioner climbing up to tie her to the stake — Virgilio, encouraged by his listeners’ captivated faces, mimed the scene, tying solid knots in the invisible ropes — before setting fire to the bundles of sticks with an experienced hand, lowering the torch to the coals and the oil-soaked wood, the smoke rising, the screams, Joan’s last words before she suffocated, then the scaffold blazing like a flare, and the heart that they discovered intact after the body had been consumed, red and whole in the ashes, so they were forced to rekindle the fire to be rid of it.
* * *
An exceptional student, an extraordinary intern, Virgilio intrigued the hospital’s management but struggled to find a niche for himself among groups of fellow surgeons-to-be, professing with equal vehemence an orthodox anarchism and a hatred of “families,” those incestuous casts, those biological connivances — when, in truth, like so many others, he was fascinated by all the Harfangs in white coats, attracted by the heirs, mesmerized by their reign, their health, the power of their numbers, curious about their properties, their tastes, and their idioms, their sense of humor, their clay tennis courts, so much so that he became obsessed by the idea of being invited to their homes, sharing their culture, drinking their wine, complimenting their mother, sleeping with their sisters — a raw devouring — and he intrigued like crazy to make it happen, as concentrated as a snake-charmer, then hated himself when he woke up between their sheets, suddenly rude, unpleasantly insulting, a grumpy old bear kicking the bottle of Chivas under the bed, wrecking the Limoges porcelain and the chintz curtains, and he would always end up running away, a lost soul.
His acceptance into the cardiac surgery department of Pitié-Salpêtrière sent his emotions up a notch: aware of his value, he immediately despised the petty rivalries of the medical courtiers, ignored the docile heirs and heiresses apparent, and set to work on getting close to Harfang, getting so close to him that he could hear him think, doubt, tremble, so that he could sense his decision in the very instant it was made and see it in the movement of his gesture. From now on, he knows, he is going to learn with this man what he could never learn anywhere else.
* * *
Virgilio checks the Italian team’s roster on his cell phone — makes sure that Balotelli is playing, Motta too, yes, that’s good, and Pirlo, and we’ve got Buffon in goal — then exchanges predictions and insults with two other chief residents who will be eating dinner in front of a giant plasma screen tonight and drinking his good health, both of them French guys who hate the defensive Italian style and support a team that is physically underprepared. The taxi glides in parallel with the Seine, as flat and smooth as a runway, and as he approaches the entrance to the hospital opposite the Chevaleret metro station, he tries to calm himself down. Soon he is not responding to his colleagues’ messages, only smiling, dropping out of their gamblers’ stake-raising frenzy. Rose’s face reappears in his mind, and he is about to write her a gallant text — something along the lines of: the curve of your eyes encircles my heart — then changes his mind: that girl is a nutcase, a dangerous nutcase, and tonight, nothing must disturb his concentration, his control, nothing must deflect the success of his work.