Pierre reverted to his solitary stamping around. Nothing stirred in his home apart from Chantepie, whom he had asked to come back. The lift was out of use, the clocks had stopped, the electricity had been cut off. It was the middle of the All Saints holiday period: three million Parisians, bearing chrysanthemums, had set off to suburban and regional cemeteries.
Pierre was bored; he wanted to go out, drawn by the summer weather of St Martin’s Day and driven by the violent shock of having nothing better to do, but his legs were numb and he felt breathless and very weary. Along with this sense of languidness came a tiresome feeling of sickness throughout his body, a feeling of deep disgust.
“Midday on All Souls’ Day… who on earth can I ring?”
Placide was away. The Mas Vieux was too far. The only recourse in a situation like this are foreigners.
“I find Regencrantz fairly entertaining. I shall invite him.”
Pierre had, as it happened, found a letter from the doctor in the post. Regencrantz described his most recent disappointments and the story of his last visa: it was from Labrador that he was now expecting one that had been too long delayed. He was no longer living in Bordeaux, but in Marnes-la-Coquette, with a doctor friend; working for a pharmaceutical products company, his job was to put calves’ liver in pills.
“Is it you Regencrantz?”
“Dear Pierre Niox!”
“Come and have lunch.”
“Impossible, I’m on duty over the holidays. But why don’t you come over here and share my lamb chop.”
Pierre dashed off to Marnes and was reacquainted with the wandering Jew’s floppy handshake and his passport adventures, filled with dreary incidents. Strengthened by a time-honoured experience of misfortune, Regencrantz knew how to use it, philosophically, to adapt to every situation. Pierre, in turn, described his trip to America in a gay and lively manner.
He ate lunch with his elbows on the table, bent over the tablecloth like a skier on a snow run. With his spoon held out, he lunged at the soup which, in German fashion, the doctor had offered him, and he kept his head over his plate. Regencrantz listened to him, arching his back and slumping farther and farther back as the meal progressed.
“By the way,” said Pierre, “a strange thing happened to me while I was in New York. As a doctor, it would be of interest to you. Although I have an iron constitution, it appears that I am not suited to flying. And yet this isn’t the first time: I’ve flown a good many times. Would you believe that in the course of a very short flight, I was overcome with a peculiar ailment, a sort of attack…”
“What do you mean? An attack? Explain yourself better. A headache? Buzzing in the ears?”
Pierre described his blackout while flying. He would normally have related it in a couple of words — as he did with anecdotes that he reduced to the minimum or the stories that he dashed off and summarized so quickly that no one ever understood them — had not Regencrantz, in his anxiety, plied him with questions.
“Will you allow me to listen to your chest? Not here, there’s too much noise… I should also take your blood pressure.”
After lunch, they went into a nearby building and walked up to the laboratory.
Pierre undressed and bared his chest. Regencrantz listened carefully, in the way people do when they eavesdrop.
“And now, the X-ray.”
Regencrantz pressed his face to the frosted-glass screen. The shadow of Pierre’s heart rose above the diaphragm with each intake of breath and then dropped down again. In the darkness, Pierre could feel the cold of the glass on his naked chest and he could see Regencrantz’s bald head following the motions of his thorax, like a collector searching for the signature on the work of a master.
“Now, lie down here. Don’t tense up. Let yourself relax.”
An electromagnet crackled behind the screen. In a tube, on the phosphorescent quartz filament, of the type of orchid colour we associate with lightning, Pierre could see a sort of magnetic signature developing and being repeated in interrupted quavers, a bright and irregular cast of his breathing.
“They are my heart’s cries expressed luminously,” he thought. “What on earth can my heart have to say to that old rabbi Regencrantz?”
In the pitch-darkness, Pierre watched with amazement as the secrets of his body were made legible, his pulse transformed into a coloured ray, his heartbeat covered in sparks, his entire life diverted into this tube.
The doctor switched on the light in silence.
“Well?”
“Are you sure, Pierre Niox, that you had only one attack of the kind you have described to me?”
“I’m certain of it.”
Regencrantz nodded absent-mindedly, looked at a note, opened and shut some drawers.
“Come now, Regencrantz, why are you asking me this? Talk to me, for heaven’s sake!”
“Given the condition of your heart, I would have thought that you had already had five or six attacks,” said Regencrantz hesitantly.
“The condition of my heart? So is something wrong with my heart?”
Regencrantz replied with a wave of his hand that signified nothing, that was merely the outer reflection of an unspoken thought.
Pierre considered the matter. Snatches of medical conversations at the end of dinner parties, items read in magazines or dictionaries all fused together.
“Bend your knees two or three times, if you would…”
“I get out of breath quickly,” said Pierre, “but that must be lack of fitness.”
“Yes, indeed… Why not?”
“Come on,” said Pierre abruptly. “What is it? Tell me what it is straight away! Vasomotor problems? No? False angina? Heavens… the real thing?”
Regencrantz nodded as he pushed away the X-ray machine, which was on a track, with his shoulder.
“And even… well developed, apparently?” Pierre continued insistently.
“By taking care, avoiding muscular strain… keeping an eye on your blood pressure… What’s your previous medical history? Nephritis? Scarlet fever?”
“Regencrantz, I don’t like being made a fool of… You have either said too much or not enough. You care for me as a friend. Don’t make that odd face. What I want to know is whether I’m done for or not. Are you sure it’s not intercostal?”
Regencrantz’s lips opened, ready to give a harsh verdict.
“Classic stenocardia, unfortunately.”
In a deep silence, Regencrantz could hear a blackbird whistling, a car pass by. But none of Pierre’s senses were focused on the outside world any longer.
“I know it’s relentless, but sometimes one can live for years,” he said very quietly at last.
“Sometimes,” replied Regencrantz, without much enthusiasm.
Pierre had plunged into a murky, suffocating world where no light or sound reached him.
“How should I consider my attack? As a warning?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll have many others… I’ll know when I’m nearing the end… I’ll know, won’t I?”
Regencrantz lectured him.
“No chlorides… No tobacco… No staircases.”
“None of that is of any interest to me, my dear Regencrantz. One thing alone concerns me, you must understand: I absolutely insist on knowing at what time death will knock at my door.”
Regencrantz said nothing, watching Pierre constructing his assumptions like castles of cards.
“What!” Pierre continued, pressing the point, “I really will see death approaching? Don’t tell me otherwise, I have arrangements to make.”
“Your heart is really thumping. Your left ventricle is not a friend you can depend on when times are bad: that is all I can tell you with any certainty.”