#AMREADING Maylis de
Kerangal, Mend the Living.
 |
| Translated by Jessica Moore as Mend the Living |
The
subject is clinical, but the language is lyrical and asks the existential
question: What does it mean to be alive or dead?
Simon
is in a coma after a car accident. His heart (or rather the machine to which he
is hooked up) keeps pumping blood, a life
of ebbs and flows, of valves and flap gates, a life of pulsations. On the
night when his heart slips from the grip
of the machine, it was bone-crackingly cold on the estuary and in the Caux
region, while a reflectionless swell rolled along the base of the cliffs, while
the continental plateau drew back, unveiling its geological stripes.
Dr.
Revol informs Simon’s parents of his death. One needs time, of course, to catch one’s breath after uttering such a
thing, time to take a pause, stabilize the oscillations of the inner ear so as
not to collapse in a heap on the ground. Gazes dissolve. Revol ignores the beep
beep at his belt.
He
gets ready to speak to the parents about organ donation. He prepares for the
conversation the way he prepares himself
to sing, relaxing his muscles, regulating his breathing, conscious that
punctuation is the anatomy of language, the structure of meaning, and he
visualizes the opening sentence, its musical line, and gauges the first
syllable he will utter, the one that will cleave the silence.
The
parents give him permission to transplant Simon’s heart.
Before
leaving the hospital, Simon’s mother turns
around one last time toward the bed and what freezes her in place then is the
solitude that emanates from Simon, from now on as alone as an object, as though
he had been unballasted of his human aspect. Simon is dead, she says these
words to herself for the first time.
