The Truth about Marie Read online

  With the same determination, characterized less by speed than by precision, scrupulousness, and an impressive economy of gesture, the paramedics undressed Jean-Christophe de G. directly on the floor, they lifted him to remove his coat and undo his shirt, opening it at the collar, causing buttons to fly off as they pulled on either side of the shirt, stripping him in this way to uncover his chest, while the doctor had already begun to check his heartbeat with a stethoscope. One paramedic, crouching beside the patient, took his pulse, then strapped a blood-pressure cuff around his arm and squeezed the inflation bulb, noting that the pressure was very weak, hardly perceptible, virtually nonexistent, as was his carotid pulse. He needed to be put on a ventilator immediately, and they placed a transparent mask over his mouth and nose, carefully controlling its airflow by means of an oxygen pump. Another paramedic, kneeling on the ground, had opened a medical kit at the foot of the bed, next to where the small glasses of grappa had been left, and was preparing to give him an IV. He’d lifted Jean-Christophe de G.’s inert arm in order to disinfect the skin around his wrist with alcohol, then, wasting no time, he located a suitable vein solely by the touch of his hand, tightened up the tourniquet he’d tied, removed the lid of the needle, and stuck the point in at an angle. Then, with the sound of ripping tape, he opened the bandage and placed it over the IV on Jean-Christophe de G.’s arm to hold it in place for the moment. There were medical kits and cases strewn about the room, opened and spilling over with syringes, rubber tubes, and accessories vacuum-sealed in clear plastic bags. Kneeling on the hardwood floor, the doctor began lathering Jean-Christophe de G.’s chest with a translucent and slimy gel, applying and spreading it like butter with both hands to soften and desensitize his skin, and, having taken a disposable razor out of its plastic case, small, blue, rudimentary, a mean little disposable razor whose toothpick handle offered little purchase, he began shaving his chest rapidly, in great even strips, from top to bottom, perfunctorily as a daily habit, with little care, scraping his skin, clearing a space rather than really shaving, effecting a slow movement in the end, a sort of exaggerated comma in the crux of the sternum, then flicking the blade to remove its foamy glop of gel and tiny hairs before quickly placing a network of electrodes on the reddened, irritated skin. There lay Jean-Christophe de G.’s body in the middle of the room, surrounded by a shifting mass of white figures hardly distinct from one another, the blinding light of a 400-watt halogen lamp shining on his chest, which a paramedic had run out to get to increase the light in the room — but, even with the combined effort of all Marie’s designer lamps turned on together, the room was no brighter than a boudoir. Standing in the room, dressed in a short-sleeved tunic, the paramedic held the lamp by its base over the inanimate body, its adjustable head fully twisted to shine on Jean-Christophe de G.’s ghostly white, electrode-covered chest. The room had now taken on the look of a surgical unit.

  Marie had gone into the bathroom to throw on a T-shirt, and she was now pacing the room, confined to the extremely small space unoccupied by the paramedics. She didn’t know what to do, where to stand, she’d gone over to the window and closed the shutters to keep the rain from coming into the room. She’d given up asking the paramedics questions, it was pointless, the gravity of Jean-Christophe de G.’s state needed no explanation. Besides, the paramedics, in a circle around the body, didn’t pay her the least attention, they were studying the electrocardiogram reader, the tiny bright screen of a cardiac monitor built into a medical case that lay open at the patient’s side, and from time to time they exchanged a few words in a whisper, one of them getting up on occasion to carry out a specific task, fetching a missing instrument or delivering an injection with the IV. Marie witnessed then an abnormal haste among the group, a spreading tension among the paramedics that caused a sudden acceleration in the performance of their tasks, with a nervous shuffling to and fro and a tangle of hands at work above the inanimate torso, a telling indication that Jean-Christophe de G.’s condition had taken an abrupt turn for the worse. The doctor, in a act of extreme urgency, sat up to press down on the patient’s sternum, before hastily placing two great electric paddles connected by means of cables to a defibrillator on Jean-Christophe de G.’s electrode-covered chest, one paddle on the upper part of the chest and the other between the ribs. Wasting no time, the doctor asked the paramedics to stand clear and, assuring that no one was in contact with Jean-Christophe de G.’s body, proceeded to perform a ventricular defibrillation by delivering a brutal electric shock, causing the patient’s chest to shake on the floor, from top to bottom, while the electric charge went through to the myocardium. Then, falling back onto the floor, the body lay motionless, and Marie understood then that Jean-Christophe de G.’s heart had stopped beating. Marie approached the paramedics and looked down at the stripped body, its face hidden by the oxygen mask, its white inanimate flesh dotted with electrodes, skin like a fish, cod or flounder, and Marie couldn’t help thinking that it was this same motionless body that she’d held in this room less than an hour earlier in that very spot, this body stripped naked and dispossessed, objectified by a whole array of medical apparatuses, shaved, hooked to an IV and ventilator — this body reduced to its bare substance, bearing no sign of Jean-Christophe de G’s personality. She realized then that up until this moment she hadn’t really looked at his body, not once throughout the whole night, not even while making love had she taken an interest in his body, she’d hardly even touched it, hadn’t paid it the least attention, being concerned as she always was with her own body alone, caring only for her own pleasure.

  The first defibrillation having failed, the doctor gave it another try at a stronger charge. After a moment of silence, with all eyes fixed on the monitor’s bright screen, the electrocardiogram’s straight line began to oscillate slightly, Jean-Christophe de G.’s heart started beating again. A paramedic added a dose of antiarryhthmic medicine to his IV, and he was given more morphine. His condition seemingly stabilized, the doctor decided to transport Jean-Christophe de G. to a hospital at once. He gave no order or instruction, and yet everyone knew just what to do, the paramedics rose and prepared to leave, they began picking up the tools strewn about the floor and returned them to their cases, with some of the men already taking kits and bags down to the ambulance. Marie observed this silent ballet, a series of precise centrifugal movements away from Jean-Christophe de G.’s unmoving body, left alone for the first time in the center of the room, hooked to an IV and a small oxygen pump resting on the hardwood floor. The paramedics returned from the ambulance with a stretcher, which they set up in the room, adjusting the poles and unfolding the legs, checking its structural stability and the tautness of its canvas before carefully lifting Jean-Christophe de G. onto it. They laid a blanket over his lap, strapped him to the stretcher, tightened the straps around his thighs, and carried him out of the room, a paramedic scurrying alongside the stretcher in the hallway with the IV and oxygen pump. The crew left the apartment quickly with Marie trailing barefoot on the landing, she tried to activate the automatic light but it wasn’t working, and she watched them go down the stairs in the dark. They proceeded slowly through the darkness of the stairwell, one step at a time, keeping the stretcher level and studying the angles and curves of their passage to avoid scraping the walls or hitting the banister. At the foot of the stairs, one paramedic broke from the group to open the door. They walked outside and vanished from Marie’s sight at the precise moment I got to the building, the sole onlooker adrift in the street at three o’clock in the morning.

  At first I hadn’t understood a thing when Marie called me in the middle of the night. The rain fell heavily through the open window, the storm continued to rage, and I heard the phone ring in the darkness of the one-bedroom apartment where I’d been living for the last few months. As soon as I answered I recognized Marie’s voice, Marie who after calling an ambulance had called me — right before or right after, I’m not sure which, the two calls must have been made moments apart —
Marie, upset, confused, bewildered, had called me for help, pleading with me to come quickly, without any explanation, come quick, she told me hurriedly, come right now, hurry, it’s an emergency, beseeching me, begging me to get to rue de la Vrillière at once.

  Marie’s call — it was a little before two in the morning, this I’m sure of, I looked at the time when the phone rang — had been extremely brief, neither of us able nor really wanting to talk, Marie had simply called for help, and I was speechless, paralyzed by the fear of a late-night call, a feeling confirmed, exacerbated even, by the irrational and violent onrush of embarrassment, annoyance, and guilt I felt immediately upon hearing Marie’s voice. For, as I recognized Marie’s voice on the phone, my gaze was fixed on the body of a young woman sleeping next to me in my room, I was gazing at this body lying motionless in the half-light, she wore nothing but a tiny pair of baby-blue silk panties. I stared at her bare side, the curve of her hip. I was gazing at Marie confusedly (Marie, her name was also Marie), and, with a sense of shock and unease, I foresaw the confusion awaiting me in night’s final hours. Make no mistake, I had no trouble distinguishing between Marie and Marie — Marie wasn’t Marie — but I knew immediately that I was incapable of being two people at the same time, simultaneously the person I was for this Marie in my bed and that person I was for Marie — her lover (even if we’d stopped living together since I’d moved into this small one-bedroom on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas after our trip to Japan).

  It was two thirty in the morning when I left my small one-bedroom on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas to go help Marie. Outside the sky was dark, black, immense, invisible, and an unbroken sheet of rain falling through the yellow light of the streetlamps blocked the horizon. I threw myself straight into the downpour, my jacket’s collar raised, and I started in the direction of the Place des Victoires, stooped under the rain, its heavy drops blurring my vision. The thunder rumbled in the distance, in regular intervals, and the rain spewed out of an insufficient number of sewage drains, as if boiling up from below, streaming down the street gutters with the impetuousness of small urban torrents, ravaging and heedless. I reached the Place de la Bourse, silent, abandoned, the staid columns of the Palais Brongniart shining in the night’s darkness. The esplanade was deserted, its surface pounded by an oblique curtain of rain and covered with a pool of splashing, windswept water. I could hardly see ahead of me, I didn’t know where I was going, I closed my jacket tightly around me in a futile attempt at self-protection. I kept turning the wrong way then would run back in the opposite direction, nearly losing my balance on the slippery sidewalks. Reflections from the streetlights shimmered here and there on the wet pavement, and from time to time I discerned through a sort of aqueous fog that the rain held over my eyes the ghostly headlights of a car passing in the distance, moving as if in slow motion, inching along, slogging through the water, its headlights piercing through the flood.

  I was still running when the Place des Victoires came into sight, I saw suddenly in the horizon the connected façades of the private houses and the three-headed streetlamps lit in the beating rain, and, in the middle of the plaza, rearing, immense, the equestrian statue of Louis XIV, which looked as though it were fleeing the storm. My concern quickly turned into panic when I reached rue de la Vrillière and saw, in the night, police lights in front of Marie’s. I walked the last stretch on wobbly legs, soaked from head to foot, still moving forward, full of emotion, out of breath, my heart racing, but no longer running, walking slowly, graceless, as if holding back each step and yet advancing against my will, no longer wanting to go on, imagining the worst, an accident, a late-night assault, and, thinking then about Marie with worry and affection, I remembered that night when an alarm on rue de la Vrillière had startled us from our sleep. We didn’t get up immediately, certain it was just another car alarm set off for no reason in the middle of the night, bound to wake up the entire neighborhood before turning off just as mysteriously as it started, but this alarm was harsher, more disconcerting than the usual car alarm — I’d never heard one like this, as if it had been designed for unknown catastrophes, sounding in the night to warn inhabitants of some nuclear accident — and it only came to an end after forty minutes, during which Marie and I had time to get up and go over to the window, Marie struggling to stay awake, her cheeks hot, her eyelids heavy, dressed in one of those baggy and threadbare T-shirts she always wore to bed, I could smell the scent of her warm sleepy body standing beside me. Side by side at the window, we relished at length the complicit, tender intimacy of the moment, I’d put my arm around her waist and we stared in silence at the dark walls of the Banque de France, exchanging from time to time an amused look, observing what was going on without trying to make sense of it, all of this taking place in what seemed a suspended moment in time, dynamic and intense, a moment of pure nothing, an emptiness charged with an invisible energy ready to explode at any instant, a gap continually animated by little events, unrelated, trivial, small in scale, occurring at regular intervals so that right when we’d be ready to go back to bed the tension would flare up again and put us back on guard, the arrival of a police car in the night, for example, greeted by two or three security guards, who seemed to have cordoned off the bank, or, ten minutes later, the slow and partial opening of the bank’s heavy bronze gate, with nothing to follow, apart from a guard poking his head out briefly in the night, and nothing more before the heavy bronze gate was then closed, filling the street once again with a diffuse sense of imminent threat, rendered even more palpable by its very invisibility. I never did find out in the end what had actually happened, I leafed through the papers the following days but found no information regarding the incident, and of this night I’ve retained only the exquisitely sensual memory of my silent intimacy with Marie.

  I was still about a hundred feet from the building, and I’d stopped running, I was walking briskly, picking up my pace and slowing it down at the same time, in the same contradictory movement, the same propelling force, the same conflicted stride. I came to an abrupt stop when I saw the flashing lights at Marie’s door and I was nearly frozen in my tracks, fear having paralyzed my legs, making my last steps impossibly heavy, resistant. I continued to move forward nonetheless, and I perceived a light through the ambulance’s wet windows, a yellow light in that intimate space where the injured are laid, then my attention was drawn to the door of Marie’s building opening in front of me. I discerned nothing at first but the arm, white, of a paramedic holding open the door, then I saw the other paramedics leave the building in turn, four or five of them total, in white tunics, and there was a human form on the stretcher, my heart began to pound when I saw that there was someone on the stretcher — this someone could have been Marie, I had no idea what had happened, Marie had told me nothing on the phone — but it wasn’t Marie, it was a man, I could see his socks sticking out from under the small blanket covering his body. I gleaned nothing but isolated details, focused, removed from their context, caught only in passing, his socks, dark, imposing, as if this man would henceforth be reduced to these, his wrist, horrid, to which the IV was attached, a livid wrist, yellow-hued, cadaverous, his face pale, on which I focused closely, scrutinizing its features to see who this was, but in vain, his face, completely covered by the oxygen mask, was perfectly invisible. This human form, shirtless, a black sports coat thrown over the top of the stretcher and a briefcase stuck in between two transversal poles at its base, was not moving. I was standing there motionless on the sidewalk when I felt the presence of someone watching the scene. I lifted my eyes and saw Marie at the window, chin resting in her palms on the second floor of the building, Marie, her eyes fixed on the stretcher, and I understood the whole situation right then and there. In a flash, I knew without a doubt the man being carried away on the stretcher had spent the night with Marie and that something had happened to him and not to Marie (Marie was safe and sound, nothing had happened to Marie). And it was at that moment that Marie saw me, our eyes met for an ins
tant in the night, it had been more than two months since we’d last seen each other.