Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal Read Free Book Online Page B

appendicitis, nothing else; the fractures? A broken radius falling off his bike the summer he was ten, that’s all; allergies that affect his daily life? No, none; infections he’s contracted? Golden staph in the summer he was five, which he announced to everyone, enshrouded in the glow of rarity this spectacular name granted him, mononucleosis at sixteen, the kissing disease, the lovers’ disease, he smiled slantways when people teased him, and all that month he wore a pair of strange pyjamas, a combination of Hawaiian shorts and a quilted sweatshirt. Does it mean listing off childhood diseases? Talk about Simon. Images wash over her, Marianne panics: the roseola of a baby in a garter-stitch knit sweater; the chicken pox of a three-year-old, brown crusty scabs on his scalp, behind his ears, the fever that had dehydrated him and left the whites of his eyes yellow and his hair sticky for ten days. Marianne utters monosyllables while Revol takes a few notes – date and place of birth, weight, height – and he seems not to care too much about childhood diseases once he’s noted that Simon has no particular medical history, no serious illnesses, rare allergies, or malformations that his mother knows of – at these words Marianne grows agitated, a flash of memory, a ski outing with his class to the Contamines-Montjoie, Simon was ten and had a terrible pain in his abdomen, the doctor at the ski hill who examined him palpated his left side and, suspecting appendicitis, diagnosed an “inversed anatomy,” in other words the heart on the right side and everything else in keeping, words that no one had ever doubted, and this fantastic anomaly had given him extraspecial status right through to the end of the trip.
    Thank you; then, having smoothed the paper with the flat of his hand, he places it back into Simon’s file, a pale-green folder. He lifts his head toward Marianne, you can see your son as soon as we’ve finished the tests. What tests? Marianne’s voice straight ahead in the office and the vague idea that if they are doing tests then nothing is sure yet. The radiance of her gaze alerts Revol, who forces himself to keep the situation in check and to curb hope: Simon’s state is progressive, and this progression is not headed in the right direction. Marianne is knocked off course, says oh, so what is Simon’s state progressing toward? As she says it, she knows she’s revealing her vulnerability, she’s taking a risk, and Revol takes a breath before replying.
    – Simon’s lesions are irreversible.
    Revol has the painful feeling of dealing a blow, the sense of detonating a bomb. And then he gets up, we’ll call you as soon as possible, and he adds, a little more loudly, has Simon’s father been informed? Marianne hooks him with her eyes, he’ll be here around one, but Sean doesn’t call, still no word, and Marianne is suddenly seized by panic, tells herself maybe he’s not at the workshop, maybe he’s not even at home, maybe he left to deliver a skiff in Villequier, Duclair, or Caudebec-en-Caux, or to a rowing club on the Seine, and maybe at this exact moment he’s aboard the vessel, demonstrating it to a buyer, and they’re rowing, sitting on swivel seats, observing how it handles and commenting on it in low tones, using an expert’s vocabulary, and little by little Marianne sees the river’s course narrowing between high rock walls suckered by thick mosses, masses of plants growing horizontally, giant ferns and thick creepers, sphagnum moss, plants of a brilliant green tangled together along vertiginous walls or bowing toward the river in vegetal cascades, and then it grows dim, the cliffs leaving only a thin corridor of sky white as milk, the water grows heavy, flat and slow, surface saturated with insects – dragonflies iridescent with turquoise, transparent mosquitos – it turns bronze, dull with silver flashes, and suddenly, horrified, Marianne imagines that Sean has gone back to New Zealand,