Maylis de Kerangal - The Heart

The thing about Simon Limbress heart, this human heart, is that, since the moment of his birth, when its rhythm accelerated, as did the other hearts around it, in celebration of the event, the thing is, that this heart, which made him jump, vomit, grow, dance lightly like a feather or weigh heavy as a stone, which made him dizzy with exhilaration and made him melt with love, which filtered, recorded, archived the black box of a twenty-year-old body the thing is that nobody really knows it; only a moving image created by ultrasound could echo its sound and shape, could make visible the joy that dilates it and the sadness that tightens it; only the paper trace of an electrocardiogram, set in motion at the very beginning, could draw the shape, describe the exertion, the quickening emotion, the prodigious energy needed to contract almost a hundred thousand times a day, to pump nearly ten pints of blood every minute, yes, only that graph could tell a story, by outlining the life of ebbs and flows, of gates and valves, a life of beats for, while Simon Limbress heart, this human heart, is too much even for the machines, no one could claim to really know it, and that night, that starless and bone-splittingly cold night on the estuary and in the Pays de Caux, as a lightless swell rolled all along the cliffs, as the continental shelf retreated, revealing its geological bands, there could be heard the regular rhythm of a resting organ, a muscle that was slowly recharging, a pulse of probably less than fifty beats per minute, and a cell-phone alarm went off at the foot of a narrow bed, the echo of a sonar signal translated into luminescent digits on the touchscreen05:50and suddenly everything raced out of control.

And so, that night, a van brakes in an empty parking lot, coming to a halt at a crooked angle, and as the front doors slam and a back door slides open, three figures emerge, three shadows outlined against the darkness and seized by the cold icy February, runny noses, slept-in clothes boys, it looks like, who zip their coats up to their chins, pull their hats down to their eyelashes, muffling the upper flesh of their ears with polar fleece, and blowing into their cupped hands turn toward the sea, which is at this hour nothing but noise and blackness.

* * *

Yes, theyre boys, you can see that now. They are standing in a line behind the low wall that separates the parking lot from the beach, stamping their feet and breathing deeply, their nostrils sore from piping the iodine and the cold, and they survey that dark expanse where the only rhythm is the roar of the crashing waves, that din made by the final collapse; they scan what is rumbling before them, that crazy clamor with nothing to see nothing except perhaps the whitish, foamy edge, billions of atoms catapulted against each other in a phosphorescent halo and, stunned by the winter cold outside the van, dazed by the marine night, the three boys now pull themselves together, see and hear clearly again, assess what awaits them the swell judging it by ear, estimating its breaker index, its depth coefficient, and remember that waves formed offshore always move more quickly than the fastest boats.

Looks good, one of the three boys muttered softly, should be a good one, and the two others smiled, then the three went back together, slowly, scraping the ground with their feet and pacing around like tigers. They lifted their eyes to penetrate the night beyond the town, the still-black night behind the cliffs, and the one who had spoken looked at his watch another fifteen minutes, guys and they climbed back into the van to wait for the nautical dawn.

* * *

Christophe Alba, Johan Rocher, and Simon Limbres. The alarms went off and they pushed back their sheets and got out of bed for a session agreed upon only just before midnight with an exchange of texts, a mid-tide session, the kind you get only two or three times a year: heavy sea, regular swell, low wind, and not a soul around. In jeans and jackets, they crept outside without breakfast not even a glass of milk or a bite of cereal, not even a slice of bread and waited in front of their apartment building (Simon) or the gates of their house (Johan) for the van that was right on time (Chris), these boys who normally never emerge from their beds before noon, no matter how much their mothers nag them, these boys who usually dont have the energy to do more than crawl lethargically from the living room couch to their beds and back, here they are in the street at six in the morning, champing at the bit, laces undone, breath foul beneath the streetlamp, Simon Limbres watched the cloud of air that rose from his mouth as it slowly expanded, dissolved, and vanished, remembering how as a child he had liked to pretend he was smoking, putting his index and middle finger to his lips, taking a breath so deep it hollowed his cheeks, and blowing out like a man these boys, the Three Caballeros, aka the Big Wave Hunters, aka Chris, John, and Sky, aliases that were less nicknames than pseudonyms, created as part of their reinvention from French high school kids to planetary surfers, so that calling them by their real names instantly brings them back to a hostile set of circumstances: the freezing drizzle, the gently lapping waves, the vertical cliffs, and the streets deserted as evening approaches, the parents scolding, the demands of school, the complaints of the girlfriend left behind, abandoned once again in favor of the van and the waves, the girl who can never defeat the lure of the sea.

* * *

Inside the van: filth and damp, sand everywhere, harsh against the skin, brackish rubber, the stink of shellfish and kerosene, a pile of boards, a pile of wetsuits (different kinds for different seasons), gloves, socks, pots of wax, leashes. All three sat in front, shoulder to shoulder, rubbing their hands between their thighs while making monkey noises, shit man its freezing, and then took a few bites of energy bars taking care not to eat too much, because its afterward that you wolf them down, afterward, when youve earned them and passed around the bottle of Coke, the tube of Nestl condensed milk, the soft sweet cookies Ppito and Chamonix before one of them grabbed the latest issue of Surf Session from under the seat and they opened it out on the dashboard, their three heads close together above the pages that glowed in the dark, the glossy paper like skin slick with sunscreen and pleasure, pages thumbed a thousand times that they stare at once again, wide-eyed and dry-mouthed: a tsunami at Mavericks and point breaks in Lombok, rollers in Hawaii, tube waves in Vanuatu, all the greatest shores on the planet unfolding before them with the splendors of surfing. They point at the pictures with feverish fingers there, yeah, and there, well get there one day, maybe even next summer, the three of them in the van setting off on a legendary surf trip, in search of the most beautiful wave in oceanic history, driving until they find that wild and secret place, which will belong to them the way America belonged to Christopher Columbus, and the three of them will be there, alone on the beach, when it finally appears on the horizon, the one theyve been waiting for, the perfect wave, beauty incarnate, so huge and so fast that they will stand on their boards in an adrenaline rush, joy and terror electrifying every inch of their bodies from the soles of their feet to the tips of their eyelashes, and they will ride it, rallying the world of surfers, that nomadic tribe with their sun-bleached, salt-washed hair, skin bronzed and eyes faded in the eternal summer of youth, boys and girls wearing only shorts printed with Tahitian flowers or hibiscus petals, turquoise or blood-orange T-shirts, shod only in flip-flops, a people aglow with sunlight and freedom, and they will surf that wave all the way to the shore.