Where My Heart Used to Beat

by Sebastian Faulks

  I took the package from the London Library upstairs and pulled out La Conspiration de la Serre by Alexander Pereira. My French was good enough to follow the story; most of the difficult words were technical and therefore close to their English counterparts. From the second page it was clear that its claim to be a “novel” was tenuous; it reeked of fact.

  The story concerned a doctor who sets up a small sanatorium of about thirty patients who are thought to be incurable on a remote island in the Mediterranean. This Dr. Lenoir has a favorite patient, a young woman called Béatrice, with whom he had been in love before she fell ill. She’s the daughter of a friend, and he’s known her a long time. She was clever and beautiful until the age of about twenty-one, when suddenly … she’s as mad as they come. She makes no sense at all. For five years Lenoir tries every treatment, but she gets no better. She hears voices; she sees things; she thinks she’s being followed.

  To give everyone a rest, Béatrice is dispatched to stay with an aunt, who lives in another part of the island, in a pleasant raised house that overlooks some swampland near the sea. A week later, on her return to the sanatorium, Béatrice develops a high fever. She rapidly begins to show every sign of malaria, having presumably been bitten by a mosquito while staying with her aunt. It’s a scandal.

  Lenoir puts Béatrice in a nice room away from the main part of the house, up a half flight of stairs—very like the room in which I was now reading this entertaining if slightly novelette-like story.

  As the malaria grips her, a strange thing begins to happen. She becomes less mad. Instead of staring through him and talking to unseen people, she begins to recognize Dr. Lenoir. Although she’s feverish, she makes sense. She tells Lenoir she can remember little of the last five years. It was as though she had been kidnapped and taken to a strange land where she was put into a prison cell and interrogated. It was a form of torture, but luckily she can remember very little of it. She asks Dr. Lenoir when she will be better and when she can go home to her mother. He tells her she’ll have to survive the malaria first.

  After a long crisis, she does survive. Better than that, she’s cured of her madness. She’s completely normal again. She can talk and reason; she has no more delusions. She’s cured; she’s happy. She leaves Dr. Lenoir’s care, and she goes back to live with her mother.

  At this point in the story, I went to the bathroom, cleaned my teeth, and got ready for bed. It amused me how little Pereira had thought to make things up. The book was obviously based on his experience (you could tell that he was Lenoir, because he clearly found the character more likable than any sane reader would). My guess was that he had called it a novel because in any other form the doctor’s actions would have seemed disreputable.

  It was almost two o’clock in the morning when I climbed into bed to finish the book. Dr. Lenoir is excited by the case of Béatrice. He builds a large glasshouse on the side of the house where he can put his patients in an attempt to raise their temperature. They lie on wicker beds under rugs and blankets as the sun beats down through the glass. It seems to make no difference. Dr. Lenoir believed it was the heat of the fever that killed whatever caused the madness just as boiling water sterilizes instruments by killing germs. Now he’s not sure. Perhaps there was something specific to the malaria parasite.

  One day he gets a telephone call from the hospital on the mainland where they have another malaria case. They’ve run out of quinine to treat the man, and they ask if Lenoir has any spare. He says, “Yes, I’ll bring some.” When he gets to the hospital, he asks if he can see the man with malaria. They show him in, and he takes a large amount of blood from the patient before he hands over the quinine. Back at his island clinic, he injects some of this diseased blood into four of his mad patients. To cut a long story short, one of them dies, one of them shows no change, and two of them are cured.

  That was as far as I got before I woke to find the sun coming up a few hours later.

  * * *

  I DECIDED TO finish the novel—there was only a chapter left—before asking Pereira about it.

  My conversation with him that night reminded me of Mr. Liddell’s house in the woods, when on the last day of term he would offer me a glass of sherry and a cigarette from his silver box as we reviewed the past twelve weeks and what I’d learned in the course of them.

  Pereira even set what might have passed for an essay topic by giving me a quotation from something he had read by a South American writer: “A man’s life is not made up of the things that happened, but by his memory of them and the way in which he remembers.”

  “It must have given you a shock to find someone else giving voice to your pet theory,” I said.

  To his credit, he refused to be nettled. “I remember a particular man,” he said, “who was very important to me. He was a resistance fighter from near Lyon. He was captured by the Germans in 1943 and sent to a concentration camp. That was what they did with the resistance, the Nazis. They wouldn’t give them proper prisoner-of-war status.”

  “But he survived?” I said. “That’s unusual.”

  “He was young, that was the key. He was a schoolboy in his last year at the lycée. He’d been a bright boy from a nice town, with plans to train as an architect. He was eighteen when they captured him and took him to the camp. The old people and the children they killed at once; the others they worked to death. He was sent to work all day, building an extension to the camp. He almost died of typhus, but somehow his youth and vigor pulled him through. Then they gave him a job in the crematorium, loading corpses into the ovens.”

  “Is that what he came to see you about?”

  “Yes. For twenty years he’d blocked the memory. After the liberation of the camp he was utterly depleted and traumatized … Back in France, he went through the motions of ordinary life. He found a clerical job in Paris. For twenty years he was a quiet man who lived in a boardinghouse in Pigalle. He wasn’t married and he had no friends to speak of, but he was reliable at work and people liked him. Then one day at the office, he read an article in the newspaper about Auschwitz-Birkenau and remembered. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘My God, I was there.’ His workmates didn’t know what he was talking about. At first they thought he was making it up.”

  “And he was middle-aged by now.”

  “Yes, about forty. He’d taken up arms because he didn’t want to be shipped off to work in a German factory like the other young men. He was happy to derail trains or blow up factories that were making tires for the Germans. He said he welcomed the idea of fighting them in the fields or on the roads. Said he’d be happy to die of gunshot wounds.”

  “And instead?”

  “In that camp he saw what we’d seen on the Western Front: the degradation of our species. He told me there was a hurry to process the bodies, to meet the quotas. Sometimes they hadn’t gassed them long enough.”

  “And that was the memory that haunted him?”

  “We went back over it for two years, twice a week.”

  “Were you able to help?”

  “I believe so. I think we shifted the location of the memory—the sound of someone crying out—in his brain. Together we were able to move it somewhere more bearable.”

  I went to the table between the windows and poured myself some whisky.

  “Do you think,” I said, “there’s much difference between what your Auschwitz man went through and what my psychotic patients experienced?”

  “Not a great deal.”

  “Do you think it’s fair to say it’s been a century of psychosis, however you define that word?”

  “I think so,” said Pereira. “There’s a difference in the facts of what my resistance fighter saw and what your patients may have felt. But the quality of the experience is … very close.”

  “And you still think memory can help.”

  “I do. The way that we remember—memory and art—there is nothing else.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING I set off for a walk over the t
op of the island. There was a track that I hadn’t followed before that led to the north side of the island (Pereira’s house was on the southwest, the port in the sheltered eastern bay). The way was sandy and flat, with umbrella pines and scrub oaks along the verge. I kept up a good pace over the dry surface.

  After a while, I left the broad track and followed a smaller path that led through a vineyard. At the end was a wooden notice that said Entrée Défendue. Zone Militaire. It was possible the island had once been a secret nuclear base or a test area for germ warfare, but the collapsed old building looked more like something from the age of bows and arrows.

  I followed a smaller path from the back of the military area and headed, I thought, towards the sea. Throughout my life I had relied on plunging into nature to help me think. The more lost I was, the better I liked it. I was the opposite of the young Wordsworth as he surveyed the mountains and lakes; for me it was necessary to be enclosed by undergrowth, to have no clear view or bearing. As a child I would sometimes lose myself on purpose on my way home, and I must have gone through something similar when Bill Shenton and I dropped down into the wadi at Anzio to take a look at the Germans.

  It began to rain heavily as I pushed through the brambles, beneath the pines, over the sandy soil; and I welcomed the lowering mists.

  You can only be happy if you are open to your past. The experience of crashing through wet undergrowth must be infused by the memories, not necessarily conscious, of all the previous times you have done it. There lies richness. But if your mind is somehow blocked—if it grips the present moment too hard—then your soul is not porous; the past can’t seep through you, healing and deepening; and you have lived in vain.

  I understood that now, I thought, as I emerged from a copse to find bare rocks. I could hear the sea, crashing somewhere beneath the risen wind. There were a few songbirds calling, and one of them, a thrush, was indefatigable, despite the rain.

  The loudest noise was of the gulls that floated up from the calanque below, then flapped their wings and circled me. I stood, utterly alone, with the rain driving into my face. I might have been the last man on earth.

  A gull swooped over me, calling hungrily. Twice, three times, it swooped until it dawned on me, as I ducked to avoid it, that the creature was actually trying to attack me. I was shocked that it had failed to understand the hierarchy of species; I also wondered how it had become so hungry when the sea was full of fish.

  To escape the gull’s dive-bombing, I made off inland, intending to loop back to Pereira’s house. On the way, I took another sidetrack and started to run, not because I was in a hurry but because I wanted to increase my chances of becoming lost. I was among trees whose exposed roots met over the rutted pathway so that each step was a hazard. I was going downhill, perhaps towards the sea again, though the trees and the mist obscured any view. When the way ahead was blocked, I climbed back and struck off across the heather. At some point it had been burned to make a path but was now covered with cut branches of pine as far as the eye could see, making it all but impassable. I had no choice except to lift my feet high and crunch down through the tight lattice of twigs and branches. Bracken threw rain over me and brambles clung. I remembered going forwards at Anzio to take Varian’s message to Donald Sidwell, telling him to come back to battalion headquarters, and when I found poor Donald he was lying in the ooze with his glasses smeared. I was truly lost now, and my strength was starting to fail. For all my country boyhood, I was never really strong; it was for only a brief time, after the years of army training, that I had been tireless, unstoppable. I crashed on through the breaking branches, feeling sweat form under my sodden shirt. Then, in the misty swirl, I made out what looked like an oil tank. I couldn’t imagine what it might be for in this uninhabited region but reasoned that it could be filled only by a motor vehicle, which meant there must be a sturdy track leading to it. So it proved, but it was almost one o’clock when I finally made it back to Pereira’s house. I went up the back stairs to avoid being seen.

  In my room, I sat on the bed with my head in my hands. I was worried that if I probed any deeper into the events of my life, if I found anything more lurking in the depths of memory, that I might not be able to manage, that I might go mad.

  Forcing myself from the bed, I went to the bathroom, dried off, washed, and changed my clothes. Then I sauntered down to the library, as though everything was absolutely fine.

  * * *

  WHILE IN PARIS I had read in the Figaro an article by some telecommunications expert about the Minitel system, which had been unveiled about three years earlier. As part of this system, you were given a small computer screen and keyboard attached to your home telephone line on which you could read timetables on a remote database, book tickets, and so on, without having to wait on “hold” to speak to a harassed clerk. It was at this time in the process of being expanded from Brittany to the rest of France; it could, the journalist said, eventually go international, so that everyone with a phone line would be linked. You’d soon be able to type the name of an old school friend into your Minitel, hit Go, and the person’s address and phone number would pop up, perhaps even with a photograph.

  This sounded quite wrong to me. Childhood and its friends can’t come bursting back into the shadowless present; they must, like Paula Wood, live in a place on which the door has been closed but where the caress of memory can periodically remold them into something meaningful: their job, in other words, is to be fictional characters.

  That evening, after my exhausting walk, I told Paulette I was not feeling well and would not be able to join my host for dinner downstairs. She later brought up a tray with some cheese and pâté and a half bottle of red wine, which I consumed while finishing Pereira’s novel. Nothing further happened in the story. Not knowing how to say as much, he had an improbable deus ex machina—a former Nazi, who had somehow become the local mayor—come and close down Dr. Lenoir’s hothouse establishment, leaving his hero to return to his native Paris a misunderstood pioneer, un médecin maudit.

  After I had finished the wine, I opened a bottle of Bonnie Dew: an emergency ration that I’d bought at the port on my last visit and hidden on a high shelf in the wardrobe. By midnight I had almost finished it.

  I cleaned my teeth and stumbled back from the bathroom, mentally shutting the door on all the events of my past life. The world I lived in now, as I lay down to sleep in Pereira’s fine house among the palms and the umbrella pines, was in so many ways better than the one I’d left behind. To be in a warm place where the night air was fragrant … the taste and effects of wine and whisky … the clean sheets and soft island noises …

  I tried not to think of the fact that I enjoyed such things alone, of how much more charged they might have been if someone else had been there with me, laying her clothes carefully on the wicker-seated chair. It was not to be. It was a chimera, this idea of love—my perfect other—a delusion as great as any suffered by Diego.

  “What is this world, what asketh men to have? Now with his love, now in his colde grave, allone, withouten any compaignye.” I remembered being taken aback by this sudden outburst in The Knight’s Tale when we had studied it at school, long years ago … Here in my island bedroom I pictured Chaucer’s rivals Palamon and Arcite rotting underground in their armor … At least they were dead, past thinking. My “colde grave” had come while I was still alive, still young. So many years had I inhabited my “tomb.”

  THIRTEEN

  The next day Pereira had a surprise guest for me at dinner. It was a young woman in a sleeveless navy linen shift with just-dried chestnut hair and a beige cardigan thrown round her shoulders; her eyes had a light sweep of mascara, though otherwise she was without makeup. It took me a moment to recognize her in clothes. It was Céline. But of course it was.

  Pereira led the way into the dining room, where we sat down. Céline looked awkward, a nature girl with a knife and fork and three shining wineglasses—one of which, to Paulette’s disgust, she
had asked to be filled with Coca-Cola.

  “I read your novel, Dr. Pereira,” I said.

  “I’m so glad. Where did you find it?”

  “The London Library. They have most things.”

  “How enterprising. I was embarrassed to mention it to someone of your writing skill. It was only a little jeu d’esprit. Did you enjoy it?”

  “Yes. You write very good English. It gets to the point. Did it do well?”

  “No. People couldn’t decide if it was based on science or pure fantasy.”

  “And which was it?”

  “Both, alas.”

  We were speaking in French for the benefit of Céline.

  “What’s the book about?” she said.

  “Shall I tell her?”

  “Of course, Dr. Hendricks. Be my guest.”

  I drained my glass. I had no idea what level of complexity Céline would understand, and in any case my grasp of French limited what I could say, but I gave her the gist. Céline sat motionless, her lips parted, her big eyes on my face. Pereira went on slowly with his navarin of lamb, a trickle of juice running unheeded down his chin.

  When I’d reached the part about malaria, Céline smiled at me over the rim of her Coca-Cola. “Is that the end?”

  “Almost.”

  Pereira coughed. “I should tell you, Dr. Hendricks, that in another world, the real world, all this did happen.”

  “I know,” I said. “Julius Wagner-Jauregg. He won the Nobel Prize for Medicine, but he treated people with general paralysis of the insane—the late stages of syphilis—so their illness had an organic basis, the syphilis bacterium.”

  “There were plenty of papers in the nineteenth century that recorded how fevers could cure psychosis. Wagner-Jauregg also got good results by infecting people with tuberculin.”