Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal Page B

a gate, and stretches out this action as long as possible, mobilizing his diaphragm and his zygomatics – a deaf man would have been able to listen simply by placing his hands on him. If you were there to witness the scene, you might see a link with the yogi’s sun salutation or the morning ritual of monks and nuns, this lyricism of the dawn; you might see any corporeal ritual intended to maintain and conserve the body – drinking a glass of fresh water, brushing one’s teeth, unrolling a rubber mat on the floor in front of the television to do some stretches – but for Thomas Remige, this is something completely different: it is an exploration of the self – his voice like a probe inserted in the body and causing everything that animates him to reverberate on the surface, his voice like a stethoscope.
    He was twenty when he left the family farm, a well-to-do plot in Normandy that his sister and brother-in-law would eventually take over. Bye-bye school bus and mud in the yard, smell of wet hay, the solitary moo of a cow demanding to be milked and the border of poplars grown close together on a grassy bank – from now on he lives in a tiny studio that his parents rent to him in downtown Rouen, electric radiator and pullout couch, rides a Honda 500 from 1971, has started nursing school, likes girls, likes boys, doesn’t know, and one night during a jaunt to Paris goes to a karaoke bar in Belleville, there are several Asians there, vinyl hair and waxy cheeks, regulars come to polish their performances, couples, mostly, who admire and film each other, re-enacting dance moves and postures from TV shows, and suddenly, succumbing to the pressure of his friends, here he is choosing a song, a short thing, a simple thing – I think it was “It’s a Heartache” by Bonnie Tyler – and when his turn comes he goes onstage, and slowly metamorphoses: little by little, his abulic body settles, a voice comes out of his mouth, a voice that’s his but that he doesn’t recognize, incredible timbre, texture, and range, as though his body housed other versions of himself – a wild cat, a jagged cliff, a lady of the night – and the DJ isn’t mistaken, it really is him singing, and then, taking hold of his voice as his body signature, taking hold of his voice as the shape of his singularity, he decides to get to know himself and begins to sing in earnest.
    As he discovers singing, he discovers his body, that’s how it happens. Like the sports amateur after an intense session – running, cycling, gymnastics – he feels tightnesses he hasn’t felt before, knots and currents, points and zones, as though something of himself is being revealed – his unexplored potential. He endeavours to recognize everything that composes him, conceiving of the precise anatomy, the shape of the organs, the variety of muscles, their unsuspected resources; he explores his respiratory system and how the action of singing pulls him together and holds him, raises him up into a human body and perhaps even more, into a singing body. It’s a rebirth.
    The time and money he consecrates to singing swells over the course of years, coming to take up a consequential part of his daily life and a salary beefed up by extra shifts at the hospital: he vocalizes every morning, studies every night, takes a class twice a week with an opera singer who has a body shaped like a light bulb – giraffe neck and reed-thin arms, strapping pelvis and flat belly, chest in proportion, voluminous, all of this sheltered beneath hair that undulates down to her knees, hurtling down flannel skirts – at night he tracks this or that recital, opera, new recording, downloads everything, pirates, copies, archives, in the summer traipses across France to this or that opera festival, sleeps in a tent or shares a rented bungalow with other enthusiasts like him, meets Ousmane, a Gnawa musician with a shimmering baritone voice, and suddenly last summer it was a trip to Algeria