"That's right. But as time went by, it seemed to take longer for the penny to drop…"
"Did you tell him about it then?"
"No. I didn't."
"Why not?"
She crossed her legs and laid her slender hands on her dark silk skirt, like a brace of pale birds.
"I thought talking about it would make the problem worse, and then…"
The neurologist looked up. His red hair reflected in the rings of his glasses. "Then what?"
"Well, it isn't something that's easy to admit to your husband. He…" She felt Laurent's presence. He was standing behind her, leaning on the metal cabinets.
"Laurent was becoming a stranger to me."
The doctor seemed to sense her uneasiness. He changed tack. "Have you had the same difficulty recognizing other faces?"
She hesitated. "Sometimes. But it's extremely rare."
"Who with, for example?"
"In the neighborhood shops. At work, too. I don't recognize some of the customers, even though they're regulars."
"What about your friends?"
Anna gestured vaguely. "I don't have any friends."
"And your family?"
"My parents are dead. I just have some uncles and aunts in the southwest. But I never see them."
Ackermann continued writing. His face gave nothing away. It looked as though it were set in resin.
Anna hated this acquaintance of Laurent's. He sometimes came to have dinner with them, but he always remained as cold as ice. Unless, of course, the conversation turned to his field of research-the brain, cerebral geography, the human cognitive system. Then there was a transformation: he became animated, enthusiastic, beating the air with his long brown arms.
He resumed questioning. "So it's Laurent's face that poses the biggest problem for you?"
"Yes. But then he's also the closest to me. The person I see most.”
“Do you have any other memory problems?"
Anna bit her lip. Once again, she hesitated. "No."
"Problems of orientation?"
"No."
"Of speech?"
"No."
"Do you have difficulties making certain movements?"
She did not answer. Then she smiled weakly "You think I have Alzheimer's disease, don't you?"
"I'm checking, that's all."
It was the first explanation that had occurred to Anna. She had gathered information on the subject and consulted medical dictionaries. Failure to recognize faces was a symptom of Alzheimer's.
As though talking to a child, Ackermann added: "You're not nearly old enough. And anyway, I would have noticed at once during the tests. A brain afflicted with a degenerative disease has quite a specific morphology. These are just questions I have to ask you if I'm going to make a full diagnosis. Do you understand?" Without waiting for a reply, he went on. "So do you or do you not have difficulties making certain movements?"
"No"
"Any trouble sleeping?"
"No."
“Any inexplicable weariness?"
"No."
"Do you get migraines?"
"Never."
The doctor closed his notepad and stood up. This movement always created the same surprise. He stood at almost seven feet but weighed just one hundred forty pounds. A beanpole in a white coat that looked as if it had been slung there to dry.
He was a real, flaming redhead. His wiry unkempt locks were the color of burning honey. Ochre freckles covered his skin, even his eyelids. His face was angular, decked with metal glasses as thin as blades.
His physiognomy seemed to have removed him from time. He was older than Laurent, about fifty but he still looked like a young man. Wrinkles had formed on his face, but without attacking the essentiaclass="underline" his eagle-like features, sharp and inscrutable. Only acne scars marked his cheeks, giving him real flesh and a past.
He paced up and down in his tiny office for a moment in silence. The seconds ticked by. Anna could take no more. She asked: "For God's sake, what's wrong with me?"
The neurologist fiddled with a metallic object in his pocket. Presumably his keys. But it was the sound that seemed to set him talking at last. "Let me start by explaining the experiment we've just conducted."
"It's about time."
"The machine we used is a positron camera. What specialists call a PET scan. It uses positron emission tomography, or PET for short. It allows us to observe zones of mental activity in real time by localizing concentrations of blood in the brain. I wanted to conduct a sort of general checkup on you, by looking at several large areas of the brain that have been positively localized, such as vision, language and memory"
Anna thought back over the various tests: the squares of color, the story told in various ways, the names of capital cities. It was easy to see how each exercise fit into the context.
But Ackermann was off: "Take language, for instance. Everything happens in the frontal lobe, in a region that is itself subdivided into subsystems devoted to aural comprehension, vocabulary, syntax, meaning, prosody…”He pointed at his skull. "It is the association of these zones that allows us to understand and use language. Thanks to the various versions of my little tale, I stimulated each of these subdivisions in your brain."
He continued to pace up and down his tiny room. The pictures on the wall appeared and disappeared as he moved. Anna noticed a strange engraving of a colored monkey with a large mouth and huge hands. Despite the heat of the strip light, her spine was frozen.
"And so?" she murmured.
He opened his hands in what was meant to be a reassuring manner. "So, everything's fine. Language, vision and memory. Each region was activated normally"
"Except when I was shown the portrait of Laurent."
Ackermann bent down over his desk and turned his computer screen around. Anna discovered the digital image of a brain. A luminous green, transverse section. The inside was totally dark.
"This is your brain when you were looking at the picture of Laurent. No reaction. No connections. An empty image."
"What does it mean?"
The neurologist stood up and put his hands back into his pockets. He stuck out his chest in a dramatic manner. The moment had come for the verdict. "I think you have a lesion."
"A lesion?"
"Which is specifically affecting the zone dealing with the recognition of faces."
Anna was stupefied. "There's a zone… for faces?"
"That's right. There's a specialized neuronal system for that purpose, in the right hemisphere, at the back of the brain in the ventral temporal cortex. It was discovered in the 1950s. People who had suffered from a vascular incident in that region could no longer recognize faces. Since then, thanks to PET scanning, we have localized it even more precisely. For example, we know that the region is particularly highly developed in people who watch the entrances of nightclubs and casinos."
She broke in. "But I recognize most people's faces. During the tests, I identified all of the portraits…"
"All except the one of your husband. And that's a vital indication." Ackermann placed his two index fingers on his lips in a sign of deep thought. When he was not icy cold, he was expansive.
"We have two sorts of memory. There are the things we learn at school, and the things we learn in our daily lives. And they don't use the same path in the brain. I think you're suffering from a faulty connection between the instant analysis of faces and their comparison with personal memories. A lesion must be blocking the route to this mechanism. That's why you can recognize Einstein but not Laurent, who belongs to your personal archives."
"And, is there a cure?"
"Indeed there is. We can move the function to another healthy part of your brain. Adaptability is one of the mind's strong points. To achieve this, we'll have to conduct some therapy. A sort of mental training, with regular exercises backed up by the right medication."
The neurologist's grave tones undermined the good news.