There are supposed to be two sides to every story, but I suspect there may be more.
No, I am not talking about the latest twist in the axed deputy president Jacob ‘JZ” Zuma saga, involving an alleged rape and goodness knows what else to come. I am talking about a bizarre medical breakthrough that has been engineered in a hospital in the French city of Lyons that may have even more far-reaching consequences for us all, including JZ, whoever we might previously have thought we might be.
It starts off, as far as I can tell, as the proverbial shaggy dog story and meanders on without a comprehensible conclusion.
One of the world’s most eminent reconstructive surgeons, who happens to be French, recently performed the world’s first face transplant, beating competitors to the punch, as is necessarily the case with all of us involved in one of the higher professions, where being the first to do anything guarantees untold euros, the chance of a Nobel Prize and a place in history.
The recipient of this extraordinary transplant (shades of that Sixties black-and-white movie The List of Adrian Messenger, which no one but me seems to remember) is a woman who was allegedly mauled by her own Labrador in the privacy of her own home, as a result of which she lost half her face. Hence the ‘shaggy dog” element of this story.
Champions of the dog insist that the poor, loyal beast had given up on his or her best efforts to revive his mistress after she had taken a drug overdose in an attempt to commit suicide. Whether through natural feelings of love or because it was well aware that committing suicide is illegal, the dog had presumably moved on from gentle persuasion by licking with its tongue to yelps and nips, and finally to aggressive forms of resuscitation, including biting. In the course of this anguished biting, she or he (the dog) had ended up tearing off half of the woman’s face — still to no effect. The chick was out of it.
Well, of course, the gendarmes had finally broken down the door (or something like that), discovered the bloody scene and killed the dog before it could tell its own side of the story.
Enter the eminent surgeon. A woman with half a face (remember the Elephant Man, the Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Man in the Iron Mask by the Negro Alexandre Dumas père, all part of vibrant French folklore?) was fair game for his upward ambitions. He offered to reconstruct the missing parts of her face if a suitable donor could be found. And in flamboyant, post-operative press conferences (what does this have to do with medical science?) he had gone out on a limb and posthumously demonised the dead dog by saying that, far from being an anti-social actor in her own attempted suicide, the woman in question had accidentally stumbled over her own pooch near the pantry and fallen on it, causing it, according to the usually reliable Daily Mail of England, to turn on her and savage her in this awful manner.
So much for the dog.
A suitable ‘donor” had been found, anyway — another woman who was reputedly also a suicide, this time a successful one, whose family were prepared to surrender her facial organs for the experiment. So her lips, nose and chin were conveniently removed and kept on ice for the required length of time to enable the eminent surgeon to swing into action. Which he did, with spectacular results.
So here’s a woman with a new, cosmetic lease of life, one that goes way beyond what an ordinary plastic surgeon could offer to a victim of this kind of disfigurement.
The woman, who had previously removed all the mirrors in her apartment because she couldn’t bear to look on what she had become after her best features had been removed, is now recuperating in a Lyons hospital, and spends her days looking in the mirror in her bedroom, getting used to her new persona. ‘I didn’t have a boyfriend when I had the accident and I still don’t,” she is quoted as saying. ‘Now I am more relaxed about the future. I won’t need to worry.”
I think it is we, the general public, who need to worry. People who are in the running to be boyfriends to women whose pasts they are not aware of should be especially worried. Who is that casual pickup in a bar on the Place Pigalle who is smiling at you so provocatively from a Gitane-filled table in the corner? Why is she beckoning you with that slightly twisted, Mona Lisa smile? Is it twisted, ever so slightly, because half of the smile is in fact not hers, but belongs to someone else, who has since passed on to another world, under unfortunate circumstances — the hidden scar tissue lending an unexpected allure to the unsuspecting?
And what does she, gradually getting used to her new self in the mirrors on the walls of a private room in a Lyons hospital, think about herself? Who is it that she is tenderly getting used to, when she thinks about herself?
Who, in fact, is she, nowadays?
And, perversely, I wonder if she ever thinks about that loyal hound that gave its life so that she could enter into this experiment in being somebody completely new — just in time for Christmas.