And Miles to Go Before I Sleep

by Jocelyne Saucier

  That was all I would get from her. An email here and there that talked about this and that, when all that mattered to me was what it didn’t say and what I felt behind every word. Léonard Mostin had had access to that part of her I was excluded from. They had become intimate. I can feel it in the we that gets away from her sometimes, which she never said about the two of us. I did not measure up to the novelist, I’ll admit. He succeeded where I failed.

  ‘Anyway, she wasn’t the woman for you.’

  That’s what Bernie told me when I returned from Paris and what he repeats every time I bring up Janelle. My romantic defeat doesn’t interest him. It’s Léonard Mostin the novelist who has all of his attention. Léonard Mostin, who, across the ocean, in his mouse hole (he really likes mouse hole; it’s miserable, pathetic, squalid, joyful), amuses himself rewriting lives.

  ‘A man who can turn Gladys into an old woman who carries death inside her is capable of anything.’

  I can see that he is afraid for himself, for his neighbours and friends, the people of Kirkland Lake and Swastika whom the novelist met during his great adventure on Canadian soil and who for the time being are only imaginary creatures, figments of a fanciful mind, but as soon as they touch paper, it will be a nightmare.

  ‘I don’t want to wake up one morning and see myself as a lumbering man weighed down by regret or in a sort of transience of a cunning mind as it pleases the gentleman to imagine me in his novel.

  He is waiting for ‘the real story’ that will reassert the facts, ‘nothing but the facts, don’t go thinking you’re a novelist,’ and that has been so long in coming. I thought I could never do it. The cursor blinked for so long on my screen without me adding the word it was waiting for. And then, one day, shortly after my return from Paris, I went back to my computer and, to my great astonishment, the words came thick and fast on the screen. Like torpedoes, as if I were at war, as if I were liberating myself. Pages streamed by, pages spoke out, pages called to me. Sometimes I would get up in the middle of the night to shut them up. I would pick up where I had left off; I finished the sentence that had dragged me out of bed, and I would find myself with something else calling out to me. The sun would rise, and I would still be in front of my screen.

  I wrote in this frenetic state until Janelle appeared in the story and everything got muddled. I kept Bernie’s instructions in mind. But how to stick to the facts when every word, every sentence, whipped up a smell, a movement of the head, a shift of her gaze that made me dizzy? The story was moving along painfully. The pages were stifled, the pages were swallowing me up. I spent months struggling in a story that wouldn’t advance. Until, looking for I don’t know what in a cupboard in the basement, I found the garbage bags. A wave of emotion swept over me. All of Janelle’s things were there, in these bags, which I hadn’t opened. I could see her, hear her, feel her through the polyethylene of the bags. Which I absolutely must not open, I knew. Janelle would come out of them like a genie from a bottle and would haunt my mind forever. And I did what I should have done long ago. I shipped the bags to Marie-Luce on the next train.

  A good decision. The story resumed its steady pace, but it could not ignore Janelle. She was and will remain intimately tied to the story and my life.

  I don’t know when I will be done with this chronicle. Just when I think I have written everything there is to know, someone catches my attention. When it isn’t Gladys, it’s Lisana and her supposed madness (I have no strong opinion on the matter), or Frank Smarz, who remains guilty of dark intentions. Even now, there is always someone shoving my nose in my mess. Or a new fact that I become aware of. Or a contradiction, an inconsistency, suddenly appears. And I have to phone, email, get back on the road. My cursor can wait for days, sometimes weeks, before I get back to it. Not to mention, obviously, my work at the high school that demands its due.

  Bernie often asks me how it’s going. I tell him that the pages are piling up, but I can’t picture the day when I will see the last word. Léonard Mostin will have published his novel well before I have finished with my chronicle.

  ‘Don’t worry’ (and an impish smile appears). ‘He has that wild-eyed woman, and she will ruin his novel.’

  I received emails from Janelle for a while. She pursued her passion for van Gogh. After the museums in Amsterdam and Otterlo, she visited those in Prague and Zurich and was planning to go to London to see the famous Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. With Léonard, obviously, still just as ‘super.’

  I entertained no illusions. Janelle had flown off again. She had rediscovered herself and was spreading her wings wide. Léonard Mostin had become her guide and companion. The two of them lived in their own inner worlds, but they had found the fast track to romantic intimacy in artistic emotion. There was nothing I could do about a track that was inaccessible to me.

  But I continued our correspondence, if only to reassure Bernie, who would come regularly for news. They had just returned from Munich, they were going to Prague, they were thinking of going to London, and every time it was good news because Janelle was keeping the author from his novel.

  For a while I got bogged down. During this time when I was half-heartedly pursuing my investigation, I would go to Bernie’s from time to time. I would see him search for the spark in my eyes, the spark of someone who is on a quest, but it was no longer there. I came and went because I was carrying inside me a life that wasn’t my own – Gladys, Lisana, and all the others – and I had the feeling that, if I stopped coming and going with them in mind, my own life would vanish. It would have lost its meaning.

  Suzan was in a bit of the same state. I hadn’t returned to Metagama, but I would call her when the weather was good and satellite communication permitted. I imagined her in her little house: the phone rings, she jumps, who could be calling her, she could pick up now but lets it ring, approaches the phone that is vibrating at the end of the kitchen counter, and with the sudden strike of an animal, she picks up the handset and asks: ‘Who’s calling?’ I’ve always been surprised by her habit of snapping at you. Normally it was after the fourth ring that I would hear her hoarse voice, sticky with phlegm. She wouldn’t have spoken for days.

  Now she answered on the first ring with such a worried ‘Hello?’ that I could almost hear what she wasn’t saying: ‘Desmond? Is that you?’ Desmond was in New York, Toronto, London, carried off in a whirlwind of success. He managed to extricate himself from the whirlwind from time to time, and he would show up with groceries that could keep her for a month. But for all the rest, firewood, things that needed repair, she didn’t know how she was going to manage. On the phone she told me: ‘I thought he was the one who needed me.’ Her voice trailed off, sounded old.

  The voice grew weaker over the months. She was delighted with her son’s success, but she could see that he didn’t have time to devote to her anymore. ‘He arrives and leaves on the same gust of wind.’ She was starting to think she would need to leave the house, her trees, the whistle of the trains, the clickety-clacks, all the things that had kept her company through the years. But to go where, that she didn’t know. ‘I don’t want to be a little old lady in a condo. I don’t want to spend my days looking at the wall across the way.’ She had started to pack her boxes.

  I got an email from Janelle, longer than normal, because she couldn’t stop marvelling at what she had seen in London. Monet, Gauguin, Cézanne, van Gogh obviously, and his famous Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. ‘The colours are powerful. How could a man so dark make colour vibrate that way?’ Other equally enthusiastic comments followed about what she had seen and admired in London, and then, at the very end, as a postscript, as if she were giving it to me in passing, Lisana’s address in Toronto. I knew it was the last email, that there would be no more. She was leaving Lisana in my hands so she could fly away to a new life.

  The spark came back, I was once again coming and going in search of something that awaited me, something that would shed light on the path behind me without knowing w
here it would take me next.

  Lisana, it was obviously Lisana, that was lighting the new terrain.

  If Janelle had left me Lisana’s address, it meant that she was alive, that she hadn’t given in to her suicidal impulse. I’m no psychologist, no psychiatrist, nothing that gives me any authority, but nevertheless, a question was nagging at me. How do you live when you have given up on the desire to die? I remember what Bernie had said to me. There is a sense of power in playing with your life. What had she found that convinced her to give up that powerful drive?

  For the few more years than my investigation required, I would go fairly regularly to Toronto. (The address will remain confidential in case there are readers of this story. I don’t want people to go bothering Lisana in her non-existence. Which, I must say, she is not doing too badly at.)

  I was cautious in my initial approaches. I kept in mind everything I had been told about her and everything I had thought when I saw her at the restaurant in Clova. Did she see me then? Was she even aware of my presence? Probably not. I was a total stranger, and I had to use tact so that she wouldn’t dig in her heels or just flat-out take off when I approached.

  The building I found myself in front of was a women’s shelter. A man couldn’t hang around there without the police being called. Luckily, there were things to keep me busy, or at least keep me looking busy, around the shelter.

  The building was colourful. It didn’t have the discreet look of a place where battered women could find shelter and protection. It looked more like a big candy tied in ribbon that awaited the little kids at the corner of a street. Caramel colour, the windows a nice creamy white, and its walls featured long strips of pink, lemon yellow, and pistachio green, and on these strips were words that invited hope and reconciliation. That is what I understood from what I could read in French and English. Most of it was in languages and alphabets that were foreign to me.

  The immediate surroundings were just as colourful. It was a long line of container restaurants that served modest cuisine, of different origins, particularly Asian, to a clientele that was just as diverse. Sometimes I was the only white man going container to container, with an eye on the women’s building.

  It took several hours of stuffing myself with ceviche, mango lassis, and I don’t know what else before I saw Lisana leave the building. Without hair hanging down her back and without her headphones on, my first surprise. She came out at the same time as a young Indigenous woman with whom she exchanged a few words – second surprise – and without hesitation, she headed right. She walked quickly, with a determined step. She turned left on a street where the currents of a lively crowd intersected. I headed off after her.

  I walked behind her, taking care to leave just the right number of people between us so as not to alert her or lose her from sight. The crowd grew thicker; people were heading home from work. I had a hard time keeping up the pace and the distance, but a few heads away I saw Lisana’s, straight and imposing, which was staying its course. She didn’t look left or right; she looked at nothing, in fact, not even the traffic lights when she stopped at a street corner. I walked for a long time, a very long time. I no longer knew where I was. I had eyes only for the head straight like an arrow in the fray. There was a moment when the crowd parted as young teens went by on rollerblades, then it reformed, and I found myself right behind her. I wondered whether the moment had come to show myself.

  At the red light that awaited us at the corner of a street, I slipped up to her left and turned toward her, but the light had already changed, and she had resumed walking with her confident step. We walked for a long time like two robots, looking straight ahead, steps synchronized, almost military, and nothing to suggest that she was uncomfortable with, intrigued by, or even aware of my presence, while I was in the midst of working out a greeting to introduce myself to her.

  An ambulance went by. Flashing lights and deafening siren. I looked toward the street, then Lisana, and I didn’t take my eyes off her after that. And her, still nothing, as if I weren’t there. I was able to scrutinize her at leisure. It was the Lisana I had met in Clova, locked deep inside herself, but with a different energy, looking younger with a haircut that showed off her neck. The headphones were there, around her neck, in case of need, if the ambient sound wasn’t enough. That’s what I understood later during our long walks, because it never failed; we walked the city in every direction every time I visited, and I would see her put her headphones on when, for example, we would head into a residential area, an area that was too calm for her liking.

  Hours passed and the day grew darker. We were now striding along almost deserted sidewalks; were we going to walk to the end of the night? She had no itinerary. I could tell by her way of taking one street and then another, left, right, left, a trajectory that was often circular, that had no other purpose than walking, walking, walking, and clearing her head – that too I understood.

  I tapped her on the shoulder. I don’t know how the gesture came to me, but that’s what I did, tap her on the shoulder like you would knock on a door to announce your presence at a friend’s or a stranger’s, and she opened it. She looked at me, really looked at me, and I saw the bewilderment, the confusion, the simmering of her thoughts, I saw intense brain activity in her eyes and, after a moment that seemed to me like an eternity, I heard her say to me in a tone that reflected her pride and relief at having figured it out: ‘You’re Janelle’s friend.’

  She had been expecting me; I had been announced. In the flash of an instant she must have seen the surprise and bewilderment in my eyes, probably also a bit of euphoria, because I had an image of Janelle holding out an invisible hand to us and smiling at us from the distant place where she was. A crooked smile; Janelle never smiles outright.

  ‘She sent me a postcard,’ Lisana told me, and what followed was the detailed, confused story of postcards she’d received from Paris, London, Amsterdam, pretty much everywhere in Europe. She talked to me while we continued our walk. It would always be that way. We roam the city. She talks, she talks, always looking straight ahead, never slowing the pace, not a concern for me. Sometimes it is confused and mixed up; sometimes it is clear and unclouded. I will never know whether the real Lisana is found in the confusion or the clarity of expression. Or she plows ahead without a word for hours, and I have to pick up the pace to follow her. Her brain works at the same rhythm as her legs, a dynamo that never stops.

  She works at the women’s shelter. That’s what she told me at our first meeting. She does a bit of everything, cleaning and cooking, in exchange for a salary that is just enough to pay for the room Janelle found her in one of the row houses that border a highway. For the reason previously mentioned, I will not reveal the name of the street where Lisana has her room. She is at her best there, I think. At least a ten-kilometre walk to get there, an impersonal, anonymous residential area, the horrible noise of the highway, all things that contributed to the room’s charm and affordability.

  We went our separate ways without a goodbye (she turned her back to me, and I did likewise), and thank god for my iPhone because my feet were on fire, and I could call a taxi to get back to my hotel. The next day, I went shopping for some running shoes, and I showed up at the shelter at the end of the day. She showed no surprise, joy, or displeasure. We walked.

  People often ask about Lisana, what became of her, how she remembered her mother, whether she was happy or unhappy in her new life. Lisana, happy? There is no point even asking. I think she has managed not to be and has found in this non-existence shelter from life’s demands. She couldn’t care less about being happy or unhappy, living or dying. From her suicidal obsession she has kept only the obsession. An obsession with no focus that compels her to roam the city in search of nothing. She lives in a void, and it suits her perfectly.

  And Gladys, does Lisana talk about her mother? The question comes mainly from Suzan. The answer is difficult because Gladys fell into the large void like all the rest, and she comes out onl
y when I say her name. I am waiting for a story to escape from her when sometimes a knot undoes in her brain and I ask, regardless of whether Lisana is telling me about a new resident arriving at the shelter or an incident in the kitchen: ‘And Gladys, what did she do?’ as if her mother were part of the story. ‘Mom?… ’ I can feel her searching. ‘Mooommmm?’ The word is drawn out, the o’s have more space between them, expand, transform. ‘Moooommmm,’ I can almost see her smile at herself and finally, ‘Moooommm would never have messed up the meringue,’ or something else that honours her mother, the best cook in the world, the most marvellous of women.

  She hasn’t forgotten anything, it’s all there, but deeply buried, and it takes her a few seconds of sifting through her brain for the memory to emerge.

  Janelle, on the other hand, is never far away. She is present in her mind. Probably because of the postcards. There is no need to activate the brain. She talks about her with ease as we criss-cross the city. Just as she talks to me about the shelter residents. They are part of a present that is hers but not entirely, a present she experiences from a distance. I am always surprised to see her talk with the few women who are getting some fresh air at the door of the building. They are nomadic, unstable, mistreated, abused women. They smoke, joke, laugh, cry, console each other. Sorrow turns golden in the sun on the sidewalk. Lisana crosses through the laughter and the tears, returns greetings, adds what is called for, and heads off with her robotic step. She is at peace with her environment.

  If I still felt I had the right to communicate with Janelle, I would congratulate her because I think the women’s shelter is the perfect place for Lisana. Where she is, she has the right to be unhappy. She doesn’t bother anyone. It took me seeing Lisana cross through the group of women on the sidewalk to understand Janelle’s words. There was no dissonance, no unease. Lisana is comfortable in the sorrow of others.