The First Garden

by Anne Hébert

  The

  First Garden

  ANNE HÉBERT

  Translated from the French

  by Sheila Fischman

  Copyright © 1988 Editions du Seuil

  English translation copyright © 1990 House of Anansi Press Limited

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  This edition published in 2012 by House of Anansi Press Inc

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  Original French edition, Le Premier Jardin, published in

  1988 by Editions du Seuil

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Hébert, Anne, 1916

  [Premier jardin. English]

  The first garden

  Translation of: Le premier jardin.

  ISBN 978-1-77089-092-3

  I. Title. II. Title: Premier jardin. English.

  PS8515.E24P7313 1990 C843’.54 C89-090611-4

  PQ3919.2.H42P7313 1990

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  All the world’s a stage.

  William Shakespeare

  TWO LETTERS FROM A DISTANT town, posted some hours apart, in different neighbourhoods, by different persons, come at the same time to her retreat in Touraine, and determine her return to her native land.

  The registry office states that her name is Pierrette Paul and that she was born in a New World city, on the feast day of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, while posters scattered across the Old World declare that her features and the lineaments of her body are those of an actress known as Flora Fontanges.

  She has pulled up the collar of her black cloth coat and carefully hidden her hair beneath a silk square tied under the chin. Offstage she is no one. An aging woman. Bare hands. A worn suitcase. She patiently waits her turn to check her bags. She’s used to it. All airports resemble one another. And the points of arrival are the same as the points of departure. This woman seems to need just one thing, the role that awaits her at the end of an anonymous runway marked off by blue lights, somewhere between heaven and earth.

  The name of the city of her childhood is not listed on the departures board. The flight number, the boarding gate, the landing place, everything is there except . . . Perhaps, since she left it, the city has been reabsorbed where it stands, like a puddle of water in the sun?

  Her face is utterly blank as she imagines, under closed eyelids, the possible disappearance of the city, and no one would suspect that she is filled with the deepest malaise. Only her pallor might betray her, should it occur to one of the crowd of travellers to take notice of her.

  She seems fascinated by the wear that has whitened the edges of her black coat pockets.

  She looks up.

  A tiny light blinks over gate 82.

  She will spend many hours crossing the Atlantic, then land somewhere in North America before the name she fears is visible on the arrivals board, spelled out, like a true country to which she has been invited to perform a part in a play.

  Once she has crossed the ocean, she’ll just have to wait for a connecting flight. Unless she takes the train.

  Two letters were enough to make her undertake this long journey back to where she started, where she had sworn never to set foot again; a note, actually an appeal, from her daughter Maud, and a brief letter from the artistic director of the Emérillon inviting her to play Winnie in Happy Days.

  Nothing to declare, she thinks, stepping lightly through the security check, slinging back onto her shoulder the bag holding the paint, powder, and mirror that are essential for creating each new image of herself.

  Captain Georges-Henri Levasseur welcomes you on board flight 747 . . .

  She presses her face against the glass. Crosses her hands on her knees. While the land disappears, leaving no horizon. There is nothing more to be seen here. A desert. The cottony mass of clouds is broken by the passage of the airplane. Then forms again. In the distance far below, beneath the clouds, the slack fury of the invisible sea.

  She curls up on the seat. Legs folded under her. Thinks about the role of Winnie. Thinks about no one but Winnie. Is filled with the notion of Winnie’s crumpled little face. She concentrates. Summons up Winnie with all her strength. Brings a very old woman into being. She stares at her, observes her, spies on her. Compares herself with Winnie. Tries to mimic her. Summons from within her, until it marks her very face, everything that is fragile, vulnerable, already ruined and susceptible to death.

  She tries to pull off her boots. Fills all the space allotted to her, between her seat mate and the window. Bends down as best she can. For a moment, draws the attention of her seat mate, who is abruptly wrenched from daydreams by her cramped movements as she sheds the boots. Her narrow feet in black stockings. Slender ankles.

  He looks at the woman’s peculiar face. Her hair is especially surprising, with grey roots and reddish tips, like the richly-colored plumage of a partridge.

  She has clearly seen the man’s derisive glance, his black mustache, his thick wet lips.

  I am made to be seen from a distance, she thinks, doe eyes, blood-red mouth, lit by spotlights. She must send this man away. Tell him to come back. After Flora Fontanges’s grey hair has grown in and all the dyed blonde and auburn tips have fallen to the scissors. She has deliberately let it grow, stopped dying it, to give herself Winnie’s grey head. At the première at the Théâtre de l’Emérillon, her seat mate can sit in the first row if he wishes. Then the metamorphosis will be complete. She will show him Winnie’s face in all its decrepitude. She will speak directly to him: I am Winnie. No one will have the right to contradict her. Her seat mate will be captivated. The audience greedy and silent, as before a bullfight. Her craft is about to go on public display, and those who have seen her childlike and beautiful will watch her decay inch by inch, under the dazzling spotlights, throughout an entire summer.

  She wants to sleep. Brushes her face with her hand to wipe away the traces of a role that is invading her. Will the same gesture erase the bitter fold at the corner of her mouth, those thin furrows around the eyes, and restore her firm-cheeked youth?

  The presence of the sleeping man at her side makes her uneasy. His breathing close to her. Hers close to him. Their breathing mingled as if they were lying together in the same bed. An old couple bound by the seat-belt, flank against flank, forever strangers one to the other.

  For the first time since her departure she wonders about the laconic note from her daughter, whom she has not seen for a year.

  “I’d love to see you. Come. Kisses. Maud”

  THERE IS NO TRAIN STATION now. A shed in the middle of a field stands in its place. The train stops in a vacant lot. Someone says this is it. They’ve arrived. Everyone gets out. Night. Open country. Garlands of light trace distant streets. On all sides, night. Taxis in line, motionless. Mayflies dance in headlights’ b
eams.

  There are flowers in her arms. Flowers from the artistic director of the Emérillon. He has a broad smile over pointed teeth, and small round metal-rimmed glasses. She looks for her daughter, Maud. Complains that she can’t see her daughter. The director says Maud is probably waiting at the hotel. They climb into a taxi.

  The director explains that the new city, half-village, half-suburb, girds the old one like a green sash. She does not hear what the man beside her is saying. At every flash of neon that indicates a motel or barbecued chicken, she shuts her eyes. Wishes she could melt into the night. Anywhere out of this world. Is anxious because she feels there is no life here, where she is at the moment. At the same time, it suits her. She only hopes there will be no reaction (no clash, no emotion) between the city and herself before she arrives at the hotel on rue Sainte-Anne. She does not want to remember that her false grandmother used to live in the old city, that she had to go through the walls on her way to her house for lunch every Sunday.

  The artistic director of the Emérillon is glad to see that the work on Flora Fontanges’s beautiful face is already under way. They’ll only have to exaggerate the effect with makeup and boldly accentuate her age. Then the burial in sand of a living creature can be accomplished, one grain at a time, one night at a time, at the Emérillon summer theatre, as its artistic director has dreamed of doing now for years.

  FOR A LONG TIME SHE slept very late, in strange rooms, foreign cities. For many years she experienced the trepidation of a woman awakening in the dark, unsure where she is. Utter panic at not knowing, for a moment, who she is. Now she’s used to it though. Everything works out in the end. She just has to retrace the order of objects in the room before she even opens her eyes. Determine some precise reference points. Yesterday’s clothes tossed onto a chair, the location of the window in relation to the bed. Grope patiently until she finds the concealed switch for the bedside lamp. Confront the unknown city head on, in the steady light of day.

  The little square under her window is spattered with sunlight. Freshly washed calèches, their red wheels glistening with water, horses with their noses in bags of oats. Calèche drivers hail one another. The aroma of french-fried potatoes joins the strong smell of horse manure.

  This is the present at its liveliest. All the church bells in the city compete as they sound the angelus, great gusts of sound. The cannon at the Citadel thunders noon. The inhabitants of the upper town set their watches and clocks by that cannon.

  Flora Fontanges remembers nothing. She must struggle to remind herself that her daughter was not at the station or the hotel last night.

  HE IS FACING HER, LEANING towards her across a small table on the terrace of a café. She leans over too because of the noise from the street, while her tea gets cold and he finishes his milk. He tells her again that Maud’s been gone for two weeks now and he’s freaking out, especially at night. There is a drop of milk at the corner of his mouth. His voice is low and drawling, as if muffled.

  Flora Fontanges looks at the boy who sleeps with her daughter and doesn’t believe he could be in the grip of any amorous difficulty. He orders another glass of milk. He stretches in the sun. As she watches, he is consoled by the pleasure this day gives him. His long legs under the table extend to the one next to them. He is trying hard to think about Maud. Makes a face like a child on the verge of tears.

  Horses clomping along the Grande-Allée, calèches crammed with tourists, long American cars passing the calèches, stains of sunlight among the leaves, sunlight shimmering on leaves. She hears herself say:

  “Have you two quarrelled?”

  He frowns but it is erased from his brow at once as if nothing, no line or fold, could last on his smooth face.

  “Quarrelled? Maud and I? Never!”

  Then says he doesn’t know why Maud went away.

  He seems to be searching for a reason for Maud’s departure but it escapes him, like a mosquito in the dark that you can hear but cannot catch. His fine, innocent face, vaguely perplexed.

  His name is Raphaël. He is twenty years old. During the summer, he tells American tourists about the city. Last year he was studying history at the university. For almost a year now he has been living with Maud, who has been a runaway since childhood.

  Flora Fontanges thinks, nothing ever changes. If Maud has disappeared she is bound to come back as she did the other times. But though she tries to reassure herself, something in the air that she is struggling to breathe is filled with menace.

  This boy across from her seems to be fighting to reject the joie de vivre that comes naturally to him. Again, a vague frown. His slow, flat voice slurs a little, as if he were talking to himself.

  “Sometimes Maud, her face, when she thought nobody was looking at her, when she wasn’t looking at us either, it was as if she was offended by something, some remote offence she wasn’t even aware of, but it would show on her face just like that, in passing, for no reason, like a shadow . . .”

  She felt herself under accusation by Raphaël, she, the mother, the source of her daughter’s affections, of everything that began in the heart of that child. A little more and this boy would tell her about the first offence committed against Maud in the mists of time, when Maud had neither speech nor clear features.

  “What was Maud like when she was little?”

  Why not evoke the little girl smelling of talcum powder who would draw herself up on tiptoe to kiss her mother as she comes off stage? The dressing room is full of flowers with letters from admirers tucked among them. Flora Fontanges is wearing a red velvet gown, her bare shoulders moist with sweat, and sparkling beads are woven into her black chignon. The little girl wears a smocked dress of Liberty print. Her hair is black like her mother’s. She is three, or perhaps five years old.

  This idyllic apparition disturbs Flora Fontanges. She would rather cling to a more recent image of her daughter, of the obstinate adolescent who has just run away for the first time. She speaks to Raphaël as if she were addressing, through him, someone hidden far away in the city. She finds her clear actress’s voice, accustomed to song and speech broken by dramatic pauses.

  “There’s nothing to understand. My daughter’s face is as impenetrable as stone. It’s impossible to know if she’s hungry or thirsty, hot or cold, sick or well, if she wants fruit or chocolate, a leather jacket or ice skates. Her desires seem inaccessible even to her.”

  He listens. He is surprised at the voice, warm and vehement, as if a ventriloquist were expressing herself through this ageless unassuming woman. He says he’ll go to see her act in Happy Days.

  She looks at the Victorian houses, now transformed into cafés and restaurants. She wonders when it began, all these parasols, brightly coloured awnings, small tables, these chairs planted as if on a beach all down the length of the Grande-Allée.

  Raphaël is engrossed in his glass of milk. His long lashes cast shadows on his cheeks. He raises his head. Eyes the color of agates. If Maud and Raphaël have something in common it cannot be merely childhood.

  She says:

  “Maud was hardly more than a child when she left me. What’s she like now?”

  “Tall and pale, with black hair, straight and very long, long enough to sit on. Magnificent!”

  For a moment Flora Fontanges seems to be gazing at a stranger who stands before her, his height and beauty theatrical, formidable.

  “A year ago, Maud went away and I had no word from her for two months.”

  He rests both hands on the table, brings his face quite close to hers. He blinks in the sun. His voice suddenly abrupt:

  “Did you or didn’t you go crazy during those two months?”

  Flora Fontanges pulls back. Half-hidden by her dark glasses. Strives inwardly to keep at a distance anyone who can touch her and wound her.

  They decide not to notify the police, to wait. They are standing in the summer light. She
has already paid the bill. He says he didn’t realize she was so tall.

  He watches her as she disappears along the Grande-Allée.

  FLORA FONTANGES WALKS DOWN STREETS that seem foreign to her and is reassured that they feel foreign. As long as she keeps her distance, nothing untoward can happen to her. As far as her daughter Maud is concerned, even if she were to meet her at a street corner she’s not sure that she’d recognize her.

  The Grande-Allée with its tawdry theatrical finery extends as far as the St. Louis Gate. Tourists and passing civil servants stroll the sidewalks. Three quick stops and they’re gone. Were not born here. Will not die here. Just passing, all of them. To sleep here for a night or two. Eat and drink. Smoke a joint. Cruise girls or boys. Take a calèche ride. No births or deaths (except for accidents) inside the stone houses daubed with color. But where are the people? The real ones? Those whose lives are tied to the dark woodwork, the nasty cellars, the exhausting staircases, the stacked-up storeys, the roaring fireplaces. Have they gone away, are they sleeping their final sleep walled up inside these stone mansions with their broad bow-windows?

  More than anything else, Flora Fontanges is afraid of awakening phantoms, of having to play a role among ghosts.

  She quickens her pace, strides faster and faster. As if she too could join the race. Carefully avoids the St. Louis Gate. Will not see today the grey house fronts on the Esplanade or the tall mansion of her false grandmother, which they have transformed into a hotel. As she walks past the old tennis courts of the parliament buildings, the sight of the distant mountains and sky briefly, surprisingly, touches her heart.

  RAPHAËL CLIMBED DIRECTLY UP TO Flora Fontanges’s room. He knocked on the door and called out: “It’s me, Raphaël.” She is wearing a dressing gown and her hair is wet. Has been lying low. Is furious at being disturbed. Raphaël calls out again, louder: “It’s me, Raphaël.” She opens the door a crack and sees that he’s not alone. He tells her Céleste is a friend of Maud’s, that she’s just arrived from the North Shore.