The First Garden

by Anne Hébert

  Céleste carries her house on her back. Like a big ant, bent under the weight of her pack. A folded tent, a sleeping bag, an alcohol burner, tins, smoked meat, salted crackers, a first-aid kit, mosquito repellent, Mexican boots, and some books on ethnology. She drops her burden on the floor and rubs her shoulders. Laughs, showing all her long, strong teeth. She is very tall, thin, and bony, wearing too-short shorts and enormous sneakers. Straight blonde bangs fall over her eyes. Her legs, her arms, her neck are covered with mosquito bites. She says that the North Shore is fantastic, but the mosquitoes are a real drag.

  Céleste ensconces herself in the easy chair, her legs apart, eyes half-shut. She declares that civilization has its good points and that bourgeois chairs are very comfortable. She laughs. She talks about Maud. Says “us girls,” and seems to want to exclude the rest of humankind.

  “Even if I knew where Maud is I wouldn’t tell you or Raphaël. There’s real loyalty between us girls. Mothers are as macho as guys, everybody knows that.”

  An image of Maud suddenly comes to her, here in the stale air of the small hotel room at the end of the afternoon. She could simply reach out her arm in this heat and touch the sleeping form of her daughter, here on her child’s bed. Her eyes would be shut, she’d be peaceful and calm, wrapped in her mystery, guarded in sleep, and safe from the entire world.

  Flora Fontanges lingers over that image, the most reassuring of all, wishing it would last forever, of the childhood, gone for good, of her daughter Maud. She vaguely hears the voices of Raphaël and Céleste flying over her head like stray bullets.

  “The last time I saw Maud was before I left for the North Shore. She seemed really uptight, you know how she gets?”

  Raphaël shakes his head obstinately.

  Céleste laughs, her head tipped against the chair back. “Poor Raphaël, you’ve never really looked at her. I’ve never seen such a girl as uptight as Maud.”

  Raphaël stares at the wall as if he were searching for his words there among the flowers on the wallpaper.

  “We were supposed to be leaving for Charlevoix in three days. Everything was ready. I don’t get it.”

  Céleste shrugs and says no one understands anything about anything but that she, Céleste Larivière, has her own personal little light to shed on the matter of Amerindian women, which will be the subject of her thesis.

  Céleste asks if she can take a bath. Shuts herself inside the bathroom. Then sweeps back into the room. Parades around naked. Blonde head, black armpits and pubis, arms and legs inordinately long. Roots around in her possessions. Kneels on the floor. Goes back in the bathroom. Sprays herself all over with Flora Fontanges’s perfume. Shouts through the door that she reeks of old actress.

  Now she is in the bedroom again, draped in a bath towel. She gurgles with pleasure. Goes back to the chair. Shuts her eyes. Abandons herself entirely to the well-being that follows a bath. Meditates. Prolongs the ecstasy. Puts off as long as possible the moment when she must act and move.

  Wearing white shorts and a very green T-shirt she says “bye” and is on her way, her burden on her back. Raphaël wishes her good luck, then turns back to Flora Fontanges. Explains that Céleste has just enough time to find shelter for the night. He says it’s quite possible that she’ll sleep at Eric’s place. Flora Fontanges asks who Eric is. Raphaël says it’s a long story.

  She wipes up the bathroom. Calls and asks for clean towels.

  SHE HAS HAD HER HAIR cut very short. The multicoloured ends strew the hairdresser’s floor. Now here she is with a grey head like a little bird’s.

  She is facing the artistic director of the Emérillon, who cannot grasp what it is about Flora Fontanges that has changed so profoundly. His name is Gilles Perrault. He has washed-out blue eyes whose colour fades into his withered cheeks. He takes off his little round glasses and tries to see Flora Fontanges through a myopic haze. She has changed her appearance without consulting him the director of the play and artistic director of the theatre. He is upset and disconcerted, as if the docile actress from Happy Days had suddenly escaped him, allowing herself to work on another role in secret. He replaces his glasses and notes that Flora Fontanges’s smile is too charming for Winnie. He must forbid her to smile once rehearsals get under way.

  Flora Fontanges tells herself that now that she’s made herself look like Joan of Arc at the stake, she could very well act out the passion of a nineteen-year-old virgin stripped bare at the fire that will reduce her to ashes. Raphaël and Céleste would be invited to the performance, in perfect collusion with her raging youth and tragic destiny. She would make them live the Real Trial of Joan quite straightforwardly, sparing them nothing. To do so she need only dip into the well-springs of her own life, where a great savage fire still burns and makes her scream in her sleep. Of all her roles, that of Joan was the one that was most applauded during the course of her career. But could she play it again, in this city, and not risk losing her life in it?

  She has left Gilles Perrault and is heading now for the Boule d’Or on rue Saint Jean, where she is to meet Raphaël.

  THEY ARE ALL THERE WITH Raphaël on the café terrace, Maud’s friends, the ones from the commune. They’ve pulled two tables together. They are drinking milk or orange juice. They’ve seen her coming from a distance, with her shoulder bag and her haircut, like Joan of Arc at the stake. Raphaël makes the introductions. He looks at Flora Fontanges’s hairdo. He says:

  “You look younger.”

  This glorious summer. Only, don’t breathe too deeply, and be careful to expel the air after it has revived the blood. Just live in the moment. Confine herself to the present only. As if she were one of Maud’s friends at the table on the narrow terrace of a café on rue Saint-Jean. She has already looked as far as she can, the full length of the street, as far as the Eglise du Faubourg. As if to make sure that nothing threatening could come from that direction.

  They are all talking at once. Trying to explain about rue Saint-Jean on summer Saturday nights. Groups of young people piled onto the terraces. Passersby all on the same side of the street, no one’s ever figured out why. Cars pass at ten miles an hour. There’s plenty of time to shop, to select without getting out of the car the girl or boy you want.

  They laugh. They are giving Flora Fontanges a warm welcome because she’s an actress and she’s come from Europe. They decide to show her around the city. They treat her like a model tourist. The usual sites. Montcalm’s house, the treasure-houses of the Ursulines and of the Hôtel-Dieu. At the Maison de la Fort someone in the shadows, among the mock-ups all in a row, gives an account of the 1759 battle, scarcely a few minutes long, in the course of which the city and the entire country were lost.

  At that very moment the inevitable occurs. Here is the Esplanade, and the grey façade, the window-frames now painted blue, of 45 rue d’Auteuil. Surely no past life can still persist inside. Tap the stone with a finger. There is only emptiness. The echo of emptiness. Hollow stone. The past now a mere pebble. There’s no risk that a tall old woman in black will appear at the window and lift a curtain of guipure lace to spy on Flora Fontanges and point at her. No harsh old woman’s voice can seep out the window and pronounce a death sentence on a little girl who was rescued from the Hospice Saint-Louis.

  “You’ll never make a lady of her.”

  Flora Fontanges tells herself that no one is more deaf than she who does not want to hear. She asks for a cigarette. No one around her has one. Someone mentions pollution.

  They are sitting in the grass of the little park on the Esplanade. She is on a bench facing them. They raisetheir heads towards her, expecting who knows what magical discourse. Isn’t she an actress, doesn’t she possess the power to change ordinary words into resounding, quickening speech?

  She wishes she could meet their expectations. That she could recite a beautiful poem for them very softly, her voice velvet against their ears, requiring keen a
ttention, a lover’s fervour. Hold them spellbound, there at the peak of existence. To be, for a moment, that point of light balancing on the horizon that sways and falls in a spray of foam.

  She drops her head. Concentrates. In the utter poverty of the moment. Gathers up her poverty like a gift. Now she is merely a tall shorn woman in the summer sun. Given over to all these gazes that surround her. To this wild expectation. In the merciful night. Joan in her is submitting to her trial and her death. She has just recanted. She trembles. Her voice is now a taut thread, breaking.

  “I was so afraid of being burned . . .”

  Suddenly Flora Fontanges is no longer master of the sounds, the smells, the images that jostle within her. The acrid smoke, a small girl coughing and choking in the shadows, the crackling of hell close by, the suffocating heat, dread in its original purity. She hears herself say for the second time, very softly but so distinctly that every word can be read on her lips:

  “I was so afraid of being burned . . .”

  The brief sentence catches them by surprise, the silence holds them absolutely still for a moment, heads raised towards her, then they shake themselves and look at one another, amazed, afraid she’s mocking them. Such a brief remark, taken out of context, having its own effect and producing such an effect on them, must be a sign of some misunderstanding, or a spell.

  She runs her hand over her brow to erase Joan and her trial by fire. Discovers her own face, worn and dull. Says that she wants to go home. Raphaël at her feet hasn’t budged. He wishes this would go on forever the expression on the face of Flora Fontanges, the sound of her voice. The drama, her terror. A kind of nervous voracity. He pleads with her:

  “Don’t go right away.”

  She is standing in the little park on the Esplanade, surrounded by boys and girls, wearing no makeup, all prestige stripped off like a mask, a tired and aging woman.

  Céleste says she hasn’t the faintest idea where she’ll sleep tonight. No one knows who mentions there are twin beds in Flora Fontanges’s room in the hotel on rue Sainte-Anne.

  CÉLESTE FELL ASLEEP ALMOST AT once after declaring that a real bed, even if you aren’t making love in it, is fantastic.

  Flora Fontanges is awake in the dark. The strange breathing at her side takes up too much space in the bedroom, sucks all the surrounding air. Flora Fontanges feels as if she’s suffocating. She wonders where her own daughter is sleeping tonight.

  In the morning she had to ask Céleste to leave. The girl jumped out of the bed as if there were a spring in the hollow of her back.

  “Oh, these clean sheets are so soft, they’re fabulous, but I’m scared I’d be selling my soul. I’ll go now.”

  She left half her belongings in the room.

  SHE PRESSES HER THIN HANDS together. Leafs through the script of Happy Days as if Winnie’s fate no longer concerned her. Wishes she were indestructible and hard as a stone. This role, though, is unexpected. She has been brought out of retirement for this, of all roles, like a plant moved from shade into the light of day, after being required for so long to be extravagantly made up, glaringly lit, so that none of the expression of her face or body would be lost, from any seat in the theatre. And then little by little she had to put away greasepaint and powder, tears and the burst of joy and bracing hysteria. Stripped of her reason for being, she began growing roses and dahlias in Touraine, where she was in the process of converting an old dovecote, when her daughter disappeared again, like a bird on the horizon taking flight.

  She decides to stop thinking about Winnie, to keep Winnie off to the side for a little while yet, like her own old age that is now approaching.

  The first reading with her partner, under the washed-out gaze of the artistic director of the Emérillon, has been set for July the third.

  RAPHAËL INSISTS ON SHOWING HER the city as if she had never before set foot there. Perhaps now she will escape from what she knows about the city and be satisfied with Raphaël’s version? Anywhere out of this world, she tells herself. She is here to play a role in the theatre. She will play it. Then go away and live the rest of her life somewhere else. Unless her daughter suddenly appears. Her arms around her neck. Her cool cheek against her own.

  Raphaël, like a proper accredited guide, has brought a map of the city. Flora Fontanges bends over the unfolded map spread out flat on the bed. She is looking for the Côte de la Couronne and for Saint-Roch. She crosses out the whole district with a stroke of her pen. She sets conditions. There are forbidden places where she will never go. Let Raphaël be warned.

  As far as rue Plessis is concerned, there’s nothing to worry about. She has seen distinctly on the map that the street no longer exists, nor do the streets nearby. The whole neighbourhood has been torn down, the maze of little streets and lanes, the proper houses and the hovels behind the splendid mansions on the Grande-Allée. But what has become of the people who once lived there? Did they make a bonfire of their old despair, a jumble of old cooking pots, sagging mattresses, grimy rags? Who blew down, like a house of cards, Mr. Smith’s candy store? What little girl lingers in the mind of Flora Fontanges, clearly uttering a phrase that has no relation to the worn-out adult Flora Fontanges has become?

  “Please, Sir, a penny’s worth of licorice.”

  A little package of short black sticks, hollow like macaroni, tied with red string, a minuscule bundle of sweets, is displayed in Mr. Smith’s window. Desire recaptured. Lust intact. Again she hears the little girl’s voice in her head:

  “Please, Sir, a penny’s worth of licorice?”

  He begs her to come with him. Says it’s a beautiful day, that it’s almost noon.

  What holds her back, keeps her motionless in the middle of the room, has nothing to do with Raphaël or with the weather. It has to do with an image from the past.

  She sees quite clearly a cut-glass doorknob that glitters strangely on rue Plessis with its dark façades. Flora Fontanges will never be able to describe the peculiar beauty of this object, the prism of colors thrown off by each facet, all turning to violet with the passing of time. Only turn that gleaming knob, very carefully, and you will gain access to the whole apartment of M. and Mme Eventurel, who have adopted a little girl who was rescued from the Hospice Saint-Louis.

  “Are you coming, Madame Fontanges?”

  Raphaël is growing impatient. He is young and handsome, here at midday, in the city he thinks he knows like no one else in the world. She is no longer altogether with him. She has been busy within herself, in search of images that disturb her.

  This must be what it is like to lapse into second childhood: a little barrier in the brain gives way and the past surges in, dense as mercury, overtaking the present and drowning it, while death prevails over life, as it says in the law.

  THE MIDDAY GLARE ON ALL things. The upper town held up by its cape, covered with green tufts like the countryside, there at the crest of the walls where the Citadel is perched against the sky. Below, the Plains of Abraham. And beneath it the river, oceanic here, and smelling of mud, oil, and tar, bathes moss-covered wharves.

  All the bells are pealing.

  Raphaël can only list the names of churches along their way, as if they were dead old women obliterated by the sun’s dazzle. While Flora Fontanges wonders if there is still someone in each church who answers to the name of God. There was a time when God made rash promises behind the grey stone façades. That was a time of certainty. Once the portal was open you knew what to expect. An illuminated red lamp signalled the real presence. A blinking flame, the Pentecostal sign, hanging near the altar, and one knew at once that the burning bush existed, shut away inside the sanctuary. God dwelt there, concealing Himself out of pity for us, because of the unbearable radiance of His face.

  “Raphaël, do you believe in God?”

  Raphaël says he doesn’t know, he’s never thought about it.

  “What about you?”

/>   She says she doesn’t know either.

  SHE STAYED WITH HIM TILL evening, exhausted, scarcely listening to him, given over to her own memory, like a child who can no longer follow her own thoughts.

  Raphaël says that their greatest dream, his and Maud’s, was to live one entire day without wasting a moment of it. Paying utmost attention to the passage of time over the city, as if they had found themselves transformed into a sundial that could pick up the slightest vibration of light, from morning till night, their vigilance and their joy in the passing moment never flagging.

  He laughs. He says it’s a dream, that he and Maud have tried several times, but never made it because they couldn’t concentrate.

  “One day, maybe, I’ll know how to live life to the full, I’ll be strong enough not to waste it. Perhaps with you, Madame Fontanges. It’s already started with us, since noon today. But you’re too distracted.”

  She says she’s tired and would like to go home.

  He appears disconcerted, sheepish, like a child who’s been punished. He insists that she stay with him.

  “Don’t leave yet, it’s not even dark. You must watch the night now, from Dufferin Terrace. You’ll see. The day’s not done until it topples into the dark. Emptying its pockets before going to bed. We create a void. In our heads. In our bodies. We throw everything overboard. We see the darkness coming in all around us, creeping over us little by little. Before we sink for good and fall asleep till morning, like a sort of death. You must watch the night arrive, watch it spread out all around. You must see it, Madame Fontanges, you must . . .”

  A huge sky, extremely high, not yet completely black, glows with a thousand points of light. The river, which has not yet shed its own light, reflects the sky and casts up glitter from all its gleaming waves. A confused stamping of hooves on planks, the warmth and sound of passing lives. Dufferin Terrace pours out its nocturnal crowd under the summer sky. People from the upper town join those from the lower town on the wooden promenade. Two currents meet, collide and mingle on the resonant boards, like the movement of the river when sweet water meets salt, briefly blurring, then each follows its briny course.