The First Garden

by Anne Hébert

  This time, it is no longer Shakespeare carrying Flora Fontanges. It is a brief statement, as dry as the Civil Code.

  Inventory of the goods and possessions of Renée Chauvreux estimated at 250 livres:

  Two women’s costumes, one of Holland stuff the other of barracan, one shabby skirt of farandine, one very shabby green skirt, one negligée of petersham, one serge camisole, a few linen handkerchiefs, six linen mob-caps and four black coiffes, two of them crepe and two taffeta, a muff of dog fur and two pairs of sheepskin gloves. Did swear in her heart, on her portion of Paradise, that she would not marry Jacques Paviot, soldier in the company of Monsieur de Contrecoeur with whom she has entered into a contract of marriage.

  Flora Fontanges carries on her shoulders all the wretchedness of the world, it seems. Why can she not celebrate the joy here, now, in the dying days of summer? Raphaël seems to have recovered from his sorrow over Maud, he dreams of the filles du Roi, gazes out at length at the river before him, empty and smooth, where there is no hope of a great sailing ship on the horizon.

  “Look how calm the river is, almost like a lake.”

  It is easy to peer at the river and act as if little Renée Chauvreux were dying inch by inch, like the flame in a votive light that flickers and dies through a coloured glass. This boy shifts from laughter to tears and from tears to laughter with disconcerting ease. Like a child of three.

  Raclot, Marie-Madeleine

  Turbal, Ursule

  Varin, Catherine

  Touzé, Jeanne

  Raisin, Marguerite

  If Flora Fontanges is letting herself be taken over by all these characters again, it is because she needs such mental activity. As long as she is playing a part, her memory will be at rest and her own recollections of joy or sorrow will serve only to nourish lives other than hers. It is quite an accomplishment, being an actress and repressing one’s childhood and youth in the city as if they were impure thoughts.

  The Lévis hill stands out clear and green against the setting sun. Small pink clouds rush past in the sulphur-coloured sky. The river is marked by the same sulphurous glimmer as the sky, by the same movement of rose-coloured clouds, weightless, with no apparent waves at all.

  THERE’S ROSEMARY, THAT’S FOR REMEMBRANCE. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.

  Ophelia appears and disappears, then reappears and disappears once more under Flora Fontanges’s closed eyelids, while at her side a boy wearing a blue polo shirt talks on and on about the filles du Roi.

  Her first role, her first tour. A picture in her mind. A theatre in the provinces in winter, its grey walls covered with saltpetre, where playbills have been posted and a small pocked mirror hung under a frosted bulb. It is freezing in here, as cold as a cave. You can see your breath. How is she to draw Ophelia’s gentle face, give her the necessary tear-filled eyes and a mouth gnawed by despair? It is a small mirror crowded with the faces of three actors who are busy painting their faces with all the colours in the rainbow, as if each of them were alone in the world, each with his singular soul, all confused with the powder and greasepaint. It’s impossible to put one’s makeup on here, with Polonius taking up all the room in the mirror, reeking of garlic and unable to glue on his grey beard, while Hamlet covers his face with diligent sorrow, in a cloud of yellow powder.

  Flora Fontanges so much wants Ophelia’s passion to be harrowing and true, to be visible on her whole person, clinging to her bones like a second skin. Just next to her, the Queen fails to stuff her opulent bosom inside a close-fitting bodice of threadbare velvet. She swears and spits like an angry cat. Farther away on the stage, behind the closed curtain, you can hear the clatter of weapons, you can hear leaps and muffled cries amid the dust and the veiled illumination from the dimmed stage lights.

  These are the good times.

  She is twenty-two years old and tonight, after the first performance, she will join a man she loves and who loves her. To play Ophelia she has voluntarily deprived herself of love (imposing her law on the man who is waiting for her) for many days and nights, in the hope that the love and desire in her heart will suffer a thousand deaths, so that she can play Ophelia with all the restrained passion that is necessary. Tonight it is over, Ophelia is offered to the audience in all her touching grace, her utter grief. The curtain is scarcely down, the greasepaint hastily removed, and she has only to throw herself in the arms of this man in trenchcoat and fedora who is waiting impatiently at the stage door. On a small street, rough and ill-paved, in the nearest hotel, a room awaits them, with a high brass bed, a washbasin and bidet, behind a rep curtain flowered in green and red.

  “Have there been many men in your life?”

  She feels like snapping that she hasn’t counted them but that’s not true, she has time and again made a precise count, with all the details, odours, sounds, the rooms, sometimes flattened grass, or the back seat of a car. For a long time she thought the cure for love was another love, which is like being healed only to fall sick again. In time, from the farther vantage point of age, it all seems like one single love, quickening repeatedly in its ashes to proclaim either her fever or her boredom.

  “What about Maud’s father, what was he like?”

  Flora Fontanges’s voice becomes curt and sharp. She has already got to her feet. Her small head, perched on a long neck, stiffens as if at the end of a staff, and her whole body freezes.

  “Like the others, no better or worse. An executive, married, two children, dark-rimmed glasses, heavy beard, olive complexion, cleft chin, vacations, church holidays and weekends with the family, what you’d expect.”

  What she does not say, what she will not say is that her passion for Maud’s father was so violent that during one whole season she played Phaedra with the fury of a devastating flame, being doubly consumed, in her life and in the theatre. Emaciated and burning with fever, she carries her daughter like the fruit of a twofold love, almost dies when the child is born and as soon as she has recovered, takes her to the country, far from the stage and from the father’s ungrateful presence.

  “I never saw the man again and Maud bears my name.”

  That is all. She will say no more. Let Raphaël be satisfied with this brief summary of Maud’s coming into the world. Let silence settle in like ice forming on the surface of moving water, not only between Raphaël and her but into the very heart of Flora Fontanges, where the slightest stirring of memory could reawaken some rather unattractive scenes between a man and a woman tearing each other to shreds. Each reproaches the other over tiny Maud, who has not yet been born, is the size of a little finger, clinging to her mother’s womb like a mussel to its rock. The man would like to make her disappear as if she had never existed, small and insignificant and unseeing as a mollusk. The woman weeps and says over and over that this is her last chance, she will soon be forty and he is a coward. They are most virulent on the subject of precautions, each accusing the other of having acted deliberately. What is between them soon begins to resemble hatred (having built up on both sides, no doubt, for several days), rising to the surface now like an endless garland of green moss that one pulls from the earth. So many recriminations, cries, tears (he accuses her of turning her life into theatre), so many hoarded grudges, so many cutting words, every time.

  The era of tumultuous loves is well and truly past. She holds herself erect as if nothing had happened. Wishes with all her might that she could be turned to stone.

  Without a single line of her features betraying her, without a flicker of her sea-coloured eyes, safe now from Raphaël’s gaze and carefully hidden inside herself, she relives the early days of her motherhood. For three months it was a mad love, and this boy who is Maud’s lover cannot have the least idea of such a loving union.

  A tiny, isolated house, rented for three months, in the countryside near Tours, hidden in the trees, with a tiny garden of flowers and vegetabl
es. The mother bathes, powders, diapers, rocks, cuddles her daughter, all day long. Talks to her as to a god one adores. Holds her to her naked breast as long as possible, under a loose smock chosen for the purpose. An infinite exchange of warmth and scent. Skin against skin. Gives her the breast with no fixed schedule, like a cat nursing her kitten. Licks her from head to foot. Even claims that if her daughter cries for one moment it is because she has lost track of her mother’s odour. For consolation, she takes her tirelessly in her lap as into her natal waters. Will use neither deodorant nor cologne so her daughter can recognize her by her smell alone, animal and warm, hidden away in the countryside, mingled with the perfumes of the earth.

  If it is true that most love stories have an end, in this world or the next, the one between Flora Fontanges and her daughter could not last forever. Once they were back in Paris a thousand old demons renewed their attack, just as in the Gospel, and the state of the woman so assailed was worse than before. Contracts argued over and defended. Contracts lost because of maternity leave. Roles to be read and annotated. Fittings. Dinners in town. Solitude interrupted at every turn. A new man looks at her from the corner of a dark green salon. His eyes without colour, merely glittering and mocking, insistent. Nothing is the same now. Time parcelled out. Have them bring my daughter so I may smother her with kisses! The first role after Maud’s birth. The pulse that beats in her neck, at the tips of her fingers. No milk. No time. Have them tell the nurse to sterilize the nipples carefully. The show must go on. The morning newspaper read at dawn, on a café terrace, with fellow-actors crowding around, eyes blurry with sleep and fatigue. The much-awaited review:

  “Madame Fontanges’s acting falls short of her abilities, she stands apart from the best that is in her soul, and from her own gestures and her own voice, which is now suddenly reduced to its simplest expression, like a tree stripped of branches. Although she has accustomed us in the past to fully inhabiting her characters, to an excess of light and heat; now her withdrawal, her lack of aura, her awkwardness disappoint us and sadden us. Flora Fontanges’s Fantine talks like a ventriloquist, gesticulates like an automaton. Real life is elsewhere.”

  Her real life is everywhere at once, in the delight at being a mother and the thousand joys and concerns of every day, while yearning for a new man is stirring. She is energetic and vehement, at the heart of her life which is surging from every corner of her being at once. No doubt she is too happy to act another’s unhappiness, to weep at the proper moment, and to die under the footlights. She is unable to burst onto the stage with all her blood that is boiling and turning to tears.

  Flora Fontanges reads and rereads the review that wounds and offends her. She weeps and clenches her fists. Her fellow actors encourage and console her. She swears she will play Fantine again, this very evening, make the character cry out through her throat and through all the pores of her skin. Even though she is filled with joy because of her little child, just born, she will make the stage resound with the character of Fantine from Les Misérables, Fantine, in all her grief, bereft of her daughter and her entire reason for being alive. Flora Fontanges can merely draw from her own childhood, go back where she had promised herself never again to set foot, and Fantine will appear, tonight and tomorrow, facing the audience who will recognize her as she is, filled with tears and sobs.

  A tiny article in a morning paper makes her cry out with pleasure.

  “Madame Fontanges’s Fantine vibrates so powerfully that she takes up our hearts in both hands.”

  No one will ever know what lost childhood is at stake here or what hidden sorrow has been brought into the light, so carefully and methodically has Flora Fontanges wiped out her traces. Just a portion of unhappiness from the dark night of her memories that is needed to give shape to Fantine and make possible her grim existence. And now the exaltation of acting overwhelms Flora Fontanges with plenitude, as if she were touching the very center of her heart and making it radiate outward upon her face, in her movements, her whole body, like waves unfurling on the sand.

  She should have nine lives. Try out each one in turn. Multiply herself by nine. Nine times nine. Unable to keep her distance, either from her daughter with her beatific smile or from Fantine with her heartrending cough. To dissolve with pleasure as she thinks of the wild and handsome man who sent her a bouquet of huge anemones. To throw herself in his arms the moment he appears in the door of her dressing room.

  It’s an accomplishment to leave Fantine’s life and death behind in the dressing room after the performance, like cast-off clothing she will pick up tomorrow, at the matinée. The strange power of metamorphosis. The finest profession in the world. Flora Fontanges bows to the audience, who applaud her. The wretched poverty, the miserable tours have been over for some time now. In an hour she will be truly in love, still humming with the glamour of the stage, mad about a man as if it were the first time. And the desperate lover will think he is touching, on Flora Fontanges’s soft skin, the whole romantic lineage of theatrical and operatic heroines, miraculously delivered into his arms.

  THE GRANDE-ALLÉE IS LIT UP like a fairground, even though the sun has not completely set over the mountain, behind the parliament buildings. A pink glow trails in the sky and the harsh glare of the street lights cannot drive it away altogether.

  Boys and girls cluster on the terraces, while tired horses endlessly drive American tourists about in their calèches.

  As they do every evening, Flora Fontanges and Raphaël go from terrace to terrace in the hope of seeing the smooth black head, the small pale face of Maud stand out suddenly, like an apparition, among the young people clustered around their tables.

  Someone claims to have seen Maud on Ile aux Coudres, sitting by the road next to the peat marshes. Céleste suggests that Raphaël come to the island with her the next day.

  She must face facts, now that the women are no longer there: if the old city and the Grande-Allée have endured with their grey stones and their green shutters, it has been because of the maids. Chambermaids, cooks, nannies, general help, at arms’ length they have kept whole streets intact and fresh. There’s not an inch of windowpane or mirror, not a single piece of silver or brass they haven’t polished and polished again, not a speck of grime or dust that they haven’t eradicated and beaten from carpets and furniture, no drape or curtain they haven’t washed, blued, starched, and ironed, not a diaper, not a single small flannel blanket they haven’t cleaned and bleached. Their main assignment was to make the houses worthy of the most elegant receptions and to make everyday life as exquisite and agreeable as possible. In uniforms of black dresses, white aprons, and caps, they washed, dried, scrubbed, waxed, plucked, boiled and roasted, fried and browned, wiped and rocked, consoled and cared for children and the sick, climbing up and down, day after day, three or four sets of stairs, from cellar to attic.

  Now that they have gone, having disappeared little by little over the years, the great, inconvenient houses with all their storeys, impossible to maintain without them, have had to be abandoned.

  Some women lost their family names by returning to the city, through the little doorway that led to the Protection of Young Girls. They retained only their Christian names, sometimes changing even these to avoid confusion with the name of Madame or Mademoiselle, in the households which they joined as servants.

  Marie Ange, Alma, Emma, Blanche, Ludivine, Albertine, Prudence, Philomène, Marie-Anne, Clémée, Clophée, Rosana, Alexina, Gemma, Véreine, Simone, Lorina, Julia, Mathilda, Aurore, Pierrette . . .

  Ah! how pleasant was the past and how well the Grande-Allée was maintained!

  Pierrette Paul escapes her destiny. She will never be a maid in someone’s house. Has she not been adopted, according to proper procedures, by M. and Mme Edouard Eventurel?

  Raphaël looks at Flora Fontanges’s impassive face, her expression suddenly obstinate as she sits there, lost in thought. He is faintly surprised, still under the s
pell of a litany of women’s given names, strange and beautiful, and tries to list them as in a nursery rhyme. Alma, Clémée, Ludivine, Albertine, Aurore ... He says Aurore and gropes for the next. Repeats Aurore, as if he were expecting someone to appear before him, summoned there by her name.

  “Pierrette Paul! You’ve left out Pierrette Paul!”

  She calls it out into the middle of Raphaël’s daydream, like someone tossing a pebble into a pond.

  “It’s a pretty name, Pierrette Paul, don’t you think? That was my first role and I’ve never recovered from it.”

  She chuckles and drops her head, then looks up at him with a sly, guilty expression. Her voice changes, becomes nasal and drawling, speaking in the country accent.

  “Don’t give me that look, Raphaël dear. It’s just a little girl from the Hospice Saint-Louis, not yet adopted, who’s putting in a brief appearance. She’s a wretched little creature, quiet as a mouse, an urchin who turns up in my head from time to time and upsets me terribly.”

  Will she ever accept the entire weight of her life in the dark night of her flesh? Why not evoke instead the Grande-Allée in the time of its splendour, and little Aurore who worked in one of these houses on the other side of the avenue?

  They are all clustered there, at the windows and on the steps of the high front stoops. They hold the smallest children in their arms, so they can have a good look. Aurore has barely had time to leave her cardboard suitcase in the room set aside for her in the basement, next to the furnace and the coal chute. She has come to her new situation on the day of a military funeral, and now she is watching and listening, heart pounding and dazed as if she were about to fall. Even at her village church she has never seen or heard the like. As if the sky were about to be torn open. The usual mass of grey or blue is split from top to bottom, as if to make room for the northern lights. The other side of the world shows itself and is heard, with its heartrending music, its solemn procession. Most poignant, unquestionably, are the sword and cap laid across a gun carriage, covered with a white cloth on which are drawn stripes and crosses of red and blue which little Aurore does not yet know to be a foreign flag. Slowly the procession is making its way towards the hereafter, she thinks, and the military music plays on and on, wrenching our hearts.