The First Garden

by Anne Hébert

  Aurore blows her nose and wipes her eyes, her bosom rises and falls inside her black sateen bodice. The son of the household looks at her, half smiling under his blonde mustache.

  This girl is doing it deliberately too. How is it possible to be at once so slender and so round? Each of her movements traces marvels in the air with just enough energy and softness to bewitch us. The son of the household, a law student, follows her from room to room the minute he has the chance! How is it possible, in his father’s house, to allow an unknown creature of seventeen to move about so freely before us? She stretches her arm to draw the curtain in the sitting room and you can see the outline of her breast as it moves under the bib of her embroidered apron; she kneels to dust the coffee table and the line of her back describes a perfect arc. But when she hunkers down to wash the kitchen linoleum and her little behind is higher than her head, he thinks such ease of movement should only be possible during a night of love, and then not in a respectable bed, while the smell of sweat that accompanies even the slightest movement of a lusty partner transports us out of this world.

  But the moment when it becomes utterly unbearable is one Saturday morning, on the main staircase that goes from the ground floor. The highly polished banister gleams dully, the green carpet, freshly swept with tea leaves, stretches tightly from step to step, held in place by strips of shiny brass. She is there, halfway up the staircase, holding a rag and the brass polish. She is rubbing and humming, her lips closed. She does not hear him. He was just passing by as he went to fetch a book, and here she is barring his way. A warmth behind her draws nearer, a warm breathless mass is draped over her shoulders, her back, her loins. She stifles a cry. Straightens. Turns. Flattens her back against the dark panelling of the staircase. The boy’s pale face is there, very close, scalded looking, as if he has just shaved. He seizes her wrists. He breathes in her odour and it is everything he loves. He murmurs Aurore, as if he has lost his voice. It is at this moment that Madame comes down, rustling her skirts. Aurore disappeared at once with her rag and her flask. He has only enough time to spy in passing a restless little sunbeam that darts here and there over the staircase, dancing from the brass strips to the reflected shimmer and the copper glow of Aurore’s chestnut hair.

  And I rub you and I polish you and finally I touch you, not with a rag now but with my two bare hands, and all your skin from top to toe, gleams like brass, like gold, like the sun and the moon, it shivers with russet light and it is so good we could die of pleasure. He can still dream. He’s a young man of good standing who studies the law in his closed room. He is blind before his open book, so obsessed, so haunted is he by Aurore. The Civil Code prevents nothing. It is useless to study the law when one already lives outside the law, in the violent regions of the self where desire is the only master.

  He will fail his year-end examination.

  All that Flora Fontanges says and does since she first met Raphaël is an attempt to appropriate the city along with him. They have summoned creatures now disappeared, drawing them out by their names, as with a rope from the bottom of a well, to bring them on stage, bowing and speaking their names aloud so they may be recognized and acknowledged before disappearing again. In this way do obscure heroines of history come to life and then die, one by one. Now it is the turn of little Aurore to gesture to us from the depths of her violent death.

  This time it is not the history student who evokes the past, but Flora Fontanges, whose memory is unreliable and concerns her selectively, depending on whether or not the fear of compromising herself forces her to ransack the memories of others, helter skelter, along with her own, until all memories grow unrecognizable.

  “My false grandmother used to tell stories in my presence as if she were talking to the wall through me, as if I were transparent, but she told them so well, with so much pent-up passion.”

  “And little Aurore?”

  Little Aurore suddenly shifts to the middle ground in the heart of Flora Fontanges, as a tall old woman, very erect, bony and white, rises and begins to speak. Little Aurore’s tragic end seems to have been evoked by a strange voice as Flora Fontanges drones on, word after word, as if she were listening to each one being dictated in turn from the shadows of her memory.

  “On the day she turned eighteen little Aurore’s body was found, raped and murdered, in Victoria Park, near the St. Charles River. Police investigations were fruitless. The murderer was never apprehended. The case of Aurore Michaud, daughter of Xavier and Maria Michaud, who was born at Sainte-Croix-de-Lotbinière on August seventh, 1897, and died on September seventh, 1915, was quickly closed.”

  The news caused horrified shudders, from the upper town to the lower town, providing fuel for conversation for days and days. But ordinary life, after being briefly withdrawn, reclaimed its rights, like water after a pebble falls.

  People are cared for with mustard plasters, with leeches, with flax seeds, syrup of creosote, and balsam of tolu, women give birth at home and remain two weeks in bed after the confinement, girls study the piano (for boys, it’s not worth the trouble, it makes them effeminate), funerals, weddings, and christenings are numerous, life and death jostle one another in the porticoes along the Grande-Allée and in the old city, the most stable fortunes are bound up with income from the land, down below, in the seigneuries. The elder Madame Eventurel promised her only daughter, Elodie, that she could have a blue silk gown as soon as the notary had given her the year’s rent from the farmers.

  WHAT SORT OF DREAM IS it, to act as if one had never been alive in the city, to create a vacuum? thinks Flora Fontanges, who has just brought to life a clear, sharp image of the elder Madame Eventurel. Perhaps she need only concentrate on the Grande-Allée as it is today, in the company of Raphaël and Céleste, and she will escape from the house on the Esplanade. Will no angel ever utter in her ear the remark, blessed above all others: “The past no longer exists”? How can she not imagine, occasionally, the leap of joy of the prisoner who breaks her chains, becomes free and light, without memory, aware only of the night falling over the city?

  Raphaël has walked away with Céleste. They are making plans to go together to Ile aux Coudres. She sits by herself, at a table on the café terrace. She feels intensely alone. The moment no longer supports her. From here she has no choice but to return in spirit to the house on the Esplanade, as if it were no longer in her power not to go there, summoned by her indestructible, stubborn childhood.

  A little girl sits on a stool at the feet of an old woman, in the chalky silence of the house on the Esplanade. The steady rhythm of a great ebony clock. The vacant air of Sunday enters everywhere, slips under doors, through the cracks of windows, it throbs, massive and hollow in chimneys.

  She is a little girl who escaped from the fire at the Hospice Saint-Louis in 1927.

  She has been without roots forever and she dreams of a great tree anchored in the night of the earth, beneath the city, lifting the asphalt from sidewalks and streets with only the dark wisp of its subterranean breath. This tree with its gnarled trunk would stand higher than the towers of the parliament buildings, dense with branches, boughs and twigs, with leaves and wind. Perhaps the little girl might even be the single bird at the top of this tree, rustling with breezes, for already she desires more than anything to sing and tell the story of the life that is in the tree, making it her very own, her family tree and personal history.

  This sometimes happens on Sunday afternoon, in the house on the Esplanade. The adoptive parents are at vespers or visiting, depending on the day, and the false grandmother is tending the little girl. The false grandmother describes so well the bright and shady sides of the Eventurel family, evoking her own childhood and youth and those of her father and mother, as far back as the first days of the colony, declaring that in the seventeenth century the seigneury at Beauport already belonged to her own blood, planted in the earth like a tree in May. The little girl, without father or mother, wh
o sits at the old lady’s feet, longs to appropriate the Eventurels’ tree for herself, the way one takes possession of one’s own property when it has been seized by thieves, in dark times of severe injustice.

  Soon, from Sunday to Sunday, the old lady’s stories extended to the whole city, as she took pleasure in recalling habitant life in all its ramifications. The little girl’s ambition grew with the growing fullness of the stories. Soon she dreamed the extravagant dream of having her imaginary possessions extend to an entire society, the way one turns over family matters, births, marriages, and deaths, she herself concerned from generation to generation, building a past for herself that consists of several generations and of solid alliances with the whole city.

  But the little girl fell from her perch when the lady from the Esplanade dropped her impassioned and engaging storyteller’s voice in favour of her everyday metallic tone to tell M. and Mme Eventurel, home from their Sunday calls:

  “The child never opens her mouth; it’s a waste to give her lessons in diction and music, she’ll never learn how to speak and sing as you’d like, nor even to listen politely. Whenever I say a word she seems to throw herself at it, as if it were a bone to be gnawed. Oh yes, that hunger of hers is very shocking, like a stray dog’s. And as I’ve told you before, you’ll never make a lady of her.”

  One day the little girl was witness to the old lady’s solitude. The door that opened onto the upstairs hallway was ajar, revealing part of the mysterious place to which Madame Eventurel liked to retire. From the door one could see very clearly the old rose boudoir, barely lit. Muted glimmers seeped onto the flowered carpet. A great black clock with hands, numbers, and pendulum of gleaming brass stood against a bare wall. Madame Eventurel was sitting there, facing the clock, very straight in an old rose-velvet wing chair. She was listening to the time that passes and never returns. Madame Eventurel’s attention to the tick-tock of the clock was total and obsessive, as if she were following the beating of her own endangered heart in her old woman’s breast. A sort of solemn ceremony between Madame Eventurel and her ebony clock. The fear of being hurled into death from one moment to the next if a single tick-tock of the great clock were skipped. She was watching her death approach her as in a mirror, she was listening to her pulse outside of her, as if it appeared on a screen. It was her wish to look her death in the eye, and she dreaded the shock of its coming.

  The little girl was convinced she had just unearthed a dreadful secret. When on Sunday she found herself alone with her false grandmother, she feared the revelation of that secret, concealed perhaps in one of the old lady’s stories.

  Sometimes the old lady would interrupt herself abruptly, marking a long peevish silence before she picked up the thread of her story. As the silence persisted, the little girl thought she could hear Madame Eventurel concentrating hard on spiteful remarks about her.

  In reality Madame Eventurel was musing that the little girl sitting on a stool at her feet should never have been born, that it was inconceivable for her to try to ingrain herself into one of the oldest families in the city.

  Although Madame Eventurel never addressed the little girl, she would sometimes talk about her in her presence, calling her “the little schemer.”

  IT’S NOT THAT SHE IS ill, but since Raphaël and Céleste left for Ile aux Coudres, she has shut herself away in her hotel room and refused to emerge.

  In the solitude and the night of rue Sainte-Anne broad sweeps of memory give way as she lies in the dark, surrendered, bound hand and foot to old images that assail her.

  The dead women make a noise in her throat. She names them one by one, and the companions of her childhood come as their names are called, from tall to short, intact and untouched by fire, wearing the same black serge uniform, white collars and cuffs, black ribbed stockings and laced boots, their short hair carefully bobbed every month.

  Alfreda Thibault

  Laurette Levasseur

  Jacqueline Racine

  Marie-Marthe Morency

  Théodora Albert

  Jeanne-d’Arc Racine

  Estelle Roy

  Corinne Picard

  Georgette Auclair

  Germaine Létourneau

  Marie-Jeanne Binet . . .

  All must be named aloud, and a witness must be present to hear them, the names of these children who were burned alive, and we must gather them to our hearts.

  Raphaël is no longer there to share her evocation of the little girls from the Hospice Saint-Louis. Now that it’s a question of her own life, she is alone, with neither pity nor compassion.

  A long string of little girls dressed in mourning surround Flora Fontanges’s bed on rue Sainte-Anne. The tallest, though, wears a blue smock cinched at the waist by a belt and she has curly hair. Her name is Rosa Gaudrault and she will be burned along with the children from the lower forms. She says “kitten, sweetheart, pet, my treasure, my lovely, my angel,” she laughs and talks very softly because the orphanage rules forbid giving the children any names but the ones inscribed in the register. At times she sings “the Blessed Virgin soon will come, with her long hair hanging down” and she is radiant as a bluebird in a black flock of starlings.

  “Rosa,” says Flora Fontanges, holding out her arms in the night, and she weeps.

  Who would venture across the live coals except Rosa Gaudrault, who has already made the gift of her life and renews it continually?

  She is sixteen years old. She goes in and out, bringing children every time, passes through the flames and smoke, a wet cloth over her face. She calls them by name, begs them to come with her, she who is kind and good and has always thought of them as normal children with father and mother at their side and a normal house filled with laughter and warmth. She calls to them. Takes them in her arms. Pulls them outside. Goes back inside with a wet cloth that freezes along the way. She is calling still. Begging them to come outside with her. Even the firemen with their masks and long ladders do not have her courage and her daring.

  When they found Rosa Gaudrault the next day in the rubble, there were two little girls in her arms who had burned to death with her, covered with ice, a single branch, gnarled and black.

  “Dead wood! There, there!”

  Fever overcomes her and makes her rave. She is writhing in the brand-new white bed with brass knobs at its corners. She is eleven years old. M. and Mme Edouard Eventurel have just adopted her and bought her a bed. She is a little girl who was rescued from the fire in the Hospice Saint-Louis.

  “If the fever doesn’t drop I guarantee nothing,” says the doctor.

  There remains just a slim margin of life wherein she struggles, tormented by invisible flames that burn her and consume her. She begins to cry out again in a voice that is harrowing, insistent, that is not of this world. She begs them to take away the unbearable thing from the foot of her bed. She holds out her arm towards the chair on which her new clothes lie folded, cries out in a voice from beyond the grave:

  “There, there! Dead wood!”

  “If death should occur, wrap the body in a sheet soaked in carbolic acid.”

  They will do what must be done. In the event of life or death. Have they not adopted her according to proper procedure, so that she will bear their name and become their daughter, with full rights? A nurse watches over her, day and night. In the next room M. and Mme Eventurel wait for word, hour by hour. Now and then they lift a corner of the sheet, soaked in disinfectant, that hangs in the doorway and isolates the sick child’s room from the rest of the apartment. They look at her for a moment, sitting up in bed, her arm stretched out towards the chair on which her clothes are laid.

  “Dead wood, there!”

  “Rosa,” the little girl will say again, over and over, in the bedroom with flowered wallpaper made ready for her by M. and Mme Eventurel.

  Then, nothing.

  Nothing more at all. As the fe
ver drops and her skin peels away in strips. Not another word. As if she had become mute following the scarlet fever. As if she had forgotten everything of her past. As if the present were a glaring and empty place wherein one need only be silent.

  No sounds seem able now to escape from her throat, as she tears long strands of dead skin from her hands and feet. Must she not slough the skin of her whole body and even renew the inside of her body where her small past life lies hidden? When she has been turned inside out and made new, perhaps she will be able to exist a second time and say: “Here, here I am, this is me. I am alive again, pulled from the dead, snatched from the flames.” Is this the way M. and Mme Eventurel want her to be, subject to no ancient law, fresh as a newborn, without past or memory, as easy to read as an open book, reborn through their good will, planted firmly upon a known road that was chosen in advance and marked out by them?

  They have taken every precaution that she will never be the same. A full quarantine, eight days longer than the doctor’s prescription. Forty-eight days exactly, shut away in a bedroom, with a new doll and a magazine to read. Delirium and fever have erased all the horror and fear. This child needs only them to begin life anew. They have only to bring her naked from her bedroom, after they have shaved her hair.