There’s— we both say at the same time.
He says, You first, so loudly that I can tell he is surprised.
I received a letter yesterday, I say. I can hardly look in its direction. I take in air. It feels like burning. It’s from a museum. I can’t grasp. Skeet. My voice is tart, raspy. The letter says. I clear my throat. The letter says— It arrived, brief and reserved. I have read and reread it, as though some new information might appear. According to this letter—the sounds come out of my mouth, held in the air—I have a granddaughter. Suddenly I have to restrain myself from laughing, just as when you think of a word so long that it begins to sound comical. I start to shake a little. A function of dealing with cognitive anomalies, or so the evolutionary biologists would say. To think somebody had to go around zapping people’s faces to come up with that. Skeet is silent.
But you know how—I search for the right word—absurd this is.
He looks down.
Seeing as I don’t have any children.
The image of the nurses glints through. The stiff gown, the footprints in slush. Leaving alone. Everything half concealed. Skeet’s eyes meet my eyes. I shake it off. It’s not right. Memories are so primitive, they have so few witnesses.
The morning sun streams through the windows and brings warmth, and with it the low buzzing of the cluster flies that favour the windowpanes, drugged and slow. Skeet, I say again, as though he might not have heard. It is a torment of impossibility. A contradiction of things that are. Things that are not. Thud. The bird hits the glass again.
Maybe, he says, motioning toward the window, it’s her.
NAUTILUS
The shell tricks you into thinking that what you hear is the ocean, not the blood beating into your ears.
PARIS, YOU KNOW, is farther north than Newfoundland, Mother remarks coolly in a letter. There is no discussion of my returning home. They have found my behaviour disgraceful. When the nuns wrote to them of my latest expulsion, detailing my fractious behaviour and outlining their concerns for my future, I begged my parents to let me enrol in the art academy in Paris.
Father is exceedingly practical. He went into textiles and then there was a war. They needed uniforms, years of them. He became enormously wealthy. He thinks studying art is idiotic. It is only for the poor or homosexual, he said, believing both to be essentially the same crime. Mother, who knew the new money appeared crass, had an exacting brain. She hot-housed me in the areas she thought refined. She sent me books about Goya, Delacroix, and Turner’s night paintings without referencing them. Ivory. Do not forget the hairbrush I sent. Please use it at least twice a day. Sincerely, Mother. She made it impossible to engage with her. She kept her distance, and seemed oblivious to what was inside me. The books were confusing. It made me think she understood something fundamental in me.
They sent me away but nothing changed. At convent school the longing for my brothers, for the woods, was so pronounced it felt theatrical. When I’d left, my brother Arthur gave me a cigarette tin filled with pencils lined up like soldiers. Drawing, I’d learned, was one thing I was better at than my brothers. Mother had an art tutor come to the house every Wednesday afternoon. He said the reason famous artists have so many self-portraits is that it is a useful exercise to draw something you think you know. It is also the only view you have that is permanent. I look into the mirror. I have no idea how to transcribe this high-boned face full of angles. But he remarks, Very good, when he puts on his overcoat. More hatching here, he says, pointing to my cheekbone, and here at the hollow of the neck. If you use dark shading at the corners, it makes a mouth more alive. Draw, even if it is only for a quarter of an hour each day, and you will find yourself much improved. I began to carry a sketchbook with me, continually drawing my brothers’ knightly faces, half blurred, in constant motion.
When I flip the lid to the tin at convent school it is like a detonator, sending a sharp longing through me, though drawing is the only way I feel better. The page glitters fresh each time. I draw portraits in the margins of my notebooks, which both comforts me and makes me more separate. I am expected to have no emotions. Do as I’m told. And though I understand this would be the easier course, I cannot help but do the opposite. It is a life of indoors full of silence, full of blame. Not unlike the precise attention of my parents, constantly obsessed with correcting my behaviour, my posture, my manners. I love being outside. What I miss is air. Cut off from sounds of my childhood, I feel untethered and dull. When I arrive, the nuns’ first words are, Rule number one.
The girls instantly hate me the way a fox hates a dog. And like most girls, they make a vocation out of exclusion. My grandmother Queenie once read to me that the first rule a geisha is taught, at age nine, is to be charming to other women. This is not my experience. My accent is wrong, my hair is wrong, and girls can be their most wicked when you don’t look right. I am so unused to these mothered girls. Unfamiliar with their habits, their secret customs. They suck on pens, they roll the waistbands of their skirts. There is a moment of horror when I see emptiness in their eyes. Nothing is reflected back at all. Just empty, shining circles. They look like a small squadron in their pleated kilts and starched white blouses. The dorms like barracks, with rows of metal beds and one small side table each. I am unpopular because I am new, and not good at anything. I can’t play field hockey. I am not good at religion. Drawing doesn’t count. Though I am so deeply lonely, I don’t make any effort to befriend them. I would rather be on my own than with people I don’t like. When we file into the dining hall for meals, a group of girls gets up and moves their table far from wherever I sit down. She munches her food like a tomboy, they say. Just before we go to lunch, I see that someone has stolen my sketchbook and torn pages from it and taped them to the walls in the corridor. They’ve drawn over my brothers’ faces. I blink, swallowing back tears. I cannot cry. No one here cries. It would show that they have broken you. Instead, I am shoved into the dining hall where there is silence, as we are not permitted to speak during meals. I sit straight-backed, listening to hundreds of girls chew their meat, swallow their soup. The tink tink tink of metal spoons against the bowls in unison becomes a dependable sound that feels like safety.
I start drawing maps of escape in black ink on small white sheets. The high stone walls surrounding the grounds, the gardens, the dormitories, the alley to the outside world, and a legend with numbers and routes below. The nuns write to my parents. This child does not collaborate with work or play.
Children are conformists. They sense my apartness a mile away. Even when I change schools, each time it is the same. There are almost no letters from home. And I wonder what it would be like, just once, to be met with something other than Mother’s cool detachment when she sees what she regards as my needy, untamed eyes. I once saw a woman swing a small boy in wide arcs in the air to his shrieks of delight, a vast look of love in her eyes. The kind that galvanizes.
At the last school, I’d begun to have a recurring dream. It is always an island. A circular, spiralling shell. It is exotic and familiar. It is only when I land to attend the art academy, walking through the whorl of arrondissements, that I realize what my dreams have been about. They have been about Paris.
I grow my hair until it touches my waist, and wear it braided, pinning it up around my head. I decide to wear only white. My body is nervous, alert to everything. To chimes and clicks. The smell of chicory and Pernod, and the pervasive stale cigarette smoke from tabacs. The streets are unlike the unimaginative geometry I’ve known. There are no straight lines. I walk with purpose on the uneven cobblestones, along Boulevard Saint-Germain, the light spilling onto the stones, twisting away from the fragrant chestnut trees that line the street. I will never forget this light. Against the dove-grey rooftops it is a miracle.
Inside the gold-tipped fence of the Jardin du Luxembourg, gravel chews at my hard shoes. The park is populated with women—a stone angel with large sweeping wings, beautiful and precise, twenty French queens,
the first statue of liberty. People sit in metal chairs and watch the octagon of water turn pink as the sun dips low. Autumn isn’t about everything leaving. Here it is called la rentrée. The return. Through the park, on the other side of the cemetery, is Rue Froidevaux, the wide street with meticulously clipped trees where I have found a flat that will double as a studio. It was once a maid’s room, and now sits above the atelier of Mme. Tissaud, a rélieure who makes, rebinds, and hand-sews books. Through the large front windows I can see a sewing loom, finishing presses, and wood-handled tools. When I walk through her door, Mme. Tissaud exclaims, Ivory!, embracing me so intensely I feel my lower vertebrae crack.
I am sorry, I offer. I am early.
She smiles slyly. Don’t apologize. I don’t like the word sorry. Besides, we count up the faults only of those who keep us waiting. I trust people who are early, she says, speaking in the direction of her bookcase. She marks a book with her eyes then takes a brown leather edition off the shelf. She is calm, deliberate. She wears a rough linen apron and has a face that is kind and wide, sackcloth hair. Kafka, she says, kept his watch an hour and a half fast.
I am thinking about how exactly that would work while I open the book, rich and coded, intrigued by a protagonist who has only a letter for a name. How nice K. looks on a page.
She draws the white thread through the eye of the needle and sits at the window sewing while we talk. She speaks in proverbs. I have five grown children, she says, holding up a hand with veins roped from age. They are my fingers. I cannot live without any one. When she looks at me, I feel naked. She seems sharply aware of how solitary I am. Fierce but unsure. All the things that match nothing in her. I see her tilt her head. As though she remembers something. Later she will look at me and tell me how hard it is to cope with youth, its moods, its intensities, everything we wish we could have access to later in life but never can. The great disparity, how there is so little of youth and so much of the other.
I was looking at a flat in the nineteenth. It was inexpensive, but it felt so far away.
I was born in the nineteenth arrondissement at the foot of Parc des Buttes Chaumont, she says.
Where I will later meet Lev, nocturnal wanderings through gypsum, fences of carved cement branches that I run my hand along to prove I am not in a dream.
—
After two months in Paris, I receive an invitation to dinner from the Hungarian-born architect Istvan Szalasi and his wife, Tacita, a friend I’ve met at school. Ours is a sistership I have never known. Our friendship, predicated on some oddly gratifying chocolate offered to me, our easels touching. Most women have problems with food, they are always trying to disappear, but like me, she thinks hunger is a mistake.
I see her three separate times the first day we meet. In three different arrondissements. In a city of three million people, this feels profound. Something passes between us, like an echo, a vibration. Whichever is deeper, harder to ignore.
When one of the instructors at the academy trips theatrically in mid-lecture in the first week, we both start laughing hysterically. I convulse, tears streaming.
Mademoiselle Frame, if you are unable to control your emotions, kindly leave the room.
Tacita and I are like magnets, the satisfying pull to the click. She notices that I use only one sheet of paper for notes, erasing the same page each time when it gets full. I know that I will like her when she doesn’t ask why. Residue from the silent pacts I would set myself in childhood. If I can jump across the sidewalk without touching the crack, that will do it. If I can bounce the rubber ball one hundred times without dropping it, that will do it. Though I never stopped to ask—Do what?
Before she came to Paris, in Hungary, she spoke French for a living. She has a fine-tuned ability to interpret facial expressions of people whose languages she speaks, as though she has been born into their languages. She tells me that, like most things, it is a practice that relies on strategies. It is all in the tongue. You must be conscious of how the tongue moves in the mouths of the people whose language you wish to speak. She leans back and takes a sip of coffee. There is a lyric poet, she says, who calls translation a salutary gymnastics of the mind. When I look at her across the table, I realize that it has been years since I have actually spoken to someone I loved.
Where did your French come from? she asks.
Mother spoke it. She had a difficult time trying to find a French tutor for us. We had the same stern man teach us Latin, science, and mathematics. She eventually dredged up a plump ginger-haired teacher, named Mme. Plouffe, whose conjugation of irregular verbs sounded more like tragicomedy coming from her small pursed lips. Bouche en cul-de-poule. I had to will myself to attend to her shrill but oddly droning voice. Asseoir. Courir. Devoir. Falloir. Mourir. One of the first things she did was teach us Alouette, the children’s song. Alouette, gentille alouette. / Alouette, je te plumerai. It sounded so jaunty until I realized that not only are they admiring the lovely skylark, but plucking its dead body of feathers systematically from its head to its feet. Whenever I hear that song I think of murder and Mme. Plouffe’s puckered little mouth.
Tacita is ethereal and intense. Elfin. Someone who never spends money on haircuts. She cuts it herself, close to her scalp where it forms in thick dark waves. She tells me she first cut off all her hair as an experiment. It was coal-black, long enough to sit on.
I’ve always thought it an odd signifier of women’s sexual powers, she says, given that it is actually dead. It is simply armour women wrap themselves in.
She is a bricoleur. She roams the junk shops looking for what most would consider rubbish. Her finds she then categorizes in her studio drawers. She collects everything. Flight maps, a doll’s forearm, tiny glass jars, old photographs, watch springs, glass transparencies of the phases of the moon, stones the colour of midnight, loose red sand, children’s blocks, plastic rose petals, butterfly wings sewn from linen, blue filaments, cutouts of birds and other creatures, satin stars stuffed thick with cotton, fragments of mirrors.
We drink café crème in one of the dim wood-and-mirror cafés beside the art academy. From childhood, she says, all I wanted was to be able to keep every object lined up on my shelves. I cannot collect fast enough to save them from ending up bloated on the river floor, decaying in back alleys, or buried deep below the ground. I love history that lives in the dirt and cracks and stains of things. With objects, perfection does not interest me, she says.
You explore by remaining open to everything.
And—she smiles into her thick white mug, she seems more here than anyone I’ve known—what about you? she presses. Where did the name come from?
Mother silently laboured for an hour and three-quarters, to the tick of a roman-numeralled grandfather clock outside the door, I tell her. She endured the delivery without a cry, her teeth clenched. I was almost blue, head jammed against pelvis so that there was a red mark on my forehead when I came out. My four older brothers filed in, their green eyes glinting, glancing at the baby wrapped in soft blankets. Albert, the oldest, three-quarters legs, said, She’s as white as cigarette paper. Ivory suits her.
Mother shot him a silencing look.
Of course, once humans got involved, I say to Tacita, mythic qualities took a decidedly unbecoming turn. I think of the tragedy, harvested from elephants—assassinated and left to rot in the savannah, swarmed by flies—to make piano keys and billiard balls. I don’t tell her that I was tormented because of it.
Where were you before you came here?
England. Convent school. I was expelled, I say, exhaling smoke. More than once.
Well done, she says, placing the cigarette back into the notch of the ashtray and resting her chin in her hand.
Well, I am not a blueblood like you, Tacita says teasingly. I am from a long line of black-haired women who come from drowsy farms. They lugged buckets of water through muddy villages. I didn’t get to know my mother long enough. She was a diviner. She had the ability to find four-leaf clover
s from anywhere. She once told me that to see them was like a bride looking through a veil. You don’t look for them, you just soften your eyes to the shape. I turned to look at my mother, stunned, and said, I know about the veil. That was our closest moment. She died in childbirth. I was the oldest, so when I was twelve, I became the mother. And when I left to work in Paris, the next sister in line became the mother. We are like matryoshka, she says, Russian dolls. She drops her pack of cigarettes in her bag and says, We all have the same face. It is too expressive ever to be considered beautiful.
No, I counter. Like all charismatic women, you are beautiful. By conviction.
I look at Tacita, looking at me, emitting a certain steady warm intensity.
Paris is filled with fascinating objects in an infinite number of unlikely places, she explains to me. You’d be amazed at what I find in the trash, Ivory, her black eyes gleaming. She spends most of her time collecting. The ideas of art come later.
You know, I say carefully, the sadness is good. For your work.
She squints her eyes.
Happy people don’t look down.
She takes me to some of her discoveries. A shop she’s found by Canal Saint-Martin that sells doll eyeballs—rows of glass eyes in constant wobble, laid out on a wooden track, clicking as they touch like the silver boules tossed on the sand by grown men all over France. Tiny refracted Tacitas stare back at me.
We end up at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, where we sit for hours drawing the bones of animals assembled into perfect skeletons, and then smoke cigarettes in the adjacent garden that is also the Paris zoo. After being cut off from animals for so long, the sounds beat blood back into my ears. Velvet ruffling feathers and silences punctuated by thwacks, metallic chirps, grunts, and screeches, crisply defined against a faint wind—the incantatory rhythms of a live, twitching fugue. We discuss the effect of the Muséum and its contents, with its art nouveau metal flower railings, the dark winding staircases, the abandonment of bones. We discover, tucked in a dusty corner, a tiny skeleton of a two-month-old human fetus that has been propped up. A fetus is always seen half-curved and floating, a sickle moon. Upright it becomes utterly grotesque with its large skull, giant round eye sockets, stunted bird legs, and miniature ribs. It is displayed alongside the monkey ear in a jar of formaldehyde and the monstre double, the malformed twinned bat fetuses, in an odd democracy. We stare at it apprehensively, as though somehow we understand at the same moment that a baby will, for both of us, remain simply a collection of bones inappropriately assembled. I see my own reflection stare back.
The Dictionary of Animal Languages Page 2
