At seven thirty-six that morning, seismographs recorded a slight earth tremor on Guadeloupe; the epicentre was the neighbourhood around the port in Pointe-à-Pitre. Hundreds of dogs barked in chorus, and thousands of pigeons took flight simultaneously, while clouds of panic-stricken bats streamed out of belfries and attics, briefly darkening the sky. Some citizens became alarmed, imagining they were reading the signs of an imminent eruption of La Soufrière – a catastrophe which, however, did not take place. Few people would make the connection between those various incidents and another, equally unusual phenomenon; dozens of dolphins and three little whales ventured into the waters of the port, swam around in the harbour basin and frolicked right below the quays, drawn in from the open sea by nobody knew what. Fourteen metres away, in room 306 in the terrific Hôtel Midas, Tania was sobbing for joy in the arms of Bilodo, who was crying too.
21
As soon as they returned from Guadeloupe, Tania and Bilodo made haste to inaugurate the bed they had never yet shared. And they made love, insatiably, pausing only to talk of what was happening to them, of all the happiness raining down upon them, of what they knew and didn’t know about each other. To satisfy Tania’s curiosity, Bilodo described the bizarre psychological process by which he had transformed himself into Gaston Grandpré’s double, the one she’d met on the balcony at the end of August: ‘You saved my life twice that day. The first time was when your visit stopped me from hanging myself, and the second was after the accident, when you revived me,’ he concluded, enriching his testimony with all the proofs of gratitude that Tania could desire.
The next day, they went to Noémie’s to fetch Bill and found him in the company of a charming female congener with prominent eyes. By way of helping Bill stave off boredom, Noémie had procured him a girlfriend, a situation about which he seemed as happy as a fish in water. Noémie invited the two lovers to take advantage of her chalet in the Laurentides and even offered to lend them her car. Tania and Bilodo accepted, unable to conceive a better way to end the winter, and the following day they drove north to that log cabin in the midst of the untamed wilderness.
The chalet was, in the words of an old song, the perfect ‘cabane au Canada’, buried in snow. They intended to make the most of the great outdoors and go skiing and take long walks on snowshoes under the trees, but actually they dedicated most of their time to indoor sports. Tania could think of nothing that would increase her happiness, and had nothing more to wish for, other than that nobody would come and disturb their tranquillity: she just wanted the sweet moments of the existence they were spending together in that fairytale realm of snow to go on and on and never change. And so, until the end of February, they made love without restraint, and with so much passion that the chalet became the epicentre of a localized climate change, in the form of a precocious little early spring that made the snow melt and the flowers sprout within a radius of fifteen metres.
March arrived on the sly. For Bilodo, the time had come to go back to being the postman he had never stopped being deep down inside. Tania bowed to necessity, regretful at leaving the snug nest they’d made for themselves in the heart of the Laurentides, but at the same time seeing no reason to fear their return to Montreal, because she no longer had anything to hide.
It was a joy for Bilodo to put on his uniform again. He had been assigned his old route in Saint-Janvier, and when he stepped into the Madelinot at noon on his first day back, he was surprised to see behind the counter none other than Tania, whom Mr Martinez had rehired without hesitation. The amused couple pretended to be as shy as in former days and much enjoyed this little historical reconstruction, even though it was incomplete; after all, certain principal actors were missing, such as Grandpré, the man with the red carnation, and Robert, who had been transferred to another district.
Bilodo was glad to be working again, and Tania was in a position to ascertain that he committed no postal indiscretions; undoubtedly, he no longer felt the need to live by appropriating another’s existence. The happiness of their great romance seemed so perfect that it made Tania uneasy; she didn’t dare surrender herself to the whims of a destiny that had so often knocked her about. Was Bilodo really over Ségolène? He declared that she no longer counted in his eyes, but her feeling of uneasiness was stronger than herself; she couldn’t help obscurely dreading the eventual arrival of a citrus-scented letter. Bilodo swore there was no room in his heart for anyone but Tania, and to prove he meant what he said, he resolved to destroy the haiku: that would convince her beyond a shadow of a doubt that Ségolène belonged to the past.
They picked up the box containing the haiku from Noémie’s apartment, and when they got home, Bilodo made a fire in the hearth. The first documents he took out of the box were the book contract Tania had neglected to sign and the manuscript of Grandpré’s volume of haiku, Enso. Examining the collection, Bilodo appeared mesmerized by the black circle that illustrated its first page.
‘Is something wrong?’ Tania asked.
‘This word, Enso...’
‘The title of the collection?’
‘It was the last word I spoke before I died,’ Bilodo revealed.
‘Enso? What does it mean?’
‘I’ve been intrigued by this word ever since the first time I saw it. I did some research. It’s a Japanese word, and it refers to this circle here on the cover of the manuscript,’ he explained.
Bilodo went on to say that the Enso circle was a traditional symbol in Zen Buddhism, representing the emptiness of mind which alone allows one to attain enlightenment. Having been painted by Zen masters for centuries, that circle, drawn with a single, continuous brushstroke, prompted a spiritual exercise in meditation on nothingness and revealed the artist’s state of mind: one could produce a powerful, well-balanced Enso only when one’s mind was clear, liberated from all thought or intention. Bilodo added that the Zen circle could also represent perfection, truth, infinity, the cycle of the seasons, or the turning wheel. Overall, Enso symbolized the loop, the cyclical nature of the universe, history always repeating itself, the perpetual return to the starting point. It was similar in that sense to the Greek ouroboros symbol, depicting a serpent biting its own tail. Bilodo flipped through the pages of Grandpré’s manuscript and showed Tania how it ended with the same haiku that had begun it:
Swirling like water
against rugged rocks,
time goes around and around
Tania recognized that such a duplication couldn’t be accidental. That final echo of the first poem, which moreover evoked a circular image, and that title, Enso, unquestionably invited the reader to a perpetual rereading of the work. But what did any of that have to do with Bilodo’s accident?
‘Why did you say that word before you...lost consciousness?’
Bilodo’s pupils reflected the fire in the hearth as he related how he had died that day. How, in his haste to post the haiku in which he invited Ségolène to come to Montreal, he had run out into the storm and dashed across the street towards the postbox, which Robert was hurriedly emptying of its contents, and...Bilodo hadn’t seen the truck coming. He remembered only the sound of a horn, followed by a terrible shock and unbearable pain. At the end of a blurry moment, he’d seen Robert bending over him. Then a second face appeared – another postman, accompanying Robert – equally familiar, but for a completely different reason; he had Bilodo’s own face. The face of the Bilodo that he had been: a perfect double of himself...What witchcraft had left him stretched out on the asphalt and at the same time hovering aloft, observing himself? The answer had come to him like an interior voice, whispering the haiku that began and concluded Grandpré’s collection:
Swirling like water
against rugged rocks,
time goes around and around
And then Bilodo had understood. That was exactly what was going on. He had become Grandpré – a second Grandpré, caught in a metaphysical trap that made time whirl around and the past do loops. How could the simil
arities to Grandpré’s fatal accident of the previous year be ignored? Hadn’t he, Bilodo, even been holding a letter addressed to Ségolène that had slipped from his fingers and been swallowed by the storm drain, just like the one that got away from Grandpré?
Obviously, that was all absurd. In retrospect, Bilodo realized that it could only have been a hallucination – that his double had been nothing more than an illusion, a consequence of the trauma he’d just suffered. Quite obviously, there had never been any temporal loop or metaphysical trap or other evil spell. And yet, he remembered, at the moment of his dying he had found the whole thing perfectly logical, he had truly believed that he’d turned into Grandpré, the man with whom he had so strongly wished to identify. And so it was with the conviction of being condemned to perpetuate the hellish destiny of an eternally repeated death that he had breathed his last, uttering that fateful word: Enso...
Bilodo fell silent. Entranced by his story, Tania jumped when he suddenly burst into unexpected laughter: ‘It’s incredible to think a person could imagine such foolishness,’ he said, laughing hard.
Bilodo took up the contract for the publication of the poetry collection Enso, produced a pen, and signed the document, imitating Grandpré’s signature. As for the rest, the papers and all the poems, he burned them in the fireplace.
Tania married Bilodo early in July, at City Hall in Montreal. Present were Noémie and Mr Martinez, who acted as witnesses, as well as the itinerant Ulysse, who wished them the endless posterity of Olympian demigods.
That very evening, the young newlyweds boarded a flight to Munich, setting off on a three-week honeymoon in Bavaria. For Bilodo it was the opportunity to meet his parents-in-law, Bernhard and Hildegard Schumpf, as well as the other members of his new German family-by-marriage. Proud to serve as his guide, Tania introduced Bilodo to her corner of her native country, revealing to him its unsuspected charms in the process and providing him with many occasions to go into raptures. As anticipated, Uncle Reinhardt placed his country house at the couple’s disposal; this dwelling, which seemed to have sprung straight out of one of the Grimm brothers’ fairytales, hoisted its eccentric gables under the vigilant guard of centuries-old pine trees. It was there that they spent the most unforgettable moments of their journey, on the shores of Lake Starnberg, that twinkling sapphire set in the Alps, where the young Sisi, the future Empress of Austria, had canoed and fished in former days, and on whose margins, long afterwards, little Tania had so often dreamt that she was Romy Schneider.
22
The young couple had been back in Montreal for several weeks when Tania, doing some errands on a fine morning in late August, received an unexpected telephone call from Madame Brochu. The lady had just found on her doorstep a package, delivered in her absence and addressed to Gaston Grandpré. Not knowing what to do with it, she was seeking advice from Tania, who had so conscientiously disposed of the deceased’s other effects. Rue des Hêtres was nearby; half an hour later, with Madame Brochu looking on, Tania opened the package, which contained twenty freshly printed copies of the haiku collection Enso, presented with the publisher’s compliments. On the cover of this little volume there was a depiction of the ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail, an illustration that Tania deemed germane to the poet’s enterprise – Grandpré would have been pleased.
Madame Brochu was delighted to get rid of those strange books, and Tania found herself on the pavement with twenty copies of Enso. Knowing that Bilodo’s postal route would bring him to rue des Hêtres shortly before noon, she felt an urge to give him a surprise. She called him up and invited him to have lunch with her in the café across the street – the one where she had kept watch, in vain, for the arrival of Ségolène the previous September. Tania took a seat on the terrace near the street, ordered a cup of tea, and waited for Bilodo while perusing Grandpré’s haiku.
At the young waiters’
big annual race:
a speaker and a streaker
Fun in the city
and sagacity –
between them a saga lies
Lost in the miles of
supermarket aisles
a weeping, terrorized child
Magnificent sweep
Oh! The utter perfection
of that golfer’s swing!
The preceding autumn, Tania had leafed through the manuscript of Grandpré’s collection only superficially, stopping now and then to look more closely; but it was a totally different experience to read the poems slowly and in the particular order the author had desired, an arrangement that bestowed on them a sort of incantatory power:
Sitting on the edge
of a new-dug grave
the old man is playing chess
Congested subway
platforms hot jam-packed
with upright, bipedal crabs
The night gets thicker
throttling the moon and
assassinating the stars
The darkness is where
adversaries fight
the most ferocious battles
To break through the horizon
look behind the set
meet and embrace Death
Sombre and yet luminous, the haiku succeeded one another, a procession of ocean fish exuding their own phosphorescence. As she turned the pages, Tania had the impression that she was moving towards an invisible goal, an ineluctable finality. The haiku resounded, one against the other, producing a mental music with a haunting rhythm; they elicited an archetypal sensation of déjà vu, or rather of ‘déjàrêvé’ – already dreamt. All of a sudden, Tania came upon this surprising poem:
Lying in the thunderstorm
after the great shock
I breathe my last breath
It was as if Grandpré had foreknown the manner of his death. Tania wanted to believe that it was just a coincidence, but believing became difficult when she read, on the following page,
This thief who steals words
will steal my life too
furtive filcher walking man
That ‘walking man’, that ‘thief who steals words’ – didn’t they call to mind a certain inquisitive postman? Could Grandpré have had a premonition that Bilodo would take his place and assume his identity, thus ‘stealing’ his life? But Tania had seen nothing yet, and her mystification changed to astonishment when she read the following poems:
The grieving woman
will stick a red carnation
in the sugar bowl
She loves in secret
He doesn’t see her
but adores a distant smile
He shall not perish
from Isis’s kiss
it will bring him back to life
How could she see in such verses only a series of coincidences? Tania was compelled to admit that the terribly familiar story recounted in those haiku was her own. Having no wish even to try to understand how these things could be, she kept on reading, recognizing herself, word for word, in the woman Grandpré portrayed:
She’ll create for him
a life made of dreams
and obliterate his past
She will dare to confront both
antique demons and
ghosts of the future
She’ll cross the waters
carried on the wind
right to the ends of the earth
Far away, where day
and night are mingled
upon a butterfly’s back
Her love will prevail
for the length of a wing-flap
just before the storm
And then she will know
the future already was
and will be again
Nothing is born nothing dies
nothing’s unchanging
but movement itself
There’s no avoiding
the wheel of fortune
and its eternal turning
Swirling like water
against rugged rocks,
time goes around and around
Tania closed the book, silencing its prophecies from beyond the grave. She noticed that she was shaking. In the street before her, the wind bit its own tail, making whirlwinds of newspaper scraps and dead leaves. Tania saw that the sky was black and heavy with clouds. A storm was threatening. Again troubled by a feeling of déjà vu, she suddenly realized...She realized that today was ‘the day’. That it was exactly two years ago, two years to the day, that Grandpré had perished – and one year ago, to the day, when an identical death had very nearly carried off Bilodo, on that very street, in the very place where she’d just arranged to meet him.
A thunderclap crashed over Tania’s head. The heavens opened and torrential rain began to pour down, and she realized that the past was going to repeat itself and that time, swirling like water against rocks, was preparing to make a new loop. She grabbed her telephone and called Bilodo to warn him, to entreat him to stay far away from rue des Hêtres. But he didn’t answer.
The downpour became diluvial. Leaving the protection of the terrace awning, Tania ran down the flooded pavement. She was making a dash for the end of the street, the direction from which Bilodo would probably come. When she didn’t see him, she stopped, drenched to the bone, and turned back. Suddenly she saw Bilodo, against all expectation, coming out of the narrow street that ran along the side of Madame Brochu’s house. Tania tried to attract his attention by making big gestures and yelling at the top of her voice, but the thunder drowned her out. Bilodo stepped off the pavement and started to cross the street, heading for the café. That was when the truck appeared.
That truck, arriving out of nowhere, going too fast, blasting through the storm. It was going to pass right in front of Tania, and then it would smash into Bilodo in the middle of the street...
Tania took off.
The Postman's Fiancée Page 12
