Wonder

by Dominique Fortier

  In a flash, while he was crossing the street, brushing his teeth, or lacing his shoes, everything would fit together. The thorniest problems would be solved as if by magic, with a symmetry and harmony that seemed themselves to be proof of the validity of a theory in which all the elements came together. Those elements formed an infinitely complex whole with thousands of facets – but then the whole would break up like the image in a kaleidoscope, as if he had rotated the ring and scattered the spangles just as he thought he could finally grasp them. The impression disappeared; he tried in vain to recapture some traces scattered just outside his consciousness; but at least he knew that the Solution was within reach.

  Garance, walking pigeon-toed now, taking tiny measured steps, was every day becoming fleshier and enjoying it. One evening, standing in profile next to the globe, her belly matching its curve nearly perfectly, she exclaimed in a voice half-jocular, half-horrified: “I look like a boa that’s swallowed a balloon!”

  Soon after that she became a watermelon, then a hot-air balloon, and in the end she no longer said anything, herself astonished to feel the foreign life swelling inside her.

  She felt the first pains late one afternoon, but she waited an hour after night had fallen before finally allowing Edward to fetch the midwife who had gone that morning to deliver her own sister-in-law at the other end of town, which was why no one answered his repeated thumps on her door.

  He had left Garance in the charge of a neighbour more nervous than she was, who kept repeating as Edward explained the situation: “Ah, my God! We need boiling water,” wringing her hands and contorting her face.

  From the midwife’s house he raced out in search of Doctor Whitfield, a prominent physician who lived not far away in a charming townhouse of golden stones. A butler opened the door to a breathless Edward, who could only say: “My wife …” The servant came back shortly, accompanied by the doctor still holding his table napkin. He looked the sweating, gasping Edward up and down, his gaze combining suspicion and boredom, as if the visitor were a travelling salesman. In the background could be heard laughter and the clink of cutlery.

  “My wife,” repeated Edward, unable to go on.

  “Yes, young man, your wife …,” encouraged Doctor Whitfield, his expression now reassuring and professional.

  “She’s going to … give birth …” Edward finally managed to get out as he tried to seize the doctor by the arm and oblige him to get moving.

  “And is she sick?” asked the good doctor.

  Edward stopped, taken aback.

  “No, but she’s about to give birth,” he repeated, afraid the doctor had misunderstood him.

  “That’s very good, my lad. I congratulate you on this happy event. Now run and fetch the midwife, don’t waste any time. Good luck,” he added as he turned around.

  “You don’t understand!” Edward cried out, words that made the doctor frown, for he didn’t care to be shown such lack of respect – and what’s more, under his own roof. The butler shuddered inwardly, unconsciously straightening himself, stiff as the silver-knobbed canes in an urn by the door.

  “The midwife isn’t in! You have to come with me.”

  Now the distraught maniac was trying to tell him what to do. With all the haughtiness at his command, Doctor Whitfield, private physician to several eminent members of Parliament, asked:

  “Is the lady one of my patients, Mister … Mister?”

  “Love,” said Edward.

  “Love,” the physician repeated, as if some error in taste had just been confirmed, one he had suspected from the outset. “Very well, is Mrs. Love a patient of mine?”

  “No,” confessed Edward, who would never have even thought of lying.

  “I see. I’m sure the dear lady, who is in perfect health, will have no trouble giving birth. Hurry back to her, I say, and give her my congratulations. Go, now. I wish you a pleasant evening.”

  Edward had already turned on his heels. He broke into a run. In the sky the moon, slender as a scythe, was covered with clouds, and a cold rain started to fall.

  The neighbour had filled the kettle but seemed not to know what to do with it, or with the two full basins steaming on the stove. Garance was upstairs in their bedroom, her moans seeping through the closed door. Not daring to knock, Edward started to pace the landing, where his shoes left traces of mud.

  A few seconds or an hour later, he couldn’t have said, a scream ripped through the air and he finally opened the door to see Garance half sitting in the bed amid bloodstained sheets, her skin whiter than the pillows she was leaning against, her hair spread around her head like the rays of a star. She looked at him, unseeing. In a corner, the neighbour was wringing her hands again. In a voice he didn’t recognize, Edward ordered her to run to a doctor, any doctor, and to bring him back by force if she had to. He searched his pockets and held out the handful of crumpled bills he found there.

  There was a kind of stillness after she left. Edward knelt by his wife and cautiously touched her skin, soaked in sweat and cold as marble. He thought he saw her smile, then came another shriek, mingled with another lament.

  He himself welcomed his daughter into the world, used his penknife to cut the purple cord that joined her to her mother, dried her as best he could, then stood up, euphoric, when Garance, after a brief silence, began to moan again. Panicking, Edward repeated mechanically the same movements for the son he’d just been given, laying him down with his sister, two small perfect, wailing beings, on the breast of his wife, who had stopped breathing.

  The room, the window, the sky and the stars beyond pitched like a rudderless boat and drifted off. Edward staggered, bumped into the chest of drawers, fell to his knees. As if the law of gravity had briefly ceased to exist, he saw, slowly, dizzily, the copper balls exit the dragons’ jaws to crash into the open mouths, black and monstrous, of the starving frogs. They fell two by two until the last one, an orphan who’d lost its partner, this final phantom sphere seeming to remain suspended for all eternity. They had been together for three years, eight months, one week, and two days.

  The doctor arrived shortly, irritated without daring to let it show, then the pastor. The neighbour reappeared now and then with a cup of tea. With half his brain, which absurdly continued to function even though it seemed to him that his heart had stopped beating, Edward wondered if she’d found a use for all the water she’d thought it advisable to boil. People dropped in, some he didn’t know, others he did know, none of it made the slightest difference. In the empty sky dark night gave way to grey dawn and an ashen light came into the room.

  Far, far away a bird called.

  —

  It was when he stood by the grave where, in a lavish mahogany box lined with silk and velvet, lay the body of the woman he loved, when he had stopped seeking, when he thought he himself was dead, with his silent babies in his arms, that Edward grasped in a pathetic flash something that had always escaped him: understanding what it meant to be alive on this planet was nothing unless you understood how the planet itself was alive.

  Once the grave was filled in, when everyone had left and the infants had been taken away, he knelt on the newly dug earth that made a brown slash in the green grass, then lay on his belly, arms outstretched, and pressed his ear to the ground. During an eternity, all he heard was a humming, gradually transformed into a kind of tinkling that grew until it became deafening. All of Earth rang out like a death knell.

  The twins – they were named Hyacinthe and Violette – were entrusted to Mrs. Love who, now in her fifties with nothing to do, played with them like dolls. Edward came now and then to see the little ones, who called him papa the way they’d have said uncle or Mr. Mayor had they been told that it was the name of the visitor who was usually content to look at them without a word and on his way out leave some little pebbles as pretty as marbles.

  He made a number of attempts, all without success, to get to know these tiny creatures born to Garance. When the twins turned four, he came
for them one August night so they could admire the Perseids, which Garance had always called the tears of Saint Lawrence in honour of the unfortunate saint born at summer’s end. She had maintained that the stars were the tears he shed at the same time every year. Sullen and shivering in their nightclothes, barefoot in the cool grass covered with dew, Violette and Hyacinthe stubbornly refused to look up at the sky, the little girl grumbling that, “Grandma never lets us go outside without a bathrobe, she says it’s dangerous and we could catch our death of cold,” until Edward holds up one finger and whispers:

  “Look, there.”

  Hyacinthe spied the fine line of light and asked doubtfully, as if he suspected some magician’s trick:

  “What is it?”

  “A shooting star.”

  “Is it falling?”

  “It’s flying.”

  Violette began to sob noisily, pressed her fists against her eyes. She only stopped crying when he had tucked them both tightly back into beds so small they looked like furniture for a doll’s house. He tiptoed out of the room.

  He went on with his work but almost absentmindedly, at times with the impression that someone else was performing through him a task supposed to be his but which brought him neither joy nor satisfaction. Day after day he covered stacks of paper with his spidery writing as if someone else through him were dictating the equations and demonstrations he was simply copying down.

  During that time he rarely spoke except to himself, repeating in an undertone the reassuring series of his childhood, to which had been added a new sequence of numbers that ended in a finite manner he refused to accept, whose meaning therefore continued and would forever continue to escape him: 3, 8, 1, 2.

  On the street people stepped aside because he was frightening and he smelled bad. At one point he had stopped shaving or changing his clothes, which now, stiff with dirt, created a kind of armour that he never took off, not even to go to bed. Most often he fell asleep at his work table and waking a few hours later, sometimes in the middle of the night, realizing that his greasy hair had smudged the latest formula he’d set down in handwriting that dwindled and slanted down like a drying trickle and left on his cheek a partial and inverted mark. He took notes on anything within reach, finally using his hands themselves, spangling them with numbers and signs that crossed each other and became tangled in an ever-changing labyrinth.

  Inaugurating a new notebook with a stiff cover that made a grim cracking sound when he opened it for the first time, he finally set out to note the fruits of his labour, his complete theory. He inscribed in blue ink on the first page the following words: Mathematical Theory of Elasticity, and kept writing until he had covered the last page and as soon as it was turned, started a new one. Under his pen sprang up the volcanoes and earthquakes he’d been pursuing for years, that he felt he had briefly managed to imprison in his inkwell, before setting them free and fixing them once and for all on the page, the way one pins butterflies to paper. It was all there finally: fire and water; Earth and Moon joined by the tides in which their mingled breaths were combined; waves that made both earth and beings quake; music and silence that united to give birth to the mysterious song of the world that was their most perfect incarnation, Garance herself who in those lines, inspired by her from first to last, would continue to survive beyond both their deaths.

  Then one day, without having to reread what he’d produced over the previous weeks, he knew he had finished. The certainty was a relief. He placed the thousands of manuscript pages and the five notebooks on the dressing table, next to the dragons and the frogs that were waiting, jaws agape. Then he lay down fully clothed on his bed amid the silence of the deserted house, as he had lain down years before in the Italian villa taken from the earth. He was found the next morning, eyes wide-open, his hand gripping a grain of obsidian.

  IT IS BARELY SNOWING ON MOUNT ROYAL. Maple branches – big hands with splayed fingers – reach for the sky. The winter sun filtering between the clouds polishes the trunks of beech trees; hanging from a thin twig, a single bronze-coloured leaf flutters in the wind like a tiny flag. A young birch grows on the edge of the path, its trunk a light brown, nearly pink, that pales and whitens as it grows farther from the earth and plunges into the sky. The mountain top is still bathed in bright light, its base already drowned in shadow.

  She exhales clouds of mist in front of her; the breath that escapes from the noses and open mouths of the dogs wraps them in a fine haze. The cold is biting. The path is still nearly unsullied, the snow broken through by just one trail, tracks indistinct but regular, small craters whose powdery edges are collapsing inwards. Without realizing it, she tries to place her feet on them but her rhythm is broken, the distance between steps too great. Lazy and playful, Vladimir, Estragon, and the others wait for her to lead the way, happy to be rooting around in the fluffy snow where they sometimes find a piece of branch and fight over it with mock-threatening barks and growls. Damocles brings up the rear, as if it were his mission to watch over them all, his quick bark calling to stragglers. The long morning shadows are a faded blue against the white surface. Squirrels don’t show themselves, huddled in their nests in the highest branches, like sailors’ lookouts at the summit of those gnarled poles. Midway into the climb, the silhouettes of alders begin to stand out against the snow like the more and more widely spaced rungs of a ladder that go from dark to light.

  Bare, the trees appear more clearly as what they are: mirror and infinite reflection of themselves, the smallest bough, the slightest branch takes on in miniature the tapering shape of the trunk. The branches rise towards the sky with the same movement, the same formation as the roots diving into the ground. As though driven by a similar force, each part is a faithful copy of the whole, present, in a state of possibility, in each of them, the apple tree bearing the apple, the apple, in the secrecy of its heart, the tree.

  She wonders briefly what a universe would be like in which humans were made so that every deed, every word contained and revealed them entirely, then reflects that nothing proves this is not the case.

  Slightly winded, she goes on climbing, hollowing out alongside the first trail a second series of tracks whose outline blurs as soon as she lifts her foot, just as a hole in the sand is filled in as soon as it’s formed. When she reaches the clearing at the halfway point, where all that can be seen are a few brown stems, dry and stiff, sticking out of the snow, she realizes vaguely that if there is only one set of footprints, it means that someone has gone up and not come down.

  Freezing rain falls all evening and all night; the next morning, the trees are covered with a thin, glittering film. The narrowest stems and trunks that line the path curve gently to form an arbour under which she sometimes has to bow her head to advance. The branches she parts as she goes on, weighed down and made supple by the ice, tinkle like clinking glasses. A white sun shines in the perfectly blue sky and the forest shimmers under its rays, as if someone has taken the trouble to decorate every one of the wild saplings with sparkling ornaments. At the edge of the path, under a smooth coating of frozen snow, large chunks of bark resemble driftwood run aground. A few bushes still bear red autumn fruit, now imprisoned in transparent shells, as if preserved for all eternity in amber made of water. At the summit of the mountain, she finds the beech tree, diamond-covered, its branches like garlands of silver and glass.

  She stops for a moment to gaze at the landscape spread out before her – flat roofs covered with snow; steaming toy-sized cars; the verdigris steeple of the church of Saint-Germain; the trees sparkling in the sun; a few tiny, rushing pedestrians. But that day, on the big flat rock under the beech tree where she usually sits for a few moments before continuing along the rocky path to the university, stands an inukshuk, firmly planted on two short splayed legs, one long arm parallel to the ground, the small square head sitting on a solid neck. It is a paler grey than the rock it stands on, composed of stones each a different shade from its neighbours. She contemplates it, then whistles
to round up the dogs now chasing each other, noses to the ground, paws covered with snow.

  Floating in the air the following day is a very fine dusting of snow that glitters in the sun and flashes silver as it dances along tiny invisible currents, like schools of fish moving together in their thousands, all at the same time showing their black eyes or the glint of their bellies. At the edge of the clearing, metal posts of different heights and sizes have been driven into the ground and someone has left a section of fence with lozenge-shaped links.

  At the summit, the inukshuk from the day before has disappeared, and now a new man of stone stands at the foot of the tree as if he has grown there overnight. This one is made of the same dozen stones, arranged this time to create a silhouette that one might meet on the street. All the same, she wonders briefly if her eyes are playing tricks on her, if she hadn’t observed the little sculpture the day before carelessly or made a mistake recalling its shape. The day after that, her doubts melt away: a third inukshuk, this one more slender and, strangely, nearly ethereal stands in the shadow of the beech branches as if it had stopped there to rest.

  From then on, when she climbs the winding path to the summit with the barking dogs she wonders what new little figure will be waiting for them. Every day brings a new one, different yet always made from the same stones, and she has the impression of finding a long-lost friend, whose features she can make out under a series of masks.

  In spite of herself she now looks with a certain curiosity at those she meets on her way up or down, trying to imagine them kneeling at the foot of the beech tree, assembling the stones like the pieces of a puzzle. She often sees the same faces: an actress she recognizes from commercials but whose name she can’t recall, who walks, always alone, repeating in a low voice, with different intonations, the lines she is learning; two or three joggers in black tracksuits and huge hiking boots that make their feet look like astronauts’; a man around forty, his whole body covered with a kind of plastic or rubber armour, head enclosed to the chin in something like a medieval helmet, astride a mountain bike and pulling behind him a tiny bichon white as snow; an old lady who leans on a long, gnarled stick as she walks, who greets her with a smile every time and also greets the dogs one by one; others, too, whom she only sees now and again, young adults with backpacks, probably on their way to the university; hikers on snowshoes with ski poles, and sometimes walkie-talkies, carrying bags no doubt stuffed with energy bars, bottled water, even flares; birdwatchers lugging heavy cameras and lenses that look like telescopes. Does she want to recognize a man or a woman? She doesn’t know, and soon decides not even to try finding out, satisfied to discover in the shadow of the beech tree every morning a form at once new and familiar.