Wonder

by Dominique Fortier

  The snow has the texture of coarse salt and it rolls underfoot like thousands of transparent marbles. The thawing and melting reveal in successive layers leaves, twigs, seeds, wizened fruit, scraps of bark, bits of grit, cones, maple keys, acorns, leaves of grass that she discovers in the reverse order to that in which they were buried, a tiny, seasonal archaeology whose strata correspond to snowstorms and freezing rain. The dogs are happy to find bits of wood that had disappeared months earlier and apparently have lost none of their attraction. Now and then the loose snow gives way under the weight of Damocles, who has trouble extricating himself, one long leg after the other, from the icy ground on top of which he remembers walking all winter. At the tips of the maple branches there are slight swellings, not yet buds, reminiscent of scales: oval forms similar to tree-coloured olives.

  On the side more exposed to the sun the snow has already melted in the undergrowth and the last hard patches form ephemeral continents separated by seas that can be crossed in one stride. All that remains of the path is a long white strip winding through the trees like a glacier that every day shrinks and recedes some more, leaving in its wake a moraine of small bits of flotsam dragged here by the frost, then abandoned, set down flat on the snow as on the blank pages of a herbarium.

  On this day of almost-spring, she discovers on the flat rock in the shadow of the beech tree not a little man made of stones but a boy of flesh and blood, with unruly blonde hair, a heavy checked jacket open over a dirty T-shirt, shapeless jeans, and work boots, deep in a thick book. Right away she feels impatience and a certain disappointment; she realizes that since morning she has been thinking about the statue she will leave on the summit of the mountain at the end of her climb, and she’s annoyed with this intruder for keeping her from this very small daily activity that’s become necessary for her. She lingers for a while, hoping he’ll go away and leave the field open, pretends to straighten a collar, unnecessarily inspects a paw, looks for non-existent burrs in Lili’s long coat. On the highest branch of the tallest maple two crows are having a complicated dialogue of clicking and cooing, black gossips warming their plumage in the sun.

  He didn’t take his eyes off the book at the approach of the dogs and still doesn’t seem to notice them prowling about, noses in the air, at a respectful distance. After a few long minutes he finally gets up, closing the volume – an old library copy, its blue cover with gilt letters reading The Last Days of St. Pierre: The Volcanic Disaster That Claimed Thirty Thousand Lives. Then, turning around distractedly he leans across to brush the inukshuk he’d been sitting beside and, in a few seconds, puts together a new stone statue. He gazes at it for a moment after he straightens up. Only then does she see the blue of his eyes.

  She turns on her heels immediately to go down without even giving the dogs time to catch their breath, as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t.

  FOR TWO WEEKS NOW SHE HAS BEEN FINDING him at the summit every day, sometimes busying himself with some invisible task among the tombstones but most often at the foot of the budding tree where he settles down to read. She is now so accustomed to discovering him there that on this day she senses his absence before she is aware of it, the way one knows while pushing open a door that the house one is about to enter is empty.

  She sits on the stone where she can see the mountain and the landscape below through his eyes. Then a silhouette appears from behind the shed that she recognizes without needing to turn her head. She is watching the foot of the slope, the ballet of the students hurrying towards the music school, miniature characters some of whom are carrying black instrument cases as tall as they are.

  He sits down beside her, scratches Damocles behind the ears when the dog trots over to them. Takes from a backpack a thermos of tea, pours a little of the scalding liquid into a tin cup which he holds out to her without a word or a glance, then serves himself. The hot drink has a very light aroma of flowers and smoke. The sun, which for days has only trickled through a veil of white clouds, ventures a ray, then another, gilding the landscape with the brightness of the approaching summer.

  Once she has drunk the tea, she sets the cup on the stone and gets ready to leave. “Thanks,” she says, and he looks up at her, blinking. She walks away, whistling for the dogs, and he follows them with his eyes for a long time before opening his book and going back to the underground worlds of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

  IN THE 18TH CENTURY, AFTER THE CHANCE rediscovery of the buried cities, men worked underground like moles, proceeding laboriously through a network of tunnels and galleries they dug as they went along. Most of the passageways linking one site under excavation (bakery, thermal baths, chamber or atrium of a villa) with another (restaurant, mill) weren’t wide enough to let the workers move around, upright or even on all fours, so they crawled like blind earthworms between the rooms and the buildings of what had been, two thousand years earlier, the city of Pompeii. When they reached the outside wall of a new structure, rather than go along it, clearing the way until they found a window, a door, or another opening, they knocked down part of the wall so they could get inside right away. Once they had roughly cleared the room, they would sometimes realize that they had damaged a fresco beyond repair. Still, they uncovered enough mosaics and paintings that they could go on choosing from among them those most worthy of being brought up to the surface. Grottoes were summarily fitted out, where workers came to show the foreman fragments of their discoveries. If a piece was considered to be of inferior quality or execution, it was unceremoniously chopped into pieces. The more ordinary frescoes, or ones that were so numerous that there was no need to bring new ones into the open air suffered the same fate. The various objects extracted from the hard lava and the volcanic dust that had been compressed until it was hard as rock – amphorae, furniture, urns, even food sometimes found intact on the table where the mistress of the house or a slave, dead soon afterwards, had placed them, like the four miraculous eggs whose thin shells had survived the volcano’s fire and were nearly fossilized – were similarly subjected to a cursory examination. Jewellery and other articles made of precious metals were set aside to be brought up at day’s end and everything related more to curiosity than treasure was rejected at once. In the event that the accumulated deposits in a particular room or building couldn’t be cut into with a pick or a mattock, the unworkable zone was abandoned and the men moved on to another. Once the inventory was drawn up and the valuable objects taken away, labourers quickly filled the rooms again with debris so they could move on without having to remove it from underground. Rather tons of earth, gravel, and blackened lava simply moved from one house to another, following the workers’ progress so that, aside from corridors along which they could move, no more than three or four houses were ever free of rubble at the same time, as if they had resolved, like Penelope, to undo after nightfall the work accomplished during the day. Thus months after the work had begun, Pompeii was still buried, even doubly: the first time by the volcano, the second by men.

  The way into the ruins was via a shaft similar to the one at the mouth of a mine but that, instead of leading to veins of precious metals or deposits of rare minerals, gave access to a vanished time from which one brought back up intact – nearly alive still – remains twenty centuries old, as fishermen bring their nets to the surface in the morning full of shining fish.

  The men worked day and night in galleries where air and light were equally rare. The city once buried by fire was now ruled by cold that made the workers’ and peasants’ teeth chatter, accustomed as they were to the sun of Naples. After several hours their eyes would grow used to the dark that was pierced here and there by lamps, but they went on coughing long after returning to the surface. Blowing their noses on their shirtsleeves, they saw there fine, black soot that might have just emerged from the mouth of the volcano.

  —

  Nearly every possible object of daily life, from plates to jewels to bakers’ implements to those of the ladies of the night,
had been exhumed from the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum. All that was missing, cruelly, were the men, the women, the children who had lived within those walls, the merchants and priestesses, thieves and fishermen, magistrates, and slaves.

  No more than a hundred and fifty years ago, Giuseppe Fiorelli had dreamed up a way to rescue them from the buried city, along with their dogs, cats, and hens, the rats that haunted their granaries and the carp that were served at their tables, all fragile chains of carbon shattered by gases, mummified in lava, and fallen into dust over the centuries.

  It was a simple matter of pouring plaster into hollows that corresponded in every respect to the shape of the creature immobilized for all eternity in its setting of petrified magma. This produced silhouettes always different, each one unique, inverted replicas with exactly the outward appearance of a living being, formed around the very absence of that which had given them birth.

  On some of these casts can be seen the facial features, the expressions – horrified, serene, indifferent, dumbfounded, resigned – of the inhabitants of Pompeii at the very moment when Vesuvius erupted. Those individuals, eternally paralyzed in the abandonment of sleep or in the urgency of flight, all seem to offer a silent warning. Some raise their arms towards the sky whence comes death, while others huddle, trying to protect what they hold most dear: their child or their gold. Others still are petrified in a desperate and unmoving race, like the white-faced mimes and Pierrots who can be seen at street corners, where they hold the same pose for hours, waiting for the toss of a coin.

  There are at least a thousand active volcanoes on earth and probably more under the sea; at any moment twenty or so are erupting.

  The southernmost volcano still active on the planet is called Mount Erebus. It was baptized (like its brother, now extinct, Mount Terror) in honour of the two ships commanded by Sir James Ross who, assisted by Francis Crozier, discovered them in 1841 during a long voyage of Antarctic exploration intended to reconnoitre and study earth’s magnetism. For the ancient Greeks, Erebus, the incarnation of darkness, was the brother of Night. Of their union were born Aether (Light) and Hemera (Day), who in turn gave birth to Thalassa, the Sea.

  Mounts Terror and Erebus rise like ships run aground on Ross Island, in the sea of the same name (both testify to a certain lack of imagination – or perhaps to an incorrigible narcissism on the captain’s part). Francis Crozier received no similar honour but some hundred years later, his name was given to a lunar crater near the Sea of Fertility, which may once have housed a volcano.

  Still, it seems that most of the cirques and craters that pit the surface of the Moon were not caused by volcanoes but have been hollowed out by asteroids that have crashed on the surface: by a fire that came not from inside, but from outside.

  THE AIR HAS A SWEETNESS THAT WASN’T THERE the day before, suggesting winter is nearing its end. Above the roofs glides a bluish mist that gives the impression the sky has leaned over the earth for a moment to see what was going on there.

  The path where the snow melts by day and freezes every night gleams in the sun like a skating rink. Cautious, Vladimir and Estragon zigzag through the trees in places where the hard surface still provides some purchase. Damocles sprawls full length, paws spread wide like Bambi’s, once, then twice, and pulls himself up, moaning indignantly. For months he will hold on to his fear of shiny surfaces and refuse to set foot on a polished marble floor. Mornings, as on every river, minuscule twigs, bits of dried leaves, red maple keys are adrift, sailing down the current to the bottom of the mountain.

  Once tea has been served and the first mouthful drunk, he points with his chin at the dogs chasing each other in what is left of the melting snow.

  “Are they all yours?”

  “No. Just one.”

  “Which?”

  “Guess.”

  The two Labradors, one blond, the other chocolate, the first an exact copy of the second, run in circles, sending up sprays of wet snow behind their stubby legs. Now and then one produces a high-pitched yelp to which the other replies in the same tone. A little behind them, a long basset hound is busy digging a muddy hole into which he disappears almost completely and from which emerge briefly just one clawed foot and one ear.

  He hesitates, continues his examination.

  A pointer with a silvery coat carefully sniffs the trunk of a tree, walks around it with dainty, measured steps. She twitches when she hears a branch snap nearby as a squirrel steps on it, turns to show two round eyes, their metallic colour exactly the same as that of the short silky hair on her face.

  “Juliette,” she introduces her. “And this,” – points to the hole where a white paintbrush wriggles at the end of a black tail – “is Doormat. Over there, Vladimir and Estragon. These are Lili and Damocles,” she says finally, indicating a bichon frise with a black nose, wearing a red coat with her little white feet sticking out of it, who has just yanked a stick from the mouth of an enormous animal who lets out a heartrending sigh, then lies down and covers his eyes with an immense paw as if he wants to say that he’s had enough of this cruel life.

  “Lili?” he asks, looking at the elongated shape, the long paws drawn up to the body in an unnatural posture one might see on an animal stuffed by a taxidermist who works too fast or is a poor observer.

  “That’s Damocles,” she corrects him.

  Hearing his name, the animal looks up and frowns attentively. The bichon, meanwhile, is energetically gnawing her loot.

  “What kind is it?”

  “A mix of Great Dane, Irish wolfhound, Rhodesian ridgeback, and Neapolitan mastiff,” she replies.

  Observing it more closely, zone by zone one might say, he does see in the animal the powerful frame of the Great Dane, the huge head and jaws of the mastiff, the strange backbone that gives its name to the ridgeback, and a rough goatee he must have inherited from his Irish ancestors. But there’s also some camel in this dog, and some dragon, and probably some hippogryph too.

  “What does he weigh?” he inquires, deciding to start with the easiest question.

  “I don’t know. When he was around eight months old he broke the veterinarian’s scale. At the time he weighed seventy-five kilos.”

  “How old is he now?”

  “Three.”

  “Interesting.”

  Vladimir and Estragon, the two stocky, cheerful Labradors, belong to a university professor who doesn’t care for walking and is only too happy to let someone else spend her days chasing the dogs to make them use up some of the energy they would otherwise expend in mad pursuit of each other, claws clicking on the polished floors of his duplex. Actually, the professor in question isn’t all that fond of animals; the labs were bought at the entreaties of an old girlfriend, twenty years younger, who for a while had threatened to want a child, a vague desire he’d skilfully deflected and at the same time fulfilled with a gift of two adorable little balls of fur with curls at their necks, in a basket.

  As she was intending to name them Nougat and Nutella, he’d had to intervene and give them names he wouldn’t blush to pronounce on those rare occasions when he was the one who must round them up. For as long as the relationship lasted, Marie-Lune – another ridiculous name, but in that case there was nothing he could do – had been happy to take responsibility for the dogs, looking after their slightest needs. She walked them morning, noon, and night, fed them the finest organic kibble enriched with omega-3 – “those dogs eat better than we do,” he invariably complained when paying the astronomical pet shop bills, words that she heard, rightly, more as a criticism of her own mediocre culinary skills than of the sums invested in dog food – scrupulously took them to the vet every year for treatments against fleas and heartworm, took them as well every two months to the grooming parlour from which they came home with claws clipped and buffed, scented with an eau de toilette that, she explained to him very seriously, had been blended specially for canines and was called Oh my dog!

  When she announced she was leaving h
im – having presumably found a man who didn’t grind his teeth when the words start a family came up, a hunch that was confirmed a few months later when he ran into her on the street, very pregnant and absolutely radiant – he was surprised that she had stubbornly refused to take the dogs. It would have been too painful, she’d explained at first, to have before her eyes all the time a souvenir, a witness of their relationship; then, as he seemed unconvinced, she had declared once and for all that the dogs needed a house and a garden, that they would be miserably unhappy in a small, second-floor apartment in Plateau Mont-Royal and that she couldn’t bring herself to torture them like that. Before this double argument that was based on both her happiness and that of Vladimir and Estragon (thank God he’d been firm; at least he wasn’t stuck with Nougat and Nutella), he could only accept. And look for someone to walk the dogs.

  Lili belongs to a woman with an unpronounceable name, whom she’d privately christened “Lili Lady” and addressed simply as “Madame.” Lili Lady lives on the ground floor of a three-storey brick house, she has silvery white hair like snow in moonlight, small blue eyes that recently have become cloudy. She occasionally has trouble recognizing her dog-walker, calling her sometimes “Anna” and sometimes “Martha.” Often the old lady invites her in and offers her cookies from an old tin box that smells musty. She accepts politely, slips the cookies into her pockets, and later gives them to Damocles, who sniffs them cautiously before swallowing them in a mouthful.