Wonder

by Dominique Fortier

  “You mean there’s part of your blood that refuses to go where it should and just does as it likes.”

  Slightly offended, she retorts:

  “I’ve never seen things that way.”

  Silence falls between them. Damocles chews conscientiously a tiny piece of ham forgotten by Lili. He makes a new attempt:

  “Or else it keeps fighting, even if it’s already lost …”

  Yes, that seems more acceptable. They exchange smiles and for the first time she discovers that one of his front teeth is slightly chipped.

  The earth’s core is made up of a blend of iron and nickel. Even today, the exact proportion of the elements that compose it, its behaviour, its effects on the rest of the planet and on the Earth’s satellites are still relatively unknown. What is known is that the temperature of the external nucleus is around 4,000 degrees Celsius, that it is liquid and not dense and viscous like magma but has a consistency close to that of water. The waves and tremors that stimulate it create Earth’s magnetic pull. But that core conceals another, hard like the stone at the heart of a fruit, whose temperature is some thousand degrees higher. Thus the Earth is like an onion, made up of a certain number of strata of varying thicknesses. We know this thanks to seismological instruments that make it possible to determine the density and composition of these layers by measuring the speed and force of the waves inside them.

  What is hidden in the core of the heart no one knows. It has been discovered, however, that its speed of rotation is not exactly the same as that of the planet, a breathtaking observation: the heart and the celestial body spin together in space, with the same movement but at a different rhythm.

  At the edge of the clearing grows a clump of birches, their thin trunks gathered together like the stems of a spray of flowers clutched in a hand. The bark of one is ivory, the skin of another a delicate cream that intensifies towards a light beige, a third has shades of pink that verge on cherry-red; together they present an entire palette of flesh tones subjected to the whole range of human emotions, from dread to embarrassment by way of joy.

  The young saplings stand brown and pointed like the quills of a giant porcupine that has curled up in a ball and gone to sleep for thousands of years. Low clouds trace long-necked, hunchbacked creatures on the horizon. In the branches, bare for months now, bulges have appeared that resemble large musk strawberries, which crack open, showing green. He came by later than usual, a spade over his shoulder, loping along, afraid she might have left. She offers him a piece of chocolate. A butterfly flutters nervously around them, its wings dark brown, nearly black, edged with white; it seems for a moment eager to touch down on a twig before resuming its pursuit of who-knows-what.

  “Did you see that?”

  “A butterfly,” he observes.

  “Yes, but the earth has barely started to thaw, what’s it doing here?”

  “Who knows? Maybe it’s coming back from somewhere.”

  “But don’t butterflies travel in groups? Hundreds of thousands of monarchs all opening out together along the coasts of Mexico then coming back here to gorge themselves on milkweed. Could that one have migrated on its own?”

  She looks at the insect circling them, imagining all at once the utter solitude in which it would have had to survive.

  “Look,” he begins, “it’s alive, that’s already something, isn’t it?”

  But she’s not certain that it really is a life if it must unfurl in such a desperate search for a fellow creature and not find one.

  When she comes back to the cemetery gate the next day, he is waiting for her, smiling. He tells her to sit down, close her eyes, and hold out her hands. She complies unwillingly. He places in her palms a round object, smooth and cold. Opening her eyes she discovers a glass jar with holes pierced in its metal lid, and at the bottom a brown-black butterfly rimmed in white, its straight wings together like hands in prayer.

  “See that? I’ve found another one!”

  He seems thrilled at her surprise.

  She taps on the glass with her fingernail. She could swear that the butterfly shrugs its shoulders.

  “Good for you, but how do you know it’s another? How can you be sure it’s not the same one?”

  “Crap!”

  “That’s right.”

  She unscrews the lid, taps the jar to encourage the butterfly to leave. The insect doesn’t make a move. Finally, she turns the jar upside down and slaps the bottom. Sluggishly, the butterfly flies away at last.

  He looks at her, shamefaced:

  “I was so happy to find it, it’s crazy, I didn’t even think …”

  “Of course not.”

  Just then though they both see out of the corner of an eye two dark forms, each the size of a hand, chasing each other near the ground.

  “D’you think one of those is the one from yesterday?”

  “Who cares? We know at least two of them survived.”

  The clouds on the horizon part to reveal a patch of sky, a blue window in the surrounding grey. The wind rises and whispers in the branches where the first leaves have come out, bashful and fine, nearly transparent when they emerge from the sheath that served as their cocoon.

  “Are you on your own?” he asks without looking at her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean: have you got a family?”

  Damocles, lying at their feet, raises his big head. The other dogs, farther away, are fighting over a ball that squeaks whenever one of them picks it up in its jaws. She takes a branch, its bark already nibbled at by the dogs, and begins to strip its leaves, as if she were removing the petals of a daisy one by one.

  “Yes, I have a family. Everyone does, don’t they? Unless they’re born under a cabbage leaf.”

  If that is a perch held out to encourage him to open up himself and spare her from answering the question in more detail, he pretends to see nothing and waits patiently for her to go on.

  “My parents live in California during the winter, they come back in the spring and move into their house in the Eastern Townships. In good years, we spend a couple of weeks together here, just enough to make me want to hop on a plane as well.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  She looks at him as if he had just said something outrageous or dictated by a questionable sense of humour. But apparently the question is serious.

  “I hate flying.”

  “Ah.”

  At their feet the leaves she continues conscientiously to pull off are piling up, a tiny, soft green mound.

  “Is that all?” he asks after a moment.

  “Well … I mean … no. I don’t like snakes either or needles. I’m not crazy about pizza and I find the Coen brothers’ movies totally uninteresting.”

  He laughs. Slightly offended, she adds as if to justify herself:

  “Their reputation is very overrated you know. They haven’t written anything really original since Barton Fink.”

  “I don’t know who Barton Fink is and I’m not sure I know the Coen brothers either, but that’s not what I meant. I was wondering if you had any brothers and sisters.”

  “Okay, yes, if I have to tell you everything. A brother two years older than me, Éric. Who, need I mention, loved snakes when he was little, and in his teens ate nothing but pizza.”

  “Wait, let me guess. He became an acupuncturist, right? Or an airline pilot?”

  She smiles in spite of herself and he feels as if he’s won an important victory.

  “No, an accountant. So’s his wife. They live in a renovated bungalow in Laval, they play golf, take courses in wine appreciation, and spend two weeks on Cape Cod every summer. What else? They like Swedish mysteries, drive only American cars (on principle, but they do their best, also on principle, to take the Métro as often as possible), and they never go grocery shopping without a dozen reusable bags. Oh, and I forgot, they have 1.4 children.”

  Now it’s his turn to smile.

  “Aren’t you overdoing it a bit?”r />
  “Not at all. They have a two-year-old little boy who is totally unbearable and Valérie – that’s her name, Valérie – is four months pregnant. Do the math.”

  A cloud sails by, veiling the sun for a moment. A breath of wind lifts a few leaves from the fragile castle at their feet, then the small mound takes off and is scattered almost instantaneously. One leaf glides over their heads before it touches down on the ground between them, where it goes on whirling for a few moments, like a compass needle gone mad.

  The cardinals are back. She couldn’t say where they come from or when they returned, maybe they spent the winter in the shade of a bird feeder, but it was this morning that she first heard their shrill cheeping, then saw two tomato-red shapes circling each other against the blue of the sky. It is obvious from their scarlet plumage that they are two males, but they don’t seem to be chasing one another, rather they appear to be surveying this realm that is theirs, to reconnoitre it and to expand its borders.

  She spies the first robins of the season in the middle of the clearing, bellies as round as oranges. Slender buds, their twisted stems like long flames of white and rose can be seen on the cherry tree now. Among the young blades of grass are dozens of blue flowers. All at once she realizes that spring has arrived, that the earth has thawed, and yet there is no sign of the dreaded development whose construction has been suspended for months.

  “Why was the work stopped, do you know?” she asks him at noon that day when she spots him at the summit of the mountain, standing near the beech tree.

  He gives her an oblique look.

  “Didn’t I tell you? It was broken off in the light of new information.”

  “What kind of information?”

  To reply he assumes a voice that could not be more official, as if he were presenting the matter to a committee.

  “As it happens, this path is home to an endangered bird species, the cerulean warbler, and connecting it with the rest of the network on Mount Royal would have brought more visitors liable to disturb the bird’s well-being, not to mention that the work itself would have risked doing considerable harm to its nesting …”

  She whistles softly. Both sit down, looking straight ahead at the sky that has come to meet the mountains, whose outline can just be made out on the horizon. Not far away, Damocles, intrigued, is face-to-face with a bristling squirrel, tail straight up in the air, pupils blazing, hoisting himself to his full height.

  “The cerulean warbler, is that all? And who told the authorities that this ultra-rare species exists?”

  He shrugs to declare his ignorance.

  “A good Samaritan, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Having apparently decided that the squirrel is an acceptable playmate, Damocles extends his front paws, drops his shoulders so that his chin is almost on the ground, then gives a high-pitched bark. The squirrel responds with an incensed yelping and furiously flicks its tail.

  She questions him again:

  “Have you ever seen a cerulean warbler?”

  “No, but I’m sure I’ve heard his song, haven’t you? Wait … Sshh.”

  He brings his finger to his lips, pretends to prick up his ear. All that can be heard is the wind in the leaves, Juliette delicately peeling a branch, and the spluttering squirrel. Damocles finally turns away, defeated, while the triumphant squirrel wags his tail as one might wave the flag of victory. The dog gives it one last look, then comes and sits at their feet.

  “No, I can’t hear it,” she confesses.

  “So maybe we made a mistake,” he says, throwing up his hands.

  The following day, the posts and the bit of fence have disappeared, leaving in the ground three small shallow holes that Doormat is quick to fill in.

  The chestnut tree has started to unfold its big leaves in a kind of backward, slowed-down origami. Half unfurled now, they resemble soft green lilies with oblong petals around a gently swollen tapering core. That stage of false flowering, between bud and leaf, lasts just a few hours. Seeing it very early that morning, as a cloud of mist is coming from the dogs’ mouths, she thinks about one of those films that shows in fast motion the germination and growth of a seed lifting its head hesitantly towards the sun.

  In the distance, one can see the silhouette of the white big top the circus sets up on the edge of the city every year. It resembles one of the vast tents that Bedouins reserve for their chief in the desert. Spotting the familiar outline, she looks away at once, her heart pounding.

  It is said that the heart of a man is one and a half times the size of his fist. The bigger that muscle, the more slowly it beats. According to one theory everything that lives and has a heart is granted the same number of beats before it dies – so many for the mouse, so many for the elephant – and once the supply is exhausted, the creature dies. Meaning, perhaps, that the lives of frogs, of hummingbirds and ants aren’t really shorter than the life of a man or a whale, but that they unfold at a different rhythm, specific to each species. The length of a life will always be a lifetime; there are planets for example where daylight lasts for months and others where the sun rises and sets every few hours, just as certain ephemeral creatures squeeze into one day what others will take a century to live.

  No one knows where or how music was born, or where language originated. It is easy to imagine though that the very first expressions of it (rhythmical clapping of hands or stamping of feet, a piece of wood struck on a stone, then on the taut skin of a drum) were simply repetitions of the beating of our hearts in our chests. If we don’t know any animal musicians, ones who make sounds that way to reassure or entertain themselves, or just for the beauty of it, perhaps that’s because, unlike humans, they do not feel a need to count out the time that separates them from death.

  Music, which can be so precise when expressing sound in its infinite varieties, possesses remarkably few tools when it comes time to take account of silence, which is not its opposite but rather its inverse. The rest sign, a solid rectangular box, a square hat clinging to the fourth line of the staff, corresponds to the whole note and like it, lasts for four beats; the half-rest, equivalent to a half-note, is represented by the same box, this time set on top of the third line where, relieved of half the silence it contained, it could be said to have broken away as it flipped upwards, no longer toppling under its own weight. The quarter-rest, its depiction resembling the profile of a theatre mask with a pointed nose, lasts for one beat, like a quarter-note. The main thing is, it goes no further: each shorter rest is designated by a fraction of the last (half-rest, quarter-rest, and so on) and noted with an oblique line crowned with a kind of slanting comma, which becomes double, then triple and quadruple as needed, the multiplication indicating the shortening of the silence until the stem resembles a spike of goldenrod bending in the wind. With its five small heads the one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth rest is equivalent to the quasi-hemidemisemiquaver. What is there beyond it? Nothing.

  Scarcely a breath, the moment that comes briefly before a heartbeat, the rustling of a wing, the fraction of a second between the instant we press the switch and the instant the light goes out, the precise moment when a drop of water suspended from the tip of a leaf breaks away and falls to the ground.

  It was years ago now, centuries one might as well say, when every night she would go through the movements with a strange sense of moving under water. It would seem to her that she was disappearing, liquefying, leaving room for another woman who knew the motions and whom she watched pirouetting, a spectator of the self who was giving in to the dizziness, then to the brilliance of the leap, fall before flight, and who only made way for her again when it was time to grasp Pierrot’s white hand.

  Perched on a silver crescent they waited, suspended in mid-air, half-hidden by the darkness that shadowed the summit of the big top, while act followed act in the ring below. Under Pierrot’s black hat, his ears, on which he’d forgotten to spread the white chalk, looked like two pink flowers. Columbine briskly caught
the trapeze that dropped from the canvas roof. Pierrot followed her slowly, each time leaving the moon reluctantly. This last part of the act, after they’d spent several minutes perched motionless high in the big top, invisible to the spectators, was the most perilous.

  —

  On the final night, as on all the others, Columbine painted on a round mouth, red as a cherry, long lashes like stars around her eyes. She spied Harlequin behind her in the light-framed mirror. He stopped for a moment at her side; he brushed her cheek with the lace escaping from his velvet sleeve and offered her a cigarette. Dreamily, she took a drag, and smoke floated for a moment above their heads, then dispersed.

  The moon, which had been damaged in transport, had been mended, reinforced, sanded, and repainted, but at the junction of the old structure and the aluminium used to repair it there were some rough metal edges that scratched the skin and tore the delicate silk costumes. The whole thing, heated by the floodlights, gave off a smell of paint. Columbine was waiting impatiently to descend to the ring and join Harlequin, whose coloured jacket blazed in the spotlight that followed his every move.

  When she realizes that Pierrot won’t be able to catch her, it’s too late. Did she arrive too soon at the end of the arc traced by her trapeze, or was he just a tiny bit too slow? How to know? The music plays, tinny brasses and ethereal violins, no one can have noticed that their trajectories, which are supposed to cross, will instead brush against one another, then move away again without connecting. She hasn’t let go of the bar yet but the movement that will make her do it, already begun, cannot be undone.

  The audience, row upon row in their seats, are outlined in silhouette, and look as if they’ve been cut out of cardboard. Their faces can’t be distinguished. As it is every night, the big top is jam-packed and the ushers guide spectators to their seats until a couple of seconds before the show begins. After that they switch off their flashlights; the narrow beams might distract the performers. Latecomers have to wait for the intermission, standing near the entrances, before they can take their places.