Her fingers release the thin, rubber-coated metal tube and, briefly, she continues her ascent, carried by the movement of the trapeze that she’s just left.
She sees Pierrot without seeing him. He also knows. He can do nothing for her.
In the ring, Harlequin, Pantaloon, and the villagers from whom Columbine and Pierrot have escaped pretend to be searching frantically for them. Armed with spades and pitchforks, they’ve emptied a hayloft out of which burst a host of birds – gracefully skipping contortionists – and, watching their takeoff, the searchers discover overhead the two runaways.
Columbine hears the laughter of hundreds of children whose faces she cannot see. For a moment that is an eternity, she floats in a kind of weightlessness. At regular intervals, behind the stands the emergency exits pulse a vivid red. In the ring, all the characters run around with their heads upturned, they’re screaming comically, waving scythes and brooms. The milkmaid’s apron is not the colour it usually is; it must have been torn or soiled during yesterday’s performance. Golden dust floats in the beam of the spotlights. In the pit the musicians’ skulls can be seen, lined up in a semicircle in front of the conductor, a tiny light shining on his rostrum. Four are bald.
Across from her, Pierrot, very close but already insurmountably distant, holds out his arms, stretches his legs, tightens his muscles, his face first distorted by effort and helplessness, then resolute. With a strange near-calm, he lets go, in a final attempt to catch her, because nothing else matters, and if he does manage to grab her he’ll find some safe way to land with her in his arms. They both fall like birds cut down in full flight amid the horrified cries of the villagers in the ring. Thinking it’s a particularly dramatic finale, the spectators in the stands get to their feet and bring the house down.
Pierrot lands violently in the safety net, has time to feel a spark of pain pass through him from neck to lower back, then faints. Columbine, held back by a harness, is pulled back brutally in mid-fall and stays suspended above him. He can no longer see her. At some point, no one knows when, the music stops.
FOR SEVERAL DAYS NOW DAMOCLES HAS BEEN dragging his paw. He has to be coaxed into or out of the car, hesitates at the bottom of the stairs and at the base of the mountain before he begins climbing with a heavy tread, and if he allows himself to lag behind, it’s not always because he’s chosen to bring up the rear but sometimes because he has trouble keeping up.
This morning, when she is out of coffee, when she mislays her keys, when she finds a hole in her boot and has to go home and put on an old pair of sneakers that squash her feet, when she turns up late at the house of the university professor who silently hands over his Labradors with an accusing look over his half-glasses, when it starts to drizzle as soon as they finally get to the mountain, the dog’s sluggishness exasperates her so much that after berating him one last time, she finally leaves him behind as if in punishment for his lack of will. She advances at a brisk pace surrounded by Vladimir, Estragon, Lili, and Juliette who keep going, barking.
—
It can happen that Lili Lady forgets to pay her for a month, then tries to do so three times in the same week, forgetting every day, it seems, what happened the previous day. Two days earlier, when she brought back the dog, she found the old lady in tears, shaking: “Dear God!” she exclaimed in her slightly lilting accent when she spotted the little white dog on the steps, “Lili! I thought I’d lost you forever!” then shut the door abruptly, without looking up, as if the animal had found her way home on her own after being kidnapped. She doesn’t remember the name of the dog-walker but she never forgets the dog’s.
The next day she was cheerful and smiling again but she had her sweater on inside out and at the base of her neck, between her hunched shoulders, you could see, standing up like the spring in a mechanical doll, a label with washing instructions. She helped the old lady take it off, then put it back on properly, guiding her frail arms, the skin nearly diaphanous, into the sleeves, as if she were dressing a child.
“Phhtt,” she says, spitting out a little downy ball, “what is this? Did it just appear during the night?”
Around them, the ground is covered with a fine white coating, like after the first snowfall, but this cottony dust flies away at the slightest breath of wind in drifting clouds that float at a low altitude for a moment, then touch down on the grass, flowers, and pebbles. The sky is filled with them, as if the mountain had been the scene of a tremendous pillow fight.
Finally Damocles appears, panting, and lies down between them groaning with relief.
“It’s from the white poplars,” he explains obligingly, holding out his hand to pick off a small frothy cluster that had formed on her head.
“You mean they moult? That’s ridiculous, I’ve never seen a living being make such a mess in such a short time.”
As if to back her up, Damocles produces a spectacular sneeze that sends a little white cloud flying around him. Stunned, the dog seems to be a prisoner of a snow globe. He shakes his head vigorously, long ears flapping in the air, but that only sends up a new plumed cloud from the dirt. He looks up, yawns and hastily shuts his mouth when he feels feathers touching his tongue.
“They aren’t moulting, it’s their mating season,” he explains.
“Couldn’t they be a little more discreet?”
“Why would they want to do that?”
She lets out a breath and a small cottony storm is unleashed.
“So what’s all that fluff for?”
“It acts as wings for the fertilized seeds and they’ll be scattered by the wind …”
Another thundering sneeze from Damocles, who scratches his muzzle vigorously with his bear’s paw.
“… and incidentally, by the dogs,” he goes on without interruption. “But not all poplars produce it; look.”
He points to two trees, identical except that one is wrapped in a fog of fluff balls while the second seems nearly naked in comparison, clad in just its shiny triangular leaves.
“What’s wrong with that one, why doesn’t it have any, is it sick?”
“It’s not sick, it’s a male.”
She shrugs one shoulder as if to say that she couldn’t have put it better.
He also works weekends. She could have sworn it.
Alone with Damocles, she has deluded herself into believing she was taking a walk that would just happen to lead her to the summit of the mountain, and scarcely an hour later she found herself a few metres from him. He waves a greeting, puts down his shovel, and comes to pet the dog, who hails him with joyful trumpeting.
“Do you work nights too?”
“Sometimes. You can’t leave plants out of the earth for too long; rosebushes die after no more than twelve hours. And rhododendrons are even more temperamental.”
“And there’s no one but you to take care of them? Surely you aren’t the only employee of this damn cemetery. What if you get sick?”
“I don’t get sick easily.”
They are sitting in the grass and while he pours the tea, she examines the books that he has, as usual, brought along. A flock of geese crosses the sky, honking noisily.
“Are you a student?”
“Not really. It depends what you mean.”
“It isn’t complicated: either you’re registered at the university or you aren’t.”
“No, then.”
“And all that?” she asks, pointing to the little mountain of books.
“That’s the miracle of the library. They give you a card that lets you borrow books and you promise to bring them back.”
“You do all that reading for yourself?” Taking the three volumes at the top of the pile, she lists them:
“Volcanoes: The Character of Their Phenomena, Their Share in the Structure and Composition of the Surface of the Globe.”
“Histoire du mont Vésuve, avec l’explication des phénomènes qui ont coutume d’accompagner les embrasements de cette montagne.”
“Illustrated G
uide to the Birds of Quebec.”
This last book opens by itself to the page that shows endangered species. She gives him a questioning look and he assumes an innocent expression, explaining: “I’m allowed to have a hobby, aren’t I?”
She continues her examination, studying the cover of one last book, worn threadbare:
“Volcanic Studies in Many Lands: Being Reproductions of Photographs by the Author of Above One Hundred Actual Objects, With Explanatory Notices, by … wait … Tempest Anderson. A prophetic name, don’t you think?”
“You forgot this one,” he says, turning over the old leather-bound volume he’s holding, on which is printed in gilt letters: An Inquiry Into the Nature and Place of Hell.
“So you’re trying to locate Hell? Most people find it quite easily, don’t they?”
“You’d be surprised to know where they place it. Underground. In the sky. On the Sun.”
Looking up, he winks as a sign of complicity, with her or with the invisible star beyond the clouds, she couldn’t say. The geese shape themselves into two white Vs, each one seeming to take an already assigned place. Damocles raises his muzzle towards the sky, surprised by their honking, and answers it with a brief yelp.
She goes on:
“If you aren’t a student why all this stuff about volcanoes and earthquakes?”
“I’m leaving soon for a job on the dig at Pompeii. The least I can do is arrive prepared.”
She leans imperceptibly away, squeezes the paper cup until a nearly unbearable heat spreads over her fingers.
“Right on. Do you speak Italian?”
He looks at her as if it had never occurred to him.
“No. What difference does that make?”
“None at all. You don’t speak Italian, but you’ll know precisely where Hell is and what it’s made of, so you shouldn’t have any problems.”
“That’s what I think too.”
A breath of wind lifts her hair onto her face, she pushes it away lock by lock.
“Far be it from me to discourage you,” she goes on, “but hasn’t Pompeii already been excavated? I’m quite sure I’ve seen photos, maybe even a documentary … You should probably find out before you buy your plane ticket.”
“The dig was started more than three hundred years ago, broken off, resumed several times, but today there are still as many buildings buried as exhumed.”
“It’s not moving very fast,” she notes, neutrally.
“Actually it’s more and more slowly, because when the buildings are brought into the light, they deteriorate in contact with pollution, even with the air, and also because of the millions of tourists who flood the site every year. Frescoes left perfectly intact for millennia lose their colour in a few weeks; columns that have been standing for two thousand years threaten to crumble.”
“So it’s more secure underground than in the open air?”
“Well … in a way, yes.”
“But why try so hard to unearth what’s buried if it means putting it in danger?”
The question obviously stuns him. He thinks for a moment, then suggests:
“Most likely there’s something more important than security?”
“I see. For instance?”
Again, silence. Then he ventures to say, timidly:
“The open air?”
As she does not answer, he goes on:
“You’ve never been tempted?”
“To go to Pompeii? Not me. Besides, as I already told you I hate flying.”
“Not necessarily Pompeii. Somewhere different. Don’t you ever get tired of climbing the same mountain every day?”
She didn’t see that one coming, nor did he, and he regrets his words as soon as they’ve passed his lips. But she has already gotten up. She says over her shoulder:
“If you really think it’s the same mountain every day you don’t understand a thing.”
She drops the cup into the grass where it overturns, and leaves without looking back. After a second of astonishment, Damocles follows her, dignified, all the disappointment in the world in his dog’s gaze.
Sitting at the foot of the beech tree, he rereads for the third time the introduction to a weighty treatise on elasticity written by a distant ancestor. Distracted, he doesn’t understand much, raising his head every time he thinks he hears footsteps. Finally Vladimir and Estragon appear, followed by Lili and Damocles, who rears up awkwardly when he spots him and then, limping slightly, nestles his damp nose in the man’s neck. But they’re accompanied now by someone in his early thirties, hair short, well-dressed but wearing incongruous rubber boots, his manner strangely familiar. He looks at this fellow, puzzled.
The unknown man greets him politely, noting that the dogs are giving him a warm welcome.
“Where is she?” he asks, suddenly concerned.
“In the hospital,” replies the other man with no apparent emotion. “Nothing serious, some queasiness last night, but ever since the accident it’s best to be cautious so they kept her overnight, under observation.”
The close-shaven stranger might as well have been speaking a foreign language. Then he realizes that this man had been with her last evening – though she’d said that she lived alone.
“And you are?” he asks the stranger, resisting an urge to start running.
“Oh, sorry. I’m her brother, Éric,” says the other man, extending his white hand.
“The airplane pilot,” he murmurs.
“Oh no, not me, I’m an accountant. And … umm … as my spouse needed a little quiet, I’ve come to the city for a few days. A kind of vacation,” he concludes, sounding like a man sentenced to death. “We had a slight difference of opinion, you see, nothing serious …”
But he has already gone. He turns around at the last minute, thinking to ask: “Which hospital?”
Not until he is in front of the imposing brick edifice does he realize that he has no idea what her name is. Strangely enough he’s never needed it for thinking about her. Suddenly he is aware that until this morning, he has never spoken to anyone about her, making her all the more precious in his eyes.
But here he is in the entrance to an enormous building where dozens of people are going back and forth, some looking busy, others exhausted: nurses in white or pale green; visitors with unruly children; attendants responsible for this or that, dressed in one-piece uniforms; a few doctors in blue, paper masks around their necks, racing outside for a cigarette or for a coffee at the corner. The lobby reverberates with the clamour of big spaces where people are only passing through: waiting rooms in stations or airports, shopping malls. He sweeps into the first corridor he discovers on his right and tries to remember the elementary principles for exiting a labyrinth. He can’t unwind a spool of thread behind him, but turning right whenever he can should let him systematically cover all the floors. And there are probably some departments he doesn’t need to go through with a fine-tooth comb: geriatrics, the neonatal unit … The thought of it makes him dizzy.
He slowly paces a corridor with a long row of doors on either side, mostly ajar. On the left, pale sunshine leaks out of windows and doorways and stretches across the floor covered with linoleum that’s known better days. Overcoming his reluctance and discomfort, he sticks his head in each of the doorways just long enough to distinguish forms stretched out in bed or hunched over in armchairs, near-ghosts that study him for a second, barely surprised, before they go back to their suffering. He doesn’t know if he has the will to go on much longer, but he knows that he doesn’t have what he would need to leave without seeing her.
She is asleep when he finally locates her room, fourth on the left in the seventh corridor of the west wing on the second floor. Seeing her pale face against the white sheets makes him think of the sunlight on the snow that covered the mountain the day they met. Next to her bed stands a plastic and metal instrument with a black screen where a thin green line traces peaks and valleys, evenly spaced. They remind him of drawings of the period
s before earthquakes occur, when the seismograph needle all at once records a number of nearly imperceptible oscillations corresponding to the wavelets, the barely noticeable palpitations and the minuscule eddies that announce the agitation about to shake the heart of the earth.
A tall, thin, sad-faced man is leaving as he arrives. The visitor looks young but he has the eyes of an old man; he leans on a cane as he walks and puts a finger to his mouth, enjoining him not to make any noise.
Silently, he sits in the vinyl chair beside the bed. A feeble light comes in the window and spills, honey-coloured, onto the walls and floor. Sounds from the corridor come to him muffled; the room is strangely calm, as if it has managed mysteriously to detach itself from the hospital and sail upon a slack sea. From his bag he takes a book and his notepad and resumes his reading, turning the pages as gently as he can to avoid disturbing her sleep. She is breathing regularly, like a wave that advances and withdraws under the effect of the backwash. Before long he too dozes off in the warmth of the room.
When she opens her eyes she finds him fast asleep, his mouth wide open. His book has slipped onto his knees and a page has escaped from his notepad. She reaches out for it, unfolds it cautiously. He has noted, in an urgent script:
Augustus Edward Hough Love
Slower than P and S waves, Love waves have a greater amplitude.
It is Love waves that people feel during an earthquake, and Love waves that cause the most damage.
She slips the paper very carefully under her pillow.
Feeling her eyes on him, he wakens almost at once. Jumps up, bends over the white bed. Probes her hazel eyes; in one pupil is embedded a green speck that shines with all the brilliance of the sea on a fine spring day. He would like to place his hand on her forehead but doesn’t dare.
Wonder Page 17
