Wonder

by Dominique Fortier

  Sometimes, at dawn in those alleys a girl will be found, covered with bruises, left there among the plastic cutlery, abandoned syringes, and sticky condoms. At this time of day the street is practically deserted. A homeless man sitting in the entrance to an ATM is petting his dog, lying curled up at his side; teenagers run up the slope to Sherbrooke Street. Farther away, they pass without a word into the realm of bling, of exorbitant restaurants and bars where every evening long lines of people stand, stamping their feet as they talk on their cellphones and where, some claim, just the night before, they saw Robert De Niro or Leonardo DiCaprio. In parking lots resembling second-hand luxury car dealers, brightly shining cars with sparkling chrome will line up; from them will emerge long-legged girls, girls who could be the sisters of those glimpsed, staggering, a little lower down on the street, in the doorways of greasy spoons reeking of rancid oil, accompanied this time by thick-haired men with heavy steel watches who laugh loudly and seem when they speak to be addressing an invisible audience. The restaurants will fill up; against a background of deafening music people will be served dishes with complicated names that will include chorizo, gravlax of something or other, and Kobe beef, often on the same plate, sometimes impossible to tell apart, served by statuesque but thoroughly morose models. At this hour, however, their windows are empty, black, and blind.

  It was there on this thoroughfare that more than a hundred and fifty years ago, Guilbault’s Botanical and Zoological Garden spread out in all its splendour. Its spectacular grounds first opened in 1840; the various attractions (greenhouse, an area planted with fruit and forest trees, gymnasium) could be visited for the sum of precisely seven and a half pence. According to the proprietor, gathered together there was “one of the largest collections of live wild Animals, rare Birds and Natural Curiosities in North America.” Depending on their inclination, visitors could take home a horticultural or avian souvenir, because “dahlias, roses, poultry, birds” were offered with equanimity.

  As for feathered creatures, store fronts in the Portuguese neighbourhood proudly display multicoloured pottery roosters at their doors and restaurants that serve up golden, spit-roasted chickens, whole fried fish, and good strong coffee; just a little further up and set back slightly from the street, there is a tombstone company; another that’s been selling cut-rate shirts for decades; cabinet-makers and second-hand stores that are to some degree the memory of this boulevard that is itself the city’s memory. Designers’ studios, vintage clothing boutiques, and everything in between (recycled, mended, new clothes made from old rags); a vegan restaurant where butter is replaced by sesame paste and bacon by seitan; farther north, a bar without a name or sign, its logo a little bird drawn on a slate with chalk that Anglos call “Sparrow” while for Francos it’s “Moineau.” Nearly across the street, another restaurant called Lawrence in honour of the boulevard, where you can eat bubble and squeak as if in an English cottage; a brick building that is home to hundreds of twentysomethings in fair-trade cotton T-shirts and Converse sports shoes, busy creating video games, while across the street is a bright café with big windows where one can drink tea peacefully in the afternoon surrounded by plants. It is there that they leave the Main, which continues on its way to the tip of the island, stopping only when the street finally finds water again.

  THE MOUNTAIN IS COVERED NOW WITH A TENDER green shadow, scarcely more than a shiver, a shimmer at ground level and at the tips of branches, a shadow that spreads from day to day until the mountain is totally enveloped. Clusters of miniature seed pods, nearly translucent, hang by the handful from maple twigs, dazzling tulips have opened in the undergrowth – how they got there no one knows – forming bright red bells on the dark earth.

  The summit this morning is bathed in a fine mist that might be rising from the earth or falling in a drizzle from the clouds. The sky is the grey of felt, and the droplets look like a thousand cold needles. All that’s visible of the Saint-Germain church is the pointed tip of the verdigris steeple. One can’t even hear the birds that are taking shelter from the rain, nestling near the trunks of the most verdant trees. She is alone in all that fog, along with the soaking wet dogs and their dirty paws.

  Not until she is getting ready to go home does she realize Damocles hasn’t rejoined them. She calls once, twice, three times. Lili, who hasn’t left her side for days, pricks up her ears and looks at her, distraught, then spins around and races down the path, kicking up arcs of mud behind her slender paws. She turns immediately and follows the dog, at first briskly, then at a trot, ultimately running as fast as she can, whistling, calling again. She can no longer feel her legs, feels almost as if she is flying, and all at once it seems to her that there’ll be no end to this descent. Finally she spots the heavy shape lying on the edge of the path. He tries awkwardly to get up as she approaches but, too feeble to hoist his body on his long legs, the animal falls back on his knees and chin, only able to wag his tail.

  The dogs stop behind her, at a respectful distance. In the dirt she sees the hesitant traces Damocles has left, the outline of his big body on the ground, his wobbling steps, again the impression of his flank on the earth. He has fallen and pulled himself up as many times as she has called him.

  He is panting with effort, has trouble holding up his head, which she takes and gently settles on her knees. He follows her every move with his big eyes which express his despair; he wants to obey but can’t. “Good dog,” she murmurs, and a nearly transparent membrane briefly covers the black pupil. Damocles raises an ear. He lets out a groan that expresses as much surprise as suffering. She strokes the soft hair of his ear, his warm nose, smoothes his forehead and his worried eyebrows; a quivering begins in his cheeks and runs through the dog’s entire body. His pink mouth opens; his tongue is hanging out, he doesn’t stop looking at her and uses whatever strength he still has to keep his eyes open. Softly she says: “We’ll soon be home, old pal.” Only then do his brown eyes close. The head on her knees is heavy, like a stone.

  The dogs approach now, sniffing Damocles’ remains as they might some unknown object. From her own throat comes a moan that she doesn’t recognize either.

  The two shaky flashlights make holes in the night, two delicate white tunnels where big white moths and other pale butterflies with large blind eyes flutter, panic-stricken, tiny, ephemeral, nocturnal fauna irresistibly attracted by the light.

  It takes forever to dig, at the foot of the beech tree, the grave where gently he places Damocles, who from now on will be one with the tree. She has brought a blanket, a bone, and a teddy bear missing two arms and a leg that the dog used to carry delicately in his teeth as if it were some precious, fragile treasure. Kneeling on the cold ground, she throws handfuls of earth onto the body of Damocles, who looks as though he is sleeping.

  The moon rises, huge and white on the horizon, casting an ashen light on the rocky mountainside and on the city below. The North Star sparkles above the trees. On drowsy Mount Royal all that can be heard is the wind rustling in the leaves and now and then, the surprised hoot of an owl. When the grave is filled in, she carefully chooses each of the pebbles and puts together a dog made of stones, lying on its side, holding in his mouth a teddy bear.

  They stay there for a long time, between the lights of the city and the wealth of stars. At the same moment, elsewhere on earth as well as nearby, children are dying and forests are burning, men strike other men who are their brothers, or their wives, or their daughters, while on all sides cries of distress rise up in the night. They both stay there, crying over the death of a dog.

  Then the moon disappears at the same time as the wind rises, as if chased away by the breeze. Leaves turn, rustling, showing their grey undersides. A droplet lands on her shoulder, another on her nose and soon the storm is raging. The drops fall so heavily now that they draw long oblique lines in the air like those traced in the sky by shooting stars. They can see nothing even two steps away, the air is saturated with moisture, erasing the outlines of tombstones a
nd the horizon, all lost in the leaden grey of the storm. A distant lightning flash lights up a patch of sky, followed by a muffled crackling. At the first drops he tried to pull her blindly down a winding road lined with vaults like massive sentinels. A new flash of lightning illuminates with a brief white brilliance trees and tombs, followed at once by a deafening roar, as if the sky had split in two.

  She throws up her arms towards the clouds, throws back her head, closes her eyes. The distance separating the intensity of the flash from the rumbling of thunder diminishes each time, as if after having followed it in vain since the dawn of time, the roar was finally able to catch up with the light.

  “Come on,” he urges her, but she doesn’t move, her face flooded.

  He takes her elbow, tries to pull her; she frees herself. Now the lightning is sweeping the sky like spotlights, while the rumbling thunder makes the ground vibrate beneath their feet. Frantic, he looks for a shelter close by.

  He did not see the thunderbolt fall but he felt it, a tremendous discharge that in an instant brings together sky, fire, and earth. A powerful smell of ozone spreads through the damp air. The oak where they picnicked more than once splits in two from top to bottom with a grim creaking sound; one emaciated half of the tree, festooned in black, still stands. The inside of the tree was hollow.

  After that she lets herself be led docilely to a stone vault. He pushes a heavy bronze door that opens without a sound, revealing a dark interior where they can discern some long rectangular forms arrayed on thick stone shelves.

  The candle lights up one side of his face and she has the impression that she can make out better than ever before the bridge of his nose, the curve of his chin, the line of his cheekbones, and the tiny creases that form at the corners of his eyes when he smiles, as if until now, daylight and lamps have always hidden some part of him that is only revealed in this chiaroscuro.

  He clears his throat as if preparing to say something but remains silent, finally sitting on the ground, hugging his knees as he leans against the wall at his back. Looking up, he pats the earth in front of him and she comes and nestles between his legs, her back against his collarbone. He puts his arms around her waist, and through the layers of soaking-wet cloth she can feel the warmth of his body. His breath is warm and regular on her neck, then on her lips, her shoulders, her belly.

  They stayed in the mausoleum for hours, the candle warming the darkness. She woke up just before dawn and watched him, still asleep, half-undressed, their clothing rolled up in a ball. Eyes closed, lips parted, he looked like a statue. During the night a young and slightly prickly beard had covered his cheeks. She pulled on the door. The rain had stopped and on every blade of grass stood drops, round and trembling. A green odour rose from the earth, the sky in the east was turning pale while the stars that had reappeared during the night were declining one by one in the burgeoning light. All around her the dead were sleeping while in the city the living were slowly waking up.

  He emerges from the tomb, dishevelled and still numb with sleep, at the same time the sun rises.

  “My name is Rose,” she says, without turning around.

  “And I’m William, Love.”

  She smiles. Of course his name is Love. In front of Rose Cyparis and William Love, the first light of dawn is stretching out between the graves. The silence suggests that the earth has drunk up the last sound and is dozing still, peacefully, in the veils of night. The nocturnal animals have hidden themselves from the daylight; there’ll be no visitors for a long time. A crow spreads its wings and takes flight. The cemetery belongs entirely to the still stones marking the presence of the dead, some with the appearance of a standing man, erected in memory of those who lived – a day, a hundred years – on this earth to which their bodies have been committed and with which they are now one. The rays grow longer, spangled with gold, next to the silhouettes of the crosses and statues lying on the ground where shadow and light rest together.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I hope that historians, mathematicians, geologists, and other experts will not hold against me the liberties I have taken with their respective fields. While inspired by facts, this book is a work of the imagination.

  It seems that Baptiste Cyparis (who has also been called Ludger Cyparis, Louis-Auguste-Cyparis, and Jean-Baptiste Sylbaris) was in fact the only human to have survived the deadly eruption of Mount Pelée on May 2, 1902, in the course of which some 30,000 lives were lost. Following that “achievement,” he was apparently recruited by the Barnum & Bailey Circus and became one of the main attractions in its traveling show. Not much more is known about him, but anyone wishing to learn more about Saint-Pierre at the time of the eruption may consult Fire Mountain, by Peter Morgan. Readers will find in it a rigorous chronology of the events – from which I have allowed myself to depart. Information relating to the first excavations at Pompeii was mostly taken from Pompeii Awakened, by Judith Harris.

  The mathematician August Edward Hough Love, born in 1863, was interested in geodynamics and the elasticity of solids, fields in which he made significant discoveries. His career at the University of Oxford was longer and more brilliant than the one I created for him in London. Love numbers, named in his honour, are used to measure the elastic response of the Earth to the influence of the tides, and Love waves are still used today in studying the Earth’s crust and, especially, earthquakes. I made Edward Love a few years younger and created for him the imaginary existence that his real name seemed to call for. I like to think he wouldn’t have minded.

  Many thanks to Nadine Bismuth, François Ricard, and Yvon Rivard, first readers who are at once shrewd and benevolent. Thanks to Dr. Danielle Gilbert, who saved me from committing absurdities in materia medica. Thanks to Julie Robert, Éric Fontaine, and Éric de Larochellière. Thanks to Antoine Tanguay, monsieur Alto, for his fiery spirit, his intelligence, and his passion for literature. Thanks to Lara Hinchberger for her instincts and her keen eye, to Ellen Seligman for a wonderful title, and to Sheila Fischman for lending her talent to my book.

  Finally, thanks to Victor the dog for the daily walks on the mountain that now reminds me of him each time I see it. And thanks to Fred for everything – and all the rest.