Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon

by Nicole Brossard

  The bus sped by the Martello tower. I was barely able to make out the sandstone, the rounded erectile grey mass whose perfectly smooth surface offers no breach to the enemy’s assault. During that brief moment I repeated Molly/Martello to the point of feeling Molly’s body against mine. The sweet touch of her breasts on mine. With the tower already far behind, I tried to engage in a conversation with the woman sitting next to me. I immediately felt such linguistic incompetence that I quite naturally withdrew into a mellow silence, thinking, Joyce was resolutely hostile to the use of quotation marks, and especially to their use in dialogue.

  I met Carla Carlson at the Hotel Clarendon bar one evening in March. Since then we’ve been meeting twice a week. Every two years she spends three months in Québec City, four if necessary, to finish a new manuscript. She stays at the Clarendon, asks for a room with a wafer-thin view of the river – the same one for the last ten years. She speaks a beautiful French, and when she laughs it gets even better; her every word changes into a luminous humid landscape. I put a lot of care into preparing for my rendezvous with Carla Carlson. Ever since our first encounter, she has never stopped contradicting me about everything, as though this were a noble and philosophical stance that sharpens our sense of responsibility and conviviality. Putting an argument to death gives her a pleasure she terms erotic. Some evenings she sinks into an inexplicable muteness and always at the most strategic moment of a conversation – that is, when everything finally seems easy, intimate and conducive to a gentle relaxation of words open to metaphysics and to any other proposal that honours life. After all these years of writing she has kept a naïveté that allows her, so she says, to remain at an animal level, where it’s easier for her to develop her storytelling talent. ‘This is how I excel at naming wild forest animals and others whose juicy, well-seasoned flesh finds its way onto our urban plates.’ In the jumble of our conversations, she often talks about her father, about her way of walking around with him as if he were her property. The man could have been a poet born in Swift Current or North Battleford. A tall dishevelled man with Viking ancestors, he was built like a truck driver and looked like a dreamer. Over time he had developed a quintessentially Canadian style. Carla could always see him standing very straight, feet planted on the asphalt of northern highways, his shrewd blue eyes sensing the satin wind, scanning the future, women and the east, which always made him nostalgic, like when we watch time going by and the whiskey going down in our glass. Mythical and unfathomable, this man reappears in all her novels. Like so many women who grew up on the Prairies, Carla has taken possession of her father’s soul, meaning that she has lassoed the man like a rowdy character at the back of her memory, has sentenced him to suffer her every writer’s whim. She calls him the old man, Father or my papa, depending on whether pity, duty or affection is pushing her pen, the pen of a woman too young, too old.

  Simone Lambert has been living in Québec City for twenty years. She knows the city well, having spent some time there several years earlier. She’d left Montréal following an invitation from the ministry of culture to run the future Museum of Civilization. She’d been given carte blanche, a rather appreciable budget and colleagues both knowledgeable and bold. She’d vowed to give the new museum a worldwide reputation and she’d kept her word, working to the frantic pace of her own wishes and of administrative constraints. With her only daughter living in Latin America she was no longer tied to Montréal, save by a few youthful memories carefully stowed away in her childhood memory box: Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parades, Santa’s downtown arrival, mental pictures in assorted flavours all neatly lined up in the English-language pigeonhole of important feast days: hot dog, hamburger, popsicle, smoked meat, fish ’n’ chips and sundaes. Sometimes an old-fashioned horse-drawn carriage drove past her and acted as her collective memory. A snowstorm, a rain of slowflakes over the city, were enough to stir up a mixture of desire and jubilation between her legs. Crystals of reverie.

  She’d known for a long time that part of her life would be lived elsewhere – an elsewhere that would make her changeable and lucid. Yes, very early on she’d known she’d have to leave Montréal often, turn toward ancient cities as if having understood that only the remains of the past could ignite in her a vertiginous sense of being alive in the present. Scorching sun and white light, pieces of bronze, bones, fragile pottery, the dust of centuries, gave her wings. Drunk on life, drunk on the beauty of Alice Dumont, she would live as far as the eye could see in uncharted territory, her fascination for disappearing civilizations constantly revived by their inescapable ruins.

  This had become obvious to her one day while lunching with her mother and grandmother in the art deco restaurant on Eaton’s ninth floor. Every travel story her grandmother told aroused in her countless little joys and questions. So it was that, surrounded by old Anglo ladies chatting enthusiastically, as if they were about to give the vote to French-Canadian women, who still didn’t have it, she’d understood that her life would be made up of ceaseless toings and froings that would take her far from her city yet bring her closer to the world of women which, for her, so far remained nameless. Like her grandmother, she would go from city to city, from museum to museum, from mysterious ruin to fabulous site. Masses of marble, panelled brick walls or gold mosaics would speak to her, fill her with joy, for she would know how to decipher the secret which had once given birth to the lions, bulls and winged horses which now and forever had found refuge in the pages of the greatest myths.

  And so it was that shortly she would be the one greeting her granddaughter, now a grown woman. Her turn to tell stories and to lay open her world of dreams and work. A few days earlier Axelle had e-mailed, saying she hoped to spend a week in Québec City soon. Ever since, Simone Lambert’s whole being was awaiting that encounter with the child she hadn’t seen grow up, with the young woman she knew nothing about except that she worked in a big biotechnology lab in Montréal.

  In a few weeks, a month at most, Axelle Carnavale would be standing in front of her with her youth, her young woman’s vitality, her knowledge and her young researcher’s enthusiasm. On the phone the young woman had seemed moved, certainly reserved. She’d said she loved her work. She’d been lucky to find a job after her studies in New York City. She’d been living in Montréal for three years. No, she wasn’t married. She would drive up. Most of the time she would be attending meetings at the Université Laval and in the offices of the Genobis company. ‘We’ll still be able to spend some time together,’ she’d added with a little English accent.

  The room is poorly lit. A fine rain is falling on the lilac tree in front of the house. A leaden greyness is descending around the cars parked behind the apartment building, the grey of malls and conference centres lost between two highways. Life against a backdrop of Big Macs Shell Harvey’s and Pizza Hut. Axelle regrets renting this apartment on Cavendish Boulevard, a short ten-minute drive from the lab. The book she bought in a Côte-des-Neiges bookstore yesterday lies on the sofa. She remembers having started to read it in a crêperie where she stopped an hour before the rave started. She should call Simone. Tell her she has to postpone her visit until next week. Tell her also that she prefers sleeping in a hotel so as to not disturb her, that she may not have as much free time as expected.

  Axelle sits at the computer. On the work table, a picture of her mother with a seventies Afro. The photo was taken in Coyoacán, in front of Frida Kahlo’s blue house. There is also a photo of her father, who had preferred to be immortalized in front of Trotsky’s house just a few blocks away. Axelle hadn’t heard from him for a very long time. Lorraine had thought he’d gone back to France in time to make the most of the creative fury of May ’68.

  I prepare carefully for my meetings with Carla Carlson. I easily memorize every sentence she uses twice. Yesterday, unusually, we were to meet at the Krieghoff Café: Carla is seated on a banquette where she can see me arrive, watch what is going on at the bar and gaze into the large mirror covering the far end of
the hall, all at the same time. At eye level on the wall to her right, a bad reproduction of a painting entitled Montmorency Falls. Always the out-of-control sleigh, the galloping horses, always the smooth and haunting snow. Movement. Turmoil. Just like in the paintings and sculptures of the Americans Russell and Remington, where horses and buffalo twist their necks, buckle their shins, fly like the wind to escape the whip men are preparing to crack with wide and spirited gestures. There, where there are plains and desert, where cold and heat bring things to a standstill, it’s necessary to compensate formally with movement which then acts as an aesthetics and a story.

  Short hair, a cat’s piercing eyes. Black pants and T-shirt. I’ve barely sat down when she places her hands flat on the table, looks at me: ‘So?’ Carla speaks softly. Her voice is suspended, flat, even. It’s obvious this woman is no longer afraid of anything and that she works with only very few elements of memory. Two or three scenes. Some key sentences. A single landscape. Most probably the horizon. The Prairies. A single season: summer.

  Carla rarely smiles. At noon the sun skims the window ledge, coils up the curtains and seeks another ray, starts over somewhere else amid the muted voices. At noon:

  – The mind invents with what it sees, has seen, doesn’t want to see. I love the novels of Marguerite Duras because she knows how to make pronouns come alive. I’d like you to tell me about the exhibition.

  – Just come and see it.

  – Urns scare me. Just look at this perfect May blue.

  Things happen in intensity. As if nothing made sense except intensity. She uses the words intensity and immensity the same way. Carla has the power to tell stories from the inside, to map out roads, labyrinths built with sentences she has the skill to turn inside out in spectacular fashion. Then, with a few words drawn from successful comparisons, she projects as though on a screen soundscapes filled with promise.

  – Yes, I often detour through childhood as though dawdling there makes the grass greener. I invent crises. I force myself to describe emotions that may not be essential to understanding my torment. It’s as if I were trying to thread literature through the eye of a needle and, once I’ve succeeded, I really believe reality has gone through it. This irritates me and excites me too. Forces me to continue. Have you never wondered why I come to Québec to finish my manuscripts?

  – Probably to enjoy a change of scene. I’ve no idea.

  – I come here to make myself continue. To make sure my father’s ghost and my mother’s story are alive and viable wherever I go.

  Mother’s silence. It’s through the space created by Mother’s silence that I view the world, that I learned that another world exists which I could dive into, laugh all I want and exit victorious from any ordeal. I sometimes feel I’m sitting at the back of a large hall patiently waiting for Mother’s silence to mould my thoughts. In this place of reverie I also learn to not scream, to not disrupt Mother’s silence nor anyone else’s.

  Just as Carla grew up in her father’s wound, I grew up in my mother’s silence. And so every time we meet I want to offer her a bit of this silence so she can transform it into a word adventure capable of dissolving the enormity of grief, the ageold mass of bodies and of their fleeting presence by our sides.

  Daily living is an achievement. I’m surrounded by cries, by long laments and a wild and shy energy that transforms both the world and my mother’s silence into fiction, into an outgrowth of life, a nameless virtuality for the souls still asleep at this early hour, who in a few hours will go and stock up on the basics and lose their ability to revolt by hanging around the Galeries Sainte-Foy mall. Without my mother’s silence I am left wide open to the static noise that amplifies the coward in each one of us.

  Some time ago, while looking for a book in the museum library, I came upon a typewritten page sticking out of a book about diamond cutting. Prompted by curiosity, I read the first lines. I read and reread. Ever since then, this page is always with me. I sometimes read it several times a day. Its meaning varies, depending on whether I read it when I get up in the morning, in the afternoon when the sun floods my work table or when I get back from meeting Carla Carlson. I don’t think the page was part of a personal diary. Perhaps of a novel. Some days the meaning of the page seems obvious, on others it wavers like a conversation by the seashore where syllables are drowned out and pronouns merge with the noise of wind and surf. Today I memorized the page. Now it’s part of me and can surge into my thoughts at any time. Whole or in parts, slowly infiltrating my everyday life.

  She’s watching me in the dawn’s first light with an intensity that melts me. Her face a vivid world, I no longer know if I exist inside a photograph or if I once existed in the whiteness of the morning in front of this slow-gesturing woman who, never taking her eyes off me, is lying there in front of me, naked more naked than the night, more physical than a whole life spent caressing the beauty of the world. Sustaining her gaze is painful. I imagine, I breathe and imagine her once more. A few centimetres below the manubrium glints a little diamond that seems to stay on her chest by magic. The diamond, no doubt held there by a little ring inserted into the flesh, sparkles like a provocation, an object of light that lies in wait for desire, engulfs the other. I am that other. I am pure emotion lying in wait for the fate crouched inside this woman. The woman offers her desire, sows sentences in me whose syntax is unfamiliar and which I’m unable to follow and pronounce. Words there I cannot clearly distinguish – breasts, gusts, ships, stext – and, in between them, the woman’s lips move like some life-giving water that cleanses away all clichés, promises that every imprint of the gaze will be sexual, will be repeated and fluid as vivid as the morning light absorbing one’s most intimate thoughts. Her arms are open. She opens herself to the embraces that, in mother tongue, suspend reality. The woman has turned her head slightly and her throat astonishes. Her gaze contains traces of that water which, it is said, gushes when memory becomes verb and rekindles desire at the edge of the labia. The woman’s gaze sweeps into the future.

  Every century stages suffering so that it’s always in the foreground of the mind. Thus we can see it transform the humblest gestures into tragedies, brushing aside all life’s principles. The world has changed. It changes every day. Simone Lambert was eating a most exquisite sugar pie in the company of Fabrice Lacoste, who was mopping his forehead like during the hottest moments of summer while attempting to convince her that not going to this year’s Venice Biennale was a mistake.

  – The world has changed. Venice hasn’t. Make the most of it. Just think of the fondamenti streaming with light, the vaporetti letting out a feverish crowd at Arsenale then at Giardini, the campi so quiet at dusk. No, really? How about a Bellini at the Danieli?

  – I don’t have the time. I’m expecting my granddaughter.

  – She’s twenty-five, I don’t think she’ll need you.

  – Well, I need to see her, to hear her talk about her life and her projects. Maybe about Lorraine. (description of the dining room) The world has changed. Reality flickers. Around reality, reality still and again, giving the impression that everything goes on following the quiet rhythm of syntax and seasons. But where does reality lodge? Yes, the world is changing. Life crashes into life. Life cleanses life the way we suck the flesh off a chicken bone until whiteness and fullness are achieved. The world has changed: alienation is back, this time flexible and majestic.

  Fabrice was about to swallow a last bit of tarte Tatin. ‘How about a little something extra? Why don’t I order us each a glass of icewine?’

  – If you like.

  – You could take the opportunity to go to Rome and see that horrid Cardinal Toffga again. Who knows, you might even be able to come to an agreement about an exchange this time. There’s increasing interest in Québec there. The idea for the Le Québec au Vatican exhibition is gaining ground. In return, you might be able to get your hands on some of those missals, ossuaries and relics you’ve been coveting for 2005.

  With th
e word ossuary suspended in the aural chain, Simone gazes at Fabrice’s hands for a moment. Androgynous and carnal, they close around his silver lighter. A small blue flame rises above his male head. Simone has been contemplating that exhibition for years; not only would it please Québec’s old Roman Catholic core but most especially it would attest to the shifting of beliefs, to the plasticity of the convictions and emotions they beget. What did being of one’s time mean other than being doomed to doing like everybody else? If need be, to going from one little extra to the next until, having lost sight of reality, maybe even some of its meaning, we manage to weave images and new concepts tightly together so as to transform the real into a translucent backdrop.

  Venice. In her mind’s eye Simone can see the bar at Hotel Danieli, the Murano glass chandeliers watching over the clients like pink and bluish marvels from a bygone era forever suspended over Alice’s tanned shoulders. The world changes. Yet Venice keeps displaying its canals, churches and private hotels. Then the world changes again. Around the corner of a calle or on a bridge, young Africans, with their trove of fakewear bags branded Prada, Gucci, Vuitton or Yves Saint Laurent carefully arrayed at their feet on a large square of white cloth, wait patiently to detect in the eyes of tourists the glimmer of greed that will ensure their meagre earnings.

  Venice howls in the crazed gaze of the Titian who knows he is being stalked by the plague. Venice howls nobly through each one of its golden lions, howls of silence stifled in the tender flesh of Saint Sebastian. But Simone hears only the water of the laguna lightly lapping on the old stone of centuries, on the suffering that never ebbs from one century to the next.