Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon

by Nicole Brossard

  The book is lying on a stack of files her mother has forbidden her to touch. To touch is to displace and then it’s hard to find things again. Tonight, Lorraine is participating in una mesa rotonda along with a sociologist, a librarian from Coyoacán and a novelist who has just published an essay on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. It’s hot. Axelle is home alone. She wanders about aimlessly in the living room. An awkward gesture and Violette Leduc’s book falls among the files: ‘I detached myself from my skeleton and floated away on my dust. The pleasure was rigid at first, difficult to sustain. The visit began in one foot, pursuing its course through flesh now candid once again. We had forgotten our fingers back in the old world, we were gaping with light, invaded by a rending bliss. Our legs mangled with delight, our entrails flooded with illumination … ’ It’s a little pink book about nineteen centimetres tall by ten centimetres wide. The pages have been cut with care. Nothing torn, as is often the case when we want to proceed too quickly.

  Axelle pauses on certain words. A lot of body. Something alive that operates slyly to project the body into a better, more carnal world. Standing in the middle of the room, Axelle promises herself to become a flesh-and-blood woman and to teach herself at length and methodically about the body.

  DESCARTES: After your death, the idea of the sea and the plain never left me. I did everything I could to settle down in villages close to the sea. I was happy in the flat land and, though my sorrow was deep, I continued working.

  THE PARROT: Med’tation, med’tation.

  DESCARTES: I don’t know what became of your mother. She seemed inconsolable, fragile. She started losing her beautiful hair which I so loved to stroke.

  HILJINA: You chased me away then you simply forgot about me. I know that your father’s death only months after our daughter Francine died was painful for you. Foregoing all sense of propriety, you allowed yourself to weep like a woman. I know you suffered, but there was no need to throw me out like some domestic animal.

  THE PARROT: Animax-machine, animale-machismo, anima-malady.

  THE CARDINAL: Intelligenti pauca.

  HILJINA: Oh, shut up! You inquisitive shit.

  DESCARTES: Helen, I beg you, let’s strive for harmony here. When Queen Christina asked me to write a poem for a ballet to honour the peace in Westphalia, I didn’t hesitate to pledge my full co-operation and to put my every energy at her service while promoting the wisdom of Pallas. (turning toward Hiljina with difficulty and suddenly mistaking her for Francine) As a child, you were very easily entertained. As a child I needed boats, swords and the wind, but like you, I also loved playing with nothing, negate, rhyme, mime, drown my sorrow in words and Mother’s hair. Francine, I would have loved to do with you what I’ve been doing with Queen Christina for a month. At five in the morning, by candlelight, sometimes while watching the snow accumulate in the shape of a camel’s back under my window, I would have told you about the passions that govern us and the phenomena that, although they’re simple, drag us unawares into labyrinths we then have difficulty getting out of with dignity. Thus the appearance of a disturbing yet simple passion in our lives provokes the just-right landscape of harmony.

  Without any hesitation, Simone Lambert heads for the embarcadero, where boats shuttle back and forth between Marco Polo Airport and Piazza San Marco. An hour and forty minutes of pleasurable settling into a tropical languor, eyes glazed by jet lag and madly bedazzled by the sea’s glaring sunlight. At first the shuttle moves fast, like on a country road, through a corridor free of algae and high grasses. On either side, people are digging for clams, bent over like in a Millet painting. At Murano and at the Lido, passengers embark, disembark; the sea widens, ceaselessly travelled to and fro starboard and portside by cruise ships and motoscafi. The sun shines bright. Strong heat blurs the horizon until, emerging from the water like a mirage, La Serenissima reveals its most unexpected shapes: the campanile, the domes of La Salute and of San Giorgio Maggiore. And travel-weariness evaporates. Time unrolls its carpet between the sea and a vague idea of the immensity which dreams so easily transform into surfaces, flexible, capable of renewing customs and embellishing stories. La Serenissima quickens everything. Centuries fly by. Before the boat docks, Simone will have walked elbow to elbow with Renaissance artists and scholars. Flouting the life sentence weighing on her sex, she will have demonstrated cleverness during each one of her imaginary exchanges with merchants, military men and men of God.

  Campo Santa Maria Formosa, siesta time. The piazza is quiet. The heat intense. Next door to the Scandinavia Hotel, the Orologio Bar is open. Simone goes in and orders an espresso. The owner recognizes her. She’s happy to see her again. Part of the pleasure of living rests on the joy others demonstrate when they see us again, thinks Simone. It’s simple and it works. The multicoloured strips of plastic hanging from the door frame remind her of Monica Vitti in L’Avventura. Simone knows it’s easy to be afraid that everything is too perfect. Easy to make much ado about nothing, hoping every instant will be chock full, entirely devoted to understanding life better and enjoying it to the fullest. Fine. She downs her coffee, walks the few metres to the hotel. At the desk she fills out a blue form, asks to be woken up in two hours.

  Axelle drops the postcard postmarked Venice on her desk: a winged lion on a starry blue background, plus Saint Theodora’s column and Saint Mark’s with its three-ton lion. On the back of the card, a date, three lines, a signature in mauve ink. The first and second sentences are printed and in quotes: ‘Thus we walked from bridge to bridge, talking of things … Love of my native place bestirred me.’ Above the signature, ‘See you soon. Love.’ The stamp, no doubt chosen intentionally, represents a manuscript page from Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere.

  As a child, Axelle was fascinated with lions. Seated in front of the television, she would watch their every muscle, and when the image was in slow motion, she’d penetrate their gaze as if it were a door opening onto a world that, provided with the proper vocabulary, she would instinctively have declared horribly fierce and nostalgic. In plush or in plastic, the king of the jungle was an ally to her, a likeable grouch. Her mother had swiftly turned her away from such a notion by telling her about the mercenary lions who used to ferociously attack early Christians. As for her father, he had advised her to stay away from the lions made of stone and of bronze, of marble and of granite, that stood watch at the entrance of banks, museums and train stations in the name of the British Empire, which held sway over the heart of Montréal. Gradually the marble lions had made way for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s roaring feline, then for the designer logo lions at Peugeot and the Royal Bank. Still today, it’s with a very peculiar emotion that Axelle recalls Patience and Fortitude nobly posing outside the New York Public Library.

  A last glance at the postcard. Peter Workhard appears in the door. He’s about to come in when his cellphone calls him to order. With a shrug and a wince, he gestures goodbye. Axelle wonders who authored the quotation, thinks that searching for the answer is like looking for a needle in a haystack. And who knows, it may not be a quotation after all but simply an appropriate thought that crossed Simone’s mind and which she chose to highlight by putting it in quotation marks.

  With Simone Lambert away for a week, I experience an unspeakable ennui while circulating through the rooms of the museum and the corridors of Maison Estèbe. I cancelled two rendezvous with Carla, as though there were some connection between being deprived of Simone’s presence and enjoying conversation with Carla Carlson, novelist. It’s been raining for two days. The grass in front of the parliament building is a tropical green that makes you want to be elsewhere and to read unusual books. Despite the rain I prefer to walk home. Apart from the museum people, I see no one except two seriously tattooed women I talk with at Taverne Dion before going back to the apartment. I reread my notes on artificial ruins. I’m thinking of adding a series of photographs taken in Chernobyl and Minsk and along the Pripet – photographs of factories and trains decaying in huge f
ields fertilized by death. Also pictures of ships and destroyers abandoned to rust, salt and their own secretions. Barrels of dioxin, radioactive matter. Contemporary ruins are slow-moving monsters yet ferocious nonetheless. Ruins strewn like fresh waste matter that acts like a wound by reminding us that, well beyond tempus fugit, abandonment is a desertion of the senses. Contemporary ruins are to our thoughts what corrosion is to raw materials; they deposit in us images of abandonment that forever contaminate our sense of duration. Abandoned children. Abandoned novels. Contemporary ruins are very useful for fuelling our contradictions. They are in no way useful to art, and yet I am no doubt going to use them to convince Simone Lambert to let me curate an exhibition I plan to entitle Ruins: Time’s Remains, Desire’s Reign.

  The vaporetto is crammed with art lovers, gallery owners, critics, artists. Few people get off at Arsenale. At Giardini, passengers rush to the gardens and onto the little pebble paths leading to the Biennale and its pavilions. Simone heads straight for the Canadian pavilion, has a glass of prosecco while chatting with the artist chosen to represent that country. After two drinks she decides to go and say hello to her friends in the French, British and German pavilions located near the Canadian one. The smell of fresh paint from the installations mixed with the wind-borne dust from the paths creates a strange kinesthetic cocktail which, now mixing in with tiredness from the trip, prompts Simone to let go into a nameless relaxation. In Venice, but especially in this contemporary place of celebration, Simone feels supremely free, at the peak of her sensitivity. Here, she once again becomes Alice Dumont’s lover, a passionate woman whose body vibrates at the slightest contact, even the wind on the nape of her neck. After all these years the images still come flooding, numerous, vague here, well-defined in the more sensitive areas of memory.

  Without realizing it, Simone moves with gestures round and full of finesse, not bothered by the snobs and amateurs around her. She can, in this precise moment of well-being, handle anything: sleazy looks, crooked smiles, limp hands, elephant-like embraces. So soars her enthusiasm until, a few metres away, a man stands out from the crowd, dressed in black, hair tied back in a ponytail, shoulders wide. The man has aged but kept a counterculture look, a Marxist hooked-on-history look. This is the last person to have been seen with Lorraine before she disappeared. Standing with a glass of wine in his hand, the man walks into some red powder spread on the floor of the American pavilion, where Ann Hamilton is showing her most recent installation. Something smoke-like made of the same powder hisses from the ceiling like gas and trickles down the white walls in thin scarlet rivulets. On the floor, the horrid stuff sticks to soles and reddens visitors’ steps.

  There was a time when their readings criss-crossed like tango steps. Simone read certain books just to be able to recommend them to her daughter. As for Lorraine, she read authors she called innocent for the sheer pleasure of discussing them with her mother. Later on they resumed this game, this time by visiting museums and galleries. Simone would propose grand major works, Lorraine promoted young artists whose work and interventions spit fire. One spoke of inspiration and talent, the other of courage and lucidity. This strategy lasted happily for a while, until the day Lorraine left home without explanation and moved into a loft in Old Montréal. Simone was purchasing art for a multinational back then. She was devastated by the feelings of abandonment and rejection Lorraine’s estrangement sparked. She invented opportunities to see her, pretending to need her opinion about this or that young artist. She invited her to vernissages where alcohol and projects flowed. Everywhere there were halls, rooms, buildings to be inaugurated in a Montréal being torn down and rebuilt, lips lapping Scotch for some, hands waving placards for others. Lorraine introduced her to Alexandre Carnavale, a talkative young Marxist-Leninist painter. Nine months later a daughter was born, whom they named Axelle in honour of the Swedish figure skater Axel Paulsen, thinking about the axis of revolution that slumbers in every newborn, even a girl.

  I’m gradually slipping into a vertigo which, for some reason, keeps me at a distance from Carla’s novel. For a long time I believed it was good to let fiction into one’s life. That this would make it possible to reframe existence, to unfurl landscapes so stunning that afterwards one couldn’t help but love the most ordinary gestures and objects, for, once fiction had traversed them with its kaleidoscopic brilliance, everything comprising reality would shine with a thousand intriguing fires. Fiction was my foothold for touching light. I knew how to make it enter my life like others allow sex, violence or gastronomy into their thoughts. Truth be told, I exaggerate the importance of fiction because I’m quite naturally able to sort out the emotions, words and sensations that emphasize the duty of existence. It’s like rolling out a carpet under the eyes of a blind person. While the blind person makes do with the muted sound of the wool on the ground, I take possession of every movement of his face. I enter what blinds him, without losing track of the carpet and its diamond-point motif, always redder than blood. Sometimes I can hear the sound children’s fingers make on the warp and weft of looms.

  Today I simplify everything, I say, ‘Oh, there are no mauve clouds,’ and in just a few thoughts I travel around the world like Simone tours civilization, forced to handle bones and weapons throughout an entire project. Sometimes while listening to Carla I feel like kissing her on the mouth. Like moulding my lips to the words she pronounces.

  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.

  CARLA: In Chapter Five, Descartes learns about Galileo’s arrest. I have him say, ‘I was afraid. And ashamed, for I had only just realized that it would to be too great a risk to publish The World, or A Treatise on Light. I did not wish to die prematurely in the fires of the Inquisition. I wasn’t a hero. The truth could wait a few more years for an editor. Shame is a feeling I had never yet experienced, for until that day my actions and my thoughts had always been in accord. When we are made to face them, violence and injustice give a new configuration to the values that govern us.’

  THE NARRATOR: How does the cardinal react?

  CARLA: He doesn’t. Hiljina is the one who intervenes by talking about guilt, honour and duty. For ten pages, she gives examples of courage and cowardice. I bring her progressively to talk about her mother, a peasant girl raped by the unknown soldiers of three different armies.

  THE NARRATOR: Don’t you think you’re exaggerating?

  CARLA: It was a common occurrence at the time. And rather more often than not. Why do you think settlers in New France sent their daughters to school with the Ursulines? Beca
use it was simply the best way to keep them from getting raped before they were married.

  THE NARRATOR: I didn’t know you were interested in our history.

  CARLA: Imagine what happens to me when I mix the words Ohio, Detroit, Hochelaga with some animal names and a few first names belonging to pallid people living along the highways of America and its great rivers. The stories that come from one era are all alike because of the tools and technologies. Morality being a technology of the spirit, it too spreads out everywhere at the same time. The boom of fascisms, the boom of dictatorships, the boom of fundamentalisms. For better and for worse, morality follows the stock exchange and fashion.

  Joy, I imagine it takes joy to run up and down the long wooden staircase between the lower city and the upper city or to run full speed ahead in the alleys of Saint-Roch. I imagine it takes great joy to make the world come to life as though magically, in its everyday narrative, for people to be happily walking along Rue du Trésor, in the corridors of Parliament, in the cafeteria of Hôpital du Saint-Sacrement. Joy, it takes great joy to pretend you’re not a people but just persons like everybody else; it takes great joy to open your arms out to the future, to new concepts and new complexes.

  Since Mother’s death, I often think about the men and women who are about to die. They aren’t ill yet but I know they are going to be. It’s a way of summarizing life, pitching it into the course of things with a joyful statistical curve. We add, we subtract. A generation leaves the city, another moves in, a third is already on its way. There’s one image that keeps coming back to me since a gorgeous May afternoon when Mother was alive. We would always celebrate her birthday at an inn by the Richelieu River. We’d arrive for the one thirty seating. Sometimes we had to wait for the first seating to be finished, and I’d see full-bellied people, yawning, slowly preparing to leave, to yield their seats to happy, hungry newcomers wanting only to drink well and eat well – exact replicas of those now about to depart who, just a few hours earlier, had sat down at nicely set tables, consulted the menu with gusto, ordered dishes and wines that were still in the realm of the virtual and of desire. Now they were all sitting in front of stained tablecloths, of empty or half-empty plates, cutlery scattered about. In a few moments we would sit down, as happy as clams, in front of virgin tablecloths, pretty place settings, menus that would make us salivate. The maître d’, the sommelier, the waitresses would repeat their courteous words, their mouth-watering explanations and their thoughtful gestures. We would feel like the first come, worthy of attention and respect. The first sip of wine would convince us of our immortality.