Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon

by Nicole Brossard

  There were no other ‘We’ll go to the museum’ times, only a parting kiss on the cheek one day in the main hall of an airport named after a fruit with people loudspeaking to announce a series of flights. Then there were cacti, hibiscuses, bougainvilleas in a little garden in Coyoacán. But no Simone.

  Exiting history, exiting my own story as I please, seems infinitely desirable to me. To do so I juxtapose place names like Las Vegas, Salta or Trois-Rivières. I close my eyes, for I know I won’t live there unless and until I’ve redrawn the landscape. Or else I simply head for the North and its mirror lakes that reflect bear jaws and great antlers. To exit my story, I imagine myself driving for hours through the pampas or the boreal forest. With every bump I glide into the scarlet roundness of a sun on the brink of setting in the distance, as shacks made of tin and brown cardboard replace the green horizon and gradually turn into an industrial town whose residents are, for the moment, standing around in the heat, the dust or the cold, like people do in countries where dreams and their own histories never coincide. I sometimes tell myself it’s not natural, all those men set in the dust, those women whose eyes we never see and whose visibility depends on the flamboyant colours of their skirts or the shape of the sleeping children on their backs or chests.

  CARLA: Descartes is fourteen in 1610 when Caravaggio, aged forty, boards a felucca for Rome. Caravaggio dies in Porto Ercole a few days later after a prolonged agony on the beach of Versilia. I’m aware of your low tolerance for the word agony, but that’s how it is. So Caravaggio’s agony in the sand was probably a lot like Pasolini’s on the beach in Ostia in 1975.

  THE NARRATOR: I never said that the word agony horrifies me. I simply shared with you the fact that when Mother died, agony stopped being an empty word.

  CARLA: (signalling the waiter to bring her another Manhattan) Lighting. Do you know the meaning of the word lighting? Imagine a pile of clean clothes on a washing machine in a laundromat. Sitting on a shaky chair, a woman in pink bermudas and a sleeveless beige shirt. Afternoon. It’s hot. The woman is sweating. Outside there’s a fine little drizzle. The woman lights a cigarette. Imagine the lighting on her face. A train station at dawn with people circulating, looking more or less computer-programmed. A woman in a jade wool cardigan stands looking up at the station clock. Her eyes are abnormally moist. Just above her hangs a huge neon sign which, should it fall as I’m talking to you, would kill her instantly. Imagine. A little car parked on the side of the highway. Once in a while an oncoming vehicle’s headlights shine violently into it. A woman is sitting at the wheel. She’s staring ahead intensely while masturbating. Imagine the muscles of her face when the headlights sweep over her gaze. Now move the ashtray and the glasses on the table, lean over the Arborite, wait until the image of your face is still and then describe your mother’s face on her deathbed for me.

  How cities infiltrate us so that we can no longer do without them will always remain a mystery to Simone Lambert. The colour of the changing river and its breeze, sometimes its violent wind, arouse in her a being on the edge who in every way resembles the image she has of the artist at her best yet whom she has always feared becoming.

  Sun on her cheek, night sticking to her retinas, how many times has she, all abuzz with projects and memories, leaned her face against the bay window, pressed her being against the horizon, her gaze simply following the rose-lined paths leading to faraway sites where stone, marble and shells formed tiers of seats, nymphaeums, thermal baths, groupings so true to life they could have been a setting for her own. Why did the cities of Bosra, Petra and Palmyra come and spin around in her memory at the very moment Axelle was about to re-enter her life?

  ‘I cannot, however, let this last vessel depart without … It is true, even though you were the only thing in the world to which my heart was attached, he wished to separate us while you were still at the breast. And I struggled to keep you for almost twelve years.’ Simone absent-mindedly leafs through the fourth volume of Marie de l’Incarnation’s spiritual and historical writings. Marie’s letters to her son have always deeply moved Simone. ‘The circumstance that the Québec frigate is going to fish at the Île-Percée, where there are fishing vessels that return to France sooner than the vessels here are ready to depart, gives me the opportunity to write this little word … These new habitants oblige us to study the Huron tongue to which I had not previously applied myself, having contented myself with knowing only that of the Algonquins and Montagnais who are always with us. You will perhaps laugh that at the age of fifty I am beginning to study a new tongue … ’ After she turned fifty, Simone too had started learning Spanish as if hoping, through this language, to reconnect with a Lorraine long since disappeared without a trace.

  Tonight, everything in Simone is distraction, a chaos of images, volatile thoughts, a huge bone-crushing present which travels up and down the spine like her fear and discouragement when a competing museum tried to snatch artifacts she’d coveted for ages.

  CARLA: These days you can’t play at writing made-up stories. You have to aim directly at the goal and give the illusion of a continuous flow of thoughts that concern all of us, men and women, here and now. Out of the question to pretend, as in literature, where that’s all there is, pretense in the midst of a great blur. Pretending until you’re finally able to distinguish someone something that makes you feel like caressing or shutting up. It’s a strange process, you know. When pages are flowing one from the other and there’s no resistance, I’m surprised it doesn’t draw me further into violence or into those zones of languor where the unspeakable remains skin-deep. When things just flow, I worry. And when words resist, I worry too that things are resisting so much, that words are putting up barricades and setting terrifying fires as if to keep me from rediscovering the perfection of July evenings and my mother’s strong accent. So I lose patience, I get carried away. I let myself fall, bound and gagged, into the Wound (see dictionary under wound) as if I’d quite naturally learned to take my revenge on the dew and fine rains I readily associate with literature.

  An alley of pylons drawn against the sky, satellite dishes above rectangular warehouses stocked with materials of all kinds, campgrounds filled with mobile homes where one imagines women and men playing cards and smoking, or a solitary individual leaning against an aluminum window frame, masturbating to chase away boredom more beige than a drop of sperm on kitchen flooring or a pair of underpants forgotten on a laundromat counter. And all along the way, here and there on the roadside like a repeated apparition, the same isolated tree in the middle of fields, assigned there to brave fate and the thunder and lightning of ancient gods who now refuse to watch over the new genetically modified corn. Axelle drives, fast, with little sparks in her eyes.

  Traffic slows starting in Saint-Apollinaire. Something akin to panic overwhelms Axelle. Why did she agree to meet this woman who will probably want to question her about life in the days of her father and mother? A spirited sadness takes hold of her muscles and for a moment which seems like an eternity or a cliché, the past stretches out then retracts inside her, becomes rapid heartbeat. Suddenly on her right the Montmorency Falls appear like lightning, a repeated flash flood on which the eye cannot really rest because it’s already captured by the gigantic shape of a bridge looming full speed ahead, juxtaposing itself upon the retina with the beauty of the landscape and vertigo. And suddenly, fear and uncertainty tie a knot so oddly voluptuous in Axelle’s lower belly that she just allows herself to be rocked by the thought of seeing Simone again, the traveller, the brilliant director of a museum of civilization – in other words, a woman such as she’s never known and who, because of family ties, must already probably love her, would probably have no choice but to love her.

  CARLA: Sometimes I also played Queen Christina. But I always separated those scenes from those of Descartes’s death. I, Christina, at full gallop through a forest of wheat and spikes which, the farther in I went, changed into crazy trees, those violently subjected to the wind. O
n other days I loved those scenes, so much so that I waited for dusk then ran out of my house and walked in the fields with the same fervour as the woman who every morning went through the numerous rooms of her castle in order to reach her library. Once there I would take a book out of my pocket and, pretending to read, I’d wait. Someone would knock at the door. I’d say: ‘Enter, Mister Descartes (in English in the text). Please sit down and tell me about “that secret impulse which directs us to love one person rather than another.”’ On other days, I’d go hunting and systematically kill spiders, garter snakes and, with a bit of luck, every rat in my path. As Queen Christina I was admirably skilled and so cultured that it could have been said of me: ‘She was so far removed from all the weaknesses of her sex and had so absolutely mastered all her passions.’ In my novel, the queen lives in Rome and socializes with cardinals. Like Caravaggio, she dies in Rome.

  Yesterday, I had an odd dream – they all are when they show us dying. A lion was holding his jaw open over my throat. He wasn’t moving, just watching for the merest movement of my eyelashes. I was frozen in time and space, knowing full well that if I showed the slightest sign of life, that would be the end of me. Sentenced by the script, I woke up.

  Let’s get together again tomorrow afternoon at the Clarendon. I’ve something to tell you about Chapter Five.

  Sauntering down Rue Couillard, I got the urge to enter a boutique whose window display was more attractive than the rest. Once inside I circled the shelves until, on a whim, I decided to buy a ring I glimpsed among several others. ‘A poison ring,’ the saleswoman said, ‘from either Thailand or Indonesia or Asia,’ while apologizing for her ignorance. The ring is made of silver. On each side are shapes that could be numbers or letters or a meaningless floral motif. The top, a domed cover, opens. Inside there is room for three heart pills or any other aspirin-type tablet that can treat those strange and mysterious maladies that darken the gaze of the living or take them away, for a brief moment’s vertigo, to a better world. I bought the ring because of the word poison, which intrigues and fascinates me. I momentarily enjoyed toying with the idea that in just a few seconds you can go from one world to another, have death on your tail and down your throat, offer up your breath and your chest to fate. There’s also the top, so highly polished it becomes a mini-mirror where I can see my anxious and slightly deformed face, like in some antique device for measuring anxiety that has remained suspended above the void.

  I slid the ring onto my left ring finger. As I caressed the dose of imaginary possibilities contained in it, I thought fleetingly that something was going to happen to me. I like the ring. It makes me feel anxious. It tells me I haven’t yet recovered from the images of Mother’s agony. The ring reminds me that we are constantly walking through silences.

  I don’t dare tell Carla that I’m writing about our rendezvous. In fact, I’ve been transcribing our conversations for a month now. It all happened accidentally. I often recordmy comments about the works of art, the artists, the hanging or lighting of an exhibition. At home in the evening I translate my main points intowritten form. It was probably while rummaging through my bag one evening that I switched on the magic tape recorder, which captures the most silent vowels, coughs, low voices and even muted ones. Two hours of conversation including laughter, hesitations and, in the background, howling trumpets and demented saxophones. Carla tells her tales, gets ignited, laughs nervously. When I mention Simone Lambert she interrupts, saying, ‘I hope you introduce us before I leave.’ No matter what, Simone Lambert cuts a proud figure at the core of Carla’s story. Yesterday, I played and replayed the fifth recording, taking the time and care to transcribe the most trifling exclamations that always punctuate conversations.

  Ever since the first chance recording, I unfailingly slip the little device into one of my jacket pockets before meeting Carla Carlson. Two hours of conversation. Never more. Everything we say after those two hours disappears forever inside us, existing only in the inner being’s infinite smallness. And lodges discretely in each one’s memory.

  Once home, I concentrate meticulously on the shifts in tone, the idling between words, the hesitations. I study the how of sentences, the birth of a topic, its strong points, its slow descent into insignificance or, on the contrary, its soaring to prominence in an overall pattern that creates the impression the soul is about to rise up against immensity. I don’t feel I’m cheating or betraying. What I transcribe into my notebooks concerns only myself and language. The recordings sometimes make me feel like there are three of us conversing, slowly circulating, moving toward the other, thinking, ‘I’ll get her, I’ll get under her skin.’ When Carla talks for more than twenty minutes without stopping I enter a rare time dimension which is neither hers nor mine but the time of literature, I believe. Time, art and reality inexplicably collect at the edges of our lips. Some evenings, Carla comes back to the fact that Samuel Beckett was once stabbed by a vagrant. I let her repeat herself, for just hearing Beckett’s name moves me. On those evenings, I grab on to silence with a wristlock.

  Fabrice just left for Istanbul. A few kilometres from there, preparations are being made to flood one of the most exquisite of Roman sites. ‘They gobble up history like monkeys gobble and burp bananas.’ Fabrice was angry-happy, radiant. As before every trip, he talked about ruins and gastronomy, about youths whose beauty is now classical, now sultanesque, or like a great cry in the mouth of a contemporary Saint Sebastian. We worked up until the very last minute before he leapt into a taxi for the airport. He left me at least a month’s work while wishing me a nice summer. He plans to take advantage of the trip to holiday in Iran. As he was leaving he whispered in my ear that he plans to go to the theatre, outdoors and wherever the spectacle lures him. Three support staff came to see him off. They hugged and shook hands. Astri Reusch’s sculpture felt whiter than usual and its watery murmur more harmonious.

  It took me a long time to understand that human beings could find pleasure in one another. I long believed that only necessary things like work, sexuality and providing aid in times of emergency, in times of great disaster and uncontrollable fear, were at the root of all conversations. I always felt I was living in the margins of friendships, which must, they say, be cultivated and maintained with precautions infinitely more subtle than those required for love. Just like the word agony was unknown to me, friendship is, in its essence, I believe, foreign to me. This I discover while talking with Fabrice and Carla. Increasingly, Fabrice is something like a friend. He has that anxiety that often makes men worried and bony yet philosophical. Fabrice transforms his anxiety into a generous tenderness. He knows how to distinguish between true knowledge and the danger of half-baked learning rotting in the interstices of lucidity.

  CARLA: At first I thought it would be simple. That it would be enough to make one character stand out and put the rest in her or his service. At first, Papa wandered through the streets. I decided on everything: whether he stumbled on a rock, slipped on the damp cobblestones, entered a bar, got drunk or not. I held his joy, his unhappiness, at the tip of my pen, just like, as a child, I’d held the destinies of Helen and Descartes in my voice, at the back of my throat, which I could fill at will with good or bad feelings. But I can’t help it, I’m unable to talk about real life. For example, you see that woman over there, how when she aims her fork at her mouth she stretches her neck slightly, rounds her back, elbows tight against her breasts? That woman totally focused on the contents of her plate, which are now on the tip of her fork and now in her mouth, that short-haired plump woman with tanned chubby arms, is existing unawares. Those are the kinds of things I can’t bring myself to write about.

  THE NARRATOR: And yet there’s nothing more fascinating than observing human beings. If, in addition, you’re able to describe their most intimate gestures, you have the obligation, it seems to me, to respond to that call inside us to be curious about our own kind, be it only to act as a mirror or to foil a sense of hyper-vulnerability.

&nbs
p; CARLA: You’re probably right. There’s an Italian writer whose books I always read simply because it’s terribly hot in all his stories. In one of his novels the hero spends part of his time mopping his brow, eating omelettes and drinking lemonade. The heat destroys him every day. Life resumes at dawn and we get the sense that the man’s soul is going to sink in the midst of culture or crash into a pile of garbage left on the curb. I like this author because his characters all suffer the sultriness without compromise.

  THE NARRATOR: That seems rather trivial.

  CARLA: To me it’s stimulating. In struggling against the heat, this man is struggling against everything that makes life unbearable. It helps me understand. What’s worse is that all this heat, all this anxiety, brings me pleasure. This is why I keep writing those dark novels against my will.