THE NARRATOR: So what are you complaining about?
CARLA: (silence)
Yesterday, after meeting with Carla: sooner or later everybody ends up saying ‘I remember,’ everybody without exception, anchored to their skeletons and to the pivotal moments of their life which, all in all, are not so numerous and never last more than a few hours, a few days at most. Pivotal moments proudly bequeathed to the next generation, which in turn will hand them down to the next one which will pin them to its resumé in lower- or upper-case letters every time there’s a need to resist erasure. Carla often says, as though she were afraid of being forgotten: ‘When the day comes that nobody on this planet is able to recognize your face in a photograph, you have just disappeared into the cosmic void forever.’
Over the last two weeks I’ve found conversations with Carla exhausting. There’s nothing left between us but dialogue – a ball game useful for her novel but which leaves me isolated in centre field.
This frenzy for telling stories. The longer Carla stays, the more the novel progresses, the less space there is for me to insert myself into her world which, I’m sure, is going to devour her someday. Just ten years ago I would have noticed her rounded eyelids, like those of fifteenth-century Italian madonnas, the carmine lips; through her I would have awakened dozens of famous women: Joan of Arc and the Princess of Clèves, Catherine de’ Medici, Marie Curie, Greta Garbo. Together we would have rambled on about learned women’s lost sense of honour.
After a month of rendezvousing, Carla knows nothing of me. I am always presumed attentive and available. There’s no doubt that I’m attracted by the disturbing landscape she carries inside her like a herizon. In this city of Québec, foreign to us both, we could have undertaken the countdown of certainties, set something up between us other than those existential playthings called childhood or flamboyant dreams.
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.
Axelle is staying in a Sainte-Foy hotel. At the reception desk, a message from Simone welcomed her and set up a date for eight thirty in a restaurant in Rue Sainte-Ursule. Axelle asked not to be disturbed. She took a shower, then fell asleep with a large towel wrapped around her. She woke up famished, realized she wouldn’t be able to hold off eating until her rendezvous, wolfed down two bags of nuts from the mini-bar. After walking around aimlessly for a while, she settled into bed to study a file on heredity. Two pages, she read only two pages before finding herself in Simone’s arms, aged three. Her mother and father are having a discussion. She is leaning against the sink, he is pacing back and forth in the kitchen. Every time his heels hit the floor there’s a funny sound. Simone recommends calm. Says the army can’t just descend on people’s homes like that without a search warrant or an arrest warrant. That happens only in dictatorships. Axelle remembers brushing her grandmother’s cheek while trying to catch an earring that was shooting sparks across the dark kitchen décor. Her grandmother was crying. That evening she’d heard Lorraine and Simone talking in low tones as though they had only secrets to share. Axelle believed for a long time that she had the power to make her grandmother cry by brushing her cheek. (Write three pages about the War Measures Act.)
CARLA: It’s never quite right to make a character disappear or die.
THE NARRATOR: Normally, somebody who’s about to die has a serious look in their eyes and no longer makes grammatical errors.
CARLA: What do you know about it? These things are discovered through writing. You don’t write, as far as I know – you’re a writing virgin, virgin in ink, right?
THE NARRATOR: That doesn’t stop me from having an opinion about the power of life and death that novelists claim to have over their characters.
CARLA: I admit I’m annoyed by people who, although they don’t write, pretend to experience the joys and anxieties of writing. You either write or you don’t – make a choice. Someone can’t just be straddling the fence, in between two lives on the pretext that they’re afraid of something that isn’t them or that could become them if they did write.
THE NARRATOR: You have to be able to imagine, to encroach on somebody else’s territory in order to promote certain verbs, for example the verb to love. If ever I do write, it will be only to tell a woman I love her and that she’s the centre of the universe, where I try to grasp reality. This makes you laugh?
CARLA: No, but writers here can’t seem to write more than five lines about stray dogs, so I wonder how they can write about love. In Europe, in the Caribbean and in Africa, you know as well as I do, a stray dog, what am I saying, stray dogs can take up half a manuscript. You know that in a European’s eyes, someone who can’t write more than five lines about dogs isn’t a writer.
THE NARRATOR: I know. It’s also necessary to know how to write about birds, faraway clouds, old furniture and the female body. Basically, writing about what intrigues us, makes us angry, enchants us and crushes us should be relatively easy. But if, as I believe, writing means slipping into the soul of a dog and coming out in people’s consciousnesses in the middle of the night …
CARLA: The farm! A farm is an interesting place for that: pigs, weeds, you’ve no idea of the vocabulary you have to develop to describe cloud formations, the variability of lightning, its erratic designs through darkness. But it’s true that I’d prefer to write about stray dogs, probably because I associate them with heat. The farm and the highway. Still, I like that. Strong winds of memory no matter where we speak from. Anywhere there are stray dogs and live chickens, there’s dust and, in the end, all rogues lead to Rome. So, when Descartes is about to die, the cardinal ends up with bloodshot eyes and screams ‘Alea jacta est’ as he rolls around on the floor like a damn fool. Because the wind is blowing toward the house, my mother can hear everything he says, everything I scream. She signals me to come in. I yell back that I want to stay here to fondle the night with my left hand. I want to do this like someone who writes, blending body parts with summer colours.
At eight o’clock, Axelle takes a taxi from the hotel. Just before the Porte Saint-Louis she decides to walk and asks the driver to drop her off in front of the Parc de la Francophonie, hoping to find there signs and symbols of an uplifting solidarity. The strange concrete structure leaves her pensive and the suspenseful effect of the word francophonie reminds her of when the Morelos family used to affectionately tease her about her funny estraño accent. Over the years the funny accent had become second nature and her mother tongue, though she speaks it more and more since living in Montréal, now has nothing in common with the firm choppy intonatio
ns typical of the exchanges between Lorraine and Alexandre when, using the words of everyday struggle and of life’s pleasures, they blasted politicians’ spinelessness. A bit farther on, a statue catches her attention. The sculpture recalls a postwar meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt. That the event had occurred here in this little provincial city of the North astonishes her. Then, the more she thinks of it, she tells herself that Québec City has no cause to envy cities like Oslo, Copenhagen, Helsinki or Stockholm, which she’d recently visited for a conference on women’s fertility in times of war.
At eight thirty, Axelle enters the Saint-Amour. Simone Lambert hasn’t arrived yet. Axelle is offered a seat under the big glass roof to enjoy a drink at the table reserved for them. She chooses to wait while walking along Rue Sainte-Ursule amid the peculiar old stone houses. At nine thirty, Simone Lambert still hasn’t arrived. Axelle gets worried and impatient. This tardiness is about to turn into abandonment. Simultaneously hurt, angry and ready to forgive, eyes brimming with tears of sadness, she dashes into the street hoping a middle-aged woman will come up to her asking if she is indeed Axelle Carnavale, daughter of Lorraine Lambert.
In Rue Saint-Louis she turns left into the little Rue du Parloir, buys a diet bar and eats it while looking absentmindedly at the grey stones of the Ursulines’ convent. A day’send kind of light runs over stone the colour of furry bunny wabbits watching at the edge of forests. The word convent starts spinning in her head, as familiar as a childhood object. Her mother, her grandmother, her aunts, each of them had at one time or another used the word to talk about that compulsory school-age rite of passage that gives young ladies access to the young men of Québec’s small elite composed in those days of lawyers, notaries and doctors who would in turn become a pool for the class of political offspring of the years of ‘The Great Darkness,’ as her mother used to say and which her father used to translate as ‘greatness darkened.’ Convent: now the word was operating, cleaved to her lower belly, associated with walking long dark hallways, a music room and a panoply of forbidden places reminiscent of Violette Leduc’s short novel.
On Rue des Jardins, a church that wears the name of a cathedral. Across the street, she walks along a pale-brick-brown building wafting a jazz tune she easily recognizes because of the Princeton nights where, as a part-time pianist, she accompanied a trio of jazzwomen for the sheer pleasure of sleepless nights. The handsome building intrigues her. On Rue Sainte-Anne, she realizes it’s a hotel. An art deco–style lobby, verbless. As she enters, the cigarette smell rasps her throat. The smoky atmosphere reminds her of Lorraine’s nervous chain-smoking gestures on meeting nights, when the house was full of men and women whose ideas ran red with change and revolution. At the back, a glass partition finely wrought with enigmatic flower motifs. Behind its transparency, shadows and the final notes of Duke Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Lady.’
THE URNS
The museum is closed Monday evenings. Simone wanders through the great exhibition hall, where silence and solitude make an enticing couple. Since the very first days of the exhibition, she’s made a habit of doing her rounds as a meditation in motion between the urns and the glassy reflections on the display cases. To the lilac of May and the river’s changing blues she prefers the time bracket, the leap in time, represented by Centuries So Far. Even though she knows each piece in detail, its history, the site where it was discovered, its original use, Simone stands in front of them for a long while, thoughtful and fascinated, as though seeing them for the first time.
Once in a while the security guard’s steps interrupt the purring of the temperature-control system, a purring sound that, in museums everywhere, paradoxically contributes to an impression of silence and intense mental activity, arousing in art lovers a sense of vitality.
Most of the urns are behind glass. Others, massive and scarred over their entire surface, appear under blond lighting produced by expert computation, making it possible to suspend time like an aesthetic particle over the debonair roundness of the giant urns.
Simone looks at the urns as if each one contained a small hard core which, while projecting her into the future, would also strangle her, a familiar nostalgia for when Alice, a young doctor, and Simone Lambert, archaeologist, roamed the world to gorge on sites, necropolises, volcanic sands. And on the sea. And on the sea. On that time when the short-term future always translated into a press conference to be organized, an article to write, an aperitif at sundown, lovemaking after nightfall when the darkness was so complete that it required her to listen constantly, closely, to lose nothing of Alice’s pleasure surrendered to the starless night, to the idea of infinity, while, not far from the campsite, jackals and hyraxes sharpened their appetites. Oh! How precious those times away on assignment, when Alice could escape the administrative dullness of the hospital and put a temporary distance between herself and intubated, palliative death, which she found cruel compared to the kind that once had reigned on the site, when swords, lances and daggers plunged endlessly into chests, viscera, eyes and any flesh crossing their path, leaving every grain of sand and blade of straw stained with blood avenged with blood shed.
On the sites, Simone did everything she could to ensure that, despite the harshness of the climate and the discomfort of the facilities, life was an expedition toward knowledge and the pure pleasure of existing in the light. In those circumstances Alice rarely talked to Simone about her work. Constantly occurring were accidents, little scratches, sprains, bites that didn’t heal, raw wounds no one dared look at. Fevers. Sometimes an anxiety attack would overcome a team member who would say they’d become enthralled with the devil or that the meaning of life had been injected into them like a slow poison. Alice saw to the fever and delirium. Simone would question the man or woman about the nature of the poison. When the person seemed able to listen, she’d say, ‘Don’t be afraid, it’s just solitude at work. There’s no poison in solitude. Quite the contrary, solitude is full of faces. The problem is, it affects the circulation of the blood in such an incoherent manner that thoughts are broken, torn apart. And this tear is what creates the confusion between solitude and the feeling of passion, sorry, I mean of poison.’
On those days, once the tools had been collected and put away, when the sun struck low across the marble and the ground seemed about to fly off like mysterious pollen over the graves and urns, Alice asked Simone if she’d used the Story of Cheatin’ Luck to bring back to reason whoever had just escaped the throbbing vertigo of anxiety.
In the exhibition hall, Simone’s thoughts sprang up pellmell, came apart, dispersed quite naturally and came back now in a form that twinged the heart, lit straw fires of fury, caused sudden blindness. Faces went by, Lorraine’s accompanied by those of Alexandre Carnavale, Trotsky, Marie Guyart, Champollion; then superimposed on Lorraine’s face was Axelle’s, her childish joy, her arms around Simone’s neck so long ago. Sometimes the faces collided then took off again in all directions, leaving a torment, a pain, a knot here and there in the throat. The security guard’s steps. What, in the end, is a life? What one has seen and told, what one avoids talking about or simply what one has invented and which has been lost over time, unbeknownst to us, very slowly just as one says a week has gone by already, the last day before your departure, three whole years of mad love, seven years of misery, a quarter of a century of war or a quarter of an hour spent waiting on a winter street corner for someone, something, that doesn’t come, that won’t come.
Passing by the urn called royal, Simone repeats to herself urn, shoulder, belly, hip. And suddenly water is streaming over Alice’s firm body. Their life together reappears like an alternation of precious moments between the shortage of water on the sites of the past and the abundance of chlorinated water in the bathrooms of the hotels they stayed at on a regular basis: the cool water of the shower under which they multiplied their mouth to mouths, the boiling calming water of the hot tubs, the stimulating water jet they learned to aim accurately at their clitorises, which sp
lit time in two or, depending on circumstances, into a thousand fragments that splashed the eye and then gently went on to merge with the idea of happiness and the salt of tears. Urns of life and daily chores which, held at arm’s length above women’s heads, were illuminated by their energy or which, passing through their rough and wrinkled hands, poured tender milk into the mouth of a child or fresh water through an old mother’s parched lips.
When at the sites, Simone often thought that in the light of day and the heat of the shimmering air she saw a far-off female form heading toward the east and toward her crimson colour until suddenly: a man catches up with the woman, yanks her by the arm which, forced to let go of the urn and its palmette, slumps, powerless and mute like an old sabre. The man drags the woman along. A cloud of dust replaces the human form. Simone would frown and her gaze would cut a path to the far-off woman so as to allow her to revel in her own luminosity.
Alice loved to watch Simone when she was so focused. It was this capacity of hers for observation and the faultless reliability of her judgment that made Simone so alluring. In the archaeologist’s eye there was an indefinable something that brought to mind the far side of things, but as Alice couldn’t look simultaneously at Simone and at the object of her gaze, she never quite succeeded in recognizing the objects of reality that crossed her field of vision. So when Simone plunged her black-irised eyes into Alice’s, the latter could not absolutely guess which image was feeding, soothing, igniting her.
At petra: Simone remembers shivering when, for the first time, she saw those tombs sculpted in pink sandstone now partly reverted to scar-faced raw material by the effects of sand and wind. When nature exhibited highly aesthetic scars, and especially when it reasserted itself over the artificial forms inflicted upon it, Simone always reacted with an emotion so vivid it often made her ill. Presently she recalled the Land Art that Lorraine was so crazy about and which had prompted their trips to Arizona and New Mexico. There they went looking for installations, sculptures, uncanny shapes, questioning the motivations, pride and merit of the men and women who practiced this outdoor art. A labour-intensive never-before-seen art full of artists’ little fists rammed into the belly of a mountain. Cubes, rods and spirals drawn child-size in the vast, blinding desert. This unusual game went on and on. Just this morning, Simone had seen a picture of a New York artist standing like a little king in the middle of hundreds of naked bodies lying down in rows like merchandise, for the sole purpose of giving birth to an image wide open to being interpreted as the artificial cross-breeding of naked flesh and urban asphalt.
Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon Page 9
