Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon

by Nicole Brossard

  AXELLE: I’m sorry but I can’t follow. I don’t understand anything you’re saying.

  CARLA: Nor do I. That’s why I like this idea of cheating on reality so much.

  (Simone turns to Axelle and whispers something inaudible to the audience.)

  SCENE FIVE

  (Simone and Axelle are seated at the table, while the narrator and Carla are now standing by the piano, listening to the music. The dialogues will alternate between table and piano.)

  SIMONE: Do you like jazz?

  AXELLE: I’m here by default. I had an appointment that fell through.

  SIMONE: Me too. I was supposed to meet someone your age.

  AXELLE: It’s my first visit to Québec City. I’m a native of Montréal but I didn’t grow up in Québec. It’s like a foreign country. Sometimes images from the past come back, but I can’t tell if it’s something I read or lived. My work is demanding. I’ve little time to think about my origins. In any case, in twenty years’ time, who is going to be able to talk about their cultural origins with any certainty?

  SIMONE: The person I was supposed to meet … you know, I rarely have the opportunity to talk with someone your age.

  AXELLE: I spend a lot of time with people older than I am. Most of them could be my parents, in fact.

  SIMONE: Does it bother you?

  AXELLE: I don’t really pay much attention. Except when they look down at me. I usually meet people for work. I just try to be efficient and expect the same from others. I don’t like to be taken for just a young woman. It keeps me from reflecting, from thinking.

  SIMONE: Thinking straight, as the saying goes.

  AXELLE: Thinking, period. For example, I don’t know you, but you may already be wondering if I’m engaged or married, or if I have children.

  SIMONE: Not at all. But maybe so. After all, you’re the same age as my daughter’s daughter.

  AXELLE: Why don’t you just say, ‘You’re my granddaughter’s age’?

  SIMONE: I don’t know. Maybe because the word granddaughter always seems to imply a very young child?

  AXELLE: Is she the person you were supposed to meet?

  SIMONE: Yes. I haven’t seen her in fifteen years.

  AXELLE: Are you sure it’s worth it?

  SIMONE: What do you mean?

  AXELLE: I don’t know. For example, she may disappoint you. Maybe she’s on drugs, or a young offender, ignorant. Selfish. She may even be crazy.

  SIMONE: It never occurred to me.

  AXELLE: Where do parents get the idea their children are going to be good-looking, smart and, especially, nice to them? I find this a bit sick.

  SIMONE: Sick?

  AXELLE: Vulgar, if you prefer. Thinking your child will be the same as you shows a lack of awareness of the laws of heredity. It’s also vulgar to aspire to eternal youth. Sorry … I’m a geneticist. To answer your question: yes, I like jazz. When I was little, my father and mother often took me to the homes of musician friends. We were like a big family gathered around the music of Duke Ellington. Each couple would bring their children and for us it was a party. There was a little boy who was fascinated by Dungeons and Dragons. He read all the time. And there was a girl named Ella who liked to talk about the Aztecs. Later, after my father left, my mother made me take piano lessons. I liked music, but I couldn’t play. Every time my fingers touched the keys, I’d see the bones of my hands. My hands on the keyboard always gave me the impression somebody else was playing, not me. After a few minutes I’d stop and cry. The teacher forced me to continue. I did the best I could. Intrigued, frightened and fascinated by the movement of what I called ‘my soul gone wild’ on the keyboard.

  SIMONE: You’re so young, yet you talk like somebody who’s had a full life.

  AXELLE: Or who remembers everything. Which isn’t the same thing.

  SIMONE: At your age I was already a mother. I was dreaming of travelling and museums. As a child I had an uncle who was a Jesuit missionary, and every time he came home, his words carried my cousins and me to increasingly fascinating places. In Shanghai, Manila, Abidjan and Abyssinia, we ate rice, died of thirst, walked in the dust and excrement among goats, dogs and lepers. We trudged through thick forests until suddenly temples and pagodas changed into elephants, cobras, tigers and lions. He also talked about feminine curves he called caryatids, canephoras or bilobate rose windows. I told many of these stories again when my daughter was born, and telling them allowed me to travel over and over.

  SCENE SIX

  CARLA: You should have told me a bit more about Simone Lambert. I find her interesting as a woman and as a character. She’s a wounded woman. I like wounded women. They’re alive, moving. I’m not being ironic. It’s true. They move me. A wounded woman there in front of you, existing, moving her lips in the name of life, deeply disturbs me. It’s like an abyss of transparency and mystery. In college, in Regina, there was a girl with indescribably blue eyes working in the cafeteria. Her job was to place the desserts on the counter. Every day we’d file past her, kept apart by rows of rice pudding, crème caramel and fruit salad. I would dive into her eyes, swim vigorously, go down to the bottom of an unfathomable sadness, then come back up to the surface, feeling relieved that such sadness wasn’t mine. For two years I thought I was in love with this girl. Her sadness turned me on. Wounds, scars, tattoos – I can’t help it, I do indeed have a thing for skin graffiti.

  NARRATOR: Do you have a tattoo?

  CARLA: No.

  NARRATOR: I do. There. (She points to her heart.) Skin is thin in that area. It’s painful. But that’s what a tattoo is about, isn’t it? To not suffer anywhere else but your skin. To circumscribe the pain in a specific place. To not forget that it’s that.

  CARLA: Is it recent?

  NARRATOR: Yes. (silence) I got it after my mother died. Probably to signal that the world was beginning all over again. It’s the only time I’ve ever wanted to imitate my mother. I probably belong to that generation of women who can say, ‘My mother had a tattoo on her shoulder.’ Mine had a blue lion that stared right at me throughout my childhood. Sixty years later, that lion had become a blurred and ridiculous beast on the flaccid skin of an old lady in the agony of her death.

  CARLA: You said it.

  NARRATOR: What?

  CARLA: The word agony, which scares you so much and which you didn’t want me to use because it grates your ears. A loaded word, with two others inside it: one, go, that makes you move forward, the other, ago, that forces you to look backward. When I was very young I started deconstructing words, messing around with their syllables, like when you shake a handbag until the last coin, the tiniest key, falls out. Falls at our young feet. Falls into our young gaze. Actually, you know, words have always scared me. Maybe that’s why I fold and unfold them over on themselves, in myself. Maybe you’re refusing to read my manuscript for the same reason. (as though she’s just made a discovery) That’s it: you’re afraid of words too.

  NARRATOR: (embarrassed) Don’t be ridiculous. Anyway, not here, not now.

  CARLA: Yes! Yes, you’re afraid. And what’s worse, you’re too proud to admit something that, if you did admit it, would make you a heroine. The history of literature teaches us that we have to be afraid. Everybody is afraid. Everybody identifies with an author who’s afraid. It’s reassuring to know we’re not alone, stuck in the middle of fear and distress. And so on until you understand that I is someone else is a hollow phrase that makes you an irresponsible being.

  NARRATOR: I think I’m afraid of the conflicts hiding inside words. But words don’t scare me. They give me a lot of pleasure. Fabrice had an exceptional way with them. Never natural. That’s it, I like verbal fireworks. Okay, there, you win. The next time we get together, bring me your manuscript. I’ll finally read that Chapter Five you’ve been pestering me about for all these weeks.

  CARLA: Are you afraid or not?

  NARRATOR: I’m afraid.

  SCENE SEVEN

  SIMONE: I think I’m going to giv
e the go-ahead for the exhibition on ruins she (nodding toward the narrator) is proposing. How can we not be sensitive to what ruins represent today? Even in this field, things have changed. In bygone days, ruins meant what remains of a civilization, of a culture, of a reality. People could learn from ruins, rewind the thread of history back to the splendour and zenith of a civilization. People could dream around ruins. Dream, I mean live amid images, be borne by the idea that two thousand, four thousand years ago, life was throbbing in full colour, voice and movement. What will the ruins of our civilization look like? But first we’d need to know which civilization we’re talking about. The civilization of humanism? Or of genomics and transgenics, which will turn us into mutants more conventional than three John-Paul IIs in one? Our ruins won’t boil down to some debris and garbage left in the middle of mined and contaminated fields, a few cans, car skeletons and rusted hangars. Our ruins will be electromagnetic and radioactive. Does it annoy you when somebody my age tells you this?

  AXELLE: It kills me. Yes, it deeply embarrasses me. It’s as though you were announcing that the future won’t look like the future.

  SIMONE: (uncomfortable) Have you had time to visit the city?

  AXELLE: Not yet, but tomorrow I hope to find a moment between two panel discussions.

  SIMONE: Come and see me at the Museum of Civilization.

  AXELLE: I don’t really do museums, as they say. When I was a child, my grandmother often took me to the museum. She’d explain everything I saw and especially what I didn’t see, with the patience of an angel. She had a collection of T-shirts from every museum in the world. She brought me some in all colours, with typefaces in Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Russian. My mother used to say she spoiled me, that she took up too much space everywhere she went. How many times, on a bus or in a restaurant, did I yell, ‘Grandmother, you’re taking up too much space’? She’d laugh, point to the space between us and say, ‘See, that’s not true.’ She never understood why I said that. Nor did I, actually. It had become a habit, a game. It’s only now, as I’m telling you this story, that my mother’s words are making sense.

  SIMONE: (trying to hide her emotions) There are other museums obviously. Anyway, you’ll see. But tell me exactly what your work is.

  AXELLE: I do research. I spend a large part of my days in the lab, the other part in meetings or writing articles. My research is confidential. Let’s just say I’m studying what’s called the living world.

  SIMONE: (still very emotional) You mustn’t be short of friends.

  AXELLE: I don’t go out much. I go dancing once a week. I work out regularly in a gym. I sleep eight hours. I never eat more than two thousand calories a day. I never watch TV. My computer screen is quite enough to ruin my eyesight. That’s all. Evenings before going to sleep I recite a poem to myself. It’s a habit from when my mother and I lived in the South. My mother knew several poets down there. Some of them used to come to the house with their wives and children. Sometimes the kids were asked to recite a poem. I was always asked for ‘A Little Sonata to the Moon and the Iroquois.’ One day, my mother asked me to recite a poem by Octavio Paz in front of Octavio Paz. He was sitting in a big armchair smiling at me. Behind his head was the shelf where my mother kept her hibiscus. I pronounced every word of the poem with meticulous care, looking straight ahead at the red flowers and the poet’s grey hair blurring my gaze.

  You know, my mother wasn’t perfect, but she did transmit her love of poetry to me, which exonerates her from all blame. All the poems I know I carry inside me, like my mother’s memory. I learned them all by heart when she was still living by my side.

  Cuánto pesa un ojo en la balanza?

  Cuánto mide un sueño entre dos parpados?

  Cuánto pesa en tus manos un ojo cerrado,

  Un ojo de muerto y un ojo pelado?

  – Homero Aridjis

  SCENE EIGHT

  CARLA: I wonder what creates fear even when there’s no clear and present danger. People are always saying they’re afraid of this and that, of the wind, of snakes, of old flames. It’s clear and specific. When we say, ‘I’m afraid of being cold, I’m afraid of not being able to breathe,’ it’s because we’re evaluating a risk or, rather, because we’re afraid the evaluation we’re making is wrong. But being afraid of writing, that must be like being afraid of living, being afraid of oneself, fearing life itself.

  NARRATOR: Maybe we’re afraid all the time, without realizing it. Afraid of dying or afraid of wanting to die. But now is not a good time to discuss this. I want to talk to Simone Lambert some more about my exhibition.

  CARLA: At this hour?

  NARRATOR: Yes, it’s now or never. It’s important. I’m running around in circles with this project. You should see my apartment. Now that would scare you. I mean, you’d be scared of the person living there.

  CARLA: I’ve seen messy apartments before.

  NARRATOR: My apartment looks like the apartments of people who have that sickness, you know, that stops them from throwing out things that have become useless, that forces them to save empty matchbooks, toothpaste tubes, liquor bottles, chewing-gum packets. But they also stock up on newspapers, magazines, calendars, even if it means dying of asphyxiation amid their documents. I’ve become a dangerous collector.

  CARLA: Dangerous? Well, you’re not collecting boa constrictors, revolvers or deadly poisons, are you?

  NARRATOR: Worse. I collect images of ruins, blind spots of civilization. I surround myself with debris, relics of ancient glories, old style manuals. I sit at my work table for hours on end, captivated by a pattern, by a suspicious relief. Do you realize: every day, I have to deal with remnants of desire, irrefutable evidence of violence, of destruction or of wear. My task is to make sure people remember well how life was before us. ‘The ideas ruins awaken in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures. How old the world is!’ said Diderot. Well, I invest ruins with power, with such power to question that part of the reality surrounding me loses its meaning. I’m fascinated by which part of a dream, of a civilization, collapses, just like an architect surely wonders what will collapse first in a church, a library, a hospital or a stadium. What are the first signs of the decay of a setting?

  CARLA: This way you have of never talking about yourself is very strange. You’re always creating questions and emergencies that seem so remote from daily life, from your life, from Québecois reality.

  NARRATOR: That’s fine by me. I’m interested in ruins because I’m interested in time, in this jaw open on the cosmos and on our genes. In any case, you rarely give me the opportunity to talk about intimate things which, as you see it, form the fine fabric of creation. For you, each one of our encounters will have been an outlet. But for me it will have been more of an exercise in listening, though I shan’t deny the pleasure derived from it – (silence) a sensory pleasure fraught with intensity. Come, let’s join Simone and the young woman.

  CARLA: Good idea. I’m going to invite them to my room for a drink. That way it’ll be easier for you to talk with Simone. And you can take the copy of Chapter Five. (looking at the two women) They seem to be getting along well.

  CARLA CARLSON’S ROOM

  All hotel rooms have angles. Dead angles such as closets, the bathroom door, the space under the bed. Living angles: windows, mirrors, chairs and armchairs where one can always read or watch dust particles move through the air like quicksilver confetti. Carla Carlson’s room is partly occupied by twin beds. On one of them, books, file folders, a camera and an umbrella. One of the walls, the one with the first light switch encountered by fingers after opening the door to the room, is papered with typewritten pages streaked here and there with deletions in red ink. Others have only a handwritten title. There is a dresser with a large mirror which Carla has used to photograph herself from all angles and under different lighting. For in the morning, when the whiteness of day filters through the muslin curtains, Carla ent
ers an altered state of perception that makes her want to commit to memory some of the dead angles. In the afternoon, if it rains or when the sky is heavy and a light grey pearls the room’s atmosphere, she interrupts her writing to photograph what she calls the wild aura of the price to be paid for writing. As for the nighttime lighting, it is of an almost Mexican sunflower yellow and appears only when Carla returns to her room following long conversations with that woman who works at the Museum of Civilization and whom she met when she first arrived in Québec City. Since then, they meet in the hotel bar to listen to a bit of jazz and regale each other with stories, facts and complex arguments which, Carla admits, move her manuscript forward. Be that as it may, the room as setting is sometimes filled with accents and foreign words which take on such fictional airs that they are transformed under the effect of diaereses, circumflex and acute accents, each one giving the impression of closing in around meaning, a real slip knot. Such is the case of hotel room settings where, time and again, objects appear like visual refuges put at our disposal to take better advantage of the characters and the mystery surrounding them. And so, should we say that each setting serves to draw us closer to our loved ones, who roam in our memories like characters or like deer gorged on vertigo and horizon? The room where the four women seen in the Hotel Clarendon bar between ten and quarter past midnight will soon gather is spacious. The dresser in front of the twin beds has a mirror which can also work as a screen during the performance. Simone and Axelle are each seated on one of the beds and looking in the direction of the mirror-screen. Throughout the following scenes, they are seen from behind but their faces are visible if the audience looks up at the screen. Carla and the narrator come and go in the room. Sometimes they sit side by side looking at the audience. Typewritten pages are taped to the wall adjoining the main hallway of this hotel floor. During the performance, the actresses will be seen or heard reading from them.