by Anne H
“Your mother will be worried sick!”
Hélène lowers her head. For the second time, Lydie runs her fingers gently over Hélène’s cheek.
The Ouellets’ canvas canoe has been freshly caulked and painted. For a long moment the red of the canoe, the yellow of Hélène’s oilskin, the blue of Lydie’s jacket, the red of her scarf — all these bright colours gliding along the river are visible from the shore, at high noon.
When the river brought them in sight of the flat village, several recognized the red canoe and its passengers.
As she sits motionless in the canoe, Hélène can feel with her whole body the shock of the waves pounding against the canoe harder and harder as they approach the rapids. Now she has surrendered entirely to the terrifying force of the water. Now she is utterly obedient to the canoe’s mistress, who paddles on the right, then the left, constantly restoring their balance. Already long white trails of foam, like spittle, run through the water as the churning grows and the roar becomes deafening. Here, there, rocks covered with green moss loom before them. Soon the water’s bland smell, its supreme fury, replace all the breathable air, all earthly life. The red canoe dances and creaks, at the mercy of the waves. Together, Lydie and Hélène enter the seclusion of death.
✦✦✦
For a long moment she was like a drowned woman, streaming water and mud as she lay full length on the blacksmith’s dock. The current had flung her onto the pebble beach and men gathered her up, not knowing if she was dead or alive, not knowing what to do with her because she had no relatives here or anyone to care for her. She spat water through her mouth and nose. The whole village, assembled on the dock and all around as far as the road, watched her choke and vomit. Her ears are filled with tumult, her face is streaked with mud and grass. She looks, unseeing, all these people gathered around her.
It was Alexis who wrapped her in a blanket and took her home in his truck.
A tiny log cabin stands in a treeless field. An enormous garage with a tin roof that gleams brightly in the light of the cold sun. Alexis Boilard’s domain has no fence, is surrounded by a scrubby hedge.
She is feverish. Her head is filled with sound and fury. The waves crashing against the rocks pound endlessly at her temples. The water’s din sounds to her like deafening applause, while an earthly and indifferent voice counts off the seconds, to calculate how long she can go without breathing, at the bottom of the river, and stay alive. She calls Hélène. Tries to extricate her from the green, sticky moss that slowly, gradually, is covering her like a second skin. The king of the mud hides in the deepest part of the river. His voice makes bubbles the colour of café au lait amid the hurly-burly of death, and with dense gurgling he declares: So much for the earthly life of Hélène Vallières.
Lydie cries out in Alexis’s cabin. She calls Hélène. Shivers and doesn’t stop vomiting in Alexis’s bed. Thinks she must spit out the whole river, and her life, in a wave of bile.
Alexis has lit a fire in the wood stove and heated some water. He tells Lydie to take off her wet clothes. She can hear nothing he says, for any human voice is alien to her now and ricochets vainly off the sound of water in her head. Her teeth are chattering.
He undresses her as if extricating her from a slimy mass of seaweed. Holds her in his arms for a moment, naked, absent, icy cold. He swathes her in sweaters and blankets, places bottles filled with hot water at her feet and along the length of her body. There’s no shortage of bottles in Alexis’s cabin, either empty or full. The boy tries in vain to lift Lydie’s head and make her drink, but the gin trickles from the corners of her tight-pressed lips.
He sits on a chair he’s pulled up to the bed and studies Lydie, who lies there twitching among the bottles of hot water. Little by little she calms down and falls asleep, curled up as she was in her mother’s womb. The air in the room thickens. The light is dwindling. Alexis’s hand brushes against Lydie’s on the grey wool blanket. He speaks to her aloud, calls her “Sweetheart” and “My pretty owl.” He begins conscientiously to drain the bottle of gin.
Long before darkness has fallen completely, Alexis has collapsed onto the bed, at Lydie’s feet. The empty bottle rolls along the floor from one end of the room to the other, then comes to a standstill against the stove.
The sound of a motor, the dazzle of headlights in the window without shutters or curtains, confused trampling around the cabin, loud knocking on the plank door were not enough to wrest them both from the deep sleep that protects them from the sounds of the earth.
A vigorous push opens the unlocked door. Now they are huddled here in this room, clear and precise like responsible adults who know what has to be done and have only enough time to do it.
Madame Ouellet has brought dry clothes. She shields Lydie with her massive body while the girl puts them on in the cabin’s one room, now full of people. Madame Ouellet talks about little Hélène Vallières who died in the rapids when her head was shattered against the rocks.
Lydie’s parents are there, cowering against the door, gasping the stuffy air inside the cabin. They are waiting for their daughter to be returned to them so they can take her away to college, where she will be safe.
The father in his long belted coat and holding his velvety fedora walks stiffly towards Alexis. He extends a hand half-closed around some crumpled banknotes. He mutters between his teeth:
“For taking such good care of my little girl.”
Carefully Alexis unfolds them for everyone in the cabin to see — one twenty-dollar and one five-dollar bill. He takes them disgustedly by one corner, as if holding a dead mouse by its tail, then lifts the stove lid and drops the bills into the fire. He closes the lid, then turns around, yawning:
“I don’t need anybody here now. Don’t bother hanging around. I’ve got things to do early tomorrow morning, three cords of wood to deliver. I need a good night’s sleep. So goodnight, everybody.”
Without even glancing at Lydie he sets to work tidying the bed.
It is Lydie now who approaches Alexis, breaking free from the hands of her mother who had grasped her arm and is pushing her towards the door. Her pallor is extreme. She is walking as if about to fall at every step. But a bright flame lights up her icy face again. She speaks softly into Alexis’s ear.
“Do it for me, please do it. You must. You must. Before I disappear from here forever. Set the horses free in the municipal field. You know the one, the field beside the river. Set them free in the village. Then I’ll be able to leave here with my mind at rest, and I’ll have all my time to think about you, Alexis Boilard, when I’m in my American college, between classes in moral philosophy or lengths of the pool.”
Again she has an urge to laugh, as if she was in good health and everything was normal.
Lydie’s mother has lifted the veil that covered her eyes like a small black grate and with her large and very red mouth she says:
“Come along, child. Quickly now.”
Lydie crosses the village one last time, comfortably ensconced in her parents’ long car. She tries to engrave in her memory the houses, the trees, the river, the hills, the entire familiar landscape that moves away at dizzying speed with every turn of the wheels.
She will not hear the huge confused stamping of the heavy plough-horses, set free on the main street after her departure with great lashes of Alexis Boilard’s whip. She will not see the frame houses light up, one after another, wakened by the galloping of the horses. Only the Vallières house, glimpsed through her tears along the way, will continue to blaze in Lydie’s memory, like a mortuary chapel lit by candles.
✦✦✦
Pauline, incredulous, held her daughter’s body, saturated with water and sand, as if she was alive. She bandaged the cut on her head, gently brushing aside the blonde hair. She washed and dressed and laid out her sleeping daughter on her own bed. She crossed her hands
on her breast. All night she sat at her side, as though beside a sick child.
Not until the early hours when the first glimmers of dawn have appeared in the windowpanes does Pauline begin to howl, like a she-wolf caught in a trap. Then collapsed with her face against the ground.
III
Henceforth Julien learns to live alone with a woman whose white freckled face is immobile, like wax, its expression frozen, whose massive body refuses to move. Deliberate refusal or genuine paralysis? The days pass and Pauline regains neither speech nor movement. Abandoning his studies, her son devotes all his time to her. He carries her from bed to chair, from chair to bed, fixes her meals and feeds her, washes her and brings the bedpan.
From studying the impassive face in the hope of noting the slightest reaction, the slightest sign of life, he realized that his mother’s features were being transformed, were hardening little by little to become more virile, the bridge of the nose more prominent, the jaw more protuberant, the mouth more bitter. Soon he became so skilful at detecting the smallest shudder on his mother’s face that he realized there were certain moments when Pauline’s lips moved imperceptibly. He applied himself to reading his mother’s lips. Eventually he was able to distinguish two words, chewed at in silence, always the same ones, depending on Pauline’s mood: “Goddamn” or “My love.”
Julien was careful not to tell the doctor of his discovery, for he wanted to keep to himself this secret he shared with Pauline.
If the image of Lydie came back to him sometimes with violence, he immediately pushed it away, forcing himself to do all sorts of household tasks, however finicky and all-absorbing. His resentment of Lydie was very great.
The silence in the apartment on rue Cartier grew heavier day by day, and Julien’s youth adapted to it as to a misfortune. Soon the only thing he wanted to do was make his mother speak, drag her out of her muteness. He would take her in his arms, speak to her very softly, saying into her stony face and as close as possible to her vacant eyes, her silent mouth:
“Just say hello, how are you? Please, just hello, how are you?”
And he would shake her by the shoulders.
“Hello, hello, say hello. There’s nothing to it. Just try. I talk to you the whole blessed day. I’m your son, Julien. Little Hélène is dead. Lydie is cursed. But I, I’m right here. Just say hello. It’s me, Julien.”
Three years after the death of Hélène, when Pauline herself was very close to death, she dropped her head onto his shoulder, her whole body tilted to one side as if she was about to fall out of bed, and said aloud and very distinctly:
“I’m slipping.”
Only her son Julien heard the last words of Pauline Vallières, who passed away on April 5, 1937, at the age of forty-five, from the aftereffects of an intolerable sorrow.
Having abandoned his studies to care for his mother, after her death Julien went to work for the post office, at the main branch on rue Saint-Paul.
It didn’t take him long to get his bearings in his new territory. A few rooms in the apartment on rue Cartier, a few city streets. Never again would he go to Duchesnay, either the river or the village, or to the Claridge Hotel on the Grande-Allée. By thus avoiding certain streets, certain parts of the countryside, he felt as if he was consoling his mother, being faithful to her beyond death.
It sometimes happened in his dreams that he sensed, acutely, Lydie’s kiss on his lips, in his mouth, felt her teeth and her bite which awakened him brutally. On those mornings he escaped from his uneasy happiness only by accusing Lydie aloud of all the wrongs on earth.
Sitting in the same wing chair evening after evening, when his work at the post office was done, walking down the long corridor to stretch his legs, dressing in the morning and undressing at night, shaving at the same hour before the same old pitted mirror, unaware of the aging of his youthful face, sorting letters all day long, eating quick snacks, curling up for sleep, living without making a sound, from rue Saint-Paul to rue Cartier, rue Cartier to rue Saint-Paul — thus did the unhurried days of Julien Vallières unfold.
The apartment, cluttered with Victorian furniture, its red rep upholstery faded by wear and the sun, and heavy with accumulated silence and with memories that lurked in the shadows, hemmed him in like a prison. He broke free of it only to go back to the mailbags and to the small grey wood boxes into which he deposited letters at the pace of a silent, well-oiled machine. He rarely spoke to his colleagues. Did not distinguish one from another.
Gradually, furtively, like someone concealing objects on the sly, Julien began to rid the parlour of the things that had been his mother’s or his sister’s. He brought in his own books and his record player, arranged the big wing chair to suit himself. On winter evenings he would draw the faded curtains over the frosty windows, then read poetry or listen to music until late at night.
The days pass, and the months and years. Julien does not read the papers. Doesn’t listen to the radio. He seems unaware that the war is establishing its reign upon the world a little more every day, tipping countries into horror one by one.
But Julien’s strange peace was becoming more and more fragile, like the skin that forms over boiling milk.
✦✦✦
Her name is Aline Boudreau. She is childlike and plump. Her diligent little hands go past Julien all day long, completely engaged in their daily drudgery, among the letters at the main post office.
One day Julien got the idea of capturing one of those little hands in midair to feel its warmth on his own hand. When he did so he saw a face overwhelmed with happiness suddenly appear, for the first time, in this familiar place where he recognized no one. Pale eyes were raised towards him, regarded him as if they were looking at the apparition of a saint. Julien immediately thought that this girl’s power of adoration must be boundless. This long, lanky man who was already beginning to stoop suddenly felt an insane urge to be swaddled like a newborn and loved without limits by a woman who resembled neither his mother nor Lydie.
For a week he courted her, giving her flowers and a tortoiseshell comb, walking her home every night to rue Latourelle, to a house made of yellow bricks that were blackened as if by a fire.
When Sunday came he went up to her room, which smelled of polish and lye. She was his, when he wanted her, as he wanted her. She said over and over, delighted:
“I’m risking damnation for you, you handsome man.”
And she hid her face in her hands.
Julien’s pride was so great that he’d have liked her to hang his big white bloodstained handkerchief at the window — the way Arab brides hang out their bedsheets on the morrow of their wedding day. At the same time, though, he was ashamed of what he’d done and afraid he had hurt Aline.
They lay for a long time snuggled close together in the shadowy light of the room and the warmth of the bed. When Julien thought he detected a vague glow through the flowered curtains he got up hastily, like Cinderella on the first stroke of midnight.
“I have to go now! I have to go!”
By way of farewell she gave him two full pages of her ration book, one for sugar, the other for coffee.
“You’re far too thin and too sad. Eat. You have to eat. It’s good for you.”
“I have to go now! It’s morning!”
✦✦✦
“Have you ever seen the sun rise, Julien dear?”
For the first time since the fox shed, he is outside in the dew of early morning. He must not linger in Aline’s bed when the sun is climbing slowly in the sky. This uncertain hour between day and night belongs to the light spirit of Lydie. The act of love with Aline has only wakened Lydie’s memory.
“You’ll see how sad and beautiful it is when the night gives way gradually and is filled with light.”
Her throaty voice in Julien’s ear like a vibration in the air around him.
&nbs
p; Julien has a rendezvous with Lydie in the dead city, at the hour when only ghosts are abroad, in full freedom.
With a beard smudging his cheeks like dirt, hands in his pockets, and chin enclosed by his turned-up collar, he turns onto the Grande-Allée. He stops outside the Claridge, carefully studies the blind windows, wonders in what secret room, behind what drawn curtains, Lydie might be resting in all her sleeping glory.
Now the day has returned like a great warm wind that spreads across the rooftops; it runs breathlessly down the longest avenues, slips into the labyrinth of little streets, stretches endlessly over the Plains and along the river.
Julien crosses the threshold of the Claridge. Speaks to the porter. Asks for the number of Lydie’s apartment.
“Monsieur and Madame Bruneau, their daughter and all their belongings, enough to fill two Baillargeon trucks, moved to the States some years ago and left no forwarding address.”
While all those years were passing I was asleep on rue Cartier, shut inside with my records and books. During that time Lydie disappeared.
I was like a dead man in his shroud. Aline had to appear before I half-wakened, like someone supporting himself on one elbow to greet the day from his bed. It was enough that Aline appeared, that I touch her as a man touches a woman. To hell with Aline. She just has to avoid doing things by halves. It’s not enough to love me like a god. I wish she were supernatural, Lydie’s equal, her magic double. Aline is unworthy of Lydie. I won’t see her again.
✦✦✦
After Julien had gone, Aline stretched, naked, at the window, forgetting that only the night before she never had clothes enough to hide her from the eyes of the world. From her window she looks down on the houses, the streets, cars, small individuals walking along the sidewalks, the line of mountains in the distance. It’s high time for her to dress and go to the post office, but she lingers there, looking at the city as if taking possession of it. Though she has just one room on rue Latourelle at her disposal, she feels as if she now has title to the entire city teeming with life, spread out at her feet. Somewhere, in a house unknown to her, Julien, too, is preparing to go out; soon he will come to her along the still-cool streets.
