by Anne H
My footsteps, without resonance or echo, resemble those of cats lost in the night.
No, no, I didn’t want that.
JEAN-EPHREM DE LA TOUR
One tiny lamp, at the end of a long cord, stands in the middle of the room. All that is left of the light is there on the floor and I’m on the floor as well, looking as if I’m using a campfire for light. All around me, the carpet like a wasteland. Here and there, spots left bare and brown where the furniture has been taken away.
All the treasures that were here have been removed — furniture, books, trinkets. Even my bed, covered with white muslin. The life that I lived here, flashy and mad, has been carried off and taken far away. I expect that I’ll be taken too.
Movers came with a truck. They left a void around me. Now I’m sitting cross-legged in the middle of my devastated loft. I’m eating a ham sandwich and picking up the crumbs as they fall to the carpet.
My big body, kicked out of the Paradis Perdu for obscure reasons, scrutinizes itself in the low muted glimmer. My hands on my knees look dead, one beside the other. My face frozen like a stone. My bare feet displaying the calluses of the skilled dancer. I persist in this implacable examination. I pretend to look over my badly lit body for a trace of some unknown sin that might be the cause of everything.
No defeat then. Real life is quite simply elsewhere. Instead of real life I’ll have a look at what it’s like elsewhere. Plenty of boredom most likely, and disgust, which is worse than boredom. All of that before the arrival of soothing habit and recovered laughter.
The rain has left long spurts of scattered drops on the glass. I press my face against it but it doesn’t cool me. On the other side of the world, the city in mist. Its damp breathing. I watch for the long car that’s supposed to come for me at any moment.
From my position it’s impossible to see the small silhouette hugging the walls, advancing along the sidewalk towards me, slow and light as a shadow.
MIGUEL ALMEVIDA
He is standing in the doorway looking furiously at me, as if I shouldn’t exist before him.
“Where have you come from at this hour of the night, Little Beast?”
I look at him too, at this man who, dead or alive, was made to be seen by the greatest number of people on stage in a theatre.
People emerge from the elevator, scatter on the landing, and laugh very loudly. Hurriedly, Jean-Ephrem de la Tour shows me into his loft.
A single lamp, standing on the floor, throws light onto the black carpet. There are no other lamps anywhere. Jean-Ephrem de la Tour’s loft no longer glows, vast and deep as far as the eye can see. Every corner now is full of darkness. So empty as to discourage you from living. Our enormous shadows on the wall no longer look like anyone. Is it here that everything will end? We don’t know what to do with our eyes, mouths, ears, with our hands that hang down on either side of our bodies. It’s a question of knowing who will be the first to break the silence. He, the embodiment of my ruin? Me, so overjoyed by him that it could kill me? Now each of us facing the other, each in his skin as in a fragile shelter.
It is he who moves first. He paces the room, barefoot, holding his shoes, then throwing them violently at the brass barre left behind on the wall.
He turns back to me. “I don’t have much time. You’ll have to leave in a hurry.”
He sits back down on the floor and puts on his shoes, slowly, like a child tying laces for the first time.
He talks so softly that it’s like a breath, just barely perceptible against my ear. “I’m expecting someone.”
It doesn’t surprise me that he is expecting someone, nervous as he is. If it’s my mother I’ll kill him, and my mother too. I’ll be handcuffed and taken to court. I enunciate clearly, as if I had a part in a play and weren’t fully there: “I hope it isn’t my mother.”
He laughs and he says that it’s not. He takes his shoes off again and starts doing exercises at the barre. It reminds me of the Paradis Perdu and I want to cry. He puts his shoes back on and looks out the window. He talks with his back to me, still looking out the window.
He seems to be speaking to someone invisible, someone floating between heaven and earth, right there at the level of the seventh floor. Jean-Ephrem de la Tour’s breath leaves condensation on the streaming wet window.
“I’ve been confiscated. Do you know what that means, confiscated? They took away everything that was here. The furniture and knickknacks. Even the gold chain from my neck and the bracelet from my wrist.”
I wish I could console Jean-Ephrem de la Tour, take him out of his unhappiness. I murmur, just in case, as if I know what I’m talking about: “Didn’t you pay your rent?”
That makes him laugh and he turns towards me, animated and happy as if he were going to start dancing again. “I like you, Little Beast, you make me laugh. But I don’t have much time left to look after you just now. Didn’t pay my rent, as you say. Didn’t pay. Anything. Debts everywhere. A mob is after me. I have to go away.”
“Take me with you.” I say this as if the words had escaped from me by themselves, without my wanting, without my even opening my mouth, a little like blood on the surface of the skin, barely touched by the air as it passes.
“Little Beast, you’re dreaming. And me, I was made for living, for living without reins and without scruples, do you understand?” His dazzling teeth so close to my face, his breath on my cheek. His gaze fixed in a strange squint, like a wolf’s.
I look at him as long as I can, wanting desperately never to lose sight of him. I tell him he looks like his portrait and that it drives me to despair.
He turns away. He stands at the window again. The bad weather exasperates him. He complains about the fog and the height of the building not letting him see what’s going on in the street. Says again that they’re waiting for him and that he ought to go down right away. He unplugs the little lamp on the floor and tucks it under his arm to take away. “It’s all I have left. Better bring it along.”
I hear him breathing in the dark as my heart fills the room with rapid, muffled beating. His shadow against my shadow in the dark room.
JEAN-EPHREM DE LA TOUR
Nothing to say. Nothing to explain. Keep my distance. Let him mind his own business. Let me mind my own. Tell him again to go away while a vague glimmer enters the room through the open window. I believe he’s shivering in the mist that sweeps in here as if we were at the seaside. I’d rather he insult me and cry openly. At one stroke I’d be rid of the patient and furious expectation of my punishment.
I hear his voice that’s come from I know not where, across the grey and empty room: “I would so much have liked to be a girl and to marry you.”
I talk to him about a wedding gown, white and billowy and falling to the floor. I tell him that his love of clothes will spell his ruin. I recite to him the hallowed formula of marriage. I insist on the bride’s obligation to share everything with her husband, for better and for worse, till death do them part.
He answers so quietly that I guess rather than hear what he says. “Yes, yes, I want all that, I want to marry you.”
Night lies slack over all the city. And yet it grows brighter and brighter in this empty room where I’m shut away with Miguel Almevida. From looking in the dark so much I’m able to see as if it were daylight. A little while longer and I’ll have his dazed face before me, staring at me. That must be avoided at all costs. Talk in the darkness of my lowered eyelids. Give in to theatrical lines worthy of the Paradis Perdu. Admit that I’m going on a trip to the sun and the sea, in the company of a very mature and very rich lady. Then move on in sheer fantasy.
“As for my pitiful heart, which is as old as a hundred-year-old Chinese egg, I leave it to you as a token. Do what you want with it. All my sins are there. I have only one thing in mind at present, to start life again as if nothing ha
d happened. Go, Little Beast. Go, I beg you, go.”
For another moment he stands there before me, ready to flee, motionless and mute, while the blood inside him rushes and stirs as if for a sudden death.
I tell him again to go. “Go now, Little Beast. Go. They’re waiting for me.”
He has the misfortune of being unable to leave. I push him towards the door. I bid him adieu, tenderly, like in a novel.
MIGUEL ALMEVIDA
Not at my mother’s or at Madame Guillou’s or at Jean-Ephrem de la Tour’s. There’s no place where I can sleep and eat, laugh or cry, in peace. Driven away from everywhere. I go down onto the deserted riverbank. Day is breaking in the grey sky. There’s no clochard to declare that the day will be beautiful.
I am heavy, so heavy, like a woman carrying a child on her back. Jean-Ephrem de la Tour, my husband. I shall deliver him from his evil. I shall take responsibility for his burden, fasten it to me like a big stone to drown me.
After looking for a long time at the Seine lapping at my feet, I begin to see images half-dreamed in the shuddering water. The Spain of my parents, with its white houses, its silvery olive trees, its green vines all in a row, undone by the invasive water when I bend over it. Someone sacred I don’t yet know is preparing a suit of light for me, in secret, in the midst of the waves and grey ripples, for when I’ll have arrived among the dead.
MADAME GUILLOU
Those people are impossible. The son has drowned himself in the Seine, the mother is screaming so loudly you can hear her in the street; as for the father, rumour has it that he prowls the city in the hope of getting his wife back and erasing all dishonour from his house.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Renowned throughout Canada and the world as a poet, play- wright, and novelist, Anne Hébert devoted her life to writing.
Born on August 1, 1916, in Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault, a tiny village 40 kilometres northeast of Quebec City, Anne Hébert was encouraged to write at an early age by her father, Maurice Lang-Hébert, a respected poet and literary critic and her cousin, the poet Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau.
Anne Hébert published her first volume of poetry, Les Songes en équilibre, in 1942. The book garnered strong critical praise and won the Prix David in 1943. Despite this success, Quebec publishers refused to publish her subsequent dark and violent works, Le Torrent and Le Tombeau des rois. As a result, the former was published in 1950 and the latter in 1952 at the expense of Hébert and her friend Roger Lemelin. In 1954, with the help of a grant from the Royal Society of Canada, Anne Hébert left for Paris, a city she believed would embrace her style and subject matter. Although Paris’s provocative cityscapes and mysterious underground later set the scene for four of her novels, Hébert remained fascinated and inspired by Quebec, and became revered as one of French Canada’s literary treasures.
During a career that spanned nearly sixty years, Anne Hébert was honoured with many prestigious awards. She won the Prix France-Canada and the Prix Duvernay in 1958 for Les Chambres de bois, the Governor General’s Award in 1960 for Poèmes, the Molson Prize in 1967, a second Governor General’s Award in 1975 for Les Enfants du sabbat, the Prix Femina in 1982 for Les Fous de Bassan, and a third Governor General’s Award in 1992 for L’Enfant chargé de songes. Sheila Fischman’s translation of Le Premier jardin, The First Garden, won the Félix Antoine-Savard Prize for translation and Am I disturbing you? (her translation of Est ce que je te dérange?) was a finalist for the Giller Prize in 1999.
Anne Hébert’s work has been widely translated and has sold throughout the world. Two volumes of her poetry, Anne Hébert: Selected Poems and Day Has No Equal but the Night, and her novels In the Shadow of the Wind, The First Garden, Kamouraska, and the four included in this extraordinary collection have been published in English by House of Anansi Press to stellar reviews.
Anne Hébert passed away in Montreal on January 22, 2000. She continues to be celebrated for her literary genius and for her enrichment of Canadian literature.
ALSO BY ANNE HÉBERT
FICTION
The First Garden
Héloïse
In the Shadow of the Wind
Kamouraska
POETRY
Day Has No Equal but the Night
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
HOUSE OF ANANSI PRESS was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”
