Madame Victoria

by Catherine Leroux

  They have just crossed the river when she’s arrested. The officers explain that she can’t sleep outside, this isn’t Montreal, and there are laws, and places for people like her. They take her, along with her baby, to one such place. The bed stinks, the window is tiny, and the water in the toilets is foul and won’t swirl when you flush. Fortunately, the little guy has no trouble slipping under the doors and goes out to play in the fresh air whenever he likes. Victoria continues to caress him in her belly, where the salutary tugs persist. She refuses to eat and doesn’t answer the questions that are put to her.

  Grumpy women come to examine every inch of her. They squeeze, grope, ask her to cough, to spread her legs, they take her blood and her urine, and one of them even dares to press down on her belly as though, under the shirt and skin, she had seen a little angel capering about in his mother’s pink waters. She is shut in for weeks. The little one grows impatient and Victoria, weaker. To thrive, they need the vastness of the countryside and the cool of the night. A thousand times she thinks of escaping. Her fatigue bars the way.

  On the morning when two square-shouldered, clean-shaven men come for her, her wound suddenly reopens. She screams and protests. The little one hasn’t come back yet. “We have no choice, Madame. Montreal is the place for you. Your cancer is too complicated for the local hospital.” She has no idea what they’re talking about and wraps her hands over her belly as they drag her to an enormous vehicle. She cries the whole way, a seven-hour drive; she doesn’t want to go to Montreal, they’re driving too fast, the little guy will never be able to catch up. As they pass hideous, reeking factories, she sobs even louder. Her only consolation is to feel him lodged in her belly. Over and over she says, “Never apart again. Never apart again.”

  They take her to a building perched on a mountain. It looks like an ancient castle surrounded by woods and she finds some comfort in this. She waits in a room overlooking the woods, until a lady finally comes to speak to her. She says she is Dr. Eon, that Victoria is under her care, that it’s complicated because she has no papers but they’ll make do without because her life is at risk. She announces they will open her belly to remove a lump of tissue that is trying to kill her. Victoria is frightened, she hesitates; can she share her secret with this woman? The doctor has eyes of different colours, and this reassures her. She explains that she’s willing to have the operation, but they must be very careful with the baby in her belly because she loves him so much and doesn’t want to lose him.

  “It’s not a baby, Madame. It’s a tumour. It’s quite possible you feel a tingle that may seem like something moving, but it’s absolutely impossible that you’re pregnant. Given your age.” So Victoria starts to scream, refuses to let them cut her open, flings anything within reach at Dr. Eon. More women arrive, grab her wrists and ankles, strap her down, Victoria howls, calls them murderers. They give her an injection.

  She wakes up feeling that forty years have just elapsed. The restraints are gone and her abdomen is bound up with a straggly bandage. She is not in pain. But the moment she touches her stomach, she understands. They’ve taken her baby from her. She can’t even manage to cry, and from her parched tongue she knows for sure they’ve drugged her. Outside, the light is long, full as a bottle on the sea; the summer chants a cheeky nursery rhyme. She tries to get dressed, to slip a foot out of the bed but the bandage pins her down. She’s been sliced, paralyzed. She pisses on the sheet.

  The nurse who washes her and changes her dressings tries to find out if someone will be waiting for her when she’s discharged. “My son.” She asks where Victoria plans to go. “Out.” The nurse doesn’t contradict her and brings back leaflets about shelters that look like all the places where Victoria had stayed in Quebec City. She guesses that, once again, they have no intention of letting her choose. As soon as she’s back on her feet they’ll force her to go to some other place where her son won’t be able to find her. She can’t let that happen.

  At night she gets up noiselessly to exercise. She has done enough walking in her lifetime to understand which muscles must stay strong, which nerves must be kept limber. She trains. She wants to get back into shape. Because the only thing she knows for sure is that if he’s not inside anymore, he’s outside. During the day she makes a show of being weak and in pain, and asks to be given tranquilizers, which she then spits into her pillowcase along with the other drugs she’s been ordered to swallow. She pretends to be drowsy, shaky, miserable, and no one is onto her.

  A lid of clouds sits over the ground as if to keep the night quiet. She decides this is the right moment. Her legs are firm, her belly is entirely free of pain; her belly may be dead but she is very much alive. She slips out of her nightgown and into a uniform pilfered the previous night. In the faded mirror, she looks at herself for the first time in ages. She’s a wreck, yet ecstatic to know her treasure is waiting for her somewhere. Her head spins and her heart races.

  Wearing slippers, she treads silently down the corridor. She finds her way, the door opens and presents her with the outside as others surrender whole countries. It all belongs to her. After a few hesitant steps on the asphalt she hurries toward the trees. They’re thin and scattered, but they’ll do. If she can get across Montreal going from tree to tree without ever touching concrete, she’ll be saved. But she’s prepared to crawl under the pavement, in the sewers full of rats as bloated as billionaires, to be reunited with her son.

  The slope is steep and the breeze is warm. Victoria is reminded she has long hair when she feels it brushing her back, and she smiles. Never has she felt this free. She climbs to the top of the knoll. From this vantage point she can see Montreal’s complicated roofs, its cracked avenues, its resolute inhabitants, and she tells herself she may have been wrong about this place. The city hums with tenderness. The branches around her start to dance and something commands her to stay put. This exactly where she ought to be.

  His laughter is what she hears first. Laughter so exultant that it bursts out like a cough, fitful and uncontrollable. The laughter of a baby discovering for the first time the organ that gives voice to joy. Victoria lifts her head. She can see nothing now, as a million colours explode before her eyes. His smell reaches her, as tender as butter and sugar surrendering to each other, a blend of eiderdown and saliva, and she succumbs to the giddiness brought on by this extraordinary scent. At last, he arrives and leaps into her arms with such force that she topples over backward. She hugs him and murmurs, “You’ve come back, you’ve come back” with endless admiration for this brave boy who was able to find her on an island of labyrinths.

  In the dead leaves, she holds the small, bare head tightly near her heart; two round feet climb up on her hip; he nuzzles up against his mother. Victoria feels light and large, larger and larger. She grows bigger and taller and expands like warm air, like the aroma of good bread. Her son is a little ball nestled against her breast, as Victoria swells and towers over the knoll, the hospital, the mountain, as she spreads through the sky and the streets, through the houses, and to the stars. She is inside, she is outside. She is everywhere.

  Victoria Drinks

  Everything starts at the throat. The thirst, the cough, the voice. The words that move mountains, the breaths like punches, the burning that comes with every swallow. All the rest proceeds from that pain: the woody aromas, the texture at once subtle and firm, the dry savours that swim to the core of your being. A tiny wound that forges your thoughts, filters colours, sharpens sounds, brings the world into focus.

  What does it say about a woman that she drinks Scotch? In a man this would be a sign of determination, strength, refinement. Success. In a woman, the same, plus one more attribute: ambition. Victoria raised her first glass as one might utter a password to gain entry into the holy of holies, where alliances are formed and power is confirmed. The place where ascension becomes possible, amid mahogany and pipe tobacco, thirty metres above the multitudes.

 
In her teenage years it would have been hard to picture her at such lofty heights. She was not born into one of those families where a learned father eager to pass on his knowledge imparted to his sole descendant the rudiments of Aristotelian philosophy and an uncommon ability to decipher anagrams. In Victoria’s house, you learned to darn socks, peel potatoes without lifting the knife, and not answer back to adults. Victoria did not answer to anyone.

  In boarding school she kept her distance from the chattering cliques, unable to fathom their frivolity, their puerile humour, their obedience. She hunched over books from which she emerged unappeased and impatient. The sisters’ prayers, psalms, and theoretical simplifications failed to satisfy the famished mouth lodged somewhere between her mind and her heart. The days and months streamed past with a slow precision that made Victoria feel as though she were living at the centre of a gigantic clock.

  Early in her final year, when the most brainless of her classmates were beginning to dream about the men to whom they would surrender their youth, and the most sensible were preparing for the cloister, Victoria decided to ask the principal for a letter of recommendation in support of her college application.

  “What are you going to do there? What about farming?”

  The nun eyed her suspiciously. Victoria imagined a future of plowing, mud, swollen udders, and the stench of liquid manure.

  “No, Sister.”

  “And what about marriage?”

  Victoria shrugged. Throughout her life she had seen exhausted women married to men for whom it was not enough to burden their wives with yearly pregnancies; they themselves were a burden the women had to shoulder while remaining under their sway. Women who were captives of a decision taken in haste thirty years earlier because it was spring, the birds were singing, and the pollen had driven them temporarily mad.

  “I . . . I’m not very domestic-minded. I’d like to go on with my studies. To go further.”

  Her reply drew a rare grin from the all-powerful mother superior.

  “Well, I’ve waited a long time to discover one who’s interested in learning.”

  The next day Victoria found herself in possession of a flattering tissue of lies that praised her faith, modesty, and remarkable intellectual achievements, thereby liberating her from the misery of the countryside and the benighted suitors her parents had lined up for her. She was seized by a vague but stubborn intuition: she must take full advantage of this unhoped-for opportunity. Clutching the letter in her fingers, she uttered the first and only oath she would ever take: she would become something different. Something that did not yet exist, and which would surpass all else.

  She moved to the metropolis, a city seething with a wild yet friendly energy from which Victoria, however, was almost entirely cut off by the austere walls of the teachers’ college for young women. This establishment trained its students to become schoolteachers, governesses, or spouses who played minuets for their in-laws. But what the college turned out to be mainly was a hotbed of quarrels. For Victoria’s fellow students were not primarily concerned with reading ancient texts but with securing a best friend. So, turning her back on the dramatic intrigues that grew out of that necessity, Victoria concentrated unenthusiastically but rigorously on her studies.

  Every other Sunday the young women were allowed to venture out into the volatile winds of Montreal. For Victoria, those days were a blessing. Detaching herself from the other students, she went out to explore the ordinary neighbourhoods, to immerse herself in the sultry intimacy of their inhabitants. It was not the people themselves that interested her so much as the effervescence of their closeness, the untidy world that they constituted. Among the outcrops of English and the yellow lustre of Montreal French, she made her greatest discovery: newspapers. Their smeary pages made her feel she was at last moored to the world, not as before through the theory and pious gaze of the clergy but by facts, the simple, lucid enunciation of the truths teeming around her. At night she devoured the newspapers under her blankets, deaf to the murmurs of her dormitory mates. She had found her home.

  A week after she graduated, Victoria, wearing short hair, pants, and a sober blouse, sat down at her typewriter for the first time. Hired by a major newspaper as a stenographer, she lost no time in overstepping the bounds of her position. Amid the jibes of the other secretaries, “Full Stop Victoria” a.k.a. “Mrs. Trousers” furiously underscored spelling mistakes and accosted reporters with a raft of suggestions on how to improve their texts. The journalists quickly forgot their wounded pride and welcomed, even solicited, the advice of this woman, who rescued their articles day after day.

  Despite this, she was shut out. As though an invisible barrier stood between the typists tapping away and the ink-and-tobacco redolence of the newsroom. To get closer to the messy, reprobate, garrulous men that she aimed to surpass, Victoria decided to force the door of their sanctuary: the tavern.

  A snowstorm was raging. Dressed in a felt coat and a battered hat, she confidently crossed the threshold of l’Ours qui tousse, The Coughing Bear. Immediately, the dampness produced by melted snow and evaporated malt shrouded her as if to soften the gazes suddenly directed at her by a hundred men. Unperturbed, she cleaved the dense row of stools and took a seat. The room fell silent. Only her neighbour to the right, already well in his cups, muttered unhappily from time to time. No one at l’Ours qui tousse had ever seen a woman stay for more than thirty seconds, just long enough to retrieve her husband. That one of her sex should actually sit down at the bar was so absurd her bewildered colleagues chose to ignore her.

  The evening might have continued like this down to the dregs, with the men politely sipping their pints of Dow and the barman content to offer Victoria a spruce beer, when the solution appeared in the form of a mug overflowing with ale. Nicknamed The Trouble, the huge mug was impossible to get completely clean and was reserved for the unlucky, the cuckolds, the losers, anybody who one way or another was being shown the door. In the absence of someone less fortunate, The Trouble was allotted that day to Victoria’s neighbour, a reporter who had been chastised by his editor-in-chief for a factual mistake.

  When the fellow tried to grasp the mug and his hand came down wide of the mark, Victoria had a sudden stroke of inspiration.

  “He’s had enough to drink. I’ll help him out,” she declared.

  With her customary resolve, she seized The Trouble, raised it to her lips, and proceeded to quaff the pint and a half of beer contained in the unwholesome jar. Her experience with this drink was limited to the drops her father would leave at the bottom of his glass, of which she had retained a sour and dismal memory. She first had to overcome that feeling and then deal with the froth that flooded her mouth, the sensation of being instantly replete, to discern at last the rare subtleties of the local brew, the sugars and bitterness that lend it a slight degree of dignity. As the crowd looked on dumbfounded, Victoria downed the whole thing in one go, regally set The Trouble down again, let out a brief belch, and announced, “Drinks for everyone. This round’s on me.”

  From that day forward, deaf to the stenographers’ snide remarks, Victoria sat down each night at a table in the pub, where, realizing her natural resistance to alcohol, she drank while keeping intoxication at bay and let the fact she was woman gradually be forgotten. A few weeks on, as if by magic, her supervisors took notice of the woman who was rescuing everyone’s articles and discreetly suggesting stories to the assignment editor, a number of which had ended up on the front page. It was a small step from rewriting the reports she had proposed to producing her own pieces, a step the paper’s management took with the heady impression of crossing the Strait of Magellan. Victoria was the first female reporter in the history of the daily.

  She began to work at a frantic pace, arriving at dawn and leaving long after the paper had gone to press. On the pretext of lending a hand she did a little of everything and gained experience in every job, especially
the top-level positions. The years went by, but the hollow space at the core of her being that she strived to fill with achievements both great and small was still not full.

  One night the publisher summoned Victoria to his office, apparently surprised at his own initiative. The news editor, a tired man whose obesity aggravated his asthma and vice versa, was retiring. For a long time now, when Victoria had finished her articles she would unobtrusively come over to assist him and step in whenever discouragement and bourbon got the best of the old man. She flitted around the plates, made child’s play of the most crowded layouts, and raised her glass with him once the edition was finally wrapped up.

  Sounding like someone christening a ship, the publisher offered her the position.

  “You’re young, but you know this job better than anyone. We said to ourselves, let’s give our little Victoria a chance.”

  Victoria took the proffered cup, which contained a shimmering splash of amber liquid.

  “I work harder than all my colleagues put together. Chance has nothing to do with it, sir.”

  She clinked her glass against that of her stunned superior and poured a thread of alcohol between her lips. Her first taste of Scotch. The liquor inundated her mouth like a conquering army.

  She had never felt love or desire or anything intense except her calculated ambitions, from which she derived precious little sensual pleasure. That first mouthful of single malt was her first encounter with true passion, with the fervour that carries away whole nations and divides continents. She drained her glass as the bemused publisher looked on, her body alert, her mind more razor-sharp than ever. She was an arrow resolutely pointed north.