Madame Victoria

by Catherine Leroux

  Victoria rarely dwelt on her reflection. Her image didn’t interest her. She was; the stability of her figure and its finer aspects were enough for her. She used mirrors only to make sure her hair was not out of place or to inspect her skin, which very occasionally indulged in a mild itch. Still naked, hardly bothered by the few degrees of heat that her room lacked, she stepped in front of the mirror and scrutinized herself. Her arms were the same. The shape of her eyes was unchanged. Her buttocks had withstood the journey, and her legs were as streamlined as ever. Everything was in its proper place, and yet the dissonance persisted.

  All through her rides on the buses, in the Metro, in wild taxis, and as she walked along the boulevards and past the old stone buildings, the malaise clung to her like an urge to cough. It took her a while to discover the source of this distress. It was neither the place nor the period but the inhabitants or, rather, the way they behaved toward her. The gaze of others had become a cloak that enveloped her at every moment of her life. But since her arrival in the twentieth century, no one had looked at her for more than a few seconds. She had received just a few passing glances, which stung more than they comforted.

  She therefore began to stare at people, to study them as never before. Incapable of initiating a discussion with a stranger, she sat down on a park bench, picked out a passerby and fixed her eyes on that person, determined not to look away until they felt the weight of her gaze, turned around, took the first step, and from that first step a conversation, a journey, an odyssey, possible worlds would ensue. But all she managed to do was to prompt a few businessmen to hurry away and make a small child cry.

  Despite her diet of heavy foods rich in animal fat, she felt constantly hungry and cold. She bought clothes made of synthetic fibres but they did not keep her warm. Eager to restore her body’s lost balance, she haunted spas, saunas, and meditation centres, yet the peace of mind she sought slipped through her fingers. It was an expensive lifestyle, and her nest egg shrank. Victoria dreamed of finding a treasure chest or a sack full of gold; she thought so hard about it that she was almost disappointed when the bonanza failed to materialize. She needed to find work, to offer an employer her intangible, unverifiable experience. But she had no clue where to begin, how to describe her qualifications, how to display them. She was caught in the jaws of a vise, where her ideas fizzled out even before they could come to light.

  When she was down to her last coins, the hotel manager unceremoniously showed her the door. November descended on the city like salt on a wound. Victoria put on all of her outfits in successive layers and left the building. She walked for hours, distraught and grimacing in the raw wind. For the first time in her life she wanted to be somewhere else. Before setting out for the twentieth century she had been told, “To come back, all you need to do is to return to the exact spot where you first arrived.” She headed toward the northern part of the city.

  The man in charge of the relaxation centre seemed not to recognize the unkempt woman standing in front of him in a polyester spacesuit.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’d like . . . hmm . . . a flotation tank, please.”

  “There’s nothing free right now.”

  “Well, can I have an appointment for another day?”

  The man gave her an unfriendly pout as he looked her up and down.

  “I’m afraid we’re booked up,” he said without even peeking at his schedule. “There’s nothing available.”

  Victoria appeared disheartened as she made for the exit. When she was certain no one was watching her she spun around and stole over to the stairs leading to the room where she had emerged from her capsule. The layers of clothing slowed her progress, but she absolutely had to reach the second floor.

  She had made it to the fourth step when she was caught. A security guard grabbed her and shouted: “Don’t resist, ma’am, don’t resist!” Victoria had no intention of resisting. A great weariness came over her body, which quietly slumped into her adversary’s arms. She was resigned and let him drag her to the exit, captive to a century that rejected her. The few remaining coins in her pocket jingled like a jailer’s keys.

  She picked out a colourful street, a clean staircase, a lively corner. If she must stay outside it might as well be a spot where she could enjoy the warmth of the people going by and the vibrant wave of the blue and purple storefronts. She parked herself on a squeaky step and watched the parade of humans, these creatures that, ultimately, she didn’t understand at all. How had everything that was so easy in the twenty-fifth century become so hard? Maybe something had broken while she was travelling back in time, and the subtle organ that enables you to engage with others had been altered. Or maybe she had always been out of step with her fellows.

  She jumped when the first coin clinked at her feet. Looking up, she saw a woman in a fur coat moving away. Had it dropped out of her purse? Victoria picked up the round dollar piece and stared at it. But before she could decide what to do with it, another passerby slipped her some small change. Victoria contemplated the coins that, to her astonishment, glinted in the palm of her hand. She’d been given alms.

  All afternoon the money piled up in the pockets of Victoria’s multiple articles of clothing. With each offering, she harked back to her twenty-fifth century penthouse, her jewellery, and the valuable paintings on the walls, which could have kept her afloat for years. Around three o’clock, a young man whose hair was done up in a mass of slender braids handed her a coffee, which she drank with pleasure. She then used the empty cup to collect donations. She received cigarettes, bread crusts, salted peanuts, and one man offered her a laughable sum in exchange for a blow job. Too stunned to speak, she slowly shook her head, no.

  In the evening, she glided into a grocery store with the forty dollars she had amassed. She foraged in the aisles for the tastiest, warmest food, things that would melt and swell in her stomach and keep her whole. While she waited in line at the cash, her eyes fell on the cover of a magazine. In addition to an article revealing the secret of slimmer hips and ten tips for a zero-calories holiday season, it promised the list of the most beautiful women of 1999.

  Victoria flipped through the periodical. Translucent skins, pumped-up eyelids, hollow chests, lips in a crimson pucker. Sullen silhouettes, melted stomachs, disciplined knees. Victoria perused the photos one at a time and then closed her eyes. It was all very clear. She replaced the magazine, which left her fingers redolent of ink and cheap perfume, paid for her purchase, and went out feeling that somewhere inside her a mainsail had just billowed out.

  Immediately the next day she went back to the office of La Perle and dictated a second message to the clerk: I AM UGLY HERE. RETURN IMPOSSIBLE. VICTORIA. The man looked at her askance as she laid down her last coins to pay for the ad. Lighter now, she went back to her staircase and her paper cup. That night, a woman in tears stopped next to Victoria, wrenched a sparkling ring off her third finger, handed it to Victoria, and dashed away. Victoria gingerly tucked the jewel into her inside pocket. The idea of selling the wedding ring never crossed her mind.

  The cold weather began to bite. Victoria kept warm with bland herbal teas and a moth-eaten parka given to her by an elderly couple. She fell into a routine like a stray cat in a deserted house. She awoke, filled up on dry croissants from the trash of a bakery, and then sat down at her usual spot to cadge for money. She lunched on broth and killed time in the afternoon when things were slow by talking to passersby who stopped to chat out of curiosity, kindness, or self-interest. In this city, homeless people served as confessional, lost-and-found, prey, or poem. Victoria adapted to all these functions.

  At night, she slunk to the far end of an alleyway or under the deck of a café and wrapped herself in old newspapers. She promptly drifted off, caught in the net of her numbness and released into the warm seas of sleep. Had she glanced at the papers that she used as a blanket she might have seen this recurring message:
EON SEEKS VICTORIA TO FACILITATE RETURN. SIGNAL YOUR LOCATION. But the troubled waters of night grew thicker, and Victoria no longer had any expectations.

  The imminence of the new millennium was palpable everywhere: above the rooftops, in the graffiti, on signs displaying warnings and impossible wishes. The world seemed ready to tip over. This effervescence left Victoria breathless, and she sought refuge in the crevices where neither the oracles nor the merchants of the apocalypse could get in. She discovered that the beauty of Montreal lay less in its facades than its back streets, which brought you closer to the core, to the magma that was the organism’s lifeblood.

  Soon, however, no matter where she went, a reiteration loomed up in the landscape. At first it was just an impression, a familiar shadow that persisted like a floater. Little by little, her vision grew sharper and focused on the point of origin of this strange déjà vu. It was a man. He wore a ridiculous hat, like a bundle of fur apparently meant to stave off the assaults of incipient winter. Wherever she went, there he was, although he never seemed to follow her when she was on the move. He stared at her insistently, a look that she was not used to anymore. She sensed it in every breath he took, in his stubborn immobility—he wanted her. He wanted her with that dangerous desire, a desire that bides its time, that patiently mounts to the brink of the intolerable, that weighs on its object as it waits for a gesture to release it, to be unloosed. He watched her, and she realized she was going to die.

  Victoria gave up her staircase, her alley, the greasy spoon where she gulped down her daily soup, and moved away from her usual territory, but he kept popping up, as if he had leapfrogged ahead of her. The next moment, he would vanish without a trace. She frantically moved from place to place, convinced that she could shake him off if only she found the right spot, some vast space charged with electricity, with the energy she had always lacked. A battleground where she could resist and hold up her refusal like a shield. The cold slashed at her bones, her nerves, and she strived with her whole body to turn that pain into a weapon. She had abandoned for good the neutral zones and friendly feelings. Perhaps her suffering would spawn a form of courage.

  He was not there when she stumbled on the eight letters V-I-C-T-O-R-I-A carved into the pediment of a building. She was shivering when she halted in front of the hospital that looked like a castle. She approached the magnificent stone walls that protected a thousand lives, a thousand illnesses. The mountain rose up glowing against the night. Suddenly full of confidence, she skirted around the buildings and climbed up to the promontory where the city centre spread out before her. A match was about to end in a stadium below and the numbed November air was filled with the fans’ triumphant shouts. The sensation of having conquered something welled up inside her. Without warning, a howl burst out of her, as if it had always been there, crouching in her gut, waiting for the moment when it would erupt and overpower every other sound nearby.

  When she stopped and there was silence again, he was there. She hardly needed to turn around to see him standing behind her straight as a ramrod. Now the place from which her cry had sprung burned as though a sword had been thrust down her throat. This time, he didn’t disappear.

  As she slowly made her way into the woods, she guessed he was following her but keeping his distance so as not to scare her away before he pounced. She looked up at the moon swelling over the cold, apple-scented landscape. Soon she would have to fight. A wire fence appeared. She sensed her pursuer stopping, his heels sinking into the mud, his vile headgear bending the dry branches. “Are you Victoria?” The words drifted to her but she could not be sure he had actually said them. She was rooted to the spot, riveted to the fence that seemed to protect a treasure or a bottomless mine. The man’s breath expanded and filled the woods, and Victoria felt the invisible sword plunge deeper into her throat.

  Then, as if an extraneous finger had come to lift up her words and fling them into the air, she answered: “Yes, I am.” And in a flash, she jumped. A prodigious bound that propelled her to the top of the barrier and over to the other side, where she landed gracefully. She was inexplicably certain he would not follow her into this enclosure. She had gone into another world.

  At her feet, glimmering under the stars, was a swimming pool. Three-quarters full, covered with a crystalline layer of ice, the pool gently chewed on the mixture of mud and dead leaves floating in its water. Victoria watched the liquid swim around, much as countless patients undoubtedly had done in an effort to recover their strength. She took a deep breath. There might have been wolves, a mob, an execution squad on the other side of the fence. She was beyond their reach.

  One effortless leap and she was in the water. Her dive broke the thin layer of ice and churned up the stagnant mire in the pool. The absolute cold of the pool engulfed all the others, the frostbite, the shivers, the cramps that had built up in her. At the bottom, everything became clearer, closer. She travelled back along a centuries-long thread. As she sank down, breathing in a liquid that at last restored her peace of mind, she evaded not just her pursuer but an entire epoch.

  Weightless, her limbs stirred, opened up and dilated; her skin radiated a hazy luminescence under the shattered ice. Her beauty, a new version of her beauty, regained possession of her exhausted body, and somewhere a perplexed man and a worried owl gathered fragments of it before she disappeared from view. Victoria had never been so beautiful, so invisible. She was as round as the invention of the wheel, as a rudder or a flooded hull. She was on her way home.

  Victoria Down

  Prostrate. The world comes to her differently. The earth’s belly is almost audible. Other sounds are dampened. She intones melodies, incantations, but there’s nothing left but a thread of air. With no one to hear her, her voice has gone quiet.

  She’s been stretched out in this thicket for so long she thought she was turning into a snake, a lizard, or a salamander. Her legs are sunk in the ground, and she breathes with the worms. Mosses tried to grow on her back but couldn’t gain a purchase there. She’s as smooth as a stone pulled from a fire.

  Before her eyes, the huts cave in and dissolve. Victoria never would have believed that what they’d built would crumble so quickly after they died. She hadn’t realized how brittle their world was, barely sustained by the daily efforts of the people who made up her family. She’d like to get up and preserve these last buildings. She stays horizontal.

  At times she sleeps, never for long. She dreams that others have survived and the survivors are standing up and walking toward her. Elated, she tries to open her arms to them, to talk to them, but she’s unable. Her voice falls silent and her words collapse before crossing her lips.

  Otherwise, she dreams of her own end. She sees herself lying flat in a muddy grave. Then she comes back to life, gets to her feet, and sinks back into death before rising once more and lying down again. This cycle repeats itself twelve times until she awakes.

  In a panic, she tries to utter a sentence, a prayer. This is hard when you’re voiceless. She’s forgotten the most important words. Child. Fire. House. Her mother tongue, in which the first person was always plural and people and family were just one word, was intimately linked to the tribe. With the tribe gone, the words go missing.

  There are also memories that can’t be suppressed. The rumbling on the far side of the mountain. The arrival of the giants, with their snake-coloured costumes. Their eyes at once blue and green. The clubs in their hands and the blood they could spill with such monstrous ease. Their pointed phalluses, their ferocity toward the sisters and daughters, the mothers, even the elders. Death in a rolling boil of blood, piss, and shit.

  She saw her people grab their little weapons designed to take down animals on the fly. She saw the strongest ones rise up to protect the others, the best warriors, the first to fall, without a fight, without honour. It came down to the little children, wielding spears, all of them filled with blinding bravery. All of them dead an hour
later.

  That is what she witnessed from the thicket where she still lies. Alarmed by the first detonations, she had dived for cover, face down. The giants caroused all through the night and left at dawn, when they’d had their fill. Victoria hasn’t budged since that day. If she did get up it would be to take hold of an arrowhead and gouge out her eyes, slash her belly emptied of the children she had borne and let die, lacerate her genitals, which had loved the men who had fallen before her eyes without a sound. Voiceless.

  Her throat is burning. Her chest wheezes. She opens her mouth wide to gather in the wind, hoping that the pollen drifting in the glade might soothe her. The flowers have opened and are sending out their call by the thousands through the dense forest. She finds their persistence somehow comforting. Animals race by without fearing her presence. She no longer has a scent. The village no longer has a scent. It’s no longer a village.

  Their prayers, tools, legends, hunts, lullabies, jewellery, trails, ovens, sacrifices, remedies—Victoria isn’t able to latch on to anything anymore. Except herself, her posture of defeat in which there may possibly reside, if not a kind of courage then a form of resistance. So long as she is alive, they have not completely disappeared. Her cowardice then becomes a victory, her survival a celebration. She celebrates face down, her mouth in the earth.