The author reigns supreme over the breadth of territory, and sometimes, like a god wracked by doubt but nonetheless persisting with a god’s unavoidable cruelty, abuses a power she doesn’t know how to use.
* * *
It’s been pouring since dawn and, faced with the grey gloom surrounding me, I can’t stop talking about the rain, the storm, the tempest. I’m convinced these climatic events will exert a profound influence on the narrative arc, because not a day passes without the perpetual changes of temperature in this country having an effect upon my way of reacting to the world, in other words on my mood — whether I am cruel, kind, or compassionate.
The summer before I met Heather was a rainy one. Clouds every day. Showers every day. Could all this rain be for me, I wondered stupidly one morning, as I stood hypnotized by the water overflowing the eavestroughs, like a deranged woman who believes a thunderstorm has burst due to the irrefutable need she feels for her heartbreak to be matched by something equally forceful.
And yet the rainfall was gentle. And I wasn’t deranged. I simply considered the water as a present dropped down from the height of the clouds, a gift to anyone wanting to enjoy the touch of the sky and the summer on their face. Still, there were others who would feel suffocated by all this streaming water, and my joy was diffused with shame when I looked at the flooded garden and saw the pallid basil unable to take root in the sludge, and thought of the rotting hooves of the animals in the ruts of infertile fields, of the wounds the humidity was inflaming. Is it possible that all joy has, concomitantly, a dark and destructive side? Can I be happy only if other creatures suffer?
* * *
The water funnelled by the eavestroughs has furrowed grooves in the earth where the overflow pours out of the pipe, forming a network of channels snaking toward the road, that meet up in places before separating again when some obstacle deviates them from their course. I try to work out if one of the channels will become a river, and if the others, following the slope of the ground, will end up joining it, increasing its flow and enlarging its banks. Fascinated by all this surging, inflating, and swelling, by the water becoming a river in this miniature reproduction of the world, I wager that the ground will collapse two metres away from the cedars, forming a frenzied waterfall that will uproot the trees.
I play at God to align myself with his maleficence, that’s what I say to P., who’s reading a newspaper behind me. I can allow myself this seeming heresy, since gods are nothing more than inventions in man’s own image, our true nature revealed more in war and abomination than in joy and lightness.
I play because I know kind gods do not exist, that they too are chimera forcing believers to imagine grand designs with infinite mercies hidden behind them, which are, however, only discernible to those capable of understanding the schemes in question. Which is to say nobody, and implicating in turn the gods themselves, concealing their kindnesses in plagues.
With my eyes fixed on the channel whose tributaries have slowly turned it into a rushing river, I add that if the gods weren’t cruel, literature wouldn’t exist, since there’d be nothing to write about except the benign satisfaction of the contented man. And then, through the roaring of the current, I hear the words “places, the cruelty of places,” these spoken by P., who is looking at the rain. I remain at the doorstep as the storm winds of winter pass over and interfere in my landscape, forcing me to question the inexorable cruelty of the milieux in which the people I’ve created for my pleasure have to sleep and work — as do too, sometimes, those I see while I’m out walking, people who follow me because they have no other choice, because they can only exist if I do, and vice versa.
* * *
The gods I evoke, the destructive waters, this staring out at the world while under the spell of messages in the water streaming down the windows, all these images come to me from a movie I’ve almost entirely forgotten, apart from the overly staring eyes of a man who believes the raindrops diverging on a grey window announce a flood or catastrophe to be visited on the house. I am that crazy man. I am Heather Thorne.
Heather managed to get out of her car despite the bashed-in left door and the right side of the vehicle being angled down over the south slope of the hill and its tiny clearing. She picked up the axe lying on the back seat, left there by a helping hand or some man whose very existence she has forgotten — a lover, a father, a brother — and then wielded the tool horizontally, sharp edge toward her, and hit the window with all the might she could muster before wriggling outside, across pieces of glass forming a constellation of minuscule slivers clinging to the window frame, like a spider’s web broken in the centre, a V-shaped shard attaching itself to her hair as she went through. Instinctively, she retracted her head into her shoulders, afraid another shard might dig into her neck and slice open her jugular, before exiting the narrow space into which the night wind was blowing, filled with smells of pine and fall, of dead leaves, stagnant water, and the urine of fleeing prey.
These smells reached her like a cloud of reminiscences in which she thought she’d identified a clue that might help her figure out who she was and where she came from — assuming, of course, that she might actually have come from somewhere other than the pile of crumpled metal from which she’d managed to extricate herself. She is barely conscious of belonging to a species that has learned to use names. Temporarily, Heather Thorne is nothing but pure instinct, pricking her nose up at the smells around her. The smells awaken in her the kind of animality that grips her right in the gut, tells her not to make a sound, and to watch out for the tiniest movement disturbing the still darkness. In the moment, Heather Thorne is no more than a lost spirit in a body whose suffering fades when compared with the whole disaster.
She licks her hands’ open wounds and then covers them with moss and black earth. She performs the mechanical gesture without thinking, which links her to a form of knowledge someone has imparted to her in a past life already escaping her. The same thing happens when she stands up: she becomes a two-legged creature moving with difficulty in a direction that instinct alone tells her to take. Then she notices a light behind the hill; it’s moving toward her, and behind it is another two-legged animal carrying a long stick made of wood and metal. Gun, she thinks. And in the dim light of the moon shining on the black metal, she remembers: the kind of animal I am is a woman, a creature that conceals her nakedness under skins not her own. And the animal approaching me is a man, a lone hunter, the kind of creature you find in novels.
* * *
The fall and its fogs have given way to winter. The furrows have frozen, the cold has asserted its rightful dominance and, in an hour or so, the clouds blown by the westerly wind will burst, parachuting a dozen centimetres of snow down upon our heads. This will make P. and I feel obliged to shovel a path to the road, and then others leading to the forest behind the house.
* * *
“Heather Thorne owes her survival to a simple logic which demands that a heroine cannot die before her story has begun. She owes her survival to me, to my needing her to exist if I am to continue inventing trees and women advancing between said trees, characters whose destiny will end in black ink suspending the ennui of cold days.”
I write these sentences as a blizzard rages, slowly covering the paths P. and I dug earlier with more snow. The paths will have disappeared entirely before nightfall. We’ll barely see anything more than their traces, where the curves of the paths have been polished by the wind, a few blades of hardened snow clinging to their edges.
The hill on the 4th Line is also covered in snow, but where Heather Thorne is standing it’s still fall, still night, and still the hunter is moving toward her, his lamp trained on the face of the woman who has only just remembered what it means to be a woman. Heather and the hunter have not exchanged a single word. Not a single new leaf has touched the ground. No movement has been made.
Although it looks as though the man and Heather ar
e anticipating a confrontation, in reality they aren’t waiting for anything. For them, time has stopped, time during which they are not growing older, not thinking, not breathing. They are a picture painted on a timeless autumn night.
Moving on from this picture, a thousand scenarios are possible. I should choose only one, and follow its multiple digressions wherever the black ink flows. The route of my meandering is uncertain. I might have to retrace my steps and go back to the beginning of the forest in which Heather is not breathing. All the while I’m afraid the ink will stagnate and, as it soaks into the dog-eared edges of the page, force me to speed up events and modify the angle of the story in order to transport Heather to La Languette, where I’ll have no choice but to give her the starring role in a tale of horror, the notes for which I sketched out last winter — days when I spent my Sunday afternoons walking up and down this isolated road, unaware that I’d soon be calling myself Heather.
In one of the scenes of this unfinished drama, a woman whose face I can’t quite make out was walking in front of me, a woman whom it now seems impossible to call by anything other than my own name, Heather. She was walking briskly, her long blonde hair spilling out from under her red hat and flowing down her back. I could hear it rustling on the fabric of her coat, the sound of it alternating with the creak of her boots on the snow rendered shiny by the caterpillar tracks of passing snowmobiles. Their treads had dug an uneven chequered pattern, a network of cross-hatched lines that occasionally forced her to slow down so as not to lose her footing on the glistening patches.
Then two snowmobilers showed up, neither expecting to see a young woman on their route, and both losing their heads when they saw her, ripping off her canvas coat and having to live with the repercussions of this madness for the rest of their days, each having nobody to whom they could admit their crime or their nightmares — except for the other man, the man at the very origin of the nightmare, whom they’d come to hate and could only tolerate on indolent nights when alcohol made them close again, united in the pathetic vulgarity of their overused jokes or, the opposite tendency, in the impetuous hurling of brash insults ripping out their guilty pasts and exposing them to the light.
The scene is all too familiar, in which all that is left of the young woman are some traces of blood on the snow, and all we see are the boots of the snowmobilers as they furiously kick snow over their tracks and wonder what the fuck has happened. “Gilles, tell me that didn’t just happen, for Christ’s sake tell me we didn’t just do that!”
It’s the kind of situation in which I could put an end to Heather without the story collapsing, because a new one would follow in its wake. The snowmobilers would take their turn in the spotlight, and then the people who went out to look for Heather — the young woman who went out walking when a blizzard was forecast and didn’t come home for dinner, who’d not returned even as the clock’s hands pointed to the heart of the night and emphasized the ineluctable passing of time.
The next question could be fatal for Heather Thorne: Do I really need her? Do I need Heather alive?
* * *
Not long ago, an injured squirrel climbed up to the cottage-shaped bird feeder swinging outside the patio door of my study, from which I watch the cedars blowing on windy days. The squirrel left traces of blood on the pale wood. Its foot must have been chapped by winter, by its severity.
I’ll have to clean up the blood soon, since the mere sight of it makes my legs feel numb, as if I were the one feeling the pain of this squirrel, Ti-Boutte, and all the other red squirrels sauntering around morning to night from the maples to the feeder, from the feeder to the cedars, from the cedars to the fence that P. and I plan to reinforce in the spring so that it doesn’t fall down beneath the weight of the wild rose bushes.
I’ll have to put my gloves on to clean up the blood, though a trace of it will remain, just like what happened with the bombyx, a fine layer of brown powder delineating the fading shape of the moth’s open wings on my desk. The stain from the squirrel’s wound will become encrusted in the memory of the wood, changing from red to brown before becoming invisible, though that won’t stop my leg muscles from tensing each time I see the feeder swinging in the wind.
Heather’s blood didn’t affect me quite as trenchantly, probably because her blood is also mine and Heather only bleeds if I do. I can’t bear other people’s blood. I can only come to terms with blood that emerges from wounds I inflict on myself, all of this amounting to nothing when compared with the suffering of creatures bruised by winter.
* * *
It’s bizarre. Suddenly it seems as though I have memories that belong to Heather, of a little blue dress, a dog called Jackson, a white winter morning, intermingling with my own. I call to the dog running in the crazy snow, “Jackson, Jackson, my love,” and look past the curtains of my blue bedroom to the landscape, and then I hear a yapping coming from Heather’s forgotten childhood, followed by a cry of terror that throws me face down on the ground. The yell from La Languette. Heather Thorne’s last cry.
When I come to my senses, the little blue dress is still there, laid out on the bed in a bedroom that is also blue. Heather’s bedroom on a summer morning, a nagging question emerging from the filtered light: is my past becoming Heather Thorne’s?
I close my manuscript as soft snow whirls in the cold air. The cat watches me from his armchair. He hasn’t moved since this morning, hasn’t eaten his fish, and didn’t jump up to the window when a blue jay landed outside. Is he Heather’s cat?
* * *
The night was long and dark but somehow I got through, my thoughts weighed down with intermittent dreams dominated by the grey of indistinct mornings. The curtains are grey, so too are the walls and the sky, which I surmise is overcast from the dusky light in the bedroom. I don’t even know what time it is, what day even, or which season will set my mood once I open the curtains. I untangle myself from the crumpled sheets and look outside.
P. is there, in the middle of a path whose edges reach to his mid-thigh. Every time his bent-over body thrusts the shovel, the steam of his breath lifts in puffs around him. I imagine the muscles of his back contracting, the warmth of his skin, his sweat soaking into the wool despite the biting cold. We are in deep winter. I repeat: we are in deep winter. Only Heather Thorne is still living in the fall.
* * *
The man has taken another step toward Heather and she retreats, soon blocked by the tangle of branches. Nervously, she surveys her surroundings for an escape route, looking for some gap she might run through without having to hunch over and, in so doing, offer up her vulnerable back to the hunter.
Cornered into the rampart of trees on the north side of the clearing, Heather asks herself why she instinctively fears this man when actually she should be overjoyed by his unexpected appearance in the heart of the forest. He must know it well if he’s walking through it in the middle of the night and perhaps, if she abandons the idea of fleeing, he’ll help her find her way, maybe offer her an arm to lean on. She has a searing pain in her right thigh, in the same spot where her ripped pants provide a view of blood drying on white skin, and the man must have noticed this pain in her pursed mouth and slight limp. So she waits for him to hold a hand out to her, offer her a drink from his water bottle, pull a clean tissue from one of his pockets so she can wipe away the blood slowly clotting on her right cheek — all entirely natural things to do when you stumble across an injured woman.
For a moment Heather holds her breath, because the evocation of women weakened by clearly visible injuries brings to mind an image lost in the fuzziness of the night, of a woman standing near a ditch and looking haggard, or stunned even, as if she’s just come to grips with the meaning of an equation that has evaded her for so long, or just remembered where she put some object — a piece of jewellery or a letter — that she’s been trying to find for weeks.
Heather has forgotten the details of this event,
but remembers the way the woman smiled as she passed, a smile indicating she should continue on her way but which then froze, along with the rest of the woman’s body, paralyzed by an astonishment suddenly giving way to a terror that had to be related to her journey along the deserted road.
For a moment, the man doesn’t exist anymore. In the light of the gibbous moon, other images come to Heather Thorne: of the stranger’s medusa smile and her purple leather jacket, the thin trickle of a stream disappearing in the ferns, the horizon line crosshatched by the waving treetops. Words bully their way through the images: Gilles, tabarnak, tell me we didn’t just do that. And then, in the echoes of his crude tabarnak, Heather Thorne is struck by the truth confirmed by the gaze of the woman in the purple leather jacket: I am an injured woman and I am called Heather, I must be called Heather. And now, paralyzed in turn, she lowers herself back against a tree trunk in order to rest and repeats, “My name is Heather, Heather Thorne.”
As she speaks these words, the man shines his lamp on Heather Thorne’s face. Instinctively, she lifts her arms, blinded by the light and seeing only the black silhouette of the armed man in the yellow halo. Time has stopped, again, and they size each other up: two animals, one of which has encroached on the other’s territory; two big cats unable to share the same space. Then, too fast to catch, a vague memory traverses Heather’s field of vision at lightning speed, like a dream in fading colours. I know this man, she tells herself, she knows this man from a distant memory her current problems can’t access. She plasters on a smile so that the man won’t notice her discomfort and starts to move forward.
Back Roads Page 2
