Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon Read online

  YESTERDAY, AT THE HOTEL CLARENDON

  YESTERDAY, AT THE HOTEL CLARENDON

  A NOVEL BY BROSSARD, NICOLE

  TRANSLATED BY SUSANNE DE LOTBINIÈRE-HARWOOD

  English translation copyright © Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, 2005

  Original text copyright © Nicole Brossard, 2001

  Originally published in 2001 as Hier by Editions Québec Amérique Inc.

  Hardcover published in 2005 by Coach House Books

  First English paperback edition, 2006

  This epub edition published in 2010. Electronic ISBN 978 1 77056 241 7.

  This translation was funded by the Canada Council for the Arts Trans-

  lation Grants program. The publisher would also like to thank, for their

  support, the Block Grant programs of the Canada Council for the Arts

  and the Ontario Arts Council. We also acknowledge the Government of

  Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Brossard, Nicole

  [Hier. English]

  Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon / Nicole Brossard; translated

  into English by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood.

  Translation of: Hier.

  ISBN-13:978-1-55245-165-6 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10:1-55245-150-X (bound)

  ISBN-10:1-55245-165-8 (pbk.)

  I. Lotbinière-Harwood, Susanne de II. Title. III. Title: Hier. English.

  PS8503.R7H5313 2005 C843′.54 C2005-900866-0

  Nobody can anything about it

  but objects but things

  nobody nobody

  but once upon a time every time

  never always and yet

  Gaston Miron

  The wind must be saved

  Alejandra Pizarnik

  YESTERDAY

  While others march gaily toward madness in order to stay alive in a sterile world, I strive for preservation. I cling to objects, their descriptions, to the memory of landscapes lying fully drawn in the folds of things around me. Every moment requires me, my gaze or sensation. I become attached to objects. I don’t readily let go of days by banishing them to the blank book of memory. Certain words ignite me. I take the time to look around. Some mornings, I yield to the full-bodied pleasure of navigating among seconds. I then lose my voice. This doesn’t bother me. I take the opportunity to lend an ear to ambient life with an eagerness I never suspected. The idea of remaining calm doesn’t displease me. Some days I make sure everything is grey, like in November, or sombre, for I like storms.

  It doesn’t take much to upset me. I read a lot. I’ve a sharp eye for misfortune. I rarely talk about misery. I grew up surrounded by the beauty of white winters; every summer for years, I drowned in the unsettling heat of July, buried body and soul in the noble and frivolous green of vegetation lightly tousled by the wind coming off the river. In town, we lived across from a park. Stray seagulls often performed great landing manoeuvres in front of the house before softly, softly wedding their sleek wings to the dawn’s fresh dew. This gave me pleasure and I concluded that I was a happy child.

  I rarely talk about my little fears. I don’t know how to explain a mother’s love for her children. I own no weapons, like the folks to the south do. Little nothings don’t shake me up. When the ice storm plunged us into the cold, I read four essays on antiquity under the most tragic lighting. I’m easily influenced, and it upsets me to realize I’m at the mercy of a statistic, of a proverb, of three chapters I suspect were written under the force of the tidewaters of violence or of deepest despair.

  Yesterday, I walked for a long time. First day of May. People were making their presence felt throughout the city. I folded myself into a group of workers in blue aprons singing with their throats fully open like flags unfurled atop a ship’s main mast. After leaving their vocal ensemble I felt lost. I no longer knew where I was. I thought about the wandering children seen in war movies, about their mothers, their crazed eyes when they’ve just grasped the fact that they will never see them again. I often think about war, but the way one thinks about eating a soda cracker. I mean I quickly forget I’ve just been thinking about war.

  I don’t know much about pain but I’m convinced that, in order to write, one must at least once in life have gone through a devastating, an almost agonal energy. I don’t much like using the word agony. Since Mother’s death, I know it means to gasp for breath, the self enclosed in tiny blue veins like butterflies about to fly off far away. Agony: I see it’s about the eye, an inward turning of the eye even though the pupil is working very hard to say goodbye, to ask about the weather, to let the light in, ever so little, ever so little.

  Words ignite me. This is very recent. Actually, I believe it’s since I’ve been working at the Museum of Civilization, on Dalhousie Street. I’ve been assigned the job of preparing notices to describe, date and geographically situate the provenance of the objects exhibited. I take notes. I’m the one who composes. I enjoy pronouncing the words out loud as I write them: callipygian statuettes, Celtic brooches, porcelain dolls, antique pistols, ritual knives made of gold. I occasionally accept short contracts with contemporary art galleries in Montréal. Yesterday, for example, it was odd writing 2000 without adding BC.

  Yesterday, during the vernissage: I’m looking around at people. I recognize the astonishment in their eyes due to the simple, almost nonchalant fear leading them unhurriedly from one urn to another. It’s hot. Men mop their foreheads. Women pat the top part of their bosoms where the flesh is soft and inviting.

  Fabrice Lacoste comes and goes in the large exhibition hall. Smiling, welcoming, he offers advice, information, sometimes a few words, which, instead of enlightening the visitor about the exhibition, make it even more mysterious and thus more desirable. To those enquiring about the location of White Room Number 1, he has a strange way of answering with his hand closed, thumb vertical, index finger pointing in the right direction.

  Time glistens in time.

  It’s been a month already since Simone Lambert gathered the entire staff around the crates that had arrived that day. She talked at length about the exhibition, about its importance and our good fortune in producing it. She went into detail about the little gestures and precautions to be taken, then discussed the strange sense of well-being we would experience once committed to the exhibition. She warned us about the vertigo followed by a certain vulnerability we were sure to feel during the first weeks after the opening of Centuries So Far. ‘We must be responsible before history, not let it pull us into oblivion.’

  It had taken three years of negotiation, four trips to the Middle East, the patience of a saint and a woman’s iron will to overcome all the pitfalls and red tape that had come up, cultural misunderstandings and sexist pettiness, border bureaucracy and tricky transportation, to end up on this gorgeous warm spring today. Now time rushes straight at Simone Lambert, straight at her body, her life, her future. It winds around her genes like the serpent around the Tree of Knowledge. Time manufactures time using her skin, her bones, her way of walking, of addressing people who, having noticed her leaning against the rail of the mezzanine, come over to congratulate her.

  Down below, Fabrice Lacoste is talking with a handsome, feline, well-read man. One hand in his jacket pocket, the other twirling to the same rhythm as the words issuing from his mouth. He is having a grand time. No doubt he is going to charm the stranger. He knows. Has always known. He does well with any subject; usually he sticks to ecology, nationalism and archaeology. He aims for the heart of the matter, then skirts around it so as to talk about art as long as possible without being inter
rupted. He usually begins with a historical fact to which he gives inordinate importance in order to segue into a full-fledged argument, allowing him to slot that same fact back into the proper place in the collective memory and, from there, to launch into a vigorous and sensual description of the passion that the sight of the artifacts should elicit in any genuine lover of art and civilization. He talks, smiles. Soon he’ll notice that his interlocutor’s breathing has accelerated slightly.

  Surprising, though, that the same man who has such difficulty breathing in his own culture has the gift of inspiring comfort and excitement in culture-seeking museum guests. Had he not once confided to Simone just how much living here disgusted him? ‘Listen, Simone, I love history, but I hate this city.’ Simone had turned cold. Nobody working in this museum had the right to talk that way, especially not in her presence. Lacoste would have liked to crumple up his words and toss them in the wastebasket like a bad draft. He had merely added, ‘What is this strange passion of ours? Are we interested only in tombs, urns and masks? I know, love what’s around you. At least understand it. But aren’t we headed for our own demise with all these fragments of mourning haunting us in the name of civilization? We’ve been living among collections of arrows, crucifixes, rosary beads, ciboria, rocking chairs, for fifteen years. It drives me crazy.’

  That day, Lacoste had gone back to his office without closing the door behind him. Simone had overheard him asking his secretary to put him in touch with the director of the Uffizi Galleries, then, lost in thought, Simone turned toward the window. In her head, spring was stirring faraway landscapes that had haunted her since the day of her very first dig. For months everything had been blue as if God existed, then every emotion had become tinged with white, for a sweet forever-lasting folly had gripped the stone-and-bone landscape. For months she’d shared the most precious moments of her life with Alice Dumont. They’d gone from site to site in search of a future and of words that would make of their love a reality.

  Since Mother’s death, I’ve started saying what I think to imaginary people. I voice my ill humour, my thoughts, my fears. I also try to imagine the answers when things are cracking up in my mind. Saying everything doesn’t necessarily make me happy and, indeed, I don’t know why there’s such emphasis on all and sundry telling their story, and what’s more, doing it live. As of yesterday, it’s as if I’d become a better person, sparked by some flame that sets me dreaming in a world where no one dreams of dreaming anymore. Misfortunes multiply like beasts amid technological knowledge. Knowledge spreads like misery. My imagination seems to work too quickly; its volume doubles with the heart’s every intention. Without end, the images violently interpenetrate, changeable and indescribable. I go to the theatre often. All forms of dialogue arouse my curiosity. I’d like to understand what gives dialogue its nobility and what makes it a high art for those of us who live wrapped around solitude like harmless boas. What is the value of a question in a dialogue? How important are the answers?

  Yesterday, on my way back from the museum: my head is full of images of storms. A boundless sea of paintings and photographs. Other storms I build like a backdrop, with sombre and anonymous characters, impossible to identify. I remain thus all evening, pressed up against the existence of a storm without feeling threatened. Waiting. After a while I become, I am, the storm, the disruption, the precipitation, the agitation that puts reality in peril.

  Sitting in front of the big window of her river-view apartment, Simone Lambert is reading the correspondence of Marie de l’Incarnation for the fourth time in twenty years. Every five years she immerses herself in ordinary life as it was lived in New France around this woman who captivates her more than anything. With every rereading she tries to sort out what belongs to the woman, to France, to the seventeenth century, to the random circumstances of a life, such as the freedom this woman recovered barely two years after marrying. Simone Lambert has always enjoyed autobiographies, enjoyed reading the correspondence of the world’s great men and of the women who make up its core. She knows that people’s worth ably reveals itself through the long-lasting words that can be elicited only by love and friendship. She likes standing silently in the dailiness of women and men who knew how to talk about the wind on their skin, about the fire in their bellies and about every possible storm containing high levels of historical violence.

  With every reading she discovers unsuspected landscapes, unknown aspects of Marie Guyart’s personality, simple anecdotes that give her a better idea of daily life in the land. She carefully scans for any information likely to justify new digs in the city. Still today, the mere hint of a rumour making plausible the possibility of a new find is all it takes for her to decide to go and probe the streets of the capital. She imagines herself discovering precious objects or mysterious bones overlooked by previous archaeological forays – just as, at the time, while walking along the Seine, Alice liked to fancy that fate would guide her hand to the first edition of a major work or a manuscript thought to be lost forever.

  The telephone rings. It’s Fabrice. He retells, verbally transcribes, the praise for the exhibition circulating on the Web. All are enthralled with the lion, the Venus of Prussia and the back of the silver mirror in Niche Number 7.

  The call has extracted Simone from her bubble of harmony and melancholy. She decides to go and indulge her pleasure and solitude on the Plains of Abraham. From Rue de Bernières it’s only a three-minute walk on fresh grass before she reaches the green bench where she often comes to gaze at the great river running to the sea. On the opposite shore, Irving Oil’s reservoirs and tall chimney stacks whose smoke always ends up merging with the clouds and their graffiti over Lévis.

  For each index card I invent a caption through which I relive part of the life of the object as if my own story depended on it. It’s my only way of penetrating the core of the artifact, of spending some time there mentally so as to breathe in the climate of the period attached to it, of entering its landscape with my contemporary sorrow. Yesterday, I hadn’t realized its magnitude. No sorrow’s ever a waste. On the contrary, it’s intensely alive, nourished by ever greater disasters, deliberately fostered, it would appear, to create new industrial waste sites where one and all can dump their grief. Sorrow is constant. Everything around it disappears: parents, friendships, buildings surrounded by the most golden olden days and yesteryears like so many friezes and church squares.

  Contemporary sorrow doesn’t enter all objects the same way. Some resist grief better than others, be it collective, like that of war, or intimate, like the ache of a broken heart. Collections of radios, cameras and pens are those that most easily absorb the sadness, the nostalgia, the enormity of the sorrow mutely at work, making us die of anxiety when confronted with the obvious fact of the short term.

  I don’t usually entertain such thoughts. Sorrow flows naturally into the object and the object naturally regains its small-object lustre while I assign it a name, an age, a function. The impression of secrecy, of rarity and of fragility emanating from small objects, even if they were once thousand-bladed weapons that caused death and spread terror, has always fascinated me. They are like roots gorged with sap, pierced through with meaningful arrows, making them akin to the trees of Life and of Knowledge. At the museum, I have the rare privilege of being able to touch them and love them in their every aspect, to detect just the right angle that will enhance them in the dark and in the light.

  Yesterday, an eighteenth-century mirror in my hands: the object is smooth, it slides through my fingers and by some miracle I manage to catch it. I hurt myself in doing so. I think about the word speculum, about all the centuries assembled in our eye, so curious and enthralled with faraway stars.

  It’s been raining for two days. Yesterday is a word I misuse. Since Mother’s death, I use it against the present. I’m hooked on the word agony. During my entire adulthood I uttered that word without a clue as to the enormity of the struggle it denotes, just as today I no doubt use the word war mista
kenly. Agony, I often repeat the word when working on my index cards the same way some people catch their breath while gardening. Agony: to persist in wanting to breathe the climate of a period in time that is never quite ours anymore. To steal a few hours, a day, maybe two. The day Mother died, it was so cold that Hydro-Québec wrote about it in their monthly newsletter to brag about their ability to keep us warm despite the severe –21°C cold of that day.

  I never think of my mother when she was alive. I only see her in the agony of death or dead but still warm. Sunken cheeks. Mouth open. Eyes closed. A life a whole life gone. A child hooked on the metaphysical time that disrupts what is most unstoppable in us: life, the body, that great wound fated never to heal and with which we must deal.

  Writing index cards forces me to keep one foot in reality, which I easily confuse with the need to be well-informed. So, on some workdays I gorge on newspapers and magazines. I feel an obligation to know, an excessive, painful duty of memory that makes me feel like my nose is stuck to death and to simple sad things like accidents, disappearances, unspeakable misery.

  Once the objects have been rescued from disappearance, from oblivion, once reinserted into the present and offered up to the gaze of the living, reality circles round them depending on how we preserve and destroy them.

  Life has taken on a different meaning since I’ve been living here. In my little apartment on Rue Racine, I’ve started experiencing bouts of sadness as though I’d forever lost the enjoyment of caresses and of the great bursts of laughter that accelerate our fall into infinity.

  Yesterday, I had the day off: after two years of hard work in Québec City, I finally decide to visit the Martello tower and the windmills near Boulevard Langelier. The existence of a Martello tower close to my apartment, combined with the early morning grey, brought back to mind the landscape of Dublin, the joy I experienced during that short trip along the coast from Dublin to Dun Laoghaire.