Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon Read online

  SIMONE

  For years I lived with fragments of civilization in my hands, russet dust, old ochre sand frolicking on my fingertips. My life is peopled with ancient civilizations I’ve learned to know, to love, to classify, to assemble, to embed in my thoughts so as to give them a look of truth. Now this scares me. On the sites, my life was radically split into black and white. White light that turned blue into lilac, yellow into gold dust. Black of night fallen like a rare petal upon our shoulders. Night. Sleep. The sleep of insects while night became sombre-eyed and an incalculable number of naïve questions lingered around the lips. I persisted among the stones with questions that set bones afire. On certain days, I confess, I lost contact with the individuals coming and going around me, gathering their strength and their tools. I thought that, after all, nothing is absolutely true, and this made me feel good.

  CARLA

  Ah! Simone, it pleases me when you get to the heart of the matter like this. Alas! We’re losing the habit of it. Too many distractions. Too much decency too. And isn’t a sense of decency required to live in society?

  NARRATOR

  The apparent simplicity of the contemporary reflex urging us to get things done shortly and sweetly doesn’t excuse us from understanding. (turning to Axelle) May I call you by your given name?

  CARLA

  We have to distinguish between the lust for life and the lust to exist. The difference is similar to the one we’ve set up between fiction and reality. Yet, in either case, a doubt always exists as to whether it’s our imagination or our very familiar body that misleads us about our hunger. In my novel, there’s a parrot-character present at Descartes’s death. The parrot is playful. You should hear him: ‘Papa struts his stuff Papa puffs it up old hound dog belching and leching on the Prairies old Papa old hound-dog-eared pappy loves flirty hotties.’ I’d like to make Descartes stark-raving mad but he has to stay focused on himself disguised as his own character and to speak seductive sentences about the lust for life that gives us material for madness.

  AXELLE

  My mother often ranted madly out of the blue. If she asked me a question and I didn’t respond the next second, she’d start a long monologue about precious time not to be wasted. During her rants, she’d accuse all societies of imprisoning women’s time in little silver rings or in heavy dusty drawers which, afterwards, they had to sand smooth from the inside. When there was no free time left around women, my mother said society swallowed them up once and for all and that we never heard about them anymore. She often said, ‘We have very little time left,’ or ‘Hurry up, the storm is coming.’ ‘Hurry up and be successful.’

  SIMONE

  At least she talked to you. I never had much time for my daughter.

  NARRATOR

  You mustn’t say that. Mothers, alas, always have too much time for their daughters, and even when they don’t, the daughters feel it’s too much.

  SIMONE

  What are you talking about?

  NARRATOR

  I simply wanted to say that mothers are omnipresent and that many daughters could do without.

  CARLA

  Legend has it otherwise. Quite the contrary. More often than not, daughters have been orphaned, abandoned or rejected.

  NARRATOR

  Daughters don’t know what they want. Too much is not enough and not enough is like absence.

  AXELLE

  Soon we won’t be able to tell the difference between womb-mother and gene-mother. Mother by instinct and mother by abandonment. Little old-boned mother and big fat mother of sorrow. You all come from another time. You think in words loaded with fervour. But fervour isn’t very effective when compared to a perfect equation, a well-drawn genetic map, a precise number.

  CARLA

  Excuse me, but fervour is rather exciting!

  AXELLE

  Fervour amounts to nothing. Or let’s just say that it simply feeds old remnants of pain.

  CARLA

  Pain leads to thinking and thinking isn’t nothing. It’s actually rather a privilege to be able to think.

  AXELLE

  Thinking should be as easy as fucking. Well, I mean, if fucking were simple.

  NARRATOR

  Everybody ruminates, mentally toys with topics. It’s called thinking au naturel. There’s a prejudice according to which only people who think abstract thoughts think for real, but I believe that thinking also means hanging around among words, images and ideas. All told, thinking may be reaching a conclusion at the right moment in a rumination. Do we think well naturally or does thinking well imply an effort, that we accept getting lost, retracing our steps, hitting the wall, a knot, that we take the time to unscramble faulty reasoning, to erase a thought that’s greedy or petty?

  AXELLE

  What a strange night! Today should be an important day for me. I so wanted not to be disappointed. I wanted her in front of me, that woman who could have explained my mother to me. Why do we say grandmother instead of my mother’s mother?

  NARRATOR

  It makes it possible to better frame the possessive, to put it where it matters most to you. Also, when you say my mother’s mother, you’re entering the realm of emotional genealogy which, it’s well-known, is undermined by tiredness, by dailiness and especially by that nervous and complex anxiety that enters any possessive relationship. You can’t say, ‘I was walking hand in hand with my mother’s mother.’ That’s too many people on the sidewalk at the same time.

  SIMONE

  I fail to see why you persist in making such a natural filial bond so horribly complicated.

  NARRATOR

  I’m suggesting paths to understand a bond that, though natural, is nonetheless dangerous.

  CARLA

  (moving closer to the wall)

  Last: say last without bursting out laughing, maybe that’s what Descartes meant when he crossed the inner courtyard to get from his apartment to Queen Christina’s. To last, now there’s a verb my naïve papa sometimes confused with to endure. Misery, no! Not misery like many of the characters often written into our literature. No. Not misery. Enduring time. Time that passed coldly over our buffalo shoulders attracted by the horizon and the vast sudden emptiness of the badlands. Enduring by sharpening one’s everyday knife, pressing up against trees once night has fallen and dreaming of cities to the south and ancestors to the north, even further north, there where my papa believed his mother’s soul may still be wandering. (gesturing to the pages taped to the wall) This is my novel – read it if you like. I’m almost done. One more week and I’m going home to Saskatoon. I’ve started dreaming about the old silence that surrounded the house of my childhood. And I’ve been having dreams of buffalo for the last two days. I can hear the terrifying sound of their furious race toward the edge of the cliff they leap from, flinging themselves into the abyss, and piling up one on top of the other, horns and body parts mixed with blood, dust and the russet grass, one blurry blade of grass swaying in front of their great almost-dead almost-blind eyes, their great eyes led astray by the void and the coldness of the horizon.

  AXELLE

  Why do you say my naïve papa?

  CARLA

  Because he was sweet and easily let himself be tied up like a doll when we played cowboys. He was always ready to die, no matter how my story started or ended. He was ready. Just like that, standing straight up in the wind. He’d say, ‘Okay, girl, it’s time for me to die.’ So then I’d get on my horse and join up with Queen Christina. Sometimes I had to make the return trip several times between Stockholm and Rome. At other times I’d go directly to Rome, entering via the Appian Way, then, without any transitional scene, I’d find myself in the queen’s arms again. We’d share a long kiss behind a screen. Somebody would bring us figs and fragole. We’d kiss one last time and then I’d say, ‘Okay, girl, it’s time for me to go,’ and I’d come back to the rape field I’d left just a few minutes before.

  SIMONE

  I think I’m going to
go now.

  NARRATOR

  No, Simone, stay. I’ll take you home later. I know this may not be the right time but …

  SIMONE

  Right, now is not the time. Axelle, I’d like you to take me home. We need to talk.

  AXELLE

  I can’t see what about. I have only one subject of conversation in mind and I don’t think you can help me out.

  SIMONE

  That’s good. I have only one person in mind and I believe you can talk to me about her.

  AXELLE

  (moves closer to the wall and reads the following passage)

  ‘I imagine it takes joy about all things to rush into time and let it close in around us. Yes, one must doubtless allow time to swallow silence and the multiform narratives that surround us like a hedge of roses.’

  FADE OUT.

  FADE IN.

  The screen switches on, showing close-ups of Axelle’s and Simone’s faces. Both are focused as though watching a show, a movie. If the technology exists, I’d like it if it were possible to work on the faces live so as to emphasize the features the actresses can’t work on. This way, their exchange would create a very strange impression. We enter the thick of the conversation they would have had had they met in the restaurant.

  SIMONE

  It’s a truly great day. I’d almost resigned myself to not seeing you again. If you only knew all the imaginary portraits of you I’ve conjured in my mind.

  AXELLE

  I was looking forward to seeing you. I’d have liked to come sooner but, you know, I work hard.

  SIMONE

  I know.

  AXELLE

  It’s as though everywhere I go I’m just a passerby. (Silence. Church bells can be heard.) The night before she disappeared, Mother had insomnia. I heard her walking around the house and talking on the phone. I fell asleep. When I woke up the next day, the house was quiet. Breakfast was visibly set out on the yellow and agave-green placemat. Only one setting. I sat at my usual place. I gulped down a glass of orange juice. A trickle of juice ran down my neck. There was an envelope in the bread-basket. I took it. It was Mother’s writing. It contained a hundred American dollars and the address and phone number of a family of friends who lived close by and who sometimes invited us to spend the weekend in Tepoztlán. Maybe Mother wrote to you or told you about them. The father is a great pianist and the mother an important businesswoman whose husband used to say, ‘Without her, workers would be jobless, the jobless would be poor, the poor would be slaves, and slaves would be corpses.’ That morning I ate everything on the table. I called the family-planning centre where Mother worked. She wasn’t there. I sat in the garden, a tiny garden where she grew basil and chives. The neighbour’s dog was barking. It was a gorgeous day, blue everywhere. People think a ten-year-old child is unable to think and to really want. Something. At that very moment, more than anything, I wanted my mother, her rough and busy gestures, her worried look, her blue eyes which, even when she was angry, always seemed soft. Looking in her eyes was like going to the movies. I always tried to do it as long as possible. Children rarely look their parents in the eye, but I always looked at my mother right in the eye. Eventually she’d laugh and say, ‘Hurry up and look at me, we’re leaving.’ When I looked at her I felt like I was honouring her and getting closer to her dreams, to her real dreams. At night I sometimes heard her screaming or talking in a halting voice.

  That day, the police came with Mr. Morelos and his oldest daughter, Liliana. They searched the house. I asked them what they were looking for and they said papers. Liliana helped me fill a suitcase with everything I loved and wanted to take with me. I took a picture of Mother, my microscope, books, a poster of Frida Kahlo which Liliana rolled up with a flick of her wrists. We weren’t going far. The Moreloses lived a few streets away. Days went by. Months. The Morelos family probably tried to reach you, but there was nobody at your Montréal address. My father was nowhere to be found. So they decided to adopt me. Two years later they settled in New York, a large apartment close to Columbia University. I had a big room. We lived on the fifteenth floor. A major silence reigned in which I strove to detect the city’s soundtrack – it produced a breathing sound I’d call nothing short of suave. Which made the whole family laugh at mealtimes. I was sent to Bard College. Then I studied genetics at Princeton.

  SIMONE

  Shortly after you left for Mexico, I was offered a job as director of a new museum here in Québec City. I’ve been living in the same place since then. I like it. The river’s presence makes me happy. Like you, I work non-stop. Nobody has forced me to retire yet. I travel a lot, but with less and less enthusiasm. I haven’t done any fieldwork for ages. So I’m left with museum hallways and big exhibition rooms. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about Lorraine and you. To disappear. As if I were destined to live among traces, evidence of the past, to preserve the memory of what once existed in its full glory. Seeing you here in front of me leaves me at a loss. You look like Lorraine. I’m moved to the very foundation of (she looks for the words) my silence.

  AXELLE

  That’s a strange expression.

  SIMONE

  Maybe so. How else can one express the essential things that run through our relationship to time and continuity, our little lonesome-beast murmurings as we roam the cosmos?

  AXELLE

  The silence of our cells or the silence surrounding our cells? The sound effect of the soul, as my gene-manipulating colleagues put it.

  SIMONE

  A friend of mine just died, alone, in the deepest dark Turkish night. Alone, far away, like your mother, one day in May, just when the days are growing longer and when the idea of life takes full-bodied shape, gorges us with pleasure and the pride of being alive.

  AXELLE

  (suddenly and violently)

  My mother isn’t dead. She disappeared. It’s not the same thing. What did you do to my mother for her to hate you so much?

  FADE OUT.

  FADE IN.

  CARLA

  None of the books I consulted say anything at all about why Queen Christina chose to leave for Rome. I’ve spent my whole life as a novelist pondering what motives hide behind gestures and decisions of abandonment and departure. What obscure motive brings me to Québec City to finish each one of my novels? Of course I’ve uncovered some derisory answers. For a time I believed it was because of the Louis Riel poem ‘O Québec’ which my little French-Canadian friends used to recite during our two-month vacations. In it, Riel begs the province of Québec to not forget the Métis of Manitoba the way France forgot Québec after her defeat. A terrible poem, but the ‘O Québec’ resonated in me like a word, a place full of mysteries where everything seemed possible. I like writing to gain some time over absurdity. I write to reconnect with the imagery of my wanderings along the South Saskatchewan River. In French, we say rivière aux amélanchiers, that is, Saskatoon Berry River. Bottom line, I think well only when I’m deflecting beings from their usual functions and assigning them new roles in the story. The impulse to fiction is surely worth a gram of coke to erase all traces of the absurd.

  NARRATOR

  Oh, that old word.

  CARLA

  Words age, but they are never old. You’d have to be a moron to not acknowledge the absurd. A moron or a heavy consumer of futile spectacles. ‘The absence of change is,’ they say, ‘the apparent characterictic of the absurd.’ Indeed, if we agree that the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre equals the Rwanda massacre, and that the Massacre of the Innocents ranks with the one at Shatila, it’s because the word absurd is still potent.

  NARRATOR

  Ionesco believed that people had become walls for one another. My impression is more that we’ve become a constant wall of sound, changing, stifling and fascinating one another – background noise that runs us into the ground.

  CARLA

  What was your mother like, Axelle?

  Axelle does not reply immediately. />
  CARLA

  (softly) What was she like?

  AXELLE

  I don’t really know. She was always occupied, preoccupied, (looking at Simone) a woman whose life centred on her mother, (pointing toward Simone) whose life was miserable because of you. Don’t worry, she wouldn’t reproach you for anything in particular. It’s just that you were there, everywhere, like a shadow, a ghost, an inexplicable threat. And this despite the dream-come-true evenings she told me about. You took her to the most prestigious museums, you had the great libraries of the world opened for her so the two of you could spend a few hours admiring rare documents, parchments, silks, incunabula.

  NARRATOR

  A mother who educates her daughter deserves the greatest respect. All daughters dream of a mother who could teach them the world, reality, and also make them dream.

  SIMONE

  All around us the world is a flavour to be transmitted. Mothers have forever transmitted, often unbeknownst to themselves, a kind of future.

  AXELLE

  We can’t talk about the future in the same way anymore. Let’s push this to the backs of our minds once and for all.

  CARLA

  The future is always composed of what we’re given to toy with as children. My mother gave me Descartes and Queen Christina. Unawares, my father left me a gift for lassoing characters. As for school, it offered me names like Sir John Macdonald and General Middleton but I never knew what to do with them. I preferred playing with the Latin and French words the Laramée sisters taught me on Sunday afternoons. And you, Axelle, what were you given to play with for your life and for this future you’re trying to warn us against?