Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon Read online

  AXELLE

  My mother left me the words justice, freedom, transgression. And work. Only words. She left me only words.

  SIMONE

  Lorraine hated work, discipline. She loved adventure, risk, stories about witches and community life. She mixed everything up with her ideas about revolution, Zen, herbs and cayenne pepper.

  AXELLE

  My mother was a wise and knowledgeable woman. Maybe too sensitive – no, touchy, like proud people are. She was like electrical current going through the house. The silence of the house. She demanded an impeccable silence of me: reading / writing / reflecting, those were the activities on offer. It was only once I was living with the Moreloses that I started laughing and masturbating. (silence) Yes, masturbating – an action verb that puts you back in touch with yourself and with the faculty of imagining improbable, unmentionable scenes, sometimes grotesque. At Princeton, girls masturbated a lot before exams. Some evenings it was contagious.

  Long silence.

  FADE OUT.

  FADE IN.

  The four women are sitting around a card table. They have ordered food, and on the table there is a bottle of champagne as well as olives and smoked salmon.

  CARLA

  I’m happy you decided to stay. There comes a moment during the night when there’s no going back nor any flight forward. You simply have to stay up. Just stay and embody yourself in the contours of the night, awaiting the contours of dawn.

  SIMONE

  You were right to insist that I stay. I feel better. Bon appétit. It has always fascinated me to think that exquisite matter such as caviar, olives, truffles, cheese, raspberries, the champagne we’re about to rapturously drink are transformed in just a few hours into matter … let’s say … not so noble. It’s almost a miracle that so many dreams, stories and work are contained in the foods that end up on our plates and in our mouths! As soon as I speak or see the word olive, I’m transported to Sicily or Andalusia. I have a siesta, I stop at a terrace for some lemonade. Time passes.

  CARLA

  Keso, fransbröd och brännvin.

  NARRATOR

  Prozac, DHEA, Viagra, testosterone, growth hormones. You are what you eat, oh my beautiful transgenic one. My beloved, my wild species among all species.

  CARLA

  What exhausts me in the novel is having to take countless phrasal detours to succeed at describing what my eyes – wild with joy or with pain – can see. Endless detours to successfully translate I love you. Come into my arms. Forgive me. Never again. Again and again. A real digestive system which, unlike our own, would be able to produce something new from the raw material of impressions and sensations.

  AXELLE

  It mustn’t be easy, being a character.

  CARLA

  No. Character, meaning pretending to be real –

  NARRATOR

  – and to suffer, but what for?

  AXELLE

  Suffering for real while pretending to suffer adequately.

  CARLA

  Like an actress, then? But an actress isn’t a character. She’s often me.

  SIMONE

  A long time ago I knew an actress named Alma Longsong. She was a friend of the great Egyptian singer Oum Kalsoum, whose voice made the whole Middle East vibrate. I met them in a café in Cairo. I was working at Abu-Simbel at the time and every month I’d go to Cairo to meet civil servants and sign papers. Whenever it was possible, I’d go to the theatre to see Alma onstage; she had a perfect face. You know, it’s unusual to hear about a woman with a perfect face who is capable of speaking about our notions not of the beautiful face but of the perfect face. Her theory was simple and thrilling. The perfect face should never be imagined based on the O but should have a U as centre of attraction. The O, she said, attracted too much imagination to the top of the skull and thus forced the beholder to juxtapose the skull and the perfection of the face.

  AXELLE

  One could just as easily argue the exact opposite. That the U is insufficient when it comes to translating the whole face and so, as long as the top of the skull is missing, the essential is missing.

  SIMONE

  Exactly. That’s how the theory was simple. And thrilling it was, because it permitted thinking about the rare perfect faces of women which, as far back as one can recall, have been the basis of a bank of images of transcendence.

  AXELLE

  My mother’s face was perfect. Since she disappeared it has never stopped haunting me. I don’t know if it’s because of its perfection or because I don’t know what became of it. What was it, age or death, that overcame her forehead, her tender cheeks, her mouth capable of the sharpest sounds and the cruellest sentences?

  NARRATOR

  (who has already stood up and walked over to the wall, reads this passage from the novel)

  ‘Daily living is an achievement. I’m surrounded by cries, by long laments and a wild and shy energy that transforms both the world and my mother’s silence into fiction, into an outgrowth of life, a nameless virtuality … Without my mother’s silence I am left wide open to the static noise that amplifies the coward in each one of us.’

  FADE OUT.

  FADE IN.

  SIMONE

  The extreme solitude of women.

  CARLA

  Do you mean yours or ours?

  SIMONE

  I mean the extreme solitude of women like a resonating body that amplifies the fear and sorrow of smooth-sobbing women. Women who say to themselves every day, ‘It makes no sense to have been born in this godforsaken place without water or electricity but loaded with tradition and religion, which put the noose around our neck. It makes no sense that my life be shrivelled up stupid because of men’s weakness for violence and their learned contempt for us.’

  AXELLE

  You know, part of the solitude is in illness, in the body’s powerlessness to move toward others, to circulate among others.

  CARLA

  (in an ironic tone)

  And where, in your opinion, can this other be found?

  SIMONE

  (as if in support of what Axelle has said)

  The other isn’t hiding. She’s feeding the first one. She’s constantly manufacturing silence and it’s up to each and every one of us to make the most of it.

  NARRATOR

  And what can be made from silence?

  SIMONE

  Silence contains everything required to live happily.

  AXELLE

  For example?

  SIMONE

  From silence streams everything we call art, including the art of living. Imagining without silence or without the constraint of silence would be unthinkable. Silence contains all the keys of our programming. The pleasure we take in respecting the constraints that keep happiness at bay constitutes our art of living – in short, a way of living by keeping open a window that would look out onto a wall. Some days the wall is opaque, sombre and repulsive, other days its transparency is an invitation to scale it or to enjoy its luminosity. The wall doesn’t protect us, nor does it keep us from something that would be attractive. The wall is a desirable illusion that keeps us alive, in a state of vigilance amid old sentences that make us dream and die all in the same breath. Today science claims that one day we’ll be able to go through that wall and so put an end to the noxious attraction we’ve always had for excesses, the very ones that allowed us to nurture our fascination for the wall and to sometimes find, in its transparency, the fertile figures of our age-old nostalgia.

  CARLA

  I prefer to work on our little memories sweetened with a flavour like that of jam, the aroma of coffee, the perfume on women’s necks or those lovely blue soap bubbles that do so-soft things to our skin when we sink into the tub. I prefer to work on the idea that each one of us is inventing a new fate for humanity, with or without the melancholy of summer evenings.

  NARRATOR

  We know so much about our species and so little about women. And yet, see,
I was going to say that we’re prepared to deprive ourselves of freedom in order to increase our knowledge. I wonder what will happen if we continue to spy on the species in the infinite smallness of our cries, hoping for an explanation that would justify an impending immortality. Soon, looking at it close up, we’ll be able to detect our shadow, our double, our pure-fiction I busy manipulating our very own genes. Axelle, don’t you think you do terribly dangerous work?

  AXELLE

  ‘My only fear is the fear of not dying.’ I swear it on my mother’s body.

  CARLA

  On Sundays I used to go to the cemetery with the little Laramée girls, who taught me Latin and a few words of French. We’d walk among the graves talking like adults. We’d all bring a sandwich and at about eleven-thirty, when the sun was searing our scalps, seek shelter by a tombstone in the shade. The sisters would sit in front of me. Anne would put on her glasses. I’d look at Margot’s knees, which always had bruises on them, blue, bloody or pinkish. I stared obstinately at her kneecaps and mechanically repeated after her lines from The Aeneid. Butterflies, flies and mosquitoes flew around us. We always chose a grave with fresh flowers. Sometimes there was still a bit of dew on a petal. Then the sisters would force me to decline rosa rosae for a rose, you know … Then, after eating, we’d have long discussions about the diffuse happiness which the sight of the petal had triggered in us.

  SIMONE

  I never got used to the idea of being called Mother. Lorraine sometimes brought over little friends who said Mom and Mum. When Lorraine said my mother, I thought she was talking about somebody else, a nun maybe. To my ears, my mother has always sounded like the screech of a seagull. One day I asked her to call me Simone. That’s when she started to say, ‘I’m Simone’s daughter but I’m not my mother’s daughter anymore.’

  AXELLE

  I always called her Mother. I don’t think I’m ever going to have children. I don’t understand why grandmothers always seem to have a greater love of life than mothers do. I don’t understand why things seem to exist only if they quiver under our eyes and ravage the heart before impaling themselves on our thoughts.

  SIMONE

  Carla, you write novels, so what’s the point of rediscovering one’s childhood? I don’t know why but I always get the impression that novelists write to rediscover the few rare moments of a terrific and full joy experienced amid their close relations or, on the contrary, the better to flee those same relations and their conformity. Basically, maybe we do the same job. We go on digs and then, each in her own way, expose the remains, debris and fragments of a great whole that once existed, which may be nothing more and nothing less than a huge burst of laughter, a nameless euphoria, a pain so raw that we have to make sense of it.

  CARLA

  I don’t know. Sometimes I tell myself it’s enough just to not forget. At other times I think there are new things to be understood by looking at people, and that if we describe their hair or their mouths, it’ll be easier to love them or to make them speak.

  SIMONE

  Have you noticed that grandmothers never talk about themselves? They’re always mysterious, ensconced in the grandchildren’s vague memory. There they are, old, tired, bony or fat, shifting their decrepit flesh around under the children’s valiant affectionate gaze. They are maternal or paternal and quite naturally they change into characters from books, from which they never exit. Only once they’ve been relocated in books does collective memory become interested in grandmothers. Then, once again, it classifies them by generations according to wars, famines and inventions which will in turn have scared them, pleased them or amused them: the car, the airplane, moving pictures, the radio, the pill, ATMs, the Internet.

  NARRATOR

  Have you noticed also how intensity always makes things happen, as if tomorrow kept reappearing like an angry torrent sweeping death and the past in its path? I always imagine myself walking with a solution in mind for everything that’s alive. When I go to the museum or the market, everything becomes terribly present, a present that erases my every step. Sometimes I stop on Dufferin Terrace, astonished by the violet wind which, blowing from all sides, sates my desire for powerful sensations. I notice how readily the sad lads abandon themselves to the wind’s violent arms. I notice how much being alive matters. We don’t notice enough how, in spite of everything, life organizes itself so as not to fail us.

  AXELLE

  It may be better that way. I don’t know. I work at refashioning the elements of life already programmed by nature. I quite like the idea of producing fragments of time, tiny kaleidoscopes that make the eye unfit to detect death. It’s ridiculous. It’s as though science is trendy because it attempts to make humanity lose its alphabet, its books of origins, its habits of the past and of ancestral solidarity. Every day I work on the immortality of my peers and I miss death.

  NARRATOR

  What are you talking about?

  AXELLE

  I’m talking about my little manipulations, thanks to which, in principle, dying will no longer be an idée fixe.

  SIMONE

  How so?

  AXELLE

  Change, old lady! (They all turn toward Axelle with astonishment.) I work on change. I …

  CARLA

  The only valid changes stem from fiction.

  A half-light slowly settles onto the stage/scene.

  CARLA

  Sometimes in the novels of yesteryear we read that people would let darkness softly enter a large room in the house while each person watched, be it the mother sitting, reading or sewing, or the brother wrestling with a younger sibling, or the father poring over an accounts ledger. Sometimes we read that the night is tender, that the room’s half-light is where the sense of values stirs and that at the very back of memory, something like a pleasing vision, a brief conviction, suddenly lights up words with a wide and wacky meaning which life, afterwards, makes sure to emphasize amid colours, bruises and caresses. I often write the same scene where I’m with my mother, seated on the large veranda surrounding the house which was itself surrounded by fields and the horizon. When I work on this scene, I sometimes add a little falling rain, I hear it clattering on the white pebbles all around the garden in front of our house. I also bring in the chirping of sparrows, the cawing of a crow. There are never any trees. I disallow myself trees and the description of their foliage; the idea that somebody could hang themselves or be lynched from the branches scares me too much. I would so love to write a scene where my mother and I are walking in a big North American city, but every time she starts talking as she walks, she brings me back to her little village of Rättvik by furtively tugging at the elbow of my red sweater where the wool is almost worn through. I hang there for a bit between the big city and the shores of Lake Siljan, while my mother is already dreaming of swimming and fairs. It was before the war, a war, there’s always a war in my nights when people’s souls start roaring. So then I sit on the verb to be and don’t budge until my mother is done swimming, comes out of the water laughing before disappearing down a path where the smell of spruce will drug her with deep forest silence.

  Novels must also talk about beasts. My papa, the lassoed man, did it very well during evenings of real solitude. He’d explain to my mother and me the damned stink of dogs found along the highways. Also the lamb’s melancholy smell when the knife nears its throat. ‘A smell can always be explained,’ he’d say, ‘and every emotion has one.’ We had a horse, and some evenings Papa explained in what ways Kermess was remarkable and different from all the other horses. I remember his mane sometimes so soft to the touch you’d think you were galloping upon one of those clouds that zip over the Prairies like an arrow and whose existence takes on its full meaning as soon as the bluish grey that makes it visible starts to clear. Papa could keep talking for hours when he spoke about horses. There were numerous horse breeds: Akhal-Teke, Andalusian, Arabian, Barbary, Bashkir, Cherkessian, Criollo, Kabyle, Kirghiz, Marwari, Mongolian, Taki, Tatar, Yili. A
nd when he talked about animals, you could imagine them parading, trotting, snorting, stamping or galloping until they were all lathered up. My habit of always having an animal living among my characters comes from my dad. No, it’s not out of love but just because I understand my pain better if the animal sets the pace for my intentions.

  Since I’ve been here I sometimes go to Rue Saint-Jean for a bit of taramasalata, a few black olives, bread and wine. On the way back I stop at Librairie Pantoute where I leaf through novels that make me want to write. I always buy at least one book so I can have the pleasure of a new novel in front of my stimuli-starved eyes. That’s how, here and there, over the years, I purchased Our Lady of the Flowers by (Carla signals with her hand that we need to guess the authors’ names) ——, To the Lighthouse by ——, Paradiso by ——, L’obéissance by ——, Benito Cereno by ——, Le monde sur le flanc de la truite by ——, The Euguelion by ——, Running in the Family by ——, The Book of Promethea by ——, Heroine by ——, Childhood by ——, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by ——, Molloy by ——, Crossing the River by ——, The Last of the African Kings by ——, Time Regained by ——, The First Man by ——, Fortuny by ——, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches by ——, Death of Virgil by ——, Fontainebleau by ——, Le Soir du dinosaure by ——, Blue Eyes, Black Hair by ——, Un homme est une valse by ——, My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay by ——, Les derniers jours de Noah Eisenbaum by ——, Pereira Declares by ——, Two Stories of Prague by ——, Next Episode by ——, Cobra by ——, La vie en prose by ——, The Lesbian Body by ——, Technique du marbre by ——, Mauve Desert by ——, Extinction by ——, The Opposing Shore by ——, Thérèse and Isabelle by ——, La déconvenue by ——, Meroë by ——, These Festive Nights by ——, In the Shadow of the Wind by ——, The Christmas Oratorio by ——, Le livre du devoir by ——, Nightwood by ——, The Tin Flute by ——, E. Luminata by ——, The Palace by ——, Parc Univers by ——, The Sea by ——, Microcosms by ——, Dios No Nos Quiere Contentos by ——, La nuit by ——, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by ——, The Swallower Swallowed by ——, Paulina 1880 by ——, Memoria by ——, Dust over the City by ——, Pylon by ——, A Universal History of Infamy by ——, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by ——, Jos Connaissant by ——, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by ——, Nous parlerons comme on écrit by ——, Life: A User’s Manual by ——.