Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon Read online

  You see, I need books in order to come and go in the complex beauty of the world. (Carla pretends to leave the room, then comes back with a bag of imaginary groceries which she deposits on the bed.) Back in my hotel room I get rid of the objects cluttering the dresser and replace them with the olives, cheese and bread. I freshen the bed by plumping up the pillows so that the head is comfy. The cardinal’s glare is always strange and threatening. The day I arrived in Québec City, I put a wooden parrot in front of the window. It’s from a Mexican boutique, a nice bright yellow. The feathers on its neck form a green necklace and the tail feathers, royal blue, skim the line of the river and of the horizon in an uninterrupted movement. A set of strings helps keep it balanced in front of the curtain and every morning the parrot gives the impression of dawn and of a beautiful upside-down hourglass. Seated at the dressing table, I eat slowly. I can hear him walking in the room. The rustle of his robe against the edge of the bed mixes with the metallic sound of the aluminum foil packaging the olives and goat cheese. From time to time he groans and she rushes in, worried. It’s raining outside, I know. A fine rain meets the windowpane. Down below, the asphalt shines no doubt like a slate mirror. Passersby walk fast. Behind me Helen hovers around the bed with white cloths and a basin. I can very clearly distinguish the face of the man lying on the bed. Unto himself he represents a whole genealogy of thinkers, new and old, who like him are about to blow out the candle forever burnt at both ends by life and death. The man’s face is like the ones reproduced in the literature and history books the little Laramée sisters carried under their arms as though these were treasures more precious still than the olives and ham sandwiches prepared by our mothers.

  She eats an olive and bites into her sandwich, looking around her. She sits on the bed like someone who usually reads before going to sleep. Simone is in an armchair, seated in the same pose as Pope Innocent X in Francis Bacon’s painting. The narrator, standing, circles the bed as if she were looking for something in the drawers, under the bed, in the bathroom. The following lines will all be spoken by Carla, but they can be ‘read’ on the other actresses’ lips as though the sound originated from them. Helen will be played by the narrator, the cardinal by Simone. During this time, Axelle is looking out the window.

  This scene will be played in Latin.

  CARTESIUS

  Quam singulare cubiculum! Nescio ubinam sim. Quid latet citra velum illud exiguum? Veritas, forsitan? Ningitne? Ningitne, Helena? Perspicere jam non valeo arborem abietis, permagnam excelsamque arborem illam, quae me commovet quotiescumque in eam oculos conjicio, ac si per semetipsam magnus perspectus effici valeret. Noli a me digredi, Helena. Porrige mihi manum tuam. Tange frontem meam. Sine me postrema vice animo te effingere. Nudam. Vellem te nudatam sistere, postrema vice, ante iam caligantes oculos meos. Vellem adhuc scribere. Vellem te nudam esse. Vellem scribere, et te nudam ut primam auroram sistere.

  CARDINALIS

  Semper tamen umbra sinenda est ad nos appropiquare, nec eam reicere debemus. Postremam animi et corporis colluctationem umbra tantummodo efficere valet sinceram. Nullum postremum certamen cogitari potest absque umbra quadam super labias illorum pendente, qui aequales eorum amaverunt, et qui bene locuti sunt de anima, quae non videtur, et tamen est, utique est. Sed extant in nobis, amice mi, irae impetus qui etiam aestatis splendorem obtenebrare quaeunt. Extant, bene novi, irae tam ardentes quae nec cursu verborum, nec etiam idearum vel rationum cursu placari possunt.

  HELENA

  Satis bene, heu, hoc novi.

  CARDINALIS

  Non vos alloquebar.

  HELENA

  (as if she hadn’t heard)

  Satis bene, heu, hoc novi. Ira est velut quidam dolor immanis, quo quondam se per vim insinuari valuit in artus nostros intimos, maxima desperatione delirantes. Et cum ira illa in intimis nervositatis nostrae sedem suam elegit, nihil potest nisi debiliores nos efficere, ac sensus desideriaque nostra decipere. Renate, noscere nunquam valebis quam intensa sit ira mea. De die in diem omni modo enitui te celare huius irae rationem, necnon horribiles illos tremores manuum et palpebrarum ab ea concitatos. Satis nunc habeo. Nunc loquar.

  CARDINALIS

  Nolite vos rustice gerere. Prae vos abdite dolorem vestrum, ut sinceram decet mulierem.

  CARTESIUS

  Helena, filiam meam videre cupio. Exquiratur filia mea ubicumque, in Francia, in Hollandia et vel in coloniis, si opus est. Francinam iubeo mihi adduci. (He coughs.) Antequam in tenebras mergar perpetuas, volo filiam meam quid sit lux docere. Mater mea asserere solebat semper prope me exstitisse, quotiescumque novas ratiocinationes haesitantibus verbis primo proferebam. Cum arbores nudae sunt foliis, oportet pulchras mulieres sibi circumdare. Propius accede, Helena, quaeso. (Helena moves closer, mechanically.)

  HELENA

  Filia nostra mortua est, ut bene nosti.

  CARTESIUS

  Quam crudelis es vindicta tua! En utique quod iram tuam vocas! Filiam meam deserere, hoc est ira tua. Nives cadunt, ut puto. Aestuo. (speaking to Helena as if she were his servant) Praebe mihi librum illum, illic super tabulam iacentem. Vellem, domine cardinalis, paginam quondam vobis ostendere. Exue vestem tuam, Helena. Te obsecro corpus tuum nudare, ut oculi mei quietem tandem inveniant. Fenestras pandite. (Helena opens the window and shuts it immediately.) Frigus est. Glacialis est algor iste. (then, softly) Quotiescumque frigore cursu vitae meae alsi, semper recordatus sum illius religiosae mulieris, iuvenis adhuc satis, in quam quondam Turonis incideram. Annus intercesserat ex nativitate Francinae. Adhuc bene memini. Glaciei fragmenta subgrundas obruerant. Grassa glacies agros undique operiebat. Aptis verbis religiosa illa delectabatur, verbisque utebatur ut magistra. Nihil aliud cogitabat nisi itinera. Nondum in monasterium intraverat, et iam nihil aliud desiderabat nisi longe profisci, in aliam terrae continentem. Quamvis vidua esset, de morte viri eius nullomondo commota videbatur. Filium habebat quem, ut asserebat, in optimas religiosasque manus relinquerat. Longius locuti eramus de vita et de corpore, praecipue tamen de passionibus animae. Passiones enim animae nos ubi nostra sistit sors perducunt. Illucescebat. Maria ad missam audiendam properabat. E coemeterio ego redibam, ubi de numero corporum quae suppeditari potuissent sciscitaveram, sperans utique mortuum quoddam corpus dissecari quantocius licere. Sperabam enim hac dissectione aliquid discere de illo ‘igne sine luce’ in nobis palpitante, tam fortiter interdum ut corpus nostrum calefaciat, quamvis animale sit et simplici machinae simile. Sitio. Aquam, aquam.

  CARDINALIS

  Citius aquam afferte homini isto. (then, in a normal tone) Propediem in Venetias et Romam iter arripiam.

  CARTESIUS

  Nolite, quaeso, nomina haec proferre urbium ubi tam felix et beatus fui. Sciatis deambulationes me semper amasse. Semper mihi gratum fuit secundum ripas Serenissimae perdiu deambulare, gaudium tamen maius accipiebam deambulando in Urbe, colles circumquaque ridentes oculis pervagando. Aquam, aquam!

  Change of lighting. The atmosphere reverts to what it was when the four women first arrived, at the beginning of the chapter. The actresses stand around the bed like pallbearers arriving at and leaving a funeral. All are looking straight ahead.

  NARRATOR

  Why don’t you give him something to drink?

  CARLA

  I can’t. Not right now.

  NARRATOR

  He looks real.

  CARLA

  That’s why I write novels. It seems real every time. And yet one is very afraid too.

  NARRATOR

  I don’t like this passage of your book. It reminds me of Mother. I thought I had healed from the word agony. Is this passage really necessary?

  CARLA

  When a word troubles us, we must surround it with simple words that create images, like Dutch tulips, Christmas tree or barrel organ. In other circumstances, it’s best to juggle words whose meanings are so ambiguous that they suck up part of our anxiety rather well.

  SIMONE

  You’re right, Carla. All my life I’ve allowed myself to be taken, attracted,
aroused by objects. When they rekindled overwhelming passions in me, I quickly turned them over so they’d show only the shape of their usefulness or their true worth on the artifacts market.

  CARLA

  Walking by a lake has always been good for me – I mean it calms my mind. Blue, I’ve always had this fascination with blue. Simone, give me a bit of water. In the novel, Francine has beautiful blue eyes, a blue that could have healed the whole planet of all the sword thrusts and cannon fire that have ravaged the continents. It’s because of war that we’re sentenced to melancholy. (Carla continues but now she’s speaking on her own behalf.) Walking by a lake like Mother used to do at fifteen, hair to the wind, a blade of grass and a story to tell between her lips. On her way to meeting herself and the summer to be, to have been.

  CARDINAL/CARLA

  My dear René, I don’t much believe stories about melancholy. (He seems to hesitate a moment.) Oh! Maybe you’re right after all. You know, if I put aside my soutane and my rank, I sink into some strange unknown that creates a sweet flavour under my tongue, with je ne sais quoi on my face that would remind me of my mother’s hair whenever she leaned over to kiss my forehead. That’s what you meant, right, that we all have a mother and a childhood?

  NARRATOR

  (indicating a character on a bed)

  Obviously she has no more energy.

  CARDINAL/CARLA

  It’s not up to you to dictate my conduct.

  Church bells are heard, as when people are leaving a funeral. Carla sits at the dressing table and starts removing her makeup.

  CARLA

  I’ve seen writers dissolve into the multiplicity of possible fragments of life and fiction. They became incapable of choosing a subject. In fact, it was as if once literary creativity was democratized and globalized, writers no longer felt the need to choose. All subjects seemed to have the same value, the same flavour, could be used as entrails, garbage or makeup, suspended like little notches on the surfaces of sense and time. I’ve also known writers unable to take advantage of the silence available to them after loving or mourning. Toward the end I saw some who, in order to get noticed, put on airs – naïve, nerdy and inoffensive – so as not to frighten their readers or to have to make a statement about reality. On the contrary, in order to be noticed, women had to act violent, sexual and chock full of contradictions. Stuff it! Of course there were openings. The diversity of a barnyard always gets me dreaming. Rooster to donkey, dog to flea, cow to mouse. Yes, entering the wanderings of dogs, like getting to the heart of the matter by inventing dialogues for each species. Well, hey! I’m writing at a moment in history. Narrator, you’re not saying a word, or maybe crumpled paper and paper balls no longer have a reason to exist because there are no more deletions, few erasures, and, if so, they’re half-hearted. Every morning in my room at the Clarendon, with its top-flight view of the St. Lawrence River, I dream of a generation that would be as concerned with silence as others are with sex – a silence come from cross-breeding the intelligences of all shapes of pain and pleasure that make us sigh, kneel down before the sea, force us to breathe it in until deep in the eye nothing else matters. Hey! Narrator, did you know that, right in front of my lassoed papa’s house, I buried a Latin grammar book the Laramée sisters had entrusted me with like a treasure? Yes, in the same place where, lying on the cool ground, I invented playful scripts while thinking of Queen Christina and of the wide world slumbering inside me like a quiet volcano. And Narrator, did you know that one should always have or pretend to have a reader in mind when writing …

  The narrator comes and stands in front of Carla, who thus disappears from view just as the whole scene goes to black. Curtain. Or

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I took notes up until the end without realizing the end had come. I wanted each moment to be whole, to let nothing escape me from the room or the set, from the face or the masks. I made careful note of the arrangement of the body, the placement of the furniture, the light outside and the lighting inside. In the next room, someone was listening to the same tango over and over again. It was hot. Nobody had thought of turning on the air conditioning or opening the window. Outside, the repeated sounds of heartbreaking church bells resonated. I was taking notes and somebody was dying amid the notes I was taking. We could have been in Madras, Petra, Québec City or Stockholm: somebody’s soul was departing, wrapped in the fine tissue of what had been a love life. Slowly the paleness of dawn was leaving us, was depriving us of dreaming. For a period of time which seemed long, there was a constant to and fro, a strange ballet of doctors, interns, nurses, parents, discreet sweepers, extras, then figures and faces in the morning, which already was moving cunning grey and the yellow of eyedrops that blur vision and thinking.

  I was right to want to stay behind to describe the objects while trying to slot them into time and history. Now I know there is a method for situating things in the adventure of cultures. Above all I know that the art of preservation is fully justified. Rings, watches, mirrors, masks or pens: every object conceals a story, a microscopic life which, when we discover it, breathes life back into the anonymous and absent-minded gestures with which we move and use objects. Perhaps we exist to name objects and perchance we do it in an erroneous way for the sheer pleasure of seeing a vase change into a rose and in its transparency enclose a beloved face, a novel landscape. Certainly objects are not quite things. For things have the power to move like events in a story: they happen, they die. Would that each one of my notices shed some light on objects, so that the thing inside them that draws them closer to us quivers and glitters with life.

  I took notes until the end so as not to fall horizontally toward the summer to be. Before the end I would have liked to quit this obsession that binds me against my will to the idea that we mustn’t be afraid to ‘spit out’ well-made well-said things about others. In the end, the woman I spent entire nights with, drinking and talking, never mentioned it, but that’s what’s at stake, regardless of what people say. Knowing how to spit out properly in language: contempt, anger, rebellion, joys, ecstasies and little hassles, desires and fits, while telling ourselves that all of this will surely strike the other at the most appropriate place in her humanity – there where, at every turn, hope and belief in the species can be recaptured.

  Not for a moment did I lose sight of the bed, the body, the narrow mask that stuck to the skin of the face while, in a final effort, life did all it could to resemble nothing. Each batting of an eyelash, the slightest movement of the eyelids, the flooded dryness of the mouth, the wrong side of the scenery throbbing like an old screen at the very back of the pupils: all of this I made note of while thinking that I wanted to live with vast and unfurled thoughts so as to allow me always to brush against the vital energy generated by the sea over the centuries.

  I would look into my mother’s mouth. It was as if, by dint of looking there, I could transform the sun of dawn and that of dusk into felicitous twinklings – tiny silver shards which, in deflecting my attention, brought me, stage right, back to a misleading setting and a silence known to shelter verbs expressing time and a wealth of replies. Later on, I noted how the density of silence can vary, depending on whether it penetrates the mouth directly or if it carefully disperses the few words still living it up under tongue before night falls there forever.

  I wrote, absorbed by my notes to the point of forgetting the city I was living in and the name of that woman I so enjoyed talking with. I copied out entire passages. It would no doubt have been possible for me to use other words to make my mother’s face come back to life and to youth at the heart of the past, of its trends and music. But all those other words would have led me to lasso Mother in a life story. And all I wanted from life was movement. Not really stories. However, I made sure to note that the character of Carla Carlson had never been afraid of anything other than the obligation she’d created for herself to understand and simultaneously love the kind of noisy beat that generations transmit one to the other unde
r the simple name of young life going its way.

  One reply after another, I tackled the knots and bonds, seeking to understand how knots take shape starting from a word, around a hard self become complex or simply mysterious. Later on I did notice how the knots held a kind of softness and then, at the most unexpected moment, they’d loosen in spectacular fashion by installing characters, actors and witnesses around this soft part, all of them willing to startle anything that moves in cities and in dictionaries of proper names. I made note of how difficult it is to turn back or to pretend to be living innocently while holding the name of a woman, a character or a god between your teeth. All that time, someone was dying in front of me. Actresses with mascara tears facilitated the passage from reality to the nameless whiteness of elsewhere. I thought perfectly naked arms were needed for rapture, dreaming and agony which, along with its shadows, remains imprinted on the retina for a long time by striking at the very heart of our ability to imagine.