Fences in Breathing Read online

  §

  As usual, the café is empty. An unknown woman is sitting at the back of the room. She is writing or taking notes, who knows. The day is so warm and green, one could die of pleasure under the shade of the great trees that Charles still keeps wanting to cut down to make into sculptures. In the far distance, the mountains, and sometimes the great white jet of precious water that, they say, brings the city good fortune. The lake is glassy and untroubled. The day cleanses the slow dust that has accumulated hour after hour.

  §

  On the wall of my room, four photographs of Tatiana. She must have been ten years old. The era is easy to recognize because back then there was only one way of framing faces. All the girls’ hair was cut in the same style, with short bangs exposing the eyes and forehead. Tatiana seemed different because in her gaze one could easily imagine Red Square covered in snow, a bygone Russia of forests and wild mythologies. Tatiana was from a time that filled lives with massacres and suffering so vivid they cannot be forgotten. But history was repeating itself and, yes, Tatiana would say once again, ‘A massacre, my dear, is when there are corpses in a field, on a road or in a school, and you can’t distinguish the faces from the arms and legs. A massacre, my dear, is man-made cock-and-bull that whips victims around willy-nilly in the wind, and then harder still. Afterwards, you have to trudge through the muddy fields, wiping the blood from the uteruses of women and from children’s cheeks.’

  §

  It is through prose that the world is driven to creating assets; through poetry, it changes and reconnects with the living. I tire quickly when writing in another language. I still don’t know where to properly place the silences. I cheat constantly. Something escapes me. Tires me out. Makes me flee. This morning I went to the post office. I rarely run into anyone at this hour, but I noticed a man talking with a woman. He was holding her left hand strangely in his right, a bit like someone wounded who, in order to shield himself from an unfortunate blow, shrivels up into himself, overwhelmed by an invisible burden. The woman seemed rather joyful and, as I watched her talking with the man, I thought for a moment that she could not see him. That he was a shadow, a tautological presence. My eyes met the woman’s. The wind was blowing hard. My eyes watered like in winter.

  §

  Images come up, one after another, like slides in a carousel or like in a graphic novel without the words. Just faces looming up from urban landscapes or science-fiction. June sees them coming, spreads them out, reorganizes them in an endless flow of profiles and close-ups that act as sites of memory and of future. Since her childhood, everything in her has played out like in the movies. Her family is a film crew, the house a film set with moments of sober silence, or of eating and drinking and laughter, notebooks scattered all over the table. June owns the Videoreal shop. For the last three years, she has been renting out old movies and some recent releases. She refuses to stock soft or hard porn. What this costs her in terms of business she makes up for with the younger clientele who love to engage in discussion and leave the store with Citizen Kane, The Deer Hunter, Death in Venice, Matrix or Star Trek. An entire generation thus navigates between past and future without sidestepping the all-powerful present. June is a fanatic for the present, which, in her view, tempers the pain of living, protects from ghosts and counters mirages. To her, everything is a pretext for the pleasure of now: lighting a cigarette, watching a movie, stretching out in the sun, reading or not really reading, kissing on the lips. June claims to be happy because she does not hesitate to transform her pain into a character capable of playing many roles. ‘Pain, come over here. Pain, go over there,’ she tells herself, whenever she feels the urge to stage what she refers to as the most exhilarating moments of her existence.

  §

  Half past midnight, the house is silent. On the kitchen table, Laure Ravin has spread magazines, newspapers, two photo albums, all dated September 2001. She slowly turns the pages, hypnotized by everything she sees and does not really see. Here, an enormous fireball in a blue sky gorged with immensity. Here again, debris like so many tiny white paper airplanes floating in the foreground of a tall tower. Already ruins, already autumn and steel, shredded. Everywhere, a fire gnaws at the building and devours the things of life: photographs of children, coffee cup, pen, an Anatolian carpet, a pleasing painting. Everywhere, books, operating manuals, bills, contracts, printers, cellphones and BlackBerrys, ID cards, twenty-dollar bills, painkillers, all of this suddenly becomes nothing. Some say this is hell, some say this is war. Human forms halfway between bodies and chimeras gesticulating in front of windows. Torso, shoulder, white shirt, here a man, arms glued to his side, one leg bent at a 45-degree angle, freefalls headfirst to his death. The sun has disappeared. A woman wearing a pearl necklace is covered in ashes from head to toe. Everywhere, ghosts in business suits walk through the darkness of the great fog of civilization.

  §

  Sometimes I catch Tatiana looking at her collection of watches. A hundred or so timepieces, antique and modern, with their white gold, their bright silver, assembled over the years since the purchase of the château: bassine-cased watches with astronomical indicators or enamelled covers, watches with tactile hour indicators, pendant watches, hunting-cased watches, dress watches, aviators’ wristwatches, ladies’ bracelet watches, gentlemen’s watches. She touches them, rewinds the ones whose mechanisms she is familiar with, marvels, tries to imagine the why of so much research, of such refinement and beauty. All these wheels, all these bridges, these screws, these pins, these hands, these springs, assembled to tempt us into a fascination with time. Once a year, Tatiana goes into town to see the mother of all complication watches, the Calibre 89, which, in addition to showing mean sidereal time and incorporating the Gregorian calendar, is adorned with a celestial chart representing the Milky Way and making it possible to distinguish 2,800 northern-hemisphere stars. And further complications still, about which she cannot stop dreaming.

  §

  The workshop is cluttered, dark like a sentence between two wounds. Here and there, tools, hammers, pliers, nails and picks, all the colour of rust or the grey of time passing by. Dust of dust and dust of scrap metal, sawdust, blond and brown wood chips that stick to your soles when you enter. Charles is sitting on his cracked leather sofa the colour of an old asphalt road. The tobacco smell of three generations of great drinkers and talkers has permeated the sofa. Charles has known them all, because the writers who once regularly visited the château liked him. Some bought his wood carvings, light enough to be carried all around the world; to others he gave those little boxes that look like drawers that he has never stopped reproducing, hoping someday, in a ritual gesture, to sow them at the bottom of the lake. With the men, he drank and talked about what made blood rush to his head. Few women visited him, but those who did enjoyed sitting on the sofa, smoking. When they asked too many questions about his work, Charles got a worried look on his face. When the woman did not grasp quickly enough that he was in pain, his eyes darkened. He enjoyed that moment when he could sense himself being misunderstood and rejected. He would then get up, find his sketchbook, doodle a few lines, pretending to draw the woman, then go back to his room to fetch a list of writers with whom he dreamed of working, he said. He made sure to add the name of the visiting woman writer to the list. Knowing they were on ‘a list’ scared the women. So each one declined his offer. In time, fewer and fewer writers visited the château. Charles continued to produce sketches while thinking about his sister and about June. Today his page is blank. Charles’s hand trembles or does not. That’s how it is.

  §

  In the garden, Laure rediscovers a kind of peacefulness. People in the area say roses grow so well here that everyone knows a poem in their honour. In the old days, her mother used to grow them with love, like in the best English films, where the rose has forever been noble. The gardener has mowed the lawn. The smell of fresh grass lodges itself in memory, in that place where the pleasure of living cancels out the throbbi
ng of anguish. The gardener claims he can make grass as silky as a young girl’s skin, but he also knows how to multiply the thorns on rosebushes so they can remain forever graceful and entrancing. Behind the cedar hedge, a car is parked: inside, a man waits. He stares at who knows what, but makes note of any gaps in language, any suspension of common sense. Tomorrow a nurse will come to care for her mother for a few days. Laure has spent several nights analyzing the Patriot Act. No verbal sleight has escaped her. She understands the danger this document represents. She hesitates to start writing her report, unsure what tone it should have. The garden is a kingdom. On bright days, one can see clearly the little boats on the lake that, to the villagers, plays the part of a real-life character. Most of the time it is said to be comforting, but on days when nothing is moving, when heat draws the contours of the mountains like in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, movement comes from inside it. Whoever looks at the lake on those days feels threatened to the core.

  §

  Kim is spending more and more time in front of her computer. One click and Svalbard appears, its amoeba-shaped archipelago; another click and the city of Longyearbyen comes up with its two rows of brightly coloured houses wedged between mountains that are sometimes white, sometimes a soul-wrenching pebble-black. Nary a tree on the horizon of the horizon. On one side, the scar of the old mine, on the other a strange cemetery with tall white crosses that, in summer, form a bouquet of lighthouses in the stone. And then there is Barentsburg, Cape Linne, Ny-Ålesund and Sveagruva, accessible only by plane or by boat. Kim is willing to do anything it takes to survive up there. At first she will work as a cashier in a supermarket. In the following months she will learn to use a weapon, to hike in the mountains for three days, to prepare dog sleds, to dry slices of seal meat; she will study the names of birds, the whole lexicon of ice, the vocabulary of its frightening roar when it tilts and capsizes. The colour of the infinitely turquoise water. The glaciers. Kim imagines the solitude, the cold, the night, the midnight sun. She loses sleep over it.

  §

  At the château, I occasionally get the urge to drink and smoke, as if that could go hand in hand with the disproportionate happiness I experience from savouring beauty and the tenderest nature there is. Tatiana says that this was the undoing of so many writers: this joy, at once minimalist and excessive, which, for company, commands impulses that are usually buried but quite active, just as the night is when dawn first glimmers. Such elation at the heart of quietude is dangerous.

  §

  A diffuse light that makes it possible to see dust particles floods the shop. Behind her counter, June is reviewing some bills. An unknown woman just came in to ask for Babel. She is staying at the château for a while. She has a strong accent. June asks about the publisher. ‘Very well, she is very well,’ says the stranger before exiting. Seen from the back, the woman reminds her of Ava Gardner. June phones Kim to invite her to watch Atanarjuat, which she just received. This afternoon, she will go downtown to buy A Woman’s Voyage to Spitsbergen by Léonie d’Aunet. Kim wants to know everything about Svalbard. June provides her with everything she desires.

  §

  I am calm, though not exactly quiet. The presence of Tatiana Beaujeu Lehmann stimulates my intentions toward silence and dissolution. Sometimes a fierce urge to leave and to not reply to her questions. In this foreign tongue, I’m not quite able to modulate my voice properly, to sort through the tides of desire and the dregs of the essential. I choke on this tongue that nonetheless intrigues me and keeps me alert. In the end, I always find a solution to the questions of meaning that do not come up in my language. I establish links between beings so that I can juggle with their anguish. Every morning, the raw cry of a raven stabs the air, leaving a floating impression of violence and of déjà vu.

  §

  Yesterday, on my way to pick up a video, I walked by the Hôtel du Nord. The man I had seen at the post office stood smoking, leaning against a tree at the street corner. He seemed surprised to see me, then collected himself and mumbled hullo. I nodded. The irate gaze of a man who appears hurt but isn’t keeps me at bay. Tatiana no doubt knows ‘the wounded one.’ Only in this part of the world do men develop this hunted-animal look, nervous and contemplative. Helped by the wound, some of them display a remarkable gift for seduction and conviviality, but the man before me seemed anxious enough to jolt the day’s very heart.

  §

  She knows her mother’s death will soon be a fait accompli. In a year, two years. Death will pass through Laure’s life for the first time. The body must struggle, for the moment it must boost all its senses to their maximum in order to understand. Let nothing go by. Act as though, but act like so. The bathwater gushes with the steady sound of little falls. All the softness in the world is not found in water. Laure knows the sea can be so untamed that its brutal outbursts are impossible to forget. She puts her hand under the tap to check if the water is too hot, too cold. The transparency, or rather the idea of the transparency, of things, of skin, of her mother’s blue eyes – which she has learned to sail through like a threshold, a level crossing, a childhood room – all this transparency makes her weary. The mother waits, seated on a little stool. Laure does not speak. Her back aches from kneeling like this, cut in half by the edge of the bathtub, bent over the noisy bubbling water as if she were crossing a bridge suspended over an abyss. The old mother is now sitting in the tub and Laure is scrubbing. Sometimes her eye falls upon her mother’s hands speckled with autumn-hued age spots. Strong hands that can still hold the thick biographies that help dream the time away, help her discover entire lives devoured by the cosmos. Strong hands and ready tears make her mother a fortress, fearless and blameless.

  §

  I must look after my solitude. Be able to count on it to astonish me, to plot and to go on with this madness for speaking even as I abandon my own language. In all languages, the writer’s solitude feeds the little pleasures and great frights of infinite nights. Lives. I am talking about solitude because it is expert at bringing us closer to death, to childhood, to beauty, to nature and even to others, whom it eventually envelops in a precious aura that makes it possible to love them. I have to nurture my solitude. Especially to not let it escape, even though, in the other language, it loses some of its brightness and intensity. Solitude is precious for smoothing out travel’s edges: bubbles, tears, secrets glittering in the dark.

  §

  For years now he has worked wood with his knife, played at carving holes in the blond mass of oaks and of magic charms. He files away curves and smooths, smooths the wood so much so that a composition always emerges in the shape of an armoire or a non-armoire. Yes, an object inside which can be stored a letter, a postcard, a pen, a secret. A beautiful object that is and is not an armoire, that could be a drawer. A safe. His wooden work table is tattooed with inscriptions made by a chisel or a gouge. He likes it when the shape of the armoire-in-progress becomes more definite, when the wood curls up, splits into chips and angel hair. His bedroom is his workshop. To leave the house, Kim must cross the room where the knives are. On the other side of Kim’s room is the kitchen. In order to eat, Charles must walk through Kim’s room. He always does this slowly, counting his steps and staring either at the floor or at the ceiling, for one day he will want to carve one or the other into a dome, or a tombstone.

  §

  ‘We should get together more often before you leave.’ June had quickly segued into commenting about the adjective northern and the territories in Canada’s north. Kim listened distractedly. Yesterday she had celebrated her thirtieth birthday in town and Charles had given her the sketch of a sculpture he would soon make. ‘No, not like the cow in Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child, no, not like the one by Jana Sterbak, no no, something more fictional and more true as well. You’ll see.’ Charles had always frightened Kim. He knew it, but neither he nor she could figure out where this might have come from. Perhaps the simple fact of still living together as adults made them suspi
cious of one another, suspiteful of their childhood memories, or melantagonistic, and not at all clever in the face of life. Adding up to a profound malaise inside them that was not at all about to heal.

  §

  June was more beautiful than ever, Kim noticed. Despite her tiredness, she’d agreed to come watch Atanarjuat. They had set up in the small room adjoining the shop. The walls were covered with photographs of actresses and old movie posters. At the foot of the bed, a library composed entirely of books about cinema. June had a passion, Kim not yet. Only this desire for the north. Very far away. For some time now, she had been catching herself murmuring ‘before the glaciers,’ her belly filling with a kind of euphoria so powerful that she imagined herself at the origins of matter, going forth to meet the light and a clamour of ore and ocean that made everything crack upon its passage. Then images that took her breath away flew off to build their nest of dread and excitement in another part of her brain.

  §

  Sometimes Charles believes his sketches are flammable. There is always something burning somewhere. Something burning that makes him scream in the night. A book, a movie theatre, a whole village. By day, everything becomes normal again: he goes to the post office, stops in at the café, walks around the château craning his neck, stands smoking in front of the house, sweeps his workshop. Yesterday, in town, people were excited, running, buying no matter what no matter how. Pretending to love each other. At the restaurant, Charles had annoyed Kim with indiscreet questions. She did not answer, he lost patience and insulted her. At the end of the meal, he gave her his blackest sketch. Then they both smoked a lot. Kim wore too much bright red on her lips.

  §

  In my language, the words piano and writing are homonyms, and their definitions, nobody knows why, intersect, with a single exception for the zones of silence inherent to one and the other. In the foreign language, writing means to get closer, while in mine to have the desire to predominates. In the evening, sometimes, believing herself alone, the secretary sits at the piano. She plays, stops for five, ten minutes. On the alert, I wait for the melodic shapes of things to come in the château. Her repertoire seems to consist exclusively of Chopin. Once, I came upon her unexpectedly and asked if she liked jazz. Completely transformed, she responded by playing ‘Moon Mist.’ Later on in the kitchen, we discussed John Cage at length while drinking red wine and eating olives. We enjoyed ourselves and planned to do it again. I spent the rest of the evening immersed in the dictionary. Around midnight, she knocked at my door.