Fences in Breathing Read online

  §

  The nurse is here. Young, cheerful, without malice. Laure feels relieved. These days of freedom will be precious, yes, she will spend these three days in town, in a hotel room with her books and her computer, working on the text of the Patriot Act. But then, suddenly, a little pain and strong heat come to dwell in her chest again, as they do every time she must leave her mother. No, she has never had the words to speak about her mother. There is no photograph, this is no movie. One can’t really know what happened when one entered the world unless one’s mother becomes a storyteller of cries, strained muscles and moist eyes, she being the only assigned narrator of the panting, labouring hole of mouth and sex, all of it like a natural order anchored in the mists of time, an otherworldly nighttime that Laure has been trying to visualize ever since she read The Atrids. The possibility that there could have been such a night of time, a vast expanse of horizon, voice pitched like the shadows in our steps, frightens her. All the same, she enjoys this dread, which, coming from so far away and so long ago, seems without real danger yet still fertile with emotions and sensations. After making her recommendations to the nurse, Laure leans over to kiss her mother. A strand of wool has escaped from the old soft sweater her mother is wearing. Absent-mindedly, Laure twists it around her finger, a little cord of tenderness.

  §

  On the train, he reads the newspaper. Nervous. Legs crossed, uncrossed, newspaper folded, newspaper unfolded; cigarette pack taken out of a pocket, turned and turned again, slipped back into the pocket. Charles needs the city. He spent all night sketching. And whenever this happens, the next day he wants to find himself amid traffic noises, senses on high alert, to walk tall among banks, self-serve restaurants, posters, neon, everyday dirt. He is, he says, going to rub up against the city’s exciting shapes. After a few hours, these shapes give him ideas and arouse him further, but he does not really know in which direction.

  §

  Description of the movie. Especially of the sequence where three Inuit women have just gathered eggs. June’s left leg is resting lightly on Kim’s. Each woman has a handful of nuts in her right hand as though she were about to feed a squirrel, a bird, an eager and faithful animal. On the screen, the scene about death, about capturing the enemy by embracing his soul, is not easy to describe in real time. Particles of time thick with sound come to nestle between Kim and June. Kim’s leg quivers. She has put her arm under June’s as if they were going hiking in the mountains. Then another arm, a slim waist, another arm, an embrace, a silky hand, another hand, an endlessly smooth horizon. Later on, it’s the grave, slow letting-go, the miraculous sinking to the depths of oneself with honey-flavoured words under tongue or suspended between lips. And rippling through the belly, the echo, the clear repercussion of what has cracked, hurtled through each one of the women on the screen. On the sofa, a smell of toasted almonds, sea and peat bog. Kim’s body is at the centre of all stories. Kim’s life, the only viable script.

  §

  Tatiana Beaujeu Lehmann refuses to tell her story in the other language. ‘Let’s speak in our own language, shall we?’ Obviously I want to. But as she utters those words while pouring herself a glass of port, I fall into a deep dark hole, as though I’ve lost my reference points, unable to grab on to now the sounds, now the commonly held meanings of the simplest words. ‘I see. Today, you want me to be the one talking. I see.’ Pause. ‘Would you put an ice cube in this?’ White hair in a 1940s style, suntanned skin, high cheekbones, few wrinkles, a slight trembling of the left hand, the publisher recalls the fifty or so persons who, every Monday, used to come to the château to listen to poets. ‘After the reading, we served wine in the garden, we also served each other in order to exist. Night would fall. The poets continued to drink and enjoy themselves. No matter their temperament, their inner desert or their tiredness, they all laughed heartily while punning constantly and quoting other writers. In the same way business people speak in numbers and statistics, the poets quoted frequently, as though quotation were at the heart of their craft, the only practice able to simultaneously attest to their culture, their memory and their mood.’ Tatiana believes that poets speak another language but resemble us in that place where beingness falters a moment before it is chased back into the jaws of time. ‘They travel, you know, they falter through a very tender darkness that makes them, I’ve no idea why, transparent. Yes, that’s it, light enters them in spite of themselves. Now it’s your turn, Anne, tell me about today’s world and drop another ice cube in my port if you would.’

  §

  The lake is always close and far away like childhood. Visible one day, invisible the next. It is the pride and joy of the residents. Children play there until late in the day. Tatiana knows that the lake is a sheet of water, a faithful dog nuzzling for affection yet never giving up the secrets and sweet nothings dumped into it. Since the purchase of the château, two writers have perished there. They say accident, incident. Only half the truth is ever told by changing the order of words. The lake is never threatening and makes no waves. It is a sheet-of-light lake. Tatiana has always called it Lake She, the hypnotizing lake that puts the heart to sleep and causes the horizon to rustle.

  §

  Indiscernible, that’s the adjective I was looking for to describe the ponds of meaning strewn without logic throughout the foreign language. Just like at the château, where there is something indiscernible in Tatiana Beaujeu’s eyes. It’s a word I use to keep from falling into the abyss I’ve invented for myself. It allows me to all at once better define my fear, compress it and project it into the vast darkness of silence until it changes into a desirable enigma. Before coming here, I did not know that fear was nomadic and that it could be transmitted via vocabulary and characters. Now I know that, in our mother tongues, we have enough words to learn to change ourselves into wolves or sirens, depending on our anxieties, our questions, and this craze for exchanging kisses at the slightest provocation, especially on July evenings when one must make adequate use of one’s soul.

  Leaves have started falling. The gardener is sweeping up summer’s sounds. The roses hold tight in the late August wind. Now the mountains are indiscernible, swallowed up by the eight o’clock fog.

  §

  Night has fallen without Charles noticing. With its street smells, its victims, its music, that hungry electricity coursing between skin and clothes, from hair to fingertips. Charles will spend the night somewhere, in a bar, a hotel, a park. He will emerge from the shadows at dawn with the new tools he purchased during the day. He says tools but somebody will mention the cutting edges of things and one will see billhook, scythe, fauchard, debris, wood chips and sketches all entangled like words in summertime, when crickets and corn, lives and vines, sunflowers and stormy hours touch and quench one another.

  §

  It’s a squeaky-clean city and not at all young. As a teenager she would come here to buy books and visit a friend she cherished above all others, whom she would have loved to love until her body became a passional wave. The city is both foreign and familiar to her, but it will never be foreign enough. Since she had left the area, a slow nighttime had settled into her gaze. She had wanted freedom, chosen to study law as if this would protect her from injustice and lies. She had devoted years to reading law books, believing this would be useful in helping her distinguish between good and evil. The law, she had come to understand, is the necessary conflict of every civilization.

  The sight of the great white bridge at the heart of the city always stirs her. She was right to return to the Hôtel Metropole, where she used to stay when she had to visit her mother, unable to spend more than a few hours in her company or to share the late ‘Good night, my darling’ hour, as well as the early-morning one that tastes of ‘It’s going to be a beautiful day.’

  §

  Story of words. All these words in the hopes of making them one’s destiny. Have no fear of licking their salt, their origins, the little delights of instinct that catch fire wit
h them. Will we someday have memory enough to recall those centuries when we had nothing but our senses and tormented thoughts with which to face life and turn it into an ally? Will we still know how to recount in what way metaphors allowed us to touch the sky and all the shadows of our fears? That time when we were as fascinated by hows and whys as by verbs that made us gallop through the cosmos and roll around between proper nouns. Will it be our duty to remember the difficult sentences that nonetheless spurted out of us like bubbles and fireworks? Beautiful torment, beautiful instrument. Who am I becoming in the other tongue? Who translates what in the alternating pattern of words’ shadow and desire’s infinite renewal?

  §

  Charles always carries a sketchbook. He slips it into the left pocket of his jacket. He likes the movement he must make to retrieve it, as if he were extracting something from a hunting pouch or a money bag full of fruit. As a child, he loved to draw; then, little by little, he started to strike, to dig into wood. One day somebody said sculpt in his presence and he took out his penknife.

  He spent the night lying on a bench in the Jardin anglais. He did not sleep. Some youths with radios came very close and did not make fun of him. He did not sleep because of the heat and the flies. He dreamed of shutting them all up in an armoire. Coolness came. When he ran out of words, he fell asleep at last. Now he is returning to the village. He has lost his sketchbook and words have come back, numerous, unusable, like old nails that slip and break. Maybe because of the train’s vibration. This train should be stopped. He would like to draw, but without the sketchbook, he can’t. His hand trembles. The train is going too fast. Where has the landscape gone? Into the light, of course, that’s obvious, he says to himself, into the light is where the nails will fall.

  §

  I have no doubt: we are often in the front rows of pain trying to comprehend how it is that one day we can take flight and on the next repeatedly bruise ourselves against the world or wander thousands of kilometres away from desire in our labyrinth of images. Discover where the little folds of tenderness come from that, now and again, close up over us like scars, and fire.

  §

  The hotel room is spacious, with several mirrors that intimidate and make the eye retreat inward. As she enters the room, Laure quickly pretends to see nothing, neither her body nor her thoughts, though they are always tinged with purple. She plugs in her computer at once, places Spinoza’s Ethics next to the Patriot Act. Orders a salad and a glass of white wine. Does not light a cigarette, does not linger by the window with a view onto the great jet of water rising in the middle of the lake. For a moment she stands in front of the television as if, before getting down to work, she wants to gorge on stupidities and mediocrity; then she sits down at a little Restoration-style desk and plunges into heavy reading about the Carnivore surveillance system, which, upon simple request by an attorney from the federal or state government, can be deployed by the FBI. In the schoolyard, the supervisor is pacing in front of the aluminum fence. Laure’s mother would pick her up in the car every day when classes ended. She would take her hand and walk her to the red car. Laure would open the window. Her mother would warn her not to throw up.

  §

  Evenings when it is still hot after dinner, Tatiana, her secretary and I sit in the garden and watch darkness fall over the lake and the mountains. The sky displays astonishing purity. At summer’s end there are countless shooting stars. Some of them send out sparks that remain longer upon the retina, creating the impression that we have some power over them if we can see them for more than two seconds. In the distance, owls hoot in the half-light, then all the night’s noises come crashing into the conversation. ‘In your opinion, how many books were written in this château?’ I haven’t the slightest idea. ‘Three hundred and twenty-eight. You should have seen all the poets. Only during the war years did I see so many worried faces that were, paradoxically, so alive. Several women writers stayed here. I can admit it now, I always did give them preference; but their stories weren’t pretty. Oh, not at all, stories so violent that several didn’t dare publish them. I did everything I could to convince them, but they were afraid, terribly afraid. Some of their husbands, some of not finding a husband, others of going to hell; others were simply afraid of themselves and of the shame that would befall their family. Things were different back then.’ The secretary and I have our doubts about this. Tatiana had done what she could, and I want only to write a book in a foreign language in order to accurately measure the impasses of my own language and not see my own limits.

  §

  In town the crowd is compact, people in a hurry, eyes ever ready to suck up the future. Trains have multiplied, each traveller rushing with robotic movements to catch his as best he can while thinking of his distress, so minor in today’s world. How to shape the stuff of raw emotions into memory? Kim is about to leave. It is now certain: she is going far away. June has promised to accompany her to the airport. First she will film her leaving the house: Kim kissing her brother Charles before climbing into a taxi, Charles waving her off Italian-style, his hand clenched like a child’s fist turned toward himself. Kim will film the drive to the train station. The car will drive by the château, then follow the river. Depending on the height of the hills, the lake will appear, disappear. Once at the station, June will get a close-up of Kim in front of the departures board for neighbouring cities. Then they will get the train to the airport. June will show people reading their newspapers, constantly coming back to Kim, her hands, the suitcase. The landscape will speed by. The vineyards, the sunflower fields, the sheep, the clouds, the mountainside villages: a world will disappear. At the airport we will see Kim from behind, heading for the check-in counter, her walk giving an impression of slow motion, catch a glimpse of the face of the woman behind the counter, then Kim will turn to June as if she were about to ask her a question. June will keep filming Kim’s face, her eyebrows, the movement of her eyelids, the mascara, the moist pupil. She will record everything she can: the boarding pass, the passport, a bottle of water sticking out of the backpack. Kim will step forward to kiss her, June offering her cheek while continuing to film, reframing their close-up faces with one hand. So June will have filmed a farewell without knowing how to, incapable of finding a fresh angle, a novel version in which Kim will have been seen one last time, from behind, never looking back. At the far end of the image, viewers will make out customs officers searching travellers’ bags. The movie’s title will be Learning to Leave a Landscape. Face to the wind, with the glaciers’ unspeakable blue in the background, Kim will live far away from June, in the all-out immensity that absorbs sorrow. That’s how it is.

  §

  She has always known how to put her hope to the test. From time to time, the image of the oh-so-blue eyes of her mother lying in bed or shivering in the bathtub comes back to haunt her. This evening, Laure would like to talk to somebody, but nobody in town remembers her. Nor does she remember them, in any case. Her head is filled with nothing but the thousands of pages printed in the name of the Law so that the Law might prevail, infiltrate every dimension of society like carnivorous water, soaking up millions of inkblot citizens. One does not touch the Law without another law authorizing one to do so. A law like Russian nested dolls. Laure always hopes to be able to touch a speck of truth at the bottom of each one of them. But today, why so many mirrors in a simple hotel room? All these facets of the same person, the pain that becomes lighter or heavier depending on whether you are facing yourself or about to turn to face someone else.

  §

  Evenings when tiredness is too great and allows nostalgia to settle into the château, Tatiana asks me to read to her from a novel by Dostoevsky. She insists I use a silver ritual pointer that belonged to her grandparents. Yad. I learned the word one day in Paris when visiting the Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme. Because of its link to reading, I immediately incorporated it into the other language, hoping to ensure its long life. ‘Use the yad, it will propel
me into another world, because, I confess, this one weighs heavily on me.’

  I read, the secretary joins us. She does not begrudge me taking her place. She knows that what links me to Tatiana Beaujeu Lehmann is as deep as the lake, which has become an obsessive presence in my story. After the reading, the secretary sits at the piano. An outdated world envelops us and we find ourselves at the mercy of a great feeling of melancholy and fervour. During these sessions, I remain on the alert, amazed at hearing my own voice, husky and multiple, drifting through time, disappearing then re-emerging in me, a foreigner.

  FENCES IN BREATHING

  Every fly has its shadow.

  Châteaubriand

  A light at the end of the hallway is I realize quite clearly in the other language a light bulb a thing deep in the eyes that encroaches on words like a symphony in a park on a beautiful July afternoon with traffic noises in the distance and fragments of silence strewn here and there in my life I’ve been told I should repeat the same words often and not be afraid of burning like money in your pocket and that nobody would complain because the more we are able to catch new expressions in another language the more it becomes legible and beautiful with new sounds so I am going directly to invent the horizon and be careful of my mother’s bare feet on the bathroom tiles while my brother waits for me in the kitchen making holes in the hard oak with a knife like he has done ever since he started chasing after words I often caught sight of him naked he was indeed holding his knife in front of him and opening an armoire to retrieve a sketchbook or a message in a white envelope I know I watched him get on tiptoes and he was talking to the armoire singing a tune our mother loved before her death she who all her life wanted to live at the bottom of the lake there to sing while blowing bubbles unable to get to the end of the lyrics while I spread the tablecloth to the vast confines of the universe where reindeer reign as do polar bears always very white when running at the foot of the mountains on the turquoise ice of the glaciers great mirror this I know at the core of my soul although I often remain trapped in the image and the impasse of the violence of glaciers when they start to crack like ice floes I know you have to run and breathe deeply nobody is guilty of breathing well nor of breathing loudly like at the movies or like Charles when he is making his holes in the wooden floor with nails like mouths round and dark awaiting a straw a little pea or a marble or eyes that can see from the inside and that pierce my soul the floor is also a coffin my mother often went dancing there on days when a friend brought cake recipes and Charles ate all the apples yelling Adam Adam it’s mine what are we going to devour today the tree or the living wood of the forest while looking at the château in the distance and a lot of words that would love to penetrate me I am not afraid I am not afraid to go where it is necessary to translate the names of sponges and shells birdsongs and the law book that injures if it falls on my fingers are we today going to sponge my mother’s large back caress her silences or let them drop into the bathwater while watching the foamy little waves around her thighs and the delicate shadow on her back naturally scrub the spine the nurse had said for there under the skin is a living world I listen to it while scrubbing always a bit harder yet I must finish this report I would like to write what I was told to write without leaving any traces I also think the opposite while caressing my mother’s hair as I help her to get up it’s as if there were fences in our breathing and this helps me to draw sketches in the morning when I get up and breathing is difficult the sketch is filled with lines and nasty black nails that fall hard on the page if the wind passes through my lungs like I want it to shaking the Damask roses in the garden then I no longer see the fences and can more easily get closer to summer by looking at the lake I love separating the colours and caresses of June and of Kim that estrange me from my soul it’s as if I were behind a hedge of thorns when I look at them and I tell myself I must breathe everywhere with my body because I need all of my breath and I also need nails to stash in the armoire for later next to the unstamped white envelope that contains my inventions.