Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon Read online

  The ashes of both my mother and my father have been deposited in a vault (description of the vault) upon which is written a family name completely foreign to our family. GRAVE OF THE O. FRÉCHETTE FAMILY. I’m able to remember the name by thinking about the poet Louis Fréchette. While walking I recall entering the vault only once. It was a spring day when the cold, the humidity and the mud ruined any hope of happiness and the future.

  Can gravestones be thought of as ruins? Can they be said to fire the imagination and awaken our knowledge as the necropolises of ancient worlds do?

  Is it possible to discuss inner ruins, childhood landscapes degraded by time or learned constructions of the mind, such as stoicism and altruism, eroded by the biting breath of new beliefs? Can one talk of philosophical ruins? I sometimes find myself imagining my contemporaries, arms akimbo, circulating amid ideologies fallen into ruin, finally able to examine them in their most remarkable and sombre aspects. Theories about progress and communication whose finest images so far are the mere carcasses of a lot of small things whose lights have gone out. I also sometimes edge along sites constructed entirely of incomplete images whose broad lines end in the shape of a root or a tailspin, images left stranded like old symbols incapable now of bearing fruit, and about which we don’t know what danger or new attraction will have turned off from using them those who originally designed them for the pleasure and intelligence of their world.

  I like to be alone to reflect upon these things. Mostly these thoughts come to me when I’m in Montréal and I stream back in time, following the origins of blood and the circumstances of a generation that inherited an impregnable view of the world.

  Yesterday, it rained. Highway surface was dangerous serpent. Arrived in Québec at around six p.m., dropped by the apartment to change. Despite my tiredness I went out again to meet Carla Carlson who, dry martini in hand, was waiting for me in the Clarendon bar: clearly, we’re happy to see each other. She apologizes for her restlessness, for ‘the mad lust of the other me, of the other night, if you prefer.’

  – You see, I just had to finish this chapter. Papa often talked about Stockholm, about that night he learned that his mother had become sterile forever. An expressionist night that twists you up with despair. An inky night with a thin shaft of light leading to dawn. Papa loved the early morning light in Stockholm, wan and full of a vibration that transformed his youthful joys into major questions about the Meaning of Life. As for Mother, she only ever had a single story in memory. She told it frequently to my sister and me, to the neighbours, to the pastor and even to the tractor salesman who, I can vouch, never interrupted her despite the twenty minutes Mother’s story lasted in its golden-age version, which matches the final version I was treated to for my tenth birthday. A hundred times over, mother went back to the drawing board with the first version of ‘The Death of Descartes.’ I’m four years old when I hear it for the first time. I’m sitting at her feet, waiting. Mother stiffens, clears her throat, lifts her hand to her forehead as though having to think very hard, then one by one the words escape her mouth like balloons. Joyous is the word.

  Without my parents’ stories, imaginary or not, I probably wouldn’t have written. But before writing, I wanted to be an actress like Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. The encounter between the silence of the Prairies and Father’s and Mother’s wild tales makes me want to scream. However, not only was I taught that screaming is disagreeable to others but also that it’s a sign of weakness, so I decided to learn to scream so that it doesn’t show, something like a ventriloquist. I scream but nobody knows where the horrible sound, the noisy tumult, originates. I want it to seem easy; above all, it mustn’t give the impression of a chasm of melancholy and rebellion one must cross. Three times a week after school, I run to the end of the field behind our house. I modulate my voice with slow, deep, curious aah!s that make me look strange, until I feel a round grainy thunder rising inside me and suddenly it all balls up, batters and bitches hard and strong, then it vibrates sudden sudden suddenly like the anxiety of drum-beating with hands and feet in order to attract love. I do this until my artist mouth spews hush, gosh, rush and great outcry (in Swedish in the text). When the scream is theatrical and undeniably tragic, I term it humanistest and stare at the back door of the house. It slams open and Papa comes out with gestures I declare paternal and worried. When it’s obvious that through the bushes he has spotted the wisp of a head above the horizon, I know at last that I exist deep in his pupils like his mother existed with her whole being the night of her mad race through Stockholm. I know then that he’s no longer worried about me and that his muscles have relaxed. I take advantage of the moment to lasso him up good as I wave to reassure him. Furious, for he knows he’s roped in now, it’s his turn to caw loudly. Then he goes back to the house with a sprightly step. Alone, I stand in the wind. At that very moment my career as an actress begins. Playing only one part is out of the question. I orchestrate the scene and play several characters. This is where my mother’s story enters the picture. I play what I call ‘The Death of Descartes.’ I am in turn Descartes, which is my favourite role, a pretty young servant who whirls like a dervish, a cardinal whose body is so stiff nothing can move but my eyes, eyelids and mouth. And a parrot.

  Her office door is ajar. In the hallway, secretaries and technicians come and go, file folders clamped under arms, cellphones glued to their ears. Seated at her work table, Axelle handwrites a report like she often saw her mother do in their Coyoacán garden. Legs apart, her left hand nonchalantly resting between her thighs; but soon the combined effect of the thighs’ muscular roundness and the heat under her palm causes her thoughts to run their course down to her belly. Someone walks by the office and says hello to Axelle, who smiles and keeps writing with one hand while zipping down her fly with the other. The coast clear, her fingers reach under the soft cotton panties, then the index finger goes to work sliding from the majora to the minora labia before stopping here for a while, then there, in lush humidity that would suit the DNA sequences she’s been working on for a year. Though technical, the report requires concentration and know-how. Axelle considers getting up to close the door but is stopped by an image: a conch with spacious pink valves set on a window ledge in an apartment likely located in a large city for, all around it, the noise is continuous, thick and alarming. The conch comes alive, vibrates for a moment in the morning light with that little frisson known by oysters when their flesh contracts under the acid effect of lemon. Index finger on her clitoris, Axelle sits still, staring at the fax machine at the other end of the room, which suddenly feels like it’s been soundproofed. Time stretches out, then the fax emits a little chirrup immediately followed by a peaceful purring that seems to excite the young woman. A slight tremor. The paper ripples and unwinds its message. The body subsides. In Axelle’s head: an ocean sound, then inaudible faraway images. Estragña.

  Evenings when I don’t meet Carla Carlson I stay home in the apartment. Nights are tender. I keep the balcony door open. I leaf through my big dictionaries. I consult the encyclopedia for the slightest reason, with an insatiable appetite for ruins and their teachings about our disappearance and the workings of desire in every civilization. Here the Islamic poets Adi ibn Zaid and al-Asha, who were called the poets of the ruins; there the poems of Petrarch weeping over Rome’s past, the paintings of Pieter van Laer, of Paul Bril and of Jan Frans van Bloemen, the drawings and etchings of Hubert Robert and of his mentor, Giovanni Paolo Pannini.

  I find pleasure in the melancholy landscapes of the vedutists, whose fictional and artificial ruins, displaced in space and time, conceal a fondness for oddities I can’t seem to elucidate. Late into the night I work my way back up through time and sometimes make interesting discoveries. Yesterday, I found myself among the Bibiena family, the first-ever set designers for theatre and festivals.

  Since I’ve been living in the shadow of photographs of grief, since Mother’s death, I feed on dialogue. I surround myself with ruins as though
they were sources of wonderment and astonishment. I don’t believe that close acquaintance with ruins is sterile or laughable. On the contrary, I hope to be able to make Simone Lambert an irresistible offer very soon.

  It must have been eleven when Axelle entered the great hall of Linoleum, where a rave was scheduled. Twenty or so young people were walking around like smiley lost souls, then without warning started to jump around like badly oiled motors before landing back down to point zero of a conversation, of a series of questions and hiccup-answers swirling in the dark area of desire and intention.

  Few chairs, four turntables where a young man with a shaved head works the beat, screwing up his face with every move of his palm. At a nearby control panel another youth works his elbows forward, backward, forward-backward, spurts tons of light down as if to suddenly quench what has now become a real crowd walking upon a raging sea. Axelle takes flight.

  Dancing: the only thing that, at the peak of her solitude, could launch her back into the practice of life outside the lab. First there were toes, feet, ankles, calves, knees, thighs, hips, a sex, a belly, a chest, breasts, arms, shoulders, a throat, the open mouth, pink cheeks, the Grecian nose, tender eyes, smooth temples, an intelligent forehead, hair so silky it could have been stroked all night long, then the skull, lower mandible, trachea, shoulder blades, lungs, heart, stomach, liver, pancreas, kidneys, sacrum, femurs, menisci, tibias, metatarsi and the shadow once again the shadow of footsteps till dawn.

  She’s watching me in the dawn’s first light with an intensity that melts me. Her face a vivid world, I no longer know if I exist inside a photograph or if I once existed in the whiteness of the morning in front of this slow-gesturing woman who, never taking her eyes off me, is lying there in front of me, naked more naked than the night, more physical than a whole life spent caressing the beauty of the world. Sustaining her gaze is painful. I imagine, I breathe and imagine her once more. A few centimetres below the manubrium glints a little diamond that seems to stay on her chest by magic. The diamond, no doubt held there by a little ring inserted into the flesh, sparkles like a provocation, an object of light that lies in wait for desire, engulfs the other. I am that other. I am pure emotion lying in wait for the fate crouched inside this woman. The woman offers her desire, sows sentences in me whose syntax is unfamiliar and which I’m unable to follow and pronounce. Words there I cannot clearly distinguish – breasts, gusts, ships, stext – and, in between them, the woman’s lips move like some life-giving water that cleanses away all clichés, promises that every imprint of the gaze will be sexual, will be repeated and fluid as vivid as the morning light absorbing one’s most intimate thoughts. Her arms are open. She opens herself to the embraces that, in mother tongue, suspend reality. The woman has turned her head slightly and her throat astonishes. Her gaze contains traces of that water which, it is said, gushes when memory becomes verb and rekindles desire at the edge of the labia. The woman’s gaze sweeps into the future.

  Simone sometimes finds herself comparing herself to the woman of action, of business and of spirit, wise to intrigue, that was Marie de l’Incarnation. She’s easily moved by the beauty of the river and its shores. Like Marie, she knows how to put out the bonfires of malice and to ignite passions full of consequence. Zero tolerance, however, as regards the stupidity and cruelty that weave the fine fabric of our humanity.

  Yesterday, once again, she paused on an event that hadn’t captured her attention during previous readings. Since then, images of the 1663 earthquake have made their way into her thoughts: fear knotting the hearts of chests and throats, landslides, waterfalls, animals gone mad, wounded creatures. Then, in a flash, cries and howls shift to Lisbon in 1755, then to Messina in 1783; there the earth quakes endlessly until silence returns, alternating with the sound of Simone Lambert’s footsteps in the white cold on Dufferin Terrace. With her is a young woman, a medical student named Alice Dumont. The two women walk arm in arm. Against her arm Simone can feel Alice’s chest despite the coat, despite the cold, the wind stinging cheeks and making eyes water so that the river and Lévis are wedged between mist, mistery and mistiness. Alice says, ‘No matter where we are in this city, the ground always recedes beneath my feet when I’m by your side. Someday we’re going to have to leave.’

  The light dims in Simone Lambert’s apartment. On the other side of the river, Lévis slowly lights up. The earthquake of February 5, 1663, fades away like a little monkey gambolling about in the ruins of a Greek theatre, an exquisite moment of suspended animation, thinks Simone, when the world reshaping itself forces us to think water, fire, earth and birth. Water, dust, mud. Full-moon evening.

  — Strange, says Carla, how my mother, an otherwise very ordinary girl, could for years, and based solely on the comment of a little schoolteacher in Rättvik, have nurtured and kept alive a fictional story about the death of Descartes, a story which to me remains the true story of a gaunt man in a white smock, breathing heavily, coughing violently for seconds that seem like an eternity. The man is ugly, and calling him a philosopher strains the imagination. His thick lips are hedged to the north by a moustache and to the south by a grey-tinged tuft of hairs which the word goatee would hardly describe. He looks like a rat whose gene for voracity has been replaced by the one in charge of will. The man’s ugliness is touching, for the being gasping for his last breath stirs such questioning and conflicting feelings in us that his mere presence moves and commands our compassion. The dying man’s bed is set away from the wall, so the people around him can move behind the patient, watch him or sink into an infinite sadness unbeknownst to the thinker, whose thoughts are already deformed by fever.

  Around Descartes, a young woman named Hiljina, whom the man persists in calling Francine. The man’s head sinks into a large, finely embroidered pillow which Hiljina constantly fluffs up to its original plumpness. Each of her steps around the bed makes the dark floorboards creak. On a bed table similar to those often seen in paintings of that period, a water jug, wet cloths Hiljina uses to dampen Father’s mouth – sorry, Descartes’s – as well as his forehead and neck where the very visible jugular vein, now blue like a little snake, at first surprising then so haunting I can’t stop staring at it.

  In her story, my mother often let speak a voice she said was inner and which she imitated in Swedish. This inner voice could speak only in the name of Hiljina or of Monsieur Descartes. As for the cardinal, he had but a few lines to say and when his turn came, my mother preferred to read a random passage from the Bible. To imitate Mother’s voice imitating the cardinal’s, I had to pinch my nose and tilt my head skyward. Then out came a rare sound, equivocal and bruised, that made me lose my footing on the prairie south of Saskatoon.

  When I read newspapers, I’m careful not to fall into the present of daily life’s communal graves. When the shadow of words spreads its disturbing grey over the clueless reports I read in the morning with my coffee, I’m careful to keep my distance from the toxic and rancid beings who undermine history. I prepare my index cards, I strip clocks of large chunks of time. I put the present back in its place in my life the same way we do with embraces in our memory and with artifacts in museums.

  What is the present if part of our life consists of imagining ourselves elsewhere, in the past or tomorrow? I don’t know if the present or necessity is how I should name the way we braid our days together so as to allow a vertical escape, either downward with a strong taste of debauchery in our mouths, or upward, an old idea of transcendence ready to torch everything in its path.

  Yesterday, I decided to alter the dates in some of the notices. Of course I wouldn’t do such things lightly. The dates must remain plausible. In some cases I can add or subtract a century, in others five hundred years will suffice. The closer we get to the present, the narrower my margin of voluntary error becomes. In galleries and artist centres, a ten-year error will appear suspect. Trends, beliefs, fears that last a thousand years, then two hundred, objects that work for forty years or one, media-hyped dra
mas that graze and criss-cross our lives for six months, two weeks, a weekend. Including Warhol’s notorious fifteen minutes of fame, which dumbs everything down: idiots, heroes, killers, victims, the living and the dead. Is it necessary to be as specific with the number of years as with the number of deaths? How many dead does it take for an accident to be terrible? How many dead in an explosion to make thinking turn to panic?

  Hard to say if in the long run my ‘errors’ will have an impact on cultural life and on those of my employers. I was born in 1953, the smells of shepherd’s pie and bubble gum smack in the heart of my childhood. Ten years earlier or later would have changed my life. I was born in an urbane city with good jazz.

  — What about the parrot?

  – Later. Be patient. So, Descartes is a man of few words. Every one of his sentences is solemn. He speaks French. I make Hiljina speak Swedish even though my mother says she’s Dutch. As for the cardinal, he speaks Latin. At ten I was aware that this language existed. French-Canadian students had told me about it. They’d even taken me to church: ‘Now listen good, he’s gonna talk Latin.’ I select the cardinal’s replies in the pink-pages section of the Larousse dictionary. So, according to my mood, he says, ‘Non omnia possumus omnes’ or ‘Medice, cura te ipsum’ or ‘Non nova sed nove.’ It’s more complicated in the novel. I tend to overlay the image of the old priest with Francis Bacon’s 1953 portrait of Pope Innocent X. The effect is dreadful – the cardinal becomes Machiavellian. To play the part of Hiljina I nibble a piece of straw, plant my fists on my hips and nod my head while gazing intently at the horizon. Hers is the more difficult of the four parts. I never know what to say. There I am, frozen as if afraid the words will unleash an overpowering anger like Mother’s when she gets mad at Father and spews out words. One day I decided to change Descartes’s style and make him talk normally because I thought this would make Hiljina more natural, and so this way I could take the opportunity to add my grain of salt about marriage and children. So Descartes speaks slowly, simply, like a tired, happy man. He coughs a bit. I can make him talk like this: ‘I loved walking along the Kalverstraat on market days when butchers arrived with their quarters of beef. The din of their carts. There were so many it was like Mardi Gras. You could see the animals’ guts. The blood, fat, ribs, nerves, muscles, the pigs’ smooth hide. Men call out to each other, bantering. Women shake out cloths over the merchants’ heads and the carcasses that are beginning to stink’; or like this: ‘I went almost every day to the house of a butcher to see him kill beasts, and from there I had the parts I wanted to anatomize delivered to my lodgings.’ Hiljina turns toward the window. The cardinal stares at the wall behind the dying man.