Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon Read online

  Axelle has just e-mailed Simone. Children are playing in the parking lot. Their screams merge with the computer’s electric hum. With the sound of running bathwater. Waterfall. Small of the back. Axelle walks naked around the living room, borne by strong energy operating at navel level and exiting through the mouth in short, choppy phrases peppered with Spanish words. She must have been ten when her mother took her to Cancún on holiday. Leaving Mexico City could do them only good. There would be long walks by the ocean with its shadows, its violets and transparent blues. Shell games. On the beach a little girl is lying in an out-of-the-way corner. Water trickling out of her mouth. Eyes closed. A woman is blowing into her mouth and pressing hard on her chest with her hands crossed one on top of the other. After ten minutes the little girl coughs, spits, chokes endlessly before God and man. She opens her eyes at last. The man and the woman trying to resuscitate her turn her on her side, talk to her, make her say, ‘Yes I feel better,’ stand up with relief. Onlookers leave. Dazed, Axelle keeps looking at the child who resembles her and who just almost died. She’s noticed the purplish lips, a trickle of saliva on the girl’s cheek, the body shaking all over. Arms limp at her side. At school Axelle easily memorizes the names of bones, muscles and vital organs. Under the microscope her grandmother sent her, she likes looking at cells embracing, mating like soap bubbles. She wonders if the human body can be compared to a machine. ‘This is my body,’ she says evenings while walking naked in front of the mirror. ‘This is my body. Tomorrow I’ll have lost a few cells in the form of dandruff asleep on my pillow.’

  About Cancún she recalls the long day spent at Chichén Itzá. Like a moron, the guide repeating chicken and pizza to make the tourists laugh. The huge pit living virgins were thrown into as offerings to Kukulcán. No matter that the view is fabulous and the pyramid majestic, Axelle’s eyes are glued to the huge man-made crater. The virgins’ bodies falling and falling. The priest’s hands thrust into a young girl’s chest and come out red and shiny, holding the child’s still-throbbing heart. The inside of the body is revealed. The body is what we see. The body is not what we think.

  Waterfall. Axelle will ask Simone to take her to Montmorency Falls in a week, maybe two. The body, thinks Axelle as she enters her bath, will be the jewel that she and her colleagues will offer to modify in the name of health, aesthetics, reproduction, preservation. The body will adapt to the small commercial pleasures of eternity redux, just as, over the centuries, it has known how to adapt to the violences and deprivations commandeered by fools for God.

  This year, the month of May is well-sculpted out of heat, so I sometimes meet Carla at the Martello tower. We always sit on the same isolated bench facing the river. Sometimes we rent a car and drive to Cap Tourmente or Île d’Orléans for a picnic. At other times, shark, boar, pink pepper and island-grown asparagus are transformed into impromptu dining pleasures in an inn.

  Depending on whether we’re at the Clarendon or outdoors, Carla’s way of speaking changes. In front of the river she spaces out her sentences as if to let the wind, the bird songs, the echo of bygone voices blow through them. Never a word about the novel. Once in a while she throws out a sentence like ‘Isn’t it crazy how nothing really unfortunate is happening in our lives?’ Sometimes I dare ask a question, hoping it will bring us back to discussing the novel.

  – Did you know that Descartes’s body was interred in the ‘cemetery for children deceased before baptism or before the age of reason’?

  – Yes. Did you know his remains are in Saint-Germaindes-Prés church in Paris?

  – No.

  – By the way, what’s the name of the little cemetery on Rue Saint-Jean?

  – You mean the park next to the Ballon Rouge?

  – No, the cemetery next to the Anglican church.

  – It’s a park now. Saint Matthew’s, same as the church. On Sundays, in summer, children play among the gravestones.

  – Yesterday, somebody told me an incredible story about Jean Cocteau’s parrot.

  – Cocteau had a parrot?

  – So they say.

  Since early today, the museum has been the scene of the comings and goings of artists, caterers and technicians. Tonight the entrance hall will welcome two hundred guests for the launch of a human-rights campaign. Politicians have been invited, as have businesspeople, some academics and, obviously, reporters.

  In her office, Simone has just read Axelle’s message. Disappointment darkens her face like a morning shadow. By the window, the light is acting crazy on the furniture because of the wind through the leaves.

  – She’s playing games, for sure. You can’t be expected to be on stand-by for her, says Fabrice. No way, not with all the work we’ve got coming up. You really should go to Italy. Three days in Venice, three in Rome to negotiate with Cardinal Toffga, and back in time for the exhibition: Talking Spoons and Fork Lore. As for me, I’ll go through Leipzig and Weimar. Sketches, notebooks and travel manuscripts: you’ll have them all, I promise, then I’ll meet up with you in Rome for the negotiations. What do you say?

  Simone looks closely at Fabrice, smiles, asks if the prime minister’s presence has been confirmed for tonight. Simone thinks about Lorraine, who never knew how to talk about politicians and policemen except by using animal or vegetable names or an impressive lexicon of swear words. Times were changing. Politicians had less and less power. In twenty years they’d have even less. The world is changing. Nothing better than a museum to demonstrate this. And a pool of curators to count on.

  Yesterday, we looked for and found Gabrielle Roy’s house in Petite-Rivière-Saint-François. The house is temporarily occupied by a young novelist. Carla asks her a few questions and says she comes from Saskatchewan, also known as the Land of Living Skies because of its storms, so fascinating they sometimes disturb some people’s minds to the point of causing them to break off from their families. Carla’s words seem to interest the young woman and, after a short while, she invites us in for a drink. (description of the living room) The novelist is surprised that Carla, who writes in English, has come to Québec City to finish her four novels. Carla replies that she’s been reading Marie de l’Incarnation, Anne Hébert and Alain Grandbois for ages, as well as some gorgeous books by a poet from the Québec City area who writes about birds. Then they discuss the single life and World War II. The young woman’s father was a career army man. One of her uncles was fiercely against the draft. The two men almost killed one another. Family drama for family drama, Carla talks about the adoption, in 1935, of a Swedish law that forced people with a hereditary illness to be sterilized. The afternoon is passing. One after the other, the novelists toss lucky dice at each other, drop names pell-mell into the gathering dusk, names that please: Greta Garbo, Anne Hébert, Ingmar Bergman, Alain Grandbois, Selma Lagerlöf, Paul-Émile Borduas, Pär Lagerkvist, Anne Trister, Fanny and Alexander. As each one attempts to instruct the other about her culture and the inner fire that sustains it, I draw Carla’s attention to the fact that she could mention a few Canadian authors. Logique oblige. Nothing doing, they continue their conversation as if they’d always known each other, as if I didn’t exist. I’m not offended. I use the time to observe Carla’s face. When Mother died, I knew every feature of her face by heart. It’s crazy how we never look at faces when we’re speaking with people. As if, from not looking into the eyes too much or seeming not to want to insert ourselves into the other’s thoughts, we end up seeing nothing. Mother couldn’t defend herself. Her whole face was vulnerable to my worried gaze discovering the curve of her nose, of her eyebrows, eyelashes so short, wrinkles not as deep as I’d thought.

  Carla has the feverish beauty and intelligence of a woman forever on the lookout, for whom people and words are due much attention. If she could she’d recycle each one of the lives around her to spare them the consequences of their errors and inexperience. She’s in exceptional form today, as though excited by the young novelist originally from Lac Saint-Jean, a region of Québec Carla
doesn’t know and which piques her curiosity to the point of indiscretion. Before we leave, the novelist shows us a copy of the first edition of The Tin Flute. Carla leafs through it carefully as if she were going to find hundred-dollar bills tucked between the pages or intimate little notes once used as bookmarks. On the way back, Carla says nothing. Musing. Elsewhere.

  — Descartes is sitting on his bed. He speaks softly. Every word he utters is perfectly audible in the half-light. He’s not yet delirious. This will come. Later on, between three thirty and three forty-five. At four, it will all be over. It’s cold in the room. Yesterday it snowed non-stop. A light little snow that slants across the eye and is enough of a distraction to impress it with tender whiteness. Yesterday Descartes watched this snow fall, first from behind the window, then the flakes began to whirl above his bed. He shivers. He’s unable to keep his eyelids open longer than thirty seconds at a time. So he yields to the freshness of each snowflake upon his face. A little cold pinching, then his skin feels the transformation of the frosty crystals into water drops. Now he’s speaking to a woman named Francine. He also calls her my child, my precious, my little Frantsintze. Stretched out on my back in the field, I too prefer pronouncing it Frantsintze. The effect is better, I think. The syllables vibrate better in the fresh autumn air. ‘Frantsintze, bring me some water’ (in Swedish in the text). Then the words thicken in my mouth and Mother’s Descartes says, ‘Jag förstar inte. Why did you leave us so young, your mother and I? Just when you become my daughter, when I finally recognize you as my little girl, God claims you.’ At that very moment I always bring in the cardinal: sustine et abstine.

  Not moving when I make the cardinal speak is what’s most difficult. Even when I play the part in full sunlight. Not moving is synonymous with half-light, with being deprived of light. Papa always said that living in the half-light is natural for Swedes; they’re used to night even though they enjoy daylight almost continuously in the summertime. In my novel, every time the cardinal speaks he conjures up the image of that portrait of Pope Innocent X I told you about the other day. Bacon was inspired by a Velázquez painting from 1650. The mouth especially causes me anxiety. A deformed mouth. A careful mutilation of the meaning of life. That mouth haunts me. Mouth of a woman who has had one eye gouged out.

  Carla’s novel is taking up more and more space between us, estranging us. Bringing us closer. As if fiction were acting like a tampon, absorbing Mother’s silence, her father’s wound and her mother’s invented story. What started off as the innocent pleasure of the spoken word has, through our repeated encounters, become an attraction, an erotico-semantic gap we hasten to fill up with the next conversation using easy reference points such as the bed, the window or the pillow upon which Descartes’s head rests. Our every encounter disturbs the meaning of Carla’s novel. Refreshing it without her awareness. Even here in the bar at the Clarendon, in what Carla calls the mystery of a city that gives insight into the continent, her novel rips us out of history, out of the quiet temporality of bell towers and convents.

  Yesterday, she asked if I’d like to read a few pages of her manuscript. I refused. She insisted, saying she was doing this so that I would think of her more often. So that a healthy confusion would take hold of me, so that I’d hesitate between her face and the face of the little actress lying in the grass in Saskatchewan. She’d like me to share some of her fears and panic, fantasies where America falls apart and recovers in the eyes of a Prairie girl who thinks she’s René Descartes and who, because of this mirror, is learning French, hoping to lose that quintessentially Canadian style that doesn’t match her aspirations.

  Who am I to judge Carla or the naïveté making her write yet another novel? Who am I to find it not terribly clever to have to resort to such a tiny thread of life as childhood lookit lookit that’s me over there! I always feel like saying to her: ‘What do you think your mother feels when she talks about Rättvik, when Queen Christina’s face merges with the face of the village women? Come on, what do you see when the clouds sail over your father staggering in the middle of the highway? What do you think about when you go back up to your room after one of our conversations? Do you sometimes want to make room for me in your novel?’

  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.

  Everything real eats at me. Even though I put a lot of energy into lapping up my contradictions, inhabiting life and its opposite exhausts me. All around me, everyone is talking about their world view. Giving one’s opinion is a widespread activity that reinforces the idea that life is a big show where good and evil meet while pretending not to recognize each other. The other day, I asked Carla if lucidity had a practical application in everyday life or if it suited only certain moments of existence. Also, if it could be cultivated or if it was something innate that couldn’t be discarded, that stuck to the skin, to the cornea, even to words that help us exist in the vast landscape of emotions and of the idea we have of suffering, of good and evil, of lies.

  When I was a university student, I thought lucidity was the most precious thing for anyone who claimed to take responsibility for their life and who chose to intervene in civic affairs in the name of justice and respect for all. Back then, lucidity meant the desire to do the right thing based on a certain quantity of information that, once analyzed, made it possible to judge politicians and the laws they often foist upon the population. Being lucid didn’t grant the right to mock those who weren’t. Being lucid meant having evidence in hand with which to fight oppression and alienation. Lucidity being an instrument of liberation, it was normal to want to share it with all the men and women who could benefit. Today many of us claim we’re lucid, that we can correctly evaluate good and evil, yet nothing results from this mass of side-by-side consciences, for each one is flanked by an impeccable solitude and a taking-care-of-number-one that always seems to ensue from mitigating circumstances. Today, only one part of the soul moves us, ignorant and smiling, a tiny part of the soul we wear like a hip-slung revolver and quick-draw in the name of our horizonless individualism.

  Masturbation (1580 – Montaigne). From Latin. Manu (hand) et stupratio (act of soiling): practice of provoking sexual pleasure (by manual excitation/stimulation of the genitals).

  Yesterday, on her way home from an evening with four women – two secretaries, a chemist and a lawyer – Axelle got lost between Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue and Île Bizard. To her great surprise, she found herself on a country road, then on the unpaved streets of a residential site under construction where she circled around for ten minutes before spot
ting the feeble lighting of the highway. She drove fast for a bit until another car sped by dangerously. The car went on, its headlights disappearing in the dark. Against all common sense, Axelle Carnavale pulled her car over onto the service ramp, turned the headlights off, locked her doors, pulled up her skirt and thought of the little pink edition of Thérèse and Isabelle.