Fences in Breathing Read online

  Today the lizards came out because of the heat their tails glitter like the sharp dazzle of stones soon Kim will be at the seventy-eighth parallel in the land of extreme darkness and of radical whiteness that make the present too vague too vast.

  The letters we have traced with the shadows of our arms in order to love somebody need always to be reread I reread I would so like to tell somebody to come visit me even though it’s cold in my workshop or in the hotel room where I sometimes go and where there are sofas and large mirrors like those I saw in the château of Tatiana the Russian she who publishes stories of love of wanderlust and of guns I so long for somebody to touch my mouth and my fur in my heart I can now say how one enters someone’s thoughts there is love there is no love we settle into it it’s that simple we ignite the conversation or not we take a look around we observe a little now I am pretending to turn my head toward the white bridge to see if somebody is coming Laure goes by wearing a black suit and carrying an enormous briefcase she is walking toward boulevard Long it’s easy to describe maybe her mother is dead I say this because of her clothing I timidly nod she doesn’t see me I don’t feel like following her any farther someone is already following her I will never get used to time’s fluidity in the foreign language it’s as if I were in an eternal present filled with cross-strokes and big fat letters in colours that are almost images there is little free time for oneself in a foreign language I always feel confined even though I am well aware that it is as vast as the imagination of someone who is afraid of sudden death it is however a language where one need not be concerned about who is truly speaking only about the verbs the generic nouns nothing specific for example to talk about trees and seasons but hundreds of words to get closer to the stars and so everybody goes travelling at any time of the year or they wish to stay in a hotel like the one where Laure and Charles stay as consolation for living in a village and probably other things like fences in breathing that I do not wish to discuss presently one life comes another life goes it’s that simple there up north I will have room to put my hands everywhere in the landscape shove them right into the daily gestures of everyone’s life I will speak the language of dogs of polar bears of reindeer and maybe even that strange code spoken by the ugly hairless fox that roams the streets of Longyearbyen I will get close to people they will explain to me how not to fear emptiness while staring into the deep water so clear so cold they will explain how not to die I will have the feeling of being nothing of being infinitely the solitude of infinite silence several roads lead from one village to another one life comes another life goes it is hot in the middle of the sunflower fields under the still-scorching sun of early autumn once in a while a warplane flies over the fields in the next moment we say that each plane is a wound in the azure skies a lion dashing at full speed a pebble thrown with fury.

  A great horse with his shadow reappears every time I go to the post office the other day I asked June if she would film my animal and give him life with her digital camera I said she needed to film in fast-forward around the horse while I pulled it in the opposite direction with a thick rope thus we would get a sense of movement the horse would certainly fall but at least we would sense that it was alive June would have to get a close-up of the eyes when I said this my hand was trembling June did not notice but a woman did notice and I felt dizzy with a pain in my chest I did not have the courage to meet the woman’s gaze while June was filming my horse I stared at the ground the lizards had not yet left us.

  The matters of the other language and of non-sense swirl through the air though I strive to put certain words in parallel I’m unable to make them touch in the right place sometimes a vagueness a slight gap sweeps the sentence away all at once and everything needs doing all over again I’m afraid to run out of words the same way one fears shortages of water gas or food I don’t know how to make use of myself in the foreign language I struggle with this and the contour of mountains the pain is more mysterious than ever when I gaze at fields of sunflowers and reeds.

  In the lake my mother holds me with arms outstretched like an offering to the gods I am three years old I can allow myself to be brushed by the soft wind or prepare to fly away by caressing her cheeks and stretching my arms out in front of me like laser beams if I keep doing this a while longer I will swallow a little water and from underneath contemplate a hedge of roses and my mother’s face when water penetrates her mouth and nostrils and her breathing seeps away with some red for I dig my fingers too deeply into her waist to hold her close so this is the question who becomes aware of what when we talk about everything and nothing like when I go to the post office or when I hear a fighter plane flying over the village or when I hold an innocuous pebble in my hand I am sad too many shapes are repeated in the unexplained matter that resists me with its shadow its fleeting energy real and illegible I embrace the horse’s shadow and this is not good for me I cry only when I embrace the horse’s shadow and nobody can see me the sketchbook weighs more and more heavily in my hunting pouch words have begun to make it sink Kim sold two of my armoires and the envelopes inside them then she bought a suitcase I was unable to speak to her to add a word anger is everywhere in my eyes in my hands it is frightening I must buy some nails there is fire in my arms she sold the Armoire of Little Woes and the Armoire of Catastrophes that I had placed behind the black sofa in order to spy between their boards the words of the two madwomen who sit there when I invite them to take tea in my sad workshop.

  I had to go to the city centre where the wolves are whom I used to spend time with before knowing June wolves that make holes in their skin their nostrils and their brains the travel agency faces the lake next to the casino I don’t know anyone here I would like to not be here I must buy a ticket to go hunting between the glaciers and stop being afraid I must respond to questions by asking questions without mixing up the answers earlier on in the train Laure Ravin who lives with her mother near the château was sitting by a window with her laptop on her knees the screen was bursting with letters she was reading very attentively she often looked out the window her hand was brushing circles on her pant leg as if she were trying to clean it or to remove a stain before disembarking she recognized me and smiled there are clouds I don’t like being in town when it’s grey June says I will have to get used to the frightening noise made by icebergs when they lose their balance and topple over on themselves she showed me several nineteenth-century drawings of boats engulfed by seas that chill you with dread this is why I suddenly saw the night of time what indeed is the night of time if I am a thousand times the same person in different centuries somebody who has been folded small in the nature of Homo sapiens?

  The city makes me dizzy with its voices surging out of insignificance and lies it absorbs me in front of the hotel the cars drop people off here and there like pawns there is always a church steeple a labyrinth of words the moving shape of a cloud an indescribable force that destroys strikes brutally while everybody tries to be themselves while I am me sitting at the Café de la Gare drinking lemonade with ice cubes because it is so good for me better even than if I had written all of this while drinking lemonade in a train-station café and had erased it.

  People cry easily when tired you just need to look closely to see tears slowly forming then people turn their heads slightly as if to ward off fate I see that their nostrils their chins their foreheads are well and truly alive people act as if nothing is happening and I pretend not to see them getting exhausted from holding back their tears then with a dry and suspicious eye they look straight ahead as if to warn about a coming disaster it’s like Tatiana’s gold watches glittering in the great glass armoire in the living room on days when this happens I no longer know if time is a light source or a misfortune and I say I must rest everywhere there are power and holes I’m right the power of stars wears me out for example when I lift my head even if it’s far it doesn’t take much before I feel the heat radiating in my hands troubling black hole this is what I see coming we can’t there are
things we can’t do they happen it is frightening in my head the number of sights that make me want armoires all the more inside which I have to shut a lot of blackness all the blackness I am capable of the purest black ever seen an otherworldly black that attracts like light does by performing very quick magical somersaults something resembling happiness but in the other language this compares to nothing so I go walking alone on the mountain the happiness continues I talk to myself everything is out of focus around what I call the great happiness I must think only of ordinary things because images and words go fast like animals in the forest when they are escaping harm I get excited thinking about everything in life that flees in the name of life.

  THE WATER LEVEL

  … and met her gaze looking deeply from the same waters …

  Louky Bersianik

  They were two sentences with water and light. I had imagined them and now I wanted to write them. The sentences were simple, they spoke of unforgettable faces and of a bridge people crossed on foot or in cars. Both mentioned a woman. I no longer knew if it was the same woman in both sentences. One of the women ran her fingers through her hair while the other watched light streaming through the landscape.

  The sentences were never exactly the same, depending on whether they were read quickly or slowly. Nonetheless, they always had a reassuring slowness. Wanting to write in our own style two sentences we have just read is natural, just as wanting to imitate someone we love seems quite legitimate and even pleasing. The sentences would stretch out as though they could make grooves in the air or give the impression of a voice and a melody about to drown, one inside the other. The tense changed from one sentence to the other, I could question myself, I could worry. I always felt like starting over. Whenever a sentence skimmed the surface of the lake, characters from a faraway time would spring up, then, without much hesitation, take off into the foreign language to indulge their fiercest fantasies. Screaming was never a solution. Screaming meant a state of emergency. Life needed to be organized to avoid emergencies. Each sentence had her own inner tense and I wanted to settle into it to get a sense of its colour. I had also noticed that, though they had the same number of syllables, one of them took longer to utter. Three syllables did not always equal three syllables. Therein lay a clue that, in each language, time could be stretched or it could contract to make it easier to decipher the cumbersome monotony of dailiness and the tenacious enigma of passions.

  I didn’t know it yet, but both sentences concerned my most intimate self. ‘There must be a reverse side to what I am.’ The two sentences spoke about water and about downtown on a sunny day with frisky cumulus clouds.

  I borrowed the château’s blue Volvo and drove along the serpentine road through Aubonne, then plunged into the forest, taking each curve in such a way as to make my heart race, wild in my chest. Light threaded through the violently green foliage, tropical-summer green. Tatiana had said, ‘Go and spend a few days in town, go.’ I had listened to her. The road glistened in the sun like young skin. The château, the village, already seemed far off, lost somewhere in the consciousness of an ancient character. I craved the city, craved skirting the shores of the lake and scrutinizing its dark water, happy there was water all around me. Noise, light, everything would do me good. Being by oneself all the time is difficult and perhaps not necessary. We need to be with other people at least half of the time so that life can intrigue, leap and roar. Some days, others are err and there strewn inside a story, at other times they are stuck still in the sentences. It’s difficult to imagine what comes next. You have to lift your head, breathe.

  In my language, I am able to reason properly, to weigh the pros and cons of a hypothesis, to understand my own hesitations, while in the other language, my reasoning is skewed, the slightest ambiguity upsets me and I have no control over the sequence of words. Zones of knowledge have no limits. Reality takes on a vague look. The images I’ve begun to consider mine become incomprehensible or get stuck here and there in space like disturbing objects, cut off from their symbolic value. Anything can happen, like the other day, when I collided with the matter of evil. A topic I’ve never stopped to ponder. Everything was unfolding as if this shapeless and powerful thing called evil were accessible to me only in the foreign language, for me in that language is not me. Although I am fully aware of how the brain can, in all languages, ennoble evil, restore the senses like one says about a wall about to collapse, set each word like a sharp weapon capable of fixing everything, I can’t bring myself to believe that language can so easily deploy inside us not the idea of evil but a theatre of evil. Is there a level of language conducive to expressing evil? Language level, water level. There is always something I don’t understand whenever I venture into the history of a city at cocktail hour.

  When the two sentences of light and water crossed paths in my thoughts, I felt free without noticing they had interrupted the rapture that had filled me ever since I arrived in the village. I now had a better understanding of what happened following Charles’s arrest the very day his sister left for the Svalbard archipelago. The next day’s newspapers made a point of specifying that he had been detained only for questioning. Charles returned to the village. He would still stand in front of his workshop, look worried, perseverant, observing the planes coming and going among the clouds, drawing sentences that, without warning, swept both skies and thoughts clean. Neither of the two sentences belonged to Charles. He could hear them. He could see them, but they were not his. He could not put them in an envelope.

  It was still sunny when I reached downtown. I parked the car by the train station and headed for the lake. A few clouds were darkening the harbour. Until now, the lake had been but a faraway space, presumably soothing and beneficial. I wanted to be at lake level so as to breathe that mixture of city and powerful water that renews vital energy. I sat near the carousel at the port des Mouettes. Inside her kiosk, an old lady is selling tickets. The facade reads Wetzel Family 1878. With its elephants, swans, horses and little cars depicting the twentieth century’s first automobiles, the carousel is picturesque. Three children are at play, preoccupied with driving their vehicles properly in an unknown world where time has no hold. Barely visible in the day’s light, dozens of little glimmering lightbulbs girdle the top part of the carousel. I can see Jean-Michel Othoniel’s Boat of Tears, a work made of wood stripped by salt and the repeated power of imaginary waves upon its sides. The tears, large glass bulbs of blue, pink and yellow, recall the magical glory of light as it might be imagined sparkling in festive garlands above the icy waters of the Atlantic. A night like the Far North and ice floes settles in, majestic and timeless in the afternoon. In the distance, the formidable water jet sprays droplets in the wind, a shower of fine particles of grit with, in the background, the port and its hundreds of white masts and little hulls pitching and rolling in the shimmery light. Behind me, the Hôtel d’Angleterre calls out as though it has a voice that is grappling with destiny, a voice set to conquer luminous sentences and their swaying above emptiness and death. How to predict where danger is coming from when one is absorbed in a book? Danger revives silences and impulses. How many Hôtels d’Angleterre are scattered here and there throughout nineteenth-century history and colonialist geography? Now a man in a top hat and bouffant pants is staring at me. Behind his barrel organ, he makes the light dance a waltz with the warm weather, then, with bursts of sounds and little rock slides at the bottom of a ravine, he stops everything. Only then does he hold out a bowl. The sun blinds him. Sweat streams down my back. I want a pistachio ice cream because of that tender green reminder of a past life I never mention.

  Sentences return, subterranean, sombre, transparent or luminous, as if to make me doubt what it is I see, hear, even desire. Sentences that draw me back to the château and in which I converse with Tatiana, aware of the secretary’s footsteps in the hallway, of the dry sound of the piano cover being lifted, then of the first notes of ‘Mood Indigo.’ All through my head, people are moving for
ward in time. People are time itself. So is there no true time to master but the one I carry within me?

  I ended up heading for the bridge, alert among the crowd of pedestrians and cyclists. The strength of the vibrations created by passing cars surprises me. A woman leans over the parapet. A little farther on, a man smokes and stares at a small grey building called La cité du temps. The man is thickset. I am unable to make out his features. The word pal comes to my mind, let’s say Al as in Alexander, Albert or Allen like the gardener at the château. The water level. From the château, it sometimes seems that the water level is rising dangerously, and when it goes down, depending on the fog, depending on the light at dusk, a new kind of concern sets in. In the morning, the mountain is what first attracts the eye. We know at a glance if the snowy peak is visible. Whenever it is, the fascination of doubt returns: does it really exist, that peak now visible, now imperceptible? The woman has disappeared behind a bus. In the foreign language there are cries I cannot get used to. Cries issuing from as far away as history, slow, funereal, that leave dark traces even inside the mouth of whoever in the distance hears them. Then there are the others: cries that are faster and fiercer, that pounce like ravenous beasts, their energy doubling every time the echo of their own cries encircles them. It’s like a game of hide-and-seek with buses poorly framed in the light. The woman appears, disappears, I feel I might know her. The man has moved closer to the woman. First he taps her shoulder twice sharply, then, from the way he fingers the woman’s sweater, it’s as if he were trying to ascertain the quality of the fabric. The woman pushes him away, stretching out her arm, folding it back, extending it as though trying to find the gesture that will allow her to keep the stranger at bay once and for all. The man gives the impression of wanting to explain something, he might even be wanting to leave with his arm around the woman’s waist. A police car stops alongside them. The woman glances toward La cité du temps. The man climbs into the patrol car, head down, shoulders hunched as if he were about to dive into another world. In his head, it’s all about staying alive. There are thousands of little holes for shelter. He regrets touching the woman’s sweater. Nylon. Nylon. Fall is coming. It will soon be time to dive into the dark.