Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon Page 7
I imagine it takes joy about all things to rush into time and let it close in around us. Yes, one must doubtless allow time to swallow silence and the multiform narratives that surround us like a hedge of roses.
Axelle can see all these images flying by at the same rhythm as the traffic, slow but fluid: Lorraine choosing vegetables at the market, Lorraine driving her old Jeep and ranting against the pollution, the ‘garages-motels’ which, in her view, slow down the flow of cars. Lorraine preparing little canapés, cutting cubes of papaya for an evening to mobilize around the disappearance of two battered women. My mother at a reception at the Bellas Artes. My mother and father at the Cultural Conference in Havana. My mother in a little white cotton dress in front of a bust of José Martí, my grandmother in front of Jordi Bonet’s mural at Place-des-Arts. My father holding me in his arms, sobbing, one referendum night.
People drive faster than in New Jersey. Axelle still can’t decide whether she prefers the highways, discos and labs in Québec to those in the States. She doesn’t know. For now, there are so many images in her head. The days are too short, the recent past as vast as the continent. An intriguing mix of vegetation where the hibiscus and armadillos of Coyoacán blend with the maple trees and squirrels of New England. A flashy past like the billboards in Mexico and those along the highways around Princeton where promises of eternity are exchanged with slogans like Coca-Cola siempre, Coke always and Jesus loves you.
What is an image of the past when it arrests you, holds up its hand and says in an authoritarian tone, No entry? Do you go around it gently, turn back or run for it headlong? Axelle glances in the rear-view mirror. Ahead, the sun slants, wan, harnessed to big galloping clouds. A two-and-a-half-hour drive, then the highly anticipated meeting with Simone, the discovery of Québec City. A northern city. A city of civil servants, she was often told at Princeton. A city she’s never seen and has dreamed of since childhood. In the distance, a sky in heat. A life in the fast lane that doesn’t allow Axelle to understand what made her decide to come back to Montréal, to add her foreign accent to a thousand others after all these years, young designer of sterilization and cloning for the better and for the worse of humanity. Tonight, let’s rap like hell.
I take Carla’s freedom for granted, and Simone Lambert’s, and mine. It’s still dark. A heavy rain is drenching the city. Standing behind the curtains I listen to the violence of the rain on the roofs, on the city. The water seeps into history, lifts up the earth, the grocery list a woman dropped when she darted into a fruit store. The sound of rain can be terrifying. I take for granted the freedom of water, the beauty of spring, the shade of the lilac trees yesterday, their fragrance. I take note, getting fired up about distant ruins. Rue Racine, rivulets form dark little lakes in potholes. During my first year in Québec City I couldn’t fathom how the snow could stay so long, sometimes until May. I was chilled to the bone with grey. The rough surface of the stones irritated me. Now I’m everything-proof. The few emotions I feel, though intense, are powerless to nail me to dreams – I mean, to shut me down with a moist eye, tearful or trembling, in an altered state like dreaming or feverishness.
There are more and more tourists in town. Here and there, gangs of sad young things. Sad lads are like ruins covered with vegetation. Life goes on while they turn grey like the stones and their parents, khaki like tanks or simply invisible. I sometimes feel like talking with them, but sad lads don’t talk much. They watch, they stand around for long periods of time, sit down for just as long, smoke and throw their butts into aluminum cans they squash with one hand if they feel like it. I also take for granted the freedom of sad lads.
Quite a number of us flirt with that dangerous and desirable thing, heat in the lower belly, a force majeure that can sweep away the static peaceful landscapes of the real in favour of the eternally renewed forces of wind and thirst.
The sad lads are indignant as they pet their dogs and wipe their pocket knives. I’m indignant about taking our freedom for granted. Since Mother’s death, my violence has lessened. I strive to find better replies to pain. I carefully conceal them in the notices I’m writing for the museum. I like this camouflage, it throws shadows on the artworks and on my life.
She probably got back yesterday. Her office door is ajar. She’s having a discussion with Fabrice and her secretary. I like knowing she’s back. She asks me to come in for a moment. I ask how she is and answer all the questions put to me. Listening, scrutinizing, observing. Her hands, her mouth, the forehead, the sequence of gestures. I’d like to enter this woman’s life and thoughts, take a quarter-century return trip in her company, circle her waist as we walk on Dufferin Terrace. Her office is strewn with little objects she’s brought from Venice: masks, glass feathers, inkwells, leather notebooks. She offers me a glass feather. Turquoise. A feather, a turquois-erie. The librarian, who’s also the director of special events, joins us. Simone offers her a mask. The mood is good. Fabrice unleashes his storytelling skills and off we go, across Piazza San Marco, to meet Casanova, who in turn immediately takes us to the Florian Bar where he becomes an even more charming, mocking good-looker smooth-talker. I look at Simone Lambert. I exist somewhere in her gaze but I don’t know where, nor for how long. I stroke my turquoiserie. Casanova and the special-events director are laughing. Fabrice resumes his racy story. ‘Changing centuries, changing sexes, changing names, changing everything in a lifetime without changing the verb.’ Surely it’s worth the gamble. I smile as I look at Simone Lambert. ‘I love you’ – Casanova, I wonder if he said it often, with varying intonations. Behind her a sky so blue as to stir the finest passions. Now Fabrice is describing how fate put into the master seducer’s hands The Mystical City of God by Sister Maria of Jesus de Agreda, a book of bliss. Simone interrupts him by saying that, at the time, mystical fate took hold of whoever showed any kind of temperament. Having one’s night of revelation was a must. Descartes experienced his triple dream the night of November 10, 1619, Marie de l’Incarnation her morning revelation on March 24, 1620, and Pascal his night of ecstasy and fire on November 23, 1654. Staging and setting are required in order to turn the pages of the calendar.
CARLA: Time must be allowed to flow between characters. There has to be trust, despite the risk of trends in things and in thoughts which, if too violent, can grab them by the throat, cut off their breathing or, if too light, isolate them in a gentleness unsuited to fiction. Over the years I’ve come to believe that the novel is nothing more than deconstructed time that falls back upon our shoulders like a first snowfall or soft dust. Hence this impression of finding oneself once again in a setting composed of the remains of one’s own violence, of a pain both familiar and ancient which, in its moments of glory, allowed us to spit out the truth, to conceal the imperfection of the hours until their configuration changed. I’ve always thought my father saw his mother as if in a movie. Beautiful, gentle, anxious, a lock of hair falling over her forehead. A small woman who loved music and hoped to have many children. When he talked to me about her, he imitated her gaze, which he called sad and sinuous like the roads that wind round the lakes north of Stockholm yet keep the water out of sight. All of this he told me when, as a young adult, I still politely drank in his words. Someday you too – it happens to all of us – will talk to me about your mother, her face, about the time when, as a young girl, she surely wanted a future. Someday you’ll talk to me about your childhood, about the first Montréal streets you had to cross alone to get to school. It’s maddening to think how much our aspirations, fears and tastes are at the mercy of events depending on whether we’re born ten years before or after the passing of a law, the construction of a metro, a cataclysm or a scientific discovery. I guess one must touch upon everything when telling a life: the toys, cars, dresses, hats, smells, crimes, the Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons. The music that blanketed all the things that made getting up worthwhile with the blue slowness of every morning. When Father talked about his mother, he looked straight ahead like at
the movies. And I in turn saw him on the screen, walking with his back to me, hands in his pockets, in the rain. At the edge of the image was a street, and at the bottom of that street a large mirror, making it possible to avoid head-on collisions. Like fictional foliage, mysterious shapes made shadows on the mirror. I imagined, I translated into my own words what would have been untranslatable for others then.
Yesterday, while walking on the Plains of Abraham: I’m taking notes about the death throes of a black dog. The dog was limping when he appeared. He circled himself once, twice, before crashing against the foot of a maple tree where he softly groans. I’m taking notes while trying not to look at the dog’s wound, even though I don’t know which part of his body hurts most. It’s a gorgeous day. The kind of May sky we spend winter months longing for. The wind is warm. It’s Saturday morning. A couple of tourists and their young children walk over to the dog. Probably thinking it’s mine, they ask me in English what happened. The woman becomes agitated. The youngest child wants to pet the animal. The mother stops him for reasons of hygiene. The man says, ‘You should do something about it instead of taking notes.’ He pronounces notes as though he were about to break into song. I tell him in French that we’ve noticed an increasing number of stray dogs on the Plains this year. The mother and children have started walking toward the ramparts. The dog must weigh about forty kilos. A handsome short-haired animal. His eyes are still open. Every so often his body quivers. Now I can see the wound. The blood is flowing bright scarlet on coal black. In the distance a man in uniform is coming toward me with long strides. I lose sight of the wound. I head for the statue of Jeanne d’Arc. Flowers all around it. Their names printed on little white cards. I transcribe their Latin names into my notes.
In Drummondville, Axelle has stopped for a coffee andacopyof Le Devoir. Since she’s been back in Québec, she’s finally developed the habit of reading every morning. At work, other researchers read only English-language newspapers. Reading Le Devoir reminds her of long conversations her father and mother used to have. Expressions come back to her: avoir le nez long, le samedi de la matraque, être en beau joual.
Axelle can see how they sprang into her head when Lorraine talked about it: great white horses, thick-coated shiny brown ones with threatening nostrils, eyes that frighten because they have a strange way of looking and you can’t know what they see. The horse is a giant. One blow from the billy club, one kick and you can bleed to death lying on the pavement, head full of the demonstrators’ cries, howls and swear words. You see legs, thick calves, Kodiak boots, sandals, running shoes. The cement is cold, rough, the asphalt smells oily, you hope nobody crushes your jaw. The fear of a hoof in the eye is paralyzing. You scream, you beg. Up there on his high horse, the policeman is out of reach. He thinks he’s God. In his saddle, he is God for two hours.
The verb piaffer, to paw: this word always made her laugh out loud because of the two fs which gave the impression of wanting to splash. And the more her mother would laugh hearing her daughter’s oh-so-coarse and sonorous laugh, the more Axelle would put it on, become a huge laugh machine. To guffaw. She could feel it swell in her chest, then rise up into her throat before heading back down, rolling rushing like a big rock all the way to the foot of her fear. To jaw. Lorraine also talked about demonstrations organized by women. Chained to each other so the police couldn’t make individual arrests. To paw.
The twenty-four-page newspaper is lying on the table along with the tip. Axelle is on the road again, hoping the hotel has a pool and a weight room.
Sometimes funny ideas enter our heads and we end up believing we’ve been thinking about something important. I prefer people who think about their unlikely fears instead of their real solitude or their insane mothers. How is it we don’t like to lie but we all end up doing it anyway – now to not hurt another, now to avoid, now to get to heaven.
Yesterday, Carla called me a passionate reader without knowing a thing about my reading habits. I think she meant I’m a passionate person and the word reader escaped her like a glass slips out of a hand. It’s true that reading is part of my life, that it brings me pleasure, but at the same time it burns me. From the inside. As if, encountering my nostalgia, it ignites an unbearable elation in me.
I envy Carla for not being dependent on events. Her world is all interior. I need museums, streets, animated terraces. Books. I envy writers who still today are able to use the word existence while licking their lips, as if this were going to add meaning to life.
My encounters with Carla sometimes make me feel like writing. A chapter. Just one. No novel. No story. Just a chapter, a visual object with paragraphs, blank spaces, a vague whiteness of gesture as days go by.
CARLA: Water! Descartes wants water. He pleads and moans. As for me, I’m standing alone in a field of rape, yelling ‘Water! Water!’ like Christopher Columbus cried ‘Land! Land!’ when he saw Hispaniola. There’s yellow all around me as far as the eye can see, under a sky of a blue so vivid it’s been termed indescribable. I howl ‘Water!’ as if my final hour had come. This land is so flat I can see the curve of the earth. Descartes calms down. He gives the cardinal an authoritarian look and begs for a glass of wine. Faced with this contradiction, the cardinal doesn’t react immediately. I take the opportunity to pull down my pants and pee while singing the first lines of an old sexist anthem, then I put everything on hold: gesture, song, crazy-lady act. And I act the cardinal, rolling my eyes. I let a gust of wind go by and then, in an unctuous tone, declare, ‘Nunc est bibendum.’
Simone Lambert is waiting, distracted, for me to speak. Behind her the river, a parking lot, grey and more grey, stone. The surface of her desk is bare. Nothing. Smooth as a screen. The world begins again at every moment, jostled by another more poignant one which immediately yields to another even more beautiful, more threatening, and so it goes until the present gives the impression of being a beautiful piece of cedar, its thousand facets streaming with light and promises.
Talking about my project isn’t easy. I throw out a few names she recognizes with a frown. By turns astonished, curious and now intrigued by my words, she wants to know what motivates my great interest in vedutists.
– How does one describe the link between art and ruins? I ask. Ruins fascinate us. They force us into thinking about time, a sensuality of time as simple as once upon a time by the seashore, transparency, purity, nature in actual size. They are reminders, traces that, instead of making us ill at ease, bring us back to the future of our own ruins.
Of course I speak with enthusiasm while wondering what she sees in me, what I represent for her, or if I’m like a little rain so soft in the morning we confuse it with the grey weather or the still water in a basin. I’d like to ask her where culture begins and where the fear of death ends. I’m careful not to, claiming instead that both dreams and ruins are good at making us flirt with thoughts of a seductive elsewhere.
I stop talking. Simone Lambert promises to think about my proposal. I slip the word dialogue between us, then décor. We discuss theatre a moment. With a maternal mouth she recommends I consult a few treatises on architecture. She leans over to write (description of Simone Lambert’s hands, little veins, two age spots, a spiral-shaped gold ring on her left forefinger): The Book of Architecture, by Sebastiano Serlio, Milan, La Scala Theatre Museum. ‘I can get you a special pass if you want to do research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.’ I nod, then other words circulate between us which bring us quite spontaneously to discussing perspective, lighting, ballets, shows and especially the first edition, dated 1486, of Vitruvius, the Roman architect who, rediscovered during the Renaissance, became all the rage by serving as a role model for many a young architect for finding pleasure in theory.
The images are vague. They appear slowly, one fragment at a time.
Axelle is driving fast. On either side of the road there are fields, grain silos. A few trees. She’s reminded of her grandmother kneeling in the garden. Simone digging the soil with hands
that look grafted on because her work gloves are so huge and pink. On her rounded back, the letters MoMA on the black of her T-shirt. The soles of her shoes are caked with earth so black one can imagine it being used to draw a backdrop for the August nights Axelle has declared the darkest of all because the stars seem to surge from some nameless opacity. At school two classmates teach her new words. A little Turkish girl has taught her flowers, honey and Turkish delight. As for the German girl, whose father is a biologist, she’s already taught her, in addition to the words Stein, Stern and Apfelsaft, the words shoulder blade, meniscus and cheek. Axelle says Simone has a lot of cheek when planting flowers. Lorraine claims that all words help us to live, but we mustn’t bend them this way and that like licorice ropes. Simone rubs her back and turns around, asking Axelle to scratch hard, there under the shoulder blade and a little bit over toward the spine. Axelle thinks her grandmother’s shoulders are wide. She kisses her neck. The garden flowers are always big: no room for lilies-of-the-valley and bluebells. Here, we live among peonies, sunflowers and hydrangeas. Later in the day, Simone has promised to take Axelle to the Museum of Fine Arts to see the fat calves, toes, biceps and breasts depicted throughout time by great and mediocre artists. Some other day, promise, they’ll spend time looking at the landscapes and portraits of nobles, queens and saints, military men and dark servant girls, most of whom time will have engulfed in anonymity and oblivion.