Authors: Anne Hebert
A
ND HERE SHE IS NOW,
old. Back at home in the city that gave her birth. The circle is complete. Her final role is before her, to be learned and allowed to infuse like the bitter tea-leaves at the bottom of a cup, for telling fortunes. She leafs through the slim volume of
Happy Days.
She knows what is in store. She is Winnie, deep inside herself. She is afraid. She collects her thoughts before climbing onto her sand pile and burying herself, grain by grain.
Her face in the bathroom mirror over the basin advances towards her, as if through a window; it is an image detached from herself, to be seen and recognized by her. Well aware that time is short. Such great weariness on her features. She turns her head. Picks up
Happy Days.
Becomes exercised at the futility of everything, long after she has closed the book.
The sounds and smells of the city drift in through the wide-open window.
H
E SAYS: “I'VE COME TO
see how you are. We're just back from the Ile d'Orléans and we're leaving again right away. Céleste is downstairs.”
He stands in the doorway holding a small bouquet of wildflowers.
She is wearing a terrycloth robe. Her eyes are puffy. Her short hair stands up in tufts on her head.
She asks in a thin voice that seems not to belong to her:
“And Maud?”
“She was already gone when we got there. She can't be far away. We'll find her. We'll cover Charlevoix County village by village. Céleste and I thought some flowers . . .”
She says:
“Look, don't just stand there, come in!”
She tidies the room. Pulls the covers over the unmade bed. Stands facing Raphaël after she has taken the flowers from him. She seems lost, as if roused from sleep. So deep a night, she thinks. She pulls the bathrobe across her chest.
“Raphaël dear, if you only knew . . .”
She would like to tell him that the city is liberated, that she is only waiting for him so she can visit the city from top to bottom, no longer protecting herself, now denying nothing.
He seems embarrassed, says again that Céleste is waiting for him. Now he is walking over to the window. He looks out onto the street.
Flora Fontanges looks out too. Shields her eyes with her hand to protect herself from the excess of light. She sees Céleste who is pacing across from the hotel, her long legs like stilts.
She turns towards Raphaël, gold from the sun, far removed from anything but the movements of Céleste down below on the sidewalk.
She can't help appealing to him, to no purpose, and well aware of it:
“I have to tell you something, Raphaël dear.”
He is there but not there, and it's pointless for her to act as if she wants to join him in his perfect complicity with Céleste. He is pulled out of Flora Fontanges's room by a tall girl who strides along the pavement like a heron escaped from its swamps.
She wants to hold him back, fears more than anything a relapse into solitude. She looks drawn. She pulls her robe across her chest. She laughs too loud. Turns away from Raphaël. Laughs more softly. Seeks the right tone. Adjusts her robe and her laugh. Assumes a suitable expression. Changes expression without his seeing it. He looks at her back, still shaking with laughter.
“I'm trying to catch my breath,” she manages to say. And already the voice is different, more sonorous and rounded now, almost youthful.
She comes towards him, strange and mysterious. As if illuminated. She takes the little bouquet from the bed. Flora Fontanges brings her face down, over the flowers, breathes the fresh smell of summer on her burning face. Her lips are dry. Her voice has inflections both tender and mocking.
“Buttercups, daisies, vetch, yarrow, white clover, pink clover.”
Her cascading laughter. She approaches Raphaël. She seems to have a priceless secret for him.
“Good my lord, /How does your honor for this many a day?”
Raphaël's smile is frozen.
“So please you, something touching the lord Hamlet.”
She lets the flowers fall to the ground.
“I would give you some violets but they withered all.”
Her voice cracks again.
“Go, Raphaël dear, quickly now, you mustn't keep Céleste waiting.”
She asks to be told as soon as Maud is found.
All at once she sounds as if she is losing her voice.
T
HE CHAMBERMAIDS ARE PESTERING HER.
Knock on the door every ten minutes. Ask over and over if they can make up the room. Might as well leave these crumpled sheets, this hastily tidied room. Tackle the city alone. Since Raphaël has gone away with Céleste and she is as lonely as on Judgement Day.
As for rue Plessis, all of that takes place in her head. The dazzle of the day sweeps into the wide-open window on rue Sainte Anne, but another street, dark and narrow, persists in her memory, its blackness and narrowness suddenly brightened by a doorknob of cut glass.
One day, unique in the world, a long slender hand gloved in black kid grasped that doorknob glittering like a precious stone, pure marvel for a little girl.
The door was opened at once for the lady from the Esplanade, who began to climb the steps, very slowly, lifting her cashmere skirt lest she pick up any bad smells on the staircase.
The old lady observed the clutter in their lodgings and recommended they would be well-advised to sell off some of their useless furniture. After she took the little girl from the sitting room and was sure that she wasn't listening at the door, she described the assistance she proposed to offer her daughter and her fallen son-in-law. Responsibility for Madame Eventurel's clothing, for her hats and linens, would be assumed by her mother for the duration of Monsieur Eventurel's difficulties. For the rest, they need only carry on as if nothing has changed and hold their heads high as if they were not living on rue Plessis. The old lady intends to play the game herself at the proper time, and organize a grand ball in her house on the Esplanade in honour of this little girl who has no name, obtaining for her at one stroke the pretext needed to establish her in the city. The old lady from the Esplanade would be glad to lend the Eventurel name to Pierrette Paul for one season, for the time needed to find a husband. And the end of the Eventurels' good deed that was begun one night during a fire would be marked by the sound of the wedding march.
She is eighteen years old. She has been told that the pearls around her neck have come down to her grandmother. She pretends to believe it, and the others around her keep up the pretence. But no one is fooled. This is a small provincial town where everyone knows everything and has since the beginning of time.
The house on the Esplanade is all lit up, from cellar to attic, even the small dormer windows on the third floor which look like the glowing tips of minuscule cigarettes in the night.
A tall lady wearing black silk and shining jet receives, elegant and haughty. Imposture and ridicule, she thinks deep down. Laughs. Old she-wolf's teeth in an emaciated face . . . She is giving a ball in honour of her false granddaughter, as if she were real. She tells her: “Good evening, Marie,” naming her for the first time. She kisses her forehead for the first time. She is thumbing her nose at the entire city. She is offering a spectacle of pomp and excess.
A long white glove, just faintly yellow, lifeless, like a dead snake found lying across a road. Is it all that remains of a season of parties and balls? Flora Fontanges drinks her second Martini, sipping it. Around her, muted conversations. Cigarette smoke drifts through the hotel bar in great blue scrolls. Green glints. Aquarium atmosphere.
Once there were two long ball gloves, quite alive, with three small mother-of-pearl buttons where the wrist begins, on the palm side. Compelling fragrance. Soft against the skin. Silver sandals. Flowers in her hair.
Never has the Eventurels' adopted daughter seemed closer to the heart and to the dearest wishes of her adoptive parents. Slender and straight in her long white gown, she looks altogether like someone who wants to be part of society.
The debutantes, hair waved and curled, family jewels around necks and wrists, showing décolletés for the first time, clutch handfuls of skirts made of faille, taffeta, silk, tulle and muslin, or let them trail on the floor which has been sprinkled with boric acid to make it slipperier.
The boys, buttoned into freshly pressed tuxedos, very straight parts in short hair slicked with brilliantine, make the debutantes dance till dawn.
The luckiest will marry within the year.
She danced for one whole winter, losing herself in the dance as if she were singing or reciting poems. Her body grew lighter and lighter, given over to the arms of her dancing partners, then transfixed once again as soon as the dance was done, resuming then the pose of a well brought-up young lady. She would have liked to become a dancer and to make the entire world ring out under her heels, like a hard, smooth dance floor edged with trees and vast rivers.
At the end of the third month of parties and balls the worst dancer in town asked her to marry him and she said no. It's easy to say no, like that, to a boy who has trodden on your feet all winter, especially if his expression is sullen and sly, surprised by the no that she uttered, sharp and clear. But what's most difficult is explaining that in order to live one needs an enormous dance floor, where nothing can limit the momentum and shut in the heart, and that the dreamed-of love is not to be found here.
M. and Mme Eventurel are simply amazed. Such a good catch, a lawyer's only son, heir to his father's practice, and such a neat little black mustache, like Charlie Chaplin's.
Too confined in her skin, which is cracking from top to bottom, Marie Eventurel feels like a little lizard, warmed by the sun, who moults and leaves behind his wilted scales. For the first time, she does not play at being the perfect adopted daughter. Her honesty is unsparing. She declares in a steady voice:
“I don't want to marry, not with any boy. I want to work on stage, and I've decided to leave here and choose a name that will be my very own.”
She was called ungrateful and shameless. The theatre was an invention of the devil, unworthy of a girl of good society. The break occurred at one stroke, between her and her adoptive parents, as if preparations for it had been made in advance, in the shadows, like a piece of cloth worn by air and sun which tears seemingly of its own volition in our astonished hands. They raised no objections to her emancipation, though she was only eighteen. She left town on the
Empress of Britain,
as a chambermaid. Her experience of poverty became her most precious possession, along with patience, of which she turned out to have a great deal. What awaited her, on the other side of the ocean, was at once more beautiful and fiercer than anything she could imagine. To learn one's craft, to become oneself
full-blown and on all sides exposed to the sun
and to find every day the money necessary for the most rudimentary existence.
She is on her third Martini. There is too much smoke here. The air becomes visible, greenish and heavy, it blends with the smoke. A sort of magma wherein people float like dead fish.
Flora Fontanges experiences the deaths of her adoptive parents like a foreboding, as if these deaths were going to occur at any moment, before her eyes, having not yet caught up with her, fixed in her heart in 1956 when she realized she had no tears or sorrow and felt ungrateful and light, all absorbed in playing
Miss Julie
in the French provinces.
Nothing is alive here now, in this bar. The atmosphere becomes more and more rarefied. The present no longer exists. All these people bent over their drinks are like accidental light in the murky water of a pond. The imperious welling of tears. The news of the deaths of her adoptive parents, occurring a few weeks apart, comes to her across time and space. She sees again the blue paper of the telegram, the small black letters dance before her eyes. The burning sensation of stinging tears. She covers her smarting eyes with her hands. Tells herself it is irreparable. It has happened. Is happening at this very moment. The deaths of her adoptive parents. She weeps. She will probably never know if they secretly loved one another, for just one moment, M. and Mme Eventurel and she. Lacking a sure memory, she has only her tears.
N
OW SHE IS OUT ON
the street in the middle of the night, in the rain, although since she arrived here she has not dared take a step in the city by herself. Côte de la Couronne. Why not settle matters now? She has only delayed them too long. Climb to the top of this steep hill, to the place where . . . It is a decision she made when she was still in the hotel bar, warmed by alcohol and driven outside by the bar's stuffy atmosphere, her loneliness, too, pushing her towards an ever greater solitude.
The rain trickles down her face and onto her neck, a slow summer rain filled with a mixture of scents. The city baked by summer steams in the night, under the rain, wet pavement, exhaust fumes, dust, and soot, while now and again surprising fragrances of earth, grass, and leaves, from who knows where, come to her in great swathes filled with sweetness.
My courage is supreme, she repeats to herself, hands thrust deep in the pockets of her raincoat. I am drunk with courage and alcohol, she thinks. She laughs to herself as she hurries down the hill. A comfortable warmth in her veins while her rain wet face stays cool, like a rose, she notes with satisfaction. The passage from warmth to coolness on her skin. The voluptuous delight of a summer evening in the rain. She is a stranger now, walking in a strange city.
At first she does not recognize Côte de la Couronne, never having seen it at night or in her present state of mild intoxication. Alternating great dark gaps and neon lights. An unfamiliar avenue lined with banners by turns dark or dazzling. Nothing palpable or solid,
trompe l'oeil
houses that sway at the edge of sidewalks, above all nothing recognizable that might show her she is going down towards the heart of the forbidden city.
The war or some other equally brutal calamity has passed this way. It is filled with abandoned buildings and with barely camouflaged demolitions. She must have turned right without realizing it. Here is boulevard Charest, or is it rue Saint-Joseph? Everywhere, the disorder of a city that cannot show its proper face but smashes it instead, as if it were a pleasure to put out an eye or break a nose. The department stores have been moved to the suburbs. The neighbourhood is disused. The air one breathes smells of ashes and chalk. Entire streets have been shaken like rugs, their buildings broken like toys.
She must retrace her steps. Climb back up Côte de la Couronne. Has vowed she will go to the end of this endless hill. Desires with an unvarying desire to get to the bottom of her memory. Soon the dark mass of an unfamiliar building blocks her way.
She is determined, though, to stay there in front of this strange façade, where no sign of life or death is addressed to her. The whole city is silent and cheerless, like stagnant water. No one can awaken what no longer exists. Pointless to dig under this new building, darker than the surrounding night, where one will find only time past and charred ruins.
It is there that in another time stood the Hospice Saint-Louis. How calm and smooth everything is here, she thinks, hands in the pockets of her trench coat, hair standing up on her head like a kingfisher emerging from the water. Her faint memory weighs no more than a dead leaf. The warmth of her present life keeps vigil in her veins.
Now images are looming up at the speed of the wind, faster than thought, a wild quickness, while the five senses, stirred to life, bring sounds, smells, touch, bitter tastes which unloose memories, precise arrows drawn from the shadows, without respite.
The present no longer concerns Flora Fontanges.
It is a fortress for women and children, hermetically sealed in the winter night. The surrounding city can very well make and unmake itself as it wishes, nothing and no one comes through the fence around the hospice except on visiting days and according to terms carefully laid down in regulations.
December 14, 1927.
Everyone inside is asleep, thirty nuns, three hundred seventy-one little girls aged from five to twelve.
No fire extinguisher, no fire escape, no night watchman, no fire drill. “The Lord is my shepherd,” sing the girls in chorus, before they go to sleep, while Sister Saint-Amable declares that not one hair can fall from their heads without divine permission.
Half-past ten. Already the first sign of fire flares in a dormer window on the top floor.
A man is coming home from the arena after a hockey game. The snow creaks under his feet. White mist emerges from his mouth with every breath. He looks up. Sees the flames at the window. Sounds the alarm.
A night light sheds its muted glow along a dormitory where fifty little girls sleep in iron beds lined against the walls on either side. They sleep, and already their dreams are filled with visions of fire and terror. From there to crossing the line into wakefulness and finding death beside one's bed, it is just one step. The burning bush, the unbearable face of God hidden in the heart of the flames, Ishmael's thirst in the desert, the Egyptians' first-born who are put to death, the sacrifice of Isaac, the fiery tongues of Pentecost, and the glowing fires of the inferno that await little girls who don't behave themselves, ah! above all the inferno . . .
“Please God don't let me die tonight in a state of mortal sin!”
The fire rumbles from floor to floor like a furious wind. The smoke is more and more dense. Bells are rung in the corridors. People shout: “Fire! Fire!” from dormitory to dormitory.
Children, children, thinks Sister Saint-Amable, evoking Jesus Christ lamenting Jerusalem, and she wishes she could gather them all around her skirts like chicks and take them from here, all these children who are entrusted to her care.
Wailing, tears. Someone clutches her dressing gown. They want to believe it is she who is the absolute mistress of our life and of our death. To obey her, once again.
Their old terrors are behind the door that opens onto the hallway, their tongues of fire pass beneath the door. A distraught woman in a dressing gown who claims to be our Sister Saint-Amable wants to take us with her, make us walk through the flames, then throw us, half-naked, into the snow and the night, when we do not know what night is, having seen it only surreptitiously, through a window, having never been inside it, having heard about the shadows where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, and the snow that lies motionless under our windows, cold below, blazing above, the snow that we already know and that is unforgiving, we must obey and leave this place, the fire runs across the floor as if someone has broken a thermometer, the smoke stings our eyes and throat. Mother, how frightening you are, and trembling, without your solemn garments! We must go with you, at once, before, Mother, Mother . . .
Now the electricity blows and the children, gathered together with great difficulty, scream, scatter, run every which way, amid the smoke and the dark. Some seek shelter in their beds, huddling under their blankets.
It was impossible to get them out, sobs Sister Saint Amable who has joined the other nuns on the snow, in a shivering cluster whence come instructions, incoherent and vain, addressed to the firemen.
Sister Marie-des-Neiges has saved six little girls and the holy species of the Eucharist.
Who now would dare to cross the blazing coals except Rosa Gaudrault, who has offered the gift of her life?
Thirty-six little girls perished in the fire, as did Rosa Gaudrault who was their maid and their first teacher.
While it is true that all the nuns were saved, the real miracle is that, intact in the smoking debris, was found the head of the statue of Saint Louis of Gonzaga.