Authors: Anne Hebert
I
T'S NO USE TRYING TO
explain to American tourists why so many anachronistic cannons are aimed at them, here and there in the city. Raphaël talks about the fortifications that took a hundred years to build and have never been used. Ever since the English conquest, history has been filled with false alarms, and it makes a fine Tartarean desert, an awesome Syrtic shore for the soldiers at the Citadel perched high above. In their red coats and fur bonnets, they guard the beauty of the landscape and watch over the river and the clouds, awaiting a prodigious attack that has been delayed for two centuries now.
Sometimes Raphaël, the scrupulous guide, recalls that the birth of the city was a misunderstanding, the founders believing they were on the path to the Orient, with its wealth of gold and spices.
A
N ELONGATED FACE, HAIR SMOOTHED
down on either side of his hollow cheeks, eyes deep-set beneath the brow, and some vague powers that let him hold sway over a group of four boys and four girls. Since Eric left the church, all his attention in this base world is concentrated on seeking a secular moral code that will satisfy him and bring peace to his heart.
He has sworn that he will start afresh as if he had never lived.
To take eloquence and wring its neck
seems to have become the main concern of this former preaching brother. One thing only is necessary, he keeps telling himself. If he could just discover that primary necessity, all the rest would be organized around it, like a planet wrapping itself about its fiery nucleus. He thinks he has laid aside all principles and all his former ways of doing things. He imagines himself breathing like a newborn in the absolute new. Yet he has maintained an outmoded sense of charity that outstrips him and leads him where he doesn't want to go. He believes that the supreme virtue is to be detached from everything, come what may, yet compassion is still alive in him and it gives him no rest. He has not said to anyone, “Follow me and be perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect,” but still they come after him and will not rest until he has told them how to become meek and lowly of heart. He has done nothing but talk to them about infinite peace and about the arbitrary nature of all power. His hoarse voice sometimes stumbles over words which he then retracts, confused. They listen and follow even his most stumbling utterance, so profound is the spell they are under, so urgent their desire for a new law. Where is life? they have been asking themselves for some time now, tired of the political intolerance in which their parents have brought them up. Hundreds of voices used to be raised in this city inhabited only by descendants of the founders, but now hearts are secretly questioning the propriety of living anywhere on the earth, that stretches as far as the eye can see, open and offered, without war or violence. What dream is this? they asked each other. To follow Eric they have abandoned father and mother, home, education and all certainty of being on this world's straight and narrow path. They have begun to grope, to search for peace with all their might. Sometimes Eric seemed to precede them along the path, sometimes he was very weary, even questioning his reason for living.
For a year now they have been sharing three rooms and a kitchen on rue Mont-Carmel.
They have pooled everything they possess, books, savings, jeans and T-shirts, sunflower seeds and millet, even their slender bodies, blithely changing partners according to the desire of the moment.
Eric likes to repeat that individual love, possessive passion, devastating jealousy, and all dual relationships must vanish from the peaceful city of their dreams.
A girl's high-pitched voice under a dark mass of curls states that Maud and Raphaël began very early to cheat, spending every night together.
They are all there, the friends of Maud and Raphaël, boys and girls on cushions or on the dark, varnished hardwood floor. They are meticulously shelling sunflower seeds, pecking at them in their palms.
They have offered Flora Fontanges a kitchen chair. She prefers to join them on the floor, using the chair as a backrest, remaining a little off to one side, against the wall.
They begin talking among themselves, in low whining voices, talking about acid rain and the acid fog that is worse than the rain, then suddenly they fall silent as if they have exhausted any desire, any reason to speak.
The voice of the girl, under her dark mass of curly hair, rises again, addressing Flora Fontanges:
“I was the one who found Maud. At the airport in Lorette. She'd been there for three days, sleeping on a bench in her sleeping bag, wandering through the airport all day like a ghost. She asked me for a light. She was smoking Gauloises. She said she couldn't stay there because the police insisted she keep moving. I brought her to rue Mont-Carmel. She had a French accent.”
Raphaël tells his story, as if he sees Maud in front of him, as if he's astounded to find her there.
“It was supper time. We squeezed together to make room for her. We all stopped eating to watch her eat. Like a starving dog. She wrapped her left arm around her plate as if she were protecting it from thieves. We'd never seen such hunger. She made all kinds of sounds with her mouth, her teeth, her throat. We were absolutely amazed. When she'd finished she pushed her plate away and started to cry and tremble from the cold.”
Again, the girl with the strident voice:
“We all tried to comfort her and warm her with sweaters, scarves, hugs, but it was Raphaël who put her in his bed, under the blanket, and offered his pyjama top to sleep in.
“I kept her there in my bed for three nights. The first night, she curled up against the wall and her whole body was shaken by sobs. The second night, she slept very peacefully, her hip brushing against me when she turned over. The third night she put her arms around my neck, cried for a while and kissed me on the neck.”
Céleste continues grumpily, as if Maud's behaviour is again pushing her into heavy disapproval.
“The fourth night, I let her know that Raphaël wasn't the only available guy here. She didn't have to be asked twice to leave his bed. She soon picked another guy from the ones who were looking her over and the ones she'd been giving the eye to. She said 'François,' pointing at him, and he was kind of uncomfortable because he didn't know how to behave with her: she'd picked him so casually, as if it wasn't important. But the next night she was right back in Raphaël's bed.”
Eric says the commune had been a great dream of his that had finally been realized, on rue Mont-Carmel.
Céleste points out that Raphaël and Maud almost caused the break-up of the commune. One fine night they went off to live together as a couple, like mom-and-dad in the olden days, back in the Dark Ages.
Céleste laughs, says the whole thing's fucking pathetic and reactionary.
Soon, Céleste confesses that she loves hanging out, just she and her sleeping bag, the search for a place to sleep being her daily problem, and that she only comes back to rue Mont-Carmel when she has no other choice. She points to the two silent boys who are standing next to Eric like unobtrusive acolytes and says there's not much choice since Raphaël left.
Flora Fontanges has been looking at the yellowed press clippings pinned to the wall of the small bedroom that opens off the kitchen.
Wanted. Maud, tall, slender, fair complexion, long black hair, aged 13, wanted, no questions asked, her mother weeps, aged 15, 17, 18, no questions asked, her mother begs, long black hair, fair complexion, a runaway. Incomprehensible. She runs away. Can't help herself.
Miss Julie, painted face, blonde curly wig, whalebone collar, leg-o'mutton sleeves. Ah! how pretty the poster is, and see how completely Flora Fontanges, with all her pain and sorrow, disappears under the features ofJulie wrangling with the valet.
Phaedra. A long white tunic with a Greek statue's rigid folds, eyes with false lashes and blue shadow, a hand on the breast feeling the pain of a heart that should never have been brought into this world.
The show must go on.
Here is the frail heroine of
The Glass Menagerie who
moves as if she is broken, who grips our hearts. The tears are real, everything is real, the stomach pain, the urge to vomit. Wait for the end of the act. Come back for the bow. Six curtain calls. Radiant through her tears. Her real daughter disappeared three days ago.
The wheel turns. Everything is beginning again. This woman who was thought to have withdrawn from the world is back on stage. Flora Fontanges has returned to the city of her birth where she will play the part of Winnie in Samuel Beckett's
Happy Days.
The photograph resembles her, though she looks old and too made-up, with dark lips, delicate plucked eyebrows, bare brow, hair in broad waves breaking over her shoulders: a woman from another age. It is Raphaël who cut out the newspaper picture and stuck it on the wall.
He explains that Maud herself pinned up the other clippings. He has merely added one last “wanted” notice, written by him and never published, to come full circle, right beside the picture of Flora Fontanges advertising
Happy Days.
Maud, aged twenty, faded jeans, white T-shirt, navy jacket, red sneakers, long black hair . . .
Flora Fontanges points out that the notice and the posters alternate neatly along the wall, as if their mutual dependence were obvious. As if it's clear that Maud vanishes into the dark every time her mother comes back on stage, to face the lights, the cheering audience . . .
She thinks: What a mess! and covers her face with her hands.
In the next room, Eric's halting voice says again that the notion of a worldwide fusion of brotherly love has always haunted him.
O
NE WINTER DAY LONG AGO,
when she had just arrived at the Eventurels on rue Bourlamaque, she was overcome by a startling thought that would not go away and threatened to plunge her into despair: that she would be no one but herself all her life, never able to change, that she would be Pierrette Paul forever, never escaping, confined within the same skin, tethered to the same heart, with no hope of change, just like that, with nothing ever happening, until old age and death. It was as if she could no longer move, as if both feet had sunk into the snow. Her breath formed a small curl of mist in the cold air.
People passed on the sidewalk beside her, walking quickly, faces red.
She was overcome by tremendous curiosity about these people she didn't know, by a strange attraction. How could she truly put herself in their places, understand what went on in their heads, in the most secret recesses of their lives? Suddenly she felt a great urge to become someone else, one of those passersby walking through the snow, for example. Her deepest desire was to live in some other place than within herself, for just a minute, one brief minute, to see what it is like inside a head other than her own, another body, to be incarnated anew, to know what it is like in some other place, to know new sorrows, new joys, to try on a different skin from her own, the way one tries on gloves in a store, to stop gnawing on the one bone of her actual life and feed on strange, disorienting substances. To shatter into ten, a hundred, a thousand indestructible fragments; to be ten, a hundred, a thousand new and indestructible persons. To go from one to the other, not lightly as one changes dresses, but to inhabit profoundly another being with all the knowledge, the compassion, the sense of rootedness, the efforts to adapt, and the strange and fearsome mystery that would entail.
She is standing, motionless, across from the apartment of M. and Mme Eventurel who have just adopted her. She has just recovered from a serious case of scarlet fever. She does not move but stands frozen there, half-buried in the snow, petrified at the thought of never being able to get out of herself.
All that happens long before rue Plessis. On rue Bourlamaque.
She does not yet know that one day she will become an actress and will break her heart into a thousand pieces as brilliant as suns.
The grey sky is low enough to touch with a finger, on the rim of the horizon. A small girl muffled like a roly-poly is standing in the snow at twilight, outside the door of 101, rue Bourlamaque. This is the winter hour, the saddest hour of all. Twilight. Dusk. The hour before night. When day has already withdrawn. The wan light given off by the snow as far as the eye can see, like a muted lantern. This small quantity of day at ground level exhales its cold breath, half-swallowed by the snow.
She dreams of having access to the sun and to the night, of learning how the light progresses, at the risk of burning herself therein.
Someone calls to her from the window, scarcely ajar because of the cold. They name her Marie Eventurel. It is a new name, pure product of the imagination of a barren old couple who yearn for a child. Now she need only answer to the name that she's been given and say yes, that's me, my name is Marie Eventurel, I'll do whatever you tell me, I'll be the person you want me to be, as you wish me to be, until my longing to be another person takes over, pushing me and pulling me far from you and the city, across the sea, where I shall be an actress, in the old country.
The day will come when she will choose her own name, and it will be the secret name, hidden in her heart since the dawn of time, the one and only name that will designate her among all others, and allow her all the metamorphoses needed for her life.
If you aren't careful the child could freeze to death. Flora Fontanges can do nothing for the little girl in the snow. Except take responsibility for the tingling and burning of her cold-numbed fingers and toes as soon as she enters the Eventurels' overheated apartment.
For the brief time she is there, Flora Fontanges runs the risk of seeing Madame Eventurel herself, her little black velvet hat, her veil, her straight back, her solemn slowness, while the apartment on rue Bourlamaque will open up under her footsteps, with its small dark bedrooms and long corridor.
Here was the start of everything in her life with M. and Mme Eventurel.
“Come on, Raphaël, let's go!”
Everything goes to wrack and ruin, the house of blackened bricks, the outside wooden staircases and most of all, the gaping opening to the basement, dug below street level, a shadowy hole in which no doubt is hidden the ghost of Monsieur Eventurel in his steel grey suit with white stripes, infinitely dignified, despite bankruptcy and seizure.
Flora Fontanges has nothing more to do on rue Bourlamaque, she quickens her pace and pulls Raphaël along by his arm.