Fences in Breathing (2 page)

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I arrived at the château on the Wednesday preceding the incident. I was coming to meet Tatiana Beaujeu Lehmann, retired publisher. A woman still sprightly, generous, who single-handedly carried an entire body of literature at a
time when it seemed about to give way to another one, produced in a language so foreign that even today nobody seems to have figured out what was at stake. In time, the other literature nevertheless won out. So Tatiana Beaujeu sold her publishing house and ended all dealings with most of the people who surrounded her with their half-truths. For half-truths had become common currency to explain reality, as if everything had the same value,
glass half full, glass half empty
acting as an example now to exalt the empty part, now to praise the full part. One never said
half-lie
, never. Nevertheless, people swallowed everything they could from the little goblet of lies. Half-truths flew off in one direction, then, having morphed into rumour, gossip and
narrative
lethal to all men and women who continued to dream of a better world, flew back like a poisoned arrow straight at the heart of their thoughts.

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Yes, his hand was trembling. The foreign woman’s gaze drifted over his fingers, then he felt it wrap round his wrist. At that precise moment, Charles’s hand began to tremble. Even after holding his hand around the handle of a heavy hammer for a long time or after carving the shape of his solitude a thousand times into the belly of a tree, he had never trembled. No, that had never happened, and
now it started to at the very moment June spoke to him to enquire about his sister, who so craved to live in the Svalbard archipelago in northern Norway. Suddenly there was a whirlwind of triangles in which he distinguished the faces of June and his sister, then another triangle formed with the silhouettes of Laure and the foreign woman. Both times he thought he saw his own shadow in the midst. But it was not him, he knew it was not him. Now his hand was no longer trembling, and he entered the post office. ‘What a wind!’ the employee said while looking for a form in the bottom drawer of a desk. ‘What a wind!’ Charles repeated with a worried look.

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The château is home to Tatiana and her personal secretary, who takes care of everything, including the letter, received six months ago, inviting me to stay at the château in exchange for a few conversations and reflections on the current state of the world. ‘Fewer and fewer people will go to libraries in search of their dignity,’ said Tatiana. ‘I need all this explained to me.’ The publisher had bought the château in the middle of the twentieth century. There are a thousand and one little reminders of America in the fifties: drinking gin, rye and whisky, as people did over there back then, must have occurred a lot here as well. The
staircase and the bedroom floors are covered in thick white carpet always just about to turn from pearl to yellow, from yellow to the grey in the air. On each side of the bed, a little table like those once found in the rooms of great hotels. When I stretch out my arm, I can press a series of buttons, launch an opera aria or a jazz tune, summon an imaginary employee via intercom, set the alarm or light the bed. It was the beginning of a new era, and owning a château did not prevent one from decorating it American-style. Tatiana is from another time, she represents what was most brilliant, generous and liberal in a bygone world fuelled by the pleasure of books, by socialism, by the soothing silence of leisurely strolls and the joys of conversation. At eighty-five, Tatiana has a sharpness of mind that can cut through umbilical cords and black thoughts with a single reply. To me, Tatiana speaks only about literature and writers she has known. Never about war, nor the Great Depression, nor the Holocaust, nor about science. But she leaves me free to talk about Québec’s Quiet Revolution and about September 11. And every time this happens, I am surprised that the fact that she is all at once Jewish and Russian, a Québécoise and a New Yorker, helps me to compose in the foreign tongue.

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Laure moves the sponge with care. From top to bottom, three times along each vertebra, then her hand makes a half-turn and heads for the left shoulder, over the nape of the neck and down again by the right shoulder, where the shoulder blade makes a slight bump, then everything becomes smooth. She repeats the same trajectory twice for each shoulder, quite naturally dipping the sponge into the bathwater once she reaches the kidney area. The most difficult part is always the breasts and belly. Not because of their lack of muscle tone, but because Laure’s imagination travels at the speed of light. So that whenever she lightly touches that white soft mass of the belly, it is like caressing a child’s cheek. A vanilla smell wafts through the damp air, reminiscent of the one in Las Vegas casinos, a pervasive scent of candy.

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In the foreign language, I am unable to correctly assess the proximity of beings around me. Nor am I able to measure the distance that separates us. Proximity remains difficult for me to comprehend. A mysterious choreography brings us so fervently close to certain beings and imperceptibly distances us from others. Grasping the other in oneself always puts language to the test. Tatiana and I often talk about the little miracles of meaning
fostered by intimate confidential exchanges, though we do not give in to them. The other evening, I’m not quite sure how, I ended up describing some of Mark Rothko’s untitled paintings, while insisting on the magic found in the series by Aurélie Nemours entitled
Structure du silence
. Without realizing it, I may have put too much emphasis on Rothko’s suicide. As she turned to gaze out the window overlooking the garden, Tatiana asked me to pour her a bit of sherry. She waited until I stopped talking before announcing that tomorrow we would go walking on the chemin du Signal. ‘From up there you’ll get a better view of the lake and the mountains. For the moment, why not just keep to the pleasure of imagining that the times have no effect on us. Let’s allow the newspapers to pile up on the living-room table.’

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On her way to the post office, June thinks of Kim’s inevitable departure. She might have the time to install some new software on Kim’s computer. Kim has long dreamt of leaving the village, of no longer seeing her brother. ‘He’s started a series of armoires that send chills down my spine. I need to travel to the north, to be reborn as a silhouette in space, without landmarks. I want day and night, the entire surface of their twenty-four hours, in my
eyes, in my body. It doesn’t matter to me what I become in that boundless Far North!’ June might leave with Kim.

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Is there any way of concluding with certainty that the world has changed? In five, ten years from now, what will my stay at the château come to mean? I see few people. I follow Tatiana’s advice: don’t read the newspapers, don’t turn on the
TV
, hidden behind a folding screen as if it were the château’s disgrace. Seeing no one does me good, but it’s best, I do believe, to love your neighbour. Our worlds are made of a few words, a few images and an energy that each of us always shapes the same way, regardless of its intensity. In the foreign tongue, I occasionally don’t finish my sentences. I feel ashamed when this happens. Yesterday Tatiana had me read an article entitled ‘Could humans coexist, form a community in a society that had a legislative system but no code of ethics?’ The question leaves me thinking. Therein lies a fissure in meaning that distresses me, that threatens my integrity, so I prefer to believe that in the end, life will once again win out, rough, warm. Half truth, half fiction.

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As usual, the café is empty. An unknown woman is sitting at the back of the room. She is writing or taking notes, who knows. The day is so warm and green, one could die of pleasure under the shade of the great trees that Charles still keeps wanting to cut down to make into sculptures. In the far distance, the mountains, and sometimes the great white jet of precious water that, they say, brings the city good fortune. The lake is glassy and untroubled. The day cleanses the slow dust that has accumulated hour after hour.

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On the wall of my room, four photographs of Tatiana. She must have been ten years old. The era is easy to recognize because back then there was only one way of framing faces. All the girls’ hair was cut in the same style, with short bangs exposing the eyes and forehead. Tatiana seemed different because in her gaze one could easily imagine Red Square covered in snow, a bygone Russia of forests and wild mythologies. Tatiana was from a time that filled lives with massacres and suffering so vivid they cannot be forgotten. But history was repeating itself and, yes, Tatiana would say once again, ‘A massacre, my dear, is when there are corpses in a field, on a road or in a school, and you can’t distinguish the faces from the arms and legs. A massacre,
my dear, is man-made cock-and-bull that whips victims around willy-nilly in the wind, and then harder still. Afterwards, you have to trudge through the muddy fields, wiping the blood from the uteruses of women and from children’s cheeks.’

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It is through prose that the world is driven to creating assets; through poetry, it changes and reconnects with the living. I tire quickly when writing in another language. I still don’t know where to properly place the silences. I cheat constantly. Something escapes me. Tires me out. Makes me flee. This morning I went to the post office. I rarely run into anyone at this hour, but I noticed a man talking with a woman. He was holding her left hand strangely in his right, a bit like someone wounded who, in order to shield himself from an unfortunate blow, shrivels up into himself, overwhelmed by an invisible burden. The woman seemed rather joyful and, as I watched her talking with the man, I thought for a moment that she could not see him. That he was a shadow, a tautological presence. My eyes met the woman’s. The wind was blowing hard. My eyes watered like in winter.

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Images come up, one after another, like slides in a carousel or like in a graphic novel without the words. Just faces looming up from urban landscapes or science-fiction. June sees them coming, spreads them out, reorganizes them in an endless flow of profiles and close-ups that act as sites of memory and of future. Since her childhood, everything in her has played out like in the movies. Her family is a film crew, the house a film set with moments of sober silence, or of eating and drinking and laughter, notebooks scattered all over the table. June owns the Videoreal shop. For the last three years, she has been renting out old movies and some recent releases. She refuses to stock soft or hard porn. What this costs her in terms of business she makes up for with the younger clientele who love to engage in discussion and leave the store with
Citizen Kane
,
The Deer Hunter
,
Death in Venice
,
Matrix
or
Star Trek
. An entire generation thus navigates between past and future without sidestepping the all-powerful present. June is a fanatic for the present, which, in her view, tempers the pain of living, protects from ghosts and counters mirages. To her, everything is a pretext for the pleasure of now: lighting a cigarette, watching a movie, stretching out in the sun, reading or not really reading, kissing on the lips. June claims to be happy because she does not hesitate to transform her pain into a character capable of playing many roles. ‘Pain, come over here. Pain, go over there,’ she tells herself, whenever
she feels the urge to stage what she refers to as the most exhilarating moments of her existence.

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Half past midnight, the house is silent. On the kitchen table, Laure Ravin has spread magazines, newspapers, two photo albums, all dated September 2001. She slowly turns the pages, hypnotized by everything she sees and does not really see. Here, an enormous fireball in a blue sky gorged with immensity. Here again, debris like so many tiny white paper airplanes floating in the foreground of a tall tower. Already ruins, already autumn and steel, shredded. Everywhere, a fire gnaws at the building and devours the things of life: photographs of children, coffee cup, pen, an Anatolian carpet, a pleasing painting. Everywhere, books, operating manuals, bills, contracts, printers, cellphones and BlackBerrys,
ID
cards, twenty-dollar bills, painkillers, all of this suddenly becomes nothing. Some say this is hell, some say this is war. Human forms halfway between bodies and chimeras gesticulating in front of windows. Torso, shoulder, white shirt, here a man, arms glued to his side, one leg bent at a 45-degree angle, freefalls headfirst to his death. The sun has disappeared. A woman wearing a pearl necklace is covered in ashes from head to toe. Everywhere, ghosts in business suits walk through the darkness of the great fog of civilization.

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Sometimes I catch Tatiana looking at her collection of watches. A hundred or so timepieces, antique and modern, with their white gold, their bright silver, assembled over the years since the purchase of the château: bassine-cased watches with astronomical indicators or enamelled covers, watches with tactile hour indicators, pendant watches, hunting-cased watches, dress watches, aviators’ wristwatches, ladies’ bracelet watches, gentlemen’s watches. She touches them, rewinds the ones whose mechanisms she is familiar with, marvels, tries to imagine the why of so much research, of such refinement and beauty. All these wheels, all these bridges, these screws, these pins, these hands, these springs, assembled to tempt us into a fascination with time. Once a year, Tatiana goes into town to see the mother of all complication watches, the Calibre 89, which, in addition to showing mean sidereal time and incorporating the Gregorian calendar, is adorned with a celestial chart representing the Milky Way and making it possible to distinguish 2,800 northern-hemisphere stars. And further complications still, about which she cannot stop dreaming.

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