Fences in Breathing (3 page)

The workshop is cluttered, dark like a sentence between two wounds. Here and there, tools, hammers, pliers, nails and picks, all the colour of rust or the grey of time passing by. Dust of dust and dust of scrap metal, sawdust, blond and brown wood chips that stick to your soles when you enter. Charles is sitting on his cracked leather sofa the colour of an old asphalt road. The tobacco smell of three generations of great drinkers and talkers has permeated the sofa. Charles has known them all, because the writers who once regularly visited the château liked him. Some bought his wood carvings, light enough to be carried all around the world; to others he gave those little boxes that look like drawers that he has never stopped reproducing, hoping someday, in a ritual gesture, to sow them at the bottom of the lake. With the men, he drank and talked about what made blood rush to his head. Few women visited him, but those who did enjoyed sitting on the sofa, smoking. When they asked too many questions about his work, Charles got a worried look on his face. When the woman did not grasp quickly enough that he was in pain, his eyes darkened. He enjoyed that moment when he could sense himself being misunderstood and rejected. He would then get up, find his sketchbook, doodle a few lines, pretending to draw the woman, then go back to his room to fetch a list of writers with whom he dreamed of working, he said. He made sure to add the name of the visiting woman writer
to the list. Knowing they were on ‘a list’ scared the women. So each one declined his offer. In time, fewer and fewer writers visited the château. Charles continued to produce sketches while thinking about his sister and about June. Today his page is blank. Charles’s hand trembles or does not. That’s how it is.

§

In the garden, Laure rediscovers a kind of peacefulness. People in the area say roses grow so well here that everyone knows a poem in their honour. In the old days, her mother used to grow them with love, like in the best English films, where the rose has forever been noble. The gardener has mowed the lawn. The smell of fresh grass lodges itself in memory, in that place where the pleasure of living cancels out the throbbing of anguish. The gardener claims he can make grass as silky as a young girl’s skin, but he also knows how to multiply the thorns on rosebushes so they can remain forever graceful and entrancing. Behind the cedar hedge, a car is parked: inside, a man waits. He stares at who knows what, but makes note of any gaps in language, any suspension of common sense. Tomorrow a nurse will come to care for her mother for a few days. Laure has spent several nights analyzing the Patriot Act. No verbal sleight has escaped her. She understands the danger
this document represents. She hesitates to start writing her report, unsure what tone it should have. The garden is a kingdom. On bright days, one can see clearly the little boats on the lake that, to the villagers, plays the part of a real-life character. Most of the time it is said to be comforting, but on days when nothing is moving, when heat draws the contours of the mountains like in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, movement comes from inside it. Whoever looks at the lake on those days feels threatened to the core.

§

Kim is spending more and more time in front of her computer. One click and Svalbard appears, its amoeba-shaped archipelago; another click and the city of Longyearbyen comes up with its two rows of brightly coloured houses wedged between mountains that are sometimes white, sometimes a soul-wrenching pebble-black. Nary a tree on the horizon of the horizon. On one side, the scar of the old mine, on the other a strange cemetery with tall white crosses that, in summer, form a bouquet of lighthouses in the stone. And then there is Barentsburg, Cape Linne, Ny-Ålesund and Sveagruva, accessible only by plane or by boat. Kim is willing to do anything it takes to survive up there. At first she will work as a cashier in a
supermarket. In the following months she will learn to use a weapon, to hike in the mountains for three days, to prepare dog sleds, to dry slices of seal meat; she will study the names of birds, the whole lexicon of ice, the vocabulary of its frightening roar when it tilts and capsizes. The colour of the infinitely turquoise water. The glaciers. Kim imagines the solitude, the cold, the night, the midnight sun. She loses sleep over it.

§

At the château, I occasionally get the urge to drink and smoke, as if that could go hand in hand with the disproportionate happiness I experience from savouring beauty and the tenderest nature there is. Tatiana says that this was the undoing of so many writers: this joy, at once minimalist and excessive, which, for company, commands impulses that are usually buried but quite active, just as the night is when dawn first glimmers. Such elation at the heart of quietude is dangerous.

§

A diffuse light that makes it possible to see dust particles floods the shop. Behind her counter, June is reviewing some bills. An unknown woman just came in to ask for
Babel
. She is staying at the château for a while. She has a strong accent. June asks about the publisher. ‘Very well, she is very well,’ says the stranger before exiting. Seen from the back, the woman reminds her of Ava Gardner. June phones Kim to invite her to watch
Atanarjuat
, which she just received. This afternoon, she will go downtown to buy
A Woman’s Voyage to Spitsbergen
by Léonie d’Aunet. Kim wants to know everything about Svalbard. June provides her with everything she desires.

§

I am calm, though not exactly quiet. The presence of Tatiana Beaujeu Lehmann stimulates my intentions toward silence and dissolution. Sometimes a fierce urge to leave and to not reply to her questions. In this foreign tongue, I’m not quite able to modulate my voice properly, to sort through the tides of desire and the dregs of the essential. I choke on this tongue that nonetheless intrigues me and keeps me alert. In the end, I always find a solution to the questions of meaning that do not come up in my language. I establish links between beings so that I can juggle with their anguish. Every morning, the raw cry of a raven stabs the air, leaving a floating impression of violence and of déjà vu.

§

Yesterday, on my way to pick up a video, I walked by the Hôtel du Nord. The man I had seen at the post office stood smoking, leaning against a tree at the street corner. He seemed surprised to see me, then collected himself and mumbled hullo. I nodded. The irate gaze of a man who appears hurt but isn’t keeps me at bay. Tatiana no doubt knows ‘the wounded one.’ Only in this part of the world do men develop this hunted-animal look, nervous and contemplative. Helped by the wound, some of them display a remarkable gift for seduction and conviviality, but the man before me seemed anxious enough to jolt the day’s very heart.

§

She knows her mother’s death will soon be a
fait accompli.
In a year, two years. Death will pass through Laure’s life for the first time. The body must struggle, for the moment it must boost all its senses to their maximum in order to understand. Let nothing go by. Act as though, but act like so. The bathwater gushes with the steady sound of little falls. All the softness in the world is not found in water. Laure knows the sea can be so untamed that its brutal outbursts are impossible to forget. She puts her hand under the tap to check if the water is too hot, too cold. The
transparency, or rather the idea of the transparency, of things, of skin, of her mother’s blue eyes – which she has learned to sail through like a threshold, a level crossing, a childhood room – all this transparency makes her weary. The mother waits, seated on a little stool. Laure does not speak. Her back aches from kneeling like this, cut in half by the edge of the bathtub, bent over the noisy bubbling water as if she were crossing a bridge suspended over an abyss. The old mother is now sitting in the tub and Laure is scrubbing. Sometimes her eye falls upon her mother’s hands speckled with autumn-hued age spots. Strong hands that can still hold the thick biographies that help dream the time away, help her discover entire lives devoured by the cosmos. Strong hands and ready tears make her mother a fortress, fearless and blameless.

§

I must look after my solitude. Be able to count on it to astonish me, to plot and to go on with this madness for speaking even as I abandon my own language. In all languages, the writer’s solitude feeds the little pleasures and great frights of infinite nights. Lives. I am talking about solitude because it is expert at bringing us closer to death, to childhood, to beauty, to nature and even to others, whom it eventually envelops in a precious aura that makes
it possible to love them. I have to nurture my solitude. Especially to not let it escape, even though, in the other language, it loses some of its brightness and intensity. Solitude is precious for smoothing out travel’s edges: bubbles, tears, secrets glittering in the dark.

§

For years now he has worked wood with his knife, played at carving holes in the blond mass of oaks and of magic charms. He files away curves and smooths, smooths the wood so much so that a composition always emerges in the shape of an armoire or a non-armoire. Yes, an object inside which can be stored a letter, a postcard, a pen, a secret. A beautiful object that is and is not an armoire, that could be a drawer. A safe. His wooden work table is tattooed with inscriptions made by a chisel or a gouge. He likes it when the shape of the armoire-in-progress becomes more definite, when the wood curls up, splits into chips and angel hair. His bedroom is his workshop. To leave the house, Kim must cross the room where the knives are. On the other side of Kim’s room is the kitchen. In order to eat, Charles must walk through Kim’s room. He always does this slowly, counting his steps and staring either at the floor or at the ceiling, for one day he will want to carve one or the other into a dome, or a tombstone.

§

‘We should get together more often before you leave.’ June had quickly segued into commenting about the adjective
northern
and the territories in Canada’s north. Kim listened distractedly. Yesterday she had celebrated her thirtieth birthday in town and Charles had given her the sketch of a sculpture he would soon make. ‘No, not like the cow in Damien Hirst’s
Mother and Child
, no, not like the one by Jana Sterbak, no no, something more fictional and more true as well. You’ll see.’ Charles had always frightened Kim. He knew it, but neither he nor she could figure out where this might have come from. Perhaps the simple fact of still living together as adults made them suspicious of one another, suspiteful of their childhood memories, or melantagonistic, and not at all clever in the face of life. Adding up to a profound malaise inside them that was not at all about to heal.

§

June was more beautiful than ever, Kim noticed. Despite her tiredness, she’d agreed to come watch
Atanarjuat
. They had set up in the small room adjoining the shop. The walls were covered with photographs of actresses and old movie posters. At the foot of the bed, a library composed entirely
of books about cinema. June had a passion, Kim not yet. Only this desire for the north. Very far away. For some time now, she had been catching herself murmuring ‘before the glaciers,’ her belly filling with a kind of euphoria so powerful that she imagined herself at the origins of matter, going forth to meet the light and a clamour of ore and ocean that made everything crack upon its passage. Then images that took her breath away flew off to build their nest of dread and excitement in another part of her brain.

§

Sometimes Charles believes his sketches are flammable. There is always something burning somewhere. Something burning that makes him scream in the night. A book, a movie theatre, a whole village. By day, everything becomes normal again: he goes to the post office, stops in at the café, walks around the château craning his neck, stands smoking in front of the house, sweeps his workshop. Yesterday, in town, people were excited, running, buying no matter what no matter how. Pretending to love each other. At the restaurant, Charles had annoyed Kim with indiscreet questions. She did not answer, he lost patience and insulted her. At the end of the meal, he gave her his blackest sketch. Then they both smoked a lot. Kim wore too much bright red on her lips.

§

In my language, the words
piano
and
writing
are homonyms, and their definitions, nobody knows why, intersect, with a single exception for the zones of silence inherent to one and the other. In the foreign language,
writing
means
to get closer
, while in mine
to have the desire to
predominates. In the evening, sometimes, believing herself alone, the secretary sits at the piano. She plays, stops for five, ten minutes. On the alert, I wait for the melodic shapes of things to come in the château. Her repertoire seems to consist exclusively of Chopin. Once, I came upon her unexpectedly and asked if she liked jazz. Completely transformed, she responded by playing ‘Moon Mist.’ Later on in the kitchen, we discussed John Cage at length while drinking red wine and eating olives. We enjoyed ourselves and planned to do it again. I spent the rest of the evening immersed in the dictionary. Around midnight, she knocked at my door.

§

The nurse is here. Young, cheerful, without malice. Laure feels relieved. These days of freedom will be precious, yes, she will spend these three days in town, in a hotel room with her books and her computer, working on the text of the Patriot Act. But then, suddenly, a little pain and strong
heat come to dwell in her chest again, as they do every time she must leave her mother. No, she has never had the words to speak about her mother. There is no photograph, this is no movie. One can’t really know what happened when one entered the world unless one’s mother becomes a storyteller of cries, strained muscles and moist eyes, she being the only assigned narrator of the panting, labouring hole of mouth and sex, all of it like a natural order anchored in the mists of time, an otherworldly nighttime that Laure has been trying to visualize ever since she read
The Atrids
. The possibility that there could have been such a night of time, a vast expanse of horizon, voice pitched like the shadows in our steps, frightens her. All the same, she enjoys this dread, which, coming from so far away and so long ago, seems without real danger yet still fertile with emotions and sensations. After making her recommendations to the nurse, Laure leans over to kiss her mother. A strand of wool has escaped from the old soft sweater her mother is wearing. Absent-mindedly, Laure twists it around her finger, a little cord of tenderness.