Fences in Breathing (7 page)

The city makes me dizzy with its voices surging out of insignificance and lies it absorbs me in front of the hotel the cars drop people off here and there like pawns there is always a church steeple a labyrinth of words the moving shape of a cloud an indescribable force that destroys strikes brutally while everybody tries to be themselves while I am me sitting at the Café de la Gare drinking lemonade with ice cubes because it is so good for me better even than if I had written all of this while drinking lemonade in a train-station café and had erased it.

People cry easily when tired you just need to look closely to see tears slowly forming then people turn their heads slightly as if to ward off fate I see that their nostrils their chins their foreheads are well and truly alive people act as if nothing is happening and I pretend not to see
them getting exhausted from holding back their tears then with a dry and suspicious eye they look straight ahead as if to warn about a coming disaster it’s like Tatiana’s gold watches glittering in the great glass armoire in the living room on days when this happens I no longer know if time is a light source or a misfortune and I say I must rest everywhere there are power and holes I’m right the power of stars wears me out for example when I lift my head even if it’s far it doesn’t take much before I feel the heat radiating in my hands troubling black hole this is what I see coming we can’t there are things we can’t do they happen it is frightening in my head the number of sights that make me want armoires all the more inside which I have to shut a lot of blackness all the blackness I am capable of the purest black ever seen an otherworldly black that attracts like light does by performing very quick magical somersaults something resembling happiness but in the other language this compares to nothing so I go walking alone on the mountain the happiness continues I talk to myself everything is out of focus around what I call the great happiness I must think only of ordinary things because images and words go fast like animals in the forest when they are escaping harm I get excited thinking about everything in life that flees in the name of life.

…
and met her gaze looking deeply from the same waters …

Louky Bersianik

They were two sentences with water and light. I had imagined them and now I wanted to write them. The sentences were simple, they spoke of unforgettable faces and of a bridge people crossed on foot or in cars. Both mentioned a woman. I no longer knew if it was the same woman in both sentences. One of the women ran her fingers through her hair while the other watched light streaming through the landscape.

The sentences were never exactly the same, depending on whether they were read quickly or slowly. Nonetheless, they always had a reassuring slowness. Wanting to write in our own style two sentences we have just read is natural, just as wanting to imitate someone we love seems quite legitimate and even pleasing. The sentences would stretch out as though they could make grooves in the air or give the impression of a voice and a melody about to drown,
one inside the other. The tense changed from one sentence to the other, I could question myself, I could worry. I always felt like starting over. Whenever a sentence skimmed the surface of the lake, characters from a faraway time would spring up, then, without much hesitation, take off into the foreign language to indulge their fiercest fantasies. Screaming was never a solution. Screaming meant a state of emergency. Life needed to be organized to avoid emergencies. Each sentence had her own inner tense and I wanted to settle into it to get a sense of its colour. I had also noticed that, though they had the same number of syllables, one of them took longer to utter. Three syllables did not always equal three syllables. Therein lay a clue that, in each language, time could be stretched or it could contract to make it easier to decipher the cumbersome monotony of dailiness and the tenacious enigma of passions.

I didn’t know it yet, but both sentences concerned my most intimate self. ‘There must be a reverse side to what I am.’ The two sentences spoke about water and about downtown on a sunny day with frisky cumulus clouds.

I borrowed the château’s blue Volvo and drove along the serpentine road through Aubonne, then plunged into the forest, taking each curve in such a way as to make my heart race, wild in my chest. Light threaded through the violently green foliage, tropical-summer green. Tatiana had said, ‘Go and spend a few days in town, go.’ I had
listened to her. The road glistened in the sun like young skin. The château, the village, already seemed far off, lost somewhere in the consciousness of an ancient character. I craved the city, craved skirting the shores of the lake and scrutinizing its dark water, happy there was water all around me. Noise, light, everything would do me good. Being by oneself all the time is difficult and perhaps not necessary. We need to be with other people at least half of the time so that life can intrigue, leap and roar. Some days, others are
err and there
strewn inside a story, at other times they are stuck still in the sentences. It’s difficult to imagine what comes next. You have to lift your head, breathe.

In my language, I am able to reason properly, to weigh the pros and cons of a hypothesis, to understand my own hesitations, while in the other language, my reasoning is skewed, the slightest ambiguity upsets me and I have no control over the sequence of words. Zones of knowledge have no limits. Reality takes on a vague look. The images I’ve begun to consider mine become incomprehensible or get stuck here and there in space like disturbing objects, cut off from their symbolic value. Anything can happen, like the other day, when I collided with the matter of evil. A topic I’ve never stopped to ponder. Everything was unfolding as if this shapeless and powerful thing called evil were accessible to me only in the foreign language, for
me in that language is not me
. Although I am fully aware of how the
brain can, in all languages, ennoble evil, restore the senses like one says about a wall about to collapse, set each word like a sharp weapon capable of fixing everything, I can’t bring myself to believe that language can so easily deploy inside us not the idea of evil but a theatre of evil. Is there a level of language conducive to expressing evil? Language level, water level. There is always something I don’t understand whenever I venture into the history of a city at cocktail hour.

When the two sentences of light and water crossed paths in my thoughts, I felt free without noticing they had interrupted the rapture that had filled me ever since I arrived in the village. I now had a better understanding of what happened following Charles’s arrest the very day his sister left for the Svalbard archipelago. The next day’s newspapers made a point of specifying that he had been detained only for questioning. Charles returned to the village. He would still stand in front of his workshop, look worried, perseverant, observing the planes coming and going among the clouds, drawing sentences that, without warning, swept both skies and thoughts clean. Neither of the two sentences belonged to Charles. He could hear them. He could see them, but they were not his. He could not put them in an envelope.

It was still sunny when I reached downtown. I parked the car by the train station and headed for the lake. A few clouds were darkening the harbour. Until now, the lake had been but a faraway space, presumably soothing and beneficial. I wanted to be at lake level so as to breathe that mixture of city and powerful water that renews vital energy. I sat near the carousel at the port des Mouettes. Inside her kiosk, an old lady is selling tickets. The facade reads Wetzel Family 1878. With its elephants, swans, horses and little cars depicting the twentieth century’s first automobiles, the carousel is picturesque. Three children are at play, preoccupied with driving their vehicles properly in an unknown world where time has no hold. Barely visible in the day’s light, dozens of little glimmering lightbulbs girdle the top part of the carousel. I can see Jean-Michel Othoniel’s
Boat of Tears
, a work made of wood stripped by salt and the repeated power of imaginary waves upon its sides. The tears, large glass bulbs of blue, pink and yellow, recall the magical glory of light as it might be imagined sparkling in festive garlands above the icy waters of the Atlantic. A night like the Far North and ice floes settles in, majestic and timeless in the afternoon. In the distance, the formidable water jet sprays droplets in the wind, a shower of fine particles of grit with, in the background, the port and its hundreds of white masts and little hulls pitching and rolling in the shimmery light.
Behind me, the Hôtel d’Angleterre calls out as though it has a voice that is grappling with destiny, a voice set to conquer luminous sentences and their swaying above emptiness and death. How to predict where danger is coming from when one is absorbed in a book? Danger revives silences and impulses. How many Hôtels d’Angleterre are scattered here and there throughout nineteenth-century history and colonialist geography? Now a man in a top hat and bouffant pants is staring at me. Behind his barrel organ, he makes the light dance a waltz with the warm weather, then, with bursts of sounds and little rock slides at the bottom of a ravine, he stops everything. Only then does he hold out a bowl. The sun blinds him. Sweat streams down my back. I want a pistachio ice cream because of that tender green reminder of a past life I never mention.

Sentences return, subterranean, sombre, transparent or luminous, as if to make me doubt what it is I see, hear, even desire. Sentences that draw me back to the château and in which I converse with Tatiana, aware of the secretary’s footsteps in the hallway, of the dry sound of the piano cover being lifted, then of the first notes of ‘Mood Indigo.’ All through my head, people are moving forward in time. People are time itself. So is there no true time to master but the one I carry within me?

I ended up heading for the bridge, alert among the crowd of pedestrians and cyclists. The strength of the
vibrations created by passing cars surprises me. A woman leans over the parapet. A little farther on, a man smokes and stares at a small grey building called La cité du temps. The man is thickset. I am unable to make out his features. The word
pal
comes to my mind, let’s say Al
as in
Alexander, Albert or Allen like the gardener at the château. The water level. From the château, it sometimes seems that the water level is rising dangerously, and when it goes down, depending on the fog, depending on the light at dusk, a new kind of concern sets in. In the morning, the mountain is what first attracts the eye. We know at a glance if the snowy peak is visible. Whenever it is, the fascination of doubt returns: does it really exist, that peak now visible, now imperceptible? The woman has disappeared behind a bus. In the foreign language there are cries I cannot get used to. Cries issuing from as far away as history, slow, funereal, that leave dark traces even inside the mouth of whoever in the distance hears them. Then there are the others: cries that are faster and fiercer, that pounce like ravenous beasts, their energy doubling every time the echo of their own cries encircles them. It’s like a game of hide-and-seek with buses poorly framed in the light. The woman appears, disappears, I feel I might know her. The man has moved closer to the woman. First he taps her shoulder twice sharply, then, from the way he fingers the woman’s sweater, it’s as if he were trying to ascertain the
quality of the fabric. The woman pushes him away, stretching out her arm, folding it back, extending it as though trying to find the gesture that will allow her to keep the stranger at bay once and for all. The man gives the impression of wanting to explain something, he might even be wanting to leave with his arm around the woman’s waist. A police car stops alongside them. The woman glances toward La cité du temps. The man climbs into the patrol car, head down, shoulders hunched as if he were about to dive into another world. In his head, it’s all about staying alive. There are thousands of little holes for shelter. He regrets touching the woman’s sweater. Nylon. Nylon. Fall is coming. It will soon be time to dive into the dark.

This is how the verb
to dive
began to take shape. I started saying it out loud, then murmuring it like somebody trying to understand by chanting the same syllables. Diving sometimes resolves the question of diving. Parting the veil, the surface that is obstacle or attraction, opacity or transparency. At the other end of the bridge, while listening to the wind, I felt the verb
to dive
station itself sideways across words and I thought about women’s caresses, their hands, the softness of their cheeks, about the slightly crazy heat that rushes to the head and transforms how we see. I wish the lake were the sea, I wish the whiteness of the shore around it would change into milky morning blue, into the soft royal blue of afternoon and the
blue again of sea and horizon, as they have been described in my language ever since they became the stuff of dreams. I don’t know how much time has passed since the woman reappeared walking toward me. Talking about this passerby in the other language is difficult, and even in my own I can barely find the words, the story of words necessary to appreciate the small and great follies within us of hope, of renewal of energy, and of humanity. Women’s caresses are smooth, existential, full of yes, a power of presence and a bond that reaffirms all bonds. Now I am sure I glimpsed that woman in the village. She was wearing a red T-shirt that bared her tanned shoulders. I had seen only one part of her body, the rest had remained hidden behind the tall cedar hedge bordering part of the village. Then I remembered how every time Tatiana recalls an event that is important to her, she says, ‘That summer was pure velvet. That was the summer Nathalie Sarraute came to the château.’

I walked on the other shore for a long time and found myself in a little cemetery full of beautiful aged trees under which I stopped. Without realizing it, I found myself at the grave of Jorge Luis Borges. A stone with a two-sentence inscription. I moved closer, convinced I would be able to translate the words that seemed familiar. Nothing happened except that time stretched out whitely as in a Piero Manzoni painting. I knew there was beauty in the
inscription, even though there loomed an unspecific threat echoing the fog-laden sentences coming at me at this moment
that’s it like at this moment nobody can contradict me because I forget who I am from too much digging in between words, too much diving into the pink and ancient shapes of my love for everything that swirls and sparkles ribbon of slow music that drowns out sorrow in small doses of cello or eyes of a species that shelter a constant sun I’ve forgotten how the day packs up and goes with tender words crouched behind bare cheval glasses in grand hotel rooms forgotten why in another language I erupt while making a hell of a racket as if this could protect me from the beautiful rolling noise of living beings thrilling in the distance halfway to the half-tremor of dreams. I am everywhere I say I am even though I forget I am waiting comfortably coiled in the roiling of words and of my muscles of silence I am waiting for the centuries to pass. I am everywhere I am.