The First Garden (10 page)

T
HEY PROMISED THEMSELVES THAT THEY
would do their duty, despite all opposition, and take their adopted daughter to her debut and her marriage. They had set their minds to it quite firmly.

“We'll make a real little lady of her,” declares Monsieur Eventurel, who enjoys repeating the English words used by his mother-in-law.

Twenty times a day, Marie Eventurel wonders if she walks properly like a lady, if she bows properly like a lady, if she smiles properly like a lady, if she eats properly like a lady. It's exhausting, like being a painter's model asked to hold a pose for long hours.

In another life she had got used to watching how she moved and spoke, watching even her most secret thoughts, in the hope of becoming like those saints, ecstatic and radiant despite the seven blades that pierce them. That was at the Hospice Saint-Louis, and Mother Marie-desNeiges was reading the lives of the saints from the rostrum in the refectory at meal time. She felt the same tension in her whole being, the same dizzying yearning to leave her self behind and burst into the light, the same thrusting towards the divine absolute, the same weariness immediately after the searing flash, when harsh reality extended all around the child born at the Miséricorde.

The bare walls of the refectory, the great black cross above the rostrum, the endless tables, the wooden benches on which were crowded a hundred little girls in black, hunched over the sour cabbage soup and the grey meat. Pierrette Paul was sure she would never be summoned into the parlour on Sunday, not in this life or the next one either, she would add on nights of despair.

There was only Rosa Gaudrault who consoled her and called her, in secret, my kitten and my treasure.

T
OO OLD TO BE ADOPTED,
thinks Flora Fontanges, and she remembers it's been two days since Raphaël has come to ask about her.

She turns to face the wall. Shuts her eyes. Picks up the thread of her story. In the dark, sees again the Eventurels who pretend they have a daughter of their own.

Too old to love and to be loved.

They should have taken a newborn. She is more than eleven years old. Too late. For her and for them. A certain distance that must be crossed, on both sides. That will never be crossed. Accept the inevitable. Beneath the implacable eye of the old lady on the Esplanade.

Lying in their big brass bed, under the pink eiderdown swollen with choice feathers, M. and Mme Eventurel frequently, at night, examine their conscience. They ask themselves if they have done all that is necessary to make their adopted daughter sweet and pliable, worthy of her appointed place in society.

While Marie Eventurel sleeps in the little room with its walls covered in flowers and birds, she utters occasional cries she does not remember on awakening.

“I must have dreamed about the wolf,” she says in the morning, shrugging, when when last night's bad dreams are recalled.

In reality it is little girls who pass through her dreams, who are set alight like torches. Seven are chosen to play the part of the seven tongues of fire of Pentecost. It is a classroom session organized by Mother Marie-des-Neiges. Their hair blazes like straw. Their nightgowns drift away like burned paper. The smell of their scorched flesh fills all the space. Someone says that the greatest gift of Pentecost is wisdom, which contains all other gifts in one bright flame.

Marie Eventurel screams in her sleep.

During the day she is as wise and well-behaved as if she were filled with the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost. There is no doubt about her wisdom or her good behaviour. Whenever she sings in school or in church, whenever she recites a poem in class, an alchemy occurs in her, stirring together tears and cries to produce a true, crystalline voice that is bewitched by its own pleasing tone and by the fact that her soul is escaping into the light of day in a pure breath.

B
REAKFAST HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO
her. She half-opens the window. Looks out blindly onto the street. Sets the breakfast tray on her knees. Sits up against the open window. She sees nothing of what is going on in the street. Eats her food without tasting it. Is quite unaware of what is in the room. Fully engaged in telling herself the story of M. and Mme Eventurel.

I know a few things about them, she thinks, and feels an urge to laugh.

First of all, it is important to note that the only daughter of the old lady on the Esplanade married her first cousin, to salvage the Eventurel name which was disappearing.

Flora Fontanges is utterly aloof. As if little characters made of wood have come to visit her in her hotel room and are moving before her now like puppets.

Monsieur Eventurel sometimes leaves the house very early in the morning, standing by the kitchen sink to gulp his coffee. Since the maid's departure, Monsieur Eventurel has stopped eating breakfast. Madame Eventurel takes too long to prepare the meal. Monsieur Eventurel doesn't have time to wait. No more orange juice, velvety porridge, fragrant toast. Monsieur Eventurel is as anxious to leave the apartment on rue Bourlamaque as if he were going to punch in at a factory. Often, he regrets that he once told Madame Eventurel she has the bearing of a queen. Since then, she has never walked quickly.

Monsieur Eventurel knows the city inside out, in all its twists and turns, ascending and descending from the upper town to the town below and from the lower town to the upper town, listening, questioning anyone, everyone he encounters, from nine in the morning until five at night.

It often started with a funeral that Monsieur Eventurel would follow, walking bareheaded, summer or winter. The life of the dead man was immediately commented upon and dissected sotto voce, his family tree assembled and disassembled, in order and disorder, along with former classmates encountered in the procession or at the church. It's amazing how, some days assuming you have the time by following a hearse, you can find yourself providing an almost flawless account of the past events in the life of one of the city's dead, sometimes blithely going back several generations.

Once the dead man has come to his final resting place, Monsieur Eventurel and a few friends might end up in the bar of the Château or the Clarendon. News items and the politics of the land were subjects of lively discussion. Over a cup of coffee or a glass of gin.

The waiter sometimes joined in, and he was listened to religiously. He would lean across the bar, bring his bright red face as close as possible, drop his voice, and shamelessly expose the city's secret lives, the ones kept jealously tucked away, but which slip out one night when you're drunk and feeling low, amid cigarette smoke, the smell of beer.

“In here, nothing gets lost.”

And the waiter touches his forehead in a broad and solemn gesture.

The sources of Monsieur Eventurel's information proved to be many and surprising. Bankers, lawyers, brokers, exchange officers were heard and consulted on every detail of Monsieur Eventurel's business. He closely followed prices on the Stock Exchange and invested and transferred his fortune with no rhyme or reason. It sometimes took him all day. From time to time he was distracted by intrigues he discovered here and there, through business conversations, lunches at the University Club or private chats with secretaries and elevator boys, to whom he was always considerate.

Some days, after a particularly solemn funeral, a very sad Monsieur Eventurel, realizing suddenly that you can't take your money to heaven, would decide to ignore business matters for the rest of the day and let the thread of time unfurl according to the inspiration of the moment.

Sometimes he would search for a perfect rose, going from florist to florist along the city streets. This quest for the absolute could take him the whole morning. Around noon, tired and drunk with perfume, fingers pricked by thorns, he would resign himself to selecting the heaviest, most fragrant rose that he could find, one he could offer with his best wishes to some old lady from an excellent background who lived in seclusion now, in the General Hospital. Once the rose had been offered and received with the appropriate emotion and gratitude, Monsieur Eventurel would turn the moment to his advantage and garner the old lady's confidences. That was how he learned that the notary was at this very moment at the bedside of poor Alice D. who wasn't long for this world. But what most stirred the heart of Monsieur Eventurel was being informed in the old lady's whispering voice of the fate that lay in store for poor Alice D.'s eldest son, who had been cut off by his mother. The old lady's voice almost vanished and she'd swear she'd heard it all through the door of the room next to hers.

“As for you, Charles my son, you've already cost me plenty, I'm disinheriting you.”

After he left the General Hospital, Monsieur Eventurel would take the streetcar to the Petit Champlain, where he would find Gladys, his parents' former maid, who raised hens and rabbits in her kitchen and never left her wheelchair. Gladys was a veritable mine of gossip and intrigue, fed on it, every morning, by her taxi-driver husband who worked nights.

Stirred by Gladys's chatter, half-English, half-French, often trivial and crude, Monsieur Eventurel would decide to round off the afternoon at Georgiana's on rue Saint-Paul, in what Madame Eventurel would call a bad house.

Without dropping one centimetre of his great height, hat in hand, his expression at once contrite and nervous, buttoned into his steel grey, white-striped jacket, Monsieur Eventurel would make his entrance. He was greeted at Georgiana's threshold by exclamations of delight. He was called “My Lord” and “Your Majesty,” which pleased him enormously.

Madame Eventurel never suspected a thing, convinced that what went on between Monsieur Eventurel and the girls of rue Saint-Paul could only take place at night, in shuttered houses where red lights drew the attention of bad boys.

Madame Eventurel's husband came home every evening around six, weighed down by the burdens of the day like any punctual, diligent worker.

Evenings at the Eventurels' were most lively. The couple greedily exchanged news. Madame Eventurel was rich with all the telephone calls she had made in the course of the day.

When the Eventurels were once again recumbent statues beneath the pink eiderdown, they experienced an extreme satisfaction, an infinite security, so evident and firmly sewn were the numerous threads that attached them to the city. They seemed unaware that there were other places on the planet Earth on which to set one's feet by day and close one's eyes by night.

On long winter evenings, in the stale air of the small blue-papered Victorian salon, the remarks exchanged by M. and Mme Eventurel would sometimes drift and hum like drowsy flies. In the next room, huddled over her books and scribblers, their adopted daughter seemed to want to know nothing about the city's stories. She cared about only one secret, the secret of her birth, and that would never be revealed to her or to the Eventurels, despite their research.

All that they know, all they will ever know, is that the child born at the Miséricorde was later taken in by nuns already burdened with all the sins of the world, dedicated to the expiation and the salvation of all, placed on the cross every day with Our Lord. And innocent and tender little children were borne by them, bodily, like surplus crosses.

The Eventurel couple never lost sight of the line that demarcates good society from ordinary people and from those who were, quite bluntly, common. Clearly stratified in this way, the city remained reassuring and clear in the hearts of the Eventurels, as if the order of the world were rooted there.

M. and Mme Eventurel fell asleep, perfectly calm and serene as in the waters that gave them birth.

O
NE DAY, THOUGH, THE ORDER
of the world was almost overthrown, and Monsieur Eventurel came close to being swept away by the upheaval, driven to the brink of ruin and tossed in with people who had next to nothing.

“Money's not producing any more,” he would repeat, astonished.

A series of bad investments over the years had pitted Monsieur Eventurel against the depression that was ravaging the country, and the image of his fall from grace rose before Monsieur Eventurel all day long and even at night, while he slept.

They had to leave rue Bourlamaque and move to rue Plessis, to a smaller apartment.

Madame Eventurel takes bitter pleasure in calling to mind the stages in her decline from rue des Remparts, which she had to abandon, sick at heart, two years after her marriage, because of her husband's financial negligence. And now what she fears most of all is to be driven from the upper town one day by a fiery angel yielding a sword, and never be able to return, to her ruin and despair.

From now on, in evening conversations between the Eventurels, the phrases “come down in the world” and “cleaned out” occur often, flung violently into the man's face by his wife. And the little girl doing her homework in the dining room next door thinks these unfamiliar words are horrible insults or curses.

In his present humiliated state, Monsieur Eventurel would give his soul to be called “My Lord” or “Your Majesty” again. But Monsieur Eventurel can't afford now to go to Georgiana, on rue Saint-Paul.

If Marie Eventurel is growing in wisdom, fierce wisdom that makes her silent, studious and obstinate, her movements are graceless and hobbled. Gone now for reasons of economy are the too-costly lessons in singing and diction, gone are the moments of freedom when she would escape from herself to become in turn Angélique, Ophelia, Catarina, Beline, Rosette, Armande, or Henriette. With no room of her own now, sleeping in the dining room, with no place to escape to in the tiny apartment on rue Plessis, Marie Eventurel lives her adolescence as if she were disappearing into the night. Her cramped movements are those of a prisoner under constant surveillance. Only much later, when she has become Flora Fontanges, across the sea, will her body be restored to her in all its lightness.