The First Garden (12 page)

R
INGS OF FLAME TO PASS
through, as in the circus. Has she not been a circus performer all her life? And now it is beginning again. Rehearsals for
Happy Days
get under way tomorrow. Already, her name is Winnie. Trial by fire once again. Crossing the line. The first time, she was in the arms of a helmeted man when she passed through a window filled with sparks, and her old name, Pierrette Paul, stayed behind her, to be consumed like ash in the flames of the Hospice Saint-Louis. It crackles and rumbles at her back, and it is the breathing of death that sniffs and licks her. A man carries her outside, onto the snow, like a bundle, climbs back onto his tall ladder to bring out another screaming little girl. Someone in the night declares that henceforth her name is Marie Eventurel. She will subsequently prove that there will be no end to jumping into the midst of the flames. Circus life is filled with risks and with incomparable jubilation when she passes through the shattered nucleus of her heart, in blazing flakes of fire. I am Phaedra, Célimène, Ophelia, Desdemona. I land on my feet after each performance. Bow very low. Then go about my business like everybody else.

The director of the Emérillon told her:

“You must fill the whole stage, be full as an egg, on the verge of shattering, as if your ribs were going to break and split apart. Your partner's presence depends on you, on the attention you pay to his almost invisible existence. You create him in a sense, his day-to-day existence depends on yours, which must be lying in wait for his slightest movement.”

“Oh this is going to be another happy day!”

“Hail, holy light!”

“This will have been another happy day!”

One needs the memory of an elephant to remember it all. Sentence fragments come and go, never altogether the same, reappear half swallowed. Above all, do not lose sight of the thread of despair which links the short simple sentences into a paltry necklace.

The props! Good Lord, the props! She must learn to use the props along with the words. The play of props overlaps the play of words, as when the fingers of the right hand are interlaced with the left.

Parasol, spectacles, capacious black bag, toothbrush, toothpaste, handkerchief, flask, lipstick, mirror, bottle of medicine, lipstick, mirror, brimless hat, magnifying-glass, postcard.

She has laid all the objects in a careful row on her bedspread. She examines them now with a sort of fervent lust, wanting to appropriate them for herself at once.

M
AUD HAS COME BACK. COLLAPSED
at her mother's feet in the little hotel room. She is crying. Asks to be forgiven. Her flowered cotton skirt spread out on the floor. She hugs Flora Fontanges's legs in both arms. Lays her head on Flora Fontanges's lap. Wishes she could melt away between her mother's knees. Disappear. Recover the perfect union, the innocence of the time before she drew her first breath in the human world.

I've come back because of you, just for you . . .

Flora Fontanges says: “my little girl.” Says again “my little girl,” her voice almost absent, a mere breath, barely audible, murmurs over and over into Maud's hair: “my little girl, my little girl.”

“It's finished with Raphaël. I never want to see him again.”

Maud has straightened up. Her eyelids are red, and the tip of her nose. A long black braid flaps against her back.

She explains that the three of them ran into one another at Tadoussac. She saw right away there was something between Céleste and Raphaël, and that she cannot bear.

“Take me with you, far far away. I don't want to stay here.”

She looks at the props on the bed, says they're pathetic, that Winnie is no role for Flora Fontanges.

“I don't want you to play a broken-down old woman. I want to go away with you, far from here. Start life over with you. An ordinary, comfortable life for the two of us, in your garret in Touraine if you want. We'll have a garden and a dog and cat, turtledoves and a coffee grinder . . . we'll travel too, I suppose, maybe Greece . . .”

Flora Fontanges shuts her eyes. Wishes she could lose herself in Maud's kind words. Forget the little parasol on the bed, and the brimless hat with faded flowers that awaits her. Not to think. Pack her bags. To leave, now. Take her daughter. Start life over with Maud as if she were not the cruellest of children. Pretend to believe in the possibility of regaining a lost paradise. The first days of Maud's life rediscovered. To relive them again. Only once. For a moment. Just for a moment. Before going back to the real world with all its constraints and commitments. Flora Fontanges cannot forget the contract she has signed with the Emérillon, while the role of Winnie is already stirring in her, laying claim to the continuation of a life barely begun. Enough to make Maud infinitely jealous, she thinks, as if Flora Fontanges were carrying another child in her womb.

She knows she is awkward and risks spoiling everything by asking questions that are too direct. A mere nothing could get Maud's back up and make her run away again. She'll never know why Maud left Raphaël the first time. She won't ask.

Maud has gathered everything on the bed into her mother's paisley shawl and pulled together the corners. She says that everything's set for their departure, and that life requires sacrifices and shedding excess baggage. She makes as if to throw the bundle out the window. She is laughing very hard.

Flora Fontanges has phoned to order tea and cakes. They drink tea together: two ladies on a social call observing one another surreptitiously and weighing their words between sips. Flora Fontanges explains that she cannot leave before September. Maud agrees to wait until Flora Fontanges is ready to go. Very peaceably, they plan their return to Touraine.

After a lengthy silence, Maud suddenly gets up and starts to sing the praises of mathematics. Flora Fontanges understands her to say that nothing in the world is purer than mathematics. Maud remains standing, very straight, braced in a sort of fierce determination.

“I wasted too much time with Raphaël. Now I must devote myself to my education.”

Her impenetrable gaze, its blue steadiness rimmed in black. Like a cold flame. Her porcelain pallor, despite the summer sun.

Flora Fontanges has just enough time to take her daughter away. They should leave at once. Quickly, before Maud changes her mind. And here she is preparing the bed next to hers, in the hotel room on rue Sainte Anne. Delivers her daughter to sleep. Postpones any decision until tomorrow. Contents herself with dreaming at her sleeping daughter's bedside, watching over her in the dark, attentive to the regular sound of her breathing. Maud has just come back to her, and now she recites to herself, like a prayer, the last sentence of
Le Grand Meaulnes:

“And already I was imagining him some night, wrapping his daughter in a cloak and setting off with her towards new ‘adventures.”

E
RIC HAS DECIDED TO CELEBRATE
Maud's return. Here they are all together around the kitchen table, concerned that the meal they have carefully prepared should go well. Couscous with chicken and lamb: a change from their usual millet and tofu. Flora Fontanges has brought wine, Céleste a big bowl of wild raspberries from her trip to Charlevoix.

Céleste at one end of the table, Raphaël at the other. He seems not to know her and carefully avoids looking at her. Maud is beside a pimply boy who goes out of his way to graze her shoulder or hand, apologizing every time, his manner both embarrassed and delighted.

She looks at them and listens to them, these boys and girls, and at her own daughter who is one of them. It's almost as if they were talking and gesticulating behind a glass. She is on the other side of the glass with her unfamiliar life, like old currency no longer legal tender, in some unknown country. Shadows behind a glass, she thinks, and the darkest of those shadows is unquestionably Maud, her daughter, who is eluding her again, all complete within her mystery, lost in a secret society with its singular customs and rituals.

As for Eric, the only son of wealthy parents, Flora Fontanges's surprise has no limits. It strikes her that he is playing at poverty, like Christ leaving his father's Paradise to assume the human condition. Perhaps Eric, too, has some original sin to be forgiven by the city's poor who have been gravely offended from the beginning of time?

Eric says that mercury has been found in the body of a salmon caught in the Saguenay, that if this goes on the entire earth will be nothing but pollution and waste.

Céleste says we won't save the earth from destruction by living as if it were the year one thousand, and that the atomic bomb is available to anyone who knows how to use it.

Eric declares that a certain way of life, which may seem archaic, is still our only recourse in the face of the progressive dehumanization of a world given over to machines. Eric dreams of divesting himself of artifice and of being restored to man's original poverty, to the free exercise of all his rekindled senses. It is a dream he would share with all those with him now who listen in silence as if his remarks, although familiar, were being clearly uttered to night for the first and only time, though frequently summarized and contemplated in the obscurity of each person's heart, down the length of the days . . .

Eric's voice is slow and deep, with muffled vibrations. It is compelling and it carries to the heart.

Eric lowers his head, his long smooth hair falls on either side of his face. He appears to be blessing the meal and the guests, and the guests too feel that they are blessed and confirmed in grace by Eric.

Silence, for a moment, remains upon them like peace.

The first to rise is Céleste. She asks, in a powerful voice:

“Who wants a glass of milk?”

They have abandoned their half-full glasses of wine and dived into tall glasses of cold milk as if quenching their thirst on the first morning of the world.

Maud and Raphaël have slipped away behind the glass bead curtain that separates the kitchen from the room beside it. The curtain is raised, then falls amid a clinking rain of beads. Through the thin screen of multicoloured balls Maud and Raphaël can be heard talking sotto voce.

In one leap Céleste is at the front door, slamming it violently before she disappears into the night.

E
VERY NIGHT WHEN SHE RETURNS
to the hotel after rehearsal, Maud is there waiting. Before the door is even fully open, Flora Fontanges calls out:

“Maud, are you there?”

Maud kisses her on the cheeks, forehead, nose, neck. Declares that she hasn't moved all day. Mathematics alone has kept her company. Sometimes she adds that Raphaël called and that she hung up immediately. She says Raphaël with a sort of strange diligence, as if the name cannot totally blend into the sentence, but remains separate, deserving another fate. She goes on quickly:

“Don't worry, Mother dear. Nothing bad can happen to us now. I'm your prisoner. While I wait for Touraine. I'm fastened to this room, my two feet sunk in your carpet. The whole city, including Raphaël, could collapse under my windows and I wouldn't budge.”

That great stillness spreads through the room. Flora Fontanges and her daughter rest, lying one beside the other, pretending not to feel the obscure menace that prowls in the dark air. Maud sometimes weeps in the middle of the night, causing her mother to wake with a start. She says her tears aren't real, but dream tears, tells her to pay no attention to them. In the morning, it all seems forgotten, and Maud wolfs down her breakfast as if it were the only thing in the world that was genuine.

How many days shut away in a hotel room, how many nights of dream weeping did it take to bring Maud to this intense agitation that makes her spring to her feet at her mother's arrival? Her freshly washed hair is pasted against her shoulders and back, she smells of soft water and shampoo. Her pale face seems smaller, as if cramped, like a closed fist. Her too wide-open eyes shine as if she has a fever.

Despite her fatigue, Flora Fontanges wants to resume the everyday acts that, for some time now, have united her to her daughter, night after night, in the little hotel room on rue Sainte Anne. Why not trust tote force of habit, weave it patiently around Maud like a slender spider's web, to hold her for a little while yet?

She need only act as if nothing has happened, neither Maud's strange fever nor her abrupt movements nor her way of suddenly talking too loud and gesticulating for no reason.

Flora Fontanges arranges her daughter's hair for the night, braiding it like a little girl's. Maud grows impatient. Says she's going to have her hair cut tomorrow and Raphaël won't recognize her. She becomes voluble and moves incessantly in the cluttered room. She talks about the soft light of Touraine and the pleasant, ordinary life they'll live there, on the banks of the Loire. Without transition she declares that no one in the world walks like Raphaël and that no one in the world has teeth as white as Raphaël's. She says that, and she looks out the window. She appears to want to challenge someone invisible who might be hidden in the city. She is out of breath and is speaking louder and louder. Leaves the window. Approaches her mother; who is sitting on the bed. Declares that she can't stand being shut up and wants to go out.

Maud undoes her wet braids. Dons a red mini-skirt and white boots. Her long bare legs. The small bag slung over her shoulder.

“Come on, Mama, hurry, we're going out! Hurry up, you're coming with me!”

Then begins a tour of the city such as Flora Fontanges has never experienced.

Avenues filled with people in the heat of the night. The glorious summer night riddled with stars. The maze of little streets. Blinking signs. Discothèques come into view here and there along the streets, from the largest to the smallest, some of them tiny and half-hidden under an outside staircase, dug into the earth like mouse holes. Maud goes from one to the next, unable to decide. Makes comparisons as she goes. Opens doors just a crack. Hazards a glance. Gusts of sound, muffled throbbing, clouds of smoke rise up to her face, while her cheeks, her nose, her forehead reflect the colours of all the lights.

This is a girl who has sworn she'll explode, all alone, in the music and the noise, a free and independent creature. She has laid this odd bet, to take a tired old woman along with her, as a witness. She pulls her by the hand. At every club, Maud shrinks back, shakes her head, then takes off again with Flora Fontanges on her heels.

Sometimes Maud looks behind her, over her shoulder. She claims someone's been following her since the hotel.

It's not that the deep and noisy retreat where Maud is engulfed with Flora Fontanges seems reassuring, but they must go inside somewhere to escape the boy who is hidden in the darkness and has been shadowing the two women since the hotel, maintaining just enough distance so they never see his face. Only his feline gait gives him away.