The First Garden (7 page)

S
TANDING ON THE PIER AT
anse aux Foulons, surrounded by the smell of tar and the falling night, Raphaël and Flora Fontanges have started to recite the names of the King's girls, the
filles du
Roi,
like a litany of saints, names hidden away in dusty archives forever.

Graton, Mathurine

Gruau, Jeanne

Guerrière, Marie-Bonne

Hallier, Perette

d'Orange, Barbe

Drouet, Catherine

de la Fitte, Apolline

Doigt, Ambroisine

Jouanne, Angélique

La Fleur, Jacobine

Le Seigneur, Anne

Salé, Elisabeth

Deschamps, Marie

In reality, it concerns her alone, the queen with a thousand names, the first flower, first root, Eve in person (no longer embodied solely by Marie Rollet, wife of Louis Hébert), but fragmented now into a thousand fresh faces, Eve in her manifold greenness, her fertile womb, her utter poverty, endowed by the King of France in order to found a country, who is exhumed and emerges from the bowels of the earth. Green branches emerge from between her thighs, an entire tree filled with birdsong and tender leaves, coming to us and casting shade from river to mountain, from mountain to river, and we are in the world like children struck with awe.

One day our mother Eve embarked on a great sailing ship, travelled across the ocean for long months, making her way to us who did not yet exist, to bring us out of nothing, out of the scent of a barren land. In turn blonde, brunette, or auburn, laughing and crying at once, it is she, our mother, who gives birth in the fullness of life, mingled with the seasons, with earth and dung, with snow and frost, fear and courage, her rough hands running over our faces, scraping our cheeks, and we are her children.

At the end of a long chain of life begun three centuries ago, Raphaël and Flora Fontanges look at one another as if self-conscious at being there, both of them, facing one another, in the month of July 1976, with their hands and their arms, their feet and their legs, their astonished faces, their hidden sex, their separate stories, their respective ages.

Let the
filles du Roi
be reduced to dust, thinks Flora Fontanges, let the dead bury the dead. It is pointless to search among the mothers of this country for the mother she has never known. Orphaned from her first cry and first breath, Flora Fontanges has no business here among the
filles du Roi,
revived through the imagination of a history student and of an old woman who has been bereft of her own mother from the dawn of time.

And if life were only that? The notion of absolute maternal goodness, just like that, at the end of the world, and you set out to meet it, directing your life towards it, anyone, anywhere, anyhow, so strong are both hope and desire, all of us are like that, like someone who does not truly see, an orphan without hearth or home, while our blind fingers move mistakenly across the soft and tender face of love. It's using a carrot to make the world move like the donkey in the fable. So many disappointing loves for Flora Fontanges and always the same hope renascent from the ashes when the furtive face of love withdraws. How strange is the life that she leads, and how difficult love is to grasp! What is the initial wound of love, for everyone, not just for Flora Fontanges who has no father or mother? What was it for Maud who has been loved desperately since birth, who has been a runaway from birth, who is constantly running away, straight ahead, not looking back, as if life existed somewhere in the distance, hidden in the clouds?

His barely audible voice, the pause between his words, that lost look of his.

“What if Maud's gone away with someone else?”

In the end they seek reasons for Maud's departure, they imagine responsibilities, feel guilt, a sort of vague complicity.

He lifts his grave and childlike face towards her:

“Why did she go away? Is it my fault? Yours?”

What is this loss? There is always someone who's not there when you need him. How to accept that without fretting, without trying with all one's might to avoid its ever happening: this absence, this negligence of the heart?

“And Maud was so secretive, so inaccessible. Who could know?”

“I never asked her any questions. I liked her to be secretive and inaccessible, so beautiful and untouched inside her mystery, alone with me as if she were alone with herself, with no secrets. And then she went away, just when I couldn't get along without her, without her mystery and her smooth face and her eyes that were open too wide. I think she sensed that, and she was afraid I'd close her up inside a stifling intimacy . . .”

“If love is a trap, it was different with me, it was just the opposite. There were many dropped stitches in the net, there was nothing to hold her back and she couldn't bear that. An actress mother isn't the easiest thing for a child. Too much cuddling at one time, between two performances, then long absences when I was on tour. It's not normal, alternating between too much and nothing. Impossible to live with, very likely.”

They both reach the same conclusion. For different, sometimes contrary reasons, at a certain point Maud inevitably finds herself facing the intolerable, and then she can only run away.

“If she comes back it won't be the same. I won't be able to live quietly as we did before. I'd be too afraid she'd go away again. I'd probably start asking her questions, pestering her about her escapades, about her past, both recent and remote. I don't think I'll be able to accept her secrecy any more. I might even become jealous and wicked like everyone else . . .”

That sulky pout, the tear on the rim of the lashes. Raphaël repeats that he is wicked, jealous, jealous, and says it's destroying him.

The boy slumps suddenly as if his whole life is a burden.

Flora Fontanges squeezes in her hand the long strong hand that rests flat on the table. She says that Maud will come back. Maud always comes back. She talks to him as if he were an old close friend. She feels light and experienced in grace, a kind, consoling woman at the side of a weeping child.

Raphaël starts to talk animatedly again about the
filles du Roi,
as if his life depended on it.

T
HEY MUST ALL OF THEM
be named aloud, all of them called by their names, while we face the river whence they emerged in the seventeenth century, to give birth to us and to a country.

Michel, Jaquette

Mignolet, Gillette

Moullard, Eléonore

Palin, Claude-Philiberte

Le Merle d'Aupré, Marguerite

It is nothing for Flora Fontanges and Raphaël to recite a rosary of girls' names, to pay homage to them, greet them as they pass, to bring them onto the shore—their light ashes—to have them become flesh again, just long enough for a friendly greeting. All, without exception: fat and lean, beautiful and plain; the brave and the others; those who returned to France because they were too terrified to live here with the Indians, the forest, the dreadful winter; those who have had ten children, or fifteen; those who have lost them all one by one; she who was able to save a single infant out of twelve stillborn—a little girl called Espérance, the name meaning hope, to ward off bad luck, although she died at the age of three months; the one who was shaved and beaten with rods at the town's main crossroads for the crime of adultery; and little Renée Chauvreux, buried in the cemetery on January fifth, 1670, who had come from France on the last ship and was found dead in the snow on the fourth day of January of that same year.

For a long time Flora Fontanges has been convinced that if she could one day gather up all the time that has passed, all of it, rigorously, with all its sharpest details—air, hour, light, temperature, colours, textures, smells, objects, furniture—she should be able to relive the past moment in all its freshness.

Of little Renée Chauvreux, there are very few signs: a mere three lines in the city register and the inventory of her meager trousseau. This
fille du Roi
died in the snow. Her first winter here, her first snow. White beauty that fascinates and kills. Starting with her own childhood in the snow, we should be able to approach Renée Chauvreux, who lies under three feet of powdery snow, if we move stealthily, as lulling and numbing as death itself. But how to awaken the little dead girl lying stiff under ice and time, how make her speak and walk afresh, ask for her secrets of life and death, how tell her she is loved, fiercely, like a child who must be revived?

And thus has Flora Fontanges in the past approached Ophelia, downstream among the drifting flowers, asking the same tormenting question of Ophelia as of Renée Chauvreux, about the bitter destiny of girls. Why?

One day she took Ophelia into her arms, the arms of a living actress, warmed her with her living breath, made her take back her life and her death, night after night, on a stage that was violently lit for the purpose. Why, in the case of Renée Chauvreux, can Flora Fontanges not feel all her blood turn to ice in the veins of a little dead girl, surprised by the winter on a sandbar of the Ile d'Orléans, swept by the wind, white as the sky and white as the river and the earth? A single white immensity, as far as the eye can see, in which to lose oneself and die, in a blizzard that erases footsteps one by one.

This time, it is no longer Shakespeare carrying Flora Fontanges. It is a brief statement, as dry as the Civil Code.

Inventory of the goods and possessions of Renée Chauvreux estimated at 250
livres:

Two women's costumes, one of Holland stuff the other of barracan, one shabby skirt of farandine, one very shabby green skirt, one negligée of petersham, one serge camisole, a few linen handkerchiefs, six linen mob-caps and four black coiffes, two of them crepe and two taffeta, a muff of dog fur and two pairs of sheepskin gloves.
Did swear in her heart, on her portion of Paradise, that she would not marry Jacques Paviot, soldier in the company of Monsieur de Contrecoeur with whom she has entered into a contract of marriage.

Flora Fontanges carries on her shoulders all the wretchedness of the world, it seems. Why can she not celebrate the joy here, now, in the dying days of summer? Raphaël seems to have recovered from his sorrow over Maud, he dreams of the
filles du Roi,
gazes out at length at the river before him, empty and smooth, where there is no hope of a great sailing ship on the horizon.

“Look how calm the river is, almost like a lake.”

It is easy to peer at the river and act as if little Renée Chauvreux were dying inch by inch, like the flame in a votive light that flickers and dies through a coloured glass. This boy shifts from laughter to tears and from tears to laughter with disconcerting ease. Like a child of three.

Raclot, Marie-Madeleine

Turbal, Ursule

Varin, Catherine

Touzé, Jeanne

Raisin, Marguerite

If Flora Fontanges is letting herself be taken over by all these characters again, it is because she needs such mental activity. As long as she is playing a part, her memory will be at rest and her own recollections of joy or sorrow will serve only to nourish lives other than hers. It is quite an accomplishment, being an actress and repressing one's childhood and youth in the city as if they were impure thoughts.

The Lévis hill stands out clear and green against the setting sun. Small pink clouds rush past in the sulphur-coloured sky. The river is marked by the same sulphurous glimmer as the sky, by the same movement of rose-coloured clouds, weightless, with no apparent waves at all.

T
HERE'S ROSEMARY, THAT'S FOR REMEMBRANCE.
Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that's for thoughts.

Ophelia appears and disappears, then reappears and disappears once more under Flora Fontanges's closed eyelids, while at her side a boy wearing a blue polo shirt talks on and on about the
filles du Roi.

Her first role, her first tour. A picture in her mind. A theatre in the provinces in winter, its grey walls covered with saltpetre, where playbills have been posted and a small pocked mirror hung under a frosted bulb. It is freezing in here, as cold as a cave. You can see your breath. How is she to draw Ophelia's gentle face, give her the necessary tear-filled eyes and a mouth gnawed by despair? It is a small mirror crowded with the faces of three actors who are busy painting their faces with all the colours in the rainbow, as if each of them were alone in the world, each with his singular soul, all confused with the powder and greasepaint. It's impossible to put one's makeup on here, with Polonius taking up all the room in the mirror, reeking of garlic and unable to glue on his grey beard, while Hamlet covers his face with diligent sorrow, in a cloud of yellow powder.

Flora Fontanges so much wants Ophelia's passion to be harrowing and true, to be visible on her whole person, clinging to her bones like a second skin. Just next to her, the Queen fails to stuff her opulent bosom inside a close-fitting bodice of threadbare velvet. She swears and spits like an angry cat. Farther away on the stage, behind the closed curtain, you can hear the clatter of weapons, you can hear leaps and muffled cries amid the dust and the veiled illumination from the dimmed stage lights.

These are the good times.

She is twenty-two years old and tonight, after the first performance, she will join a man she loves and who loves her. To play Ophelia she has voluntarily deprived herself of love (imposing her law on the man who is waiting for her) for many days and nights, in the hope that the love and desire in her heart will suffer a thousand deaths, so that she can play Ophelia with all the restrained passion that is necessary. Tonight it is over, Ophelia is offered to the audience in all her touching grace, her utter grief. The curtain is scarcely down, the greasepaint hastily removed, and she has only to throw herself in the arms of this man in trenchcoat and fedora who is waiting impatiently at the stage door. On a small street, rough and ill-paved, in the nearest hotel, a room awaits them, with a high brass bed, a washbasin and bidet, behind a rep curtain flowered in green and red.

“Have there been many men in your life?”

She feels like snapping that she hasn't counted them but that's not true, she has time and again made a precise count, with all the details, odours, sounds, the rooms, sometimes flattened grass, or the back seat of a car. For a long time she thought the cure for love was another love, which is like being healed only to fall sick again. In time, from the farther vantage point of age, it all seems like one single love, quickening repeatedly in its ashes to proclaim either her fever or her boredom.

“What about Maud's father, what was he like?”

Flora Fontanges's voice becomes curt and sharp. She has already got to her feet. Her small head, perched on a long neck, stiffens as if at the end of a staff, and her whole body freezes.

“Like the others, no better or worse. An executive, married, two children, dark-rimmed glasses, heavy beard, olive complexion, cleft chin, vacations, church holidays and weekends with the family, what you'd expect.”

What she does not say, what she will not say is that her passion for Maud's father was so violent that during one whole season she played Phaedra with the fury of a devastating flame, being doubly consumed, in her life and in the theatre. Emaciated and burning with fever, she carries her daughter like the fruit of a twofold love, almost dies when the child is born and as soon as she has recovered, takes her to the country, far from the stage and from the father's ungrateful presence.

“I never saw the man again and Maud bears my name.”

That is all. She will say no more. Let Raphaël be satisfied with this brief summary of Maud's coming into the world. Let silence settle in like ice forming on the surface of moving water, not only between Raphaël and her but into the very heart of Flora Fontanges, where the slightest stirring of memory could reawaken some rather unattractive scenes between a man and a woman tearing each other to shreds. Each reproaches the other over tiny Maud, who has not yet been born, is the size of a little finger, clinging to her mother's womb like a mussel to its rock. The man would like to make her disappear as if she had never existed, small and insignificant and unseeing as a mollusk. The woman weeps and says over and over that this is her last chance, she will soon be forty and he is a coward. They are most virulent on the subject of precautions, each accusing the other of having acted deliberately. What is between them soon begins to resemble hatred (having built up on both sides, no doubt, for several days), rising to the surface now like an endless garland of green moss that one pulls from the earth. So many recriminations, cries, tears (he accuses her of turning her life into theatre), so many hoarded grudges, so many cutting words, every time.

The era of tumultuous loves is well and truly past. She holds herself erect as if nothing had happened. Wishes with all her might that she could be turned to stone.

Without a single line of her features betraying her, without a flicker of her sea-coloured eyes, safe now from Raphaël's gaze and carefully hidden inside herself, she relives the early days of her motherhood. For three months it was a mad love, and this boy who is Maud's lover cannot have the least idea of such a loving union.

A tiny, isolated house, rented for three months, in the countryside near Tours, hidden in the trees, with a tiny garden of flowers and vegetables. The mother bathes, powders, diapers, rocks, cuddles her daughter, all day long. Talks to her as to a god one adores. Holds her to her naked breast as long as possible, under a loose smock chosen for the purpose. An infinite exchange of warmth and scent. Skin against skin. Gives her the breast with no fixed schedule, like a cat nursing her kitten. Licks her from head to foot. Even claims that if her daughter cries for one moment it is because she has lost track of her mother's odour. For consolation, she takes her tirelessly in her lap as into her natal waters. Will use neither deodorant nor cologne so her daughter can recognize her by her smell alone, animal and warm, hidden away in the countryside, mingled with the perfumes of the earth.

If it is true that most love stories have an end, in this world or the next, the one between Flora Fontanges and her daughter could not last forever. Once they were back in Paris a thousand old demons renewed their attack, just as in the Gospel, and the state of the woman so assailed was worse than before. Contracts argued over and defended. Contracts lost because of maternity leave. Roles to be read and annotated. Fittings. Dinners in town. Solitude interrupted at every turn. A new man looks at her from the corner of a dark green salon. His eyes without colour, merely glittering and mocking, insistent. Nothing is the same now. Time parcelled out. Have them bring my daughter so I may smother her with kisses! The first role after Maud's birth. The pulse that beats in her neck, at the tips of her fingers. No milk. No time. Have them tell the nurse to sterilize the nipples carefully.
The show must go on.
The morning newspaper read at dawn, on a café terrace, with fellow-actors crowding around, eyes blurry with sleep and fatigue. The much-awaited review:

“Madame Fontanges's acting falls short of her abilities, she stands apart from the best that is in her soul, and from her own gestures and her own voice, which is now suddenly reduced to its simplest expression, like a tree stripped of branches. Although she has accustomed us in the past to fully inhabiting her characters, to an excess of light and heat; now her withdrawal, her lack of aura, her awkwardness disappoint us and sadden us. Flora Fontanges's Fantine talks like a ventriloquist, gesticulates like an automaton. Real life is elsewhere.”

Her real life is everywhere at once, in the delight at being a mother and the thousand joys and concerns of every day, while yearning for a new man is stirring. She is energetic and vehement, at the heart of her life which is surging from every corner of her being at once. No doubt she is too happy to act another's unhappiness, to weep at the proper moment, and to die under the footlights. She is unable to burst onto the stage with all her blood that is boiling and turning to tears.

Flora Fontanges reads and rereads the review that wounds and offends her. She weeps and clenches her fists. Her fellow actors encourage and console her. She swears she will play Fantine again, this very evening, make the character cry out through her throat and through all the pores of her skin. Even though she is filled with joy because of her little child, just born, she will make the stage resound with the character of Fantine from
Les Misérables,
Fantine, in all her grief, bereft of her daughter and her entire reason for being alive. Flora Fontanges can merely draw from her own childhood, go back where she had promised herself never again to set foot, and Fantine will appear, tonight and tomorrow, facing the audience who will recognize her as she is, filled with tears and sobs.

A tiny article in a morning paper makes her cry out with pleasure.

“Madame Fontanges's Fantine vibrates so powerfully that she takes up our hearts in both hands.”

No one will ever know what lost childhood is at stake here or what hidden sorrow has been brought into the light, so carefully and methodically has Flora Fontanges wiped out her traces. Just a portion of unhappiness from the dark night of her memories that is needed to give shape to Fantine and make possible her grim existence. And now the exaltation of acting overwhelms Flora Fontanges with plenitude, as if she were touching the very center of her heart and making it radiate outward upon her face, in her movements, her whole body, like waves unfurling on the sand.

She should have nine lives. Try out each one in turn. Multiply herself by nine. Nine times nine. Unable to keep her distance, either from her daughter with her beatific smile or from Fantine with her heartrending cough. To dissolve with pleasure as she thinks of the wild and handsome man who sent her a bouquet of huge anemones. To throw herself in his arms the moment he appears in the door of her dressing room.

It's an accomplishment to leave Fantine's life and death behind in the dressing room after the performance, like cast-off clothing she will pick up tomorrow, at the matinée. The strange power of metamorphosis. The finest profession in the world. Flora Fontanges bows to the audience, who applaud her. The wretched poverty, the miserable tours have been over for some time now. In an hour she will be truly in love, still humming with the glamour of the stage, mad about a man as if it were the first time. And the desperate lover will think he is touching, on Flora Fontanges's soft skin, the whole romantic lineage of theatrical and operatic heroines, miraculously delivered into his arms.