This sudden lack of interest leaves her perplexed. Is it a sign that she should consider retiring? She looks at her watch. The last Metro leaves in ten minutes. She could go back home, take a hot bath, empty her bottle of rum—and just forget about the memory of Herménégilde Doucette.
Two blocks south, a police siren can be heard wailing down the street. Joyce shrugs and walks into the parking garage.
No sign of life. Here and there, a few vehicles have been left behind, surrounded by puddles of oil and litter. The car owners must be doing overtime, twelve floors up.
Joyce glances scornfully at the surveillance cameras. She knows how to go unnoticed. She edges along the walls, cuts over to the third pillar, crosses the garage following a specific angle, skirts another section of wall and ends up directly in front of the dumpsters.
She opens the first one and shines her flashlight inside.
A face appears in the beam.
Joyce stops herself from recoiling. She quickly regains her poise and proceeds to examine the situation with a cool head.
A woman is lying among the garbage bags—most likely an employee tossed out due to downsizing. Under the sensible beige suit, her body has become perfectly mummified. The limbs have atrophied and the skin has taken on the shiny tautness of smoked herring. With her arms crossed over her chest and a tense smile, she waits for the garbage to be collected with the serenity of an Egyptian queen.
How long has she been there? Joyce takes a whiff. No noticeable odour. She presses the tip of her forefinger against the corpse. As light as papier mâché.
In the course of her nocturnal outings, Joyce has come across many oddities, but nothing remotely like this. She sweeps her flashlight over the body from head to foot, fascinated by its angularity, its empty eye sockets. She has the impression of looking at a distorted mirror image of herself.
Then she comes back to earth. Best not to hang around.
Just as she is about to lower the lid, she notices an ID card pinned to the mummy’s blouse. Under the black-and-white photo, an ordinary employee: Susie Legault / No. 3445.
Joyce carefully removes the card and slips it into her coat pocket. Then she closes the container ever so gently, as if afraid of waking the mummy.
The incredibly cluttered state of the apartment would suggest that an insane hostage-taker has just spent three days holed up within these walls. But there is no one here, no one but Joyce, and she has assumed the roles of both captor and hostage.
No sooner had she returned from the centre of town than she took refuge under her work lamp, with a bottle of rum on the port side and the tools of her trade to starboard. It is nearly six in the morning, yet so much remains to be done.
She pulls an identity card from her pocket and examines it carefully. Then, with three strokes of a razor blade, she shucks the plastic sleeve and excises the photo. She glues her own in the blank space, deftly forges the expiration date and slides the whole thing into the lamination machine. The smell of melted vinyl instantly floods the room—the aroma typical of a change of identity. The machine spits out the card, hot and glistening like keratin.
Voilà! Joyce’s name from now on will be Susie Legault.
A shiver runs through her as she examines her new skin. She thinks back to the woman lying amid the trash, her bones jutting out under her business suit.
From a shelf, she takes down a shoebox stuffed with IDs recycled from the rubbish: baptismal records, certificates of civil status, student cards, magnetic or bar-code passes, library cards, video-club membership cards, ISIC cards, health insurance cards and even a quite credible passport. The same picture is repeated dozens of times, always hastily taken in the automatic booth at the Berri-UQAM Metro station, a cheap portrait of a nice young girl auditioning for a lookalike contest.
Joyce nonchalantly adds her new card to the collection.
She rubs her eyes, swollen from lack of sleep, unplugs the laminator and pushes the work lamp away from her eyes. The light falls on Leslie Lynn Doucette.
The newspaper clippings, always pinned up in the same spot, have turned a shade of amber.
Joyce has combed the Internet repeatedly, looking for the missing link that might elucidate the ties between her and this distant cousin. But what she has learned from her research amounts to nothing more useful than Michael Doucet’s prolific contribution to the Cajun group Beausoleil, the address of Elvis Doucette Muffler Service (4500 Road 67, Lafayette, Louisiana) and the existence of Neimann-Pick type D disease, a hereditary condition widespread among the Acadian community of Yarmouth County in southern Nova Scotia, which has been traced back to the seventeenth century and is attributable to marriages between blood relations.
Even the massive genealogical archives of the Mormons are of no help in untangling the branches of her family tree. Nothing on Leslie Lynn Doucette, or Herménégilde Doucette, or the family’s buccaneering vocation. Grandfather Lyzandre apparently knew something the genealogists did not.
She still has to download tonight’s email. With a finger-flick she wakes up Louis-Olivier Gamache, fifty-seventh avatar of the species, and logs on to the Internet. A minute later, Eudora announces: 96 new messages.
None of these messages is addressed to her. In the last ten years she has not received a single email in her name. Not one Dear Joyce, or Dear Miss Doucette, or Hi, Jo! Piracy demands absolute anonymity, and Joyce has always hidden behind one or another of the false identities fished out of the garbage.
In a single glance, she spots and annihilates the spam—email publicity spawned by super-robots equipped with a business dictionary, a grammar corrector and a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People, capable of firing off ten thousand new messages per minute: Want to earn more money? Stop Hair Loss Now! Lose 30 Pounds in 30 Days, Guaranteed! Increased Sexual Potency! Hot Casino Action—Try for Free! Brand New—-Just Launched—Be the First!
That leaves the business correspondence, written in a vast variety of languages: the ornate slang of the Cayman Islands, the telegraphic Spanish of Mexico, the elliptical Japanese of Osaka. Not to mention the picturesque Anglo-Russian of a certain Dimitri, a seventeen-year-old Muscovite hacker sustained by little more than Brezhnev Cola.
She glumly observes the stream of credit card numbers, IP addresses and fragments of source code.
For the second time tonight, Joyce experiences a deep-seated weariness. The little universe of piracy is exhausting. Information spills out on every side, circulates at lightning speed and almost instantly fades into obsolescence. The moment you slow down you are left behind, so that life soon turns into an endless series of expiration dates.
Joyce looks at her watch. In three hours she must report for work at the fish store.
She yawns and looks outside. The sky is gradually growing blue over Montreal. For a brief instant, she has the impression of looking not through a window but at another cathode screen.
She presses her nose against the glass and peers at the old building across the street. Curtains are drawn back. One family after another is waking up.
In the tiny window of a bathroom, a man is shaving and cautiously pushes his nose up out of the way with his forefinger. A couple of windows farther along, a woman is making breakfast while a long-haired young girl hastily does her math homework on the edge of the table.
Joyce feels she is living on the outskirts of a precious world that is slipping away. On the other side of this window, events take their course and there is no stopping them, no way of affecting their inherent logic. Each second, each moment, unfolds for the first and last time. The process cannot be interrupted, cannot be reversed, cannot be copied or backed up.
The windowpane has misted over from Joyce’s breath. The outside world gradually recedes, and reality seems more and more a relative thing. She wipes the window with her sleeve. On the other side of the street, the long-haired girl has finished her math homework and is putting her notebooks away in a brightly coloured backpack.
Looking around, she discovers only one object that is familiar to her: the photograph of Susie Legault, employee No. 3445, abandoned in a wastebasket.
Little by little, the odour of melted vinyl fades away.
María Libre
NOAH AND SIMÓN, with sandals on their feet and towels around their necks, burst out of the house running. Just as they are leaving the garden, they collide with the mailman. After a moment of disarray, the old man straightens his cap and glasses, before handing an envelope to Noah.
It’s a letter for Sarah, addressed to General Delivery in Relay and returned with the notice: No Such Post Office.
Noah shrugs and dashes off again. Simón, who is still a good ten metres ahead, shouts for him to Come on! and Hurry up! At the corner of the street, they jump on the old sky-blue bus that goes down to Juangriego.
As it leaves La Asunción, the bus route crosses the flight corridor of the Santiago Mariño airport. A roar fills the air, and Simón thrusts his head out the window just in time to see the white belly of a Boeing brush over the hillside in slow motion. The airplane gains altitude, veers off toward the mainland and dissolves into the sun, while the crowded blue bus continues on its way down to the seashore in a thundering racket of steel.
The simple pleasures of a bus ride.
Waves of dust and pollen blow in through the windows. The driver steers his vehicle lackadaisically, fiddling with the radio buttons all the while. Amid the crackling, the tuner pulls in a few measures of cumbia and fragments of detergent commercials. Three times in every kilometre, the bus must take on or drop off a passenger. At each stop, the brakes groan as if about to commit their souls to God in the next few metres. And when they move off again, it’s the transmission’s turn to utter its death rattle. Between these two threats, the bus rolls along without much trouble, aided—it should be said—by the slope.
After an endless series of hairpin curves, the road comes out at sea level and shoots straight toward the water. Each time, Noah hopes the bus will not stop, but keep on sailing over the water toward the horizon.
After the exit to Juangriego, the houses are more dispersed. The roadside is filled with watercraft, fishing gear, rickety shacks and then, finally, there you are at the María Libre beach. Screech of brakes, groan of transmission—Noah and Simón find themselves alone before the ocean’s immensity.
Simón dashes across the road and through the stand of coconut trees, swoops over the beach sloughing his clothes off behind him and plunges naked, headlong, into the surf.
Noah grins and unrolls the bamboo mat in the exact middle of the beach, where he can easily supervise the boy. He is fascinated by the tremendous amount of energy that radiates from this little Homo sapiens. Every minute, he leaps out of the water holding a new treasure: gold coin, emerald, ivory figurine. Noah greets the artifacts with cheerful shouts and jams them into an old plastic bag, their improvised strongbox, which is soon overflowing with dripping stones, shards of polished glass, and shells that here and there are shaken up by hermit crabs trying to break free.
Noah had never set foot on a beach before coming to Margarita Island, and this belated discovery has overwhelmed him. Gazing at the sea, he once again experiences the dizziness one feels on the great plains of Saskatchewan. The monotone roar of the waves is reminiscent of the wind in the barley fields, and triggers a state of mind conducive to the fabrication of crazy stories that he will tell Simón that night.
The setting would be perfect if not for the presence of the Granma, an old yacht abandoned by the side of the road years ago, whose condition is in constant decline. The portholes have been smashed, the hull is falling apart under layers of rust. Half peeled away on the lower stern, the ship’s name (La Granma) and its home port (Tuxpan-Mexico) can be made out. Perched on a makeshift cradle, it resembles a grim wading bird lurking among the coconut trees.
Noah eyes the Granma warily and with a peculiar uneasiness. The old yacht reminds him of boat people, and he cannot help but imagine the family of Cuban refugees who once found themselves drifting off Miami Beach in this dilapidated old tub. He wonders what his life might have looked like had he grown up on a boat rather than in a trailer.
Late in the afternoon, on the far side of the bay, the sun goes down suddenly and without warning.
Shielding his eyes with his hand, Noah observes the sky. Off the coast of Trinidad the horizon has turned suspiciously opaque. High above the territorial waters, a great mass of rain is gathering. For now, though, only the precursory cirrus clouds are visible, those fine particles of ice floating ten thousand metres above sea level.
Noah removes his shirt and dives in to retrieve Simón, who threatens to grow gills and never leave the ocean again. With teasing carelessness, he hoists the little rebel on his shoulder, carries him back to dry land and, over the boy’s protests, gives him a vigorous rub-down with his towel. The same scene is repeated every time they go to the beach. Simón seems to be a prototype for a new human subspecies, half-terrestrial, half-aquatic. But might this not be just the normal demeanour of an island-dweller?
They get dressed, try in vain to shake the sand out of their clothes and, while scarfing down the chorizo sandwiches that María made for them, run to catch the old sky-blue bus going back up to La Asunción.
As they approach the road, Noah turns to take a last look at the stand of coconut trees. The Granma, alone and ominous on its stilts, seems to be watching them.
Colonial Archives
ROUTE 627, SASKATCHEWAN.
On both sides of the road, a cornfield goes on forever, as vast as the Pacific Ocean. Nothing interrupts the horizontal perfection of the immense plain. Nothing except, to the southwest, a tiny silhouette.
At first it resembles an elephant propped up on crutches and saddled with a pagoda. The silhouette gradually grows larger, more distinct, until finally it’s the Granma that comes into view, crossing the prairie on iron stilts, straight out of Salvador Dalí’s surrealist menagerie. It advances diagonally, indifferent to the layout of the fields, cutting a wide swath through the corn. With each huge stride, long metallic groans ring out, and large flakes of rust drop away from the hull.
It crosses Route 627 and disappears heading north-northwest.
Noah sits up in his bed, eyes wide open.
He wipes the sweat from his forehead.
The clock says five in the morning, and the room temperature is close to 30 degrees Celsius. There’s no point in trying to go back to sleep now.
He turns on the bedside lamp, grumbling as he rubs his eyes. He looks for a book on the night table, but all he finds is the dog-eared copy of Moby-Dick that Arizna lent him. He has made several attempts at reading this daunting book, all in vain; Herman Melville bores him. Come to think of it, wouldn’t that be the best way to go back to sleep? The book opens of its own accord at chapter 44. Noah skims a few paragraphs, but the oppressive presence of the Granma still weighs heavily on his chest.
He gets up noiselessly and goes out into the corridor.
In the adjoining room, Simón is fast asleep, arms and legs spread out like a little starfish. Standing in the doorway, Noah muses over the child’s slumber, flawless and untroubled by phantoms.
He shuts the door and goes down to wait for sunrise on the patio.
After four years of exile on Margarita Island, Noah has made friends with only one person: Bernardo Báez, superintendent, secretary, treasurer and director of the colonial archives of La Asunción—archives that amount to no more than a few dozen boxes crammed inside a forgotten cubbyhole of city hall.
When he was a teenager, Bernardo had a Great Dream. He
would become an expert in marine archaeology and go live on the Mediterranean coast. Every night, immersed in the turquoise waters of his obsession, he discovered Phoenician shipwrecks, Alexandrine sphinxes, submerged amphorae. In 1993 he went to study history in Caracas, the first leg of a centrifugal voyage that, in theory, was to take him farther and farther from his native island.
He enjoyed two years of freedom in the capital, until his father was drowned in a fishing accident. Bernardo returned home for the funeral and decided to stay for several weeks to help his mother, who adamantly refused to leave Margarita. The arrangement was supposed to be only temporary. It went from temporary to transitional, from transitional to permanent, and now, four years later, Bernardo is still mired in the daily routine of the sun-drenched island. He works half-heartedly in the colonial archives, a poorly paid sinecure barely a step up from hawking seashell necklaces to tourists. No one ever comes to consult the archives aside from old Javier Salazar Ramirez, a silent, hundred-year-old genealogist who every other day gets locked in after closing hours.
Needless to say, Bernardo welcomes Noah each morning like a saviour.
The two companions roll up their sleeves, sit down at the enormous writing table and play checkers. From opening to closing time, they pass the hours lazily moving the pieces, drinking oversweet instant coffee and discussing marine archaeology, Venezuelan politics and the local gossip. Noah corrects Bernardo’s French, and he in turn corrects Noah’s Spanish.
Bernardo is the only person on the island who knows the truth about Noah, and this knowledge obliges him to refute the countless rumours going around. Whenever questioned, he assures the questioner that Noah is toiling day and night toward his doctorate on the Garifunas. Friendship is sometimes more important than truth.
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