* * *
A few days later Nicolas was knocking at the door of Madame’s flat.
‘You’ve come to check your work?’ I said, a warning. Madame was in the salon, reading her feuilleton.
‘My train leaves in an hour,’ he whispered. ‘I had to see you again.’
I pulled my shawl tightly around my shoulders. Loudly, I said, ‘We’re quite satisfied, there’s no need for you to come in.’
He cleared his throat, looked beyond me into the apartment. This time, without whispering: ‘Say you’ll wait for me. Say you’re done with that woman.’
There he stood in dirty boots, his hands stuffed deeply into his pockets as if he were being reprimanded instead of giving orders. He carried a small leather bag over his shoulder, which most likely contained everything he owned. I had been fooled. Had been a fool to believe such a wretch would have had the power to undo me.
‘I’ll wait for you,’ I said, knowing I would never see him again.
‘And?’
‘And I’m done with that woman. Now, go.’
He smiled, the first of his I’d seen; it was like dry plaster cracking.
29
Nora
Toronto, 1989
Saturday morning, the last weekend of August and the final hours of Carolina Cho’s Lake Ontario crossing. Nora, up at 5 a.m. She pulled herself from the bed, and from Anouk’s bedroom could hear the hum of the nebulizer. Anouk, up without an alarm, into her routine early so they wouldn’t be late to the beach.
Nora poured milk into a pan on the stove and prepared Anouk’s Creon with maple syrup. She also set on the table Anouk’s vitamins, liver pills and steroid puffer, and in her head a voice both mocking and kind: See? You can do this. See?
The only light in the kitchen was the stove light, and she stood at its edge stirring the milk, got a little lost and sleepy with the gentle scrape of the wooden spoon circling the bottom of the pan and the sweet smell of warming milk. Outside, the sky was indigo. The whole world in this muted moment was the nebulizer engine burring down the hall, and the froth just bubbling up on the surface of the milk, and the tick of a hot stove element. Linoleum tiles under bare, thick-skinned summer feet. She stirred three heaping teaspoons of chocolate powder into the milk and filled a thermos for the beach.
She went out of the kitchen door and across the backyard to the shed, which housed the lawnmower, a rusty rake, a shovel and crack-handled hoe. Also in the shed, on a dusty shelf and behind a stack of terracotta pots laced with cobwebs, Nora kept her cigarettes. With feet dew-wet and the smell of damp wood and cool earth, she retrieved her stash along with a lighter and an ashtray full of stubbed-out butts leaning against each other like sinking gravestones. She stepped outside the shed, behind it so Anouk couldn’t see, and lit one up, blew the smoke sky-high. She looked up at those few morning stars, and felt the shunt of smoke going down the windpipe and curling into the furthest corners of her lungs. The guilt was as pungent as the smell. She revelled in guilt. She was wandering wife. She was mother.
* * *
On the Friday evening news, the day before, Nora and Anouk watched a clip of Carolina Cho’s departure from Niagara, the other side of the lake. The girl, strong bare legs showing from under a large winter coat, red cap on her head, stood next to her father, who gave a short speech about the years of hard work that led to this one day. He expected the fifty-plus-kilometre swim, a distance that would vary depending on the wind and waves, would take approximately twenty-four hours, and he explained how the support team on the accompanying boat would feed his daughter every thirty minutes by passing food out on a cup attached to a pole. The water temperature, he said, out in the middle of the lake, would be about seventeen or eighteen degrees.
‘Do you think she’s worried about the eels?’ Anouk asked.
‘I’d be more worried about having to swim for twenty-four hours. Jesus.’
Carolina Cho, on the TV, kicked off her flip-flops and carefully removed her jacket, folded it and passed it along with her shoes to her father. She whipped her arms in wide circles and slapped her lateral muscles, slapped the backs of her solid thighs. She bent over and hung her arms loosely, shook them out, right down to the fingertips. Nobody so young had accomplished this swim before, the newscaster explained. The first person to do the crossing had been a swimmer called Marilyn Bell, thirty-five years before, who at the time was sixteen.
‘Go, girl!’ Nora yelled at the TV.
‘Shh,’ said Anouk.
Carolina Cho stood where the water was just past her ankles and looked out to the horizon. Her chest heaved. She adjusted her goggles, pushing them tightly into her eye sockets, and ran her fingers within the rubber strap at the back of her head and, with a snap, adjusted that too. She turned slightly to the beach, to the camera, and waved politely, then turned back towards the horizon and lifted her shoulders vigorously a few times, rolled her neck. She raised her right arm straight up and, from the support boat a few metres off, a horn blasted. Short and definitive. The girl, moving quickly now after the last few minutes of careful deliberation, splashed a few steps deeper, stumbled a little on the stones, and dove in.
The next scene of the news clip, filmed from the boat a few hours after the crossing began: Carolina Cho alone in calm water. Bright sun, minimal splash. With almost no kick, she trailed her legs behind the power of her arms and hips, and flicked her streamlined feet efficiently like tail fins only once every three or four strokes. She was water. She was lake. Her breathing rhythm, the newscaster said, was something she’d perfected over years: two breaths over two consecutive strokes, head down for two strokes then breathe again twice to the opposite side.
She’ll repeat this pattern for twenty-four hours, Nora thought, until she gets to the end. What would go through your mind, with nothing to think about but your breath? Nora knew all about lungs and how they were supposed to work. The air would travel smoothly into the healthy lungs of this girl Carolina Cho, and branch off into the bronchi where her cilia flowed as freely as river weed, then slip without resistance into the smaller bronchioles, and deeper still into the air-sac clusters of microscopic alveoli where the oxygen would be transferred into her blood. Pathways clear and unscarred.
The final words of the newscaster: When Carolina Cho exhaled into the water, her father had reported earlier, she hummed. This, as far as her father understood, sent her into a state of bliss.
By 7 a.m. Nora and Anouk were on their bikes and getting close to the spot where Carolina Cho was meant to land at Ashbridges Bay. The lake was ribbed and pulsing with an insistent chop from a wind that had built overnight. On the beach, a gathering of fanfare. A television van and locals who had come to welcome the swimmer ashore. It was a perfect day. Still August, but the rising blue of the morning sky and the shifting broad leaves of the beach maples promised September cool. Anouk would be going back to her father in a few days.
Nora laid out a blanket and some food she had packed for breakfast: cream cheese and sweet grape jelly on bagels, sliced apples and bananas, cold sausages. Thermos of hot chocolate. Balloons jogged from where they’d been tethered to the lifeguard stand, and a few boats were anchored in the bay. A man bobbed alone in a Laser, mainsail pulled down and relaxed over the boom, with a pair of binoculars around his neck.
Anouk perched on the blanket like a meerkat. From under her white T-shirt, Nora could see the blue straps of her bathing suit and this, these stupid little straps, broke her heart.
Nora spilled hot chocolate on the blanket, and Anouk fed her bagel to a mob of dull-eyed seagulls who squawked and brayed and refused to leave. Eight o’clock became nine o’clock and Anouk, funnelling sand through the heel of her fist on to her legs, asked shouldn’t she be here by now, and the TV woman paced around her van with a walkie-talkie pushed against the side of her face. The man out in the sailboat scanned the horizon with his binoculars
.
Starting at the television van, the news travelled from one end of the bay to the other like wind. Carolina Cho had been pulled out of the water. And like wind, the story was impossible to capture. Someone said she’d been bitten by a lamprey. Someone else said it was too windy and wavy out in the middle of the lake. And another: she’d become nauseous either from the bite or the waves, and couldn’t keep her food down.
Anouk. Baffled. Nora poured the remaining hot chocolate into the sand and they packed their bag and rode home.
30
L’Inconnue
Paris, 1898–9
Some weeks after Nicolas left on a train for Marseille, I still bore Axelle like a scar, and had come to the conclusion that life would be more bearable lived quietly and without love. Because within me, in the place where my body breathed, a sort of melancholy had settled, like ash. This wasn’t sadness or outrage or even heartache. Whatever it was, it was far worse than those trivial things. I chose to ignore this feeling and continue what I had been doing before, to brew coffee for Madame. Heat water for her bath. Eat what little I could.
A few days before Christmas, Madame and I went for a stroll along the Boulevard Beaumarchais, which, for the season, had been converted into an outdoor market, lined with dozens of little rough-wood baraques. All the things you could buy. Or even just touch. Chocolate perfumed with orange or lavender, bronze ornaments, silks from China or just a good pair of bootlaces. Madame and I made up a game where, at one shed or another, we both guessed at items we believed the other would choose to possess, if we could only choose one, then revealed our guesses. Madame chose correctly for me almost every time. She bought me sticky sweets that came in a cardboard funnel, and I ate every one of them because all morning, the taste of something like stale coffee had lingered on my tongue and I wanted rid of it.
We came to a wall of stacked birdcages, right there in the street. Each cage vibrated with tiny, delicate songbirds and their fragile, perfectly formed heads ticked like the hands of a hundred clocks. They had beaks of vibrant blue and yellow and orange. Madame’s favourite was the yellow canary. I preferred the house finches, their muted, pastel feathers untidy and their movements less mechanical than those of the other birds. I watched them for such a long time that Madame offered to buy me one.
‘What would I do with a bird?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think one does anything with a bird. Admire it? Set it free and see if it returns?’
‘I don’t know how to care for it.’
‘I shouldn’t think there’s much to it. Feed it some seeds every once in a while; make sure it has clean water to drink. It could be a companion to you.’
‘A bird as a companion.’
Madame grasped my hand then. ‘You’re not happy here anymore. I keep expecting that you’re going to tell me you wish to return home.’
I couldn’t speak. All the vile things I had done. A hot ache steamed behind my eyes.
‘Let me buy you the bird,’ she said, and raised her arm stiffly to get the attention of the vendor. In that moment, a humidity settled over me and nausea swelled in the bottom of my stomach. I took a few steps towards a cafe table and sat, heavily, and slowed my breathing. Concentrated very hard on not vomiting.
Determined to possess the bird, Madame hadn’t noticed that I’d sat down, and when she realized I was no longer standing next to her, she pivoted back and forth like a lost child.
‘Here,’ I said, ‘I’m here.’ My mouth was dangerously full of saliva and my guts rolled.
‘Ah,’ she said, working her way past a pair of men who stared and pointed at a cage of tuft-headed cardinals. She beckoned with her small, gloved hand. ‘Quickly now, we need to choose a colour. I was considering the grey-and-violet one, but I’m not so sure. It has a queer look.’
I inhaled, my lips shaking, and exhaled, towards the ground. I pinched the bridge of my nose but this did not stop the tears. Madame Debord stood at my shoulder and cupped my chin, lifted my face towards hers. ‘What on earth is wrong with you?’
‘The sweets,’ I said, trying very hard to smile. A tear ran down the side of my nose and came to rest at the corner of my mouth. ‘All the sugar. My heart’s beating madly.’
She blew her cheeks out. ‘Well. They weren’t meant to be eaten all at once, were they?’
I shook my head. ‘If you don’t mind, Madame, could we go home?’
‘Now? What about the little bird?’
Nausea blew through me again and this time I couldn’t stop it. I vomited the sweets into the lap of my skirt: putrid pink and orange and a shade of purple too purple to be believed.
* * *
And then. More weeks dredged past. I was constipated and vomiting bile out of an empty stomach most days, and it became nearly impossible to fit my tender bust into even my loosest chemise. I thought I was diseased but Madame knew better.
Late afternoon, cloudy. The dining room was darkening in the space between Madame and me, but I didn’t dare move from my seat to light the lamps.
‘I thought I dreamt it,’ Madame said. Her lips were quivering and even the sight of that unsteadiness made me want to purge. We faced each other across the dining table. The stew in our bowls grew cold and the back of my throat was tight with the smell of the beef. ‘I’d forgotten all about it, but that boy, the one who fixed the cupboards, he was here again, wasn’t he?’ She couldn’t look at me and spoke as if she were searching the memories of sleep. ‘You told him you would wait for him. I heard you say the words.’ She looked from her bowl to the window and back to her bowl. ‘He asked you to leave me and you promised him you would. I didn’t think it was real. I heard the words but they were so unexpected, and . . . it was so easy to convince myself I’d heard nothing at all.’
‘I only told him what he wanted to hear, Madame,’ I said.
‘We can force him to come back,’ she said, sitting taller in her chair. ‘We’ll contact the Compagnons. You’ll be married within the week and no one will ever know.’ She laughed then, a sound soft and bitter. ‘Well. Everyone will know. But they won’t have the right to say a thing about it. At least, not to you directly. You and your family can live here, with me.’
‘I can’t marry him, Madame.’
‘Why ever not? You’ve already given yourself to him.’
‘I don’t love him.’
‘Love has nothing to do with it.’ She fiddled with her spoon, rubbing her thumb up and down the edge of its cupped face. She looked at me with eyes that were bright and jittery. ‘I don’t give a damn what people think,’ she said. ‘We can do this. I can help you. A baby, really, is a wonderful, wonderful thing. It’s another chance.’
With a throat dry as paper, I wished only for the dark to fall faster.
* * *
Madame became carer and I. The cared for. Some things I welcomed, for example, the gentle purgatives she urged me to try (they had to be gentle, she said, so as not to dislodge the baby while they did the work of dislodging me): leeks and spinach with fresh butter, honey, purslane with dock leaves, stewed prunes. These foods worked. She also indulged my cravings (salted nuts, goat’s cheese, candied fruit of any kind) because she said that to deny them would be to deny the baby, to deny you. She said that you would be born craving what you had lacked in the womb so badly, you would enter the world carping and whining like a little devil.
She had other ideas that I didn’t like so much – foolhardy, provincial superstitions. She warned against grinding coffee, or unwinding thread from a skein, or even plaiting my hair because, she believed, the circular motion could result in the birth cord winding its way around your neck, suffocating you. For the sake of peace I indulged her in this, but I refused to rub her suggested concoction of St John’s wort and brandy into the skin of my thighs, a procedure she believed would protect me from clumsy falls.
In the beginning, I
concerned myself only with myself. You were simply the problem growing inside me, until one night in March, while I lay in bed, I felt the quickening. A moth at the window. So subtle I wasn’t convinced anything out of the ordinary had happened until, a moment later, it happened again. I sat up, sweating. Next to my bed, the wicker berceau Madame had already placed in the bedroom. Ambrose, the baby who’d lived for twelve days, had slept in this basket, which was lined with stiff, yellowing lace. As I sat up, it came again. A twitch in the deepest part of me.
This. This was the moment. This was you.
* * *
But I was so, so tired. I could scarcely get out of bed in the mornings yet I still had a job to do. As much as Madame wanted to coddle me, there was food to be shopped for, meals to be cooked and companionship to be made. There was always that. I felt as if I were wilting but Madame, she was blossoming. From old clothing she kept in a trunk in her room, she pulled out the layette she’d sewn herself: long slips and swaddling, night caps and undershirts, napkins, nightgowns, socks. All unworn, a little yellowed with age but with embroidery so fine and delicate, it touched my empty heart.
The season did what seasons do. Soft green buds appeared on the acacia trees and my belly grew. The hump of it was still concealed under my skirt but I could feel it there, hardening. You fighting already for your own space in the world. Everything changed, everything. The smell of fresh bread or the sound of horses on hard-packed mud. The well-dressed gentleman reading his news or the old woman selling her copper pots. Even the way the spring sun shone off the Paris stone – all different, unfamiliar again. It wasn’t that things had become worse, particularly. The world had been stained like wood. I had been stained.
Coming Up for Air Page 18