I felt nervous, all the time. All the time.
One morning, late March, I sat on a park bench and stared at the twiggy black branches of a dwarfish tree. Small silver-green buds, still packed solid as stones, protruded from the tree’s multitude of tough little knuckles. One shrivelled, yellow leaf clung to the tip of a branch, and I watched this leaf for a very long time. The wind blew and the leaf danced in a shifty, awkward way, yet still it held on, as it had done throughout the winter. Unperturbed by the new year’s growth. My body was pulling itself inwards, wrapping itself into a dense nut, and I did not interpret the leaf as some sign that I should persevere. It meant nothing.
On a busy street in Montparnasse (it might have been that same day or it might have been another), I saw a different man selling those mechanical toys made of painted tin. As before, onlookers watched the toys meander and jerk pointlessly around his feet. They looked like a horde of gargantuan, nocturnal insects that had been taken against their will from under a rock and were now blindly trying to find their way home. I thought of the man with his magnified eye in Deyrolle’s, impaling butterflies with straight pins. I thought of Axelle.
The air in the street was smoky and full of the steam of horses, and I became distracted by a wedding party passing by. The bride, if she was the bride – it was difficult to tell – looked young and unprepared. People shouted salutations. One man drank freely from a jug of wine and offered it to a young boy. There was a gentle prodding on the toe of my boot and I looked down to find one of the toys bumping up against my foot, trying to mount it. The toy, at first glance, looked like a man and woman copulating, but of course it wasn’t. This was a plaything composed of two acrobats locked hands-to-feet in a perpetual somersault.
This, too, meant nothing.
Nor did the ricochet sound of a woman beating a rug with a broom on a second-floor balcony mean anything.
Nor did the church entrance that swayed with black funeral drapery mean anything.
Nor did the wooden lasts hanging in the cobbler’s window, like pigs’ trotters, mean anything.
* * *
There was something else my Tante Huguette told me about my mother.
I was fifteen years old when, undressing for bed one evening, in winter, I discovered my first blood. This was long after the death of my grandmother, so it was to Tante Huguette that I brought my stained bloomers. Put up with one of her headaches, which made her as mean and dangerous as hot iron, she was sitting in a chair in front of the hearth with a blanket over her knees and her knuckles shining around a glass of brandy. Her chin was tucked into the ruffle of her collar as if she were sheltering from an icy wind. The room was nervous with fire shadow.
I twisted my bloomers in my fists, cleared my throat to get her attention. She opened one small, roving eye.
‘What could be so important? Can you not see that I’m suffering?’
‘Something happened.’
Tante Huguette opened her other eye and glanced at the fabric in my hands. I untwisted the bloomers and the stain in the gusset appeared, like a rusted flower unfolding.
She leaned forward to examine it. ‘Ah,’ she said, and settled back into her chair. Closed her eyes once more, slowly, as if even that tiny movement exacerbated her headache. ‘I’ve been waiting for this.’
‘Is there something wrong with me?’
‘It’s your womanhood. The blood will flow monthly, or thereabouts. You can now bear children. Congratulations.’
I stood, swaying on my feet, no less confused than when I entered the room.
‘A man, hopefully one you are wed to, will plant a seed in your field whether you like it or not,’ she said. ‘Or two. Or three or four.’ She opened her eyes and turned her head towards me. She smiled. ‘I feel it would be remiss of me not to tell you that you do have a choice in these matters. There is the medicinal douche. There is arsenic. There is pennyroyal. Your mother attempted pennyroyal when she was carrying you. Your father had just begun his apprenticeship in another town and she had an intuition he was never coming back. Anyway.’ She took a careful sip of brandy and, with one hand straddling her forehead, she rubbed both temples, her smallest finger jutting out like a dirty word. ‘Evidently she did not take enough.’
31
L’Inconnue
Paris, 1899
‘We could move away,’ Madame Debord said one evening in the salon. Expenses ledger balanced, liqueur poured. ‘We could go to some other city where nobody knows us. Toulouse or Nîmes or Nice. Why not live by the sea? I ought to be living by the sea, it’s in my blood, and the further one moves from Paris, the cheaper the rent. Our story is simple: I am your grandmother. Your husband, the child’s father, died. In a fight. No, no. That’s sordid. He died of consumption or a weakness of the heart or some other fault with an organ. People will be suspicious – people love to believe the worst – but there will be no way to determine the truth.’ She touched the side of my face then, gently, with the backs of her fingers. ‘You may even find someone else willing to marry you. You’re thin but you’re pretty enough.’
I listened and tried very hard not to scream. To live the rest of my life behind a fiction that was as badly constructed as those old kitchen cabinets. As shabby a lie as teaching a friend to sew.
But then one morning in April there were swallows. Queeping and trilling in wide arcs outside my bedroom window. I woke and, without my commanding it, both my hands found my stomach, round and tight and with an odd, dark line running from its centre down to the pubis. Somewhere deep inside, the shock-jab of a knee, or elbow or foot. That was you. That was your knee. Your elbow. Your foot.
I was hungry. For the first time in months, I woke thinking of something other than Axelle. I was ravenous. Not wanting to wake Madame, I walked softly on the balls of my feet to the kitchen and poured milk into a bowl, and sat at the table with the milk and a triangle of hard cheese and a hunk of bread. I dipped the bread into the milk and broke off crumbs of cheese with my fingers and savoured every bite. When I was finished, I went into the salon and pulled the drapes back from the windows. The geraniums in their boxes were bursting pink and red. I pulled open the windows to the fresh morning air and leaned out to pinch off the old brown, gnarled leaves from woody stalks, making way for new blossom. This left my fingers sticky and smelling of bitter nut.
I’d never seen the sea. To live by it, I thought, that morning, could be something.
I dressed and put on my spring hat, a soft, white woven hat with a wide brim, fastened with a water lily I’d sewn myself. I told Madame I’d be gone less than an hour. In my pocket, just the right amount of money to purchase food for the day. I went to a certain charcuterie, and a particular boulangerie, where I could get cold, cooked meats and bread for a little less than what I usually paid, leaving me with enough money to buy daffodils. I wanted something yellow, something bright.
The flower vendors in the Place de la Bastille were loud and competitive. Mostly women, women in comfortable skirts and wide-armed, cotton blouses, displaying their goods in large woven baskets on the ground, or flat baskets in their arms, or big-wheeled barrows. They were no-nonsense and jolly and wore their hair tied loosely on top of their heads, fuzzy locks around their ears, cheeks rough and rosy.
At least, those were the women I noticed that day. They wouldn’t all have been no-nonsense. They wouldn’t all have been jolly.
The flowers and plants were artfully choreographed. White lilies spraying like fountains, bleeding nasturtiums, delicate white daisies and stiff hyacinths not yet blooming. Everything spilling to the ground, baby’s breath and fern and feathered plumes of conifer stems. Underfoot, a carpet of cuttings and discarded fronds and cartwheeling petals.
I walked the gamut of sellers, each daring me to buy, until I found the freshest daffodils, their heads still swaddled tightly in their husks. I bought ten, wrapped in brown, waxy pap
er. Water from the stems seeped through the paper and dripped on to my skirt as I walked, and I imagined the daffodils opening in the vase on my bedside table like the horn section of an orchestra. I almost felt happy.
And, queerly, the perfume of flowers, the earthy smells of dirt and roughage, made me want to fill my mouth with dirt, to feel the grit of it in my teeth and along the plane of my tongue.
On my way home, in the shelter of a passage, its glass roof darkened by dust and muck, I saw someone I recognized, the legless man from the Gare de Lyon. He was begging at the outdoor tables of a restaurant. I stopped to watch him, considering whose lot was worse, his or mine. He caught me spying and palmed his way slowly towards me. His movements, they were slow, soporific. I could have stood in that spot for a hundred years watching him approach while everything else in the world flowed around us, we two pieces of flotsam. As he drew close, I recognized the awkward hang of his lip, his contorted mouth. He smiled.
‘Monsieur,’ I said, my voice high and silly with complicity. ‘Comment allez-vous?’ I thought he might confide in me some precious, private thing. But from the look on his face it was evident he didn’t remember me at all.
‘What could be so terrible, Mademoiselle, from way up there?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Your sadness is palpable,’ he said, with great difficulty. ‘Perhaps Mademoiselle is weighed down by her condition?’ He directed his gaze just below the waistline of my skirt.
I knelt to him as I had before, though my balance was off and I nearly tumbled on to my backside. I laid the daffodils by my knees and steadied myself with my palms on the ground, and a woman passing in a red velvet hat looked down her nose at me and frowned. Thin peacock feathers pranced from where they were fastened at the top of the hat, an indictment. And then she and her hat were gone.
‘You would be amazed at what can be seen from my perspective, Mademoiselle,’ he said, drawing out his final syllable like taffy.
‘Monsieur is bold to address a stranger with such familiarity.’
‘But here you are, on your knees. Quite familiar.’
‘You don’t remember me,’ I said. ‘We met, a year ago, in the train station.’
His eyes fluttered and he pressed one dirty finger to his lips. ‘I meet a lot of strays.’
‘I had a husband. He died,’ I said, shuffling my feet. My toes were going numb and my knees were close to buckling. ‘He had a sickness in his heart.’
‘Son coeur. En effet.’ Indeed.
‘He had a condition.’
The legless man closed his eyes, very slowly, then opened them again. ‘You’re not in mourning dress.’
I raised my eyes towards the brim of my hat.
‘You ought to get yourself some black muslin,’ he said, as evenly as he could. ‘And a wedding band.’
What a fool I was. My mouth went dry and my ankles ached. I stood up, dusted my hands on my skirt, then brushed the dirt away and smoothed the pleats with my palms.
The legless man watched me, closely. ‘Mustn’t be soiled,’ he slurred. With one filthy hand, he pulled at a thick forelock of greasy hair and tucked it elegantly behind his ear, then smoothed it with two fingers until it shone like metal. ‘Your story needs work,’ he said.
‘The story is all I have.’
‘Then you must learn to believe it,’ he said, and stretched out both arms to me, creating with his hands a bowl into which, I understood, should be placed a few sous. I had spent the last of the money on the daffodils. I looked through my basket for an apple, a roll of bread, anything, and offered him a wedge of soft cheese wrapped tightly in paper. ‘I have nothing else to give.’
His face darkened.
‘I’m terribly sorry.’
He spat on the ground next to the hem of my skirt and his spit was pearly with phlegm. ‘Pute,’ he said, spitting again. Some of it landed on his chin and this made me retch. He rotated his platform and, as he rolled away, gathering speed, he called again over his shoulder, ‘Putain!’ Everyone in the passage stared.
I pulled my hat over my eyes and quickly retreated; the end of the passage seeming a mile away. The daffodils. I left them in the dirt. It had been a ridiculous idea to buy them in the first place, with money that wasn’t mine to spend.
I did not want to go back to Madame Debord’s apartment, believing that if I walked far enough and fast enough, I could leave shame behind. And so I walked without direction and was soon crossing the river at the Pont de l’Alma, where I descended the stairs to the riverbank and continued east. Mounted on the side of the next bridge, the Pont des Invalides, was a stone carving of a woman’s face. I had passed this bridge before but this was the first time I noticed her, and, oh. She was cruel. Her face sculpted in ashy-grey stone, protruding from a coat of arms that was covered in amphibious scales. White streaks of bird shit ran down her cheeks, and the creases of her features were blackened with mould. Wavy hair, parted down the middle of her head, framed a look that was seething. Her mouth was a black gash, forced open by some silent lament. I imagined, though, that I could hear her, and the sound was mournful, unchanging in pitch and volume. It carried all the weight of the bridge and the people passing over it, and it carried the darkness in their hearts, too.
A bunch of yellow daffodils. Pah.
The next bridge along the river was the Pont Alexandre III, the place where Axelle and I, a lifetime before this, had stopped to watch the ambling boys. It was now two in the afternoon and growing cloudy, the sun just a dull hum in the sky. Normally this would have been unthinkable and scandalous, to be alone and skulking under a bridge, but, if nothing else, the apathy I felt was certainly freeing. I remembered that feeling I had the first time I’d been here, with Axelle, when I wanted to take off my boots and do what the boys were doing. This second time, I believed I was that person who could shed herself and just. Climb. I placed my basket on the ground and took one tentative step on to an iron rib, wrapped my arms around the nearest support and pressed the side of my face against it. The metal was cold and rough with rivets that were hard and reassuring against my cheekbone. Feeling stronger than I had in weeks, I skirted around this pillar and reached for the next, grasping it with one hand before letting go the first, and slid my boots flatly along the rib, too afraid to break the connection between my feet and the bridge. Afraid I might get tangled in my skirts and fall. With both arms, I hugged the second pillar, and, once again, repeated the manoeuvre pillar-to-pillar until I was a quarter of the way out over the river. I lowered myself into a sitting position and dangled my legs over the water, a mumble of murky green licks, a good drop below my sturdy black boots. The river. Intoxicating, ceaseless ripples like tongues whispering incoherently. And the wind passing under the bridge was a doleful answer to the stone woman howling from the Pont des Invalides several hundred metres away. I stared into the water and remembered what it felt like when once, Axelle rested her head on my naked stomach and her eyelashes brushed my skin. And I stared into the water and remembered the dark warmth of Madame Debord’s bedroom, which smelled of wood and woman and wax and sleep. I hadn’t expected to grow so fond of her.
And then there was you. The stranger growing inside me. You were a gift I neither wanted nor deserved, and I felt very strongly you weren’t mine to keep.
Below my dangling feet, the river.
32
Anouk
Toronto, 1989
On her second-to-last day in Toronto, less than a week after Carolina Cho did not make it across the width of Lake Ontario, Anouk went again to Cherry Beach. Yellow leaves tumbled across the grass and there was a change in the wind – a fresh cold, the edge of fall. And the sky was for ever blue. Not a cloud.
An infection was coming; the low-down rumble and scratch was there. This itch happened when the lining of the lungs became inflamed and rubbed against the lining of the cavity i
n which they sat. It didn’t hurt, but it was annoying, like hearing your own voice in your head when your ears were clogged with water. Or like an involuntary twitch. The last thing she should have done was to get into the lake.
She swam out to the spit and climbed up on to it and walked across to the other side, goose pimples on her arms and legs, and climbed right back into the water. Open, windy lake now, nothing ahead of her but horizon, two blues fading into each other at the seam. She pretended that she was Carolina Cho out in the middle of this great water.
She put her head down and swam, and when she turned her face to breathe, the air clawed through her system, inhalation rough and gritty. With heavy limbs she carried on; it wasn’t supposed to be easy to get to the other side of the lake. The cold crept inside and her blood shivered. She kicked harder. Battered a little by waves. She turned to look back and saw that she was further out than she’d expected, and that the waves had carried her a little way up the length of the spit. But she turned again, face down and arms trundling, to see how close she could get to being in the middle of nothing. To really see what it was like. As she took her next breath, a wave caught her in the face, and her throat and nose were swamped with cold, foul-tasting water. She swallowed some but inhaled some too, and so she choked and sputtered. Coughed. Coughed again.
Before it really began, the fit, she knew it was coming, and within seconds the cough was a live thing acting alone. Simultaneously it was of her and not of her, this millstone she had carried since birth. Each retch required the work of her upper body and so her legs had to keep her afloat. She began an awkward paddle back towards the spit, which seemed to have moved further away. Her head went under just as another cough came up and she inhaled what felt like all the water in the world. So she turned on to her back and drew her legs up and kicked like a frog, and with arms out straight, scalloped the water with cupped palms. This worked for a short time, but being on her back antagonized the cough so she spun again on to her front and paddled like a dog would, trying to keep her head above the waves. Every few strokes she had to stop, hug her body and let the cough come, beating her legs to stop from sinking. She paddled as much as she could between coughs, so that it felt like she was pulling the land towards her by a thin cord. But with each cough, the cord snapped and the spit, released, bobbed away again like a balloon. The calf muscles in her legs had balled tightly into iron cramps and she was very tired.
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