CLÉMENT MARCHAND
‘In Montreal it is presently two degrees below zero. There is the possibility of snow this evening. Dress warmly. Winds from …’ She turned off the radio. She slid her hand through her black hair which she had had dyed the day before, down below on the concourse of Sherbrooke Station where a new hairdressing salon for both men and women had just opened. That way she had not had to go out and confront the cold rain. The hairdresser had also cut and given body to her hair, giving her a sort of black halo effect which made her grey eyes radiant, with a very ‘magazine look’, she thought. This amused her. She was thirty and she was magnificent. She knew it. Which gave an even more terrifying weight to her loneliness. She went towards a window and stuck her nose against a pane. A mist formed, which she wiped away with the back of her hand. Then she admired the Jacques-Cartier bridge which linked Longueuil to Montreal in a postcard posture. The afternoon was becoming hazy in the gloomy weather. The pink lights of the city would soon become visible in the distance, in the countryside. She loved this bridge, which seemed so light, stretched between the sky and the river like a body at peace with itself. She turned away from it and examined her hotel-like suite, three rooms and a box-room in a row, which was terribly untidy. So much for routine! She again slid her hand through her hair and turned to face the bridge and the town, a vibrant modern refrain of metal and light in the oncoming night. Dusk was her favourite time, when she could enjoy that changing vision of the town arranging its night-time ‘look’. But she suddenly felt very alone on finding herself surrounded by cigarette ends and empty glasses. She turned on a few lamps and saw the post that was lying on the kitchen table. She seized an envelope containing an invitation to a private view in the rue Saint-Denis, at the Aurore gallery, that very evening. She knew the spot: a large flat on the first floor, which had been converted into a pleasant space by the owner, Anne, one of her friends. There was an exhibition there of a fairly well-known painter who had brought back her most recent work from Tibet. ‘In China ink, I suppose.’ But this thought did not make her laugh. It had been a long time since she had laughed. And this gloomy month of November did not make anything better, and nor did splitting up with her lover either, obviously. You cannot erase twelve years of living together like the mist on a window pane. And in Montreal, when the autumn leaves have packed their bags and gone with all the colours in the world, all that is left is a grey that marks time, waiting for the barbaric invasion of the snow which the pollution will soon sort out. So, this private view could be an honourable escape from her flat, which was in such a mess. She turned her back on the disorder and returned to the windows to lose herself in the urban landscape. She had been uniquely lucky to find this flat, on the fourteenth floor, on the south-west corner of the apartment block, with a privileged view over the river and the town centre, and even over the Mont Royal, which, at this time of the evening, was beginning to disappear in the chilled shadow created by the cross that was lighting up. She could go straight down into the metro, without the need to go outside, which was a blessing in this harsh climate. And, on the second floor, a heated, Olympic-size swimming pool could easily give one the illusion of being elsewhere. She had lived in this flat for five months. Since … She did not want to think about it any more. One is never cured of a problem of the heart. One recovers. That is all. She was in a period of convalescence. And her sabbatical year had come at just the right time. She would return to the University of Montreal, where she gave lectures on the history of art, next year, in September. But all of that seemed far into the future and she was relieved about that. This evening, she felt like going out and rubbing shoulders with the lights of the town; this private view was most welcome. She reread the invitation card. In her studio in Old Montreal, the artist had reworked drawings and objects done in Tibet. She picked up a glass and filled it with red wine, then stood looking out on the town, which was slipping into its filmstar’s gown, and smiled for the first time in a long time. This evening, life gave the impression of being beautiful. She raised her glass to her reflection in the window, which seemed to be floating among the stars of the town, and, closing her eyes, she took a long drink of wine. She had the impression of seeing red bubbles falling down her throat. When she opened her eyes again the wine had almost all gone. She went to get some more. After all, the evening was only just beginning. As usual.
On entering the art gallery, she spotted several people crowded together in the front room, commonly called the double living room in the past. She turned off towards the corridor and opened the door to the bathroom, which was fortunately empty. As the hubbub from the crowd echoed against the door she touched up her make-up, combed her hair to reveal her forehead so that the amazing light in her eyes could be easily seen. Once she was satisfied, she went out, ready to confront society. She made sure to take a glass of red wine on the way, and greeted the people she knew, her friends. The exhibition was not bad, but nothing more than that. The wine was good. The wine consoled her. Calmed her. She relied on it more and more. She felt removed, very removed from all those people about whom, in several cases, she knew what had gone on to make up their lives. As removed as those drawings hanging on the wall, painted in a far-away country. A country which she too had, however, visited. As she went towards the back, that is to say towards the kitchen, she had to walk through a large room which, in days long gone by, had probably been used as a dining room. The exhibition continued there as well, but it was different. There were more drawings on the walls, but on the floor had been placed large blocks of plexiglas containing different sculptures, and that is where she saw it.
A shape that was folded over on itself, with black and shiny reflections as if a purple energy emanated from it, and open as if it were not afraid to reveal the surprising strength from which it fed hidden in its imperturbable curves, and in the centre a jewel (an amethyst?) was pulsating like the eye of a cyclops.
She was fascinated by it. Immediately, she felt compelled by it. And she searched for the word that could adequately define that object. It bore a simplistic, not to say mocking, title: Objet d’Art. Beneath, as a sort of subtitle in smaller letters, these intriguing words: ‘Video of a Novel’. It was here, a prisoner in this cage, like a strange insect, a relic of the Palaeozoic era. A stream of incongruous images went through her head. She simply could not get over it. She stood there, as if glued to her wine-glass, and examined it. She had an irresistible desire to touch it, to see it coil up in the palm of her hand, to brush it gently against her cheek.
There was not yet a red dot next to it. And there was a good reason: the price was exorbitant! She was sure that the object had been made for her. Yet she would never have enough money to buy it for herself unless she forgot about the trip to the South, but that was out of the question. She was confronted, she thought, by problems of wealth. But the simple fact was that she did not have enough. It was pointless to imagine countless scenarios: the object was beyond her means. So, racked by a sense of anguish that she considered ridiculous, she watched over it, turning over in her mind a thousand scenes of victory, that is to say that the same figures shone in her plans, each more impossible than the last. She stood there, drinking her wine, which an attentive waiter kept on refilling, smiling like a freshwater shark. She did not even see him. Only the object mattered. An object with the pompous title of Objet d’Art.
People were moving around her and the object, chatting. And the more they laughed and chattered, the more it seemed to her imperative to shield it from this tawdry vulgarity. She knew she was over come by a sudden attack of madness, as if she had been put under a magic spell. She looked at the people and could not get over so great a lack of awareness. This world of artists, critics, writers was there, frolicking, as if the exhibition were part of the aperitif, the shopping and the gossip … Whereas she was deeply troubled, as if for the first time in her life she had come face to face with holiness. She absolutely had to have it! For she had fallen madly in love
with it. Yes, love was precisely the right word. And it remained there, in its case, assessing her, deriding her, seducing her.
When she saw the owner coming towards her with a red dot on the end of her finger, she felt dizzy. As if she was witnessing the arrival of death. She felt as if she were on the edge of a great misfortune and only the object, she now knew, could save her. But Anne smiled warmly at her and stuck the label at the bottom of an insignificant drawing. Now she understood: she had to have the object, whatever it cost. And she sank into deep thought. The private view was a success. And if anyone had paid the slightest attention to this woman they would only have seen an attractive young person contemplating, studying certain objects, there, in a transparent box. They could not have guessed that she was bewitched. But she was beside herself with impatience. She could not free herself from the yoke placed on her by the object. It was pointless calling herself mad, she had never seen anything so beautiful, so alarming. Seduction had pierced her to her very soul. She could see it in its smallest detail, its most subtle nuances, even the shadows in its folds, its entrails, down to the most subtle of its reflections, and that eye, which looked at her like a burning star, shattered, just for her, the awful plexiglas. It was imperative that she buy it. The matter had become one of life or death. It was as simple, as terrifying as that. But the price! She found it hard to make up her mind.
The waiter filled her glass and said: ‘It’s hot, isn’t it?’ She looked at him. At first she did not see him, then she perceived teeth coming into focus, white and straight, in a smile that could have been an advertisement for toothpaste. She tried to do the same. ‘Do you feel all right?’ She nodded to say yes. Then, from the depths of her childhood, rose that image of the pink angel, in the crib, who thanks the faithful when the coins fall through the slot in his neck. She got the giggles, which encouraged the young waiter to carry on: ‘There are so many people here, aren’t there?’ She touched his elbow with her left hand. He shivered. She did not notice and managed to mutter to him that she wanted to see Anne, immediately. He replied – and she could then see a tongue twist into a damp red point ready to stick itself to her forehead: ‘The owner?’ She nodded again. With great ceremony he bowed like a servant in a silent movie and disappeared. But all those people were still coming and going. She stared at the object and felt better. She had finally made up her mind.
When Anne turned up, her index finger again tattooed with a red dot, she panicked. But Anne put it at the bottom of some drawing or other. Then Anne came towards her. She was quite slender and her face looked as though it were divided into two. Above, her eyes were sad; down below her smile was radiant. So one never knew whether Anne was happy or unhappy. Which meant that people always remained at a certain distance, always had a sense of disquiet when they did not really know her. They exchanged customary trivialities then she pointed to the object. Anne smiled wryly, ill at ease. There followed a strange silence, made all the more acute by the surrounding crowd. Then Anne said in her husky voice: ‘Of course, it is not possible for you to know that this is the first time that the artist has agreed to put it up for sale?’ Taken aback, she looked at Anne. ‘You see, she has never wanted to part with it. She says that it’s her good-luck charm. But since she wants to return to Tibet, this time for a very long time, she needs to get all the money that she possibly can. But, I’ll be perfectly honest with you, she was hoping that no one would buy it.’ ‘But I want it.’ This reply, pronounced so curtly, took Anne completely by surprise and she raised her left hand as though to ward off bad luck. For seconds that seemed to last for ever, the silence meant that they could only look uneasily at each other, then at last Anne went off, saying: ‘Since you’re so keen on it, alea jacta est.’ The phrase seemed threatening. Trembling, she put her wine-glass down on top of the object, on the cube of plexiglas, then searched in her black leather bag, which she wore across her shoulder. She had put on a roll-neck dress made of black wool, out of which emerged her long legs, made extremely shapely by her pointed shoes, which were also black and had terrifyingly high heels. She found her cheque book, issued by the Caisse Populaire Saint-Louis-de-France. The name and address seemed to flicker. The words seemed to move away then come close, grow smaller and bigger, as if the name of the saint were constantly passing before her eyes and through a magnifying glass. She leant gently and heard a crack: the plastic construction was collapsing with a terrifying din and she was rolling amid the debris, holding, in her hands covered in blood, the object that she so desired. She regained her composure. She was finding it hard to breathe. She shook her head as though to drive away these hallucinations. Anne reappeared and asked: ‘Are you all right?’ She nodded in assent. As an excuse she pointed to the crowd around her. But Anne did not look convinced. She managed to find a pen and, like an automaton, wrote out the cheque, exactly as required. She let out a deep breath, which worried Anne. ‘That can wait, you know.’ She immediately fired a look at her in which were mixed surprise and fear. Anne, beside herself with surprise, repeated that gesture with the left hand which this time seemed to mean: ‘As you wish.’ Then Anne took the cheque, thanked her and, in the time that it took to say it, marked with a blood-red circle the ‘i’ of ‘Video’, and disappeared, swallowed up by the noisy crowd. At last she was alone with it, and now it was her ‘objet d’art’. At last, it was hers! If only she had had the time to touch it, but Anne had acted with such dexterity, such speed … ‘in secret’, she thought. She picked up her glass. As though by magic, the waiter appeared, all his canines on view. She smiled at him, this time for real, relieved. He rushed over to fill her glass. He was fascinated by her beauty, by the incredible colour of her eyes. But paying him no attention whatsoever, she returned to her private conversation with the object, interspersed with many a private toast. She drank. And she drank.
When she noticed that the crowd had thinned out, she furtively blew a kiss to the object, which seemed to wink at her in a way that had a great effect on her. She jumped. She drained her glass. She had no difficulty in reaching the portico where the waiter was waiting for her. He helped her to slip into her loose-fitting black woollen coat bought in the Parachute de Soho shop in New York. He uttered some inane phrases, which she had heard thousands of times before. Anne thanked her again and said that the artist would love to meet her. But she retorted that she was too tired and that she would speak to her another time. She would have liked to take the object away with her, but she knew the rules of the game: once the exhibition was over, she would be able to collect it, not before. But how she would have loved to have it immediately! She kept her desire a secret. Reluctantly, she went down the stairs. Dreamily, Anne watched her leave. Once outside, the cold wind lashed her face. Next door, the Express was heaving, as usual. She went in and was miraculously able to get the seat of a customer who was paying his bill. She ordered red wine, a medium-rare undercut and chips, which she adored. She ate and drank with relish. Everything was turning out as perfectly as possible. She had just sacrificed her trip to the West Indies for an object which was perhaps not worth it. ‘So what!’ she repeated to herself. Had she not sacrificed twelve years of her life, sacrificed her youth, for someone who was not worth it, so why make such a big deal of it? She drank. She did her make-up twice in the toilets. Her eyes glistened in the mirror like moons over the Nile. She knew she was getting more and more drunk and, at the same time, more and more lucid. She was developing a split personality, analysing and becoming astonished at herself. Outside, the blizzard was picking up.
She paid with her American Express card and left. The wind was now whipping the night indecently. She crossed the street and then, a little further up, she dived into a bar that she liked a lot and the name of which, Le Passeport, had been found by one of her friends, Julien. It was full to bursting. The sound was so loud it shook the place. She left her coat in the cloakroom, and went towards the bar at the back. Colette, her favourite barmaid, welcomed her by raising her arms in the air and
saying that she looked to be in tremendous shape. As usual, she asked for red wine. Colette suggested new wine to her, which seemed an excellent idea. She drank and the rest of the world gradually disappeared in a fuzziness of faded colours, pierced now and then by the violet eye of the ‘objet d’art’. When she felt that she was drifting too much, she went on the dance floor and pirouetted like a plucked feather beneath artificial stars. And thus she spent the rest of the evening, drinking and dancing. Then, Colette invited her to go to a place where they illegally served alcohol after closing time, but she declined. She wanted to remain alone in order to dream more clearly about it, the objet d’art.
She went outside and found the pavement metamorphosed into a tortured, icy zebra skin and no taxi in sight. She raised the collar of her coat in order to combat the storm. She had no choice. She crossed the street again and walked past the Aurore gallery. No light shone from any of the windows. But she knew that behind them, deep in a glass sarcophagus, a mysterious eye shone. The Express was closed. Only a few pale lights watched over the ghosts of the evening. Opposite, the entrance to the new Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui looked like an empty aquarium. But the cold wind and the blizzard prevented her from stopping. She closed her eyes and thought that she now had her talisman. Outside the Marcel Proulx florist’s she clung on to a small, skeletal tree, a gift of the town of Montreal. The florist’s window, in which were displayed magnificent, seductively coloured flowers, cruelly reminded her that she had just sacrificed her journey to their beloved countries, and every petal of a scarlet hibiscus seemed to make a blood-red reproach to her. Then, at the corner of rue Roy, she made out a taxi at the end of rue Berri. But it turned right, went between the Saint-Louis-de-France church and the Caisse Populaire where, in a few hours’ time, would arrive an astronomically large cheque signed with her name, and it disappeared from sight at the end of Roy where, in a depressing little square, lie some chairs that no one knows what to do with. The taxi was probably going to turn into rue Saint-André to answer the call of someone who was impatient to set off on a journey, and whose aeroplane would take off in the very early morning for a sunny country. She felt like Alice in Wonderland, at the crossroads: either she turned left and faced the diabolical wind, which, as though in a shooting gallery, was weeping and swearing, impaled on the church steeple, or she went on straight ahead and tried, as a result, to inch her way past the house said to be ‘of the deaf and dumb’ where Louis Fréchette had died, the poet who had written La légende d’un peuple. She plumped for the second way. The snow was running down her neck and her wet scarf was virtually useless. Her high-heeled shoes were the stuff of a complete nightmare. The cold gripped her ankles and threatened to nail her right into the cracks of the pavement that she could make out through her tears. When she had been little, playing hopscotch, she had always been certain that she would go to heaven, but now her guardian angel had abandoned her in this white hell through which she was drifting like a broken wing. She cursed this country with its barbaric climate, and her only encouragement was to think about enjoying this spectacle, once she was nestling in the warmth of her apartment, even if violent squalls of wind beset her from every direction. Outside the café Cherrier, also closed, she was able to catch her breath. Opposite, the trees on Saint-Louis square groaned like opera ghosts. Dumbfounded, she stopped to listen to these arresting moans, then she set off again, at a faster pace. Another hundred metres and it would all be over. She would have liked to make for the building covered in grey sheet metal, the ugliest in the town, where sat the Institut d’Hôtellerie, foolishly grounded there like a pathetic double of Darth Vader from Star Wars, but she knew that at that hour the doors to the metro were bolted. So there was no way she could go down the tunnel which linked the west and east exits of Sherbrooke Station in order to take advantage of that underground passage and get straight into her building. She steeled herself to cross the three-lane section of the Berri thoroughfare. Under the viaduct, the wind rushed at her, screaming like a maniac, and caught her. Slowly, she was being stifled as though by a cruel octopus that had come out of the deepest regions of the town. But, knowing herself to be so close to home gave her renewed strength. She literally threw herself forward. She lost all awareness of time and eventually found herself beneath the awning at the entrance to her apartment block, unjustifiably called Circle Square. She hurtled through the portico made from imitation beige marble and leant, with relief, against the door. At last, the odyssey had come to an end. Trembling, she took her keys out of her bag and managed to open the other door. Her frozen fingers seemed to be a haven for all the pins in the world. The lift was there, waiting. She succeeded in pressing the figure fourteen. The door closed as if in slow motion. She got to her floor and took out another key to unbolt the door to 1404. She was greeted by the magnificent spectacle of the storm which was unfurling on the screen that were the windows. She stood for a moment, astounded by the realization that she had just walked through that gale. She dropped into an armchair. Then she began to take off her clothes. Vigorously, she brushed her teeth and took off her make-up, which had run everywhere. The wind was beating on the windows. The lights in the town were flickering, like headlamps gone mad. ‘The first snow-storm in Montreal is always fascinating,’ she muttered to herself before sinking into the calm waters of her pink sheets. But she dreamt of immense ice-sculptures, darkened by whirls of smoke surrounding a crater that glowed red and in the centre of which flickered a violet iris which sucked her in.
Short Stories in French Page 11