The First Garden

by Anne Hébert

  Raphaël tells his story, as if he sees Maud in front of him, as if he’s astounded to find her there.

  “It was supper time. We squeezed together to make room for her. We all stopped eating to watch her eat. Like a starving dog. She wrapped her left arm around her plate as if she were protecting it from thieves. We’d never seen such hunger. She made all kinds of sounds with her mouth, her teeth, her throat. We were absolutely amazed. When she’d finished she pushed her plate away and started to cry and tremble from the cold.”

  Again, the girl with the strident voice:

  “We all tried to comfort her and warm her with sweaters, scarves, hugs, but it was Raphaël who put her in his bed, under the blanket, and offered his pyjama top to sleep in.

  “I kept her there in my bed for three nights. The first night, she curled up against the wall and her whole body was shaken by sobs. The second night, she slept very peacefully, her hip brushing against me when she turned over. The third night she put her arms around my neck, cried for a while and kissed me on the neck.”

  Céleste continues grumpily, as if Maud’s behaviour is again pushing her into heavy disapproval.

  “The fourth night, I let her know that Raphaël wasn’t the only available guy here. She didn’t have to be asked twice to leave his bed. She soon picked another guy from the ones who were looking her over and the ones she’d been giving the eye to. She said 'François,' pointing at him, and he was kind of uncomfortable because he didn’t know how to behave with her: she’d picked him so casually, as if it wasn’t important. But the next night she was right back in Raphaël’s bed.”

  Eric says the commune had been a great dream of his that had finally been realized, on rue Mont-Carmel.

  Céleste points out that Raphaël and Maud almost caused the break-up of the commune. One fine night they went off to live together as a couple, like mom-and-dad in the olden days, back in the Dark Ages.

  Céleste laughs, says the whole thing’s fucking pathetic and reactionary.

  Soon, Céleste confesses that she loves hanging out, just she and her sleeping bag, the search for a place to sleep being her daily problem, and that she only comes back to rue Mont-Carmel when she has no other choice. She points to the two silent boys who are standing next to Eric like unobtrusive acolytes and says there’s not much choice since Raphaël left.

  Flora Fontanges has been looking at the yellowed press clippings pinned to the wall of the small bedroom that opens off the kitchen.

  Wanted. Maud, tall, slender, fair complexion, long black hair, aged 13, wanted, no questions asked, her mother weeps, aged 15, 17, 18, no questions asked, her mother begs, long black hair, fair complexion, a runaway. Incomprehensible. She runs away. Can’t help herself.

  Miss Julie, painted face, blonde curly wig, whalebone collar, leg-o’mutton sleeves. Ah! how pretty the poster is, and see how completely Flora Fontanges, with all her pain and sorrow, disappears under the features ofJulie wrangling with the valet.

  Phaedra. A long white tunic with a Greek statue’s rigid folds, eyes with false lashes and blue shadow, a hand on the breast feeling the pain of a heart that should never have been brought into this world.

  The show must go on. Here is the frail heroine of The Glass Menagerie who moves as if she is broken, who grips our hearts. The tears are real, everything is real, the stomach pain, the urge to vomit. Wait for the end of the act. Come back for the bow. Six curtain calls. Radiant through her tears. Her real daughter disappeared three days ago.

  The wheel turns. Everything is beginning again. This woman who was thought to have withdrawn from the world is back on stage. Flora Fontanges has returned to the city of her birth where she will play the part of Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. The photograph resembles her, though she looks old and too made-up, with dark lips, delicate plucked eyebrows, bare brow, hair in broad waves breaking over her shoulders: a woman from another age. It is Raphaël who cut out the newspaper picture and stuck it on the wall.

  He explains that Maud herself pinned up the other clippings. He has merely added one last “wanted” notice, written by him and never published, to come full circle, right beside the picture of Flora Fontanges advertising Happy Days.

  Maud, aged twenty, faded jeans, white T-shirt, navy jacket, red sneakers, long black hair . . .

  Flora Fontanges points out that the notice and the posters alternate neatly along the wall, as if their mutual dependence were obvious. As if it’s clear that Maud vanishes into the dark every time her mother comes back on stage, to face the lights, the cheering audience . . .

  She thinks: What a mess! and covers her face with her hands.

  In the next room, Eric’s halting voice says again that the notion of a worldwide fusion of brotherly love has always haunted him.

  ONE WINTER DAY LONG AGO, when she had just arrived at the Eventurels on rue Bourlamaque, she was overcome by a startling thought that would not go away and threatened to plunge her into despair: that she would be no one but herself all her life, never able to change, that she would be Pierrette Paul forever, never escaping, confined within the same skin, tethered to the same heart, with no hope of change, just like that, with nothing ever happening, until old age and death. It was as if she could no longer move, as if both feet had sunk into the snow. Her breath formed a small curl of mist in the cold air.

  People passed on the sidewalk beside her, walking quickly, faces red.

  She was overcome by tremendous curiosity about these people she didn’t know, by a strange attraction. How could she truly put herself in their places, understand what went on in their heads, in the most secret recesses of their lives? Suddenly she felt a great urge to become someone else, one of those passersby walking through the snow, for example. Her deepest desire was to live in some other place than within herself, for just a minute, one brief minute, to see what it is like inside a head other than her own, another body, to be incarnated anew, to know what it is like in some other place, to know new sorrows, new joys, to try on a different skin from her own, the way one tries on gloves in a store, to stop gnawing on the one bone of her actual life and feed on strange, disorienting substances. To shatter into ten, a hundred, a thousand indestructible fragments; to be ten, a hundred, a thousand new and indestructible persons. To go from one to the other, not lightly as one changes dresses, but to inhabit profoundly another being with all the knowledge, the compassion, the sense of rootedness, the efforts to adapt, and the strange and fearsome mystery that would entail.

  She is standing, motionless, across from the apartment of M. and Mme Eventurel who have just adopted her. She has just recovered from a serious case of scarlet fever. She does not move but stands frozen there, half-buried in the snow, petrified at the thought of never being able to get out of herself.

  All that happens long before rue Plessis. On rue Bourlamaque.

  She does not yet know that one day she will become an actress and will break her heart into a thousand pieces as brilliant as suns.

  The grey sky is low enough to touch with a finger, on the rim of the horizon. A small girl muffled like a roly-poly is standing in the snow at twilight, outside the door of 101, rue Bourlamaque. This is the winter hour, the saddest hour of all. Twilight. Dusk. The hour before night. When day has already withdrawn. The wan light given off by the snow as far as the eye can see, like a muted lantern. This small quantity of day at ground level exhales its cold breath, half-swallowed by the snow.

  She dreams of having access to the sun and to the night, of learning how the light progresses, at the risk of burning herself therein.

  Someone calls to her from the window, scarcely ajar because of the cold. They name her Marie Eventurel. It is a new name, pure product of the imagination of a barren old couple who yearn for a child. Now she need only answer to the name that she’s been given and say yes, that’s me, my name is Marie Eventurel, I’ll do whatever you tell me, I
’ll be the person you want me to be, as you wish me to be, until my longing to be another person takes over, pushing me and pulling me far from you and the city, across the sea, where I shall be an actress, in the old country.

  The day will come when she will choose her own name, and it will be the secret name, hidden in her heart since the dawn of time, the one and only name that will designate her among all others, and allow her all the metamorphoses needed for her life.

  If you aren’t careful the child could freeze to death. Flora Fontanges can do nothing for the little girl in the snow. Except take responsibility for the tingling and burning of her cold-numbed fingers and toes as soon as she enters the Eventurels’ overheated apartment.

  For the brief time she is there, Flora Fontanges runs the risk of seeing Madame Eventurel herself, her little black velvet hat, her veil, her straight back, her solemn slowness, while the apartment on rue Bourlamaque will open up under her footsteps, with its small dark bedrooms and long corridor.

  Here was the start of everything in her life with M. and Mme Eventurel.

  “Come on, Raphaël, let’s go!”

  Everything goes to wrack and ruin, the house of blackened bricks, the outside wooden staircases and most of all, the gaping opening to the basement, dug below street level, a shadowy hole in which no doubt is hidden the ghost of Monsieur Eventurel in his steel grey suit with white stripes, infinitely dignified, despite bankruptcy and seizure.

  Flora Fontanges has nothing more to do on rue Bourlamaque, she quickens her pace and pulls Raphaël along by his arm.

  AT TIMES A SORT OF feverish anticipation appears on Raphaël’s face from looking at her so hard, when he is no longer altogether sure of what he’s saying, caught unprepared, waiting for her to ask the questions, to answer them herself. Suddenly, he hopes for everything from her. Absolute revelation. Is she not in the fullness of her womanhood, an accomplished individual for whom love and the pain of love have no secrets?

  Raphaël’s beauty, his profound and untouched youth, his look of enchantment when he recites a poem.

  I am the child you love to sing to sleep.

  They are both alone in Eric’s apartment. She, on the chair that is intended for her; he, kneeling at her feet. He buries his face in the folds of Flora Fontanges’s skirt, complains he’s been dying of loneliness since Maud’s gone away.

  She takes Raphaël’s head in her hands, her long slender fingers graze the forehead, the soft eyelids, the slender bridge of the nose, the damp mouth, the smooth cheeks pierced by a surprisingly rough young beard.

  For a moment he shuts his eyes between her hands, surrendering himself like a cat. Then leaps to his feet. Pleads with her:

  “Please, Madame Fontanges, you can do better than that, you can console me like a real woman who fears neither God nor the devil. Like a real mother endlessly bringing new life into the world, generous in forgiving. Take me with you tonight to the hotel, I beg you. I don’t want to sleep alone and I don’t want Céleste in my bed.”

  Flora Fontanges says that she fears neither God nor the devil and that she’s not sure she has ever been a real mother. Only the streets of the city frighten her and perhaps, too, the sorrows of others when she can do nothing to console them.

  “You’re tough, Madame Fontanges, but I can get along very well without you, you know . . .”

  “That’s too bad for you, Raphaël dear, and too bad for me.”

  They walked together through the summer night, along fragrant streets murmuring with life. He began very soon to look around him, noticing all sorts of charming and amusing things in the city, so that when they reached the hotel on rue Sainte Anne he seemed altogether comforted and happy.

  He fell asleep almost at once, fully clothed, on one of the twin beds, while Flora Fontanges watched over him in the dark, as one watches over a sick child.

  Raphaël’s finely delineated features persist in the room, where all the lights have been extinguished. Her fingers preserve the memory of them, as if she were blind.

  SHE DISLIKES BEING WATCHED BY the director. Gilles Perrault’s blue eyes through his little round glasses make her think of his resemblance to an old owl. However, in reality this man, apparently innocuous and bland, is a fierce hunter lying in wait for whatever will claw, bite, damage the soul and body of Flora Fontanges. Ever since he started dreaming about an emaciated Winnie, confined to her sand-pile, slowly suffocated grain by grain, facing an enraptured audience. A small corrida for an old woman whose death never ends.

  He insists that she go on a diet, even though she is already very slender and tall. He rubs his hands. He will wait as long as necessary for the degeneration of Flora Fontanges to occur. He wants her to be as brittle as glass, to be gravely wounded and totally submissive to old age and death. He grants her one final extension before the first reading. All that matters now is July fifteenth. Once again he looks defiantly into her face. The myopic’s single-minded insistence. He cracks his knuckles. Swallows.

  Flora Fontanges promises herself not to touch the script of Happy Days before July fifteenth. Vows that she will enjoy her pathetic freedom until July fifteenth. The first reading will be unsullied for her. She will probably stammer as she faces her partner, grope in the dark of her own soul for the fleeting soul of Winnie. In the meantime she will let Raphaël, Eric, or Céleste keep her company, their radiant youth surrounding her, a kind of feast.

  There will always be time for Flora Fontanges to offer up her spirit on the stage, just once more, until death ensues.

  ERIC SAYS STRANGE THINGS. IN his mouth words are urgent, they jostle and clash, inaudible, evasive, they explode, then silence briefly falls and they break out again, brutal and sharp. You could believe that voices other than his are seeking an outlet on his tongue and in his mouth. He is saddled with incoherent voices. He never knows exactly what is being spoken by his lips. Sometimes he thinks he is alone within himself. For a moment, he breathes and is appeased. Then it all begins again. Eric is haunted by the living and the dead. The whole city, starting with his closest relatives, seems to have chosen him as a spokesman. Some voices call for absolute love, others for money pure and simple, all complain that earthly goods are insufficient though they look fine, a broken voice is heard among the others talking about the promise, never kept, of eternal life. The voice is that of Sister Eulalie-de-Dieu, a distant cousin of Eric’s who died at twenty-three, at the Hôtel-Dieu, speaking out of the heart of death.

  His head slumps to his chest, his hair plastered down incredibly smoothly and falling on either side, making him look like a drowned man. He says we must return to the source of the earth, back to our original brotherhood with plants and animals, stop believing in the arrogant separation of woman and man from the rest of creation.

  “All evil stems from the pretentious invention of the soul that’s been reserved for human beings. Either this mysterious soul doesn’t exist at all or it is incarnate everywhere, rudimentary or complex depending on the bodies, the splendid terrestrial bodies. The same breath of life, the same energy, makes a leaf stir in the wind, creates a small pink shrimp or a nervous and sensitive cat, and creates the man and woman who study the mysteries of life.”

  Eric hears scraps of conversation. The everyday words of his parents come back to him, greedy and stupid. Speculation, markets, real estate, selling, buying . . . Eric refused his legacy when his parents died in a car accident. He took a vow of poverty in the secrecy of his heart. He fidgets, stammers, talks about business offices and banks—dens of iniquity.

  Eric’s incoherence bothers no one; an obscure thread at the very root of his being seems to link his muddled words. Eric wonders about the inhabitants of the city just as persistently as his parents used to keep an eye on real estate fluctuations. The living and the dead cry out in him with broken voices.

  “If I get to sign that contract, I’ll go crazy with joy. This time, it’ll be
the salvation of me.”

  What can he do about his mother’s final words? If it’s true that she had no time to sign the hoped-for contract, did she see in a flash the blind face of her salvation before death burned her eyes? And what kind of salvation is there when the body no longer exists, is a blazing torch amid the twisted metal of an automobile in flames?

  Eric keeps repeating that the only good poverty is voluntary, that the other kind, the kind that is imposed and causes pain, is criminal and destructive. Sometimes when he and his friends are together, he denounces the poverty of little Claire Lagueux, who was crooked and bent because she never slept in a real bed of the proper size, but in a deal box set on the kitchen floor, until she was five.

  Eric thinks that knowledge and learning must pass first through the body. He has only pity for those students who live in an ivory tower, retreat their only way of dwelling in the world.

  “I have chosen you and you have chosen me. Together we shall possess the earth.”

  All these boys and girls around him have trained themselves to be patient through manual tasks. They are attentive to their five senses, cultivating them as if they were miracles. To tell hot from cold, to experience dry and wet, bitter and salt, smooth and rough, to learn how muscular effort bears and supports the weight of things, to breathe the smell of the city, grasp the passage of light on the river, communicate directly with the earth, to have no car or motor-scooter, to travel through the city step by step, at the rhythm of one’s heart, to study the earth with one’s entire body, like a small child discovering the world.

  They set themselves to work at it courageously, giving up their parents’ money and often their education, which depends on money. Sometimes, at night, before they fall into a heavy sleep, they listen to their aching bodies vibrate with the accumulated experience of the day. What they hear is like a harsh and pungent song as the whole body gives over its secrets, which the heart can hear distinctly in the night.