by Anne Hébert
To rediscover the initial poverty, the first freshness of all sensations, with no recollection or known reference. The taste of the world at its birth. What dream is it that makes Eric live in his gentle madness?
They wash stacks of plates in restaurant kitchens, peel tons of potatoes, drive horses and calèches crammed with tourists gobbling chips and popcorn, pick strawberries on the Ile d’Orléans and peaches in the Niagara Valley, they deposit their cash in the kitty established for that purpose, and they eat like squirrels.
Céleste and Raphaël escape now and then, long enough for a good restaurant meal which they talk about afterwards, with delectation, after they’ve repaid the common cashbox.
Eric presses his face against the window which glistens with rain. The whole city is there, half-hidden by its old sick elms, a few skyscrapers emerging from the close-packed mass of houses. Eric listens to the song of the rain as if he can hear a mass of little voices telling him about the city, secretly, in the night.
STREETS, LANES, PUBLIC SQUARES: RAPHAËL has started to peel away all the lives of the city, century by century, as if stripping layers of wallpaper. A historian’s job, he thinks, not wanting to be like Eric, with his nostalgia for a lost paradise.
Raphaël wants Flora Fontanges to accompany him on his search.
“I’m going to awaken the past, bring out characters still alive, buried under the debris. I’ll give them to you to see and to hear. I’ll write historical plays for you. You’ll play all the women and you’ll be enthralling as never before. You’ll see.”
They scour the city from top to bottom and from bottom to top, they follow the irregularities of the cape in successive stages, from the Citadel to Les Foulons.
Here, there are only hills. Generations of horses have broken their backs on them. The girls have dancers’ calves. Exhausted hearts. Côte du Palais, Côte de la Montagne, Côte de la Fabrique, Côte de la Négresse, Côte à Coton, Sainte-Ursule, Sainte-Angèle, Stanislas, Lachevrotière, Saint-Augustin . . .
These abrupt names have long haunted Flora Fontanges, a strange jumble, touching her suddenly, without warning, in the foreign countries where she was an actress, sometimes at night on her way back to the hotel after the performance, or in a restaurant in the middle of a meal, around the table with the cast after a few bottles, when a last toast was being drunk in honour of someone who had no name, when they suddenly ran short of imagination and could think of no one in whose honour to clink glasses. Flora Fontanges would raise her glass. Salut, she would say, Côte à Coton, des Grisons, Stanislas or Sainte-Ursule, and no one knew what she was talking about.
“The most wonderful thing,” said Raphaël, “is that if you turn around after you’ve been climbing, you can see the mountain in the distance, and the open sky above the valley.”
A thousand days had passed, and a thousand nights, and there was forest, another thousand days and thousand nights, and there was still the forest, great sweeps of pine and oak hurtling down the headland to the river, and the mountain was behind, low and squat, one of the oldest on the globe, and it was covered with trees as well. There was an unending accumulation of days and nights in the wildness of the earth.
“Only pay attention,” said Raphaël, “and you can feel on your neck, on your shoulders, the extraordinary coolness of countless trees, while a roar, loud yet muffled, rises from the forest deep as the sea. The earth is soft and sandy under our feet, covered with moss and dead leaves.”
Is it so difficult then to make a garden in the middle of the forest, and to surround it with a palisade like a treasure-trove? The first man was called Louis Hébert, the first woman Marie Rollet. They sowed the first garden with seeds that came from France. They laid out the garden according to the notion of a garden, the memory of a garden, that they carried in their heads, and it was almost indistinguishable from a garden in France, flung into a forest in the New World. Carrots, lettuces, leeks, cabbages, all in a straight line, in serried ranks along a taut cord, amid the wild earth all around. When the apple tree brought here from Acadia by Monsieur de Mons and transplanted finally yielded its fruit, it became the first of all the gardens in the world, with Adam and Eve standing before the Tree. The whole history of the world was starting afresh because of a man and a woman planted in this new earth.
One night, unable to sleep because of the mosquitoes, they went outside together. They looked at the night and at the shadow of Cape Diamond which is blacker than night. They realize they are not looking at the same sky. Even the sky is different here, with a new arrangement of the stars and the familiar signs. Where are the Big Dipper and Canis Major and Canis Minor, Betelgeuse, and Capella? The sky above their heads has been transformed like the earth beneath their feet. Above, below, the world is no longer the same because of the distance that exists between this world and the other, the one that was once theirs and never will be theirs again. Life will never again be the same. Here in this night is their new life, with its rough breathing, its sharp air never before inhaled. They are with that life, they are caught in it like little fish in black water.
The children and grandchildren in their turn remade the gardens in the image of the first one, using seeds that the new earth had yielded. Little by little, as generations passed, the mother image has been erased from their memories. They have arranged the gardens to match their own ideas and to match the idea of the country they come more and more to resemble. They have done the same with churches, and with houses in town and in the country. The secret of the churches and houses has been lost along the way. They began floundering as they built houses of God and their own dwellings. The English came, and the Scots, and the Irish. They had their own ideas and images for houses, stores, streets, and public squares, while the space for gardens receded into the countryside. The city itself laid out, more and more sharply defined, more precise, with streets of beaten earth racing against each other up and down the cape.
Flora Fontanges is struck by the early days of the city as Raphaël evokes them. He becomes animated. Thinks that the old life is there waiting to be recaptured in all its freshness, thanks to history. She says that time recaptured is theatre, and that she is prepared to play Marie Rollet then and there.
“A headdress from the Ile de France, a blue twill apron with a bib, earth under my nails because of the garden, and there is Eve who has just arrived with Adam, the King’s apothecary. And Adam, Raphaël dear, is you.”
She laughs. Shuts her eyes. She is an actress inventing a role for herself. She manages the passage from her life today to a life of the past. She appropriates the heart, the loins, the hands of Marie Rollet. Seeks the light of her gaze. She opens her eyes. Smiles at Raphaël.
“Am I a good likeness, Raphaël dear?”
He asserts that the creation of the world was very near here, and that it is easy to go back to the first days of the earth.
She goes through the motions of adjusting an imaginary headdress on her short hair. She has been transfigured, from head to foot. At once rejuvenated and weightier. Laden with a mysterious mission. She is the mother of the country. For a moment. A brief moment. Before declaring:
“That’s all mimicry. I’m a chameleon, Raphaël dear, and it’s terribly tiring.”
Suddenly she goes numb, like someone regaining her foothold in everyday life. She wants to go home. Says again that she’s very tired. An ordinary woman now, lacklustre, on her son’s arm, walking through the city streets.
That evening, Céleste assumed an injured look and declared that this whole story Raphaël and Flora Fontanges had made up about the city’s founders was phoney and slanted.
“The first man and the first woman in this country had copper-coloured skin and wore feathers in their hair. As for the first garden, there was no beginning or end, just a tangled mass of corn and potatoes. The first human gaze that lit on the world was the gaze of an Amerindian, and that was how he saw
the Whites coming down the river, on big ships rigged out with white sails and crammed with rifles and cannons, with holy water and fire water.”
FOR A LONG TIME FLORA Fontanges has been a stealer of souls, in hospitals, asylums, the street, salons, backstage. She would lie in wait for the dying or those in sound health, for the innocent and the mad, for ordinary people and for others full of pretensions, for those who are masked and those who go through life exposed, their faces bare as hands, for those without love and others who are radiant with overflowing passion, like monstrances.
She takes from them their gestures and their tics, the way they bend their heads and lower their eyes, and she feeds on their blood and their tears. She learns how to live and how to die. She has models who are alive, and the dead laid out on their hospital beds. How long has she spent at the bedsides of the dying, spying on their last breath, on the supreme moment when the features stiffen and all at once go white, like old bones? She has held the little mirror to dying mouths, thinking to see the soul’s passing in the mist that forms, wanting to take hold of that evanescent soul and give to it an additional life, wanting to use it this very night when she plays Camille.
And Raphaël? Perhaps he has no soul. All that she can be sure about him is his strange beauty, utterly animal and disconcerting. Is it possible that he has no mystery or any hidden dream, like smooth water? Here there is nothing for Flora Fontanges, who is a thief, to steal. Raphaël eludes her, like innocence.
That night, Flora Fontanges had a dream. Her daughter Maud appeared to her, her long black freshly combed hair framing her face, falling to her shoulders and her chest, gliding from her waist to her hips. Maud talked with her mouth shut, her lips unmoving, with no line stirring on her very white face. Maud’s voice was audible as if from far away, behind a wall of ice. She declared that Raphaël had the name of an archangel and the teeth of a wolf. At that moment Raphaël’s dazzling smile filled all the space in Flora Fontanges’s dream, erasing the image of Maud at one stroke. His smile, like the Cheshire cat’s, floated in the still air, while Raphaël’s face and body remained hidden. Then little by little his smile disappeared, like a drawing under an eraser. It began to turn very dark and very cold in Flora Fontanges’s dream.
ONE CLIMBS UP AND DOWN in the city, one sees the mountain, then no longer sees it. The layout of the streets is unpredictable. Her past life and her present life also lie in wait for everything that passes, like a small wild animal alert for its prey. Flora Fontanges listens to Raphaël’s stories, draws from them characters and roles. Sometimes she can see clearly before her the women Raphaël has conjured up, dressed in the finery of a bygone age. She breathes the breath of life into their nostrils and begins to live fully in their place. Is enchanted by this power she possesses.
At the residence of Monsieur le Gouverneur they ape the court of the King of France. The men have curly wigs and hats with plumes, the women, tall fluted headdresses of muslin and lace. There is wrangling over precedences and privileges in a residence from which the bark has just been stripped. While all around comes the growl of the forest’s green and resinous breath, sometimes advancing by night like an army on the march, threatening at any moment to encircle us, to close in on us and take us for its own.
The governor’s daughter is twelve years old; she turns in her bed, inhales through the walls the forest’s vast breath. The howling of wolves mingles with the wild smell of the earth. The governor’s daughter is overcome by nightmares and dread. Says she wants to go back to France. Her father reprimands her, complaining that she is not brave, promising she will be married soon, to an officer of the Carignan regiment.
The governor’s daughter has blonde hair, and she is slender and tall. She dances a ravishing minuet. When night falls her eyes are dilated by fear.
They have named her Angélique.
For a moment Flora Fontanges tries on at her wrists the chilly little hands of the governor’s daughter. She feels a morbid fear. Frees herself at once to join Raphaël, who is waiting for her at the door to the General Hospital.
THEY ARE THERE, BOTH OF them, amid the disorientation of the convent and of time, heedful of what role the life of the past might be playing in this closely guarded place.
On the wall, three young sisters painted by Plamondon testify to their earthly monastic existence, even though they have long since been merely ashes and dust. They persist in a tableau vivant as a witness, captured for all time by the eyes of a painter who apprehended them and followed them to the threshold of the mystery, before he too fell silent and vanished into dust.
In a glass showcase, among the pious souvenirs on display there, are a little wrought-iron hammer and scissors, the work of a nun who died in 1683, according to the Sister who guards the museum.
Raphaël and Flora Fontanges must awaken a little nun, faceless and nameless, and keep her alive beneath their gaze, long enough to imagine her story.
Please God, thinks Flora Fontanges, let me be clairvoyant again, let me see with my eyes, hear with my ears, let me suffer a thousand deaths and a thousand pleasures with all my body and all my soul, let me be another woman again. This time, it is a nun at the General Hospital, and
I shall remake her life from the beginning.
“It’s quite an accomplishment to go back in time and draw their secrets from the dead,” Raphaël murmurs in Flora Fontanges’s ear.
Once again they agree, perfect accomplices in a game that enchants them. They wish and are able to summon the past to the city, to restore the light and colour to the air that covered everything when the city was merely a village tucked away between river and forest. Now it is a matter of reviving a faded sun, of replacing it in the sky like a ball of light: is that so difficult, after all?
The high tide spreads itself from shore to shore; one can hear it lapping gently against the wharfs when the forge is still and the flame stands briefly erect and motionless. A girl wearing a leather apron that falls to her feet is doing a boy’s job at her father’s forge on rue Saint-Paul. Standing in the heat and glare of the fire, she wields the forge, the hammer, and the tongs, she pounds the iron, gleaming and streaming with sweat, then takes it from the furnace to the basin of cool water in which she plunges her work. The flame is no longer on her face and she is all black in the dark. Her father, arms folded, watches with admiration as she works, and his heart is heavy, for his daughter must leave him soon to enter the convent.
For a long time she has been childlike and good, the delight of her father and stepmother. Then, at the table one day, she declared before everyone that she wanted to become a blacksmith like her father. There were no boys in the family. Six daughters from the first marriage, like a garden in which all the flowers are blue, without the shadow of another color. She wrote with a black pencil on a sheet of white paper, in highly wrought and ornate letters: THIBAULT AND DAUGHTER, BLACKSMITHS. You could see at once that it would make a very pretty sign. The father smiled, quite dazed, and overcome by uncertainty and doubt. The stepmother shrieked that she must be possessed by the devil to be thinking of such a thing. She talked of bringing in the exorcist.
A tall girl with broad shoulders, a sweet face, and strong hands effortlessly lifts heavy weights, and she smiles almost all the time. Guillemette Thibault is a fine name, one to bear all one’s life, never to change for the name of some stranger who would take her as his wife. She has already refused two suitors and she wants to take over from her father at the forge. Everyone has joined in to reason with her, the stepmother first, then her five sisters and the curé. The father is silent and lowers his head.
She listens to them, her face leaning into the shadow of her coif, her sturdy hands flat on her knees. What she is hearing now has been told her time and time again. There is men’s work and women’s work, and the world is in order. Marriage or the convent: for a girl there’s no other way out. She looks at her hands on her knees, she listens to her hea
rt beat in her chest, and it’s as if all the strength and the joy in her heart and in her hands were freezing inch by inch.
Guillemette Thibault decided in favour of the convent. But before she entered the convent her father allowed her to forge on the anvil and in the fire a pair of scissors and a little hammer, so delicate and finely made that she brought them along to the General Hospital with her trousseau and her dowry, as an offering.
What she feared most in the world, that her name be taken from her, subsequently came to pass. After two years of novitiate, she became Sister Agnès-de-la-Pitié and no one ever heard of Guillemette Thibault again.
THEY LIKE WALKING IN THE port at the end of the day, when a warm mist rises from the water, and sky, earth and water, ships, wharfs, docks, sailors and strollers, are mingled, mixed, confused in a single white and hazy substance.
So much looking at the river has given her a vacant stare; she can no longer sort out her images, but lets herself be assailed by all that passes, then passes again, near and far, on the water and in the harbour and even in her memory.
He feels like waving his hand in front of Flora Fontanges’s eyes to bring her back to him, make her stop staring into space.
“Flora, what is it you see that I don’t?”
He has never before used her Christian name and he struggles to meet her gaze. The water hovers, as far as the eye can see. Small waves pound the pier, oily filaments congeal at the edge and glimmer gold and violet.
She stretches her arms towards the watery void.