by Anne Hébert
The first to rise is Céleste. She asks, in a powerful voice:
“Who wants a glass of milk?”
They have abandoned their half-full glasses of wine and dived into tall glasses of cold milk as if quenching their thirst on the first morning of the world.
Maud and Raphaël have slipped away behind the glass bead curtain that separates the kitchen from the room beside it. The curtain is raised, then falls amid a clinking rain of beads. Through the thin screen of multicoloured balls Maud and Raphaël can be heard talking sotto voce.
In one leap Céleste is at the front door, slamming it violently before she disappears into the night.
EVERY NIGHT WHEN SHE RETURNS to the hotel after rehearsal, Maud is there waiting. Before the door is even fully open, Flora Fontanges calls out:
“Maud, are you there?”
Maud kisses her on the cheeks, forehead, nose, neck. Declares that she hasn’t moved all day. Mathematics alone has kept her company. Sometimes she adds that Raphaël called and that she hung up immediately. She says Raphaël with a sort of strange diligence, as if the name cannot totally blend into the sentence, but remains separate, deserving another fate. She goes on quickly:
“Don’t worry, Mother dear. Nothing bad can happen to us now. I’m your prisoner. While I wait for Touraine. I’m fastened to this room, my two feet sunk in your carpet. The whole city, including Raphaël, could collapse under my windows and I wouldn’t budge.”
That great stillness spreads through the room. Flora Fontanges and her daughter rest, lying one beside the other, pretending not to feel the obscure menace that prowls in the dark air. Maud sometimes weeps in the middle of the night, causing her mother to wake with a start. She says her tears aren’t real, but dream tears, tells her to pay no attention to them. In the morning, it all seems forgotten, and Maud wolfs down her breakfast as if it were the only thing in the world that was genuine.
How many days shut away in a hotel room, how many nights of dream weeping did it take to bring Maud to this intense agitation that makes her spring to her feet at her mother’s arrival? Her freshly washed hair is pasted against her shoulders and back, she smells of soft water and shampoo. Her pale face seems smaller, as if cramped, like a closed fist. Her too wide-open eyes shine as if she has a fever.
Despite her fatigue, Flora Fontanges wants to resume the everyday acts that, for some time now, have united her to her daughter, night after night, in the little hotel room on rue Sainte Anne. Why not trust tote force of habit, weave it patiently around Maud like a slender spider’s web, to hold her for a little while yet?
She need only act as if nothing has happened, neither Maud’s strange fever nor her abrupt movements nor her way of suddenly talking too loud and gesticulating for no reason.
Flora Fontanges arranges her daughter’s hair for the night, braiding it like a little girl’s. Maud grows impatient. Says she’s going to have her hair cut tomorrow and Raphaël won’t recognize her. She becomes voluble and moves incessantly in the cluttered room. She talks about the soft light of Touraine and the pleasant, ordinary life they’ll live there, on the banks of the Loire. Without transition she declares that no one in the world walks like Raphaël and that no one in the world has teeth as white as Raphaël’s. She says that, and she looks out the window. She appears to want to challenge someone invisible who might be hidden in the city. She is out of breath and is speaking louder and louder. Leaves the window. Approaches her mother; who is sitting on the bed. Declares that she can’t stand being shut up and wants to go out.
Maud undoes her wet braids. Dons a red mini-skirt and white boots. Her long bare legs. The small bag slung over her shoulder.
“Come on, Mama, hurry, we’re going out! Hurry up, you’re coming with me!”
Then begins a tour of the city such as Flora Fontanges has never experienced.
Avenues filled with people in the heat of the night. The glorious summer night riddled with stars. The maze of little streets. Blinking signs. Discothèques come into view here and there along the streets, from the largest to the smallest, some of them tiny and half-hidden under an outside staircase, dug into the earth like mouse holes. Maud goes from one to the next, unable to decide. Makes comparisons as she goes. Opens doors just a crack. Hazards a glance. Gusts of sound, muffled throbbing, clouds of smoke rise up to her face, while her cheeks, her nose, her forehead reflect the colours of all the lights.
This is a girl who has sworn she’ll explode, all alone, in the music and the noise, a free and independent creature. She has laid this odd bet, to take a tired old woman along with her, as a witness. She pulls her by the hand. At every club, Maud shrinks back, shakes her head, then takes off again with Flora Fontanges on her heels.
Sometimes Maud looks behind her, over her shoulder. She claims someone’s been following her since the hotel.
It’s not that the deep and noisy retreat where Maud is engulfed with Flora Fontanges seems reassuring, but they must go inside somewhere to escape the boy who is hidden in the darkness and has been shadowing the two women since the hotel, maintaining just enough distance so they never see his face. Only his feline gait gives him away.
FLORA FONTANGES IS HURLED INTO the sound and the fury of life. It vibrates all through her body. She is like a drum that reverberates as it is struck. A little more and her ribs will shatter, her heart spring loose and fall to her feet, under the violence of the repeated shocks. Flora Fontanges presses her hands to her ears. Feels barbarous spasms in her chest. She looks on, as in a dream, under the green rays of light, as the boys and girls break loose, appear and disappear in the convulsive movements of the shimmering light. Their solitude particularly surprises her, she who has been accustomed to couples dancing in each other’s arms. What are they doing on the dance floor, all of them separate, showing off as they undulate and sway their hips?
Maud stands utterly still, as if plunged in meditation. Her whole body picks up energy and rhythm. The beat is swallowed up by all the pores of her skin, like a storm, it makes her bones ring and her blood throb.
Presently she steps onto the minuscule dance floor, grazing the other dancers without looking at them, avoiding them, threading her way through them, clearing a path, following her own thoughts, alone in the world, in a magma of streaming bodies, of flashes of light and heat, of raw desire on display.
Now he appears in the doorway, lets his tall stature and his handsome face be seen, makes his way unguarded. His clear precise features. His archangel’s name which she cannot stop herself from uttering now as he moves towards her from the back of the room. Glides through the dancers until he is facing her. A moment of utter stillness, a wall of ice between them. She is the first to start to move again in rhythm, and he follows each of her moves, silently begging for her forgiveness and her dancer’s complicity. A very small space for their steps which already fit together without their knowing, moved by the same obsessive rhythm. A very small space between their foreheads, their mouths, their chests, bellies, hands, which move in rhythm, never joining, a furious attention to the rock music which possesses them equally, their separation and estrangement utterly gone and restored now in the unity of the dance as they face one another, never touching even with a fingertip, pierced by the same arrows, existing powerfully, in a single breath of life, while desire gradually rises and overcomes them.
They drink cool beer, mop their brows, calm down slowly, as if nothing has occurred between them, in this room, nothing at least that they want to talk about, while their hearts seek each other in silence.
Maud and Raphaël accompany Flora Fontanges through the streets of the city to her hotel. They take her arm, they touch her shoulder, with infinite acts of kindness and care, as if she were made of glass and they fear seeing her shatter in their hands at any moment. They disappear very quickly into the night.
When Maud came back to the hotel the next morning, Flora Fontanges was still in bed, half
dreaming, foundering in unshed tears, like dry sand, burning her eyes with them.
She props herself on her pillow and asks for breakfast. Maud pours coffee and butters toast. Says Raphaël and she are reconciled and are ready to start life together again.
The coffee in the steaming cups smells good. Outside, the city is peacefully beginning another summer day of heat and light.
Flora Fontanges has started to leaf through the worn and dog-eared pages of Happy Days.
Hail, holy light!
Bitterness and scorn, she thinks. The deepest solitude comes towards her, barely emerging from the magnificent day.
This is going to be a happy day!
And it is Winnie who speaks through the mouth of Flora Fontanges. This woman already,knows the four seasons of life when an extra season is given to her, transfiguring everyday joys and sorrows to make of them a violent form of speech that bursts on the stage, in full light.
ON OPENING NIGHT THE THEATRE is filled with spectators, somewhat uncomfortable and vaguely anxious. Embarrassed smiles cannot tilt into laughter. Irritating little coughs. Above it all, the tireless voice of Flora Fontanges tells a story these people would prefer not to hear. Probably they have heard before about the treacherous body and soul, but always accompanied by the proper ritual, sentimental and dramatic, and the long sob of violins to lull their hearts. Tonight, what gloomy ceremony is this, with these meagre props, these pitiable creatures? The spell of Flora Fontanges’s voice, though it is broken, her profound conviction act upon them, in their final entrenchment, in this place where they can see themselves in a mirror, for a flash, unrecognizable, suddenly bared, ridiculous, and condemned.
They brought down the house, because of the performance they say, then were angry with her for her poisoned gift.
Two of the critics maintained that this was not a play for a summer theatre, and that even if Madame Fontanges was splendid, she could not make them believe in the futility of all things, when the bright July sun was blazing over the world.
The curtain is barely down and they are there backstage, to embrace her. Raphaël’s prickly cheek, Maud’s as smooth as a baby’s. She takes off her makeup and she trembles. The traces of Happy Days are inscribed on her face, in lines more enduring than the greasepaint. Maud begs her to remove it all, quickly, and to wash her face with soap and water. She says:
“I don’t like you to be old!”
Raphaël repeats:
“You’re fantastic . . .”
He appears to be embarrassed by his emotion and seems somewhat aloof from her now. It’s all over between them, the sweet familiarity that held them together for long days. She is alone again. She made her tour of the forbidden city, including the Côte de la Couronne and Saint Roch, without her appointed guide. If you only knew, Raphaël dear, she wants to tell him. But it is to her daughter that she turns now, a little girl so busy listening to her own heart, stolen by Raphaël.
She explains to Maud all the horror that filled her just now, when she picked up the parasol and it wouldn’t open.
For a month, she plays Winnie every night except Tuesday, suffering a thousand deaths and a thousand sorrows. She is possessed. She quivers with Winnie’s passion and cannot sleep at night, for the plague of small bitter waves that strip her and wear her down, one by one.
At the end of the month, her contract finished, the two of them came to take her to the same country station at which she had arrived. They said goodbye, looking vaguely embarrassed.
She left the city. The separation has already occurred and the exile into which she enters follows her. While in her bag, a letter from Paris offering her the part of Mme Frola in Right You Are makes her want to laugh and cry at once, like a musical instrument that you graze with your hand, and it vibrates in secret, amid the silence of the earth.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”