The Dead of Winter

by Lisa Appignanesi

  I thought of my letter and made light of her fear. I knew I should tell her then, confess everything. But there was something that made me hold back. She wasn’t really paying attention to me. And the moment was wrong for admitting to a gigantic hoax. So I didn’t speak, but I knew that soon I would have to tell her.

  The whole enterprise had, in any case, begun to pall. I had no intention of frightening Madeleine. I didn’t want her to suffer. I only wanted to show my love in a way that was permissible, to show her too, that I didn’t need to hit or be violent, that I could love her just as much in this pure, disembodied form.

  I put a date to it. I told myself that over Christmas in the long evening of the countryside I would tell her. Tell her softly with perhaps just a touch of whimsy in my voice so if the laughter gathered I would not be unprepared for it. I imagined her staring at me and then bursting into giggles as she did after our childhood pranks. Alternately I imagined her falling into my arms and whispering, ‘I should have guessed. Only you could have known so much of me.’

  I allowed myself only two more letters. The first was intended to heighten the joke once it was revealed. It described Madeleine and I leaving her apartment and going down to a Crescent Street café for a snack - as seen by a third person. I enjoyed writing it. I enjoyed finding a film equivalent for each of her gestures - the swing of her hair over her back, the slight slope of her face in the lamplight as she looked down into a boutique window, the touch of forefinger to generous lips. Here was Julie or Anne or another of her screen heroines in the flesh. The spirit was that of the first letters. Or so I thought when I wrote it.

  Now, as I scan the sentences, the exactitude of the description frightens me. I can see Madeleine on my arm. As we move down the icy stairs, she nestles just a little into my shoulder. She pauses to pat the silky head of an Irish setter. The eyes of its sombre-faced owner are on her, then on me. Other eyes too - a brightly scarfed girl in the street, a big burly man, slumped beside a car.

  I pause at this figure. There is something about him which in retrospect is familiar, but I can’t quite place it. Hastily I put the letter aside. I don’t want to read anymore. I don’t want to remember that it would have reached Madeleine just after the killings at the Université de Montréal, at a time when she was in no mood to appreciate jokes.

  There is only one letter to go - an annoucenment really, to tell Madeleine that this is the last letter, to tell her how our one-sided correspondence has engrossed me, to tell her how she will chuckle should she ever meet her principal fan.

  But that letter isn’t here. I suddenly remember it tucked into the palm of Contini’s hand that day we left the apartment together. The sight of it made me shiver. Makes me shiver still. I am glad Contini has not seen the rest of these letters.

  What confronts me now does nothing to reduce my uneasiness. It is a letter in Madeleine’s own looped hand. The characters skate across the page as gracefully as she did on the edge of the river. Through tears I claw out their frozen sense.

  Pierre!

  I want to creep into a dark hole and die. I want to become utterly invisible, a heap of ash caressed only by the wind. How could you? How could you have? You whom I loved and trusted. All this time…

  I had begun to suspect it was you. Now I am certain. You have given yourself away. No one but you sitting opposite me in the café could have seen the fleck of mascara ‘smudging my cheek like a dark tear’. No one but you could have made out my whispered words from the movement of my lips.

  Perhaps you see it as an act of love. A strange love it is that wants only to fathom and control, to stalk my imagination more insidiously than my movements.

  For over a year now, I have been obsessed by the knowledge this anonymous stranger has of me. I have felt trapped by an omniscience I don’t recognize - like some baleful god created only to watch me and fix me in his perverse gaze.

  You have made me an object to myself. I can no longer lift a finger or a lock or pour myself a glass of water spontaneously. On stage or in front of the cameras, each gesture carries with it one of your phrases. It is worse still in bed. An analysis of yours rears up to confound and pin me to a slide, like some insect under a microscope. I am no longer capable of loving. But perhaps this is what you always intended.

  Anatomy is what one performs on the dead. With incisive brutality, you have performed it on me and now I want to die. I am superfluous, even to myself.

  If it is an act of vengeance you intended, it has been utterly successful. You have betrayed me far more radically than I ever betrayed you.

  There is only one part of me you have been unable to touch. You will never know about it now. It is too late.

  There is no signature on the letter. Madeleine has followed my example.

  I read and reread Madeleine’s words. My hands tremble. In the window my own shadowy face confronts me, as distorted and malevolent as any portrait of Dorian Gray. I have killed Madeleine. These letters, my letters, have tied the rope round her neck, kicked away the chair beneath her feet, more surely than if my limbs had taken part. Like a slow, certain poison, these letters have led to her death.

  Apart from me, there is no other murderer. Will Henderson may or may not be guilty of many crimes, but Madeleine’s death is mine alone. The law may see it as suicide. Contini will take this letter as the confirming suicide note, he first looked for. But the responsibility is all mine.

  In taking her own life, Madeleine has performed the one act I never described, the single act my imagination never followed her into. A gratuitous, an unnecessary act. An escape. An act without meaning. Except for me. An act intended for me. My act. Yes.

  My head feels fuzzy. My eyes are blotched with tears. I close them for a moment and images leap and dazzle before me as bright and noisy and untouchable as fireworks. I force myself to stare at them, but their speed and brilliance makes sight impossible. As if some synapses had gone askew and produced a brainstorm.

  Without realising I have moved, I find myself leaving my bedroom. The letters are in my hand. The key clinks in my pocket. It is time. I need to see Madeleine alive.

  At the end of the hall there is a locked door which opens onto a narrow staircase. The room at the top spans half the space of the attic. Three windows poke out of each side of the sloping walls to form small gabled alcoves. The inside partition is starkly white. Every other space is hung with posters and photographs. This is not my father’s collection. It is my own. It is my museum to Madeleine.

  There are posters advertising each of her plays and films - in French and English and German and Italian. There is even one in Hebrew for La Parisienne and one in Greek for Secret Woman, oddly renamed Janus Face. The blocked shapes of the antique alphabet carry with them a whiff of the collège classique and confer a sculptural serenity to Madeleine’s bent head.

  There are stills and theatre photographs and publicity shots crammed into alcoves, making inroads on the ceiling, filed into a corner cabinet. The photographs carry Madeleine’s signature. None of them is dedicated to me. In this room, I have no name. I am everyman.

  Banked along the floor of the outer wall are a series of aluminum cases. Each one contains a reel of film. Each one is clearly labelled with name and part number. At the far end of the wall, a book case is stacked with video tapes. Some bear the glossy covers of store-bought product, others the uniform packaging of off-air tapes.

  Behind the blue velvet sofa stands a 16mm projector. Tucked into an alcove on a wheeled pedestal is a television set and video recorder. An alcove on the opposite sides contains a chair and a small desk on which my old office computer and printer sit. Apart from these, the only other furniture in the room is a radio-cassette player and a tiny fridge of the kind used as liquour cabinets in desultory hotel rooms.

  I pour myself a drink now and prowl the length and breadth of the room. The single lamp to the back of the sofa casts a dim circle of light. In its shadows, Madeleine looks out at me, ever vivid, eve
r radiant.

  From outside there is a faint whistle of wind through trees, the sudden hoot of an owl. I peer out the window and see a smattering of stars. In the distance I can make out, more by sense than sight, the blur of the copse beneath which the remnants of the barn lie.

  Before the blaze overpowers me and the motion of memory reels me back to an intact barn and the sight of Madeleine’s helpless swinging body, I veer away and switch on the projector. The whirr of the machinery is soothing. It casts a pale creamy circle onto the white of the far wall.

  Quickly, I prod open one of the aluminum cases and position the film onto the projector. It doesn’t matter what movie I’ve picked. Anything will do now. Anything that blots out the real.

  The sound of a flute and violins floats across the room, strains of Debussy. I lean into the soft warmth of the sofa and see Madeleine as large as life on the far wall. She is running across the slope of a meadow. The grass is very green. The sun shimmers and dances across leaves and field. Madeleine’s face is troubled. For some reason I no longer know why, nor what film I have stumbled into. I only know that Madeleine is very young and in some distress and her dress is long with the pale embroidered flowers of the turn of the last century.

  She stoops to pick a daisy and gazes at it for a moment as if its centre could solve a mystery. There is a soft glow on the arch of her cheek. Her eyelashes cast a shadow and then the flower is in shreds, tossed aside and she runs again, her dress lifted and swaying, her stockings brightly white against the green of the field.

  Madeleine’s voice comes to me. But it doesn’t come from the projector, where the flute still pipes.

  ‘I hate the country,’ she says.

  ‘Nonsense,’ I say.

  ‘It’s true. I hate all that green. All those trees, all those insects, all that life that could happily do without me. That does happily without me. That doesn’t care. That doesn’t see. That’s indifferent. It went on before. And it’ll go on after. The same green. The same trees. I hate it.’

  But Madeleine on the wall which is a screen has stopped beneath a vast beech. There is a swing hanging from one of its branches. She perches on it. Her legs begin to move with that slightly hectic randomness I remember from Lulu, as if their motion were unwilled. Were utterly their own and utterly sexual.

  Her face is still troubled, but she is swinging now, back and forth, her legs arching and swooping and slicing the air, higher and higher. Her mouth relaxes, Her hair sweeps the ground and suddenly on a curve of ground near-by a man’s booted feet appear and then his legs and torso and velvety face, shaded by a wide brimmed hat. He is watching Madeleine whose eyes are closed now, her face a map of the rustling leaves above her.

  Despite myself the stirring starts, a tug and tickle at my crotch which I am powerless to control. As Madeleine opens her eyes and meets those of her onlooker, my hand is already in my pocket.

  He pulls her off the swing and I am there with him pulling her onto the ground. The earth is soft with moss. Her face beneath my fingers is soft too and her hair has a fresh fragrance of wind. She lifts her lips to him and I cover them with mine and wonder which one of us she is kissing and if it is the same or different with each and I see his fingers rising up her stockinged leg and the sudden wildness in her face as we taste the cleavage between her breasts. Then for a breathless moment everything is a painful sweetness of flutes and violins and a summer afternoon. And cut - we are in the salon of a comfortable house and Madeleine is talking to an older woman.

  I let the film play over and through me until the spool winds its way to the end and flaps repeatedly into the air. Reluctantly I switch on the light and gaze at the bare white wall which minutes ago was covered with such heated activity. I get up and turn off the projector.

  The room is a cavern of silence as echoing as that of a church. But this is a church, I remind myself. My very own shrine to Madeleine. Built out of love and devotion. Erected in her honour. Madeleine - Magdalene, the whore who bathed her saviour’s feet with her tears and dried them with her hair and was purified in turn. Madeleine, who gave her name to a hundred sanctuaries and to that area of Paris where the upper class call girls drive round in their white convertibles and pick up their clients. Holy Madeleine who gave her name to those delicate little shells of cakes which dipped in tea brought the past back for Proust’s Marcel.

  How often in these last years have I visited this shrine and sweated through memories? Engaged in my rites in this hothouse of fantasy. Written those letters which began so innocently and ended in doom. I should have pinned them to the wall, like those devotees who offer their prayers in writing to the saints.

  How often? Twice a month? Less? More? Does it matter? As religiously as a devout sinner in search of a confessional, I have returned here to bathe in memories and dreams which offer no absolution. For my shrine is also a brothel. A brothel in reverse. Not one in which dream is made flesh. But one in which flesh is made dream. My estranged wife become pornography.

  The thought, so coldly put, startles me. Madeleine’s dead body hurtles towards me. I don’t want to see it. I thrust it aside with activity, push the television screen into the centre of the room, pick out a video tape and hurriedly press the play button.

  The throb of a heavy metal song fills the room frightening away the ghosts. I pour myself another finger of brandy and tell myself I have unconsciously chosen well. Madeleine dies in this film. I have watched her die at least a hundred times. And each time, I knew that her death was a play of illusion. Each time, with a flick, I could rewind her into life.

  Adept as I am in the world of fantasy, perhaps I can maintain that illusion for the length of another night. And postpone that cold weight of guilt which will drown me as surely as ice closing over a winter pool.

  As I watch I find myself erratically thinking once more of Madeleine’s tirade against the country. What did it mean but that she hated the country because she couldn’t be seen in it. The trees, the grass, didn’t watch her, didn’t return her life to her. Is that what it meant to be an actress? To be enamoured of the gaze which confirms one’s life?

  But my gaze has killed her. She has said as much in her last letter. I had seen too much and given testimony to my seeing in words, blind to the imprisoning effect it might have.

  My mind balks at the paradox. Can there be an excess of seeing which topples over into blindness as there is an excess of love which ends up as hate?

  Or perhaps Madeleine didn’t altogether mean what she said. She often didn’t. Words for her were speculations and fancies, teasings as well as truths.

  The images on the screen race and blear in front of my eyes. I am fuddled with alcohol, exhaustion, and too many emotions. I zap on the rewind button and watch life hurtle backwards. Video is the technology of dreams.

  What would I not give to have real time move under my mastery in the way that these images do? Backwards and forwards, fast or slow, repeated at will. What would I not give to have been able to stop time on a frame like this one in which Madeleine throws back her hair, her face dreamy, secret, alive in every fragment and feature. Alive for me.

  But I have never had any control over Madeleine’s real life. That has always been the crux of the problem. If nothing else, that is clear to me now.

  It comes to me with a fierce jolt of anguish that the only mastery I have ever had is over her death.

  14

  ___________

  The bell sounds through a great blur of distance.

  ‘Pierre,’ my mother’s voice calls. ‘Pierre, vas-y. Réponds. Get the door. C’est le facteur.’

  ‘OK, Maman.’ Without opening my eyes to the murky light, I look for my slippers. They are not at the side of the bed where I left them. Nor does the soft chenille of my robe meet the scrabble of my fingers.

  The bell rings again and with it comes my mother’s softly admonishing voice.

  ‘Pierre?’

  If I don’t hurry she will go to the door and
I will kill her. She is supposed to rest. To rest as much as is possible. My father has made that very clear.

  ‘J’y vais, Maman.’

  I rub my eyes and scramble out of bed. The floor is cold. Colder than it should be. The carpet has vanished in the night.

  I open my eyes properly and realise with a start that I have been dreaming round the sound of the doorbell, which rings again now with an emphatic insistence. The cold floor at my feet is that of the attic. Madeleine’s face smiles at me from a hundred pictures. I have fallen asleep on the sofa. In front of me, the television screen flickers black and white.

  I pull on my socks and shoes and zap the screen into darkness. I pass a hand through my hair and glance at my watch. It is almost eleven. My wakeful nights are eating up my days. But who on earth has taken it upon themselves to visit me without a telephone warning? Perhaps it is Jerome again, willing me away.

  I race down the stairs and try to put a semblance of order into shirt and sweater as I do so. Everywhere in the house, last night’s lights are still on. I switch them off as I go and only pause at the door to take a deep breath, before opening it.

  Above a black ski-jacket Contini’s smooth face startles me.

  ‘You sure know how to take your time,’ he says by way of greeting. ‘It’s colder than a witches teat out here.’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting anyone,’ I mumble.

  ‘No.’ He brushes past me, stamping his feet on the indoor mat. ‘And from the look of things, I’d say you hadn’t bothered to wake up yet. Let alone to turn off the lights or take off your clothes before getting into bed. Your behaviour could get a man seriously worried.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes, another few minutes and you’d have had me climbing through a window.’