All the Voices Cry
Page 2
Jan knew better than to say anything. Hugh had every right to live as he wished. Early on, she did her crying on a city bus, during one of those winters when she taught photography at a community college. The tears erupted when she least expected it, pouring out with all the shame and inevitability of vomit onto the sidewalk, while the high-school kids sitting around her sank into their jackets and looked out the window.
The next summer, when they returned to the woods, Jan slept in the cabin and Hugh shuttled between her room and Crispin’s in the Bunkie. One morning when she was out taking photographs, she came across Crispin perched on a rock, brooding in the steam that rose off the lake into the cool morning.
“I do love him, you know,” he said.
“You know nothing of love,” she replied. That morning, she took a photograph of a reed bending backwards into its sharply angled reflection. Around it quivered the lines of the water. The illusion of flexibility recalled her desire to share her streams and woods with Hugh, but when she looked at the bent reed, she also remembered how hard it was to share Hugh.
Later in the day, she woke Hugh from a nap, sat on the edge of the bed, spread out her hands on her knees, placed her ultimatum before him.
“I’m not cooking any more,” she said.
“I never said you had to.”
“I don’t want you sleeping in the cabin any more.”
“I’ll leave if you want me to, Jan.”
“No, you must stay, but stay in the Bunkie. I’m not leaving you.” It was all she had left to say. She could forgive Hugh for Crispin. Perhaps Hugh had discovered some great and good love in himself with Crispin that he had never experienced with her. She even told herself that she could stop desiring Hugh, if that was what he wanted, but she could not stop caring.
They did not see a couples therapist, but they did see an architect; “the architect of our separation,” she called the rotund little man in his office tower of reflecting glass. They renamed the main cabin the “Ruche” or hive, and constructed a network of simple buildings, half hidden in the bedrock or up on stilts, with shutters that hid the windows, and ferns that grew upon the roof. Fireplaces and rock ledges jutted out into the sitting rooms, and the buildings were joined by walkways with holes cut in them to accommodate the growth of the trees.
Jan built herself a studio where she worked on her photographs with an intensity that surprised her. Her subjects were clouds, trees, reflections. She made photo essays of the barns and shrines in the rural community around the lake, but she rarely took pictures of people. The only face for her remained Hugh’s. He had a half-smile of such infinite sweetness, made the sweeter by his capacity to withhold it. She marked every day of their separation with a photograph: ice in the reeds, the coal-bright sparks on the lichen stalks, the water droplets that filled the lichen goblets to the brim.
And so the years had passed. During the summers, they lived in a scattered way among the trees, with Crispin, without Crispin, with Crispin again. And little by little Hugh’s skin took on the transparency of age, and little by little, Jan’s photographs became all the same. Up on the cliff top, with the empty container in her hand, Jan saw how she had lorded it over Hugh in her ownership of the paradise, and somewhere she had lost the natural line of herself, the line that swirled, was elastic and cut on the grain. Glorying in the idea of doing what she said she would do, she had given Hugh a place to stay, always, and in her stubbornness she had made chains for them both.
She had done what she said she would do. She had shared. By God, she shared everything that she had, and now when she finally had it all to herself, the wind lifting the roof in the old cabin, the rattle of flies against the glass in the studio, she found that she did not want it.
Perhaps Hugh had been right in his insistence that there should be nothing left to mark his passage in the world: no child, no artwork, no monument, nothing. Let the cabin and the studio on stilts fall into a careless teepee of boards in the forest, and beneath it a stained kapok mattress, its sodden insides spilling out into the leaf mould. Maybe there is no virtue, after all, in doing what you said you were going to do. Gone were the days of Frédérique lifting her chiffon scarves to the poplars. Jan shrugged. Now Hugh was gone too, and what was the point of holding on to anything? The time had come to pull her resentment out of herself, this anchor of hatred and love, and the gobbet of flesh that it was attached to. Up came the cable, dripping and straining, encrusted with zebra mussels and streaming weed. Mentally she flung it off the cliff after the ashes, left it to coil like a dead snake caught in a cedar tree.
Jan turned away from the cliff’s edge and started back down the track. Out of habit she caught herself observing the funneled spider webs and the woodpecker holes, the flaps of lichen attached to the rock faces. It was November 20th, 2003 and Hugh had begun his passage into the ground, but she had no camera, no way to mark this day. Tomorrow the day would be gone. And now the tears came, for there was no other pair of eyes to see, to verify or to contradict her version of the vision. He was a bastard to have left her so alone.
Jan reached the bottom of the hill. In the distance, she could see the huddle of men beside the cars strung out along the road. Crispin was in the middle of the group, no longer young, but preserved by the passage of good scotch and regular exercise. Four young friends stood about, their beards groomed into neat pubic triangles. Hugh had been in thrall to them, more so than ever towards the end, trapped by loneliness and the camaraderie of rough young sex in tree houses.
The men looked at the cold sky and at the cold land, their hands thrust deep into their jacket pockets. Then they turned to look at her, expectant.
“Well, he’s out there,” she said, showing them the empty container. She waited for Crispin to speak. Now it was time to see what Crispin would make of the scattered remains of Hugh’s love.
“God, I’m so very sorry,” said Crispin, breathing in deeply and covering his face.
She stood looking at the backs of Crispin’s hands, reddened and dry with cold, asparkle with short golden hairs. What was Crispin to her now? He was certainly not a son, or a brother, but some other relation—a step-partner, from whom she expected nothing, and to whom she owed nothing. And yet, she thought, it was true, she had also passed a life of sorts with Crispin.
Hugh was gone, but nothing was finished. Together they had built a colony, and the history of a colony is filled with coming, and going, and coming back again. The words came out of Jan before she could stop them.
“Stay,” she said to Crispin. “Stay. Invite your friends. There’s plenty of vegetable soup in the pot.” Her mouth stretched sideways in an elastic line, and there was a give in it that she had forgotten.
Crispin took his hands away from his face and reached out to touch her forearm. His eyes appeared paler than ever now that he had taken to bleaching his hair.
“Thanks for the offer Jan,” he said, “you’ve been a sweetie. But I think we’ll head back into town. Mike has a gig tonight. Don’t you Mike?”
A young man in black leather nodded, jingling his car keys.
“Right,” said Jan. “Well. Come up whenever you feel like it.” She turned away, holding herself rigid against the cold. Crispin stopped her as she was unlocking the car.
“Jan,” he said, “Hugh stayed because he wanted to.”
Jan spent the night at the cabin. She did not light the fire and she did not heat the soup. Instead she cocooned in the duvet and lay listening to the scuffle and twitter of mice in the walls. In the night the first snows came, and when she awoke she looked out at the fir trees and their green fingers, now outlined in white, spread wide and ready to bless. So that was it, she thought, the final benediction. She was forty-four, and free to go.
Salsa Madre
Photographs and translation by Jan McDonald
COME ON IN, don’t be shy. My name is Bernadette. And you are? Jan. So pleased to meet you, Jan. Father René told me that you would stop by. Yes, I
always work out here under the carport. I like the sound of rain falling on the roof. You’re from Montreal? Toronto. Ah. That’s a long way. I have a niece who lives there, on Yonge Street. Twins in a stroller, maybe you have seen her? They’re a handful of trouble. Well, this is my summer project—should be finished in the next day or two. Sure, photos are fine. You might find the ground more stable for your tripod over on the path.
These are my tiles and pots and cups, arranged by colour. I do the actual smashing on the concrete, and I shape the pieces afterwards with nippers. I use an outdoors glue to fix the ceramic on the tub. Here’s a nice piece of Limoges that Madame Benoit passed on to me. Look at the pink dress on that courtly lady, but see how it’s cracked underneath? There’s gold paint on it. I’ll be using it somewhere special.
Today I prayed that the paint inside my shrine would stay put. I will not be ashamed to ask for that in the church, since my work is to glorify the Mother of Our Lord, so the paint should not flake no matter what I do. Not to say you shouldn’t prime carefully. After all, our God is a busy God. I’ve seen shrines where the sun gets in and the paint hangs down in sheets around the head of the Holy Mother. She stands there as if she had her head up under a string of washing. Shame.
Mind you, not many people bother to keep up their shrines any more, and I don’t know that you’re going to find anything other than empty ones around here. These days people prefer deer on their lawns, or roosters or kids fishing. Down on Rue Bonaventure someone has an Olympic Stadium being attacked by a giant polar bear. Not many people feel that much faith any more, or if they do, they keep it in their pockets and not in their gardens, except at Christmas, and then it’s the plastic figurines. Violette La Caisse bought an entire set on sale at the hardware store and they faded after two years. You can’t make holy things out of plastic.
I’ve been doing ceramic stars on my bathtub, rays or petals of one colour and centres of another. I stick them on first, and then I fill in the gaps with little bits left over. Mother Mary approves of recycling. She gave birth in a barn, after all, even though where she is now she probably has most things in gold and jasper. I gave her a good clean this morning. She looks nice lying on the grass, doesn’t She? Resting. Just like my mother used to have a little siesta after lunch.
I expect Father René told you that I was once a novice. I was about to take my vows when God came to me in a dream. He said go to the general store, so I did. I was so shy! The store was nothing like the supermarkets we have now. You could get anything there. Violette La Caisse was the cashier that day. Urgel Beauregard from up Lac des Tortues way came in. I didn’t know him from Adam, but I heard him say to Violette that his wife had died and would she have him, because he had six children and didn’t know what he would do. And Violette said thanks for offering, but she had enough on her hands with the rush on sugar pie orders, and she turned to serve me and I looked up at Urgel’s big empty eyes. He drove a truck for the paper mill, and I brought up all those children in this house and we had two more of our own. Good kids. They all pitched in.
Now I’m going to tell you what happened to my son Henri. It’s nothing you won’t hear from down the road. Still, I’d rather tell you in my own words. People say that divorce is the worst thing that can happen to a family, but there are worse things. It’s the same with families as it is with ceramic. You don’t quite know how the tile will crack, even if you think you have a rough idea. I’m talking hairline cracks, places where it’s ready to break and we can’t tell until the hammer comes down. Well, whatever went on used to happen in the vestry. And in the end my boy Henri got so quiet I knew something was up. He was not the only one. And next thing they sent that priest to the South of France so that he could do it all over again in the sun.
When Henri turned sixteen, he went to work in his uncle’s fish shop in Montreal. Plenty of boys do it. I suppose they think there’s more to life down there. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? When we have all this sky up here. But at least he told me he was going—he could have gone to do squeegee like that kid down the road. I left him alone. You have to let people work things out, but I never stopped wondering how he was, and I never stopped praying for him. He was a good kid.
You know, about this time last year the Virgin Mary appeared to me behind the barn. I was spraying the lettuces with a slug killer that I make by boiling up cigarette butts. It works a charm. Well, all of a sudden I had this feeling that there was a mystery happening beyond the edge of the vegetable patch. And I came around the corner of the barn, and there She was, hovering over the lightning weed. Just small, like a figurine, but shimmering. And she said to me in a voice as low as a mourning dove’s, Find what was lost, renew what has been broken, give the thanks that is due. I fell down to my knees and I cried and I cried.
Well, what can you do when the Holy Mother calls? I went to Montreal on the bus and stayed with my cousin’s friend Rosalia. She lives near the Jean Talon market. So beautiful this market, with the fruit laid out in the shops—pink carrots, pink! There are organic bananas spooning to the left, aubergines spooning to the right, and prickly fruits from Asian countries that I don’t even know the name of. I bought a lot of tomatoes for only five dollars, and Rosalia and I spent all afternoon making a sauce called salsa madre, which is very good and has more garlic in it than Urgel would ever let me use at home. I had no problem discovering where Henri was living. He has an apartment in the Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, only now it’s condos. Early in the morning I sat in the band rotunda in the park, and I saw them come out of the door, my Henri, and a little boy, and another man.
The boy sat on Henri’s shoulders and held onto his ears for balance. Henri’s friend held the door open for them, shut it carefully behind them. The urge to get up and run to them, God help me, it was so strong. My feet were rising off the ground, but I held onto the railings with both hands. I watched them walk all the way down the street to the car, a nice car. Then I went back to Rosalia’s and got the jars of salsa madre, and then I returned to the church that is now condos. A young man with a ponytail let me into the building. He had a T-shirt on that said “Don’t shut me in.” I looked at him and said with my eyes, “Don’t shut me out,” and he opened the door, just like that.
Inside, you can’t imagine what they have done to the Church of Our Lady. They have built a hotel in there, and left one pew to sit on while you wait for the elevator. Where there should be a stoup, just inside the door, there is a water cooler. And where the Cardinal walked on marble flagstones in 1961, there is carpet and a corridor. Well I’ve done the same thing in the other direction, me out here turning my bathtub into a sacred place. We’re all going in one direction or another, and who’s to say it won’t become a church again in a hundred years? Likewise, if you needed a bathtub, you could come and dig up one of those empty shrines from down the road.
From Henri’s apartment on the fifth floor you can see the whole city. A young woman was there, doing the cleaning. Such a tiny girl from some Asian country. She could see I was his mother, and she showed me right in. Oh, you have never seen such an apartment! So tidy, so calm, like a monastery, with slanted windows high in the ceiling, and a shining aluminum refrigerator, and a bedroom up a spiral staircase. I delivered my jars of salsa madre, and the girl stood on a chair and put them in an empty cupboard high up, and we lined up the jars just so and closed the doors. Henri will find them on a hungry day, a day when he cannot think what to cook, and he can use that sauce with the vegetables that he might already have.
So that was it. I came home. I don’t like Montreal. Too much concrete. But at least I know that he is living in the house and heart of Our Lady, and he is safe. And I am glad, and grateful for Prayers Answered. And so I wait, in case Henri wants to bring that child home to meet his grandmother, because that is the next thing that I will pray for, as I pray for the man who held the door open, and the mother of the child, too, whoever she is. I will wait and watch for Henri to come in
his own time, same as I wait for the deer to come out of the forest to eat the new shoots on the field. And then, what a feast we will have.
Look, Jan—I am ready for the coulis. What is the word for coulis in English? Yes, grout. The colour of this grout is called paprika, which will spice up all that blue and make the yellow bright in the rain. So we mix up the coulis with water, until it’s thick and sloppy like icing, and then we work it on with a spatula, like this, into the cracks, and then scraping off the excess, and then doing it again. Here we go. And now we give a good polish with our cloth, et voilà, the colours come together and my bath becomes a shrine fit for Our Lady of Lowing Cows, Our Lady of Meltwater, Our Lady of Lightning Weed, Our Lady of Blackened Shingles, Our Lady of the Smelter, Our Lady of Everywhere.
Without the coulis, the broken cups and saucers are just that, broken. And without the ceramic, the coulis is just wet earth. But put both together, and they glow. The coulis is love. We cannot do without it. You have kids, Jan? Just your books of photographs? Well, it’s all for the glory. Will you listen to that blackbird? He’s up there every evening. Let me wash my hands and I’ll make you some coffee. You won’t find a better cup down the road.
Champlain’s Astrolabe
FUELLED BY A COFFEE of mythic proportions, Brian Armstrong drove eastwards from Toronto in a mood so foul it made his flesh cold and his armpits sweat. Brian hated site visits in Quebec. Why couldn’t Irwin have sent him to photograph the Bahamas project instead? Beyond Montreal there must have been a hundred groundhogs perched on their burrows in the weak spring sunshine or squashed along the sandy shoulders of the road. Brian would have liked to wrap up a few of the riper ones and courier them back to Irwin as a present. Still, in the car he at least felt safe from the hovering clouds of French vowels that swirled in the air outside. The deeper he got into the province, the more roly-poly the French accent would become and the less likely it was that he would ever understand a word of it. Men, women and children: a whole province-full of people talking through a mouthful of steel wool. The main thing was not to stop until he got to the site at Lac Yahoo.