***
Baby M.’s mother and Nurse Vautour did not follow the Trieste Affair closely. L’Évangéline often spoke of the precarious situation in that corner of Europe, but the crux of the problem continued to resist understanding. It was another of those political situations which are difficult to grasp from a distance. And so, in July 1954, when the newspaper announced that an Italian division would soon take control of the zone the Yugoslavian adversary had finally agreed to give up, Baby M.’s mother and Nurse Vautour sensed there was reason to rejoice. They had no time to explore the issue further, however, being too busy that day with Baby M.’s hospitalization. And yet, there was, in the mother’s gesture of placing Baby M. into the arms of Nurse Vautour, something akin to Yugoslavia’s turning over the port of Trieste to Italy. The mother, like Yugoslavia, experienced the contradictory feelings of her surrender: on the one hand, the weight of failure, on the other, the relief that comes to those who can recognize defeat and act accordingly. For her part, Nurse Vautour, like Italy, accepted Baby M. with all the assurance of the medical world (that is, the Western world), but knew that no effort must be spared to put Baby M. (that is, Trieste) on the road to a healthy development.
In Baby M.’s case, medical science accomplished its duty. Without really understanding the cause of her illness, and without really being able to stop its progress, medical science sustained the child through her time of crisis, ensuring that the tiny body took in a sufficient amount of nutrients in spite of its difficulty absorbing them. In short, medical science kept Baby M. alive. And yet, during her hospitalization in July 1954, before regaining her health, Baby M. sank to the lowest point of her illness. The attending physician was not sure he could save the child. Despite her unshakeable strength of character, Nurse Vautour also feared that Baby M. might be swept away by her own turmoil. For, deep down, Nurse Vautour felt Baby M. was too capricious for her own good. And though she granted Baby M.’s right to enter life through the door of her choosing, she begged her, for heaven’s sake, to stay clear of the door of malabsorption. Which only shows to what extent Nurse Vautour was ignorant of the measures taken by the Almighty to ensure the reproduction of the species of novelists. In this particular case, the seed of writing was buried deep in Baby M.’s entrails, which may be true for all writers, given their tendency to navel-gaze.
And yet, as she moves from her mother’s arms to those of Nurse Vautour, Baby M. has no idea what is happening. Like Trieste’s, the secret of her survival lies in a distant past, in a sense of time and the passage of time that humanity, in its rush to live, struggles daily to forget. For Baby M., nothing changes. Life is nothing but the womb of her intestinal struggles, which require all her energy and which, in devouring her, maintain her link to life. Because Baby M.’s spirit is already in transit. It can know nothing, because it is already gone. It is elsewhere, in exile, in the realm of the unconscious.
4
A Writing Scenario
To believe or not to believe in God — The mad undertaking of the novel— Far from futile — The slightly horrible effect of rising water — The infinite diffusiveness of life — A sensation of absence — The baseball base as a resting place — The seriousness of the comic and the truth of falsehood — The present as a possibility — Baldness and transsexuality — Denial and the progress of science — Mysteries and contours of civilisations— The ultimate shape of things — The quest for a centre — Mussolini’s tomb and the miracle of the Virgin’s tears
NOT ALL NOVELISTS believe in God, and many of those who believe in Him only do so sporadically. This is a shame, because there are few other ways to maintain your serenity while writing an out-of-control novel. In their longing for a kind of logic, novelists tend to panic when what they are trying to say doesn’t really seem to fit into the story. At such times, they may conclude they have failed in their task, allowed themselves to get side-tracked, or simply not worked hard enough. Because novelists often have the impression that they are in control of the writing of their novels. Poor things. Rather than limiting themselves to lending intelligence and intuition to that which wants to be expressed, novelists who try too hard to control what emerges from their pens risk drowning in their own ink. They would do better to let themselves float above all logical considerations and calculations, and drift with the current. Even at the risk of running aground or taking a wrong turn. God will easily forgive them their sins of illogic, He Himself being constantly accused of committing them.
The novelist also tends to lose himself in the relationship between his story and History. In fact, he is never entirely sure on what plane he is telling (his)tory. Just as in films, a troubling soft focus always forms around the thing that needs to be shown with precision. On the other hand, a telephoto lens deprives the novelist of any depth of vision, crushing all relief, flattening the very vision which was responsible for pulling him out of his lethargy in the first place and dragging him to his work desk. This difficulty caused by the story, or History, probably explains why every novelist engaged in the writing process swears this book will be his or her last. Obviously no one in his or her right mind would ever willingly get on this merry-go-round again. History, which in the beginning draws us like a majestic statue, turns out to be, from the inside, a damp and cavernous enclave, complete with bats flying about and stalactites dripping into a still and almost certainly bottomless lake, across which we are nevertheless called to venture. A nightmare! To the point where one might well wonder: why take up this occupation? And this is precisely where fiction begins.
The ball returns. Each ball is a challenge.
***
Élizabeth and Brigitte are sitting face to face in Brigitte’s office, a high-rise office reeking of success, complete with leather sofa, art objects, etc., etc. The windows the size of movie screens are at the perfect distance from the ground, not too high to make out the comings and goings of humanity, yet high enough to keep one’s distance from the futility of these comings and goings. From this height, the world does not seem ugly and life is not such an impasse. Naturally, from this height, any downtown looks good, even Montréal’s. To Brigitte, the spectacle of the mildly exciting city remains the same, day after day. There is nothing to wait for. Élizabeth, on the other hand, when she looks down at the hustle and bustle, can’t help but feel as though she were on the verge of a celebration. The sight of this feverishness is especially useful at this moment. Sitting silently, the two women have drifted each into her own thoughts. To tell the truth, it was Élizabeth who’d been doing most of the talking. Now her silence seems relatively natural. Whereas Brigitte’s, as she was mostly listening, is rather compromising.
And the ball returns.
The time that elapses between two swings of the racquet represents, in Brigitte’s mind, a perfect time period. Were she called upon to invent a unit of time, that would be it. Her entire life passes as though it were superimposed on this rhythm. Brigitte can feel this cadence in every important or happy moment, and sometimes, she imposes this rhythm on situations herself. But Brigitte has, of course, never externalized her consciousness of this rhythm. And people in her presence never suspect they are playing a tennis match.
Each ball is a challenge.
Brigitte can do nothing to beat back the silence, whose grip on her only grows stronger, even though it appears compromising. In fact, she is a little surprised to find herself plunged into a state that seems to want to expand and take over. She searches for an idea, a word that might end the invasion. All she sees is the image of water slowly rising, above her feet first, then her ankles, calves, knees, thighs. Nor is this tidewater, from which one easily escapes by taking a few steps back. It’s more like water coming up from a basement, filling up one floor after another, water coming from below, from which escape is impossible. But there’s something slightly horrible in this description, which really has nothing to do with what Brigitte is feeling.
; Brigitte knows very well that this thing she is feeling cannot be directly ascribed to Élizabeth’s presence in her office. She knows that Élizabeth is only a thread, a concrete symbol of the moment. Her friend asks nothing from her other than a moment of friendship like so many they have shared in the past. And since Brigitte has always had a fundamental disposition towards friendship for Élizabeth, she does not see what the problem could be today. All the same, Brigitte doesn’t know what is going on. She has difficulty distinguishing between what comes from within and what comes from without. It is as though she were subjugated by the infinite diffusiveness of life.
The ball returns. Each ball is a challenge.
***
For her part, Élizabeth has allowed herself to become somewhat numbed by the calm of the office and the soft lighting. As though she had suddenly been transported to an oasis of tranquillity. Brigitte’s silence does not surprise her. She knows there is nothing to say, at least for the time being. But she knows something else as well. She knows she has reached a kind of end, a sort of degree zero. The same is true for Brigitte, although Brigitte does not think in those terms. This moment that resembles nothing she has ever known does not frighten Élizabeth in the least. All the same, a strange image forms in her mind. She imagines herself shoving her fingers into her sternum, tearing open her ribcage, and thrusting her lungs and heart out into the open. She imagines holding her heart in her hands, in the open air. She sees and feels it beating. Then she lifts her lungs, feels them inflating and deflating against her palm. She likes the warmth and autonomy of these organs, as well as the oily blood that covers her hands and forearms. But there’s something slightly macabre in this description which really has nothing to do with what Élizabeth is feeling.
Élizabeth often gets a feeling of emptiness in her chest, as though there were nothing inside her ribcage. Nor in her breasts. All this part of her body reminds her of the shape of a missing piece to a puzzle. The absence ends at her stomach, which she can feel quite clearly, along with her sex and her legs. She can also feel her shoulders, arms, neck, and head. She feels her back too. But she feels nothing in her chest. There are moments, when someone is caressing her body, that she does feel something. Or, at least, she forgets the emptiness in her chest. Even if that person is only touching her hand. Perhaps she is feeling, through this touch, the heart, lungs, and full chest of the other person.
***
So, two women, now face to face, now side by side. Brigitte and Élizabeth. Élizabeth and Brigitte. We would have to remain a long time in their presence, in this room, to gain some small sense of the distance they have travelled. Though they have not attempted to escape it, one might say that their past has caught up with them. Each one knows, though confusedly, that she has arrived at a destination, but not a goal such as we sometimes set for ourselves in our lives. This is rather a kind of rest stop, more or less necessary, more or less desired, not entirely unwelcome to each of them. A little like in baseball, when the home-run-hitter, knowing he can’t be put out, takes the time to sink his foot into each base in passing.
In 1953, Brigitte was five years old, an age when everything can be interesting. Her father, a geographer, would talk to her for hours about the contours of the earth, often digressing into the contours of life. It was a game they both played without constraints, without really differentiating between serious talk and fun, or between truth and falsehood. Not to confuse the child, the geographer had found a way to respect reality without making it too complicated, and to reassure her father, the little girl would sometimes pretend she did not understand something. Gradually this universe of explorers and distant lands was augmented by scientific discovery, so that the global geography lesson soon became a study in human aspirations. It was in this universe of determination and great exploits that Brigitte learned about the sound barrier and the two Jacquelines (the air pilots Jacqueline Auriol and Jacqueline Cochrane). She also followed the exploits of the swimmer Florence Chadwick, as she crossed the wild Dardanelles, the Channel with its schools of jellyfish, the straits of Catalina, Gibraltar, and the Bosphorus, and discovered the depths of the ocean and the upper regions of the atmosphere along with the scientist Picard. The eighty-plus days of fasting by the German Willie Schmitz and the Indian Rei Kan were, for their part, instructive as to the possibilities of living without food.
The further geographer and girl advanced in their discovery of the world, the fewer limitations they placed on ways to approach it. Sometimes the game took on enormous proportions. To the delight of the neighbourhood children, father and child staged Ann Davison’s feat: her conquest of the Atlantic to avenge her husband’s death. The father played the part of Davison the husband, who drowned while he and his wife were attempting to cross the ocean in a three-metre sailing boat. Brigitte then carried the play herself, confidently assuming the role of the thirty-eight-year-old widow who attempted the same crossing alone to honour her husband’s memory. In spite of her young age, Brigitte could easily imagine the elasticity of time spent alone on the sea. She imagined it as a deja vu that goes on and on, each fraction of a second opening up into more fractions of a second, as in an implosion. Melting into the rhythm of the waves, she retreated so completely into herself that her young audience was spellbound, unsure whether the heroine was on the verge of losing consciousness or of attaining a higher consciousness.
Father and daughter also followed with great interest the conquest of Everest, focusing especially on Tensing Norkay, Edmund Hillary’s Indo-Nepalese companion in the climb. The presence of a tiny cute dog in the Norkay family portrait (a wife and two daughters) had much to do with this preference. As for Hillary, the two armchair adventurers noted only that he had undertaken the ascent in celebration of Élizabeth II’s coronation. Brigitte and her father also knew that some women porters had participated in the expedition, but they did not know if they had reached the peak. As the neighbourhood children continued to demand new scenarios, daughter and father concocted a kind of alpine mutiny by these women porters. The conflict resolved, the leader of the expedition was obliged to admit that the climb would have failed without the endurance of the women.
***
Élizabeth was only one year old in 1953. Her destiny was therefore radically different from Brigitte’s and Baby M.’s. Too young or too old, she remained oblivious to the wonders of 1953. All her life, she has felt trapped in this in-between, on the edge of the present. Today, this condition seems clearer to her than ever. Baptized with the name of an as-yet-uncrowned queen, a queen, furthermore, who would have been given another name if the crown had been more clearly destined for her, Élizabeth suspects she may go through her entire life as someone to whom something is either always on the verge of happening, or perhaps was never meant to happen at all.
Élizabeth has just spent almost three days in her car watching the apartment building where she and Claude often met. The latter is a masseur, which was the reason for Élizabeth’s visits. This time Élizabeth stayed in her car because she did not want to talk to Claude. She only wanted to know where he was. She now knows that he no longer lives in the building. The terse caretaker finally revealed that the tenant in question had been gone for three months, without leaving a forwarding address. This explains why Élizabeth was unable to reach Claude by phone. At first, there had been an answering machine, then a recorded message stating the number was no longer in service. Although she did not expect much from this man, Élizabeth felt sufficiently hopeful to come and check if he still lived in the place where she had met him.
Whenever she comes to Montréal, Élizabeth always sets aside some time to see her friend Brigitte. The two women met in medical school and have continued to see each other ever since. At this moment, in Brigitte’s office, Élizabeth remembers it was Brigitte who introduced her to Claude. Élizabeth would never have made an appointment with a masseur on her own. In fact, the very idea repelled her, but Brigitte’
s irresistible charms had finally carried the day. And Claude had won her trust. He was discreet but attentive, seductive without trying to be. But, as he spoke little and maintained his distance, Élizabeth concluded this was going to remain a service relationship, so to speak. One day, Brigitte and Élizabeth ran into Claude in town, at an antique shop on Saint-Laurent. It was a Saturday afternoon; Élizabeth remembers it well. Thanks to Brigitte’s friendly personality, the three of them chatted for a while. To Élizabeth, Claude seemed relaxed. But this out-of-context meeting had changed nothing, either in the relationship which had been established between their bodies or in Élizabeth’s feeling that she could expect nothing more.
***
Whenever the opportunity presents itself, Brigitte likes to say she has made a career in the pharmacology of denial. Having completed her studies in medicine, and after practising for several years in a private clinic, she was recruited by the multinational pharmaceutical where she has now worked for a dozen years. She feels at home in this medical discipline which is concerned with remedies and other forms of reprieve. In the beginning — and this took several years — Brigitte worked hard to acquire a clear understanding of the gargantuan company’s operation. She read mountains of documents dealing with everything from scientific research to philosophy and ethics. Thanks to her ability to assimilate a multitude of new ideas and to handle newly acquired knowledge, she was quickly promoted to management ranks. For several years now, she has been planning and supervising the work of a half-dozen research teams.
1953 Page 6