THE LAST BULLET IS FOR YOU
Martine Delvaux
Translated by David Homel
.ll.
Copyright 2012 © Les éditions Héliotrope, Montreal
Translation 2016 © David Homel
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced for any reason or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Prepared for the press by Katia Grubisic
Cover design: Debbie Geltner
Cover image: Éléonore Delvaux-Beaudoin
Author photo: Patrick H. Harrop
Layout: WildElement.ca
Printed and bound in Canada.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Delvaux, Martine, 1968- [Cascadeurs de l’amour n’ont pas droit au doublage. English]
The last bullet is for you / Martine Delvaux.
Translation of: Les cascadeurs de l’amour n’ont pas droit au doublage. Translated by: David Homel.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-988130-11-8 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-988130-12-5 (html).--
ISBN 978-1-988130-13-2 (html).--ISBN 978-1-988130-14-9 (pdf)
I. Homel, David, translator II. Title. III. Title: Cascadeurs de l›amour n›ont pas droit au doublage. English.
PS8607.E495C3713 2016 C843’.6 C2016-902311-7
C2016-902312-5
The publisher is grateful for the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and of SODEC for its publishing program.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’sOfficial Languages 2013-2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.
Linda Leith Publishing
P.O. Box 322
Station Victoria
Westmount Quebec H3Z 2V8 Canada
www.lindaleith.com
.ll.
Militiæ species amor est.
Ovid
I had to wait before writing these first lines, I waited the way you do before you make love to the one you want. That first time after you’ve drawn out the wait, because waiting is as sweet as the first touch. Because waiting is a pleasure, painful and alluring.
I flirted with the words, I watched as ideas gently flickered. I let desire grow, I let it swell and take over everything, the space of the desire I had for you and which I thought I would never get over, one night, at the beginning, paralyzed and with only tears to soothe me.
I wanted to hit the computer keys the way I kissed you, the way I nipped at your face, because nothing could satisfy my need for you, making love to you as though my life depended on it, giving myself to your body, slipping under your skin. When nothing else, or almost nothing, existed. When I lived only to be in your arms. Time stopped moving. It was dense and thick, it wove a cocoon around me, a cotton cradle. I was drugged, abducted by aliens, a member of a cult.
When you left my life, I wondered what parts of you remained inside me, what memories, words, treasures, and trophies. In ancient Rome, soldiers displayed the fruit of their battles. A sword. A helmet. A shield. A severed head.
I wanted to rip out your tongue, cut off your legs, handcuff you. I wanted you to cry out for mercy, I wanted to see you fall on your knees and beg my forgiveness as you cried all the tears you had, I wanted to put out your eyes so you could see again, slap you so you’d finally feel my touch. I wanted to tie you up and gag you and make you listen to everything you had refused to hear, fatal poison pouring into your ears. I wanted to make a martyr of you like in the days of Caesar and his empire, bury you alive beneath my words, inside a mausoleum. I hated you with a passion for making me get over you. I’ll hate you for the rest of my days for making my stomach turn every time I come across a novel you told me to read, a film you told me to see, a section of reality I hadn’t known about until you. I’ll never forgive you for not being the one I loved.
Our love story turned into a tragedy, and only Rome could contain the ruins. Rome, where I fled in mid-summer to perform my exorcism. Rome, the city that has seen it all and lived through everything, suffered every indignity, the crucible of all that humanity could devise in its imagination. Rome, where all pasts and all futures appear on a street corner, in a hidden piazza, with the stray cats in the Colosseum. Rome, the eternal city where I would tell the story of this love I stayed faithful to as long as I could, continuing to love the man I had met, the one I glimpsed and dreamed would continue to live under the layers of suffering, behind the curtains of contempt and salvos of anger, among the ghosts that haunted him and shared our bed. This man was poisonous graffiti, a mad gladiator, an ambitious senator, an amphora filled to the brim with dangerous elixir. This man I left because it was either that or surrender my life to him.
I travelled to Rome to write you this last letter. The longest and most painful letter. The fall of your empire. Our D-Day.
You left eight months to the day after the airport in Montreal, sixteen months after the gold rings exchanged at City Hall, and twenty months after the narrow bed in the room at the Villa d’Ostia.
It was May 1, your departure date had been decided the day you arrived in September, I was accompanying you to the airport. My heart was sad, I was worn thin and exhausted. I knew I would miss you. I didn’t know how I would go on with my life on my own after it had revolved around you at such velocity. I didn’t know how long you would be gone or if you would come back. You had said nothing about our future. You sabotaged your immigration proceedings because you were sure you hated your life here, and now you were leaving me, a prisoner of my desire.
During the last moments, I tried to imagine how it would be afterward, what I would do with myself. I began organizing my days, setting up schedules, shopping lists, so I wouldn’t lose my way. I never thought that would be the last time I saw you.
When you walked into a room, all heads turned. When you spoke, time stood still. Your words were imperatives. You dictated actions to be taken, emotions to be felt. You commented, you decreed, you organized, you were a parliament.
We sat in the airport terminal. Behind us were Highway 20, downtown, the skyscrapers, the river, the harbour, the grey stones of the old city, the stores on St. Catherine Street, the ducks in La Fontaine Park, smoked meat, the shops on the Main, and in the middle of the Portuguese neighbourhood, between the city’s East and West, in the smell of sardines and grilled chicken on Duluth with its nightlife, Coloniale Avenue, the walls of my apartment, and our bed.
Behind us was Montreal, the city where you came to live to be with me, where you immigrated out of love for me, and that you hated so completely.
Today, after eight months of living together, you were going back home, returning to Prague.
In the terminal, you held my hand. Your face was sombre, serious, worried. In your eyes I saw signs of your pain, the suffering inside you like lava in a volcano; a single slip of the tectonic plates would send it shooting to the surface. I shook you, you awoke, and the flames flared up and charred everything.
You were tender with me those last days. That hadn’t happened for a while, maybe your departure made you understand what you were about to lose. Though I was pained by the distance you were about to put between us, though I was overcome by sadness, I felt something rise in me like a clenched fist.
A minute later, I was following you toward security. You moved between the ropes and lo
oked for me. I waited for you at every turn to kiss you once, one last time, a final last time. When you’d nearly reached the end, I waved and walked away. You put your hand over your heart and blew me a kiss. I headed for the door. For the first time, I left without looking back.
From inside the bus, the world seemed grey. Outside, the sky was low, the air saturated with humidity. I watched people around me, the couple sitting behind the driver, suitcases and gym shoes, they were coming back from a trip, they were both beautiful, they seemed very close and expressed gentle impatience at how slow the ride was going. I thought of you waiting by the gate. I wondered if you would call. When I got back home, there were no missed calls.
You are gone and in the quiet your absence gives me, I have no choice but to recognize the suffering I have lived through these last few months. I can’t deny it anymore. Time has travelled over my body the way waves erode a cliff. My muscles have melted away, my joints are stiff, sleep mocks me, I have lost my ability to concentrate, even dreams bring no relief. I have undergone major surgery. I am recovering from a serious illness. Sometimes I hear myself whimpering, “I want to die.” I spoke those words more than once when you were with me, I murmured them one evening as I sobbed in despair on the living room floor. I said them to you in the dark, in bed, my back turned, twisted into exhaustion by the discouragement of hours spent in the spin cycle of moods, a hellish whirlpool impossible to escape—you told me that if I were a man instead of a woman, these endless discussions would be cut short, we would limit ourselves to clear decisions and actions, we would fight it out and put an end to our relationship as quickly as possible.
You asserted this with that self-assurance of yours, that authority over the world that could never be challenged.
I didn’t understand that my words were there to numb your pain, that my voice was a nursery rhyme for children who can’t sleep, rocking them.
For you, love was acceptable only when it was unlivable.
As things got worse, I lost hope, and death seemed the only recourse: I let myself fall into its arms, curled up and trusting. You were gone and I had become a suffering ball of pain. It was worse than when you were there, when your caresses gave the illusion of balm on a wound. Life had meaning then. I was a soldier taking up arms as the sun rose, because life meant being there to see dawn come up the next day; dying would be treason.
“I want to die.” Today, I repeat the words over and over again to exhaust their power. I make a mantra out of them to test my true desire, and I end up rejecting it. The fighter in me will not desert. I’m angry at myself for even having considered the thought. I’m superstitious; if I ask for death, it will come to me. I picture a malevolent genie perched high above, hearing my request and, shaking his head, letting me know that this time my wish will be granted. I begin to murmur something like a prayer. I pray not to give in. I call out. I ask for forgiveness.
You are gone, I let you go, and a week after you left, with the ocean stretching between us like a shield, I decided to leave you. I wrote you a breakup letter. Love had become a prison, I couldn’t share my life with you anymore, I was caught in a net and had to break out whatever the cost. Against my own will, I hit “Send.”
Cry until my eyes were dry, let the dog lick the salt off my face, wring my hands, soak in the bath, listen to my iPod, drink some wine, scream into a pillow, eat a bowl of noodles, swallow some supplements, watch a film two films three films, listen to their stories, buy an airplane ticket, gaze at the clouds, walk the dog walk the dog walk the dog, throw the computer the land line the cellphone out the window, dye my hair blond, move the furniture around, buy new clothes, stare at the horizon, drink a beer in a sidewalk café, watch a TV series to the end and start all over again, walk endlessly through the city, touch myself and come as I cry late at night, sleep in the middle of the afternoon, lie down and wait for the pain to fade, fight the desire to go back in time, pray to any god at all, dream of the days before when I lived life in time with the beating wings of butterflies in my stomach, when I quivered at the sound of a text message, when life could be summed up by the unbearable expectation of a trip across the Atlantic, when we wondered whether we’d survive this latest wait, each on the other side of the ocean, but soon our bodies would fall into each other and we would scarcely believe it because the time had been so long, desire building for weeks, the sexy messages we wrote, and Skype serving our shameless desires.
I don’t know if I had this love affair in order to write about it, or if I’m writing about it so it will finally exist. I am tucking away our story in a book that you will hate the way for months you hated the fact that I was from here, a girl from a new world that you said was too young to really make a difference on the game board of the planet, this universe of the uprooted, of immigrants, refugees, people abandoned, this world of assimilated bastards who spoke only second languages, this world that had emptied the churches and expelled God, this world of consumer goods and the absence of tradition, this world that meant nothing in your universe because the great cultures and the old countries were sufficient unto themselves, this new world would never be more than a pale imitation, like the Arc de Triomphe in the middle of the desert or the mail-order brides that lonely American guys found on the Net and ended up marrying, “Hi, my name is Tatiana and I look forrr good husband, verrry purrre nice girl to looove you and serrrve you till death comes forrr you.”
You went away and I bought new sheets. I put your things away in boxes after smelling them one last time and breathing in the leather of your perfume. I grasped the clothes you wore in my hands, the ones you would pull off as you made love to me. I went into the fridge and the cupboards and found the food you liked and threw all of it away. I couldn’t stand to see you everywhere I looked. Little by little, like dead skin you rub off, I sloughed you off.
After I sent you the letter, I took down your face pinned to the wall, the photos I had taken one day last fall in the Old Port, pictures where the green of your eyes shone through, set off by the ash-blond strands of your hair blown by the wind, your sculpted Slavic features. Those images were like swords that ran through my body.
We hadn’t taken any photos since you immigrated. A sign that there was nothing to leave behind for remembrance. You focused your camera on the line of wooden light poles on Coloniale Avenue, and on the heaps of garbage bags, but you never pointed it at me.
After we made love, once, at the very beginning, when you were lying on me, your chest against my back, and I was holding you, one hand around your hips so you would stay a little longer inside me, you spoke softly into my ear: “It’s like we were made for each other… ”
America was your prison. No sooner had you landed here, with your nomadic ways, that you started protesting that you’d been locked up against your will. This enormous empty continent was a gulag to which love had sentenced you. You fought it every inch of the way. You refused to give in, you wouldn’t let go of the fight, America wouldn’t submerge you, it wouldn’t wash you away, you would commit no crime against the nation, you wouldn’t be guilty of treason because never ever would you betray your country. You seemed to be afraid that it would be drawn out of you the way patients used to be bled, that with an eraser you would be eliminated from the map, you and your country and all it represented, not only Prague and its mythology but also that murderous mother Russia, that motherland that had made people from your country suffer by dragging them off to an intoxicating feast of hatred, and that some continued to love, like you, who kept endlessly turning to her as you wondered what you would do without that culture, if something would remain inside you once the wheat was separated from the chaff. What better fetish than this mixture of Kremlin and Kafka that had the power to protect you against love, and distance you from me?
You told me about the countries of the Eastern Bloc as if they were the Holy Grail, and Russia, despite the tanks of springtime invading your country, r
emained the land of a great culture that you cherished, a culture inherited from your mother who, out of spite, married a young Czech man she’d met one drunken night in front of the astronomical clock. You were faithful to your mother and her contempt. Your father, the young rebel, grew up with Jan Palach, he had watched him set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square to protest the occupation. You took your mother’s side when she said, “All the Czechs need is a good red boot in the ass!”
Buying you your non-alcoholic beers. Making you coffee at the end of the afternoon and setting it on the table in front of you, making sure to add sugar. Walking with you arm in arm, feeling our bodies in perfect harmony. Giving you a record you won’t listen to, a book you won’t read. Setting the table for a meal I planned, thinking of you. Making breakfast, coffee, oranges, a grilled cheese sandwich. Turning up the heat in the bedroom because you get chilly even if I don’t. Pretending to be sleeping when you come home late at night for the pleasure of you taking me without me waking. Nestling my head in the crook of your arm. Stroking your hair as you sleep. Watching you come to bed in your pyjamas. Kissing your shoulder softly when I awake in the morning curled against your back. Thinking that today you’ll be happy, there will be no more anger at the world, no anger at me.
I wait for the time when my heart will stop seizing up when I think of you. I wait for the headaches to leave me alone, for my eyes to linger with desire over a face other than yours. I wait for the moment when I will emerge from my state of paralysis and the feeling that life is over. I wait for my mind to stop turning in your direction like flowers instinctively seeking the sun. I wait for the desire to hold another body in my arms, to stop adding up the pros and cons in a two-column list, and surrender the illusion like a puff of smoke. I wait for a time when tears won’t catch me by surprise in the middle of a conversation, when I’ll stop struggling against myself, divided between one woman who wants to go on loving, and another who knows that common sense forbids it, one who clings to hope and the other who is desperate, one who thinks she understands and the other whose vision is blurry, one who goes on fighting and the other who gives up. I wait to get back the woman I was before I fell in love with you.
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