The Longest Year

by Daniel Grenier

  The man wasn’t drunk. He was waving his hands in front of his face, miming a spinning reel, at one with the phenomenon he was describing. Aimé just listened. He pointed out that reality was three-dimensional. But there was no way to experience three-dimensionality, the man countered, with your eyes or your mind. Aimé talked to him about touch, and this gave him pause. They weren’t looking at each other, they were watching the celebration unfold.

  Exotic meats imported from Brazil, a hemisphere away, were served impaled on large metal skewers. The waiters walked from table to table, leaning low to send the odours wafting, transporting the guests. Pastry chefs had been brought in all the way from New York City. People were eating, sitting and standing, drinking too, you could hear laughter of every sort.

  A man in a tuxedo appeared from under a white tablecloth and grabbed the ankle of a young woman, who yelled for help, but everyone just laughed. The man picked up his monocle, which had fallen, and pretended to dry off his knees as he stood. The circle of guests gathered around, and the conversation grew lively. At the back of the room, on a stair, a colonel of the Merchant Marine began a speech that attracted few listeners. People were moving quickly, touching each other affectionately with their fingertips, as if they’d known each other forever.

  Rumour had it William Randolph Hearst had been invited and was actually in attendance, over there, or maybe at the back of the room. They said he’d rolled up in a convertible Packard with chrome running boards, a model no one had ever seen before. A squealing trumpet occasionally made itself heard over the clicking of pearls, jewellery, and crystal glassware.

  The two men watched this opulent evening unfold, admiring the guests’ elegance without really partaking of it. Aimé stood while the man sat on the piano bench with legs crossed and a champagne flute in his hand. Sometimes, when it seemed he was about to play something, he would suddenly snap to attention and realize the band was there for that.

  “But the movies aren’t there to replace our sense of touch — just our sense of sight. And our imagination — by turning those two into one and the same thing. That’s what the movies are for: to take the place of all the images we see while our eyes are open, and the ones that haunt us once our eyes are closed as well. Movies work better than dreams, because they follow an order, despite their . . . artificiality. Is that even a word?”

  “Artificiality? Sure, I think so. Why not?”

  “Me, I’m obsessed with the movies. I’ve been making movies forever, as long as I can remember, in my mind that is, even if I didn’t actually lay my hands on a camera until ten years ago or so. When I was ten I used to act in plays with my parents, but I was already thinking about movies, about film. I didn’t know it yet, but I was organizing space for a take, not for a scene. I always used to tell myself: That far, no further, otherwise you’ll be out of the frame, it won’t look good. Like if there were more than five paces between my father and me, it wouldn’t look good. I was framing the shot, see. I was constantly on the set. So I could always see things from the audience’s point of view. I’ve always been obsessed, so when Fatty put me behind a camera, it all clicked. Can I tell you a story?”

  “Sure.”

  “You really interested?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Don’t let me bore you, now.”

  “You don’t bore me. I don’t agree with what you were saying about movies and the imagination, at least I don’t think so. But you aren’t boring, not by a long shot.”

  “I don’t want to importune you either. The last thing I want is to bother you. I just want to make myself understood. What I’m saying is that movies and imagination have the same job: to give us a sense of wonder, entertain us. If you think the human imagination is there for any other reason, well, you’re missing the point.”

  It was Aimé’s turn to think. He thought about how his mind worked, how he would get lost in the meandering paths of far-off memories, like flashes, which he had a different name for, the way they rose up behind his eyes and mixed in with the reality before his eyes at a given moment. He thought about his mind and his imagination and his nearly unfathomable memory. He saw soldiers and priests in dozens of different uniforms all blurred together, blue here, grey there, dark green too, blending into the landscape. And the priests spoke different languages: Latin, French, English, Italian, even German in some of the parishes he could or could not remember passing through.

  “We’d planned everything down to the last second, down to a sixteenth of an inch, there was no room to take chances. We have to make people think everything is happening naturally, but also make them unconsciously understand that it’s a choreography, it’s orchestrated like a symphony. You have to take risks, too. I understood that early — that’s what makes us laugh, and what moves us too. We’d planned a scene on one of the drawing tables, and we rehearsed it without water, and without a camera. I was supposed to be running on train cars that were moving a little faster in the opposite direction, and then, at the last minute, grab onto the rope hanging from the cistern, to get back down to the ground. Right then I set off the valve by accidentally turning on the pump. You know the scene? A lot of people saw it. A lot of people talk to me about it, happens all the time.”

  Ideas were changing. What everyone believed yesterday wouldn’t mean a thing tomorrow. Like medicine: we used to think bleeding was the only cure, we made deep incisions as we watched the blood flow into a basin or a vial, and then decades later we stopped believing in it, laughed at what our fathers and grandfathers had done. Aimé thought about the first time he washed his hands with a bar of soap, how he’d grown used to it in a couple years. How could the movies explain that? Superimposition, as this man claimed? He thought about black slaves, fields teeming with them, something he’d seen without ever thinking twice. Or the black men in costumes and makeup in the movies, decades later, chased by knights in robes and pointed hats with eyeholes cut out.

  “We only shot one take, it was now or never. The plan was so perfect no one noticed when I broke my neck, not even me, that’s the story I wanted to tell you. So when I hanged myself with the rope the water came gushing out of the giant tank, gushing so hard I almost passed out. The water came crashing down and my neck twisted and I could feel my ear touching my shoulder, and it felt like I was yelling, but the crashing sound — you can’t hear it in the movie — it was so loud I thought I was hallucinating. I still remember that it didn’t hurt, I remember the adrenaline, the powerful rush right after I let go of the rope and was shaken. You can see that feeling in the film. When I watch myself in the movie I can see it. I stayed there in front of the pump for four or five seconds, swaying back and forth, before the other people started running toward me. My spinal cord had snapped, at the third cervical vertebrae, and I had a severe concussion. I’ve had a high-pitched ringing in my ears ever since.”

  Aimé thought about all the former slaves who’d been made up and dressed as soldiers. Someone had imagined that, without experiencing it, someone had decided on a camera angle and imagined everything, to entertain and create a sense of wonder, to shape reality and give it larger meaning. The camera steered toward painted men, dressed in rags torn in the most revealing of possible places, play-acting the horror, playing at being assassinated, pretending to be lynched. Aimé had seen it in a dark, smoky theatre, sitting in a comfortable chair surrounded by handsome men and pretty women. When the light came back on they applauded, talked about how realistic it all was, about realism, how real it felt. But no one could remember those days, the heat and the cold, the certainty that they’d never make it out alive, those long days more than two generations earlier, now represented by actors with music and recorded on film. The slightly artificial speed of the images unfurling was the one remaining connection with how things actually were.

  Was it the same for this man he was talking to now? Were his memories and his imaginings confused, after so
many years behind a camera? Did he have a hard time making the distinction? Was it the same thing, when you got down to it? Aimé might only have one memory, might lack imagination or be unable to summon this sense of wonder, as the other man put it. At another time, during his first youth, he had created a life for himself in his dreams, and acted accordingly. He vaguely believed he remembered it. But after a certain point, around his fiftieth year on earth, when his body was finally as hairy as other men’s, he was no more than a collection of memories, his memories, a past on the march toward an uncertain future, an ever more powerful past chipping away at his ability to reinvent himself.

  “But, see — I know it’s strange, but I only realized last month. My doctor finally figured it out. I always had this sharp pain, around the carotid artery, right here. It kept me from turning my head to the left. It’s still very sensitive, see? I can barely turn toward you. I actually have to turn my whole torso, or else it hurts. There are mornings I literally can’t move. And others when I’m perfectly fine.”

  Aimé wanted to hear more without necessarily trying to understand where all this was going. He was almost tempted to have a drink himself, for the first time in twenty years. He trusted this young man, his capacity for introspection, though he was a filmmaker and had never experienced anything significant, anything tragic. But how could he know? Maybe he grew up in a vomit-stained hovel in a squalid corner of Manhattan. Maybe he’d crossed the Atlantic with his parents in the hold of a freighter. What did Aimé know about it?

  “I broke my ankle once,” Aimé said. “And I just kept walking, didn’t realize it was broken, through the forest, in the middle of nowhere. It took sixteen hours, I could tell from the sun’s movement in my memory, trying to get somewhere. My shin bone broke to pieces when I fell, it was totally crushed, as if it had been put through a gristmill.”

  The other man tipped back his champagne, barely tasting it, unable to appreciate what was undoubtedly a grand cru. He was concentrating on Aimé’s words, while observing the guests. No one came close enough to talk to them, they were offstage, as if abandoned to their fate. Aimé continued:

  “I know someone, an old man who fought on the Confederate side. Third Tennessee Regiment. He also told me a story about a train. He’s ancient now. He told me the same story lots of times, as if that way he could somehow save something of that time, a vivid picture. He came out unscathed, not so much as a broken fingernail. But there was always the fear that never quite left him. He liked to tell me about the one true act of bravery he witnessed, a guy who wasn’t even a soldier. He said normal folks were much braver than the army, in those years.”

  “What was it, this act of bravery?”

  “An entire Confederate Army train was stolen by Union spies. They’d blended in with the civilians at the station. And what’d the conductor do? He ran right after them, without a moment’s hesitation. He ran down the rails, then jumped on a handcar and set off in pursuit. Unarmed, mind you.”

  “Did he make it back?”

  “No, he never came back. And no one ever saw the train again. Not in Memphis or Jackson, anyway.”

  “So it was more foolhardy than brave.”

  “That’s not how the old man put it. For him, it was about moving forward, with no hesitation. The sight of this man running along the railway, to defend something dear to him, something he was determined to get back — well, that was a shining example of courage. There’s always a touch of foolhardiness in courage, I’ll give you that.”

  “And vice versa, I guess. But why didn’t the soldiers run with him, to get the train back?”

  “As far as the old man was concerned, this was the very opposite of war. The flipside of the coin, if you will. Chasing after the train was pointless. He was adamant on that point.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Yeah. He told me the regiment fired at the locomotive, which was disappearing fast. The troops assumed the position and fired, under the captain’s orders. But by the time they figured out the train had been stolen it had already built up speed and was disappearing around a curve, pulling out of downtown.”

  In the crowd, Aimé had noticed a few old men in pince-nez and extravagant bow ties, men light on their feet, with little time to spare. They probably had the first-hand knowledge of the war he and his new acquaintance were talking about over the piano. Other, younger men were dancing too, without a care in the world it seemed, many had come back from another battlefield, a mere seven years ago, in Europe, a continent Aimé had never set foot on, not even to visit castles older than himself. One of the ones who’d caught Aimé’s eye while he was chatting with the young man had what was clearly an artificial right leg, and wore a medal pinned to his jacket. His limp was apparent when he moved, and added a doubtful shimmy to his dance steps. A steady flow of people would come up and congratulate him with a pat on the shoulder or a squeeze of the forearm. The women who spoke to him would bow slightly and hold their wineglasses in both hands. There was no trickery to this man’s elegance.

  The filmmaker said, without a hint of cynicism:

  “What about that guy there. Was he really brave? Can we know for sure, just ’cause he’s wearing a medal?”

  “Hard to say. But he definitely looks happy. He wears it with pride.”

  “I hated my uniform. I felt ridiculous in it, and I looked ridiculous too. The commissary general clearly never planned for a man under five-foot-five in the U.S. Army.”

  For the first time Aimé felt a need to look directly at the man. His last sentence added a layer of complexity to the image he had drawn in his head, and he felt bad for a sort of petty naivety he’d thought he’d grown out of.

  “You served?”

  “Just seven months, in France. Fortieth Infantry Division. My pants were too long and my coat looked like a potato sack, and I could never properly wrap the puttees the army gave us to protect our legs. Oh, and the shoes? Way too big. Eights. I’m a six-and-a-half. In our division, the old-timers had long given up hope of getting uniforms that actually fit. They’d have them altered by civilian tailors. And they’d buy proper workman’s boots too, rig ’em up to pass inspection.”

  Aimé threw in a lie, to keep the conversation going:

  “I wasn’t sent to the front. I was already married.”

  “No need to justify yourself.”

  “No, it’s not that. Just mentioning it.”

  “I wasn’t at the front either. Didn’t see much beyond the mud in the trenches before they called me home. I almost died — from an ear infection. They treated me back home, in Virginia actually, in a veteran’s hospital, same as all the others. Never saw that guy over there, though.”

  “Makes sense, there were thousands of you.”

  “I know. Thousands upon thousands.”

  “There’s no way you could have seen all the others.”

  “Nope.”

  At one point, as evening was turning to night, they understood that something rare was going on between them, and were quiet for a few seconds, long enough to gauge what was happening and savour it. Then they kept going a little further, beginning a few phrases and a few ideas, but with a sense of lost innocence, as if genuine communication depended on not knowing you were in the thick of it. After snapping up a final glass of fine champagne, the young man shook Aimé’s hand, without ever looking him in the eye, and disappeared behind the draperies on the ballroom wall. A taxi was waiting on the esplanade. He’d be back in Hollywood the next day, reviewing his script, shifting emphases here and there.

  On the way, he’d surely think of Aimé, the worldly man he’d met, who talked about war as if he’d been there, with words anyone could understand, fearful words that sent a chill down your spine, anguished words that could make you feverish, a man who’d spoken of those rare moments where something came into play, something you could call courage, for lack of a better word,
a rare thing that was almost never self-aware. While he took a quick stop by the side of the road, to admire the massive mountain range that ran all the way up to the Yukon, where the gold was getting scarce, he decided that his hero, who he would play himself, without a single smile, would be assigned the rank of lieutenant, and live in the midst of the absurd actions of his fellow men. And the only general in the entire movie would be the train, that would be its name, the runaway train, crossing back and forth over the line of fire, screaming on the spark-filled rails. The camera in his head was already rolling.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SEPTEMBER 1863

  SAINT-HENRI-DES-TANNERIES, QC

  The smell of leather and burnt fur impregnated the air in every street, and along the canal where the heat brought together swarms of insects and smoke from the factories down at the port. Morning, noon, and night, there was no escaping the racket. Sewers were being dug and built and tons of bricks and stone were piling up in front of houses, sometimes higher than the rooftops. A man could show up with nothing but a shovel, with nothing but a few plugs of chew and a pair of willing hands, and work he would find.

  Aimé knew the area well. He’d been spending whole days poking around here and there, waiting for evening when he could meet up with Jeanne, talk to her, set her at ease, and wordlessly convince her to let him slip his fingers under her clothing and caress the back of her neck. He never stopped thinking about her, and he knew she never stopped thinking about him either. He ate rarely, whenever he was hungry, with no desire for the company of others or concern for the honest people whose fruit and vegetables he spirited away. He hadn’t showed up for work in weeks. They’d most likely forgotten all about him, as if he had never existed. His name wasn’t written in any register.