He’d crossed America more times than he could count, from north to south and east to west, by car and plane and train and carriage, on horseback and on homemade rafts, but he’d never walked from coast to coast. His enthusiasm for new technology and advances in transportation made him lose sight of the joy to be had in something as simple as walking for pleasure. He remembered he’d taken a keen interest in the building of the Appalachian Trail, a saga that spanned close to forty years. The newspapers reported on fights and squabbling among partners, competition and conflicts of interest. Best friends would suddenly find themselves embroiled in hatred. People started talking when Myron Avery and Arthur Perkins took over the project from Benton MacKaye, an eccentric visionary who essentially invented hiking during the Great Depression. Mountains were on everyone’s lips, from Buffalo to Atlanta. People were learning of the existence of that long, ancient mountain range which had lost pride of place in a modern world that had seemingly sprouted up overnight. Breathless editorials by radical ecologists argued for the protection of hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest. They wanted to block mining development for generations, protect the flora and fauna and trees and the mushrooms, for the sole purpose of giving Americans a place to walk through the forest.
The idea may have been counterintuitive — build a two-thousand-mile trail through the mountains that belonged to no one, were marked yet wild, alive with bears and magnificent birds — but it caught on. And Aimé got swept up in the movement: one day, why not, he’d retrace his steps and take possession of the land of his continental memory, behold it stretching out into breathtaking landscapes, never-ending mountains that would come into view in a new light, unclouded by fears of freezing to death or outrunning a gang of bootleggers he’d relieved of a cask of brandy.
For Aimé, heading out on the Appalachian Trail was a chance to rediscover places that had been important to him throughout his long life. Some of these memories were fading and disappearing. He’d spent so many years hiding out in the Alleghenies, or concealing things like his fear of being discovered, or having unimaginable adventures. For years he’d worked in coal mines, an invisible witness to industrialization, seeing and hearing men and children making up songs and telling tall tales to get through cold nights in drafty bunkhouses with no heat except for their own bodies packed in like sardines. Some of these storytellers were living legends, and when they got started even the wind fell silent, to better take in their stories. You’d encounter tame grizzlies, fish as long as farms and strong as millwheels, men who could break through seven prison walls and travel ten leagues in a single bound. He remembered long nights in cabins in the woods with men whose mouths never opened by day, they were too busy carving out the mine walls with picks and shovels. Men who might at first seem to be mutes but who, once they got going, seemed congenitally unable to shut up. Had he really been one of them? He had turned fifty-five this year, and his joints were starting to hurt as if the cartilage had finally woken up. He was often taciturn and was thinking about setting off with nothing but a backpack, canteen, and walking stick. Had he really once been that chatterbox, capable of holding an audience spellbound? In his mind’s eye he could still see a storyteller whose cup ran over with beer and fanciful tales.
Late one night at a Christmas party near the very end of the last century he’d tried, to the accompaniment of a glum-faced fiddler, to tell the true story, his story, the story of a man who couldn’t grow old. He had a reputation for never speaking, so when he did, people turned to listen. It was, he remembered, a pretty night, a long, grand night like a never-ending story with a thousand and one digressions. Aimé had talked about the stars and the planets, the powdered-wig scientists of the Royal Academy; he’d explained the adoption of the Gregorian calendar; the life of Isaac Newton with his dilemmas and famous apple. He’d touched on the importance of the moon and the tides, of precise calculations that prevented the world from crumbling under the weight of accumulated mathematical errors. February 29 was the most important date in the universe. Why? Because it was the date that let us live forever. He implored them to never forget this date, his El Dorado and his Fountain of Youth and Philosopher’s Stone rolled into one, the point where everything converged, where lead could be transmuted into gold and coal compressed into diamonds. They were in a leap year, mind you. If pregnant women wanted their children to experience eternal life, they knew what to do. He had just explained it to them. There was no such thing as Providence, we were all responsible for shaping the future. Not a single sound upset the balance his voice found. Even the violin had fallen silent. Aimé had never spoken so eloquently before. He was developing a taste for it.
Yes, he’d developed a taste, he remembered it now. He scared himself, that night; he’d believed himself. On the chair they set out for him, he’d seemed to grow, to take on gigantic proportions, like a wise man or a sorcerer, and the four legs of the chair had started cracking under his weight. Every eye was watching him carefully and he suddenly stopped and ran out of the room, leaving a wide-open door behind him. No one ever saw him again.
So it was that one day, in another age and a world otherwise more rational, he started walking. Because he felt like it. He hit the trail with the joy of a new man. To provoke his body and remember what had happened in the past, enjoy himself in silence instead of simply growing bitter, because it was starting to drag on too long and his memories were making him sick to his stomach. Who would have believed him? Who would have believed he had watched the Brooklyn Bridge being built and walked across before its two halves met? More and more often he wondered whether his joints, the backs of his knees and his Achilles tendons would make him suffer another hundred years. His heart was far from atrophied, but he felt little sharp pains, more and more often, like electric shocks, as if a doctor were trying to rouse him with a defibrillator.
It was time to get going. He outfitted himself as best he knew how, bought everything he’d need to make sure he didn’t freeze or starve to death, and a few books explaining the risks of long hikes. He might meet certain trees he’d known before, perhaps the great elms of his youth. In his new waterproof cleated boots, he might once again step in his old footsteps. In early June 1980 he reached the foot of Mount Springer, with a little smile on his face, looking like a young retiree who knows how to live, eager to make the most of his last good days. He had the best equipment money could buy, in sweet-smelling natural and synthetic materials. His walking stick alone cost more than all the clothes he wore in the first third of his life.
In the right-hand pocket of his jacket he carried a sort of compass of his own invention, a round object of golden metal and crystal. It was a precise instrument, an alethiometer he’d designed at the beginning of the century, and that he would have liked to give to someone, had the opportunity ever presented itself.
As he walked into the forest, alone, he thought of her, as he had before her death, when he decided to go see her one last time. It must have been the massive trees waiting to engulf him, working their magic. He just started walking and let his memory guide him. The dark green dome of pines and beeches soon concealed the mountains awaiting his return.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DECEMBER 1900
PHOENIX, AZ—MONTREAL, QC
when he thought of her he pictured an ageless face through a curtain of fog. It was a young woman’s face, she was barely an adolescent when they’d first met and she would now be over fifty, if his count was right. Fifty years with all that entailed, the loosening and slackening skin, and wisdom lodged deep in her eyes, and beauty built up over time. He had seen so many people grow old and fade away without ever really knowing them, without ever being touched by their fate. How many men and women had he survived? As the number of years apart from each other grew, Jeanne continued to appear in his mind from time to time. He saw her more often, like a negative image at once blurry and focused, troubling him in the middle of whatever he was doi
ng, a diversion and digression from his daily routine.
He thought of her at strange and unexpected times: coming out of an important meeting with a businessman who’d hired him through obscure middlemen and had unwittingly found himself in Aimé’s presence; when he suddenly noticed daylight slipping in between the slats of a poorly built or abandoned house; in the middle of a field he was crossing for the first time, up to his shoulders in wheat; in the night, between two blows of a pickaxe as he dug a grave for an old dog, the only living being who’d kept him company for a long time, and the only one who had succeeded in gaining his trust.
Without ever actually seeing for himself, either up close or at a distance, the new life she’d begun after his brief, meteoric passage, he’d learned that she was married and had managed to give birth under safe and respectable circumstances, through her brother’s influence. The child had been born a Langlois, and recognized as such by the Rue Saint-Antoine merchant who’d generously agreed to take Jeanne’s hand in marriage. That’s what Aimé had heard and what he believed, barring credible proof to the contrary. He’d never checked, had tried everything to forget and start again, with a new name and a rifle, a bayonet and an increasingly deep-rooted hatred of the men in grey approaching from across the battlefield. The war had almost been enough to make him completely forget Jeanne and the thing he had left in her stomach. The truth was that Aimé had no idea what had happened to Jeanne in the days and months since their lovemaking. He hadn’t set foot in Canada since the night he fled after they were surprised, limbs entwined in the hay, two young lovers guilty of a long list of crimes and unforgivable sins. He could still clearly see Jeanne’s brother’s face at that moment, a silhouette with razor-sharp edges. In the light of the lantern, his left hand hoisting a large brick, held high, he stood ready to strike, with three other dark, menacing silhouettes behind him.
Aimé set off with very little: a change of clothing, a well-thumbed volume of natural science, and a not yet functional prototype of the four-needle compass he’d worked on day and night. His intuition told him it would be a short stay. He waited at the train station with a growing crowd of passengers, imagining that every one of them was on their way to visit loved ones. In their faces he could read a form of melancholy he associated with filial love and nostalgia. On that warm December day, the people waiting with him on the platform missed their parents, their hometowns, the particular countryside they’d left behind in order to seek their fortunes in the city, toil at the textile mills, or drill for oil. Some had indeed made a fortune. They wore watches on fobs and elegant clothing and were travelling great distances, north or east, to visit ageing parents before they passed away irrevocably, as if they had never existed.
Aimé exchanged polite smiles with a visibly pregnant woman sitting on one of platform’s few benches. She was pretty, confident, and never stopped rubbing her stomach. Aimé figured she must have been born into poverty, somewhere in North Carolina maybe, and prospered in these territories that stretched on forever beyond the last great rivers, land the government was giving away to anyone who’d take it. She would have prospered in the company of a young, ambitious man, a man free of complexes who knew how to farm dry land and play the market. It was her first pregnancy and she was feeling good.
At the appointed time, with a whistle of steam, the train stopped at the station and the steward came down onto the platform with a cry: Hurry up, the train departs in fifteen minutes. Passengers for Amarillo, Oklahoma City, Fayetteville, Little Rock, Jackson, Nashville, Lexington, Columbus. All aboard! Railroad men hopped to and helped passengers load their baggage. With a polite apology, Aimé slipped between the members of a family that seemed to hesitate between two cars, and climbed the metal steps. His reserved compartment had a couchette and private washroom. The sliding doors locked from the inside without a squeak and the dining car was a few steps away. He sat in the padded seat, and unbuttoned his jacket with a sigh of relief. He took in the unabated excitement of the crowd on the platform. At the edge of his field of vision, the stationmaster stood erect, watch in hand and whistle in mouth. He wore a moustache waxed smooth, like Aimé. This man was not taken lightly; only once he blew his whistle was the ingeniously designed and meticulously crafted mechanism set in motion. Jets of steam emerged from the axles, brakes disengaged, and dozens of wheels started spinning, very slowly at first, so the latecomers holding onto the bars of the doors could be pulled aboard by uniformed railwaymen at the last second.
The train gathered speed, quickly drawn by motive and centrifugal forces and the efficiency of a furnace fed by stokers. The racket all around intensified to clearly signal the train’s departure, and Aimé saw a child who looked about ten, alone on the platform, so overcome with sadness he couldn’t bring himself to wave goodbye.
The days passed and so did the nights, and landscapes that kept changing yet were always alike in colour and contour. Aimé thought about Jeanne and the state he might find her in, slightly faded but still alive and well. Her undefined face was imprinted on his retina, he was unable to properly focus on the features he had so often contemplated in the light of a gas lamp, in their secret hiding spots, or in the middle of the afternoon on the bank of the Lachine Canal, while further out on the St. Lawrence River, great ships were being fitted. Time had passed and Aimé was trying to reconcile two conflicting faces. Jeanne was in his head, there was no doubt about it, she was the reason he had left, but he had no idea what was waiting for him when he got there.
He slept well, ate well, smoked fine cigars offered by men who leaned over to light them. The seats were comfortable, the restaurant tastefully decorated. The other travellers gathered around card games and rarely spoke to him. He gave off the scent of a man who wanted to preserve his anonymity and be left alone. Nor did he speak to anyone, beyond politely thanking the waiters who brought him highballs on ice. People watched him from a distance, with a mix of admiration and envy. Perhaps he was a magnate, one of the new self-made men who were in on the bank trusts. Maybe he lived in New York City, and was on his way back with cases stuffed with treasury bonds and deeds of title. There was speculation surrounding the little metal object he frequently pulled from his pants pocket and rubbed gently as he watched the landscape unfurl. People figured he must live in one of those grand hotels that had gone up along Central Park, west of the reservoir.
The meals were good, the meat was always fresh, even after Columbus where he changed trains and was seated in a much older car. This venerable north-south line smelled different, more leathery somehow, and smoke clung to the curtains, but Aimé enjoyed his quiet, comfortable couchette. Suddenly, a little after he crossed the Pennsylvania border, the mountains appeared in the distance.
It had been years since he gained weight, he could still boast a slender waist and the ropy hands of a young man. He ran his finger over his collarbone, and felt the way it stuck out, an oft-repeated gesture that was almost a nervous tic. When he met Jeanne, people figured he’d been alive less than a quarter century. No one suspected how much older he was. But the next time he saw her she would be older than him. An explanation would be required. Or not. He already felt presumptuous in assuming she’d see him, or that he’d even manage to make contact. He might have to settle for observing her from afar. Every time the train pulled into a station, in a small town or major city, Aimé thought about getting off and turning his back on this whim of his that wouldn’t make anything different or new. In those few seconds of complete hesitation, he redefined what closure meant to him. And, if he stood up, he’d sit down. Take a breath, fight off his boyish nervousness. High-flying cottony clouds formed complex patterns in the sky, a forewarning of hard rain. The train hurtled along fast. You’d need a lot of imagination to read anything in the white shapes colouring the sky, as far as the eye could see.
Aimé had abandoned her to her fate thirty-six years ago. He wondered whether she’d even remember him. How many people had he f
orgotten? But the child, the oldest child, who’d been named Langlois like the others who must surely have come after — wouldn’t he be a constant reminder to Jeanne? Had he even survived? If remembering Jeanne’s face with any degree of precision had become a challenge, picturing the child was an outright impossibility. While the train approached Albany, Aimé cleared his mind, tormented by this fiction of a child growing up in the bosom of a happy, healthy family in Montreal, striding into the twentieth century. One thing was certain: he wasn’t coming back for him; he was coming back for her.
He hadn’t been a coward often in his long life. The exception was that one time he’d run away, without looking back, in the middle of what was left of the night. Thanks to his network of contacts and intimate knowledge of back roads, he’d made it to the border by dawn. It was as if the consequences of his actions had been too heavy to bear, in the hours and months that followed, so he’d fled without looking back. Jeanne had been taken in by an honest man. He was sure to hate Aimé without ever having laid eyes on him. It had to be admitted, he was also her saviour.
Now that decades had passed, it was easy to say: perhaps he should have come back for her instead of joining the army in place of that shirker who was disinclined to squander his birthright. It was easy to say, but Aimé felt it bore repeating. He judged himself harshly, his heart beat quickly and unsteadily. His skin grew pale as the outside temperature fell, as the North drew closer and snowflakes took the place of raindrops. He took out his compass and noted that the mechanism was off-kilter again: the needles were vibrating constantly but not pointing at any one symbol, not indicating anything definite, except a magnetic agitation in the air, as if parallel worlds were colliding.
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