Breakneck

by Nelly Arcan

  Rose looked at Julie, her eyes narrowed by the sun, though without wrinkles, and in return Rose felt herself weighed and measured and destabilized, undressed with that same attention to detail she used when she styled the models for fashion photographs. She was shorter than Julie but the shoes she dangled from her fingers had higher heels than Julie usually wore, as compensation for her size, a yearning to reach higher.

  Julie couldn’t remember a Charles but wished she did, since he was the reason Rose decided to establish her relationship, with a simple handshake, in front of her door.

  “I’m sorry,” she answered, “but I don’t know Charles Nadeau.”

  Rose’s blue eyes, no more than slits, showed her doubts. Out of embarrassment she looked off into the distance, toward Saint Lawrence Boulevard where the Hare Krishnas were still raising their song to the sky. Maybe Julie was lying to her, but that didn’t matter, the die was cast.

  “You’ve seen each other and talked in the neighbourhood. At the Nautilus. Often. He’s tall and blond. A photographer. You also met Bertrand, a friend of ours, in the patio at Plan B. You told him you wanted to write a script on the world of fashion, and on Montreal photographers. It was one of your projects.”

  Rose had spoken her lines with the tone of a woman who’d been rehearsing them for a while, a reply casually dispensed with the quickness of words thought out ahead of time and repeated in front of a mirror, then kept close, waiting for the opportunity to have them heard by the party concerned. The line was both a demonstration and a warning, and each time Julie thought back to it, she was impressed by how it contained their entire story, how it held both prophecy and realization, a bottle thrown into the sea from high upon a roof, landing straight in the enemy woman’s life.

  It was true, not long before Julie had been approached in the street by a man, the same Bertrand she’d spoken to about a documentary project on Montreal fashion and its photographers, it was true he’d mentioned a well known photographer friend of his who was dating a fashion stylist.

  Julie knew who he was, actually she had just discovered him. Watching Rose, she could picture him in quick succession in different parts of the city, at the gym and Java U, sometimes by himself, or with a woman who was out of focus, who must have been Rose, the impression of a woman gravitating around a man, Charles, whom she’d spoken to without remembering his name.

  Every time they crossed paths he looked at her tenderly, it was a look that held her close but without the sexual aspect that so often hung heavily over the looks men who contemplated her body gave her, each time he seemed to look beyond her, to the background in which she was caught. She talked about weight-lifting with him and hypertrophic exercises, proteins and creatine, he wanted to invite her, in a moment of boldness, to have a drink somewhere nearby, in an outdoor café ideally, where you could still smoke, the patio at Plan B was a good choice. But before Rose stepped in, he was no different from all those who’d come before him, the others covered over by the boredom of a life without love, immersed in an indeterminate state created by years of anodyne encounters where faces and cocks blurred together, in an infinite number of combinations in a lottery nobody won. Charles, whose beauty she had never taken stock of, now took on the substance of reality, through Rose, he had become a semblance of a challenge, since Rose’s goal had been to keep them apart.

  After she’d finished her piece, Rose still looked at Julie, but her eyes fighting the sun no longer had anything to say, they simply showed regret. Julie felt that Rose had followed the path of her own thoughts as it so often happens to women who know by heart the truth of the things they fear, to such an extent that, despite their best intentions, they make it happen, simply by intervening in the way she’d just done. Perhaps Rose had understood her error and this forced her to continue on a different tone, with words that moved away from Charles, in an attempt to play down his importance.

  “I hear there’s never anyone on the roof. This is the second time I’ve been up here. The heat is unbearable.”

  A great silence came over them, a welcome truce for Julie, though painful for Rose. They stopped speaking to each other, looking at each other, they stood side by side, unmoving, Rose couldn’t leave because she’d just gotten there and Julie was looking for the exit. Julie, voluble, the chatterbox, couldn’t find anything to say as she felt an emotion suddenly rising inside her, almost imperceptible, a slight pinch that absorbed her attention since it was so rare. Charles had made an appearance in her mind and she began thinking of him, wondering where he might be now, maybe she would go with him for that drink at Plan B, scraps of emotion quickly dissolved in the heat that enveloped everything in his embrace, the sky like a sponge that had reached its limit, and now had to purge, perspiring, sweating profusely, beads of water running down its own walls. Clouds had formed and they began piling upon each other, capturing and snaring once and for all the life underneath, Montrealers thirsty for celebration. Just then a racket of honking exploded from Mount Royal Avenue, leaving just enough room to hear the cries of victory, happiness shouting and shrieking, without speeches, brute joy, an assault.

  A number of cars had stopped at the light on Colonial Avenue, filled with men accompanied by their females, bellowing, from their windows they waved three-coloured Portuguese flags and something else inside, a scribble, an indefinable emblem from the rooftop. More cars filled with screaming and festooned with flags crawled in both directions on Mount Royal Avenue, going toward or having passed the Hare Krishna procession, the cars were so loud they would erase the Krishnas from the consciousness of Montreal.

  A soccer game had just ended, and another one was beginning, the game that broadcast the good news through the city, not through the spirit of God but of Sport, good news launched into the streets as the Krishnas had attempted before them. The game would continue with its millions of fans, the clamour of the World Cup was beginning to resonate in all the big cities of the world. The Portuguese had defeated the English and Montreal’s Portuguese, as well as fans of the Portuguese, for the rest of the day and through the night, lay endless siege to the city, criss-crossing its major streets, forcing their flags on the public as if it were the end of the world, and their right to drive through the streets in joy, and Montrealers would agree, admiring the courage of their national pride, their audacity in proclaiming their identity, they would see in them a warrior attitude they had lost long ago, the way your back straightened and you could stand tall, instead of eternally picking at your own conscience.

  Julie could sense in herself the symptoms of that national self-examination, the common enterprise that consisted in self-flagellation, standing in the grandstands of the world, watching it like a stage on which other people lived, whereas her nation lapsed into boredom and torpor, flight, death by denigration, belittling, the weakening of fathers, the death of a soul that could strike a nation, leaving an entire people to reproduce inside their own tombs.

  But that day Rose wasn’t insipid, she didn’t have that feeling of distance from others, on the contrary she was filled with a state of urgency and immediateness. Julie disoriented her, offered her no purchase, what’s more she had eyes that Rose saw for the first time, unexpectedly of a rare green, emerald wonders that took her breath away. Meanwhile, Julie had identified the fear in Rose, she had felt it, weighed it, she knew she had gone further than she wanted to. Rose was exposed in the middle of a shooting range, everything was falling apart, yet she had to push on.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  Rose opened a door for Julie, an opportunity, she was offering her hand so that she might be helped.

  “Yes,” Julie lied.

  Julie was looking for a continuation, a name to offer that she couldn’t find, a situation, a way to flesh out her lie.

  “We’re not living together yet, but we will. He’s an architect.”

  The heat, the honking, the screaming, and Rose herself suddenly became intolerable, her existence was no more than a
rmour against life, against the world and all it contained.

  Rose watched Julie, she was smiling with her mouth but not her eyes, she didn’t believe her.

  “I hope it’ll work out. Living together can really change a relationship.”

  That was all there was to say.

  The sky changed colour. Without warning, it turned grey and dropped even lower toward the women, curving, seemingly moving toward its own centre. The sky folded over itself, an angry grey mass carrying as much water as a lake and which, helped by a strong wind that suddenly flared up, emptied itself upon Montreal like a giant letting go, clouds scattering across the sky as thunder and lightning finished them off. Something up there went beyond their understanding, a presence carried by its own gigantic motion that overcame everything in its unconcern, without a thought for the men it oppressed.

  All this had taken no more than a few minutes to come together, to mobilize, to generate an extraordinary event, flamboyant, the climax of the day up there on the roof, that neither woman would forget, it would mark their lives by immortalizing their meeting. For Julie it would remain a symbol for the whole world, the power of mighty nature throwing back mankind’s arrogance in its face, God as a churlish child. For Rose, it was a far more personal symbol, the entire world was communicating something to her, as a response to her mistake, forcing the sky over her head on Colonial Avenue to tell her something terrible, because of Julie, because of the meeting she initiated.

  Lightning, the central part of the sky, had struck three metres from them, on the wooden guardrail against which they’d been leaning. They never heard such a sound, a detonation that carried the weight of a plane crash, they had never felt through their bodies such a powerful shock with such enduring weight, it lasted, obstinate, in the air around them, it filled the space like a lead wave. In the noise that forced their eyes to close, neither Julie nor Rose saw the splinters of wood exploding in every direction, but they felt the guardrail reeling under their hands. Rose had the clear sensation that her high-heeled shoes were thrown forward, down the emptiness of eight floors, as the number five hundred flashed in her mind, the price of the shoes she’d dropped and weren’t hers, shoes she’d taken from some designer collection the day before. The shock pushed the women backward, synchronized, the two women in their bikinis swimming through the crashing rain as they cried out in unison, synchronized there as well, together and useless in the chaos, Rose fell to the ground, protecting herself in her fall with the hand that dropped the shoes, and Julie, once she found her legs, left the roof running, leaving Rose behind, alone in the storm, on the ground, next to the guardrail struck by lightning.

  II

  * * *

  SHAPED IN THE SAME KILN

  HER GIVEN NAME was bestowed on her by her mother, and her father’s inattention, at least that’s what she told herself. All her life she had tried to explain away her name, since everyone, except her mother and father, with a modicum of good taste and good sense could feel—despite the image of gentle fragrance it implied—that something was wrong, and that it came from the mother’s side, a kind of abuse, worse than a spelling mistake.

  She was called Rose and her mother Rosine, you can’t imagine, she’d confide to people she met and whom she’d introduce herself to as a protestor against mothers and their choice of names, and husbands too.

  Her mother had chosen the name to insert herself into her daughter, it was quite clear, and her father hadn’t seen the Rose motif in Rosine’s choice, and by letting her choose, her father had sacrificed his daughter by not paying attention.

  Her mother had given birth to five girls and a boy: Lisa, Geneviève, Rose, Suzie, Marie-Claude, and Stéphane.

  No sooner had she been born than Rose’s personal drama began, she was stuck in the middle of a parade of girls and finally, as a reward and much to the Dubois family’s great relief, a boy arrived who would become, against his will, his big sisters’ doll. He was transformed into a possession that belonged to a plethora of little girls in little girl dresses bouncing up and down and clucking over him, and in the end, through sheer suffocation, lullabies and affections, they succeeded in breaking his gender, changing him into his inverse, a hole, a girl.

  Rose grew up in a typical family unit in the town of Chicoutimi, in the Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean area, in the midst of a swarm of females in a part of the country known for producing girls only. This proliferation of girls created her indefatigable perspective on the world. Even outside her native region, the surplus was obvious, everywhere she looked she saw the hateful distribution of the sexes that disadvantaged women who insisted on living and being part of the woodwork, so much so that she decided to dress them and make that her living, something that was also an abdication.

  Julie revived that torment in Rose just as she was turning thirty, just as the question of affection and the love of men had found a solid answer in Charles, an answer she might have counted on for years to come. She told herself that Julie was only one woman among many and that it was a form of justice, for her and for others, she consoled herself by placing Julie in the logic of the overpopulation of women, those beings who required men and who weren’t despicable individuals, of course, they weren’t harmful in themselves, of course, but became so by the surplus they represented, and the war this surplus created.

  Rose believed that women see nothing but what men want, they think of nothing outside of what men want. Women don’t notice each other but for Rose it was the opposite, she saw them far too much, for her each woman should be questioned as to her motives, she was convinced that all women paid the price—it was clear, empirical, not subject to interpretation—for being more numerous than men. And a woman wasn’t necessarily a woman. A woman was any being that gave its body to men, that wanted their body to meet men’s, a man could be a woman in Rose’s definition, as long as that man got hard-ons for other men. For her, gender wasn’t defined by a person’s genitals but by the genitals of other people, the one you dreamed of, and salivated over, to whom you gave a part of yourself if you were lucky. Not many understood this, and knew it to be true, Rose believed.

  Her theories weren’t politically correct. Theories are built on anomalies like homosexuality, she thought, and anomalies are often natural, she also believed, like homosexuality again. The anomaly when it came to women was that nature had decided they should be born in greater numbers in certain parts of the world, like in Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean, to stockpile them in case of the extinction of the race, or massive loss of life due to an epidemic, without considering the happiness of those women without genetic or hormonal means to take up arms and establish an equilibrium. Very few women decided to fuck each other to find satisfaction because homosexuality was first and foremost a male thing. Easy to comprehend why, Rose believed, if you brought to mind the image of the hole you came out of.

  Rose was a fashion stylist, she made up women for photographers, the clothes she chose for them didn’t hide but revealed. She sculpted flesh for desire, for erections. The number of women grew with every picture, and in each one Rose left her mark, as small as it might be, in the sculpting of others, participating in her own disappearance. In her life she’d met women so beautiful she had to close her eyes from the shock. She named that moment of shock the dagger. A dagger to amputate her eyes, her heart, to suppress her own existence faced with dazzling light.

  Many of the models were adorable, and Rose had appreciated a number of them for their kindness, their gentle souls, but more than anything she would look at them and each time be thrown into personal chaos.

  Charles Nadeau was a photographer for whom she’d worked for years, and there was more tenderness in his eyes than his photographs. Pictures had to sell and selling was something that had to hit you square in the jaw, take you by the throat, at least that’s what you heard everywhere that women became merchandise.

  Charles the photographer didn’t fall for models, against all odds he preferred Rose. Charles would
remain for Rose a man who had fallen from heaven and given birth to her among the models, he had given her substance among the most beautiful of them, gradually beginning to notice her, over time, invisible in the pictures but always at his side, in the same studio, carting around the clothes and hanging them on racks, clothes chosen according to the desired degree of nudity.

  Charles had loved her for years, Rose could never deny it, even after he’d left her. Her best memories were of the pictures that she was the centre of. Life is fabulous when it puts the lie to theory. Theories are built on disappointment, they aren’t constructed to tell the truth but to force the truth to reveal itself and reject life, this she believed sometimes, when life was sweet, when a man had given her meaning.

  Their story lasted five years. These days, Rose figured, that was a respectable length of time. Surely it would have gone on longer if not for Rose’s mistake. Without meaning to, she had styled Julie the way she styled the models. She placed her in Charles’ lens by making her move over to his side, his life, his work, and Julie let it happen the same way models let themselves be made-up, not out of vanity or cruelty, but boredom. Today Rose could say it: Julie was bored because her body had outlived the death of her soul, as Julie herself once told her. There was nothing in her body—a concept hard to understand if you’ve never died yourself—but her body remained sensitive to the life that existed outside it, and that life was a hard thing to tolerate. In emptiness movement no longer existed, or barely did at all: love and hate, basic feelings, had been replaced by the two monoliths of torpor and irritability.

  ROSE WAS WITH CHARLES the first time they saw her, one afternoon at the Nautilus on the corner of Mount Royal and Saint Lawrence. The place practically empty, the air conditioning blowing hard enough to dry the skin off your bones, a lot of men for once, moving equipment that shifted more air than muscles, groans accompanied the lifting of weights, and Julie among the men with her body just muscled enough, developed with elegance, with her body that, for those who couldn’t see past her façade, seemed filled with as much life as anyone else’s; Julie looked like she had a soul.