Tacita leaves to roam the brocantes while I sit in the zoo where I spend hours observing the monkeys, gazelles, and hyenas. I often don’t draw them there. I listen to them. I seek out the grassblades, the copse of trees, anything that will lead to a confluence of intimacy between the human and animal world. I practise for great swaths of time, always undisturbed. As in the cafés here, where everyone drinks and drinks and pays hours later.
I begin to keep a notebook of sounds.
Is it a diary? Tacita asks.
Diaries are just emotional weather reports, I tell her, writing and not looking up. They don’t interest me.
I write in the notebook. Nightingale: narcotic effect, lunar dust. Hyena: points of stars, cackle. I add the word dialects with a question mark. Tacita writes in the margin: Funny.
I had hoped that I could paint my way into a pact I’d made in the woods years ago, a pact of saving. I haven’t yet told Tacita about the animals. All the time in the forest, how I would hear their voices, shot like arrows through the silent trees. I heard their secrets and kept them to myself, huddled low in the mud, listening to the sounds issued from insects, animals, and birds at the roots and tops of trees. I took in all the silences as well as the sounds. The sounds around me and the ones inside of me. My inner life took shape around them. For the first time I was happy—was it happiness I felt? People always think that it’s animals who are observed, but they observe us too. My brother Edgar liked to tease me. Anyway, what’s wrong with people? I remember looking at him concentratedly. People are noisy, I finally said.
This feels unrelated, I confide to Tacita. Capturing a living creature and then making it inanimate, deliberate brushstrokes, swirls of oil, seems so, inadequate. You can overwork it and it becomes stuffy and dull. You focus so much on the detail that you overlook the important things. All the little inaccuracies that make up the truth. A solemn and divine truth somewhere in their indifferent eyes that twists into you.
She doesn’t ask about the pact. Instead she says, An unordinary life leads away from the past. Maybe it is something else. Maybe the creatures you seek to interpret are like starlight, or the moons of other planets. Maybe they need to be discovered.
Outside the Muséum, a roasted scent like fennel flowers saturates the air with its perfume, something that grows in one of the geometrical flowerbeds in Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes that Tacita and I have become obsessed with. We pass perfumed women in silk stockings wrapped in furs with gold belts around their waists clicking along the streets, arms full of parcels. Despite looming threats, everything seems to be slowly growing more luxurious, more exaggerated. Eventually it will be complicated floorlength dresses, a retreat to safety, to something that is known. We comb the markets and bring everything back to Tacita’s apartment. We decide the kitchen is a place of power. Alchemical. And though her art and that of the group mocks social conventions, still she finds herself wringing out Istvan’s socks and hanging them out to dry over the balcony. We walk back to the kitchen.
I had never assumed they were married. But they were, eleven years, since Tacita was seventeen. They never met in Hungary, but she had stood inside a soaring building he designed in Budapest. She thought it an impossible feat, to make something that moved someone to the point where they felt a burning in their chest. She liked when he told her that he’d stayed awake on the site for twenty-four hours before making any sketches. He wanted to see the progression of light.
She says they have been with other people, like most of the artists in the group. But it has never interested them as much as each other. She says it so casually, with her big warm smile. I should feel self-conscious around her, having only just emerged from the high, thin world of girls. She seems so fully fledged, with her own kitchen, where she cooks and draws, and a studio filled with objects and photographs pinned to the walls. Her soft, low voice. Her bare feet. The exotic silk robe she wears with a thin tie around her waist. The way she runs her fingers through her short dark hair, the stacks of silver bracelets clattering on her wrist. I find I feel more like myself around her. She makes that part of me, with the secret shame of being so banished, into an artifact. But then I wonder, Am I right? Have I read her gestures correctly? More and more, we talk about what we want to make. We conspire together, our eyes electric.
When I watch couples resigned to their marriages, Tacita continues, the thing I cannot bear is the slackness underscored by bitterness. All the indignities they inflict upon each other, the little dropped remarks. How sometimes with married people you wonder whether what you’re looking at is love or hate. Their lives drift so far from themselves that they spend them on nothing; they engage in banal domestic conversations like “It’s time for a new sofa, don’t you think?” She says she and Istvan live without routine in part because that is what clouds people’s ability to see what they once loved about the person they are with.
I remember watching a famous Hungarian cellist play a Brahms concerto, Tacita says, hands turning red from the cold sink water. For his encore he did something that caught everyone off guard. He played a line on the cello and then stopped. The hall was silent. Then he sang it back. Played a line and then sang it back. His voice and the voice of his cello overlapping until I had no idea what I was listening to. Which was more exceptional, his command over an instrument or a human voice becoming an instrument? I shut my eyes, Tacita says, and as an ordinary mortal accepted his superiority without question. Yet, while his genius filled every sliver of the recital hall, I thought, This person still needs to make toast. He still needs to feed his cat. He still requires his socks to be washed. She laughs. I’ll never understand it.
Understand what?
Being human.
I find it hard to consider myself part of a category, I say. I know what it is to be myself but I’m not so sure what we are as a whole. We are a species, I suppose, like any other animal, just trying to find our place on the earth, except that we seem to need to discover the truth about the space we occupy.
I think that’s why there is no such thing as wisdom. I don’t believe in it. No one can tell you how to become who you are. You just have to live it to know it, she says.
Have you ever heard that recording of an English cellist who was broadcast playing Dvořák’s Songs My Mother Taught Me in her garden? I ask.
She shakes her head.
The sounds of nightingales in the garden made it onto the recording. Singing the same four notes and then eventually adding a flourish, a fifth note. The broadcast was a sensation. They said it contained an element of ecstasy. But you know what I always thought? The birds stole the show. The cellist must have been annoyed at this. Humans always want to win.
Their flat is charmed with the smell of citron from the scented log she put on the fire. A cuckoo clock marks each hour as Tacita moves about her kitchen, small and pale yellow. She tells me that the gastronomy of the group of artists tends toward elaborate and somewhat grotesque cuts of meat. The last meal involved a naked woodcock flambé in strong alcohol served in its own excrements, as is the custom in fine Parisian restaurants. There are lambs’ brains, calf livers, eel pâté, pigs’ feet, and anything with a shell. They prefer what is clear and intelligible in form, she explains. The shapelessness of vegetables is something they have no interest in. Shellfish are prized. They like the battle, jaws ripping at armour.
I think it is because they are mostly men, she says, unpacking the rest of the vegetables. Everything is a dare.
Doesn’t it bother you?
What?
That kind of bravado?
She places beets on the table. The thing that bothers me, she says, is people whose imagination stops too low.
She walks out and comes back with a little wooden box. The frame is amber wood with dark black holes where the nails once were. The ground is wood, painted a thick chalky white with deep cracks running vertically. There is blue around the edges, and a thin piece of wood jagged at both ends painted the same bl
ue. Shards of blue glass, along with a piece of white coral that seems almost the shape of a human heart. A speckled ball in one corner. White nails hang upside down from the top.
I love this, I tell her. These everyday things that together form a dream. Where did you find the coral?
Pigalle, she says. One of the streets with a woman in dirty underlinen and varnished fingers leaning out each doorway, like a play. You know, she says, placing the box on the table, people think artists live in garrets and drink cocktails. She smiles. Instead here I am in the gutters collecting dirty things and trying to arrange them to evoke some sort of wonder. Something that we know, but altered by time or circumstance. Tacita takes an opened wine bottle from the counter, pours it into two glasses, and hands one to me. Like pink glass, she says, frosted by sea change.
It’s the notion of just truly being awake to everything, I say, taking a sip. Never sleepwalking and always seeing.
—
She says she is happy I’ve arrived. Before she felt that women in the group were relegated to lovers of male artists. A lot of the men looking for some form of muse, and then going home to wives who will service them anytime they want, but mostly are too tired.
I’ve never understood why everyone doesn’t know that women are the ones who convey things in the most interesting ways, I say. We have always observed. We have been used to no audience and that has given us room to really see. I often think that’s why women were put in tight corsets, so that is what their minds would focus on. Men are secretly threatened, I say, touching the back of my hand to my cheek, hot with wine. Besides, they are more compelled by action. To the sequence of events.
Maybe this is why in my work there is such a recurrence of birds in cages, Tacita laughs. I like that your interest lies in animals too.
I take another sip and put down my glass. Not the petted things.
I notice that she has an astonishing ability to give herself completely to people, without distraction. A perfect and rare transparency. I learn from her that the way a friend acts toward you is a clue, it is a window into the way they would like to be treated. It is also what undoubtedly makes her an accomplished translator. She confessed to me that she’d only once taken liberties, and that naturally, it had cost her the job. It was worth it, she says. It was when she met Istvan. He was designing a theatre interior by the Canal Saint-Martin and she was hired to translate the meetings between him and the maire from the tenth arrondissement.
The maire, a big man with a long face that joined a wrinkled forehead, large sloping eyes, and an enormous nose, and who overall gave the impression of a somewhat intelligent bloodhound, said, I think we should have the building permits by April.
What Tacita said to Istvan in Hungarian was, Last night I saw that Venus was out. It sparkled above the treetops. I am in love with this bright planet.
Istvan, already alive in the presence of the translator with a scar above her lip, a silver vertical line that made her even more striking, tried desperately to comprehend how it was possible that the balding, nasal-voiced maire before him was speaking about the beauty of elusive planets. Once he understood it was Tacita, he began thinking of how he might ask her to dinner. A week later, the bloodhound himself married them in the atrium of the Mairie du dixième.
What sort of wedding did you have? I say, turning the thin-stemmed glass in my fingers.
I wore blue. We invited no one. It was divine.
FOX
Heard nothing. Heard nothing. Rained hard.
Leaves getting green. One vixen on third night.
Barks, chilling screams, oddly birdlike.
SKEET’S BODY SHIFTS IN HIS CHAIR. Just when I thought I had figured something out there is something new to organize.
Have you slept yet? he finally asks.
My eyes meet his eyes. He knows I am a lifelong insomniac. How profound working into the night has been. It always strikes me how odd it is that we live with such divisions, that we spend half our lives lying down, in a blackout.
I must have slept last night, before I drove into town, because I woke up in the kitchen, fieldbook on my knees, with the fizz of static, the scratchy piano playing on the radio, Chopin’s Waltz in D Flat, which has always sounded to me like a dog running in circles.
He twirls his finger at his ear.
I’ve not heard it for a long time, I say, ignoring him. It was based on an incident in the garden of Chopin’s lover, the writer George Sand. As I had understood it, she sat in her garden with Chopin watching her crazed dog chase after its tail, turned to him and said, If I had your talent, I’d compose a pianoforte piece for this dog. Which is exactly what he did.
Skeet goes to the kitchen and brings back the coffee. He pours both mugs full.
I ate one of my special macaroons, I tell him, which sometimes helps.
He laughs. And then you drove?
It helps with the pain. It goes marvellously, quietly into the bloodstream. I buy the herb from a handsome young Algerian man who wears trousers of such rough fabric I am convinced they are prison-issue. And I’m not talking about one of those escaped cons who impersonated a dentist. The Algerian, as I’ve taken to calling him, sells on market days by the scrubby river in Chinon where the youth also go to have relations after dark. I drive there, passing the white French cows, mythic against the bright blue sky. Though I prefer the closer town, Fontevraud. There is an illuminator there with gold under his fingernails. His studio is full of brushes and stencils and fourteenth-century vellum. It is the last atelier of its kind in all of France. Mme. Tissaud would have loved it.
My initial exchange with the Algerian was somewhat embarrassing. He thought I was an escapee from a nearby home for senile females, and I was convinced he was trying to rent me an expensive boat, the kind they use to fleece tourists. I think my nervousness sprang in part from no longer knowing how to act around an impressive-looking man, it being entirely historical. Though he behaves with a brusque yet serviceable politeness toward me, everything is awkward in our communications, which is compounded by the fact that I am always confused about the calibration of grams to ounces with narcotics. Are they metric grams? Is it an American ounce? Finally a teenager standing next to him blurts, Just ask for a bag, mémère.
God Frame, you’ve got to be fucking careful.
Skeet. Mostly I smoke and think and work. I speak to almost no one.
Old shy people are ridiculous you know.
Well I want to talk with someone Skeet, I say, sipping my coffee. Just not anyone human.
There is a long silence. Which series is this one? he finally asks, holding up an image of dense spoke-like lines of geometric shapes that from a distance appear to be a sequence of veined circles, each one different, like snowflakes.
We are adept at avoiding discussing what next. Skeet seems more absent. Normally he is focused and frank. There is a thin blue static in the room. And how really can we talk about this? What I have always left unsaid. There are so many things, I’m not sure what to feel. I have no language for it. For the time when there was the possibility of a child. When that possibility was taken away, I never mentioned it again. Not to anyone. There was no one left to tell. But it is an impossible topic to escape as a woman. Reproductive activities are, for whatever reason, eternally open to public opinion. I never spoke of it. There was nowhere for it to go. Realizing that I too was falling into the line of the wordless women that I come from but having no power over it. I feel pain in my lungs, worsening in my stomach, my heartbeat pounding in my body. It occurs to me that the pain is the letter.
Morpho eugenia, I finally answer. The delicate vibration of wings. It is the vibrations of vibrations, given that butterflies don’t hear, don’t make sound.
It’s amazing, he says, that you— He hesitates.
That I?
I don’t know. Aren’t you thinking about the letter at all?
The lower frequencies create less complex patterns, I say, my voice not right. But
, I continue, the higher frequencies are dense and arguably more beautiful.
This one looks like something you would see on a rug, Skeet says, pointing to the Osiris blue butterfly. What’s this one?
Red fox.
Looks like a prehistoric insect. He turns it sideways and pauses. Or stoner art. He flips through the stacks of images and immediately sits down. He looks worn.
What is it?
Sometimes I can’t believe the scale of this project. I find it amazing that it doesn’t overwhelm you.
Well, thank god the feeling of defeat has always motivated me, I say. I’ve always disliked the feeling at the end of an experiment. I sometimes wonder if that is why I’ve taken on such a vast project. Though all my energy goes to this. It takes it all now. I still have not even seen the forest at the back of this property and I have been here for over two years. The house is let from a middle-aged American woman. Its provenance, a former chicken coop, went unmentioned in her brochure on the computer.
Skeet says, Don’t say brochure. Say website. It makes you sound old.
I am old, I tell him. Old enough that when he tried to lure me into technology by tapping my name into a computer, I found it dreadful that all this information about me appeared, available without my consent.
The house is made of pale heavy stone that has lasted for a thousand years and looks as though it will last a thousand more. The American suspected caves, then dug out centuries of dirt, down the stone steps, with her bare hands while on her stomach. Swimming through the earth. It would be impressive if you happen to think that digging is harder than drawing. Or mathematics for that matter. The countryside here is strewn with caves, attracting academics and tourists, though most have yet to be unearthed. The first white cave on the property, tall with three separate entries that lead to three separate caves, has a high curved ceiling, sonically perfect, holding each note I have recorded, crisp and controlled. It picks up any vibration and renders it crystalline.
The Dictionary of Animal Languages Page 3