The Dictionary of Animal Languages

by Heidi Sopinka

  I think I enjoy freedom too much to ever have a child, Tacita says, jutting back on her chair. There is a part of me that makes me wary of anything I’d have to give my whole self to, other than my work. Besides. She bangs forward on her chair dramatically. The violence of childbirth. The loss of autonomy. The love. That’s the thing that terrifies me the most.

  How exacting the knife that skinned off that desire. I say this out loud, though I don’t mean to. I share her view but for different reasons. I have no growing tendency toward domesticity. I can’t even remotely imagine the desire to have a child, having only just barely escaped my own childhood.

  I’ve spent my whole life trying to avoid the notion of children, she snaps back with such celerity that it’s sort of funny.

  I had to look after all my siblings. My mother used to cry all the time. But her tears were different, pregnancy changed them.

  She flips through the pages of her sketchbook and then shows me a drawing. It depicts an isolated woman sitting in a lonely tower, a blank expression on her exhausted face. Mechanically, she is grinding up stars that she then feeds to an insatiable moon. This would go on endlessly, Tacita says. Unless, like my mother, the celestial feeding ends because your own life does.

  Tacita’s composition decentres the gaze. It is oddly shoved to the left, making the woman look tiny and pale and engulfed in black. Alone.

  She winces and then says plainly, Her name is Aglaya. That is the only thing I know.

  What? I say, slightly nettled.

  Lev’s wife’s name is Aglaya. She pauses. Sorry love. But all I know is that you will survive this because you are meant to survive it. You must believe this on a cellular level.

  Tacita’s words jam me stiff. I dangle my limbs, my heart, before a man who is married. Who somewhere has a wife. One that he loves, or has loved. One that he is betraying. His body is still on my body. This emotional tension, I say to Tacita, is like an anxiety dream from which you try to awaken but cannot.

  Tacita and I try meditation. I reach for the back of my head, unfastening my hair and shaking it out. We sit on the cold hard wooden floor of my studio and chant bits of old Latin prayers I remember from convent school. Convertere, Domine, et eripe animam meam: salvum me fac propter misericordiam tuam. We say it over and over until Tacita turns to me. You know, hell is repetition somebody once said. Both of us try to remain silent but then start shaking with laughter. As my flanks grow numb on the unforgiving floor I wonder if my affliction is simply an interior conflict with my own art. I know, somewhere, there is a rival. A voice tells me to run away, to be free of it. To not enter into this struggle. But then he does something, turns to me with one of his illuminations, and sets me alight. I rest my attention on my paintings, pulled directly from my dreams, from my imagined world. At the academy they keep telling us that to become an artist you must be able to draw from life. I try to do as they say, but I am not fully convinced. Inside there is a growing sense of apartness. Of moving toward something else.

  I have on my easel a painting I have begun with a woman in the foreground. She wears a large overcoat that could be a man’s, though how the woman looks is of less interest to me than how she reacts with the landscape that surrounds her. The slope of her shoulders is not quite accurate, but the angle of her head is good. When I tilt it toward the light, it is still not right. The forest is dark and blurred, there are feathers on the ground. But there are things I haven’t been able to work out. The palette seems too dusky. I dislike green right now. All I can see is blue. I have been to Sennelier, where I found the perfect blue. Cobalt glass powder. They roast ore and then remove the arsenic, sieve it, and mix it with pulverized stones. It is a stunning hue in a tiny precious package they wrap in brown paper. In my studio I smooth this perfect electric blue in silky oil with a glass pestle that I use sparingly. It is expensive and beautiful and I want it to last. The expression on the woman’s face shows determination, but what is her intention? Some days I like it, others I don’t. When my mood slips, the painting feels flat and obvious. Other days I am pleased with its overall effect. Does Lev fall in and out of love with his own paintings as I do? I don’t ask. I let thoughts of Lev lead me away from it. He knows how to give parts of himself without losing anything. For me, his presence alters everything. I question the confines of the academy. The direction of my interests. My own artistic motives. My emotions inconstant as weather. Yes. Maybe it is that, I say, convincing myself that what rips through me is not because of a man I hardly know. A man who leaves each time, having promised nothing. He unmoors me. I forget myself with him. In these past few months, it is the memory of him that lingers the most. Enraptured. Debased. All night, all night. And sometimes I wake to the early sounds of delivery carts dragged over the stones, drivers shouting, the predawn flurry of buyers and sellers heading toward Boulevard Raspail. And in my empty room, it’s as though he was never here.

  He will appear when he appears. This apartness, this deep-diving absence, is essential to his survival. Because there is always a part of him that is not here, even when he is here. When he is no longer in my periphery, each time, I realize he may never enter back in. He is unnaturally adept at negative space. He is remote and then disappears. No one seems to know where he goes. Even when he himself tells his history, he seems not to want to remember anything.

  But it is all outside of reason, and at moments the urgency for Lev is so strong it makes me feel sick. At other times it fades. I work on my sound notebook or paint in my room above Mme. Tissaud’s atelier with its one small window in the northwest corner, and lose the feeling in my legs. I can seal it off. This is almost more disturbing than being consumed. As though I must cut off the part of the world he inhabits to survive.

  —

  I feel as though I’m only breathing through that thin slice of air between pond and ice, I say to Tacita.

  I guess it is possible, she says neutrally.

  But really, Tacita, what is this meant to do? How can this kind of living be sustainable? What do we learn?

  What do we learn. There is a long pause. We learn to notice everything.

  I walk home through a light rain, stepping carefully as though everything might spill. I am relieved to see Mme. Tissaud sewing a text block, needle between her teeth as she lines up the spines of each signature against the table edge. She motions me in.

  Ivory. I have something for you.

  She hands me a thick leatherbound edition, A Booke of Secrets, a centuries-old translation of a Dutch edition, though the book was originally published in Italian. She has rescued it from one of the bins she combs for first-edition esoterica. She has restored and rebound it. My fingers touch the whorls on the leather. You can identify which kind of animal skin, Mme. Tissaud tells me, by the marks. Ostrich has noticeable concentric circles because of the large follicles from which the feathers grow. Pigskin has hair follicle patterns on top and bottom with a uniformity that is distinct. Goat, she says, has an attractive grain, the telling factor being the size of the piece. The book contains medieval recipes set in blackletter for inks that sound more like rituals. They require such things as collecting rainwater droplets to mix in with boiled cornflowers and elderberries, clarified with the egg of a songbird, fixatives made from the skin of a hare. Iron gall, she explains, is created when wasps lay eggs under a tree’s bark. The tree’s own defences create a lump that becomes the gall. Those disfigured nodes are then sliced open and milked for the darkest night of pigment.

  Mme. Tissaud knows of my cooking experiments with Tacita, and my desire to work elements of nature into my art. I mix my own egg tempera from a failproof recipe in her back sink where I also wash my dishes. The yolk of one hen’s egg, powdered pigments, mixed and applied in thin layers to wooden panels, sometimes burnished, everything transparent. It allows underlayers to vibrate below the surface colour in three dimensions. I unscrew the metal cap of the small brown bottle and add a drop of clove oil, which keeps the colours and makes t
hem sweetsharp. I am excited about these colours made from nature. Denatured nature, on the page. The egg tempera produces jewel-like tones, the faintly metallic gleam of minerals. I wait a day, then gesso, and sand, and only then do I begin to draw on it. The shopkeeper at Sennelier says, Mademoiselle, you do not need linen, when I ask for it. No one uses linen anymore. Here, this canvas is less expensive, he says. He directs me to a man at the hardware who cuts a Masonite sheet into panels instead of the more expensive ready-made ones at the shop.

  While I wait for prepared canvases I draw in my notebook, experimenting. Bright pigments, like the Indian yellow that used to come from the urine of cows fed on mango leaves alone. Our instructors tell us its fluorescence attracted Dutch painters who wanted to paint the sun. I draw watery configurations and close the book while the pages are still wet. When I open it, there are abstract shapes that imply natural forms. It looks almost like a mystical landscape or a mapping of another moon. Accidental naturalism. I like how it removes my hand, removes me from the act of creating altogether. I am just letting it become what it will become.

  Mme. Tissaud also has an interest in this. Materials becoming the spiritual part of the work. She explains that the high acidity of some inks means the paper gets eaten by the ink. I look at her in disbelief.

  She shrugs. The thing that illuminates it kills it.

  Lev rarely discusses his art. He hates the recent past. He is uninterested in incorporating natural materials. His time in the woods, all the living in the open, has made him devour cities, move toward the unnatural. He despises imitations of nature. In his studio is the pervasive smell, the flaking smear of glue and solvent. He reveres the tidy gardens and mathematically sculpted hedgerows of France.

  It is useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me, he says. Only later do I realize he is quoting Baudelaire.

  I once painted the village I was born in. I sat and drew it over and over again. Then I realized that what I loved was not the village but what the village pulled out of me. But you have no feeling for what you are left with. That kind of representation has no resonance. It is like a beautiful ancient religious temple. To the secular world, it retains its beauty even though its original purpose no longer exists. What it becomes is a decoration for tourists.

  I think I know why he won’t paint nature. His childhood. The woods to him are ugly not because they are aesthetically unsatisfying, but because they mean fear. They also mean death.

  I embrace Mme. Tissaud, hard, lifting her feet off the ground and holding on for seconds longer than anyone would, the way she has shown me. She is so thick and soft to my dark and narrow, we illustrate opposites.

  I kiss her. What would I do without you?

  —

  Upstairs, I lie on the bed in the corner and look up at the window. The rain is falling in straight lines though what I still see is Mme. Tissaud’s hands stitching spines below. It is the kind of rain that makes you believe in weather. But then from my eye corner I see grey. It is a mouse dead and lying flat on its left cheek. Velvet fur, its thin tail behind it like a bootlace. The room takes on a slight scent of fish. I find some scrap paper to gather it up but cannot. It seems it could be just sleeping and my prodding will disturb it. It will suddenly flee in the lightning quick way mice do and I will have a coronary. The thing that we often fear in animals, like strangers, is their movement, their unfamiliar velocities. Instead I cover the mouse with paper, sit at my table, and begin to record in my sound notebook, but I cannot work. I am suspicious of other bodies, other deaths that may have occurred in my absence.

  I lie down and try to sleep. The uncertainty comes at night, when everything grows bigger. We miss what we know, even if what we know isn’t good for us. I lived in equal parts of fear and awe of Mother. A brusque contrarian. Her obsession with cleanliness, both inside and out, was delineated by purges, the necessary ritual for those seeking perfection. It’s why she didn’t like sunny days, though she would never say it. Because they show all the dust. It is also why she had to be the thinnest woman in the room. It is not only that it makes her the most envied, but that, I suspect, she is actually disturbed by her own corporeality. Though she was not entirely a devastating presence. When I was allowed to visit her in her sitting room, she would hold me rapt with her descriptions of the paintings I loved, the Bruegels, Vermeers, and Boschs she’d seen when she travelled through Europe. But when at the conclusion of these visits I was given a chocolate, I saw what I was. A guest. Her voice was so beautiful and quiet. Her sentences were thrilling, and contained arcane knowledge. She spoke in paragraphs. She seemed to essentially be living in another century, though she could be modern when it suited her. Queenie once left the dinner table in tears when Mother came down in a dress with a neckline two inches lower than normal. It was unusual behaviour for Queenie, soft-hearted and steady. Perhaps it seemed to her that civilization was falling. When she came to visit, Queenie read Gothic tales and Irish folklore, and said we were the descendants of shapeshifters. Her stories of magic and alchemy fixed in my mind. I would sketch them on paper after she’d gone. Do you know why they always leave a lone tree in afield? So there is a place for spirits to gather. She would often contradict Mother, especially when it came to me. Once, after they’d argued, I heard Mother say to Father, I wonder if they forgot to screw in a heart under those toothpick ribs of hers. And I thought, Takes one to know one.

  My time was marked by two distinct lives. During the day I took lessons, studied, played the piano dutifully. I sat with a straight back, occupying the strict space reserved for children, especially girls. Sunday meant wearing a starched dress and sitting on the couch with my hands folded in my lap. Not moving or speaking while they received guests. In the evenings before dark or early in the morning I was allowed to ride. Every day I walked out to the tall wooden barn, its roofline like a church. In the early morning my leather boots were hard and cold when I pulled them on. I took the bridle from the hook in front of Admiral the gelding’s stall and pulled it over his ears, my other hand slipping the bit between his teeth, the sound like a metal file scraping something hollow. It was almost impossible to see the outline of his outerspace eyes against his jetblack fur and mane. A tightly braided whip sat in the corner, but I never used it. The saddle creaked like a ship as I rode into the forest, climbing the sharp angle of the hill, ducking under low branches, sometimes slapping and stinging my face. I noticed how the birches held thrushes and that kestrels would circle in slow motion far above. I was always moving toward danger—a thunderstorm, slick trails, the low sun barely casting light, tight unknown corners, cantering down steep rocky ground while the mist blurred the land from the sky, thrashing through water, losing my sense of time and coming home far too late to be acceptable.

  The house was seated in front of fields and woods, on the edge of a slope, at the bottom of which wound a river. In the distance was a singular conical hill, and when the trees were bare you could see the dark blue waters of the small lake nearby. It would take me fifteen minutes, ten at full canter, to get through the forest and cross the stream into the back field. I could no longer see the maples, reduced to squares of light in the cold black. All that distance shook off constraint. My days consisted of what I could not do, all I couldn’t say. I stopped in the field, leaned over Admiral’s neck, and patted it. Steam came off his shoulders. He blew out a long ruffled breath that shook his whole body, and then jerked his head down, ripping at the grass with his teeth. Out of nowhere came an explosive whir of a partridge taking off from the ground as they do. My heart jumped, he jumped, but I managed to stay on. Steady old boy, I said, leaning back, my hand on his flanks, watching the orange sun dim then drop below the tips of trees. I pressed my heels below his ribs and cantered back in the dark.

  I never tell Mother where I go, I say to my oldest brother, Albert. And she never says anything.

  Then she knows, he says.

  If she knows, it means it
is only a matter of time before I am stopped. Her concern seems to come from appearances, not true worry, like most mothers. I hear her murmur that there is a wildness in me that makes her uneasy. Why does she require so much air? Things she doesn’t like, she tells Father, she describes as suffocating.

  I started to keep secrets. I decided everything out-of-doors was my own. I don’t tell her the day I punched a boy for setting a fox trap. Or that my broken front tooth was from when he punched me back. It is a milk tooth, she said standing back get a better look, thank god. Her own profile is exquisite; a portrait of it hangs in muslin above the fireplace.

  I don’t tell her of my collections I have begun to catalogue in notebooks: leaves, nests, insects, the hollow bones of birds. Or the day I stood in a field of Queen Anne’s lace and in a few short moments was covered with tiny flapping wings. I was with my brother Garnet. At first we laughed. I said, Listen to the sound of their wings. Garnet looked at me. You hear what other people don’t, he said seriously. Don’t try to do anything, I whispered. Feel it. And then we both stood perfectly still, feeling the little brushes of the wings on our necks and arms, in our hair. Their bright wings fluttered and fluttered and we didn’t move. Open arms aching. Sunshine blinding us. The clear gleaming sky. My body flooded with rapture. I felt my face was wet and realized that tears were running down my cheeks. We stood there, long after they went, saying nothing.

  The day I come home, clothes soaked, wrinkled against my skin, Mother’s voice spikes with anger, though she appears calm, neck tall. She wears elegantly sewn dresses from a woman who comes to the house and measures her with a tape, not the kind other women order from the catalogue and have delivered the same day by horseback. Why, she says slowly, must you choose to go out in violent weather? It is unnatural. Her tempo making it hard for me to know what will be next. I have disappointed her. I am not sure what to do, so I stand there, dripping onto the glossy hardwood floor. I know that she has attended finishing schools in France and in Italy. That she had a coming-out ball where she wore a silver dress with long white gloves. She has a way of making something trivial seem as if the entire world hinges on it. She seems to have constant issue with my brothers and me, agitated by what she sees as our inattentive and erratic nature.