I am vague about what I’m doing and he doesn’t ask. His utter lack of curiosity verges on eccentric.
Reindeer have two extra bones in their feet that click so that they can hear one another in the dark.
The only reason the reindeer herder takes me is that he needs money. He has had some animal rights people campaign against deer hunting. He sizes me up, alone with my recording equipment and fieldbooks, and determines that I am not here to distribute virtue. That I will leave the landscape, the creatures, inviolate. This is when the objectives of those who save and those who kill overlap.
On the long ride in he tells me about how when he slaughters deer he uses every part. He sells the meat. He uses the skin for clothing and blankets. The heads become dog food. The hooves, boots. The antlers, handicrafts. The antlers are also ground into a powder and sold to the Japanese—a cure for sexual weakness.
It makes me think of Duchamp. He once walked into Café de Flore, and Tacita leaned in. Two words, she whispered.
Porcelain urinal? I ventured.
No, she laughed. Notorious impotence.
That is not what I expected you to say, I whispered back.
She told me that he had married a lascivious peasant girl from Normandy, who, as it turned out, had little interest in his cleverness. When he started to launch into one of his ideas, she would say, Look, we’re here to fuck. Stop telling stories and get on with it. This did not go over well with Marcel. It made him incapable of sleeping with her, so she left him. He was crushed. People said he was a destroyed man after that, in a sense.
The truth is, the reindeer herder yells over the sound of the engine, it does nothing, but they give me a good price.
The herder unhitches the sledge. The trees are being cut, he says. It is so far north it takes three hundred years for them to grow again. He pulls a piece of lichen off a tree and holds it out to me as if to accentuate his point. If they cut down the trees, the reindeer can’t eat. It means more hay, which costs too much money.
The hay?
The gas for the snowmobile.
I feel alive in the cold. Sharp. Starved for sound. All my training funnels into this skill, remaining calm and quiet. I wait. It is so still, I can’t tell which way the wind is. I watch my breath, visible in the cold. Not sure if they might be picking up my scent. Then I see them. After all this time, random flashes of pale fur across the white, like a hallucination. They come toward me, loping and arcing. Dancing. Hooves barely touching snow. They come close to where I am lying. Close enough for me to see the soft underfur, to feel their shudders, ear twitches, everything in them that is wild. I am cold. My heart hammering. I can see their eyes, two shiny black pearls, moist noses. I can hear their nostrils take in air. I feel the electric intensity that trembles from them, what they know. That there is no order in the world, nothing at all except for this very moment, sure as death. We are the only creature who has the knowledge of our own mortality outside of imminent danger, and yet they know more. They don’t have reason. They don’t do anything. They just are. What is my snowblindness is their articulated forests of ultraviolet light. And then something extraordinary happens. They stop. The whole herd, over fifty animals, have been doing myriad different things, long legs loping and pawing, bodies at every direction. In a flicker they all stand completely still. Every single one of them freezes. It looks like a photograph. I hear the trees creak and the snow skimmed off by a faint, low wind. It lasts at least a minute, which in close proximity to a herd of wild animals feels like a very long time. When they are still, I see only their ears lift. They are listening. They are concerned with what is happening over the horizon. After a long while come the clicks. They are clean and sharp, like a glass slide placed on a microscope. In the dark blue light, it startles. Eyes closed, it is the guttural voice of a farm animal, but here, it sounds like comfort to sorrow.
They twitch and paw and push their noses in the snow. And then they turn quietly and run, legs angled like lightning bolts, vanishing as swiftly as they came. I look around. There are vast plains of nothingness. Being in a northern place so cold and white, so absent of detail, can cancel you out. You have to keep your focus. There is no distinction between earth and sky, this repetition, this feeling of waiting for the inspiration, as in painting. It makes you see everything, hear everything in all this white. You notice that there is still black in your heart.
SWAN
Long neck with dead space. Can hiss like a snake, speaking fragments, unforeseen.
WALKING OUT INTO THE FILTHY daylight knocks me awake. Day is harder than night. My eye sockets burning. They sharpen when out in the cool air. I should feel brazen with matted hair in the morning and the same clothes from the black moonless night. I see shoals of knee-socked shins of schoolgirls in the cold streets, kilts with knife-sharp pleats. Lev has been drawing all night and my head pounds, my shoulders ache from sleeplessness. My body still in disbelief, replaying itself like the way you are tricked to feel waves after you’ve reached solid ground. A bruise near my collarbone contains the violence of nights before. Blackvioletblueyellow. Each day I carry it, the only thing that links him and these acts to the days between. I lose track of street names, how long I have been walking, which way the light is coming from. Has winter yet passed? I think suddenly in a panic. A striped awning clicks forward. The boulanger can tell. I do not see the scorn on the faces of the women gathered in front of shops. Women who are eager to pass judgment on the authenticity of a woman’s honour. Though they misinterpret where exactly this is located. Still, in France, however far from admirable infidelity is, if conducted properly it is as acceptable as a standard piece of furniture.
I try to send my mind somewhere else. The things to hold on to. I have been meaning to visit the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. I have been wondering about the hyena. I haven’t gone to her in a few days and worry that I’ve mythologized her too quickly. Tacita is set to paint her portrait. There has been some shuffling of animals at the menagerie and I am convinced that the monkeys are no longer there. I even inquired directly of the mid-sized mammals guard, but if he knows anything he’s not saying.
My pace quickens and I am soon in the familiar courtyard. I’ve come straight to the academy, without washing or changing my clothes. Without eating. I find the capped cardboard tube stowed in my desk in the studio. Inside my drawings are furled leaves that I will remove and flatten to show M. Marant, though this does not happen. There is no doubt about the intelligence he possesses but there is something that feels antidemocratic about it. He has a reverence for callow religious painters and for coldly impassioned painters with immense technical skill. He is not convinced by my paintings nor by those of the artists in the group, but he accepts my meticulousness as a kind of mutual consent. I can tell that he has found my deportment at odds with the increasing horror and bestial fictions of my work.
The last painting I submitted was not received well. I had the usual animals, birds, horses, but the main subject was a ritualistic meal. A banquet of cannibals that Tacita thought to be a blasphemous take on the Eucharist. There is a group of gluttonous grotesque women, with heads that she described as phallic though I had thought of them as equine. They sit at a table, abundant with extravagant dishes. It is all writhing and moving and somewhat alive. There is a woman alone, with a neutral expression on her face. She is off in the corner of the painting, and appears to be unaware that her fork has dug into a plump, live baby. It was part of a series of banquets I had begun sketches for. The last being one that depicts forest animals who turn against the humans they encounter hunting boar—the prey eat the predators.
The instructor was silent. All he said was, The assignment was for a still-life rendering.
But doesn’t a banquet constitute a still life?
I’m not certain one could call something this—he pauses—perverse a still life.
—
I look at M. Marant and tell him that I am withdrawing from the
academy.
When he registers my determination, we walk through the high halls to a small office, his heavy oak desk under a pile of papers with tidy paragraphs and aligned paperclips. After some rustling, he produces a document that I sign with the slim pen he holds out for me.
Thank you, I say.
I am swaying back and forth from lack of food.
Remember the rigour with which you have learned to draw, Mlle. Frame, and keep it with you. An artist must have dedication, ideas, and technical ability. But ultimately, they must be better than the sum of these parts.
The absoluteness with which the instructors speak about painting feels like learning without belief. It seems they explain everything without explaining anything. Being preoccupied with the sound notebook, and contemplating how to make this into something, I showed it to one of my instructors tentatively, after my life drawing class. The students filed out. The air was dense with cigarette smoke. But what is this? he said. His broad hands leafing through my writing dismissively. I felt my neck grow hot. He shut the notebook. Spend your time working on paintings, he said with the long dramatic pause of a man who is used to being listened to, or you’ll not improve.
M. Marant finds a key threaded with a white ribbon and fits it into the lock on a wooden filing cabinet. His soft small hands flit through the files and for a moment I think of the Larva and that she may stand to inherit these soft hands. But then I realize that for a girl, this is desirable. He touches his necktie as it swings forward while he bends over the files. He produces my tuition deposit, which oddly bears my father’s signature, and looking over his eyeglasses, hands it to me. I will be able to live on this money for months.
Bon courage, Mlle. Frame, he says, with no trace of irony. He extends his hand and I shake it. It is limp and warm. It is the first time I have chosen to leave a school without the involvement of my parents. I am sure of my decision.
Je vous remercie. He has allowed me the dignity of uncontested escape. How lightened. How free. With every step away from the academy.
—
Tacita and I sip kir royale. She is supportive of my decision. The unlikelier of the two of us, she will remain at the academy.
I like the rows of seats, the wooden lecterns, the professors who have studied every corner of an Ingres, Tacita says. I prefer practising my art within a structure. I’ve had so little of it. It seems something to push off from. But you, I, you come from that controlled world. You are right to rebel. Besides, no one can teach you to be an artist.
The same applies to you.
But I didn’t come to the academy out of escape. It was pure practical desire. I never really learned how to draw. What I want is technique, not ideas. We all have those.
Our tangents have crossed and are headed in opposing directions. I have begun to consider alternative semi-abstractions that may not involve putting pen to paper at all. Tacita is increasingly interested in the mystical immanence in portraits, in landscapes, that she was once dismissive of.
But, I, in the end it doesn’t matter. It isn’t the ways in which these things meet the eye, but the ways they take form in the mind that count.
The door opens like a blade.
A tall, fine-boned woman who formerly danced with the Ballet Russes brushes past us. A woman whom I have been told Lev has been with. A welter of jealousy. A slow flush crawls up my neck, my face. She has an exacting part down the centre of her head. A swan neck. She sees herself in the mirror above the bar. Glued to her own reflection, as swans are. She wears her long pale hair drawn into a low bun that means her ears are covered. Sharp Slavic cheekbones, glacial eyes. A sensual mouth, long dancer thighs. A calm but unmistakably predatory way of turning her head.
Despite my own will, I am decentred and seeing how Lev would see her. Does she know who I am? Does she call me l’Anglaise and make jokes with the other dancers? Do they speak Russian and laugh at our alphabet with all its childish roundness? The consonants of tin? Does she offer her body to Lev the way she does with her art? I envy their shared native language, which I imagine to be far more nuanced than English, where everything has to be pinned down. Because to feel connected with someone is to have the kind of dialogue where you don’t have to think, however imperfect. And in this they conspire together.
Ivory, don’t, Tacita says, in characteristic telepathy. She’s a fish. Remember that jealousy is more a matter of self-love than love.
What’s wrong with self-love? I say. Besides, who is speaking about love?
Oh I forgot. Your northernness comes out when you’re mad.
I’m not mad. I’m, for the first time, scared. I’ve given up the academy, the one steady thing, and my life now hangs like a question mark. And with Lev, I have rendered myself helpless by succumbing to something that is outside of me. Though I say nothing.
We will finish this champagne and then drown ourselves in red, Tacita says. We will join everyone at Le Dôme later.
The only thing I can think of is the dancer. Her small high head and drawn-out neck make her seem ethereal, longer-limbed, taller than she really is. Do our eyes meet? They are beautiful, vacant eyes, though she is not unintelligent. She walks straight up to me and says my name the way Lev does, her r’s deep and palatialized.
She looks at Tacita and then to me. The silent language of the eyes. I think she is not speaking because she is preparing what to say, but she is merely taking time to see who I am. I can see from her eyes that for her, everything is absolute. She has the look of someone who is bad at life, though somehow without losing her advantage. She wears a long scarf wound tightly around her neck and has filigreed earrings that swing and flash when they catch the light. The immense bag on her shoulder is cream leather like the underbelly of a snake. Its size makes her seem even narrower, as though she might have one less rib. What does she carry? I imagine it to be filled with all her portable possessions that she brings with her, never trusting them to anyone. When she speaks I cannot believe this is what she intended to say, but there is no mistaking it.
You should not open your legs for him, he is not for a little girl like you. In his head, there is always something more beautiful. Go home, English, if you know what’s good for you.
My hand burns. I am shocked by her vulgar words, her brazenness. I grew up with emotions kept in line by the notion of proper appearances, even in the absence of witnesses.
I rage inwardly for my lack of control. But I am raw, a vulnerable version of myself. I feel bonier and stiffer in her presence. She has a tensile strength enough to break me in two, but I can see that she is frailer than I am, in a different way. I observe that jealousy spoils her face.
She touches her hand to her cheek and then laughs and says what someone says later means virgin bride in Russian. It is a ridiculous laugh, but one with warning. She turns away.
It is then that it occurs to me that this woman could actually be Lev’s wife.
Well, she knows that Lev has chosen you, Tacita attempts to say jokingly, so naturally she wants to kill you.
Neither of us laughs.
She is not a happy person, Tacita says, lowering her voice. People who are happy are harmless.
DOLPHIN
Ceta cea. 21″ length of symphysis…5′3″ of ramus…16′6″ end of muzzle to palatal notch…13′10″ to preorbital notch…85 teeth incurved, fang compressed…Habitat, unknown. Creates rings out of blow hole or creates water vortex ring and blows air in.
AFTER SWITCHING OFF CHOPIN, I take my woollen shawl and wrap it around my shoulders. Two jumpers layered over pyjamas. I slide my feet into my sandals, my ungainly limbs labouring up the courtyard gravel to the car parked on higher ground by the wild blackberries shot through the tall grasses. My bones feel too large, too heavy for my body, though when I catch a reflection of myself I am so slight I am barely here. After Paris, I refused to look at myself in a mirror. For years, only catching flickers in windows, the glint of a knife, finger-marked lenses. Afraid to look and
find that grief had altered my face.
There is the absence of sound and visible objects in these tracts of land. All the evenings, across these violet-lapped fields from setting suns, I watch from the front door. Cool to the heat of them, emotions dulled by the simple act of time passing. The darkness unrolls, the white-tufted moths fluttering in confined circles around the light. So much of making something out of life comes from the physical world, from really looking at everything. The smell after rain, trees illuminated in a storm, the sound of a screen door, the first star, all the things that compose your existence moment to moment. It forces you to live in the present, which is the only thing I’ve ever known to stop the sinking fear of death.
The American found me this car. I’m not sure the era. From some friend of hers who summered here from California. This is his dead wife’s car. I wedge the cuttingboard behind the driver’s seat and feel it jutting into the small of my back. Did his wife do this? I wonder. She was a young woman. It makes me feel ashamed at once, to still be here.
When I reach the village I realize that I don’t remember the drive. I’ve unintentionally driven to Chinon, twenty minutes to the seven of Fontevraud. My mind elsewhere, and time moving still. The shops and flats are quiet, shuttered in. No sign of the tourists with their canvas hats, hauling around their ridiculous packs, and maps, and cameras, and plastic water bottles, as though they were going on safari and not to a French town with perfectly potable water.
I park along the river at the foot of a plane tree and slowly walk to the river’s edge to the payphone, with its clouded plastic scratched with graffiti, and begin pressing the small grubby metal squares. My hand judders. A calling card, strings of passwords. I let it ring. Six, seven, eight. I am rehearsing what to say. Then nothing. No one answers. There is an answering machine detailing various extensions, gallery hours.
The Dictionary of Animal Languages Page 10