The Perfect Circle

by Pascale Quiviger

  In the yard behind the hotel, where you finally go for a coffee, a path has been dug out with a spoon that’s just wide enough for one pair of legs; its edges crumble as you walk on it. After your coffee you go to the harbour. It’s already night and snow is still falling. The sky is a peculiar blue, as if the white earth were going to force it to speak. Masts sing in the wind, the sound more crystalline than usual. He lets his white dogs run in the white harbour, between snowballs.

  The storm lasts for two days. Because of it perhaps, you become inseparable — or because your anger has been purged. It’s also because of the giddiness you take from one another that neither silence nor distance nor anger can appease. He lends you a coat and boots, stays close to you and, with no apology or explanation, he draws you gently back into the circle of love; you go along with it because it’s good that way, because the force that propels you towards him comes from very high, because you’ll give anything to allow that force to act.

  When the snow has melted you go back to Quebec. You write to him every week, every day, every hour, every minute, over a period of seven months.You write about this and that, but in fact you only write about one thing, the distance between you and the slow passage of time. I want to tell you things I don’t know how to say in your language and that you can’t read in mine, things that while I wait should perhaps be kept silent so they’ll watch over us in secret, so that on this side of us, they will take care of the road our souls follow towards each other, blindly, so that one day, finally, our continents will be absolved.

  He calls you once a month, Saturday morning on the stroke of eight. The conversation lasts for seven or eight minutes, scarcely long enough to recognize your voice and adjust to the language used, long enough to understand that he really does exist, that he always will exist, and that because of you, he can’t sleep. Obsessed by his calls, you develop a scientific interest in how telephones work — and satellites and cables in general. Obsessed by him, you don’t do the slightest thing without dedicating it secretly to him, you don’t say a single word without wishing that he could hear it.

  A person can write this, it’s easy enough: “You are waiting for him.” But the wait is long enough to invent the wheel, to pass through the Middle Ages, produce the Renaissance, count on Modernity, and then give up on everything, end the millennium as if one were closing a bad book, opening it again only to throw it in the fire. When one day he invites you to come back, you accept.

  You don’t want to live through another departure that contains a return. You leave your job and your apartment, wipe out your bank account, give away a few things and store the rest, tell your friends goodbye.All this you do with bitter lucidity, with a premonition that you’re flying towards failure, but knowing too, knowing powerfully, that this probable failure is coupled with some dark truth. To bring that truth within your grasp, you empty out your known world and fill up your suitcase again. It is for that truth, far more than for him, that you decide to leave and to balance yourself on the instinctive crest, with nothing behind you and nothing ahead, and without a net to guard against falls.

  You board the plane on June 1. Twenty-seven years after your birth, fifty-two years after Hiroshima, four hundred and ninety-five years after Michelangelo sculpted his David, four months before your godson’s birth. You board the plane, it would be an event of no significance if such events existed. Such events do not exist.

  For some time I thought that this story would be my entire life. Maybe I wasn’t mistaken.This story, brief though it may be, led me towards the precise point at which living should result from a decision.You would make everything possible by making everything impossible, everything but the exhausting memory of intense joy.

  I would like to make of this story an object, I would like that object to be a book. I would change all the names, all but the dogs’. That way I could set it down somewhere, in my bedroom maybe but outside myself, and I could close my eyes and sleep.

  And I could sleep.

  Those words last only long enough to lose you.

  I

  THE POSSIBLE PLACE

  Beauty makes us solitary. It makes us responsible for tolerating its passing and for being its worthy witnesses.

  I am looking for nothing else.

  The problem is that of disappearance. Beauty always goes away. As a child, I wanted to be equal to that departure and I felt very deeply that to achieve it, I would have to do something with beauty, perhaps something that doesn’t die. But all things perish and it’s when we learn this that we take leave of our childhood.

  The problem remains intact. The heavy joy of beauty will be nowhere except in itself and it will leave me alone, here, leave me only myself shot through with beauty, unless I do something with it.

  Unless I do something with beauty.

  Marco is thirty-seven when Marianne meets him, he’s drinking an amaro from a narrow glass, he’s wearing a white T-shirt, he has a long beard.

  He lives in a village on a hill, beside a lake. The stone is ochre and grey, the place emerges from its walls and seems to want to hoist itself above them. From the highest point, behind the castle’s battlements, emerge the triangular façade of the church with its steeple on the right and on the left the ghost of another, which fell during the war.The scales of unambitious children practising on the municipal piano hover above the central square, which you reach through narrow labyrinths where doors and windows open in the most incongruous places. Silk underwear is quite conspicuously hung out to dry, plants climb up staircases, icons sit in niches carved into the walls, plastic Virgins, artificial flowers, portraits of saints dog-eared from the rain. Dishevelled straw-bottomed chairs sit here and there, sown at random. From all the openings, in what appears to be a single immense house, can be heard laughter and shouting, radios, dubbed American soaps, and the figures who are stubbornly impassive before a stranger become animated and excited in the company of neighbours. The village is round, closed, but three lookouts open onto the lake and the uninformed stroller plunges into a windy vertigo there, as if vigorously regaining the use of a lung.

  Higher up, in the wild grass of the hill, Roman ruins disclose an underground passage, site of orgiastic worship; a well filled with ferns; an altar; and the clear outline of what was once a temple, with steps, monumental, that point to the highest part of the sky. Close by in the cemetery, tombstones stubbornly display the same three family names, and the gate creaks like the caretaker’s knees when he comes to open it, chewing candies.

  An alley of plane trees goes down from villa to villa, all the way to the lake at the bottom of which, according to legend, lies an Etruscan village. Professional fishermen leave at night wearing woollen caps and come back around nine or ten in the morning.Their boats are inspired by the Etruscan model, with a wide, flat bottom that keeps them from capsizing. They have a tapered bow and a wide stern and Marco thinks they’re “as beautiful as a woman’s thighs.” The lake, which is volcanic, is clear and blue and tepid. In September, the water is turned over by the tramontana and its icy bottom comes up to the surface. Among the villagers it invokes fearful respect and a jealous affection. On average, two tourists drown in it every year.

  The patron saint of the village is a little guy whose martyrdom is recreated every year on the public square. He is torn apart in front of the main bar; when the blood flows onto his white robe, the crowd shudders, then applauds when he refuses to recant. When he finally succumbs, angels — muscular, tanned, bare-chested, bare-legged — come to fetch him under a shower of petals.

  Marianne meets Marco at the hotel bar one night. The next day she sees the light on his face for the first time.

  As a child I used to lie in the grass and use the garden hose to soak the earth. I liked the smell of the swarming universe and of the life mounting up the green stems. It was the smell — I didn’t know it at the time — of the house you were preparing to close up and would unlock years later as a place where we could pass the n
ight.

  There are the hours of waiting for you and then the ones spent not waiting.

  There are the hours spent letting you disappear.

  You made the sky immense and brought it closer for me. Every day when I wake up I will thank you for it.

  When Marco asks Marianne to come and live in his country, he has the electricity reconnected in the house of his childhood which has been uninhabited since he built a more spacious one in the new part of the village. Marianne knows the old house without ever having seen it. She’s been inside it already, to lie on the floor and to not sleep. She knows only odours — of the rosemary her shoulder has brushed against at the entrance to the garden, of a dark room, of sleeping Europe, of the earth that drinks the rain, of damp cellars; she knows the thrilling smell of Marco’s skin, the steel smell of his sweat, the blank smell of his silence.

  When Marianne decides to move in with Marco, he opens the windows and the dampness is scattered outside.

  The house is squeezed into the back of a garden that’s cluttered and crammed on all sides — right, left, above, behind — by other, similar houses that sit, neglected, under the mild sky; it has a flat roof, narrow windows, and walls where the plaster is eroding in patches. Long ago, all these houses belonged to Marco’s grandfather, a very prosperous fisherman who made his fortune by sending out other village men to fill their boats with eels and whitefish for him. He had a nasal voice, he drank a lot, was always joking, and smoked too much. One day in his youth, during a fierce storm, he set off for one of the five islands, where he seduced a girl, brought her back to the village, and married her without further ado. When he was old and deaf and one of his grandsons came to introduce his fiancée, he started to cry because he couldn’t hear her voice. He died while playing cards, holding a spectacular hand. He brought his progeny to live in row houses, but before he died he sold them one after another. Marco bought the one where he’d spent his childhood with his father, his mother, his brother, his grandparents, and an aunt.The Germans had occupied it too, during the Second World War.

  Now the house is empty. No longer is it home to children’s cries, dogs’ stories or German barking, or to the table under which Marco’s brother used to tie him up, unbeknownst to anyone.The aunt with whiskers lives in an institution and the grandfather is dead.The empty house has three windows and two doors, and the shifting shadows of those who used to live there sometimes move around on the twelve strokes of noon. Marco doesn’t talk about it, but Marianne senses that she’s being pushed into someone’s inviolable privacy. There is no table, chair or hot water, and in the bedroom hangs a curtain his mother wanted put up, to shield their lovemaking from the neighbours’ curiosity. As for the armoire that belonged to the grandmother, she is advised not to touch it.

  A few weeks after Marianne’s arrival, Marco, suddenly tired of playing fakir on the bedsprings, decides to buy a mattress. He drives the Jeep into town. He chooses a double-bed mattress that’s wider than the roof of his car. He brings it to the village on the roof anyway, constantly checking it with his left hand to make sure that it won’t fall off. The mattress finds its place in the middle of the bedroom, doubled in the mirror of the armoire where Marco likes to see his own reflection carrying Marianne’s off to sleep. It’s a mattress wider than a car, wider than the village, it sometimes spills over the vineyards and the entire universe, it is a flying mattress. It becomes the heart of the house, its beating. Marco leaves it at five every morning, already tired from his too-short night.

  Around, in front, behind, on both sides, and above, live aunts, uncles, and cousins of Marco’s.The aunt from up above knocks on the door the first morning and under the pretext of looking for a kitten, she’s come to solve the mystery of the electricity that’s come back on after ten years of darkness. By noon, Marco’s mother already knows that the aunt has seen Marianne, already knows what she thinks of her. It’s a family of people who fish for a living. From the telephone lines that transmit the meagre information obtained by a sustained process of listening through walls and observing at windows, they weave their nets. Those nets are invisible. Marianne, who’s naïve enough to think that she is free of everything, doesn’t immediately realize that the place is haunted and that it will conjure up another space — her own, the biggest, the smallest, the space without furniture, where voices reverberate, banging their heads against the wall.

  Because the house watches over a cold truth, impossible to embrace, which will stand before her every day, every night; which will surprise her at every waking with the burning acuity of liquid nitrogen; that truth, the only one, with its abrupt corners and the broken voice of a weary angel; that truth is the kernel of her solitude. And it is precisely by cracking that kernel, filled with hope, that Marianne will discover it’s empty, empty with a windy emptiness that passes through the body and erases the soul, that takes from one’s hands all the tools of joy. Then she’ll start listening to music, perhaps for the first time she will really listen to music — in other words, needing it. She’ll stretch out on the big mattress in the afternoon — no one’s looking for her, no one’s calling for her — she’ll listen to requiems that will open cathedrals of glass, then she will fall half asleep, outside time, finally dissolved in the song that saves her and for a moment draws her out of her agitation. She will always be surprised when the music expires, because in the end it’s only a sixty-minute cassette; surprised when reality, painful, crashes down on her again like a sledgehammer as soon as the silence resumes its rights.

  And that is how she’ll succumb to cigarettes again.

  The narrow cul-de-sac that’s pink in the morning and green at night bears the name of a great navigator. In Marianne’s garden there’s a plum tree, in the neighbour’s on the left, a pear tree, further away two olive trees and a peach tree, further still there are vines climbing up wooden trellises, and at the very end, a stand of fig trees, weeds and roses. An underground spring runs into a canal dug by each family to dip water from it — an undertaking worthy of ancient Rome that makes it possible to grow flowers with no increase in taxes. On windy nights in July, each garden deposits in the leaves its own resonance, which is more or less subdued, more or less laden with flowers and oil, sometimes crystallized in the voices of children or interrupted by the growls of a poodle that never recognizes anyone. All the residents pick from the same fig tree, greet the same child, silence the same dog, as if they were part of a single entity, as if they shared a secret that really consists of nothing more than a key in their pockets.

  One of the oldest roads in Europe crosses the village. Cars speed along it.At the edge of the pavement, dusty plastic bouquets here and there commemorate a death, forming a kind of sparse, anonymous rosary.When the villagers arrive from outside the village, even if they’ve only been away for a few hours, they can’t stop themselves from taking the ritual detour that starts on the main road, goes down the avenue of plane trees and along the lake, then back up to the road. Along the footpath circling the lake are scattered a myriad bars. Inevitably an acquaintance has stopped at one of them, so they stop as well, or toot their horns. Often the evening outing will be nothing more than this trip around the block, all windows open, scanning the terraces.

  At the edge of the lake, set back, is a beach of coloured pebbles, shards of plates and glass, polished tiles; offshore, the cabin of a half-sunk yacht serves as a diving board for children. A maritime pine — stiff, bent in two like someone with a terrible stomach ache — dips its head, kept from falling by a metal post. In a park, a seesaw, a slide, a fountain, and some benches, as well as a clock that always shows the right time, the only punctual clock in the village, giving the impression that time, motionless elsewhere, only starts up again in this very spot, under the eyes of children watched over by the old. Across the way, all summer long there’s an amusement park. Its few rusty rides make a terrible racket. Now and then a teenaged couple kiss on the swaying seats of the Ferris wheel that the operator starts up jus
t for them and which go by so quickly that no one can make them out, and they themselves can’t pick out on the face of the other the joyous turmoil brought on by proximity. A pathetic place, artificial, a temporary Eden — at the far end of the grounds you can see the two magic vans it emerged from and will disappear into during the first days of September.

  The avenue that runs along the lakeshore is guarded by pine trees. The sun falls like powder, resembles the light in Renaissance paintings — white in the distance, yellow up close.Trees are planted at random, with no alignment, giant parasols from which thorns rain down. Between the paved street and the carpet of thorns there’s no sidewalk, no border, nothing to indicate the limit between the street and the rest and, in the end, everything is the street, nothing is the street, strollers travel on the pavement and cars, between the pines.

  The harbour consists of a few circles of oil meandering between some pleasure craft and a dozen sailboats. Off to one side, a boat of no precise colour is docked in water so shallow you can see its outline on the mud. An orphan boat, and honest. On its side are peeling layers of paint that testify to its age like tree rings. Families of ducks drift by it and human families come to watch them. As for the fishermen’s impeccable boats, they are moored to the wharf on the right, the order different every day depending on when they’ve come in. All bear the name of a woman — which is not necessarily that of the fisherman’s wife. Maurizio, for instance, bought his boat from a brother of his wife’s and to his great despair it bears the name of his mother-in-law. Massimo’s boat and Sergio’s are both called Anna Maria and while you might assume that this not-uncommon name belongs to two different women, everyone knows that actually, it’s the same one.