The Perfect Circle

by Pascale Quiviger

  “Could have been worse.Who sold it to you?”

  “A man.”

  “How old?”

  “White hair, balding, blue eyes.”

  “Glasses?”

  “Right.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “No.”

  The mother sticks out her chest as if she were about to disclose the fact that she holds the reins of western economy.

  “My brother. With that accent of yours he could see that you’re a foreigner and he figured, might as well take advantage of her, but next time you go there — now you listen to me — next time you say: ‘Do you know who this fish is for?’ He’ll say:‘No, who?’And you’ll say:‘For la Rosina,’ that’s what he calls me,‘it’s for la Rosina and I want the best.’”

  “All right,” says Marianne, who’s becoming irritable, and while becoming irritable, cuts into the Band-Aid with her knife and feels the onion juice in her cut again.

  The mother gives her a quick and worried look, then goes back to rummaging in the grocery bags.

  “Bread, parsley, garlic, I’ve got all that, you should have asked me. Mustard, of all things! We never eat that, you can take it to the other house. Shall I light the oven now? And if something’s missing, let me know. Is there anything you need?”

  My mother, thinks Marianne, Mamma, help, but she replies: “A big frying pan. Have you got any butter?”

  “Yes. But oil would be better.”

  “No, butter.”

  “If you say so. Here’s the butter.”

  Marianne browns her onion in the butter, she mustn’t have adjusted the flame properly, the butter scorches, the onions burn. She adds parsley, bread, mustard (like it or not, the recipe calls for it).When it’s time to add the cheese, she realizes that she’s forgotten to grate it. She turns down the flame, asks for the grater — which takes several minutes because she doesn’t know how to say “grater” or “grate,” so she has to mime what she wants. The mother, perplexed, finally shows her the parmesan grater, which has tiny holes. “Sorry, it’s all we’ve got.”

  Marianne starts to cut thin slices of cheese with a knife. She eats a bit while she’s at it (she’s famished) and is terror-stricken: it’s totally bland. She doesn’t dare add more mustard to make up for the lack of taste. Her throat tightens as she watches the cheese melt in the pan with the other ingredients that, while she was miming a grater, have turned pitifully limp. As it melts, the cheese forms fat lumps. Bravely, she spreads the shapeless mush over the raw fish filets and puts the result in the oven.

  “Cheese with fish? Really?” asks the mother.

  Marianne makes no reply. She starts to prepare the vinaigrette and the salad.

  “Now that’s a good idea, putting all the vegetables together. Watch out for your fingers.”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making the vinaigrette.”

  “Marco hates vinegar, you know.”

  “Yes, but with the other ingredients it doesn’t taste so strong.”

  “Very well, do as you like, we’ll see what he has to say. Wait and see before you put your vinaigrette on the salad.”

  “I’m making more, the full recipe, that way you’ll have some in reserve.”

  “That’s nice of you but no, I don’t think so, take it all to the other house — your vinegar, your mustard, really, it’s nice of you, but I don’t think so, no.”

  Everything is ready. The fish, the salad, the vinaigrette. Marco doesn’t appear. For a long time Marco doesn’t appear. While Marco isn’t appearing, the fish goes on slowly baking at the lowest temperature.At last he appears. He comes into the house, then leaves immediately to feed the dogs. He comes back, asks if he has time for a shower before supper, his mother says yes, Marianne says no. He washes his hands and sits down at the table.

  Marianne takes the fish out of the oven. While she’s arranging it on the plates, she sees it break apart. Overcooked. Very overcooked.

  “What kind of fish is this?” asks Marco.

  Marianne, who’s forgotten the name of the fish again, is silent.

  “Sole,” says the mother.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “On the Piazza della Fontana.”

  “And how much did you pay?”

  “Umm, well.”

  “A lot?”

  “A little. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Look, next time you buy something, now listen, I’ll go with you. They’ll understand who you are and then you won’t have any problems.”

  “Okay. Buon appetito.”

  They start eating the fish.The first mouthful confirms it: totally tasteless. As a result, Marianne has no appetite. “It’s very good,” says Marco’s mother, standing up to get the salt. Marco says nothing. He shovels it in. He takes a second helping — he walked a lot that day.

  “Look at the lovely salad,” says the mother.

  Marianne gets the vinaigrette and starts pouring it onto the salad.

  “Hang on,” says Marco, stopping her. “Is there vinegar in that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me some salad without it. Have we got oil, Mamma? I like it with just oil.”

  Marianne can feel the mother looking at her. She expects her to smile, victorious, but when Marianne looks up, she sees her sympathizing. “All right,” she thinks, “don’t panic. I’ll make up for it with the French toast, that’s something I can make even before I’ve had coffee.” She gets up, cuts the bread, soaks it in the mixture of egg, sugar, vanilla, and milk, and puts it into the frying pan where the butter is already melting.

  So far, all is well: the fire is low, the butter doesn’t burn. And then, suddenly, everything keels over again when she bends over the pan and, helpless, sees a skin form on the milk and the bread slowly dissolve, turning from a slice into a granular liquid inside the hard crust, which is derisively intact. “What a feast! Dry fish mush with tasteless cheese, another mush of bread and boiled milk. A dazzling revelation of my many talents.”

  Reduced to mush herself, she brings her guests huge plates of French toast (whose French name, lost bread, has never been more fitting) onto which, as compensation, she pours half the contents of the jug of maple syrup. The room temperature that evening is thirty-seven and when Marco and his mother tuck into their dessert, they begin to sweat copiously and their faces start to look like wax. They slow down more and more until they decide to push away their plates, Marco first and then his mother.

  “Thank you, Marianne,” they say, “it’s not that it’s bad, but here, you know, we aren’t used to sweet desserts.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” says Marianne, getting up to clear the table, while Marco and his mother, slumped on their chairs, rub their stomachs.

  When she sits down again the verdict falls, irrevocable. “Thanks,” says the mother, “it was nice of you to make supper and we really did eat a lot.”

  And that’s all.The mother will sleep well tonight, in spite of her digestive difficulties and her miasma of compassion, because in Marianne’s mush she has seen the future, which she already knew: Marco will never leave.

  When your mother dies you’ll be alone with your dogs.

  You’ll be alone among the dogs, and you’ll wish more than usual that you were a dog yourself. You’ll eat pasta every day, and tomatoes with oil. Neither the pasta nor the tomatoes will taste like before, because you won’t take the time to salt them properly or to put in the basil. Dead birds will pile up in your freezer, now and then you’ll give one to friends, you’ll also use them as bargaining chips.You’ll stop shaking off your boots when you come in and you’ll let the dogs sleep inside. You’ll sweep up once a month, quickly, and limiting yourself to under the kitchen table. You’ll never go to the cemetery. On your mother’s grave — she who all her life put flowers on the graves of others — there will be none.

  You’ll hardly shed a tear, resolute forever in your isolation though it will w
eigh on you in a new way. You’ll think about her every day. You’ll sleep in her bedroom, which is bigger, but you won’t change anything in it. You’ll leave her clothes in the closet, her crochet work and yarn on a chair.

  Your aunts will try to look after you, but you’ll turn them down, politely. In spite of everything, you’re very polite. Your politeness comes close to rudeness, it’s so cold and automatic, it just shows how far removed from anyone else you want to be.

  You’ll miss certain things, a few little things such as never having learned to speak words of love, such as never having had the courage to leave home, and you’ll know that your mother took with her to the grave, along with her recipe for stuffed turtledove, the recipes for love and courage.You’ll know that it was from her that you’d have had to learn the proper words, and from her heart that you’d have had to snatch permission to leave. It will be too late and it will be no more important than today, because already you’ve given up, because you’ve welded your renunciation to your silence, because already you find in it the relative comfort to be found in any form of asceticism.

  On the day of your mother’s death you will go on living the way you did before, perhaps greeting a little more solemnly life’s dark intentions which you, an utter fatalist, have always greeted as they arrive, without trying to change anything at all.

  I’ll be elsewhere then, and you’ll have long since withdrawn from me the power to caress the thoughts that are in your head — all of which I loved without ever knowing them.

  IV

  EVERY DAY

  It’s a field of dried sunflowers, their black faces bent towards the ground. Marco has on his blue work overalls with the straps tied at the small of his back, he is walking ahead of Marianne. She catches up with him, grabs hold of a strap, from the colour of her eyes he understands what she wants.

  They retrace their steps. He carries her over his shoulders through the thorny bushes. They climb onto the boat that’s hidden in the grass and in the slow sound of the lake and the early evening, between the reeds and close to another abandoned boat that’s full of water, in no time their knees are full of splinters, Marco’s fabulous eyes are shot through with the fleeting sun, his back set with pebbles, water falls from his forehead drop by drop onto Marianne’s throat, his eyes are closed, then open, then closed again and in a little while, when they’re back on terra firma, their legs will still be trembling between the sunflowers.

  It’s nothing, it’s so little. It takes so little in the beginning to make Marianne happy. The first sentence spoken in the newly acquired language without one mistake; the thick, phosphorescent green of the olive oil; a magnificent rainfall that clears the beach and transforms the surface of the water into a carpet of metallic grasshoppers; the vigorous way the dogs run through the fields, and the mist that escapes from their muzzles; the splayed red interior of ripe figs; the immensity of the lake beneath her avid strokes; their gravelly accent when they pronounce her name; the handful of basil the salesman puts in with the tomatoes, its piquant taste rubbing off on the peaches in the same bag.The lining of joy is bitter from the outset however, because Marianne soon realizes that it has no resonance here at all outside herself, that joy, this particular joy, her own, cannot be communicated.

  At the table around two p.m. Marco’s remark, always the same, drops like a blade: “Okay, I’m off now, do whatever you want.” So she won’t hear it, Marianne often rushes out as soon as she’s cleaned her plate. You never know exactly where Marco is on his way to. He says “to work,” but that’s actually a generic term. Marianne sees him from a long way off, chatting with other men on the terrace of a bar, and his sailboards are always on the roof of his Jeep. Actually, he works as little as possible, just enough to earn what he needs for the mortgage payments; he leaves plumbing in the lurch and his customers without water as soon as he can afford to. She both admires and scorns the way he fills his days with trivial chitchat and little lies, the way he goes through life with no urgency, filling it with whatever he fancies.

  Now and then he parks outside the empty house. Because of the stone wall, Marianne can’t see the car, but she recognizes out of all others the sound of the engine that’s become her obsession. He takes her for an iced tea or to feed the ducks. As she never knows if Marco will come by, she keeps her ear pricked. And on the street, she can’t help glancing furtively over her shoulder. He shows up sometimes, like a mushroom suddenly emerging from the ground. She sticks messages on the door for him: I’m at the lake, I’m at the hotel, I’m in the village drawing, I’ve gone for a walk in the harbour. At first she’s reluctant to do it because, she thinks, the neighbours will also know where she’s gone. But remembering that everyone always knows everything in any case, she sticks her messages on the door. She has come to live with him. She doesn’t let him lose track of her, because she knows that he could. Because he does lose track, obstinately. Never does he take advantage of the little notes, all of which she’ll keep in memory of God knows what.

  She accepts his absence, though it makes her suffer, because that absence is him. It’s his way of owning himself: free. She knows that he expects from her a similar freedom, and during the first weeks she takes every measure to be fully occupied by her own affairs. Until she understands what she hadn’t understood before: her need of a world.To exercise her freedom, she needs a world. She needs a world in which freedom is used to overcome the inertia of the world and to flow with its movement. She also understands that the world does not start out as a landscape or a work or an administrative procedure undertaken with a view to obtaining a residence permit, the world doesn’t even consist of the need to drink or eat: she understands that the world is other people. That is well expressed in fact in the French saying: “It takes a lot of people to make a world.” In that language, a single word, monde, means both people and the place where they’re located, and it’s because a place is its people. In Marco’s country, Marianne has no world. She speaks to individuals who don’t reply, who are content to accumulate information about her that they can pass on to a cousin or an aunt, that for two or three minutes will give them the upper hand. In this absurd situation, Marco himself becomes the entire world, though he is unquestionably the individual least qualified and least willing to become someone else’s world.

  A letter arrives now and then to remind her that she too exists elsewhere, with the density of a normal individual. But a letter is a very modest testimony. It is the residue of a moment in the life of a friend two weeks ago. A few times the phone rings for her. She picks it up, awkwardly, surprised by the simultaneity of her voice and the one over there. She can never articulate anything at all and that difficulty says a lot about the distance she’s thrown into, the opacity of the mist that she fades into while she waits for Marco, who doesn’t come, and while she works relentlessly to at least stay contemporary with herself, detached from all continents of reality but still secured to a shred of herself, to the memory of her self that is hard to grasp, lost as it is like one drop among raindrops.

  A fisherman makes fast his boat to a metal ring. He stops for a moment and observes Marianne.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m drawing.”

  “What are you drawing?”

  “The boats.”

  “Where’s mine?”

  “It will be here.”

  “Are you a foreigner?”

  “Yes.”

  “German?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “Canadian.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I come from Canada.”

  “Ah. How long will you be staying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you staying at the hotel?”

  “No.”

  “Where then?”

  Marianne gestures vaguely in the direction of her street.

  “What number?”

  “Three.”

  “Ah!”


  The man’s face lights up.

  “You’re Marco’s girlfriend.”

  “That’s right.”

  He stares at her for a moment, pensive.

  “Good old Marco.”

  Suddenly Marianne notices the striking resemblance between the fisherman and Marco’s mother. As she knows that chances are she won’t be mistaken, she asks: “Are you his uncle?”

  He’s stupefied.

  “That’s right. I’m his uncle. You’re staying in the house where I grew up.”

  “Ah!”

  “I’m not too interested in what happens on the ground. I caught an eel today. Some day maybe you could draw an eel, they’re very pretty.”

  The evening meal, when Marco is there, unfolds like lunch. Fulli meets her on the doorstep. He leads the way into the kitchen, turning around two or three times during the very brief walk to make sure she’s following, visibly eager to be a good host.

  Fulli is the only one who comes to welcome her. Approaching her, he also tries to overcome his jealousy, his painful awareness that he’s just the eldest of the dogs and that unlike her, he doesn’t have the privilege of climbing onto the bed. During the meal, he lies on the floor, as close to the table as possible, and sometimes, without realizing it, he steps on the mother’s foot and she shoves him aside, cursing. When Marianne has finished eating, he checks out of the corner of his eye (hidden by fur) that she has stopped using her fork, then he comes and lays his head on her lap. Every time, Marco says, “Fufu, no, leave her alone,” but in this very precise situation, Fulli waits for Marianne to say the final word. Sometimes she says no and Fulli, head down and tail dragging, turns around and stretches out on the floor. Generally though she says nothing, she pets him and he lets his head weigh more and more heavily on her lap; he slobbers abundantly and keeps an eye on her. Marianne is well aware that he’s the only one, that he’ll always be the only one, to approach her without demanding that she reinvent herself, without demanding anything but her right hand on his big hairy head.