The Perfect Circle

by Pascale Quiviger

  After a while Marianne gets up and goes out. Marco — if he doesn’t fall asleep at the table — will join her in an hour or two. In the empty house she doesn’t turn on any lights. If it’s windy, she opens the windows. If he comes, Marco always says: “You’re in the dark.” Always, she replies: “Yes, I’m in the dark,” and as the evenings pass she thinks that her reply is more and more pertinent. Marco switches on lights along the way. Invariably, he asks: “What do you want to do?” though they both know there’s absolutely nothing to do, except maybe have a beer at the bar or walk the dogs just outside the national park. They’ll go for a beer, then they’ll walk the dogs.

  In the morning, at five o’clock, Marco gets up, gets dressed, and leaves.

  Every day is a desert.

  And yet, in the nighttime forest, two stone basins collect water from a hot spring. They take off their clothes. Night is opaque on their skins, the stone slippery under their feet, slowly Marco immerses himself in one of the basins. He crouches, sighs with contentment, lets the small amount of water cover his shoulders; he holds out his arms, in the shadow you can see his white smile floating like a firefly. Marianne puts her feet in the basin and plunges her body into the tangled arms of the warm water and the man.

  She is madly in love with this body. Stocky, tanned, lithe, perfectly adapted to each of his movements, as if all of them, no matter what they are, originated in an absolute necessity and took their form from an ancient design: walk energetically, almost vertically, open the hand the precise amount required by the object to be grasped, let it describe the discourse in space, smile abruptly, a smile that holds a pleasure forever new. This body that smells of green leaves and dead leaves, that moves among other bodies: she loves the way clothes fit on it and conceal it, she loves the privilege of its nakedness. When this body is cold, when it trembles, how perfectly it resists the wind; the moment when this body topples into ecstasy and then into sleep, the imperceptible change in his breathing, becoming deep, irregular, and his way of waking with a start at the slightest sound of footsteps. She loves this body, madly, that madness will be her downfall, she knows that, but still it contains the kernel of desire, the animal truth of living heat. She goes towards this body, it’s an irresistible and disastrous progression that she consents to with all her strength and that her newly regained strength greets as a miracle.

  He holds her against him. For a long time they stay that way, naked and together, unmoving.Above them, the darkness has hair of lightning, one tower of the castle offers its crenellations between obstinate pines, the night is vast, they are two, one, barely.A mass coiled in the stone basin, swallowed by the woods. Each of them given back to the first darkness, they say nothing — there is nothing to say.

  “Would you donate your body to science?” Marianne asks Marco.

  They’re driving in the mountains. Marco knows all the dirt roads, he prefers them to the paved ones, he often drives on them for the simple pleasure of emerging into a field, of loudly losing his temper with a wildcat that’s lying in wait for the same prey he is, or of seeing a pheasant panic at the dogs’ barks, forget he has wings, and run across the road with urgent, frenzied little steps.

  “No. You?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Because it’s mine.”

  “But if you die it’s of no use.”

  “It’s still mine though, isn’t it? Just as your body belongs to you, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ve always thought it was a kind of loan.”

  “Who are you then?”

  “Me.”

  “And who’s you?”

  “Me.”

  “The rest, outside your body?”

  “Maybe.”

  “No, listen, you aren’t being clear — you rarely are, by the way — what else is there?”

  “The soul maybe?”

  “What’s that? You always use that word, what does it mean?”

  “I don’t know any more than you do.”

  “Ma dai, if you use the word you must know what it means, right?”

  “It’s the kernel.”

  “Of a peach or a grape?”

  “Same thing.”

  “I prefer the flesh.”

  “The flesh comes from the kernel.”

  “That’s true. So you believe in the eternity of the soul.”

  “Probably. You?”

  “No.”

  “And when a person dies?”

  “What do I know about that?”

  “But you talk to your father now and then, you told me.”

  “Maybe I’m talking to myself.”

  “But the meaning of life — don’t you every wonder about it?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll ask you then: what is the meaning of life?”

  “It’s ... to live.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Yes. I’m at home here.”

  “Here?”

  “In life.”

  “In your body?”

  “In my body, which is in life.”

  “But that, your body, doesn’t it ever seem foreign to you?”

  “Sometimes I’m in pain or tired, but it’s my pain and my fatigue.”

  “You never feel the need to get closer?”

  “To what?”

  “To the world.”

  “No. You?”

  “It’s hard for me to have fallen into the world.”

  “You’ve fallen into the world?”

  “Or the world fell on me, who knows?”

  “And before it fell, where were you?”

  “I was complete.”

  “But I don’t lack anything here, I eat, I sleep, I drink, you’re there, look at those trees, they produce fruit for us, they have seeds for the next trees, and when the hunting season opens there’ll be ducks — but maybe not in November, hunters are idiots you know, they kill everything they see at the very beginning of the season. Look, Marianne, the sun’s out, what don’t you have?”

  “The world.”

  “Still, it’s there, the world is there.”

  “But it always seems that it’s not for me.”

  “No, no, that’s not true, it’s there, it’s there to be taken. Not to steal, mind you — you know, some hunters are stupid, they kill more animals than they can eat — it’s there when we need it, it’s there for us because we’re part of the world.”

  “You’re right.”

  “No, no, it’s just the way I think, that’s all.”

  “For you living is quite natural.”

  “Well sure, it’s totally natural.”

  “And death?”

  “What?”

  “Are you afraid of dying?”

  “No, but I’d like to live as long as possible. I’m at home on the earth. I’d like to be immortal.Tell me what you don’t have that you need.”

  “To be able to fly.”

  “To fly? There’s the sky, it’s made for that.There’s the big bed in the little house, it’s made for that, Marianne, it’s made for flying.”

  “In Quebec it’s cold for six months of the year.”

  “And what about your soul, do you warm it every day?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  “Come and live with me then.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do.”

  “Come on, we’ll both be immortal.”

  Later, Marco stops the car to pick a giant artichoke blossom, mauve and white, its leaves pointing towards every corner of the earth at once.

  They enter into one another, it’s their most natural state, the most reassuring, the closest to the state in which one is fully part of the world. Impetuous in the cold tender in the heat in the rain in the morning in the fields slowly at night scarcely stormy again lost new eternal until — eternal. As if their bodies were naturally one single body eager to recognize itself. Desperately searching for its own code.As if it were foreseen. As if what was foreseen were to be embo
died, urgently, before the separation that had itself been foreseen and feared, because already that had happened too. As if it were a question of being not yet born, knowing that it wouldn’t be long: the breaking of the waters. Groping, they try to find a form for God, in the other’s moans they hear the suffering of his personification and his wild animal’s sensual ecstasy. It’s a tremendous job. It is their way of speaking the same language, each knowing they’re understood and confirmed, beyond any possible doubt, in their similar hearts. These hours snatched from reality give them the certainty that they have everything to live for, each in the other, the one for the ecstasy of the other, and that is why there is between them no coyness, no hesitation, there is the disproportionate power of placing one’s hand there, where desire can be sensed, there, where it will presently, immediately drift into pleasure — the mere beginning of a caress is enough sometimes, or a way of stretching one’s neck, of unlacing a shoe, sometimes it takes them the whole night to arrive, exhausted, trembling with the knowledge of the other, overwhelmed by their way of letting go.

  I write every morning so as to keep at hand the words “sun” and “flower” — I am poor. I do it to imagine that my pencil moving across the page perforates the paper straight to the dogs’ barking, and there are times when I’m able to be nothing more than this place, with no stopping or fatigue, and in spite of everything.

  Small gestures are what keep us alive, yet their smallness creates the urge to die. Through the sound of plates in the sink, between my toes and the cotton sheet; with your absence hidden like a frog beneath the warmth of everyday things, it might have been better to hope for nothing. I wish my belongings could fit into one cardboard box, light, then I could leave again, to anywhere at all.

  At the airport, when the customs officers have gone through my suitcase and confiscated the sunflowers I’d brought back, they also studied, perplexed, the artichoke blossom, the distraught expression on my face and the dried face of the flower, and they gave it back to me a moment later so I could put it in my room next winter, which was going to be long, very long, just by looking at my face they knew, it was an omen better than onion skins: the next winter was going to be a hard one.

  The knot on your overalls is as remote from me as a Chinese film, as a nineteenth-century novel, as a half-repressed dream. As remote as patent leather shoes for pre-kindergarten; as the branches swept along the St. Lawrence to Sorel or Baie-Saint-Paul, to the sea; as the chalet where I spent whole summers pulling my brother’s hair. On the village square, between the clock and the men’s bar where you’ve never let me buy you a coffee, under a rain of scales played by mediocre students, stands the strong part of my soul, my faith. It can still perhaps be heard knocking at your door, and on very windy nights, spreading its arms open on the harbour promenade, hoping for a storm that would break before long — my faith.

  I placed in my bedroom the giant artichoke blossom you picked at the end of a difficult road, and in its spines I see all of you. My emptiness is this: having had to cut myself away from my faith and to live now on the remains of the day, knowing vaguely that I was right to leave, not finding in any face here the luminous trace of yours; yet searching for it relentlessly, straining in a search as slippery as a bar of soap, struggling to engage myself in what surrounds me only to discover that I’m no longer engaged. My faith: it drinks a wine whose cork explodes into a blossom of gaiety and it smiles the way all of you smile, free of ambition.There, in the main square, my faith is hot at four p.m. and cold around midnight, I see it waiting for me, whispering: don’t come back, I can’t be here, look for me somewhere else, I won’t move.

  It won’t move from your village until I’ve found the other place where I can grasp it again. It is lodged in a metaphysical space and if I were so extravagant as to take the plane, the train, and the bus that would drop me off at the foot of the clock some week-night at five after six, I wouldn’t be able to recognize it. It is waiting for me there, where I’ll be strong enough to travel again. It stays with you, who are no longer a journey but only the residue of the most wonderful of journeys. It stays there, waiting for me to find the other window through which I’ll fly away, waiting until I take a step in the life of my life whatever it might be — my faith: in the meantime I must bear its looking at me from so far, from so high, and lacking the wings to reach it.

  I would like your memory to be the counterpart of mine.You, who have known only the extreme fringes where you took me without noticing, who invented for me, invisibly, the continent fit to live in, the undying continent, the happy excess — I am here now, in my country the winter is long, it’s hard, and I have so much to do to reinvent myself.

  “You don’t say anything about yourself.”

  “There’s nothing to say.”

  “Why did you become a plumber?”

  “So I could work on my own.”

  “And you like your work?”

  “A person has to earn a living.”

  “What do you like most when we’re in bed?”

  “Everything.”

  “Why do you always use the vulgar word for ‘making love’?”

  “Because ‘making love’ is a lot wider.”

  “Meaning?”

  “‘To make love’ means everything that’s done for love, right?”

  “For instance?”

  “For instance, to talk.”

  “I see.”

  “Like that it’s more precise.”

  “Do you think that Fulli and Argo talk to you?”

  “No. Yes. With their tails. And Fulli can smile, have you noticed?”

  “No.”

  “Look at the moon. How many days till it’s full?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “It’s easy to see you’re from the city.”

  “What?”

  “Take a good look.”

  “Oh. Fourteen.”

  “You should look at it more often.”

  “Do you talk with your mother?”

  “Never.”

  “What does she know about me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you think she hopes that I’ll leave?”

  “Why?”

  “To be sure that you won’t go away.”

  “That’s my business.”

  “Will you come to my country?”

  “Maybe.”

  “No, never.”

  “Yes, maybe never.”

  I loved you in your silence, the silence of a man rebelling against the mystery of women, and I waited for you every day, the way I used to wait for my father at supper time, at the foot of an old oak tree. My father taught me about everyday absence and about presence restored, he also taught me the meaning of a promise, the meaning of the other, who is implacably other, who encourages us to become ourselves through waiting, and being alone while we wait.You’ve always kept yourself outside me, which was fine, which was fine until I realized that you’d never come by and take me beside the oak tree, that you would let me wait for you and wear myself out from waiting. My father came without fail, he would sit me on his knees as we drove down the gravel road. Probably that’s also the reason why I had to leave you.

  Marco asks for nothing more than for what happens to him. He “works.” Fall and winter, he hunts. On windy days, he goes wind surfing, on dull days, he talks about the weather with people he’s never attached to. He has no friends, or very few, friends who know nothing about him because he never says anything.There are friends whom he’s lost, a good many, friends he’s broken with for various reasons, the main one being that he has no pity for the human race.

  Marco is faithful to himself, he is faithful to his dogs. He eats at his mother’s house twice a day, he deals with his bills and makes mortgage payments on time. He is faithful to his hunger, to his thirst, to his need for sleep, regardless of when, regardless of where. Even if he loved other women, Marco would be faithful in his way, faithful to his desire; and that fidelity, which she ad
mires, enables Marianne to accept anything.

  Marco is faithful to the life for which he was born. He complains about it for the sake of form but never changes it. His body is faithful to his life, just dark enough that he doesn’t suffer in the sun, just muscular enough that he needs to make no effort. He’s never gone to a dentist, his teeth are remarkable, and when he takes aim at a bird on the wing, he never misses.

  Marco’s silence is faithful to his way of speaking. There are times when he’s silent and times when he speaks, and the difference between those two states, surprising though it may be for those around, means nothing to him.

  When Marianne enters the perfect mechanism of Marco’s life, she moves like a mouse so as not to break anything, though she understands that she is in the process of digging a hole which she’ll leave gaping open on the day of her departure, understanding as well that she will never possess Marco’s grandiose modesty, the quiet joy of days that are all the same, and along which time seems to move by accident. Numbers shouldn’t matter. See you later or tomorrow.

  His bedroom in his mother’s house is cramped, with a camp cot, too soft; hunting trophies and sailboards; the material he needs for making cartridges; pheasant feathers and open doors; dog-eared books; cassettes; an Italian-English dictionary; an Italian-French dictionary.

  His room is a mess, his garden and garage are a mess. Any neat areas are his mother’s. Marco’s untidiness is limited to where it’s allowed. It is contained within itself, small packages left there, abandoned to the goodwill of space. His way of neglecting objects is very gentle. It’s not forced or aggressive, it’s not opposed to anything: it is quite simply the tremendous flexibility of reality at ease in its present state. It simply is, like the growth of weeds.

  Above his bed floats his diving gear, like a limp body covered with dust. It is suspended from the cupboard where his mother methodically puts his clean clothes. Marianne is terrified of that hanged man. One night when she asks him how he can sleep with it there, he replies, shrugging: “What’s to be scared of? It’s just me.”

  Marco has never thought about suicide, is even surprised that such a thought exists. On the other hand, he is obsessed with the imminence of some deadly disaster, with a predilection for a viper’s bite, though he acknowledges a mass of variations — another hunter’s rifle; the drowning of those who eat too much melon; a surfer surprised by a storm; car accidents; bombings; bad falls; food poisoning.