“Three hundred and I’ll take it off your hands right away.”
“Three fifty. The tank’s full. That’s worth almost fifty dollars.”
The young man rummages in the back pocket of his jeans, pulls out a wad of bills and counts them while trying to keep his fingers from trembling. Along with the money, he gives the old man the sun-bleached For Sale sign. The old man pins it under his arm, counts the money and offers his hand, which the young man pumps with a show of energy before seating himself again behind the steering wheel.
“Come around this way. I’ve got my lettuce over there.”
The young man gently eases himself out of the tall grass. The fragrance of spring rises together with the scent of leather and gasoline. The car responds smoothly, but the brake pedal’s action is a little slow, something he’ll have to remember. He touches the tip of his cap by way of goodbye, a salute he reserves exclusively for old people, for the witnesses to a disappearing world. Everything here seems to be on the point of dying. The village road is deserted, except for a cat, except for the fox keeping watch from a distance. The young man presses down on the accelerator and speeds eastward with the windows rolled down. The radio is dead. What a shame. What luck.
From the window of her office, Madeleine looks at the watchman doing his rounds. This is what she does when her eyes need a rest. There’s the sea, of course, but it isn’t at all restful. It’s a struggle, a call, a mystery whispered with every rising tide. The watchman, on the other hand, is calm and predictable. Afflicted by gout, he limps but has never taken a day off. He circles around the lighthouse like a grey satellite; his hobbling in no way diminishes his reassuring presence.
Like everyone else, the watchman has a name, but Madeleine always calls him monsieur le gardien. He is a kind, quiet man who believes in angels and extraterrestrials. About once a year he uses his break time to tell her about an apparition, a glow glimpsed from the shore, a movement in the autumn sky. Madeleine is not put out by these strange beliefs. On the contrary, knowing her watchman is on the alert for all possible forms of intrusion gives her a sense of tranquility.
As for the students whose job it is to welcome the crowds of tourists during peak season, they are all called Sarah or Sandra. Madeleine did her best to hire a Megan this year, but the girl declined after the interview. So she will have to fall back on the same Sandra as last year, the one who fabricated historical facts rather than rely on the documented information about the lighthouse. For the time being, Madeleine and the watchman are the only ones welcoming the “regular” off-season visitors—groups of school children and elderly people.
A class of seventh graders is expected at ten o’clock, the youngsters of group twelve of the local high school. Kids who are struggling. Madeleine goes to meet them and their ripped jeans, their defiant way of chewing gum, their certainty that they’re already losers. During the visit, a slender teenage girl dressed head to toe in black stares at her with burning intensity. Her gaze is so insistent that Madeleine is convinced the girl is about to speak to her, to confide in her, to share the secret that weighs on her soul, a secret that will free them both, the girl and Madeleine, at the same time, one of those revelations that add a layer of truth to the world. But at the end of the presentation the little black widow moves off with the others. The morning’s fine weather gives way to a shower that sends up a salty mist. And each time this happens, the sound of the foghorn seems to be missing. The lighthouse has been voiceless for ten years yet its silence is as piercing as ever.
Night has come and she can’t sleep. Once again, her son is the matter—either that or she ate too much chocolate before going to bed. Shabby, the cat, refused to come inside and the foot of the bed is abnormally cold. Toward midnight, Madeleine slips into the doorway and calls it once more. She smiles in the shadows when she discerns its little gallop in the distance. It arrives from where the willow stands, its tattered ears pointed in her direction, and rubs its patchy fur against her terrycloth robe. “Come on, in you go.” A few hours later, the ring of the telephone wrenches her out of sleep. Madeleine grabs the receiver only to be met with silence yet again. These mute calls have been recurrent; she utters a few hoarse “hellos” as a matter of form and hangs up. Her ears are humming as though filled with a sudden gust of wind and she hears something creaking, apparently on the ground floor. “Is someone there?” No answer. The house breathes, and dreams come and go.
Despite the persistent pain, the first night in the Monte Carlo was far more comfortable than he had imagined. The back seat is wide and firm and still recalls the four or five kids who would pile in on Sunday with the scent of soil and rhubarb trailing behind them; it remembers the crates of okra hauled to the market and the honey seeping out of the jar on the bumpy roads. The young man woke at six, left the tree-lined backroad where he had pulled over to sleep, and found a truck stop where could clean up and order a coffee. A stupid idea given his condition, but there are only two more days to go.
In the late morning he stops for a hitchhiker and takes fifteen seconds to study the man’s face. It’s furrowed in the wrong places, but he has good eyes. The young man swings the car door open for him.
“Quite the boat, your car! Where are you headed?”
“North. Across the border. You?”
“I’m going home, near Memphis.”
“That’s on my way.”
The passenger twiddles the radio dials but to no avail, and he clucks his tongue in frustration. Then he pulls a bottle of soda out of his backpack and offers some to the driver. After a few minutes he begins to hum a popular song, a bubblegum tune that grows soulful and solemn between his lips. The temperature seems suddenly to rise three degrees and the pain in the driver’s body recedes. Then the melody stops.
“What sort of guy are you? You give a Black man a ride a few miles from the federal prison without asking the slightest question—you some sort of psychopath? Going to chop me up into little pieces and eat my liver?”
The young man burst out laughing.
“I’m the sort of guy who doesn’t let a man rot by the side of the road.”
The passenger nods and takes another gulp.
“My name’s Lloyd. I did seven years for theft and possession of stolen goods.”
“What did you steal?”
“Cars. Don’t worry, yours doesn’t interest me. Anyway, I’m done with that foolishness. I’m keeping on the straight and narrow, with the help of God.”
“In the eyes of God, no one deserves to go to jail. In the eyes of men, everyone’s got a good reason to be locked up.”
A bump jolts the car, and the pain returns like a needle burrowing into the muscles. The driver’s fingers tighten on the steering wheel.
“It must be strange to be out, all at once.”
“If it weren’t so hot I’d swear it was a dream. At night, I constantly dreamed I was free. But if you want to know if it’s real, there’s a trick: you never sweat in dreams. Whereas today…”
“We’re melting away.”
“It’s nicer than every second spent inside.”
Late in the afternoon the young man insists on going out of his way and takes the exit pointed out by his passenger. He knows very well Lloyd is right: a Black man can wait with his thumb in the air for hours on the side of the road before someone stops to pick him up, if the police don’t come along first. He drives Lloyd to his mother’s place but doesn’t turn around immediately. He waits to see the front door open, to see an arm reach out, to see Lloyd stepping toward the one who had waited steadfastly for seven years. The scene is both familiar and incomprehensible. He averts his eyes just as mother and son embrace each other and then continues on his way, clinging to Lloyd’s last words, which still hover inside the car. God bless you.
Madeleine is especially pleased with the last set of photos. In the developer tray, a nascent storm eme
rges where the roiling of the clouds melds with that of the water so that the horizon can barely be made out and it is hard, amid the mirages and reflections, to separate what belongs to the sky from what belongs to the sea. This is the sole subject of Madeleine’s work: the horizon, the boundary between the two worlds, and what manages, unbeknown to scientists and the gods, to travel from one to the other.
Her interest in photography began backwards: she learned to develop before ever touching a lens. Micha was the one who handled the camera. After he died she mastered the darkroom he had set up in the basement in order to find out what the kilometres of film that he’d left behind contained. What they contained for the most part were insects. Micha could spend hours photographing them with a macro lens that captured the minute details of a wing, an iridescent shell or a globular eye. He loathed those tiny creatures, all of which he identified as pillbugs, but season after season he forced himself to recognize them, to magnify them, to fix his eyes on them one by one without blinking. “I hate them because they will end up eating us. I study them for the same reason,” he would say.
Once she had gone through the four hundred and thirty-two posthumous pictures, Madeleine turned her attention to the camera. Her first subject was travellers’ faces, red-eyed and blurry-mouthed. As the months passed, she honed her technique and their features became more sharply defined, until they deserved to be framed. They multiplied: youths, unadorned, their gaze hard and dreamy, their bodies tattooed, glorious, or beaten, weary and suntanned, posing in front of the sea or the willow, their hair windblown. Madeleine hangs them on the corridor wall among the portraits of persecuted ancestors and pictures of her son as a child, never as an adult. Each time he passes through, Madeleine promises herself she will photograph him. He goes away without leaving a trace on the plastic film.
She gradually lost interest in people, perhaps because it is more acceptable to fail when tackling a landscape than when facing a human being. Or perhaps because she recognizes herself more readily in the unstable symmetry of the sky and the sea than in another’s face.
Night comes on with a ruddy breath that gilds the road and lends an ochre tinge to the sign held up by the girl, which bears one word: FAR. The driver pulls over for the second time today. The girl hurries to the car towing a dust-covered trolley case utterly unsuited to her chosen mode of transportation. With a superhuman effort, she hoists the beast onto the back seat before climbing into the front. Her name is Yun and her goal is to reach the extremities of the hemisphere: the Maritimes, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego. The young man tells her they can travel part of the way together. Delighted to hear this, she relaxes. Silence sets in, and she makes no attempt to switch on the radio. She leans her head out the window and breathes in the cool evening air. An hour later she asks:
“And you? What’s your name?”
“Édouard.”
“Édouard—that’s a lovely name.”
“It’s because I was conceived on Prince Edward Island, l’Île-du-Prince-Édouard.”
“No kidding?”
“That’s what I was told. Yun—what kind of name is that?”
“Korean. It means ‘melody.’”
“You’re a musician?”
“Hardly. I’m a chemist.”
They spend the night in a room with one bed. Yun doesn’t like to French kiss; she says it’s cannibalistic. But, supple as a bow, she enjoys running her lips along the spine, brushing the floating ribs, meandering over the inner thighs. They don’t get much sleep before sunrise, then they drowse until the cleaning lady raps on the door. At eleven o’clock sharp they are sitting in the Monte Carlo once again.
The road turns dreary. The extravagance of the South, its incongruous vegetation, the madness of the religious billboards give way to the monotony of Yankee farmland. Édouard steps on the gas. There’s no time to lose; the pain is gaining ground and he must get to Montreal post-haste. When he can’t bear it any more, Yun takes the wheel. She strokes Édouard’s forehead while steering the Monte Carlo with a lack of precision that, even so, doesn’t frighten Édouard. They reach downtown Montreal at nightfall.
“I can’t remember the last time I saw a skyscraper,” Édouard remarks.
On a piece of hamburger wrapping, he scribbles an address and a few directions; then he hands Yun the car keys.
“You should arrive by midday tomorrow if you don’t stop too often.”
“You look weak. Are you sure you don’t want me to stay with you?”
“Quite sure. I’ll be in good hands. A friend of mine is driving down in a few days. I’ll catch up with you as soon as I’m done here.”
She gives him a tongueless kiss, which nevertheless thrills him to the marrow; then she strides away, her hair beating time on her perfect shoulders, and Édouard could swear there is a brass band marching somewhere among the glass towers.
Again, the telephone rings when Madeleine is in bed. This time it’s for real: a girl with an indeterminate accent announces she’ll be arriving the next day. This makes Madeleine smile. Such manners are a rarity among the guests, who, generally without warning, just show up as willowy silhouettes at the far end of the road. For years Madeleine has been putting up passing strangers, travellers, and drifters from all over the continent. When her son went looking for adventure at the age of seventeen, he began to give his mother’s address to the people he met on the road. Some dream of exploring the Maritimes, others, of learning French. A few simply need a tranquil place to rest, regain their health, find some peace, sometimes their souls.
Reticent at first to open her door to strangers, Madeleine soon grew accustomed to their company, which in the end she came to genuinely appreciate. No one in Grande-Anse, her hometown, can surprise her anymore. Not one of its seven hundred and thirty-nine inhabitants has ever slept under the stars, stolen out of hunger, or hopped a freight train heading who-knows-where. None have awoken in an unidentified city. None have found true love on a godforsaken road only to lose it again a few hours later with nothing but a guitar tune, a hawk feather, and a hickey to remember it by.
So she fixed up a room for these unexpected guests and laid down some rules. Alcohol and drugs are not allowed in her house. Visitors must choose a task to be carried out during their stay, but the task need not be confined to the domestic sphere. Accordingly, a young man decided to carve a bas-relief on the trunk of the old elm tree behind the house. A girl gave a classical song recital in the village. A couple spent their whole time there hauling seawater to the garden as part of a (failed) saltwater pond experiment. The last rule—the most important one for Madeleine—is that every guest must write home before leaving.
The system works quite well, even though two or three objects disappeared from the house after some visitors had come and gone, and she had to accompany one of her lodgers to the psychiatric hospital after a disturbing episode involving a racoon and a blowtorch. But aside from those few complications, the presence of these travellers does her good. Through them she feels she has connected with Édouard. What’s more, her guests’ stories and eccentricities distracted her from grieving in the aftermath of Micha’s death, which is when Édouard’s wanderings began.
There was the thirty-year-old man with a quasi-aristocratic bearing and studied manners. His name was Frank but he insisted on being called François. He spoke French flawlessly and was helpful, courteous, and jovial. The only thing peculiar about him was this: a few days after arriving he announced to Madeleine that on this day of June 6, 1944 he was celebrating the great victory of the Normandy landings. Fifty years after the fact, François lived through the ensuing weeks as if they were the last days of the Second World War; he kept Madeleine abreast of the slightest retreat of Axis troops, every Allied manoeuvre, and described for her the wild parties he claimed to go to at night in the basements of Saint-Germain-des-Près. Fearing at first that she might have to make another trip to the
psychiatric ward, Madeleine soon put her mind at rest. Frank was neither unbalanced nor delirious. He had simply decided to recreate that year, so crucial for the history of the West, and to experience each moment with the same intensity that Europeans must have felt at the time. When the Third Reich finally collapsed, Frank dropped his Parisian accent, returned to the 1990s and picked up his backpack, telling Madeleine, “Thank you so much, Madame Sicotte, for welcoming me to Grande-Anse. I’m a new man.” Then he turned around and she never heard from him again.
Madeleine was also visited by a woman with long grey hair—which always seemed to snare dead leaves or bits of wood—who said she was completely amnesiac. As a result, her stay at Madeleine’s house was a total reconstruction, a project in which Madeleine immersed herself body and soul, trying by every possible means to help the woman find clues about her identity, making phone calls left and right, even hiring a hypnotherapist from Gaspésie in the hope of dislodging a few fragments of her history. The woman asked to be called Missy and favoured a different approach, whereby she reconstructed her past through suppositions. “My fingers are long and slender, so I’ll bet I was a concert pianist,” she proposed. Or: “I have the feeling I was surrounded by men my whole life, which no doubt means I was a prostitute or a madam in a brothel.” After a few weeks Madeleine gave up the idea of discovering even a smidgen of information about the woman, who, in any case, preferred to speculate. Then Madeleine received a phone call from Édouard. She filled him in on the situation and asked him if he remembered Missy and how he’d met her. “A crone with witch’s hair? Yes, her name is Cynthia,” he answered. “I don’t know if she’s amnesiac but when I met her she remembered very clearly how her husband had left her for a Hooters waitress. She ended up on the streets because he refused to give her so much as a penny.” Following that conversation, Madeleine approached Missy ever so gingerly and told her she’d found out that her real name was Cynthia and that she hailed from Colorado. Missy’s eyes went blank. “Yes, my dear, it’s true. I was trying to forget it,” she answered before packing her suitcase.
The Party Wall Page 2