“Excuse me, I think I recognize you from somewhere… Aren’t you an athlete?”
“Runner. Carmen Lopez.”
“That’s it! At the Barcelona Games… You were fantastic! And then Atlanta! But what happened…”
“Thank you!” Carmen cuts her off and jumps in the car. Simon barely has time to sit down beside her before she pulls away.
The hospital parking lot is almost deserted. There are seven cars there. Seven families keeping deathwatch or awaiting the birth of a child. So few. Carmen looks at her brother with the choking sensation that they are alone in the world.
The hospital is still swarming with staff who are busy clearing away the traces of the second quake in the geriatric department, as if the absence of debris could banish all thought of the tremors that will cast these old people out of existence one by one, one piece at a time. A team is at work in room 224, and Carmen and Simon are asked to wait outside. They are getting Frannie ready for the night, a nurse explains. Simon has no idea what this means. Are they putting on her pyjamas? Brushing her teeth? Maybe their mother is naked, her numberless wounds and protrusions, her manifold ugliness starkly exposed; maybe he and Carmen are being spared a sight that would change them forever.
While they are waiting, a doctor arrives and introduces himself; his hair is neatly combed but there are unsightly patches of perspiration under the sleeves of his smock. Simon is willing to forgive this sort of impropriety. Sweat is the sign of vital effort, of one’s commitment to something. A symptom that he values in his own person, the recurring confirmation he is not a bad policeman, but one who truly cares about his fellow human beings.
The doctor bluntly informs that Frannie had another heart failure while they were out.
“If I were you I would stay by her side tonight.”
The nurses file out with the guilty expression of people who have presided over the end of an empire without attempting the impossible, and Simon forgives every one of them.
Frannie’s body lies in the half-light, just a grim collection of bones and flesh that nothing holds together anymore; her face is distorted by the tubes serving as lifelines. Carmen and Simon pull up chairs on either side of their mother, ready for a sleepless night, white as a flag and long as a mast.
They have stopped speaking. Sometimes they stroke an arm, a cheek, terrified by the tentative gestures that were never possible before. Simon repeatedly places his hand on his burning chest; he needs some milk, and Carmen considers getting up to find some for him but she does not budge. She must stay there. The whole world is concentrated here now.
The hours go by. Carmen has the sensation there have been gaps in time, a sign that she has slept. At one point she realizes that Bastard has reappeared, nestled against his mistress’s shoulder. It’s an almost pretty picture, a strange quasi-still life. This is surely Simon’s doing. Simon and his big heart under all those layers of rules and restrictions.
Later, she catches herself singing. This must have begun while she was sleeping because she can’t remember starting into this old, approximate and cheerless Mexican serenade; nor does she even know where she could have learnt it. Frannie never sang them lullabies. And yet a fragment of childhood slips out between her lips to caress the dying woman, to draw her into her rare regions of happiness and lay her down there as one would a child, in the safety of warm blankets and the scent of milk.
First the hand comes to life, followed by the eyelids, fighting to open, and then the quivering arm rising toward the chin. Frannie tries to pull the tubes out of her nostrils. Simon does his best to stop her, but, as always, in vain; his mother knows what she wants. A great groan goes up from her throat. She’s back.
Her breathing is a bow sliding over a cordless violin. Her chest pushes as hard as possible to draw the air inside, to enable one more breath. Her feet are completely frozen; the blood has already given up—there’s no point in doing the full circuit. It nourishes whatever is indispensable: the fluttering nest of the abdomen, the commanding tower of the brain. But the extremities are left to fend for themselves. The throat stays sufficiently irrigated, because it must be. A few words still need to be uttered. But which? Nothing at all can be seen; before her eyes there is only turbulence, as when one tries to penetrate the sunrays dancing on the ocean’s surface to plumb the depths. The spinal column saws away at the trunk, where the muscles no longer hold down the sides of the big tent. The ribs alone keep on working. It’s enough. Enough to finish what needs to be finished. Francisca Lopez shall not die in silence.
“I want…”
Every atom in the room draws closer to her, as though the energy of the world were concentrating around her mouth to help her continue. The universe is all ears.
“I want…”
The waiting turns into a hum, the darkness grows luminous; something is still missing—one more try.
“I want some peanut butter.”
There, it’s said. Now the inner commotion can quiet down. One more gust of wind and it’s over. Through the long exhalation that carries her off, Francisca can hardly hear a voice murmuring, “Mother, you’re allergic to peanuts.” She is far away now.
Brother and sister stare at each other, incredulous, dishevelled, demoralized. The electrocardiogram sends out a long beep, which Carmen kills by pressing a chrome-plated button. Simon stands up, walks around the room four times, seizes the cat and hurls it against the wall with all his might.
“Peanut butter?!”
Carmen picks up the animal’s head, which has rolled to the foot of the bed.
“She was delirious, Simon.”
He sinks into his chair and buries his forehead in his fingers. Carmen comes over and places her hand on his shoulder. Frannie’s body seems to be slowly vanishing, dissolving amid the urine-soaked sheets. The smell does not bother them; it dissipates in the room, where the walls have retained the effluvia of a thousand deaths, the miasma of bile, fear, sweat, damned breath, and swollen lips, which, at the very end speak nonsense, because the end of a life is never a redemption, because we die as we have lived. Absurdly and untruthfully.
Someone knocks softly on the door three times before opening. Simon gets up, Carmen steps toward the doorway, both of them dazzled by the chemical light flooding in from the corridor. A young woman stands unsteadily in front of them. She looks in the direction of the bed, and her eyes well up with water.
“I’ve come too late,” she mutters.
She reaches into her bag and proffers two scraps of paper to the orphans along with a muddled clump of fur. Bastard the cat’s tail.
GOLD MINES IN RUSSIA
(MONETTE AND ANGIE)
To anyone who shops in supermarkets, the shelves in Mr. Dodge’s little grocery store seem to have undergone rationing befitting the era of world wars. But for Monette, what they hold is nothing short of princely. She shuttles between two aisles: confectionery, sprinkled with lollypops, liquorice, chewing gum, and jujubes that gleam with the magnetism of precious stones; and pastry, less appealing to the eye but with possibilities far beyond those of mere candies—chocolate, vanilla, the lightness of sponge cake, and the fabulous density of brownies.
Looking up from an inventory sheet, Mr. Dodge makes a show of coming to the little girl’s assistance.
“Can I make some suggestions, miss? I notice that you have your eye on the soap chewing gum. A wise choice, if I may say so. It will last much longer than a jujube, which gets swallowed in no time. What’s more, it wards off dirty words.”
Monette gives the grocer a look of suspicion, but he is not in the least put off and points to another counter.
“Then again, we’re offering excellent value for your money this week with our sugar-coated donuts. But be careful: the icing sugar leaves traces on your clothing that your mother can easily notice!”
Completely ignoring these recommendations, Mo
nette continues to make her way down the pastry aisle, satisfied that she has shaken off the pattering salesman. While she grasps mouth-watering packages one by one to get a closer look, Angie leafs through magazines. On the first page of one periodical is a picture of a huge herd of dead cows. Another shows a woman in a race moving away from a tightly packed group of runners. In the middle of the last magazine, Angie gets lost in some dizzying photos of a Russian gold mine. Once she has gone through the series of photos, she realizes she must come to the aid of her younger sister, who is having as much trouble choosing a treat as she has tying her shoelaces. When she comes alongside the little body hopping left and right, Angie gently takes hold of the coveted packages and reads aloud:
“Sugar, enriched flour, hydrogenated canola oil…”
Monette listens attentively to the litany her sister recites for three different products and finally settles on a molasses cookie, seduced no doubt by the terms niacin and brown no. 28. Mr. Dodge gives her a connoisseur’s nod of approval, and the little girl, now free of the burden of decision, responds with a good-humoured greeting. Angie takes a few more moments to bask in the coolness of the shop before she opens the door and confronts the swelter of the morning and the stifling fabric knitted by the boys, who—maybe in expectation of the two girls exiting the shop—have tightened their ranks so that it is virtually impossible to go down the stairway.
Clutching her cookie, Monette looks up in despair at her sister. Angie instantly gives in to the mute appeal and lifts up the child, who twists her chubby limbs around her sister. Angie’s voice is unwavering:
“Make way,” she commands.
As if by magic, the boys part and open a path where Angie can gingerly set down one foot after the other, somehow managing to keep her balance under the weight of her precious cargo. She knows that Monette, facing backward, has closed her eyes; Angie can also smell the molasses cookie tucked securely between her shoulder and her sister’s chest, safely out of sight. When she reaches the sidewalk, a voice rings out behind her, an arrogant organ just recently broken.
“Too bad; next time, wear a skirt. Not much to look at on the outside but maybe there’s something worth seeing under your shorts.”
Without flinching, Angie puts down Monette, who sprints across the street as if to lay down a definite boundary between them and the teenagers. With her head held high, Angie goes to join her. Behind her she senses the pack slowly moving off. One at a time, the boys get off their numb backsides, stand up on their lazy legs, and amble down the street, making sure to be noticed. Pretending to arrange one of her sister’s braids, Angie waits. It’s imperative for her to know which direction they will take. Praying that they continue southward, she prolongs the adjustments while Monette, already indifferent to the goings on across the road, fusses with the wrapping of her treat.
They seem to dither endlessly before heading off. They go north, toward the pony and their house, where Mam is scrubbing away at the floor with that old, animal-like brush that has always been there. Without further ado, Angie leads her sister to one of the many trails that cut through the woods.
“Where are we going?” Monette inquires.
“We’ll walk along the train tracks to get home.”
The little girl frowns. She’s not fond of detours.
“Maybe we’ll see a train!” the older sister coaxes.
Monette calms down. It’s true, there’s always the train.
To Be but One
(Madeleine and Madeleine)
Although she has yanked out dozens of grey hairs—a losing battle, now given up—this one hurts a little more than the others. She begins three times, curling her index finger around a hair at the top of her skull, without daring to pull. In the end, a creaking sound upstairs prompts her to deliver the coup de grâce. She hastily slips the faded thread into a plastic bag identical to the one containing a lock stolen from Édouard’s comb and hides the documents under a crumpled tablecloth. A few seconds later Joanna appears, already dressed in her cycling shorts, prepared to tackle the eighty-odd kilometres she covers each day “to stay in shape.” She flashes her widest grin and goes out noiselessly, leaving Madeleine to marvel at how someone that big can be so unobtrusive.
Alone again, she completes the questionnaire and inserts everything in an envelope addressed to a private laboratory that usually receives the hairs of unlucky, cuckolded, or exceedingly suspicious men. “It’s probably the first time they’ll have tested a mother’s hair,” Madeleine mutters as she licks the flap. She has not spoken to anyone about her new course of action, fearing this would complicate things even further.
To eliminate the possibility of an error, the blood tests were repeated at the hospital, but the results came back with the same absurd degree of accuracy. The social worker assigned to the case already seems to regard Madeleine as a guilty party, a monster who may have stolen someone else’s baby. The fact she is a widow with no other children doesn’t help. A husband may have testified on her behalf; a second child would have put the incomprehensible revelations of her DNA into perspective. A living, rational blood relation might have bolstered the defence that she is timidly trying to marshal. But she is alone.
Having sealed the envelope, Madeleine collects her photographic equipment and goes out. The light outside has grown majestic after hours of false modesty. Spring has begun to crackle and sends up fragrances that astonish Madeleine every year as if she had never encountered them before. The mud warming in the artificial pond. The verdigris on the bronze sculpture near the day lilies. Her own sweat, which sends out a new note when the mercury ventures beyond a certain threshold.
She cautiously attaches a macro lens to the camera, which she mounts on a small tripod. Then she positions her arm in front of the lens. For days the only subject that has really interested her is her skin; her shots run the gamut from goose bumps to the crinkles on her water-soaked fingers, as she avidly seeks to penetrate the pores, to pierce the layers of skin as though they are walls keeping her from the truth. She has come to understand what her deceased husband was looking for with his close-ups of insect legs and antennae. The truth in the tiny. The devil in the details.
By the time Édouard wakes up, Madeleine is already on the road. She would rather not bump into her son, and apparently the feeling is mutual. When she arrives at Paul’s place the house is silent and gaping on all sides, with the windows and shutters wide open. Paul is absent. Madeleine calls out a few times but there is no answer. Taken aback, she heads for the beehives. She has always kept her distance from the bee colony, not so much out of fear as incomprehension. Today, however, something impels her there. She wants to feel the swarm swirling around her, allow the more curious worker bees to land on her hair, to forage on her clothes, on the sparkle of her rings; she wants to let the buzzing whisper a message that she alone can grasp.
But instead of the perpetual vibration that ought to prevail there, she finds nothing but silence. Intrigued, she steps closer to examine the wooden frames that the owner so carefully maintains. They are deserted. Not a bee in sight.
“Paul?” Madeleine shouts again.
All at once, she slumps down amid the hives and bursts into tears. For the first time since Édouard told her about his disease, she lets herself sink into the heart of pain, to plunge where nothing holds up anymore, where the ground gives way with every step. She digs her fingers into the loose earth and watches her limbs writhe with distress. She wants to tear herself in two.
After a long while, a heavy pair of hands alights on her shoulders. Paul sits down behind her and hugs her with the strength of a sea monster. The kind of embrace that puts an end to sobbing and lifts the head. Here and there, puddles of honey ooze from the ground.
“It’s hard when someone close falls ill. It’s natural to be upset.”
Madeleine doesn’t answer. How can she explain to a man accustomed to the smallne
ss of the peninsula and the Cartesian world of bees that she must fight to prove the obvious? How can she tell him she has just dropped two strands of hair into an envelope in the hope of demonstrating that she is indeed the mother of the boy she gave birth to? Most of all, how can she tell him there is nothing, absolutely nothing natural about this? She wipes away her tears and looks around her. The beehives are as quiet as they were before.
“The bees—where have they gone?”
Paul shrugs: “Vanished.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. I’d heard about such occurrences, but to be honest, I didn’t believe it. I didn’t think it could happen here.”
He steps up to his hives, brushes his hand over them. Without the colony, they seem smaller, a dolls’ village that Paul moves through like a sad giant. Overhead, large birds sweep across the sky on the lookout, spot the lagoons, and fly back toward the shore like arrows. Madeleine stands up, shakes the dirt out of her clothes, and walks toward the car. She never says goodbye when she leaves. Paul watches her drive away, then turns around and enters the untamed fields where insects shrewdly assemble and where his bees may have gone to hide out.
When Joanna isn’t riding her bike she’s in the kitchen. Basil-stuffed eggplant lasagna, tagines so spicy they make your head spin, breads that sigh coming out of the oven, vegetable feuilletés that rustle like dried leaves lifted from between the pages of an old dictionary. All this, too, she does without making noise or small talk, thus surrounding herself with an impenetrable wall that no one dares go through to offer a hand or steal a piece of carrot. But Madeleine can’t help watching from the next room. When their gazes meet, Joanna, sounding like a sorceress, says:
“I’m making tea. Want some?”
Madeleine does and sits down opposite her guest as though she, Madeleine, were the visitor. Smiling, Joanna speaks to her as if the conversation has been going on since daybreak:
“So you’re all right?”
The Party Wall Page 11