The Party Wall

by Catherine Leroux

  As they are leaving, she glances at Shabby curled up in the armchair, deaf to the fuss, one paw resting nonchalantly on a geology textbook that once belonged to Micha. “You watch over him,” she silently orders the hundred-year-old walls that for generations have supported and guarded, divided and kept watch.

  On one level, the paramedics were right. Édouard’s wounds are only superficial. But the consequences turn out to be disastrous for him. The fact he is no longer allowed to leave the house makes him even sicker than do his damaged kidneys. Constantly in a foul mood, he spins his wheels and kicks at Shabby, refuses to shave, and never opens his mouth except to whine. Only Yun succeeds in cheering him up. They spend long hours sprawled on lounge chairs looking at atlases, maps, and out-of-date travel guides, plotting like conquistadores about to take over a continent. Madeleine watches them from a distance, praying for something to happen: a phone call, an earthquake, a stray musical note that would stave off the immobility, the black prism through which the nascent summer is being tarnished.

  A warm front arrives, in no way intimidated by the icy currents of the Atlantic. Madeleine finds nothing better than to try to keep the heat at bay with the help of a fan whose red paint chips with every stroke. The cat seems shabbier than usual, its fur weighed down and left misshapen by the humidity. All its pleas to be petted are ignored. In any case, its mistress feels completely incapable of doing anything. The heat wave has taken upon itself to stupefy everything still moving.

  Still, she leaps to her feet when the telephone rings. It may be the kidney. It may be Paul, who’s recovered his bees. It may be a foghorn. She answers. Her doctor’s voice sounds different. She has known it to be cold, firm, tinged with a hint of accusation, then contrite, inquisitive, buoyed by scientific curiosity. This time it is gentle, incredibly gentle and friendly. When he suggests they meet on the beach instead of in the hospital she knows that what he needs to tell her is something he has never had to tell anyone before. She takes the road to the village, on foot, like a vagabond. She walks all the way to the sea.

  The doctor is barefoot.

  “It’s incredible,” he says. “I came to practise in Bathurst because I love the sea, yet in five years I’ve come down to the shore just two or three times.”

  “Too busy?”

  “I forget. The beach is never too far away, but it doesn’t occur to me anymore. It’s silly.”

  The waves envelop his feet in seaweed. He shakes it off, steps closer to Madeleine, and leads her to a sea-washed tree trunk, where he invites her to sit down.

  “As you know, Madeleine, we’ve been trying for weeks to understand your situation, which is quite particular, not to say extraordinary. The team at the Chaleur Hospital was struggling to find an explanation, so I paid a visit to some colleagues in New York State who specialize in genetic research. They’re the ones who helped me find answers to our questions. I’ve just come back from that little trip and I called you right away.”

  Madeleine notices the clean, undamaged suitcase sitting on the sand. Nothing like the luggage of her son and people of his ilk. The doctor takes a deep breath, as if about to dive into deep water.

  “You are two people.”

  His tone is meant to be solemn, but the statement is too preposterous.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean there are two distinct DNA’s inside you because your body contains two human beings.”

  Madeleine opens her mouth and the offshore wind rushes into too quickly, making her cough.

  “How’s that possible?”

  The doctor opens his briefcase, rummages through papers that apparently have nothing to do with Madeleine’s case specifically, but this sort of diagnosis must be supported by documentation, any documentation.

  “It appears you have a twin sister with whom you merged in utero. Actually, it’s inexact to say ‘you had a twin sister.’ It would be more accurate to say, you are twins. Because one did not invade the other. You are two equal and indissociable parts of a whole.”

  Madeleine stands up, unable to utter another word. Her heels dig into the sand, and she has the sensation of being aware of them for the first time in her life. She starts weeping.

  “You’re not the only one,” the doctor adds by way of consolation. “There are a few, very rare but very real, documented cases. Patients who are in this situation are referred to as chimeras.”

  “A chimera,” Madeleine mumbles. “Science was obliged to draw on mythology to describe what I am.”

  “One of the twins took over the circulatory system, the other the skin and hair, and so on. You might say that you divided up between you the different zones of the same body.”

  “Mine or hers?”

  “Yours. Both bodies. Let me try to explain it this way: if the merger process had not been completed, you would have become Siamese twins. You see? Inside you, there’s the same separation that exists between two individuals, two twins. The partition is simply imperceptible, because there’s just a single body. And a single brain, of course.”

  Stunned, Madeleine opens her hand and runs her fingers over her belly, her arms, her legs, endeavouring to distinguish two women where there is only one. It seems to her that by playing the arbiter of her own body she has just added a third term to the equation. The truth that she is doing her best to grasp explodes in her mind. Stepping into the water, she looks down at her distorted toes. “A foot for one, a foot for the other,” she murmurs, knowing this to be inaccurate. “The skin of one, the blood of the other. Bones versus hair. The nails but not the muscles.” The doctor comes next to her, briefcase hanging from his hand, trousers rolled up to the knees.

  “Do you have any questions?” he asks softly.

  “Hundreds!” Madeleine shouts through her tears. “At least tell me this: who is Édouard’s mother?”

  “Well, I guess it’s the one who took possession of the reproductive system. The same one who’s in your hair. But not in your blood.”

  “So you weren’t entirely wrong. I’m not quite his mother.”

  “Which ‘I’ are you referring to? Your ‘I’ includes Édouard’s mother, Madeleine. In any case, I think such distinctions fade away once you get past yourself.”

  The tide has risen at least a metre. When the doctor leaves, Madeleine slumps down in the water. Her skirt forms a shifting corolla around her and she could swear her ribs are dancing on either side of her spine and her limbs are out of joint. As if her body must deconstruct itself for her to be able to grasp it, compute it anew.

  “I am two, I am two, I am two,” she repeats, knotting her fingers together in a frenzied prayer in order to decipher in that entwinement the shadow of something manifest. “I am twins,” she adds, disconcerted by the realization that the only way to speak the truth about herself is to defy grammar.

  After an hour, maybe two, the words get lost. She lets herself flow in the back and forth of the water; she wraps her arms around herself and tries to hug her trunk, to embrace all of herself. In the distance, the shape of a boat emerges from the waves. A small isosceles sail and at the foot of the mast a creature whose black hair slants in the wind. The silhouette waves her hand, a greeting that Madeleine readily answers, knowing for certain it is Yun.

  Édouard spent two days with the truck driver. He was not like the others; to start with, he was not fat. After only a few years on the road, most of his fellow truckers had put on excess weight and as a result were beset by a host of problems and illnesses that would eventually finish them off. But Joe had stayed slim and Édouard could not say if he was thirty or fifty years old. His moustache—so blond it was almost white—did not help. Although he did not seem to be especially conceited, he had stuck a photograph of himself on the rear-view mirror and never stepped off the truck without flicking his thumb over the picture.

  Joe was a quiet man. He was heading
to Oklahoma over the arrow-straight roads that blazed across the plains, but he never spoke the state’s name, preferring the term “Dust Bowl” as if he’d been born in 1929 into a family of destitute farmers. Most truckers like to talk about the places they had grown up in; this one said very little about his hometown. He smoked cigarillos—their cherry aroma streaming out the half-open window—and scrupulously avoided religious radio stations as well as country music channels, favouring instead the rare classical music shows. He never used his CB radio to speak to the other truckers and did not wave to them when they passed. Whenever he drove past a dead deer or coyote on the side of the road, he would cross himself.

  The one night Édouard spent in Joe’s company, Joe insisted on giving up his bunk and chose to sleep under the stars. Young and incorrigible, Édouard used the opportunity to invite the truck stop waitress to join him in the cab when her shift ended. She was barely four feet eleven and had breasts like birthday balloons. When they slipped outside in the wee hours for one last kiss, Édouard saw Joe lying with his arms spread wide on the roof of the trailer, crucified between sleeplessness and dreams, between the Milky Way and the blacktop.

  They reached Oklahoma in the late afternoon. Joe then left the interstate and took a backroad riddled with potholes. Édouard, who was going nowhere in particular, silently let himself be transported. Behind them, the trailer clanged like a cracked cymbal. It sounded as if the truck was empty. Joe finally stopped on the outskirts of a town, near a cemetery. Without saying a word, he alighted, walked over to the graves, where he quickly found the one he was searching for and knelt down in front of it.

  Édouard waited two hours for the trucker to get up and take his seat again behind the wheel; it was then he realized that Joe had reached his destination. Determined to head out again in the first car that pulled over, Édouard stepped closer to say good-bye to Joe. On the grave where Joe was immersed in prayer were a few wildflowers, several stones of various shapes and colours arranged in a small mound, and a photograph that Joe apparently had just placed there. In the picture were two Joes, the first with his arm draped across the shoulders of the second Joe, who was also wearing a jean jacket and holding a bottle of beer. Only one of them was wearing a Chiefs cap.

  Édouard cleared his throat to draw the trucker’s attention. To no avail. The traveller timidly uttered some simple words of thanks but was cut short by the trucker’s arm, which abruptly shot up to hush the voice that was disrupting his meditation.

  Joe did not turn around for another hour and remained completely silent, as if petrified beside the grave of his double. A car stopped and took Édouard eastward, and the twins remained alone in their intangible communion. Now, every time Édouard recalls that episode, he is stricken with shame.

  No matter how often Madeleine repeats to herself she is two, the news has left her prostrate with a feeling of overpowering solitude. She can’t help harking back to a period of her childhood when she would spend her days playing in a closet with faceless figurines. She might have shared all those terrible, gloomy hours giggling and exchanging secrets with another little girl. “Maybe that is what allowed us to survive,” she tells herself by way of encouragement. “If we had not merged, we may not have had the strength.”

  The heat wave has grown too heavy for human restlessness. Madeleine succumbs to it and scans the sky desperately hoping to glimpse a cloud or a passing iceberg. Inside the house muffled by the heat, the cat, dragging an invisible weight, laboriously grooms itself, while Édouard rests. Day by day his health is deteriorating despite the dialysis and the host of drugs he swallows each morning. His reaction on learning of Madeleine’s chimeric nature was rather indifferent. Whereas Joanna rushed to wrap her arms around Madeleine and Yun plunged into some books to find out more about the phenomenon, Édouard simply nodded:

  “I’m not all that surprised. It explains why you’re constantly talking to yourself.”

  Madeleine bit her thumb. A few days later she found a drawing on the living room coffee table. A hybrid woman, part shark, part doe.

  The small hours of the morning find her sitting at the kitchen table. She catches herself wishing Micha were there; he would have considered the situation with the same equanimity he would display when faced with most of the vagaries and dramas of the world around him. His coolness sometimes annoyed Madeleine, but it had a soothing effect whenever panic came scratching at the door at about three in the morning. One night Joanna comes downstairs as if she has heard her host calling. She tiptoes in and sits down next to Madeleine.

  “Insomnia or an early hike?” Madeleine inquires.

  “A bit of both,” her guest answers slowly, with her typical stress on the consonants. “Can’t get back to sleep, so I’m going out.”

  Madeleine collects the crumbs of the last meal between her fingers and shapes them into a small nest bounded by one of the squares on the check tablecloth.

  “And you? How are you doing?” Joanna asks.

  Madeleine smiles, adding a few specks of bread to the mound.

  “All right.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember?”

  “What?”

  “When you were separate?”

  Madeleine shuts her eyes to better concentrate and tries to discern what she has striven so hard to imagine that it has already become a kind of memory: the pink of the uterine world, the aquatic motion, an amoebaean form dancing nearby, brushing her in the amniotic wave.

  “No, we were too small.”

  “Pity. Just imagine if you could recall the sensation of merging with another human being. In a way, you experienced in the first moments of your existence what everyone spends their whole life desiring.”

  Madeleine sets down her cup with the camomile dregs floating at the bottom, stands up and, leaning over Joanna, kisses her on the cheek. Outside, the sun is coming up. The animals throughout the peninsula are chomping at the bit.

  In the village the parade of compassion has resumed in the aisles of the grocery store. People stop to ask after Édouard in hopes of leaving with some clarifications, anecdotes, or an exclusive insight into the chimera.

  “Do you eat more than a normal person?”

  “When you’re injured, does it hurt in only half of your body?”

  “Do you believe you have two souls?”

  Madeleine makes an effort to be patient, answers the strange questions as best she can and sidesteps the stupid ones. What takes place at the lighthouse museum’s board meeting is hardly any better. In an attempt to forestall awkward questions from her colleagues, Madeleine picks up a report as bulky as a loaf of bread and tries to start her presentation as quickly as possible, but she has trouble breathing under the inquisitive eyes of her audience. The silence grows heavy; Madeleine is paralyzed by the many eyes fixed on her, by these colleagues who are not interested anymore in the number of visitors or the box-office takings at the lighthouse, but rather in the little museum of horrors that she incarnates. She looks at their notepads covered with doodles, their drained pens, the requisite cups of acidic coffee left hovering in front of their faces so they can scrutinize her on the sly while she parses the attendance graphs, until she finally breaks off.

  “I’m not going to split in two, if that’s what’s troubling you. You can stop staring at me.”

  The administrators squirm uncomfortably in their office chairs.

  “I insist,” she adds, surprised by her own firmness.

  There are bursts of laughter here and there, a few knowing glances cross the room. They expected this. This is why they are here. They came to see her lose it.

  “I’m aware how small your world is, how much you need the monsters and miracles of others. But I am neither one nor the other. You all know how to read, so I leave you in good company. You can make do without me.”


  With the dazed board members looking on, Madeleine tosses the thick report onto the table, where it lands like a slumbering body, and then slams the door behind her. Once again she finds herself at the foot of the lighthouse and leans her back against it facing the sea spray. She inhales the infinite and the multitude of the ocean that is numberless—neither one, nor two, nor a hundred—a plural, incalculable world before which she wants to kneel down. In the distance, she sees Yun, both feet planted on the deck of a sailboat as slender as a spear, with a cabin strangely similar to a Chevrolet Monte Carlo.

  As she is leaving, the watchman hobbles up to her. She ferrets in her bag looking for her keys. He lays his hand on her wrist to interrupt her frantic searching. He has never touched her this way.

  “I have a present for you.”

  Poking around in his jacket pocket, he retrieves a stone whose blue and white colours are combined in a sort of mineral swirl.

  “I picked it up on the beach a long time ago. I knew it had come from far away, from another world, and that it was there for someone. So I’ve kept it at the bottom of my pocket. It’s yours. This stone is you.”

  “Do you find me so very cold?”

  Monsieur le gardien smiles.

  “I didn’t say it was your heart. I said it was you. You’re not alone, Madeleine. Remember that.”

  Madeleine’s fingers gently caress the pebble’s coolness as the watchman walks away with that slow gait of his filled with certainties. “For him,” Madeleine mutters, “the whole world is strange and twisted. He expects nothing else.” She takes the stone out of her pocket and presses it to her lips.

  Paul’s second pillow always has too many smells. In every fold of the pillowcase she finds a different aroma. Roses. Lavender. Some tobacco. It all makes her want to sneeze but, instead, she lets out a sigh.

  “Are you bored?” Paul asks, stroking her temple.

  “You make my head spin.”

  He gets up to part the curtains and let in the setting sun; then he goes out and comes back with two bottles of beer all beaded with drops of July. The first swallow awakens Madeleine’s languid nerves, and she sits up, putting distance between her nose and the pillow.