The Party Wall

by Catherine Leroux

  Ariel is now known as Albert Morsehead, and Marie has become Anne Leblanc. Marc provided them with false papers, new fingerprints, artificial irises, and other necessary biometric devices. But because their faces had been plastered across the screens of North America for weeks, they had to attend to their more superficial physical attributes. Marie underwent a minor nose reconstruction as well as a reshaping of her eyebrows. With her hair dyed blond and cut short, she was unrecognizable. Ariel’s case was somewhat more complicated. In spite of major plastic surgery, a beard, eyeglasses, and a different accent, something of the former prime minister persisted.

  Marie was the one who suggested he put on fifteen kilos. This simple idea was the missing piece of the camouflage. Ariel was nowhere to be seen in the new, bulkier body, as if he were concealed in his own flesh. In any event, in this region of vast distances, where neighbours are recognized by virtue of their cars more than their faces, no one studies them up close. The inhabitants of central Saskatchewan have become so scarce they hardly look at each other and are identified from a sideways glance at their hairdos, their voices, the unique vibration of their presence, always perfectly distinct from someone else’s.

  The town of Rockfield is a place where one quickly feels at home but to which one never belongs. “Too windy, too flat,” Ariel notes. Very soon the cashiers in the stores recognize Marie (or, rather, Anne) and call her by her alias, and the waiter at the café remembers that Ariel takes two sugars in his coffee. Both of them find this fabricated life deeply comforting. Here, no one will photograph them surreptitiously, no one will cover their house with graffiti. No one will shoot at them.

  Marc, who still has friends in the army, helped Ariel find a job on the military base located in the vicinity. It involves introducing recruits to international politics and law. The young soldiers put him in mind of tight shells that crack open upon discovering the complexity of the world, the magnitude of the underflow that shapes its movements and tremors. The job, chosen by default, has grown on him. He likes giving these men, barely out of adolescence and the insulated world of rural traditions, a horizon, however condensed, and enabling them for a brief moment to enjoy an informed view of the countries where they will soon serve as cannon fodder.

  As for Marie, she teaches French to kids who are completely untouched by the notion of the founding peoples and the bilingual imperative, now virtually obsolete in a province long ago swallowed up by the majority. Fortunately, they are also too young to understand their parents’ disdainful remarks about the “lazy people’s language,” and they have no reservations about singing the old-fashioned songs that Marie teaches them: Il était un petit navire, À la claire fontaine, Alouette, and so on. She takes pleasure in watching them recite the confused syllables with open mouths or lean over the coloured keyboards, typing away with wondrous dexterity, their pudgy fingers hopping effortlessly from key to key like ignorant, agile little birds.

  Sometimes Ariel comes to meet her at the end of the day and stations himself near the classroom door to watch her, pale and eager in front of her captive audience. Then he contemplates his own reflection in the glass door—fat, bearded, disappointing—and once again realizes she is worth all the failures, all the humiliations, all the relinquishments. Marie, his half of the world.

  Ariel’s mother could not stop crying and his father clenched his teeth so hard that a fine snow might have appeared between his lips had he not pressed them together so tenaciously. The Leclercs, for their part, paced up and down and shuddered—the outward expression of their ineffable distress. In both cases it was not easy to know whether their families were reacting to the drama itself—the unmentionable word incest—or something else. Marie suspected her parents were no less horrified by their circle having learned their daughter was adopted, a fact that contradicted the notion of a bloodline as strong and pure as the water of the last glaciers. As for the Goldsteins, Ariel wondered if they were in fact mourning the fall of their angel, the end of their dreams of glory. One night on his way to the bathroom he even overheard his mother whispering, “None of this would have happened if he had become a dentist.”

  “You’re going to divorce,” Martial declared in a tone that was more imperative than interrogative.

  “We have no choice; the law obliges us to dissolve the marriage.”

  “But you are still living together?”

  “Until the dust settles and we’ve sold the house,” Marie replied half-heartedly.

  The truth was they had no wish to separate. There was no one anymore who could look at them in a way that was unmarred by disgust. They were their only refuge.

  In the meantime, Marc investigated, slowly but determinedly retracing the steps of the scandal to its source. The Canada of shining tomorrows was dead and a culprit had to be found, a traitor to be crucified in the history books or, at the very least, a name to be placed on a list of enemies and slipped into the inside pocket of a jacket, over the heart.

  In March the snow does not melt so much as evaporates, leaving the fields dry and dirty. Then in June the pitiful wisps of grass that remain catch fire here and there, speckling the plain with orange-coloured nests of desire. In August the temperature drops inexplicably and the ground freezes, imprisoning thirsty spiders and snails in the frost. In October, the rain awaited since the spring equinox finally decides to fall, trapping the houses in a turbid lake.

  Luckily the place is equipped with a canoe, wisely stored on the upper floor, this sort of deluge having become a common occurrence on the Prairies. For a week Ariel and Marie move about by paddling, with no definite destination, for the simple pleasure of exploring the region without submitting to the dictates of roads and territorial boundaries. They come across a few frantic deer, several soggy cows, and a handful of neighbours searching for dry patches. They are looking for earth or sand banks to fill some bags and keep the water from flooding their basements. As if that were possible.

  At night, the darkness is so opaque that Ariel and Marie feel as though they are floating in a submarine. The big diseased trees, whose bark has begun to give off a rotten stench, turn into giant algae surrounded by whirling swarms of bats and gnats. Occasionally, persistent glimmers appear in an atmosphere too damp to belong to the ground, and Marie and Ariel move closer, plunging into the private lives of neighbours of whom they know the names but not the faces, the number of children but not the joys and woes. Besieged by the flood, the inhabitants take shelter in front of their screens, where they find comfort in news from abroad a hundred times worse than their personal calamities; they crowd around meals based on canned foods that had been stored in deep larders in expectation of this sort of climatic glitch. Occasionally a naked couple brushes by a window they had not bothered to cover, certain of being alone in the ruined vastness of the Prairies. Two bodies sizing each other up, consoling each other, revelling in one another.

  “Do you miss it?” Marie asks.

  In the darkness Ariel stays mute. Of course he misses it, and Marie knows it. He wishes they had never had sex or that it were transformed into a superior act, a sort of communion that could not be associated with anything and to which no horrid labels could be attached. He wished he were living in one of those courtly poems where love is elaborated in extended metaphors and prolonged hand-kissing, and had never looked at his twin sister with the carnivorous eyes of men when they are something akin to animals. But it seems to him now that sex can no longer be extracted from the equation. Marie drops her paddle in the canoe and moves toward him.

  “It doesn’t have to be sordid, you know. We’re the ones who determine the meaning of our acts.”

  She presses her cheek against his, her breast against his shoulder. She waits. Ariel dares not budge, but each of his atoms becomes electrically charged and hurtles toward Marie.

  “It’s all a question of designation,” she continues. “Here, we’re just a couple like any other
.”

  While keeping a firm grip on his paddle, Ariel’s hands tremble; he averts his gaze from Marie’s temple, and from the window where the light still falls on two bodies entwined.

  “Ariel, I love you. You belong to me.”

  Someone in the house turns off a lamp; everything goes completely dark, except for Marie’s increasingly naked skin, which is clad in a luminescent whiteness. Then she vanishes, concealed beneath a body that has swooped down on her—Ariel, at last relieved, damned for all time.

  After Ariel’s resignation the universe went quiet around them, and they believed it was over. For a few days they lived in a sort of sensory void where the hours flashed by filled with nothing at all. Suspended moments. Then daily life started up again. Ariel was called back to the capital to help with the transfer of dossiers, and Marie went on a trip. Saying goodbye, they chastely kissed each other on the forehead, their hearts balanced on an invisible rope.

  The drive south cannot be made non-stop, Marie was told, but she ignored the advice. For more than twenty hours she travelled down the hurricane-ravaged coast, through cities once bustling with summer vacationers and fishermen but now abandoned by inhabitants worn down by the struggle against an ever more merciless climate. Only the aged and the insane stayed behind; only the seabirds thrived there.

  At dawn, her heart pounding, she ventured down a road full of potholes. Trees on either side were bent down like beaten men. On a scrap of paper stuck between her hand and the steering wheel an address written in ink was staining the palm of her hand. The last known address of Eva Volant. When she pulled up in front of the house—a cracked, dilapidated building—she burst out sobbing, unable to do what she had come to do: step out of the car, walk up to the door, ring and wait for someone to answer, speak the words: I’m looking for my mother.

  With her head buried in her hands, she did not see that someone was coming toward her. The knocking on the car window made her jump.

  “Can I help you?” said a quavering voice.

  Marie looked up, rolled down the window and contemplated the old man standing before her. Everything about him seemed washed out. His brown eyes, his flannel clothes, his skin that must have been naturally swarthy but was now as dull as poorly steeped tea. She got out of the car, her legs still rubbery from the long road. The air was dusty and lacked cicadas.

  “It’s very quiet here,” she noted.

  “Oh, not all that much. There are the airplanes. At all hours, day and night. Going to the war, you see.”

  She nodded. The old man stared at her.

  “You’ve got my address on your face.”

  This brought Marie up short. She looked at herself in the side mirror. From paper to hand, from hand to face, the directions for finding her mother’s house had ended up smack in the centre of her left cheek. Rubbing her skin, she turned back to the old man.

  “I’m looking for a woman, Mrs. Volant. Does she live here?”

  “No, there’s just me here, dear lady.”

  “Does it ring a bell, even vaguely? Eva Volant?”

  “Doesn’t sound familiar. I’ve known Julias, Christinas, Franciscas, but no Evas.”

  Because the information about her mother was not quite up to date, his answer was unsurprising and did not have the demoralizing effect she had feared. Searching her heart, Marie found nothing but relief. What would she have done with a mother, now that her whole life was falling apart because of this woman? The slimmer the chance of finding her became, the more Marie realized that what she was pursuing since she had set out on this journey was a place rather than a person.

  “May I go in? I’d like to take a look inside.”

  The old man stiffened.

  “I tell you I’m alone here—have been for at least ten years. You don’t believe me?”

  “I do believe you. But I’d like to go inside just the same. I was born in this house. I’d like to visit. Five minutes, that’s all, and then I’m gone.”

  “You were born here? You should have said so right away! This is your home.”

  He bowed and left the way open for Marie; she stopped at the doorway as if to say a silent prayer. The interior smelled of tobacco and mildew.

  “Please don’t mind the mess. You see, I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

  The house was not large but it let in the light so as to create an impression of open space, of continuity with the world outside. One could easily imagine its first inhabitants being happy here, just as it was obvious that those who had followed had known all manner of misery. The old man showed Marie the kitchen, with its clutter of frozen dinner wrappings and its warped linoleum floor. He took her to the tiny bathroom, peppered with brown patches, and then the living room, which contained an unmade bed.

  “I put my bed here. I prefer to sleep by the TV, you see.”

  “And the bedroom?”

  “That’s for my souvenirs.”

  Marie stepped into a room that was darker and tidier than the rest of the house. Everywhere, the man had hung photographs of what looked like the streets of Mexico at the turn of the century. There were boxes stacked against a wall, and an old rocking chair had pride of place in a corner. Marie took a deep breath and felt as though a tree was trying to grow inside her chest. She moved to the centre of the room. It was here, under this sloped roof, that Ariel and she had come into the world a few minutes apart. She began to weep. Here is where they had taken their first breaths and together let out their first cries. They had been washed, swaddled, and no doubt laid down side by side a few hours before Marie was taken away, thereby pulling on an invisible string, an elastic waiting only for the right moment to stretch tight and hurl the twins toward one another in a movement as inevitable as the orbiting of the planets. For the first time Marie realized that their reunion, however fateful, constituted an immense consolation for that primordial sundering. The fact of having known the bliss of childhood for just a few wretched moments before being abandoned was made bearable only by the thought of having found Ariel again, no matter the circumstances and the consequences. A sort of return to the zero point of her existence, an obliteration of all those years of isolation and sadness.

  Behind her she heard the noise of the television. It was time to leave. Had it been possible, she would have cut out the little bedroom and taken it with her so she might find refuge in it once Ariel went away, once the reporters began to swarm around her again, once another Jackson Pollock picture came to attack her. She fiercely clenched her fists, trying to engrave inside her every angle of the room and to imprint her own silhouette on the place that had witnessed the first hours of her existence.

  “Have you found your memories among mine?”

  “You might say that,” she answered, drying her eyes.

  The old man walked her back to the car. At the last moment, she sensed that he would have liked for her to prolong her stay, that he had already grown accustomed to another person’s presence in his home, undoing in a few minutes years of training in solitude.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Roberto. My friends call me Roberto.”

  “Thank you, Roberto.”

  Her car churned up a cloud of dust and as she drove off a strident roar could be heard overhead. A warplane sliced through the sky, crossing Marie’s trajectory so as to form an X with it. Never-ending wars. So many things to fight against, and Marie was so very tired.

  Far away from the major cities, the noise of the news reaches them somewhat blurred; the distance lends an unreal sheen to events. Politics has taken on the shape of a masquerade for them, and human-interest items seem like sordid tales drawn from mythology. They are not shocked by the Alaskan man accused of killing and eating his four sons, because he does not really exist. The Newfoundland cult that tried to crossbreed dogs and humans is just a joke. Nor are they even surprised when the woman receiving handsome
payments in exchange for getting struck by lightning turns out to be a robot. As far as the planet’s decline is concerned, they have let go. They are ordinary spectators of a world grown so warped as to beggar belief.

  As for word from their families, it is as rare as sprouts in the ground here. Marc is the only remaining link between them and their former existence, allowing Marie and Ariel to send their close relations the occasional letter, the content of which is always so insubstantial that even the cleverest spies could not determine its point of origin. The information travelling in the opposite direction is hardly more specific. Ariel’s parents, having also yielded to the appeal of exile, have entered into old age on what is left of the Yucatan Peninsula and confine their messages to the weather and sometimes their health. Meanwhile, morality has gained the upper hand at the Leclercs’, who have refused to communicate with their daughter ever since it became clear she had no plans to leave Ariel. Marie has registered this loss without dramatizing it, like one more thing gone down in the ocean of all she has had to give up. Only Rachel, equanimous with regard to her sister’s choices, continues to correspond with her. As for the information passed on by Marc—the tribulations of the cops, the rebuilding of the Party—Ariel does his best to ignore it, just as he refrains from broaching with Marc the subject of his divorce from Emmanuelle. The less he knows about it, the better. An island with too many bridges is no longer an island.

  In any case, it is not hard to turn a deaf ear on the plain, where silence is stronger than all else. Ariel and Marie give themselves up to this landscape, with its smooth horizons, its regular surfaces devoid of hills or fjords or the rectangular woods of the cities. Their self-sufficiency is more than ever necessary. They are friends, family, lovers; they share all the loves that go into a life, and all the solitude this entails.

  When Marie returned to Montreal ready to describe to Ariel her journey in search of Eva Volant, she found him on the street, red-faced and stupidly rooted in a puddle of melted snow. The fire seemed to float weightlessly like a will-o’-the-wisp, a paper airplane ignited through spontaneous combustion. It took Marie a few seconds to grasp that it was their house.