The Party Wall

by Catherine Leroux

  Two rooms in the shadow of the hills—that is all Simon has from now on. In their relationship, it was Claire who earned the most money. Given the rents in San Francisco, his policeman’s salary is enough for no more than a dim, two-room apartment a few paces from a cable car that makes the dishes dance whenever a train passes by.

  Considering his wife’s barely disguised dalliances, Simon could have tried to squeeze every last cent out of her, but he did nothing of the sort. On returning from Mexico, rasped by the sun and worn out, his mind was already made up. In a matter of days, his lease was signed and his boxes packed. When Claire saw he was leaving she barely batted an eyelid. He didn’t think long explanations would serve any purpose, so he restricted himself to a terse, “We hate each other,” something she could not deny.

  When Alan heard the news he was hardly more forthcoming with his feelings and confined himself to muttering, “So, every second weekend?” As for Jessica, contrary to Simon’s expectations, she expressed no wish to live with him. A few weeks after he had moved out she announced she would be spending the summer in Europe. Claire made a scene; Simon, no longer bound by his wife’s demands, gave his daughter the money for her airfare. After twenty years of family life, all he was left with was this vague alliance with an adolescent girl who was already far away.

  Living alone calms him. He works the night shift, gets back before dawn, draws the blinds, sinks into his sofa, and stares at the shadows flitting on the wall without trying to interpret them. He speaks to only a few people and the telephone has stopped ringing. He is scarcely aware of world events, the royal wedding, the death of Bin Laden, the Dodgers’ victory. Roberto’s picture, Frannie’s letter and all the other elements of his investigation have been stored in a cardboard box marked with an X. His trip to Las Palmas, in addition to dispelling any desire to go on living with Claire, drained him of his last drop of hope. He resigned himself to remaining an orphan.

  He eats frozen meals, drinks cheap tea, and dozes off just anywhere, sometimes even on the threadbare carpet, like a dog suddenly overwhelmed by fatigue. The sounds of the street and the neighbouring apartments come to him muted and he soon learns to ignore them, to live in a chosen silence, a blinding solitude. He has finally found his lair and discovered what sort of creature he is. An animal that thrives in the midst of scarcity and austerity. In the evening, when his clock sends out its shrill alarm, he finds the wall covered with rough patches, like granular stone. He blinks his eyes three times and the room regains its cubic shape, its civilized texture. He stretches his back, counts his vertebrae and once again dons the uniform of an ordinary man.

  The runners are divided into categories that are fenced off in specific enclosures: marathon, semi-marathon, ten kilometres, etc. In the family paddock, a handful of parents are warming up behind strollers and some eager kids are itching to tackle the thousand metres allotted to them. The adjacent section is for the handicapped, who will follow a special route that avoids the city’s most treacherous hills. San Francisco is a place of inclusion and its marathon aims to embody this spirit of tolerance, which doesn’t preclude classifying people in a manner worthy of the heyday of segregation.

  Carmen is warming up. It won’t be her best race—she can already sense this in the pit of her lungs, in the jut of her ankles. She slept badly and the humidity weighs on her. She is busy tying on the number 132 that has been assigned to her, when a familiar voice reaches her ears.

  “Mrs. Lopez! Carmen!”

  On the other side of the fence Carmen recognizes the young woman who took care of Frannie during her last months. She is grinning from ear to ear.

  “Angie! You’re doing the marathon? I didn’t know you were a runner!”

  “It’s recent. Actually, it’s you who inspired me! I’ve been training for three months; I even got these legs, specially designed for impact sports.”

  She shows the prostheses attached to her knees. Carmen knew she was handicapped, but this is the first time she has seen her artificial legs, which look both highly sophisticated and strangely organic.

  “I hope you don’t find this too nosy of me, but I never knew how you lost your legs.”

  “You’re not being nosy. It changed my whole life, so I don’t mind talking about it. I was run over by a train when I was nine.”

  “My God! I’m so sorry.”

  “There’s no need. I wouldn’t have lived the way I have if it hadn’t been for that brush with death when I was young.”

  The two women continue their conversation as their respective enclosures fill up. Carmen relates how the stuffed cat recovered its bygone dignity; Angie tells her she has won a scholarship that will allow her to pursue post-graduate studies in Berkeley. Then she asks about Simon.

  “To be perfectly honest, I haven’t spoken to him in a long while.”

  Angie nods with a knowing expression on her face.

  “It was that letter that upset him, wasn’t it? I hesitated for a long time before handing you those papers.”

  “Why is that?”

  Looking ill at ease, the girl examines at the tips of her soles.

  “Your mother wrote those letters one day when… well, I believe she’d been drinking. She asked me to give them to you after she died. She was doing okay at the time so I put them away and forgot about them. But not too long before her heart attack—I guess she was beginning to sense the end was near—she pulled them out again and ordered me to burn them. I have to admit, I read them. I told her I’d destroy them but I couldn’t do that. I thought it would be better to let you have them. Maybe I was wrong.”

  “Not at all! We had to find out the truth at some point. My only regret is that Simon took it all so literally. From one day to the next he stopped being my brother.”

  “You know, even blood relations can become estranged like that. Siblings don’t make up an indestructible organ. Not many things do, actually.”

  Carmen gives her a sad nod of agreement. Now a whistle sounds to rally the runners. Carmen squeezes Angie’s hand through the steel mesh.

  “Any last minute advice?” the young woman asks.

  “Do a proper warm-up. And when you get to the point where you think you’re about to croak, keep going. There’s always life left, even when you can’t see it.”

  A few minutes later the starter’s pistol goes off and Carmen bursts out of the enclosure jostling against hundreds of runners who are about to do violence to their bodies to prove to themselves they have the stuff of winners, of survivors, to forget their shortcomings and faults, to stop thinking altogether, or to lose themselves in the essence of absolute effort. The throng on either side of the road cheers them on. Despite the massive number of spectators, Carmen immediately spots Marcus’s face. Overjoyed, she veers away from her path to slap his open hand. When she gets closer she sees he is holding a daffodil petal out for her. She slows down to snatch it and puts it against her lips. Marcus kisses her fingertips as she picks up the pace again, her strides diligent, her ambition discreet, running at the speed of those the pack never catches up with but who don’t overtake the frontrunners. Those who run for the sake of running and nothing else.

  Simon wakes up and checks his alarm clock: 3:20 p.m. He mechanically turns on the TV. A glowing female announcer declares the weather will be dry with a gentle breeze. He lets her gush while he puts the water on to boil, and then he comes back and settles into the sofa with a pale cup of tea and some porridge. The weather report gives way to the news; the local news begins with a shot of the always majestic Golden Gate. Below the bridge the Coast Guard is hoisting a body out of the water. The man threw himself into the Bay at sunrise. Before jumping he apparently chalked a message on the pavement: Freed from my fate.

  “Poor guy,” Simon mutters.

  He hears the sound of knocking and believes at first that it’s coming from the TV. But when the sound grows more in
sistent, Simon goes to the door in disbelief. No one has knocked on his door since he moved in here. He slips the door chain without giving it any thought.

  When after months of separation you see a person with whom you previously had spent a great deal of time, there is always something peculiar about her appearance. Carmen has not changed, but her hair tied in a ponytail seems longer and drier than ever. Her chin looks pointier, her muscles harder. Her lean chest now appears to have a hollow, a concave space where someone might plant his cheek, or fist. There are tears streaming down her face.

  Without asking permission she walks in and collapses on the couch. Her sobbing rises when she sees the images of the events below the bridge. Simon does not wonder at how easy it is for him to sit down beside her, to wrap his right arm around her, to hold his sister in face of the winds working to uproot her from the clear, measurable world that she has always dealt with equably. Without speaking, they return to the original magma of their story, the wound that made them into steadfast allies.

  After a few minutes Carmen finally opens her mouth.

  “It’s Marcus. He’s the one who jumped off the bridge. It’s my fault.”

  It doesn’t even occur to Simon to ask who Marcus is or what in the world Carmen might have done to drive him to suicide. He sighs and gently strokes her hair.

  “If only we still had the cat.”

  Carmen lifts her bloodshot eyes toward him.

  “He’s at my house, on the mantel. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”

  He chose the Sutro Baths, as if this place explains everything. At least it has helped to loosen his tongue for the first time in months. Carmen listens in amazement to Simon’s account of his divorce, his daughter’s double life, and his search for Roberto Aurellano. While he talks, Simon mechanically thrusts his finger into the holes dug by the crabs. When he was small, Carmen had him believe that under the sand was a crab-controlled warren of tunnels and galleries, which could cause the ground to collapse. The boy would walk on tiptoes and fling every crustacean he managed to get hold of into the surf.

  Carmen in turn relates her experiences of the past few of months: the Death Race, Magenta Lopez’s urn, meeting Marcus. Simon tries to reassure his sister, who is convinced she reopened her friend’s wounds by bringing up his family drama.

  “He lived with that suffering on a permanent basis. It’s the kind of thing that haunts a man, and he can’t forget it even for a second. Whatever you told him had no bearing on his decision.”

  A thin smile finally forms on Carmen’s lips.

  “I’m so happy to have found you again, brother of mine.”

  Simon gazes out to sea and squeezes his sister’s hand.

  “Me too. I’m sorry, Carmen.”

  Carmen sweeps the air with her hand to brush away her brother’s remorse. As the light starts to wane they find a spot on the beach and set about surrounding themselves with sand walls. As children they made this their ritual: as soon as they set foot on the beach they would build a canoe around them and play at braving the incoming tide and the seagulls with their imaginary paddles. This time, however, they make no attempt to row. It is enough just to drift.

  “I guess we’ll never really understand where we come from.”

  Carmen doesn’t take her eyes off the pointed prow to which she is putting the finishing touches.

  “Is it really so important, Simon? You spent more than forty years next to your birth mother. You know more about your true origins than I ever will.”

  Simon turns around, as if to make certain no ghosts in tailcoats are hanging around the baths.

  “That’s the point. I was hoping to be something other than Frannie’s son.”

  The light goes down in the prodigious riot of colour exclusive to the Pacific Ocean, its heat, its monsters, its vortex of plastic waste, and its untamed islands soon to be swamped. With the sun now just a golden rib, the brother and sister scan the horizon looking for the famous green flash that appears just as the day star slips away to present a new morning to another continent. Carmen thinks about the pioneers who discovered this spectacle, about the sensation of standing at the world’s edge that must have overwhelmed them; it would never leave them again but would cling to their thoughts in prayer, in toil, even in their last resting place. As for Simon, for the first time in months he imagines himself embracing a woman, here, at the mercy of the wind that would add the taste of salt to their kiss. He opens his hands to the air laden with mist and microscopic algae.

  The crash of the breakers on the shoreline grows stronger and the roar makes their outstretched legs tingle at the bottom of the sand canoe. The day moves off into the distance, and Carmen and Simon start speaking Spanish, and German, the language they learned in school so Frannie would not understand them, and then various dialects, invented codes, creoles of sad children, until they are repeating themselves, unsaying what they have said, re-Christening themselves. The scent of the nearby woods arrives on the offshore breeze and is accompanied by the noise from the road, the whoosh of passing cars blending with the murmur of the waves in an elusive refrain. On top of this comes a rumble like a deep explosion.

  The fierceness of the elements makes it impossible for them to quickly grasp what is happening. Only when their canoe comes alive do they realize the ground is shaking. Suddenly they are shooting down rapids, they are riding a sand storm. Everything is in flux and they have no paddles.

  For the first minute they stay calm. But as the quake gains in amplitude and persists, fear wells up inside them. Something enormous is shifting under their feet. The continental beast is turning in its sleep; one tectonic twin is shoving away the other. Simon moves closer to Carmen and presses her hand. Night has fallen; it’s hard to see anything but silhouettes. Already, the landscape appears to have changed, with new ruins added to the old, but they cannot be sure of this.

  The tremor lasts almost five minutes. When the ground stops moving, the brother and sister have formed into a compact ball that refuses to be undone. The noise of the waves seems twice as loud as before, and a furious commotion has latched onto the air. In the distance they can hear sirens and voices screaming, but around them, no one, no movement of living things. Clasping each other in the wet sand, they are incapable of standing up, of taking stock of the damage, of deciding to head back to the city to help those who are left and to mourn the others. Tonight the fault has spoken, perhaps once and for all. Perhaps the coast has slid into the Pacific never to emerge again; perhaps an entire civilization with its myths, its excesses, its violence, and its poetry has just been engulfed. It already doesn’t matter. Carmen and Simon, their eyes fixed on the sea, are waiting for the wave. If part of the world has fallen into the ocean, out of it will surge an equal part of water. Archimedes’ laughter reaches them while, far away, oceanic shadows bare their teeth, the grin of those that will subdue everything.

  THE SISTERS IN THE WALLS

  (MONETTE AND ANGIE)

  Amid the tumult of sirens and tourniquets, Angie sees nothing. Not the movement of the stretcher, not the comings and goings of the paramedics, not the great absence below her knees. She does not hear Monette sobbing in the arms of a policeman, or the neighbour saying how to get in touch with their mother, or the birds that don’t care and keep on keening because it’s hot, because the tree barks are alive with larvae. The only things Angie manages to recognize are the silhouettes of two little girls. The only thing she hears is Mam’s voice telling them that story before putting them to bed. The story of the little girls in the walls.

  In a crooked old house, two inseparable sisters had parents who were mean and stupid and would beat them morning and night and shut them in a closet, sometimes for days. The little girls stayed there and made no attempt to escape because even though they did not like to be locked up in the dark, they had far more to fear on the outside.

  One day th
ey discovered a secret passageway from the closet to the space between the walls, which allowed them to move throughout the house. Since the place was in a bad state of repair, they could look through the cracks into the rooms. Keeping quiet, they knew what their parents were up to at any given moment and could be back in the closet when it was time to be let out.

  Protected in this way and enjoying the advantages of spying, the two sisters began to be less afraid of their father and mother. Pretty soon they came to see them as mere scarecrows whose bellies were stuffed with straw. Speaking in whispers, the girls learned to make fun of their parents, to laugh at their cruelty and foolishness.

  Then they hit on the idea of never leaving the walls. What was the point, they said to each other, of obediently going back into the closet only to be beaten anew? The elder sister stole nails, while the younger, a hammer. Then, after patiently waiting for their parents to go shopping, they slipped through the passageway and sealed it for good. When their father came home he could not find them anywhere. Their mother went to the window and started shouting their names. Inside the opposite wall, the two children laughed to themselves.

  The parents looked for them everywhere and wept at having lost them, but the sisters never wavered. At night before going to sleep, one of the girls would slip her arm through a hole in the pantry and take cookies, potatoes, raw eggs. They slept back to back and spent their days making up silent songs or pantomimes in which fairies danced with show dogs, and they learned to write by etching letters into the panelling.

  After a few months, their parents gave up all hope of finding them again, and they were declared dead. From time to time they would amuse themselves by scratching or whistling between the planks to frighten their erstwhile tormentors, who would go out to the garden in the middle of the night, believing the house was haunted. When, out of exhaustion, the parents decided to move to a faraway city, the two little girls chose not to leave the labyrinth. They stayed between the walls, their bodies growing flatter and wider, their thoughts and joys flattened out, their days unfolding horizontally. Still today, when visitors come to explore the abandoned house, they knock on the partitions, and those with keen ears can hear smothered laughter, an eggshell cracking, the rustle of a skirt, and a hand turning a page as large as a wall.