The Setting Lake Sun
J.R. LÉVEILLÉ
TRANSLATED BY
S.E. Stewart
© 2001, J.R. Léveillé & S.E. Stewart
Print Edition ISBN 978-0921833-77-2
EPub Edition, 2011
ISBN 978-1897109-58-8
Published in French as Le soleil du lac qui se couche by Les Éditions du Blé, 2001.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, without the permission of the publisher.
Cover design by Terry Gallagher/Doowah Design.
We acknowledge the support of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council for our publishing program.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Léveillé, J.R., 1945
[Soleil du lac qui se couche. English]
The setting lake sun.
Translation of: Le soleil du lac qui se couche.
I. Stewart, S.E. (Susan Elizabeth), 1951 II. Title. III. Title: Le soleil du lac qui se couche. English.
PS8573.E935S6413 2001 C843'.54 C2001-900462-1
PQ3919.2.L3977S6413 2001
Signature Editions, P.O. Box 206, RPO Corydon
Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3M 3S7
www.signature-editions.com
The geese
fly over the place
where the bullfrogs stay
Contents
The Setting Lake Sun
About the Author
About the Translator
The Setting Lake Sun
1
I was twenty years old when I met Ueno Takami, the Japanese poet. Some said he was a monk, others that he had a wife and two children, still others that he was the president of a large Japanese importing firm.
At the time I didn’t know what the truth was.
2
Many years have passed since that time. I’m much older now, but this story still resounds in me as clearly as a bell in the empty sky.
3
I would like to say that I met him at his cabin in Northern Manitoba. Something mysterious happens when you arrive unexpectedly before a campfire.
But it wasn’t like that at all. I first saw him at the opening of a show by a Cree artist in a Winnipeg art gallery.
4
He caught me staring at him. His face, with its strong bones, was a little creased with age, sort of weatherbeaten but vibrant. He was wearing old jeans, work boots, and a wonderful black turtleneck sweater that seemed typically Japanese. His most striking feature was his eyes, what you’d call coal black, brimming with an exuberant restraint.
As soon as he caught sight of me he came over and said, “You’re Métis, aren’t you?”
5
And what a smile he gave me! I started to laugh at what he’d said.
“That,” he added, “is your Indian side.”
We shook hands.
“Angèle.”
“Ueno.”
6
Something drew my eye to the large window at the end of the room and out to the spectacle of the darkening sky. I was filled with both an enormous sense of melancholy and the joy of this sunset that could have gone on forever.
“That,” he said, “is your White side.”
He was right.
7
The next morning I awoke to the ringing of the telephone. It was my sister.
She told me that a letter for me from the university had arrived at my mother’s. “Want me to open it?” she asked.
I hesitated. I had applied for admission to the school of architecture. The telephone line seemed like a tightrope and I felt both hope and fear. Would I rather open the letter in the privacy of my apartment?
“Go ahead. Make the leap,” she said.
It struck me as strange, this idea of “making a leap,” since the internal inclination and the image that had convinced me, or pushed me, to launch myself into architecture were entirely different.
I’d seen a television documentary about the men who work on the construction of bridges and skyscrapers. American Indians, it seems, have no fear of heights and they’re blessed with an excellent sense of balance. So I had imagined myself walking blithely along a steel beam up in the blue.
I guess my notion of architecture was all wrapped up in the idea of a suspension of the void under my feet.
8
“Okay, it’s all right,” she said.
I still hadn’t replied.
“You know,” she continued, “I had a dream about you last night.”
“About the letter?”
“No. You were strolling down a trail through the woods with an old man.”
“You’re kidding!”
A strange feeling came over me, like the metallic blue of oncoming night.
“No, he wasn’t actually old. Well, maybe. It was an older person. Almost an old man. But at the same time he seemed quite young.”
My sister’s dreams had a way of coming true.
9
“So, what about this letter?”
I’d forgotten about it while she told me her dream.
“I’ll come over and pick it up.”
“Just make sure you keep an eye on your emotional life,”she said and started to laugh.
10
My father left when I was five or six. I hadn’t seen him since.
I’d kept a memento. That is, my mother let me have it. It was a bear claw mounted as a pendant on a leather thong.
I took the necklace out of the small cigar box where I kept my jewellery. I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror.
I then dressed quickly, feeling a sudden desire to go for a walk around the streets of Winnipeg.
11
It was quite sunny and as I strolled along the streets in the Exchange District, over by Main, I couldn’t help thinking of my mother and how she would take my sister and me for walks not far from there. When we were very young she’d take us in strollers; later on we’d ride our bikes or walk.
We lived in a series of small apartments on Furby, McDermot, Bannatyne. We certainly weren’t rich; my mother worked as support staff at the Health Sciences Centre hospital, just minutes away from those dwellings we occupied on the edge of downtown. And yet I never felt we were poor.
12
A few days later I awoke with a start. Not because I was scared; it was as if the awakening had come from inside my dream and propelled me outward into the light of day.
No doubt it had something to do with my walk of the evening before, since in my dream water was shooting up from the fountain in Central Park. The fountain had not worked for a long time and shooting may be too strong a word. It was trickling. It had never done more than trickle. But this trickle, after such a long drought, seemed like a gush.
It was a wonderful fountain. I felt wonderful too as I stretched and got out of bed. The sun was shining and I’d been accepted into the school of architecture.
13
I dressed quickly that morning as well. It was unlike me, all the more because I had a few days off. There’s a side to my character that’s very organized, but usually I take my time.
Since I’d dreamt of it so vividly, I decided to make my way to the fountain. I headed for Central Park.
I wasn’t in a hurry but—how to put it?—it was as if I had a mission.
14
I had surely seen the park over the previous few years, but only when driving past in a car or from a distance, never paying it much attention.
Up close, it had changed. The handsome wrought-iron fence was gone. The park looked more open, “newer,” less intimate than it had seemed during my childhood. The paths were more clearly defined, but less appealing, m
ore manicured, less natural. The fountain still wasn’t working.
A few old men still played checkers, but there were more drunks stretched out on the ground or lying on the benches.
And Ueno!
15
I was almost abreast of him when I spotted him. He was sitting on a bench—close to the fountain. And in my surprise I said his name right out loud. “Ueno!”
“You have a good memory,” he said.
How could you forget a name like that?
16
I don’t believe I knew his last name at that time. Normally I would have addressed him as Mister, especially since he was older than I was.
But I was so surprised.
“I’m sorry, I was surprised to see you there and to recognize you, so I didn’t say hello properly.”
“Neither did I.”
And I started to laugh.
He said, “That’s my Métis girl.”
17
“But you haven’t even asked me whether I am or not.”
“You confirmed it the other night at the opening.”
“Even then you decided for yourself.”
He wasn’t smiling, but there was a smile all over his face.
Normally I would have been self-conscious and lowered my eyes. Until then no one had ever called me a Métis without making me feel ashamed.
18
The lunchtime crowd was starting to invade the park, some to eat their sandwiches and others to take a walk in the spring sunshine.
“It’s too bad about the fountain,” I said.
“I don’t think so. What is incomplete has a certain beauty.”
I don’t know why, but at that moment I felt as if I had the body of a young girl, a child walking along with her mother.
19
“Do you really think so?”
“No, I know it,” he stated simply.
“What makes you say that?”
“Everything.”
Then I remembered my dream and it all fell into place. It formed a pattern to which I lacked the key, but a great feeling of peace came over me.
20
He had to leave shortly afterwards. He told me he had obligations elsewhere.
He was wearing an old pair of jeans with splotches of paint on them, construction boots, and a white T-shirt. The first time we’d met I hadn’t noticed how much grey there was in his hair.
“You aren’t sad today,” he said as he left.
21
I took his place on the bench. For a long while I remained sitting there in a sort of blissful trance.
I couldn’t say exactly what effect this man had on me. When my sister made me happy, I felt rose-coloured spurts. When I was getting along well with my mother, I had a sense of blue mist. With this old man I was filled with a kind of transparent whiteness.
I had a memory of the silvery reflections of fish in clear water from the time, perhaps the only time, that I’d gone fishing with my father before he left us.
22
That evening I went to have supper at my mother and sister’s place. I was overwhelmed by lethargy and was practically falling asleep at the table.
“Are you asleep, Angèle?”
“Mm-hmm...”
Even though I wasn’t tired, my entire being had become drowsy. Not only my body but my mind as well.
I went and lay down on the sofa.
“She must have celebrated her acceptance to architecture school too hard last night...”
I could hear the two of them talking in the kitchen, a soft, intimate murmur.
I made no effort to listen to what they were saying, but I liked hearing their voices. I focussed on the grace and rhythm of their conversation to reassure myself that, although barely conscious, I existed.
23
I had promised to help my friend Aron Levi mount an installation at Artspace the next morning.
I was finishing the cup of coffee I’d made myself and was about to leave when my mother came into the kitchen with her beautiful chestnut-coloured hair all tousled.
“Did you sleep well?” she asked me.
I don’t know why I answered, “Yes.”
But it was the truth.
“I’m sorry, I’ve got to run. I’m late.”
24
I told Aron about the sort of sleepless night I’d just had. I retained an impression of having heard my mother and sister talking into the wee hours, but I felt very well rested.
“I know what you mean,”said Aron. “It’s hard to explain. You think you’ve slept badly or spent the whole night dreaming. When morning comes you’re dead to the world. You need a good, strong coffee. Then finally, after all, you feel really good to be alive. Basically, you’ve entered another dimension. Although the day-to-day world around you looks the same and at first you’re not aware of it, you suddenly realize that something has changed. As if you’ve become more ghostly, more spirit-like. The shift takes place in your body and there seems to have been a change at the molecular level. Would you like another cup of coffee?”
25
I was very fond of Aron. He exaggerated sometimes, but he had an original way of looking at things.
At that moment I recalled a small bit of conversation I’d exchanged with Ueno Takami while looking at one of the canvases the night of the Cree artist’s opening.
“Many people,” he’d said, “believe that interpretation and even expression are subjective. But what’s going on is just the opposite. It’s objectivity itself that is being manifested.”
26
“As if the universe entered our bodies and led a life of its own inside us?” I said.
Aron nodded his head as he poured the coffee.
And the thought came to me that Ueno would have said, No! not “as if.”
Where did I get this certainty that seemed like a voice in the back of my head?
27
Aron’s artworks looked like totem poles scattered across a broad field. He believed that magic was my birthright and he wanted my presence to inspire the work of installing them. He had often called upon me as he readied his show, because he considered me to be paranormally beautiful. “Such marvellous formal qualities,” he’d say.
He used rebar to construct his totems. On the metal stems he threaded wooden floats which he had gathered along the shores of Lake Manitoba. “Where your family does its fishing,” he said to tease me. The shape, the origin, the weathering of these artifacts were to him as charged with meaning as the variations in the mythic figures of major religions. He had also carved branches or slender tree trunks to create a spiral effect, reminiscent of the sculptures of Brancusi.
Brancusi inspired in me some extraordinary notions about dwellings. Wood and iron worked over by the elements.
Ueno told me that in Japan they use the expression wabi-sabi to refer to the natural changes in material things.
“Materials have a wabi or sabi quality,” Ueno explained, “when they have been visibly affected by use or the passage of time.”
“Like a patina.”
At the time I was thinking of his old construction boots.
“Yes. Objects that have wabi-sabi are a physical record of the effects of air, wind and sun. These objects have a fundamental character. Yet rust, fading, cracks and alterations in their shape are essential characteristics.”
It occurred to me that the duration of this exhibition, from early May to the end of June, coincided with springtime. Aron was delighted.
As for me, I had the feeling that events were condensing around me.
28
I had lived with Aron for several months after I finished high school, the year before doing prep work at the university in the hope of being admitted to the school of architecture.
Aron was studying fine arts. He wanted me to pose for him. He tried to persuade me by quoting mystical passages of the Kabbalah.
I told him again and again that I wasn’t Jewish.
At the s
ame time my being with him was a fate of some kind that had been visited upon me, and I didn’t hesitate to move in with him.
29
We were crazy about each other. For months we were seldom apart.
Since that time I’ve come to understand that there is a kind of perfection in the connection between beings who love each other. This perfection is a function of timing and circumstances, and the happiness it brings does not reside in permanence.
I often think of Aron. We’ve remained good friends. I like people who give themselves up to their passion.
30
When I met Ueno I believed that my feeling for him resembled that I’d had for Aron when I met him. And yet Aron was darker, more obscure. Explosive, with a cloud hanging over. I would have liked to bring some calm into his life. I’m afraid that I brought him only a teenager’s joyful impulsiveness.
Ueno once told me, “Even Bodhidharma grew tired of being enlightened, and then he would take his monkey out for a walk.”
31
I had a darker side, too. We realized that we’d been better friends before we started to live together. The greater the height, the deeper the gulf. Neither of us was made to be the other’s day-to-day companion. But when we made plans to meet, the world became a magical place. I have never understood why, I only knew that it was true.
32
This state of affairs was unrelated to what we did or our attitude to one another. For example, if I overslept and risked being late for work, he would not get involved. He let me be. Everything went smoothly in that regard. But if we happened to be gloomy at the same time, everything fell apart. Living together made it worse. Whereas before, if I were to spend the day at his house, he wouldn’t send me away. He let me stay, even if he had to go out. If I came over to spend the night—at the time I was living with my mother and my sister—I slipped in and out of his life without interfering.
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