Borderline

by Janette Turner Hospital

  BORDERLINE

  “Janette Turner Hospital is a stunningly stylish writer who turns almost every chapter into a virtuoso performance. This is a very clever, very fascinating book which should not be missed.”

  Brenda Little, Australian

  “Complex and disturbing, a compelling attempt to go beyond the safe borderlines within which much current fiction resides.”

  Cheri Fein, New York Times Book Review

  “A novel of maturity, exuding literary confidence comparable to Borges, Calvino, Barth … Borderline is among the best novels in English of a new age, a novel of exceptional quality, offering the reader exceptional worth.”

  John Moss, A Reader’s Guide to the Canadian Novel

  “My personal books of the decade include Janette Turner Hospital’s Borderline, the style and shape, the supple satisfying prose, the scintillating play of words and ideas of which could keep me warm on a winter’s night … One of the most perfectly satisfying novels I have ever read.”

  Katharine England, Adelaide Advertiser

  “Exhilarating in its complexity and confidence … in an age which insists that every problem has a solution, Hospital has the courage to remind us that there are questions to which there are no answers.”

  Ken Adachi, Toronto Star

  “Hospital writes a rich and allusive prose that is a delight to read.”

  Montreal Gazette

  “This book is brilliant in its several meanings: sparkling, intelligent, distinguished … Hospital is in complete and wondrous control of her material. Borderline is a book to be urged on one’s friends.”

  Shirley Streshinsky, San Francisco Chronicle

  BORDERLINE

  Janette Turner Hospital was born in Melbourne in 1942, but her family moved to Brisbane when she was seven years old. She has taught in Queensland high schools, and in universities in Australia, Canada, USA, England, and Europe. Her short stories and her novels have won a number of international awards, and she is published in ten languages. In Australia her novels have been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, the Banjo, the Townsville Foundation for Literature and the Adelaide Festival National Fiction Award. In 1999, she was invited by the University of South Carolina to be the successor to the late James Dickey, and she now holds a permanent position there as Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence.

  Other books by

  Janette Turner Hospital

  Novels

  The Ivory Swing

  The Tiger in the Tiger Pit

  Charades

  The Last Magician

  Oyster

  Due Preparations for the Plague

  Short Stories

  Dislocations

  Isobars

  Collected Stories

  North of Nowhere, South of Loss

  For

  Blanche Gregory

  and for

  Jack McClelland

  with gratitude and affection

  All one’s inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

  Flaubert

  Once Chuang Chou dreamed he was a butterfly,

  a butterfly flitting and fluttering around.

  He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou.

  Suddenly he woke up and there he was,

  solid and unmistakable, Chuang Chou.

  But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou

  who had dreamed he was a butterfly

  or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.

  From The Book of Chuang Tzu*

  4th century BC

  Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, trans.

  Burton Watson (NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 1964)

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  1

  At borders, as at death and in dreams, no amount of prior planning will necessarily avail. The law of boundaries applies. In the nature of things, control is not in the hands of the traveller.

  Felicity had crossed more borders on more continents than anyone would want to keep a file on. She had the right documents, the right kind of charming smile, a knack for the smooth and non-detaining rite of passage. She was a veteran.

  Nevertheless, in retrospect, she was not surprised by what happened. She had a veteran’s knowledge and scars.

  In the ordinary course of events, she would never have met La Magdalena — which was just one of the names of the woman so many people were looking for. Some said her real name was Dolores Marquez; others called her La Salvadora, perhaps because of where she was from; still others referred to her as La Desconocida, the unknown or unknowable one.

  Nor would Felicity have met the man Augustine, whose life was to suffer dislocation. In the ordinary course of events she would never have put herself on the wrong side of the law, nor been obliged to hide from knives and shadows.

  But at borders there is never an ordinary course of events.

  2

  I call them the Holy Innocents, los desaparecidos, the disappeared ones. Felicity, Dolores, and Augustine. They had a certain quality that made one think of them as soft-shell people. In a way, their disappearance (if they have really disappeared) was inevitable.

  These are violent times, as Seymour says.

  And yet, though a year has gone by, I am constantly expecting to hear from one or another of them. Kathleen also expects to hear. She visits frequently, she practically lives here now, she says I remind her of her father. (I am not entirely flattered by this, though she thinks of her father as a saint.) When I go on my rounds, she comes along. Mr Piano Tuner, she teases. She sits quietly in a corner while I work with tuning fork and lever, and afterwards we tell each other stories. I tell stories about Felicity, she tells them about her father. Neither of us ever met Dolores.

  We wait for letters. We wait for a telephone call.

  They are the kind of people who lose track, Felicity and Augustine. Who trail off in the middle of a sentence. So I do not necessarily believe they have disappeared permanently. I resist believing it. I begin to ask myself if I dreamed the entire course of events. Every time the telephone rings I expect it to be Felicity. She will be calling from New York or Rome or Mexico City or wherever. (She travels a lot. It has always made her nervous to stay in one place for too long; she is only at ease in transit.)

  I can hear the operator’s voice: Long distance for Jean-Marc Seymour.

  “Felicity!” I’ll say. “About time! I had the most extraordinary dream about you. In the end you vanished without a trace.”

  “Oh dreams!” she’ll laugh. Because no one has dreams like Felicity’s. Her dreams are as beautiful and mysterious as a hand-painted tarot pack — the Visconti set in the Pierpont Morgan Library, for example. Lavish. Arcane. Felicity’s dreams are
as clear as runes. You could write a gloss on them.

  “Seriously,” I’ll say. “An incredibly complicated dream. The exegesis would take a whole book.”

  “So,” she’ll say. “Write it down quickly, Jean-Marc, before it goes. I’ll interpret it for you.”

  This is a joke. At the girls’ school Felicity’s aunts sent her to, an extremely proper New England one (“She was so uncivilized when she first came to us,” the aunts said), there was a very Freudian counsellor, an Interpreter of Dreams (upper-case) who was also the headmistress’s lover. Or so the girls claimed. He spoke of the “repercussions” of Felicity’s “vagabond life” and made her hand in a daily dream on quarto with one-and-onehalf-inch margins and all official Style Sheet niceties observed. “Before breakfast,” he used to insist. “While it’s fresh in your mind. Write it down quickly before it goes.”

  What a twit, I said.

  A dream-sniffer, she shrugged. They’re a prurient bunch.

  To make things interesting for him, she invented a dream in which she slept with a young nobleman in a Rembrandt painting. The headmistress’s lover told Felicity that though her feelings for him were understandable, she had a slight problem with reality. Her view of life was out of focus, he said.

  He spoke to the headmistress.

  The headmistress had a talk with Felicity in the chapel. She prescribed corrective measures and assigned an essay on St Agatha, who had her breasts shorn off with pruning shears rather than lose her virginity. The topic gave Felicity an abiding interest in the iconography of medieval painting, and perhaps it was this very penance that led to her distinguished career as an art historian and curator of a private gallery. Which in turn led, in a way, to her disappearance.

  The moral of this, Felicity would say, is that even the dreams you dream up are dangerous and should never be written down without due regard for the consequences.

  Nevertheless, I am going to write it all down before it goes. For Felicity’s delectation when she reappears.

  And partly, of course, for Kathleen, who needs to invent her missing father.

  But mostly, I confess it, for myself. To try to make sense of what happened. Not that this is going to be easy, since I have so little to go on: a few encounters, a handful of phone calls, a jumble of out-of-sequence information, and of course my lifetime knowledge of Felicity.

  Felicity used to say …

  Correction.

  Felicity says: There are only three possible defences: the first is not caring, and the others are irony and art.

  Naturally, given the facts of my own life, I distrust art for reasons that must be obvious. What else would you expect of the Old Volcano’s son? And yet I am, you will point out, an attendant lord. True. There are, in my opinion, far too many composers and performers, too few piano tuners. Too many prima donnas, not enough people to hold the props, clean the paintbrushes, build the perfect harpsichord. But I digress.

  Felicity, I fear, relied excessively on art, altogether too much on not caring, and not nearly enough on irony. Though when explicators of Seymour’s painting occasionally managed to track her down and asked about her early life, she would shrug and say: It didn’t happen here. It’s too foreign to be of interest to you.

  Do you miss those places you came from? I sometimes asked.

  Constantly, she said.

  And yet, though you travel just about everywhere else, you never go back to those particular —

  I can’t afford to, she said. I keep a perfect image intact. I’m not going to tamper with it.

  She felt at ease in airports and in the hearts of great cities. Because, she said, they are full of other people who don’t belong — my closest relations.

  Of course it is difficult, even for me who knew her so well — knows her so well — to separate Felicity from the welter of visual interpretations, footnotes, capsules of biographical speculation. Too many galleries and too many wealthy private citizens own an early work by Seymour (the Old Volcano himself). Far too many people have stared at Blue Woman or Reclining Nude or Eve Fragmented and read their catalogues and thought they knew something about Felicity: the childhood in India, the Australian grandparents, the Boston aunts, the famous affair much photographed in Vogue and Life: “Artist leaves wife of many years for missionary waif.” (Journalistic nonsense, it goes without saying. God only knows how many women came in between my mother and Felicity.)

  For the curious, there is a surprising number of these missionary waifs around. Grown up now, of course; relics of imperialist piety. Doctors, lawyers, artists, professors, secular missionaries all. They were born in China or India or obscurer parts of Asia, tossed about through childhood by itinerant preaching and violent uprisings and the whims of various missionary societies and emergent nationalisms. I know. I tune their pianos. I cannot tell you how many living rooms hold their coded mementos: the sandalwood carvings of Krishna, the jade statues, the African masks, the Indonesian shadow puppets. Oh, the owner will shrug with slight embarrassment, I grew up there. Haven’t been back since I left at the age of fourteen.

  Felicity left earlier than that. Her mother died of heat and childbirth. Her father “went native”, a not uncommon indiscretion of that era. “Lost his sense of the uniqueness of the Gospel,” as the missionary society put it. He died of further rashness. Australian grandparents (her mother’s side of the family) rescued her and then rather carelessly, within a few years, succumbed to terminal old age. Enter, from Boston, her father’s sisters, hitherto unaware of Felicity’s existence. They restored her, as they put it, to the respectable part of the world.

  “Don’t ask about the years in the wilderness,” she says tartly when asked. “It’s too foreign. It wasn’t in the Promised Land.”

  “Artist’s model,” gushes some asinine reporter, “hails this country as promised land.”

  “Honestly!” she says to me, and we laugh.

  But the wilderness years are part of her, they seep up. It’s like being a live transparency, she says, from a camera that was jammed. A multiple-exposure life.

  It shows in some peculiar though secret ways.

  For example, that file she keeps (privately she calls it her “wilderness file”): clippings of dark and bizarre events, world news, the familiar international insanities.

  “Don’t you think that’s excessively morbid?” I’ve asked.

  She shrugs. “It’s a kind of proof that I didn’t invent my own childhood. There are things I saw, things I think I remember … and such things still happen. Even stranger things, worse things, though they have no reality here. It’s in bad taste to talk about them here.”

  It is in bad taste, in my opinion, but I don’t argue with Felicity.

  I am often tempted to argue with the twits who mention Felicity in art reviews and catalogues. The rubbish they write. But if I were to be cynical about my reaction — and what, after all, can one afford not to be cynical about? — I quite simply resent anyone else writing about her at all. No one else (besides myself) is qualified. I especially resent the presumption of those who think they have her located in the Old Volcano’s acrylics. A painting? It’s static, which Felicity never is. You speak of his “kinetic” brilliance? The whirlwind of tropical colours around her unmistakable lopsided eyes?

  I can assure you: This is not Felicity.

  3

  Felicity often overheard herself described as a painter’s dream. For years the remark bothered her because it took on a life of its own. In a catalogue, below one of Seymour’s portraits, she read: The woman is not real. She is an idealization, an embodiment of the painter’s fantasies.

  “Why do you tell people that?” she asked, hundreds of gallery openings and cocktail parties later. “What exactly did you mean by it?”

  “Mean by it?” Seymour puckered his brows. By then he was in his sixties and weary with fame. Long ago he had moved on to other women, other canvases, other themes. “I don’t suppose I meant anything much. I don’t reme
mber. I borrowed your eyes quite often.” He reached over and touched each eyelid with the pad of his right thumb. “And once, after you’d gone, you appeared as a swan. Did you recognize yourself? Then for a long time you kept showing up as a shadow. But that’s far behind us, isn’t it? They all seem so pale now, those old canvases.”

  Now his colours came thick and violent. These are violent times, he was quoted as saying in a prominent art critic’s column.

  “But what exactly did you see as ideal about me back then?”

  “I’ve never understood why you left,” he said. “It was a savage act.”

  “Or were you claiming to have invented me? Implying that outside of your paintings I was … insubstantial?”

  “You still creep into my blues,” he said sadly. “My blues have always gone closest to the truth. But I don’t remember saying it. I don’t know what I meant. It’s irrelevant. A marginal comment.”

  “I wish they wouldn’t keep quoting it,” she said.

  She laughed when she told me about it, a sheepish laugh, embarrassed. “I shouldn’t let it rattle me, Jean-Marc,” she said. “But still … when I’m right there, in flesh and blood, in front of his paintings … I get this queasy feeling that it’s vulgar of me to insist on being literal.”

  “Oh well,” I shrugged (casually, my blithe and bitter self), “my father can make anyone feel like a cipher. He has a knack.”

  Still, I have to admit, there has always been a quality of absence about her; which is why her disappearance itself seems insubstantial, merely a figure of speech, or a trick of the light, a momentary thing.

  If I shut my eyes, I can see her waking in the apartment in Boston on the day that it all began …

  4

  Felicity woke beside her lover in an apartment in Boston. No one lived in the apartment, though they both shared the lease; it was purely for assignations. There were plants and rugs and Marimekko cushions and a waterbed, all the usual pretences of permanence.

  Felicity woke sweating because of the dream.

  She was trapped in a painting again. She fitted snugly inside her black outline but there were 144 square inches missing from the middle of her torso. Between her breasts and her pubic hair, the viewer could see straight through to the tropics: mango trees, coconut palms, white sand. A conch shell where her navel might have been. White wave crests frothing like crabs up the sand, a little breeze off the reef stirring her pubic hair. There was a hibiscus behind her ear. Jasmine in fluted letters across her thighs announced: This is not a real woman.