Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon

by Nicole Brossard

  NARRATOR: This is Carla Carlson from Saskatoon. Novelist. She never talks about us in her novels but always comes here to finish her manuscripts by the river, at close quarters with our history. Carla, this is Simone Lambert, director of the Museum of Civilization.

  SIMONE: We welcome you within the walls of our collective memory and of our tourist-friendly citadel. (Simone looks briefly at the narrator. The ambient noise decreases, gradually ceasing.) I received a phone call about two hours ago. About Fabrice. It was to tell me that he … it was to tell me that his body had been found in a pine grove on Princes Island near Istanbul. He’d been dead for fifteen hours. I spoke with his sister. For now there’s nothing to do but wait.

  black hole [falling into time, into the pure fiction of every sudden and unexpected disappearance. A wrenching apart. Everywhere in the world, people scrub objects. Everywhere in life, women wash bodies, clothes and objects. Everywhere, bodies disappear after having been examined, washed, embalmed, their strange fixedness examined one last time by an other who, throat knotted and eyes alight with thoughts of revenge or infinite sadness, gets lost in a darkness that none of his habits had prepared him for. The bad news rushes to the brain / cuts off the electricity, then, in one jump, steers toward the dark side of entrails, of saliva and of tears where there are no words to translate]

  black hole impossible to cross

  NARRATOR: Wait for what? For him to come back from the dead?

  CARLA: Who is Fabrice?

  SIMONE: I’m sorry. There’s no good way to announce someone’s death. Fabrice is dead. (silence) I’m exhausted. I had a date with my granddaughter. I’ve not seen her for such a long time. I wouldn’t recognize her. (She says this as she looks at Axelle. From this moment on, the young woman seems to find some interest in the conversation. Little by little, it becomes obvious she has recognized Simone Lambert.)

  CARLA: You don’t have any pictures of her?

  SIMONE: We were to meet in a restaurant not far from here. The news of Fabrice’s death threw me into an altered fate, oh sorry, I mean altered state. I came in here out of habit. Deaths are multiplying, we’re so unaware.

  NARRATOR: How did he die?

  CARLA: Who is Fab–?

  NARRATOR: (annoyed) The museum’s chief curator.

  SIMONE: We don’t know. I don’t know. His sister didn’t know anything. I tried to reach the embassy. The offices were all closed. Are you familiar with nights along the Bosporus? At this time of year they’re soft enough to hurt you, to make the most beautiful images of your life resurface. The night fills with mysterious sounds and you spend it with strangers as though it were the only thing to do. You’re afraid of nothing, you’re happy, while in the perfumed night your eyes seek a name for each star, a word with which to catch the wind of madness that stirs in you as you try to understand how it is that, with your body pressed against memory, you still can’t manage to feel anything but pure present. (turning to Carla) You’re from Saskatchewan?

  CARLA: By birth, if you will. But I gave myself a French style so long ago that I’m the only one who knows where I come from.

  SIMONE: What do you mean by French style?

  CARLA: A way of imagining that the world is yours and awaits only a word from you to exist.

  SIMONE: I can see that you’ve travelled a lot or read a lot. Travelling and reading, it’s true, have that ability to change us to the extent that we sometimes end up taking ourselves for someone else. Nietzsche, for example, liked to pass himself off as a Polish count.

  CARLA: It’s because of my mother. Without her, I’d never have taken myself for someone else. She talked to me constantly about René Descartes, who’d come to Stockholm especially, so she said, to die at the court of Queen Christina. One day I saw a film starring Catherine Deneuve. I was eight years old. From that moment on I became interested in France. I started stealing my mother’s lipstick and playing the parts of flaming drag queens. Later on I started calling, with loud swordplay, for the head of a cardinal whose portrait I’d seen in a little French-Canadian girl’s school book. My sword gradually turned into a sabre and I saw myself navigating the Atlantic with a parrot on each shoulder.

  NARRATOR: I can’t quite believe that Fabrice is dead. Wham! Bang! Gone. Just like that. Slam! Just like that, a twist of fate. Slam! Here is a man, here is a corpse. Death swallows hard.

  SIMONE: Calm down. Were you very close?

  NARRATOR: I drove down to Montréal with him sometimes. We discussed theatre, painting, travelling. He didn’t talk about himself much. I mean, about his private life. He was a man who cultivated his gestures and his voice. His wounds, too. There was nothing natural about him.

  SIMONE: (as if she’d not listened to the answer) It’s the third time.

  NARRATOR: The third time what?

  SIMONE: Sudden deaths destroy. I mean, the life of the men and women who remain behind. Sudden death is like a huge pin that impales what’s most precious in us, and that’s not the heart. When death, a sudden one, looms, in one fell swoop it lacerates everything you have of skin, of pitiful skin, to protect you against time and the wicked eyes of fate that want only to swallow you up in one gulp. The day I learned of my daughter’s disappearance, I fainted. Six hours later I was on a plane heading for Mexico. It was July. Torrential rains had started to erase everything. Car tracks, truck tracks, dogs. Streams of mud everywhere. The heat made me feverish. I was returning to a country I knew well for having loved it, kneeling in the stony ground under a blazing sun, searching the earth, using a pickaxe and my hands in sandy ochre-coloured mud hoping to meet the sharp onyx stare of a jaguar or the shiny scales of a serpent-god. (silence) I’m sorry.

  CARLA: Suffering that keeps us halfway between misfortune and fiction is a foul thing. Sometimes it seems tailor-made to bleed us of all our blood.

  SIMONE: Are you superstitious?

  CARLA: No, I’m a novelist. I cultivate a bare minimum of humour so I’m not left cowering in pain.

  SCENE THREE

  (The last bars of ‘I’ve Got a Date with a Dream’ are heard. Applause. Musicians’ break. Axelle orders an orange juice in French. The waitress says, in English, ‘One orange juice.’ Axelle repeats, ‘Oui, un jus d’orange, s’il vous plaît.’ She pronounces each syllable carefully, as if she were making a political statement.)

  NARRATOR: I thought you were single.

  SIMONE: I am by nature.

  NARRATOR: It’s strange, imagining you as a mother, as a grandmother especially.

  SIMONE: There’s no point making a big deal of it. I should go back to make a call. I don’t know anything about her. This whole story is absurd. I feel like I’m living a story that doesn’t belong to me.

  AXELLE: (interested in the conversation) Excuse me, would you have a pencil I can borrow?

  CARLA: Are you from here? Are you here as a tourist? Like me?

  AXELLE: I’m attending a conference.

  SIMONE: You’re very young.

  AXELLE: Is that a problem?

  SIMONE: It was a compliment.

  (Feeling uncomfortable, Axelle goes back to her seat at the end of the table.)

  CARLA: My whole life I’ve dreamed of living as a stranger. I feel good only when I’m somewhere else. It’s like at the theatre – the plays I like always happen between strangers, never in families.

  NARRATOR: ‘Families, I hate you’; Electra; Hamlet; Marcel Pursued by the Hounds; Cross Purpose; Suddenly, Last Summer. If it’s drama and tragedy you want, then stick with family, where hatred and the proprietary instinct are ever so fertile.

  SIMONE: You’re probably neglecting some very fertile ground there, Carla.

  CARLA: The curse on my writing is that I grew up in a happy family. So I’m reduced to inventing my father and my mother as these peculiar objects who could be the cause of fireworks, verbal explosions, mysterious whisperings.

  NARRATOR: You’re exaggerating. (in a tone of sympathy) Write what you must and don’t bother us
with your happy family. Anyway, happy family or not, we always end up in mourning for our mothers.

  SIMONE: Do you still have your parents? I mean, are they still alive?

  NARRATOR: My mother died two years ago. Since then I left Montréal to come and work here, in your museum. You know, Simone, it’s a pleasure working with you, for you, if you prefer. (Axelle raises her head when she hears Simone’s name.) That exhibition project I spoke to you about a while ago, it matters to me. A lot. I’d need special permission to consult some documents in the library at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

  SIMONE: Let’s talk about work some other day, if you don’t mind. I’m weary. Let’s enjoy the music and the night. Have you known Carla for a long time? (without giving her time to reply)I find her quite pleasant. I dreamed of being a novelist for a long time. Now that I’ve reached a respectable age to write my memoirs, the desire for novelizing has gone. In any case, novelizing isn’t really very trendy anymore. Today, one must document. Everything. People seem to want to consume things raw. Events, emotions, actions. Nothing reheated. Everything’s got to be raw. You have to ‘get it’ unprepared, in real time, where, as we know, nothing particularly interesting happens except that in principle we’re there without really being there.

  CARLA: Once something is written – an action, for example, ‘Simone gets herself a glass of water while absent-mindedly looking out the window,’ or a sensation, ‘the house is fragrant with a good coffee smell’ – once written down and especially once in print, the sentence will never again exist in real time. It forever goes over to the side of fiction – that is, where we are not, which by the same token forces us to imagine in order to understand. Because of this phenomenon, which constitutes the very miracle of literature, quite a few contemporary novelists don’t question the interest that their every move, rant and most meaningless sigh can elicit, once documented in writing. You’re right, Simone, today we document everything as if it were necessary to collect our each and every thought and action to avoid being swallowed by the eternal present that flattens everything in its path.

  NARRATOR: Ruins: Time’s Remains, Desire’s Reign. That’s what I’d like to call the exhibition. Do you know the book entitled The Lure of the Sea? The text harbours a major, a subterranean, nostalgia that highlights fatal words like suicide, monster, catastrophe. Gloom. Don’t laugh. Gloom is a contemporary word just like erratic blocks or natural abysses are expressions that accompany our everyday lives.

  CARLA: Wouldn’t it be simpler to say daily lives?

  NARRATOR: Our everyday lives are not daily. If they were, we wouldn’t fear the void. There’s something restful about the word daily while everyday is like a warning, as if misfortune could befall us at any moment, at any hour, and eliminate us with a whack of its paw and of fate.

  SIMONE: (in a detached and benevolent tone) What do you like about that book?

  NARRATOR: Seascapes and their fantasy-inspiring coasts. The book drowns the sea in its own spectacle with its dykes, shores, storms, shipwrecks and immensity. It places the meeting of body and sea above all else – it takes the soul by surprise. Time is a landscape for travellers open to the idea of wounds … (The narrator sinks into her thoughts then concludes as though she had finally found the right word.) It’s a book open to the idea of vestiges.

  (The musicians set up.)

  CARLA: What an odd expression, (pensive) ‘a book open to the idea of vertigos.’

  SIMONE: Of vestiges.

  (The music starts. Carla and the narrator signal Axelle to come closer.)

  SCENE FOUR

  NARRATOR: Do you think we’re truly ourselves when we’re dreaming?

  CARLA: Who else would we be? We’re always ourselves, regardless of circumstances, regardless of whether we’re busy lying, cheating, assassinating, telling the truth or playing Pirandello. There’s no real flight, but one can play at something, to be sure. I like the idea of makeup, of deceitful mimicry.

  SIMONE: Of masks and masquerades. ‘Starting in the sixth century, Thespis smears his actor with wine and white lead or hides him under a white sheet. In the fifth century, Phrynichos imposes the mask for feminine roles, then Aeschylus perfects it [ … ] One of the ancient masks is called the Gorgoneion. Hesiod writes that the Gorgons, the most famous of whom is Medusa, are three monstrous sisters, daughters of the Old Man of the Sea. Their abysmal faces (round face swollen with anger, serpent-hair, flat nose, huge mouth) stupefy whomever looks upon them. Perseus, when he wants to deliver Andromeda from her rock, beheads Medusa, taking care to not set eyes upon her by using a mirror, carries her head away in a bag and uses it as a weapon to petrify Andromeda’s monster guardian.’

  AXELLE: I’m sure we all have a virtual ‘me’ inside that offers the hope of not always being oneself.

  NARRATOR: Ask for your virtual ‘me’! Clone of my mother, tell me who’s the fairest, will the real me be this one here or that one over there?

  AXELLE: Don’t make fun.

  SIMONE: ‘The mask’s function is to cancel the effects of time and time itself.’

  CARLA: Everything changes so fast. That ________________ distresses me. On some days we tell ourselves nothing has really changed, that we’re still the same. Wrong! We’re so pressed for time. Pressed like lemons, plugged into ever-newer novelty. Being pressed without being in a state of emergency changes our nature. We are the new serfs. Well-connected. (turning to Axelle) What’s your name? Shall we use our first names?

  AXELLE: Axelle.

  (Simone looks at her intensely. Axelle looks away.)

  SIMONE: That’s an unusual name.

  CARLA: There was a Swedish figure skater with that name.

  AXELLE: My mother used to tell me about him when I was a child.

  SIMONE: (whose voice has just changed) A few years ago, Fabrice Lacoste wanted to curate an exhibition of Venetian masks. I was against it. With all my being I was against it. I felt there was something futile about such a display of masks, which seemed to me to be nothing more than traps for seduction, lies and perversion. Back then I just didn’t have the playful spirit I do now; and yet, as the months went by, Fabrice managed to convince me. We’re unaware of the extent to which pain, or, rather, the will to avoid suffering, dictates our choices, our opinions, commands our decisions. I was travelling a lot in those days. A woman friend often accompanied me. That year we were supposed to go to Venice. It was February, a time of the year when part of the city is flooded, damp and cold. Regardless of the work awaiting me there, we’d decided that this trip would be unforgettable and wagered that we’d be able to transform the rain and fog into a spectacle of the pure pleasure of life. Departure was two days away. Suitcases were packed and standing in a corner of the living room like two handsome purebred dogs. In a few minutes, night and its old inky silence would own the landscape. Standing in front of the window, I was looking at the river and Lévis while talking about the Grand Canal and Cannaregio. I could feel Alice’s movements behind me, coming and going around the table where we’d soon sit down to a favourite meal, with smoked salmon and prosecco. Sometimes the reflection of her joyful body appeared in the bay window, then immediately disappeared to make room for the lights sparkling on the opposite shore. I remember a noise, light wobbling. I turned toward Alice. She was falling, falling in slow motion her heart beating her cheek striking the floor hard in slow motion Alice’s soul flooding the whole room, embracing me. Alice died two days later, surrounded by her husband and two children. As far as the family and the hospital were concerned, I didn’t exist. Besides, I did nothing to exist in their eyes. I never sought to make noise about our relationship. That year, for I don’t know what reason, the streets of Québec were bare of snow. I remember walking part of the night through the city streets, which had become quite foreign to me. Under my boots I could feel the grains of sand and of salt break up with a continuous and nervous squeaky crunch. The fact that there was no snow as usual stirred a feeling of inexplicable f
right in me. I walked part of the night then came here to sleep in this very hotel where I was known as Iris Stein. Twenty years later, when Fabrice first talked to me about his project of an exhibition of masks, all I could do was howl my disapproval.

  NARRATOR: (to herself) Fascinating, this sense of well-being and of worry that sets in when someone casually tells a story that creates the impression of having wind in her sails and solitude tightly packed at the bottom of a powder keg.

  CARLA: Yesterday, I listened to the bells of a church in Saint-Roch for a few minutes. I was certain I was thinking about nothing when I saw myself again in Saskatoon, on a May day, sitting on a bench facing the river, which was rippling with a mixture of exquisite words whose meaning was emphasized now by the wind, now by light and the continual rustling of insects still plentiful at that time of year. The day was perfect, the sky absolutely blue. I was thinking about my mother going back to Sweden after my father’s death. Every time a person dies, another one goes somewhere else. It’s as though death constantly displaces populations. I was thinking about my mother, and the idea came to me to create characters whose speech, although contemporary, would nonetheless have made them anachronistic. Perhaps for me it was an entirely natural way of foiling sadness and reframing it in a more tolerable landscape. The characters had paraded in front of me, then, as in my childhood, I’d made them disappear by taking their place. On that perfect day’s morning, I’d seemed to myself like one of those undefined and troubling masses in Francis Bacon paintings. I’d become as yellow as death.

  NARRATOR: No civilization associates yellow with death.

  SIMONE: Not so fast! ‘Yellow is the colour of eternal life like gold is the metal of eternal life. It is also through these golds, these yellows, that Catholic priests lead the dead to eternal life. In Egyptian funerary chambers, the colour yellow is the one most often associated with blue, to ensure the soul’s survival, for the gold it represents is the Sun’s flesh and that of the gods.’