Fences in Breathing

by Nicole Brossard

  This is how the verb to dive began to take shape. I started saying it out loud, then murmuring it like somebody trying to understand by chanting the same syllables. Diving sometimes resolves the question of diving. Parting the veil, the surface that is obstacle or attraction, opacity or transparency. At the other end of the bridge, while listening to the wind, I felt the verb to dive station itself sideways across words and I thought about women’s caresses, their hands, the softness of their cheeks, about the slightly crazy heat that rushes to the head and transforms how we see. I wish the lake were the sea, I wish the whiteness of the shore around it would change into milky morning blue, into the soft royal blue of afternoon and the blue again of sea and horizon, as they have been described in my language ever since they became the stuff of dreams. I don’t know how much time has passed since the woman reappeared walking toward me. Talking about this passerby in the other language is difficult, and even in my own I can barely find the words, the story of words necessary to appreciate the small and great follies within us of hope, of renewal of energy, and of humanity. Women’s caresses are smooth, existential, full of yes, a power of presence and a bond that reaffirms all bonds. Now I am sure I glimpsed that woman in the village. She was wearing a red T-shirt that bared her tanned shoulders. I had seen only one part of her body, the rest had remained hidden behind the tall cedar hedge bordering part of the village. Then I remembered how every time Tatiana recalls an event that is important to her, she says, ‘That summer was pure velvet. That was the summer Nathalie Sarraute came to the château.’

  I walked on the other shore for a long time and found myself in a little cemetery full of beautiful aged trees under which I stopped. Without realizing it, I found myself at the grave of Jorge Luis Borges. A stone with a two-sentence inscription. I moved closer, convinced I would be able to translate the words that seemed familiar. Nothing happened except that time stretched out whitely as in a Piero Manzoni painting. I knew there was beauty in the inscription, even though there loomed an unspecific threat echoing the fog-laden sentences coming at me at this moment that’s it like at this moment nobody can contradict me because I forget who I am from too much digging in between words, too much diving into the pink and ancient shapes of my love for everything that swirls and sparkles ribbon of slow music that drowns out sorrow in small doses of cello or eyes of a species that shelter a constant sun I’ve forgotten how the day packs up and goes with tender words crouched behind bare cheval glasses in grand hotel rooms forgotten why in another language I erupt while making a hell of a racket as if this could protect me from the beautiful rolling noise of living beings thrilling in the distance halfway to the half-tremor of dreams. I am everywhere I say I am even though I forget I am waiting comfortably coiled in the roiling of words and of my muscles of silence I am waiting for the centuries to pass. I am everywhere I am.

  Now there is sand, watches, human time and sidereal time in each one of the sentences walking along the lakeshore with me at cocktail hour.

  Laure Ravin moved into the Hôtel Metropole hoping, once and for all, to finish with her analysis of the Patriot Act. She has barely slept in the last forty-eight hours, checking, cross-checking the meaning of each word, the consequences of each omission, the word associations that could easily compromise a paragraph, a chapter or a destiny. Her entire body is filled with a kind of anger that seems like a dead end. As though every line of the Patriot Act has fuelled in her a relentless shudder, an indignation, a wild malaise, the precocious intuition that this legislative anomaly will result in her North American humanity plunging into dizzying chaos. The pages of the Patriot Act scroll through her mind with their threatening details, limitations, prescribed sentences, obligations, fines. Every word counts. It can split in two, spill over on itself, provoke a bloodbath. Later on in the evening she will phone home, talk with her mother for a long time, try to reach a civil servant at the Department of Homeland Security to check a few facts. Then, with a glass of white wine in front of her, she will try to convince herself that she is wrong about the extent of this future law’s disastrous consequences.

  The Patriot Act has become a kind of obsession, a matter of life and death. There is venom in it, programming that threatens certainties fought for long ago. ‘And yet my life remains the same,’ she thinks to herself. How much time for a looming calamity to materialize? How does our brain reorganize the future so as to erase the mathematics of calamity? How do the voices of the women and men of a country, of a whole continent, harmonize in such a way that it accelerates their sense of being resigned to disaster? The man with the bended knee in the photos flashes by her. He is falling like a mythical statue against a dark backdrop filled with words upon which she had been leaning before she herself fell into the infinite number of physical laws that lighten consciousness.

  The room looks over the Jardin anglais and its fountain. Farther on, like a stage setting, are the harbour, the little white lighthouse, the towering water jet. Depending on whether she is sitting at her desk working or standing by the window looking out, she can glimpse either the lake’s sky-high jet of water or the garden’s tall trees. She has to choose. Impossible to see both simultaneously. Perhaps it’s the same with laws. They exist simultaneously, each adding to the others, while we see only one at a time, easy to outwit, or so we believe, and unable to reach out and crush us.

  It was darkness that incited Laure Ravin’s interest in the law. As a teenager she spent hours in her room reading The Atrids, silently and out loud. In the college auditorium, dressed in a white tunic, hair anointed with henna, lips bright blood red, she had been afraid of drowning in a time so remote as to preclude any further imagining of life. A time of chaos, fear and night. She was terrified at the idea of finding herself alone, on the edge of animal madness in the great cosmos of life. She could remain thus for a long time, surrounded by pre-human silence, then the violence of the noises of civilization would grab hold of her again and she had to deal with murders, the blood of sacrifices and massacres, the blood of rapes and births. No corruption. Nothing but blood, clean and clear like life, death, with the sea as background. The sea windless or raging, smashing time itself, so frightening with its Möbius strips spiralling over chasms. The law was a response to this time of chaos. The law was keen, as fine as a blade capable of slicing the pain away from muscles, eyes and faces. The law, in principle, erased fear and kept mothers at bay.

  At about six o’clock, Laure Ravin went down to the hotel bar. She picked up a Herald Tribune that was lying on a chair and headed for a table in front of the large window looking over the Jardin anglais. The weather had changed, rain was imminent. She liked this Bar du Miroir where, when she was in town, she would come by for cocktails and listen to a Chechen pianist. Each wall was decorated with a huge mirror recalling an Orthodox cross. Seven squares high by seven squares wide. The armchairs and sofas were black or grey leather. The carpet, red. All around, businessmen discussed contracts and good fortune. All had grey hair, as if money protected from baldness.

  She was about to sit down when I recognized her. It was the same woman I had glimpsed one day behind the cedar hedge of a nice house in the village. She gave the impression of wanting to talk to me. I was glad to see her. I invited her to sit at my table. She ordered a glass of white wine, noticed I was drinking a martini, like she herself did when in New York. Then she inquired about my life at the château, about Tatiana, whom her mother had known well years ago. I talked about the reasons that had brought me to the château, about my ‘relationship to history,’ about my sense of estrangement in this village. As though it were very important, she described the vineyards surrounding the château, the tasting rooms where wine always made heads spin and tongues loosen. She spent more time describing a wooden bench behind the church from which one could look at the countryside, see the lake and, on some days, the snow atop the very high mountain. She said she was fascinated by the cohabitation of an ancient world and of cutting-edge technology in
each village home.

  The sun was setting. The lake was becoming a monochrome presence while its great jet of water, shot through with rainbow colours, switched on like a neon sign. Laure often used the word lacerated: lacerated sheets of paper, lacerated painting, lacerated woman, lacerated democracy, lacerated freedom. This epithet no doubt translated a deliberate gesture that suddenly and violently damaged an integrity. I listened to her very closely. I could not quite determine whether I should attribute my close attention to how interesting her ideas were or to what she could represent to me. Out of the blue, Laure Ravin started enthusing about Spinoza, saying she could never refrain from talking about this man whose work she found so contemporary. In the same breath, and at length, she inter-wove opinion, knowledge and belief. ‘Spinoza cut telescope lenses for a living. He was a joyful individual who feared neither exile nor excommunication.’ It was obvious Laure wanted to draw me onto political terrain, but every five sentences a word or expression would bring her back to her mother. To hear her talk, one would think I knew her mother.

  ‘My work is composed mostly of reading and interpretation, like in Ismail Kadare’s The Palace of Dreams.’ She was listening to me. She did not know this book. She confessed her ignorance with such fervour that her voice troubled me. The granite table felt smoother and warmer under my palm, the martini transformed familiar sensations into a mini-dose of anxiety and reverie. Outdoors, it was getting gloomy. Could it be that what I was feeling in one language was untranslatable, incomprehensible, in another? Suddenly everything is so frail from afar from up close to the end of the street we kids loved to play in and with the past and memory demolishing potatoes tasting of ashes and molluscs we loved jumping from up high falling into ravines with words that threw open an abyss in the eyes every time we loved abysses and in their depths what had broken and scattered and needed to be put back into its original shape with one predatory glance in order to keep breathing. As for myself I enjoyed underlining words it was my way to keep repeating in someone’s ear if I loved them hated them if I wished them well whenever I underlined I stopped the wind and something would begin that I called grave, deep night.

  Outdoors the weather was changing. Laure Ravin suddenly seemed to want to conclude: ‘I must drop by the post office. And make a phone call. Would you join me for dinner? On the other shore?’

  They were two sentences at the door of the Hôtel Metropole with a bridge and a touch of dusk penetrating mouths and thoughts. The two sentences touched in a single spot, resulting in a single syllable. Night. In the middle of the bridge spanning the shores, it was a known fact: they were two sentences made to prevent the night from sinking into night. Two sentences sweeping the dark like emergency lights, bright gashes flaring into a fan above the lake.

  Laure had bought two large envelopes and some stamps showing the white mass of a bear amid the blue vastness of Arctic glaciers. We crossed the bridge in the opposite direction, lingering because of the beneficial scent of kelp and silt. A slow darkness was descending, slowly sweeping the sky, creating the impression of a field of mist and ruins. At eight-thirty in the evening we made our entrance at the Hôtel d’Angleterre. In the dining room, Laure talked about a frightening world. About the powerful life force that makes us hungrily consume reality and recreate it in imaginary form, dreadfully fascinating and, in a sense, irreproachable. I said I loved people only when they are coiled inside the intelligence of the living. For the lawyer in her, meaning was alive only when brutal and all-consuming. She deemed that reality was but a kind of laundering that made it possible to properly dispose of violence and despair, and that it was necessary to always hold it in the utmost respect, regardless of the emotions running through us. I replied that, on the contrary, it was imperative to dive into the heart of reality in order to thwart lies and the filthy imprints they’ve left on time like a horizon of culture. We were the only ones speaking French in the room. All around us, German, Japanese, Arabic and English words raised the dust of the present, punctuating diners’ laughter and good manners. Between Laure and myself, a life chapter was opening, a discourse of honour gliding word by word into old ideas of freedom and the infinite desire for life.

  I decided to walk Laure back to the Metropole. On the way, the perspective shifted. The bridge seemed larger, wider. Behind us the Hôtel d’Angleterre had become just another hotel among the other grand hotels along the quay. The vibrations that were so strong on the bridge during afternoon had ceased. The asphalt glistened under the rain. Car headlights left long red traces. Or white ones, depending on their direction. The city seemed suspended in the playful twinkling of its shores. Ever so smoothly, I had slid into the metaphor of sadness of Jean-Michel Othoniel’s illuminated boat. By turning it over to the night, where it belonged, this metaphor seemed even more gorgeous, as precious as the mute tenderness that follows a moment of abandon.

  They were two sentences with an idea of time and night. Sentences permeable to death and oblivion. One could readily have believed in a story between them. Each sentence poured its meaning into a great vivarium of torments and questions with words ever easier to caress. Yet each one sought to understand the laws of her own gravity. Whenever the two sentences crossed paths too quickly or too often without apparent explanation, inner reality dealt the universe a sharp, glorious kick. There remained a wound in the middle of the universe. One needed to behold it, then to have no fear of burrowing into it until the universe became the universe again. This is how the sentences moved forward into the night, carrying with them a quaking of the heart, a taste of the eternity that recommences at the edge of the void, as fascinating as dawn in any mother tongue, in any foreign tongue.

  Walking over a bridge with someone at night creates a potent moment of intimacy that lifts the soul, one knows not quite why or how, but it always brings us closer to the stars and constellations where it is said that each second exists in close-up, speeds up the continuous flux of perception. Crossing the bridge with Laure Ravin at that time of night gave me pleasure. Pleasure of the eyes watching running water and darkness while the body yielded to vertigo, inconsolable at the idea of abyss and of culture. Walking slowly, letting one’s hand run along the wood, steel or iron of the parapet. I’m talking about my favourite bridges, the very short ones, like the Rialto, the Charles IV, the Dragon Bridge. And the very long ones, like the Brooklyn and the Jacques-Cartier. I can see myself strolling through Prague, fists captive to a cold wind that leaves no time for stopping in front of statues of soot and dust, or, in Montréal, crossing the Jacques-Cartier Bridge one June evening amid a singing crowd draped in blue-flag blues. All these bridges cast a spell by means of their architecture, their lace crafted from steel and wind, they make us enter and exit history while taking a thousand precautions so we are not overcome by the temptation of elsewhere and of the beyond, which are suddenly reunited in an invitation to cross the threshold of the irreversible.

  The Parc des Eaux-Vives darkly stains this city of a thousand streams. The water murmurs from sky to earth, makes everything sparkle in the wind, which is already etching long ripples on the lake, swelling each droplet of the great water jet before opening them one by one like a main sail until the whole thing topples over into the night. Night stretches out, with spots of white suspended suspicious above the lake. Night thick with all the absolutes infused into it over the centuries. It deploys its own peaks of despair and tenderness. It comes apart, mends itself from one peak to the next, penetrates chests where it feeds the sustained fire of births. How to translate what would be our nature in the face of darkness and light? Walking in the night leads to ideas.

  At the château, nights are true with, almost every evening, a wide view on thousands of stars, permanent fireworks that Tatiana’s voice slowly comments on with silences as flamboyant as those tropical trees that, when in flower, open up a living space in anyone who loves them. ‘During the day, most of the poets slept till one in the afternoon. We had to wait till nighttime for pa
ssions and impulses to swoop down on fate, all sails set.’

  Nuit, notte, noche, Nacht, noc, nit, noite, night in Irish, Bulgarian, Romanian, Macedonian, Arabic, Wolof, night in Norwegian, Swedish, Ossetian, Icelandic, Korean, Farsi, Mandarin, Mohawk, Algonquian, Russian, Latvian, Croatian, Thai, Albanian, Nahuatl, Czech, Tzotzil, Tamil and Cree: night according to the centuries, the eras, night of the Far North where Kim went. Twenty-four-hour night awaiting a full moon that will illuminate the slopes of glaciers, my fear embraced by the cold and vastness. A night of expecting embraces and its feeling of dawn.

  ‘Embraces are like spaces, with wounds or frost, that close upon an image of oneself. I know,’ Tatiana would say, ‘of no embrace that is fake. All embraces are by definition spontaneous. If ever they become just the muscular result of calculating thoughts, then that day humanity will take its leave, its ancient blood, and flow out of us.’ The image of Tatiana uttering these words on a rainy evening kept recurring. There was a wind, like tonight, a wind capable of stirring the cruel and contemporary side of the images in our hearts. Tatiana was talking. I hid between the sentences, ready to pounce or to sink. During the day, I lived in the expansion and edginess of things. At night, I could easily make a synthesis of the world with a kind of softness and well-being that transformed me into a flexible and unhappy being.