Fences in Breathing

by Nicole Brossard

  In the foreign language, I continue to dig holes and to weave short stories in which I am happy, multiple and worried, perfectly free. Some sensations disappear, leaving dark circles around words. Others originate in the same places. In the other tongue, I uselessly multiply the pronouns, embrace obscurity like some precious object, a small shadow of the big fear.

  Laure talked about cities that now have their official nuit blanche, one night rich with madness, making people feverish and terribly present. Permission to party all night, wandering among countless shows, holding someone’s hand. The idea of having someone to hold by the hand accelerates or slows the life instinct. The hand’s warmth is precious. It keeps alive both the singular I and the we of reverie, without which intimacy would be a useless word.

  ‘At the château,’ said Tatiana, ‘all our nights were blanches and filled with words, laughter, poems, gestures of affection, amorous hands. Everything seemed made to help us devour the wind, designed to prolong every sweet little thing fingers encountered: fine fabrics on divans, smooth wood, suede vests, naked shoulders, silk ties, cheeks so youthful, arms so downy. Then all the guests would execute great dives into their dreams, go back to their rooms to perform even higher dives, carving their shadows into the fresh dawn like a rose, something of the self that deserved to be seen coming from as far off as antiquity and the dark crucible of life whence it had sprung.’

  We were in the Jardin anglais again. Near its fountain, a group of tourists and bystanders was watching a young woman who, wired to her iPod, was tracing a fiery choreography through the night with the help of two round masses at the end of her delicate arms. Gracefully, with her wrists and shoulders, she was inventing a mysterious calligraphy that the wind altered amid smells of oil and sulphur. Among bystanders there are always the truly inquisitive ones things are so much simpler if we spend the night in a park a little flame glitters as it escapes a plastic lighter it’s starting again the characters I put my wounded hand under my armpit Kim is holding the lighter to please me a warm wind brushes her face a Venetian mask scary there is seaweed between her rings, flowers harmful to happiness that is easy to graze on as I gradually move my wounded hand toward her scary eyes that set fire to my workshop. That’s how it is.

  Among the bystanders I recognized the woman from the bridge. She had her arm around the waist of a woman her own age. Their converging faces gave off a white glow that answered the fire’s ochre brightness. The night suddenly became less night-like. At my side, Laure was lost in thought as though she were moving into a world with its own laws, its commas, its intonations and interpretations. We crossed the street to the Hôtel Metropole.

  The two sentences were never-endingly one with the other about everything, a song, a breath, a river, continents, sentences that occupied the body, the emptiness of thoughts, the fulsomeness of living, sentences that plunged into the present and the unknown and, wave after wave, suspended time before heading off again toward eternity, the next sip of wine, a salty snuggle, an appeasement. They were two hungry sentences, one and the same mouth, a carnivorous confrontation between joy and solitude at the heart of darkness that stroked foreheads, thoughts, insults, softened fear, dissolved the salt on foreheads, between thighs, under palms, two sentences that leapt toward faces to glean a little personal history and memory before sliding down into the chest, there to accomplish tasks of hope and of tomorrow. Sentences that did things in grammar and in the wind, did the same things repeatedly as if it were me, in the shape of yesteryear, going back upstream into the time of darkness and the unspeakable.

  They were two sentences with wings and desire, one always ready to seduce the other into conceiving, beyond words, a moistness of life in its slightest splitting of sap and saliva, there where the mouth, caressing the dream’s fine fabric, ventures all the way to the source.

  I could imagine the sentences but I could no longer see myself writing them. In any case, it was impossible to grab them out of the air in full flight or to slow them down enough to grasp their meaning or their scope. The sentences lifted time up like a huge sheet in space and in the same breath took refuge in the slightest nooks of words where, in fits of laughter or spasms of pleasure, they could once again raise themselves in a totally unexpected way so that each one might dream of dreaming still and forever more amid light and darkness.

  The sentences generated their own questions, exclamations and imperatives, which, depending on the degree of urgency, always ended up returning thoughts to the body’s orbit; face-touching sentences, or shoulder-touching, or touching valiant muscles that willingly let things happen to them. Lusty, merry sentences that could starve or multiply the little sweet rolls, flare into a fan, cause lips to heat up, curve and project themselves into the inexpressible, or coil under tongue with leafy rustlings before reaching unknown shores. Most of all they were night-wandering sentences that reminded me of the vertigo of long-gone days, sentences with honey, with rice, with fragrant oils and death in absentia; it was an intoxication of lips and the flavour of flanks, every time thirst touched a verb, there was in each sentence a cloud or a storm that increased the rhythm of breathing, they were good sentences, senselessly good, eternal, ephemeral, arousing mucous membranes and taste buds.

  Tomorrow I would go back to the château and once again immerse myself in the complex world of Tatiana Beaujeu Lehmann and the everyday life of an archaic and global village. The foreign language would continue to flourish and to transform me. I would shelter it for a time, then, suddenly, it would be chased from my thoughts.

  The early-morning light was about to melt into the great gleaming jet of water. A first crack of dawn wet with serenity. A quiet moment before Beirut, in flames, sinks into the middle of the lake and of the reconstituted present.

  LEARNING TO LEAVE A LANDSCAPE

  And we, spectators always, everywhere,

  turned toward the world of objects, never outward.

  It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down.

  We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Autumn. I watch the movement of leaves at the top of a tall tree, always the same one in my gaze ever since I came to the château. I slow the speed of word after word so that Tatiana can, with calm and serenity, enter the realm of the gentle time that is no longer euphoria but an endless dawn with its own heat. The château has been turned into a museum. On display are Charles’s armoires and sketches, June’s photos, and albums of letters and dedications collected from poets who stayed at the château. Part of the living room is now a screening room. Twice a day, one of June’s films is shown, one of those she made while she was living with Kim in Svalbard. The two of them now take turns looking after the library and the archives. Part of what was once the large room with the canopy bed has become a surveillance centre. Five cameras have been installed to protect the château, to which more and more people have access.

  Tatiana was quick to understand that the landscape no longer belonged to us. She was slowly preparing to leave, gradually forgetting the details that make one smile, or cry, or want to go for a walk along the chemin du Signal to contemplate the lake and the city. I too was beginning to feel a lack of landscape. It was eluding my thoughts and desires. I would not be able to keep talking much longer about this setting that we would soon leave.

  Our pleasures, our fears, our conversations, everything that gave us a sense we were living intensely, all this was about to be neutralized, changed into invisible strips of ribbon spiralling above our lives. Ancient languages were translated less and less frequently, as though they had become unfit to reflect the world. Everywhere, egos tossed and turned counter-clockwise. The nature of time itself was changing. That’s how it is.

  Nobody understands anything anymore about events that a mere five years ago were considered commonplace and familiar. On this side of the lake, everything is changing through little tasks, details and regulations. Catching up with one’s life has gradually beco
me impossible, for life seeps out from everywhere, carrying away the presence of each one of us. Nobody understands a thing other than that life gives the impression of not having changed one bit, of being, oh and yet, oh and how, already other, and of continuing its metamorphosis.

  We no longer set angry feelings on fire: they die out on their own, slowly, like the wind. One day anxiety grips us, the next day things are different; all it takes is a little light rain that makes you want to cocoon, to crawl deep into the ancient language, but then one day anxiety returns and we wait for words to spill from our throats, unpronounceable and rubbery. With time, we hope their nameless opacity will make us want to rebel.

  I now sleep in the library, I mean in a small room adjacent to it. A bed, a chair, that’s all. At dawn, I can’t tell if I’m in my room or in the library. I’d like to experience strong, spirited feelings that would leave me in a perfect state of hope and creativity. In the other language, I was an animal sated with hoping and instinct, carnivorous and chameleon. An animal with sharp hearing who, from very far away, could hear the cries and sounds of the wind while immensity lay curled up inside me. I would circulate between pronouns then wait for somebody to start crying or for tenderness to join with dew. I dwelled in my hunger. I always went further.

  Today, I am clinging to the landscape. I am trying to hold it back with my body of silence. Waiting for sensitive things and shapes to awaken in me the ideas necessary to comprehend the world. There is a way of being on the alert and letting our senses do the work. We sometimes have to think, but I’ve noticed that we do it only when forced to, either to solve a problem or to prepare an answer. Choosing is increasingly difficult. I prefer daydreaming, especially in autumn. Not everything can be explained: the crises arising from the inside, the others we see coming that appear like bouquets of images outside the self.

  I drink a lot of coffee. At breakfast I eat pasta with a bit of olive oil and cayenne pepper. I slip into the daily life of the château, slyly longing to write another book, in my own language this time. Laure Ravin is in town. Now and then she drops by the château for cocktails. For years, she and I commuted between New York and Montréal in order to keep on loving one another. Over a forty-eight-hour period, we would celebrate a new time with its own infinite clock ticking. This lasted until border crossings became longer and harder. When war broke out between our two countries, we stopped seeing one another.

  The museum is open Tuesday to Thursday from ten a.m. to three p.m. On the other days, the château is used for receptions held by multinationals with headquarters in the city. Today the château’s foundation is welcoming a Chinese group representing the oXcimore company, a big champagne producer. There are about thirty of them. Several without wives. The terrace buzzes with the tos-and-fros of tones rising, falling, neutral like exclamations and waterslides amid birdsong.

  The water level has gone down considerably. It’s as if the lake were leaking out the bottom. The city has had to stop piping water to the great jet. From the château, the lake is a still, sombre mass. You now have to pay admission to walk in the Jardin anglais, where several murders have been committed in the past five years. Three times, young immigrant women who did not speak the native language, burned alive. You have to pay admission. That’s how it is.

  There is only one newspaper left in the area. Charles publishes sketches in it three times a week. He rarely comes to the village now that he lives in town. From time to time, someone invites him to a reception. He walks by his old workshop. The smell of fire still hangs in the air after two years. There is nothing left but the foundations, scattered stones, beautiful, among which crawl insects and weird little beasts. At the château, during the receptions, he sketches portraits on request. They’re well done, soon done. The rest of the time he talks with the wives. He tells about how in the old days he spent hours sitting in this very garden with great writers discussing Spinoza and Nietzsche as they drank and smoked till dawn. Writers who had no fear. He smiles like a wounded man with tenderness in his eyes. Sometimes his hand trembles alongside his body. That’s how it is.

  I published a first book written in the foreign language, which I speak more and more frequently and in which I am even able to express with precision feelings I am experiencing for the first time. For example, I succeeded in translating what happens when a piece of oneself breaks free with a loud noise or goes softly away toward an ah! so far away! that is nothing like a horizon. Sometimes I try to imagine what June and Kim feel for one another. I still occasionally write in my mother tongue, mostly when sitting in the garden or after a conversation with Tatiana. Our conversations now unfold slowly, as if we were constantly bathing in an Italian afternoon along the Adriatic. I need sounds like the song of cicadas or crickets in order for childhood words to resurface. That I will say, although I experience fewer and fewer emotions. Yes, when someone cries. I have a sensitive ear and react to the slightest change in breathing, tone, volume. I know if it’s coming from the glottis, the nasal passages or through the whole chest.

  The smell of ink lingers in the landscape. I am trying to understand. Inside/outside. What is inside me? What is outside and why should this matter if it is not in me? Having a body is something we rarely think about because it is normal to be in one’s body and to follow it like an instinct that precedes our thoughts. Having a body comes from the verb to be born, and the word mother is never far behind. The body of she who gives birth varies very little from one language to another. Later on, we see if there is tenderness in her gestures, if the tenderness is repeated.

  When the sentences in my head became shorter, tighter, I understood that I could at any moment fall into a disturbance of the senses, get violently carried away in mid-sentence or lose all sense of time in that same spot. It’s one of the reasons I cling to the landscape like a surreal little girl in the centre of a drawing of a beautiful blue sky with a shimmering horizon.

  Around the château, it’s like there’s nothing left but the lovely smell of roses and cedar hedge. Al, the gardener, still works here. He comes twice a week to rake, weed, water, harvest. With him I can talk about the war. Nobody around us wants to discuss it. It’s a taboo subject, just like what happened in Montréal in December 1989. He is very familiar with the geography of both countries. He knows all about the trees and plants from the very tip of Key West to the shores of Baffin Island and even farther north. Hibiscus or potentilla, palmaceae or betulaceae, he knows. I can tell him how I went from Montréal to Gaspésie, then on to Halifax, where there were still boats that met up with ships in international waters. One day he simply said, ‘Water, I pushed their heads under water. It could go on for hours. You couldn’t make a mistake and keep the head under too long. It was horrible. There was always a risk of breaking their necks, we had to work in twos and be gentle with our big hands. That took good judgment. The palms of my hands can still feel the slippery scalps, the wet hair getting tangled between our fingers. Their heads thrashed about vigorously. The faster they moved their heads, the more noisily they suffocated. It took patience. We always played music made in U.S.A.’ I now believe there is something unreal in this man. I can no longer look at his hands. He said he wanted to leave for Thailand soon.

  More and more I love darkness for itself, it soothes me, makes me feel good, though I don’t quite understand why. I also love it because I am trying to imagine language without light, as though I wanted to understand how things were before language, when, deep in the throat, syllables and vowels were not yet organized and it was necessary to tilt one’s head back to allow sounds to fly through the open air, terrifying, guttural or strident. In the beginning, I thought the other language would enlighten me, clarify the mysteries of my inner life. I wanted to learn to read inside myself. Reading inside oneself may not be important.

  Somehow, by setting the original me and a fictional me in a foreign language, I thought I might succeed in covering every angle of the idea that the body renews itself. I rarely write
in the ‘desperately tomorrow’ mode, yet it does happen, such as right now, when the voice, in fragmenting meaning, becomes concerned, oh and how!, with seeing itself go thus with its hand outstretched toward infinity, in life and in death. I then grasp that if this irresistible arousal requires words, it’s because their great reserve of the absolute revives the meaning of life time and again. Meanwhile there will be, there were, hollows, games, depositions. What is there to understand other than simple sentences like those I read sitting in the garden in the afternoon, craving images? What else is there to read but my intention to not disappear?

  At the time I was writing the book in the foreign language, I had come to believe that the effort required would be so great that it would force me to refine the meaning of what I nonchalantly called my ‘desire for immensity.’ I knew the foreign language had the reputation of containing a large number of words used to measure and interpret the physical world. Words abounded to talk about the cosmos, black holes, dark matter and constellations. What’s more, this other tongue allowed me to shift from I to third-person singular and vice versa without justification, without crossing the bridge of identities and differences. It was useful to me from dawn till dusk and always gave me the impression of standing in the truth of things and of sensations. With this language, I was simultaneously intimate and public. I was afraid of nothing. I claimed to be afraid of nothing, for I could also lie whenever it struck my fancy. To enter and exit at will the landscape of my loves and of my anxieties.

  Inside/outside rolls the language of passions. Part of me is visible, the other sunk into the invisible. Every hour imperceptibly shifts the visible part of what I am into another dimension. The invisible part whirls around the garden above the lake, I know it sometimes goes back to the darkness of before language. This I know. It’s the invisible part that gives life to the life in me and around me. I would like to know what it is made of and how it travels through the body without ever quite rendering it nostalgic.