by Anne H
Aline hurries. Her red shoes trip lightheartedly along the sidewalk. She sees everything, hears everything along the way, as if everything was being offered and given to her. Streets, houses, the small lots in front of houses, the children playing, the barking dogs. The entire city has been tamed. Aline herself could define the city’s boundaries, organize it in her own way, locate its secret heart, and lodge in her own breast the city’s radiant heart that so enchants her.
All day, Julien’s place at the post office stayed empty, surrounded by piled-up bags of mail.
Aline has neither his phone number nor his address.
✦✦✦
His head filled with romantic models, Julien revels in his solitude. Ensconced in his armchair he reads poems, listens to records. He seeks accomplices and brothers. Wishes he could unite his voice with the most hopeless songs on earth. Having put off mourning Lydie for so long, now he would like to celebrate her in a great dirge of a poem, like a poisonous flower wrenched from his heart. He is swallowed up in dreams.
Soon he hears nothing in the silent red room, sees nothing, feels nothing but a vast weariness. Books closed, records still, the reasons why his soul is lost are no longer apparent to him. Julien falls asleep in the threadbare old chair that smells of dust.
On wakening he is not quite sure if it is the end of a day or its beginning. Pale sunlight filters in through the windowpane. Time can no longer be measured. All that is left for him to do is drag himself like a sleepwalker, walk endlessly down the long corridor, knock at the closed doors of Pauline’s room, and of Hélène’s.
Julien’s life is filled with dead women. Where does the idea come from, suddenly, to hurl abuse at Lydie as if she was alive?
✦✦✦
Aline thinks she’ll never see Julien again. She continues to look out her window. The wrong side of the city is there before her eyes, after the good side — the one she knew first and that will not return. The sick, the crippled, the humiliated, the injured, the old, the prisoners, the battered child, the woman gravely offended — all are there beneath her window, assuring her that a disappointment in love is a mere drop in the ocean of the world’s pain. Now she need only take her place like everyone else in this city that has belonged to her for just a short time, go back into the rank that was intended for her for all eternity. Here is the share that is just for her, the bundle of her belongings she must shoulder at any moment. More than the city where she was born, the entire world is there before her, round as an orange she could hold in her hand. Invisible creatures are born, then they die. Their cries are lost in the boundless emptiness. Now Aline is simply a dot that is erased from the map of the world while a gigantic shadow hovers over the land and the seas, tracing there the shape of a cross.
Aline has no tears. A sharp burning stabs at her eyes, dries her lips.
On the evening of the third day she has gone to bed, as usual. Sleepless for a long time, she looks at the ceiling, at the glow of headlights from the cars that pass along the street.
✦✦✦
We shall enter splendid cities
Stripped to the skin
Astride steeds of horror.
His one and only poem. Again and again, Julien repeats those words from another time. It was autumn on the shore of the Duchesnay. A scant three lines in honour of Lydie Bruneau. Julien sits at the kitchen table. He drinks coffee. Pleads for grace. He hopes a poem will come. He darkens entire pages, then immediately tears them up. Dead letters no one will ever read.
Once only, it was autumn on the shore of the Duchesnay, there was love and in his poem the steeds of horror turned loose against his heart. The splendid creature who was driving them has fled out of this world to the sound of clattering hooves.
Here is the apartment on rue Cartier. In the kitchen, torn scraps of paper on the floor and around the deal table. The red room with books, records, clothing, empty cups, and the coffeepot overturned on the carpet in the stuffy air.
Julien throws the window open, breathes deeply like someone recovering his breath after running for too long. He is hungry and thirsty.
In the kitchen, not a grain of coffee nor the smallest crust of bread. Julien leans out the window, listens to the rumours of night rising towards him. Aline’s slight body is resting somewhere in the night. Julien has only enough time to go to rue Latourelle. He is afraid of losing Aline. He showers, shaves, rushes out into the sweltering summer night. He will kneel before Aline, beseech her forgiveness. He will beg a cup of coffee and a piece of bread.
✦✦✦
She heats water. Brews coffee. Now she takes pure white slices of bread from a brown paper bag. You can hear the water sing in the kettle. She turns around slowly, she is barefoot, wrapped in her flowered housecoat. Her tangled hair foams across her forehead and down to her nose. Her voice is different. A feeble thread, barely audible:
“Do you want sugar for your coffee?”
She crosses and recrosses her housecoat over her breasts. He eats and drinks. Holds a tray on his knees. He avoids looking at Aline but can feel her gaze fixed on him. She stands before him, unmoving, and studies him endlessly, as if she is amazed to see him here, in her room.
Again her voice, half stifled:
“I think I nearly died.”
She laughs, embarrassed, as though she’s just said something very stupid.
“Never mind me. I’m just being silly.”
Aline is so tired that Julien takes off her dressing gown and gently, with infinite care, puts her to bed. Now she is lying on the narrow sofa. She shuts her eyes, exhausted from holding back so many tears. Whispers:
“Good night, sleep well, see you tomorrow.”
“Yes, see you tomorrow,” replies Julien, already sorry to have committed himself a full day in advance.
He stuffs his hand in his pocket, touches the cold metal of his own apartment key, as if he had access to his full freedom as a man.
✦✦✦
Julien sees Aline home every evening after work. Sometimes he goes up with her to the room under the eaves. She fixes him spaghetti or French toast, instant coffee and cheese with cherries. They make love together, without extravagance and without forgetting to take precautions. She is crazy about him. He is as reasonable as a model student.
As soon as he leaves Aline, Julien returns to the solitude of his red room. Sometimes he writes poems, then tears them up. He plays records, listens to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, to Schubert, Ravel, and Stravinsky. He reads poems and novels. He is transported to a world without limits, one where strange sensations and astonishing characters abound. A second existence doubles the little life he leads as ideal employee and well-behaved lover. Fabulous cities appear between the lines of his books, allowing him to glimpse a labyrinth of strange streets and lanes, while great sacred squares loom up before cathedrals like huge standing stones, filled with carved saints and demons.
Anywhere out of this world. The domes of St. Petersburg, Raskolnikov and Stavrogin, the smog of London streets and the debtors’ prisons of Dickens, Esmeralda dancing on the square outside Notre Dame, the blue of Chartres (as seen in costly picture books), so many images that appear to Julien’s eyes like scattered elements of the promised land of his dreams.
Following in Baudelaire’s footsteps he tastes the spleen of Paris, breathes the noxious air, wanders endlessly through the haunted streets, while the cry of the evil glazier splits his ears and Mademoiselle Bistouri dogs his footsteps, asking endlessly:
“Are you a doctor?”
When the war is over and he has saved enough money, Julien will leave. He will board a ship and cross the Atlantic. Over the course of days and nights he will come to know the sea.
Julien goes more and more often to Aline’s. He climbs the stairs, breathless. Calls Aline “My sweet,” “My pearl,” “My marvel,�
� though he doesn’t like her checked or flowered dresses.
✦✦✦
When Julien is with her it seems that nothing can violate Aline’s peace. With her face buried in Julien’s neck, she sometimes thinks of eternity, without fear or dread. When the earth no longer exists, she thinks, and when Julien, reduced to his volatile soul, is cast alive into God’s burning bush, like a brief candle flame at sea in an ocean of fire, I shall turn to him out of all the rest, and warm my hands and heart there, world without end.
Sometimes Julien ventures to read Aline a poem of his rescued from the wastebasket, sharing it with her like a formidable secret.
She listens, knitting her brow, utterly attentive, fascinated by the strange language that she understands no more than she did the Church Latin that lulled her childhood. Can it be that all these fantasies Julien has written are, like Latin, only some obscure signs of the word of God?
She hides her face in her hands. Julien’s mystery embarrasses her and frightens her as if it was sacred. She stammers:
“Where on earth does all that come from, for the love of God!”
Often when Julien raps at her door — three short knocks, following the signal they’ve agreed on — Aline is startled because she has been hunched over her crackling radio, listening to news of the war. Softly she laments refugees, prisoners, those who are tortured or killed under a rain of fire. She retains the names of countries, imagines the tears and the blood. As time passes and the horror advances, she says: “The poor little Poles, poor little Belgians, poor little French, poor little Canadians, poor little Russians, poor little English.” One night when Julien showed up after a week of silence, she switched off her radio and in a voice filled with infinite compassion, murmured:
“Poor little me.”
Giggling, she makes small talk. Again and again, she repeats the same trivial details of her everyday life as if they were affairs of state. But when it’s a question of what matters to her most in the world — her love for Julien — every word must be torn from her mouth, as if she was afraid she’d have to spit out her heart and die on the spot.
She mutters, seems to mock both herself and Julien:
“When we’re together it’s paradise, you handsome man!”
Never, not at the sweetest moments, nor at the bitterest ones, does she ask Julien:
“Do you love me?”
Does she not know in the hollow of her bones that Julien has no answer to such a question?
✦✦✦
He is like a childish Don Quixote, crammed full of reading and music, who accumulates treasures before going out to explore the vast world. One day Julien will set sail for Europe, having stocked up on marvels in a closed room.
Sometimes he takes Aline to Anse aux Foulons, where they look across the immense river to the Lévis shore. Soon he plays at pretending it’s the Seine. He tries to fit the St. Lawrence River into the scale of his desire, finding it inordinate, vertiginous. He gazes at the water and waves through a small circle formed by his thumb and forefinger. I believe what I want to believe, he tells himself. Here is the Seine between my fingers, flowing and returning to the sun. At any moment Baudelaire may appear upon the rocky shore, with his green hair and his stovepipe hat over one ear.
Aline touches Julien’s shoulder as if he was a child who must be wakened softly, without shaking him or frightening him too much.
“Come, quickly. Time to go home now.”
✦✦✦
When the war was over, Julien, torn for a moment from the world of his imagination, felt something like a shiver pass over his skin. The harsh reality of the earth was counting its dead and its survivors. He asked Aline to arrange a little party to celebrate the victory.
Aline set up the card table and there was no room left to move around it. She set the table with a white cloth with cross-stitch embroidery, blue plates with yellow figures, carefully washed cream-cheese glasses that sparkled like crystal, a lighted red candle. The small size of Aline’s room seemed not to hamper her precise gestures in the least. She turns and turns, from the table to the tiny electric hot plate, from the hot plate to the table, like someone dancing on the spot. On the sofa bed, hulled strawberries in a blue bowl. A stew is simmering on the hot plate, the aluminum lid bobbling up and down amid gusts of aroma.
On the windowsill there is the pink rose Julien gave her and put in a glass.
If Aline takes a step towards the window, it is to smell Julien’s rose, to feel it soft and cool against her cheek.
When they had finished eating, after each of them had smoked a cigarette, Julien kissed Aline. He told her that with the war over now, all he wanted to do was leave for France as soon as possible. He continued kissing Aline, who sat there as still as the dead.
It was then that Aline realized that along with Julien’s mysterious reveries, she too possessed a secret of her own. A vast room with tall windows, a long table with a cloth upon it white as snow and reaching to the floor, a huge oven where three-layered cakes were baking, air to breathe deeply all around, like at the seashore, a big bed to lie in with Julien and make love without precautions, to start a family in full peace of mind.
✦✦✦
Julien waits for things in France to calm down: the settling of scores, the trials, the girls with shaved heads. He reads newspapers and magazines. He is learning about the world in the days when it was cursed.
Julien scrimps and saves to prepare for his journey overseas. He does without socks and movies, no longer buys flowers for Aline. He pinches pennies, pinches dollars, too. He counts the months, the weeks, the days that separate him from his Atlantic crossing. He writes poems and immediately discards them.
One night Julien gave Aline the keys to his apartment. He asked if she wanted to live there while he was away. Two rooms were off limits, however: Pauline’s bedroom and Hélène’s. Aline looked around the apartment. She saw two blocked-up doors in the long hallway. Dead women whispered dimly behind them. Aline was as sure of it as is someone who hears a mosquito buzzing unseen in the dark.
Aline looks at the bunch of keys in her hand. She thinks of Bluebeard and refuses to enter into a tale that is so cruel. She tells Julien she’d rather stay in her own room on rue Latourelle.
She insisted on seeing his ticket with the number of his cabin. Promised to write.
Two days later, Julien bids Aline farewell. He kisses her on the mouth, the eyes, the nose, the brow, he drinks the tears all down her cheeks.
“I’ll come back. You know perfectly well I’ll come back.”
The Mauritania slowly pulls away from the wharf, leaves long thick trails of oil and tar. Aline measures the space that is growing imperceptibly between the ship and the wharf. She watches the deck where Julien’s white handkerchief is waved, then gradually disappears.
When there was nothing to see on the horizon but the grey of the water, the grey of the sky, Aline felt very cold — on her back, her bare arms, to the very roots of her hair — despite the vast warm June day all around her.
IV
Here they are sitting side by side on a wooden bench, in an allée of the Jardin du Luxembourg. Julien is no longer alone and at sea in a strange city. A woman is with him here beneath the placid, orderly trees, in the hot air of July.
He bows his head, stares at the sand at his feet, digs at it with his shoe. Real life is not here, he thinks, with this unknown woman at his side and this overly manicured garden around him. He is all stubborn, testy silence.
“Oh là là, what a grump you are!”
Her laughter is light and she looks at Julien with amazement.
He is thinking about the trees he knew in Duchesnay, that grew there untidily, the dead ones mixed in with the living. He looks up but no longer sees anything around him, neither the garden nor the woman at his side. Inside his ch
est a savage and taciturn land is wringing his heart.
“Good God, this garden is so tame and tidy!”
She laughs very loud, sure of the satisfactory beauty of her garden and of the fullness of her life.
He bows his head again, peers closely at the sand and gravel at his feet. He wishes he had neither past nor turmoil, only bliss that can be measured, sorrow that can be healed, like this woman sitting close to him who laughs and laughs and laughs.
With both hands on the nape of his neck, rumpling his hair, she forces Julien to look up again.
“What hair you have, it’s as thick as the fleece on a sheep’s back and the colour of a marron glacé!”
Her bright and merry eyes try to capture Julien’s fleeting gaze. She is patient. She will wait as long as is needed until he does something, says something.
Her soft warm hands on his neck, on his brow. Later perhaps, once it has been surrendered to the wonder of memory, this brief moment in the hands of the woman from Les Billettes will seem to him delectable and harrowing, like the gift of a day that passes and never returns.
She has risen, now stands erect in the light, already caught up again in her own unknown life that awaits her out there, somewhere in this city, beyond the gates of the garden and beyond Julien’s grasp. He says goodbye to a stranger who eludes him, who is reaching out towards an immediate future, one from which he is excluded.
They were taking their leave of one another as the gates were closing and the slow, tired stream of donkeys and ponies were returning to the stable for the night. He was so afraid of not seeing her again, of losing her face in the nameless crowd. He makes her promise to come to the Ravel concert two days hence, at the Salle Pleyel.
✦✦✦
It rained all the following day. The trees of Paris, and what little earth there is at the base of trees or inside the iron gates, are fragrant now as Duchesnay once was. Thus did Lydie in a bygone life smell of damp earth, in the fox shed.