The winters marched past, closely flanked by autumns and springs that ushered in the fleeting summers when Montreal stewed like a potful of soup. Her face showed one or two new wrinkles, she quit smoking three times only to start again, and slept with a few women, mothers or younger women in search of new continents. Once a year she returned to the bleak maze of the east-end refineries. At the spot where Mila had died, an oil stain stubbornly persisted. Killing the woman she loved so deeply had given her a reason to die, and this had infused her undercover work with a kind of recklessness. It remained the pivotal moment of her life, even now. But she no longer wished to die. She wanted to go back to the scenes of the worst mission ever assigned to her and to experience, with all the ambivalence of her body, the sort of man she once was. Hard, obedient, and stupid. Had Maslo been slower to act, Mila surely would have killed him first.
It was on the day of that anniversary that she met Mila again. Victoria was down on one knee, deep in meditation, when she felt a stab in her back, in the exact spot where the bullet that killed Mila had exited after boring a hole through her heart. The point was so precise that at first Victoria thought she was dreaming. Then she heard the hard heels striking the asphalt behind her and quickly realized that the apparitions of her former lover had not been mirages. She turned around.
“I may have killed you, Mila d’Eon, but I didn’t shoot you in the back.”
“Well, I have. I shoot people in the back. And you didn’t kill me.”
“Obviously not.”
“You, on the other hand, have about three minutes left before lethal paralysis sets in.”
Mila yanked a dart out of Victoria’s back and handed it to her. Victoria calmly considered the originality of the method adopted to eliminate her.
“My just deserts.”
“It’s not what you think. I’m not after revenge.”
“Oh, really?”
Mila stepped closer and angrily clutched Victoria’s blond hair.
“I want to punish you for being so completely ridiculous!”
She flung the wig far away, pulled Victoria near to her, and planted a brutal kiss on her lips.
Despite being one of the most closely watched places on Montreal Island, the refinery district was deserted. Unseen, Mila and Victoria made love savagely. Once they’d put their clothes back on, Victoria was amused to see the streaks of rouge she’d left on Mila’s neck.
“Looks like I’m not about to die.”
“Of course not. There was nothing but lemon juice on the dart.”
“I love you, Mila.”
Mila gave her a stern look and then picked up her Hermès bag, which held—Victoria hadn’t doubted it for even a second—a Glock and enough poison to slay a regiment. She disappeared among the storage tanks and Victoria headed back with the sense that the order of the world had just been overturned. The refinery lights blinked in the evening moonscape. In a little while it would be her turn to step up to the mic.
She spent many feverish hours desperately looking for Mila. She scoured the city and combed through the most arcane records trying to track her down. Recovering her old reflexes, she followed every possible trail, from newspaper archives to political organizations, from shooting clubs to the courthouse clerk. At wit’s end, she even inquired at the consulate of Russia, one of the four countries of which Mila was a citizen. Speaking with a flawless Québécois accent, Victoria explained to the official that she was looking for a former tenant who had decamped without paying her rent.
“She told me she was Russian. Her name is Mila d’Eon.”
At this, the sad-eyed bureaucrat stopped scanning the sports page and looked up at her.
“How long was this woman a tenant of yours?”
“I’m not sure . . . a few months.”
“And she said her name was Mila d’Eon?”
“Yes. I’d like to know if she’s still in the country. If there’s a way to get the money she owes me.”
“Excuse me for a moment.”
The man went out of the office. Squirming in her chair, Victoria waited for what seemed like an eternity. Since her defection she had never been so close to her former bosses. It made her nervous. When the functionary came back he looked Victoria straight in the eye.
“The woman you’re looking for has indeed been reported missing, Madame Tremblay. And it would be best if your search ended here and now.”
He had spoken in Russian, his voice perfectly calm, articulating the words “Madame Tremblay” a little more slowly than the rest. Victoria nodded and cautiously made for the exit riddled with multiple lenses that recorded each of her movements.
That afternoon she took a leave of absence, packed her belongings, and changed her address. Having discarded her blond wigs, she turned into a brunette and got rid of everything that had been left over from her former life. Using her makeup kit, she fashioned a new face for herself, more subtle and low-key, in keeping with what she needed to become: an inconspicuous woman. As she applied a second layer of foundation she studied her reflection in the mirror, trying to locate among her features the interior enemy that had made her life such a failure.
After a while she went back to the cabaret burdened with her obsession and a broken heart. She would gladly have given up her now thoroughly joyless job, if not for the hope of seeing Mila’s ruthless pout poking out among the audience. Shunning the stage, she spent her nights behind the bar surveying the crowd in search of a sign. Mila’s shadow was omnipresent, pervasive, toxic.
The anxiety made Victoria’s muscles wither and her face sag. She even seemed to grow shorter; her feet shrank inside her cheap shoes. Her voice went up to unfamiliar heights, and her body hair became increasingly sparse. Victoria was wholly preoccupied with her quest and didn’t notice these changes right away. But one day, as she was coming back after a stroll around La Fontaine Park, she felt it. The difference. An alteration at once subtle and radical lashing the pivotal centre of her body. She raced home in disbelief, but her mirror confirmed the spectacular transmogrification: in the place that just yesterday had held the last vestiges of the man he had been, there were female genitals like all those she had known, endowed with the various curves, dimples, and smiles that made them unique. On her chest, the pectoral muscles had given way to tired but proud breasts, and her sides had acquired new contours that narrowed her waistline. Like a planet that changes its axis, her body had tipped over.
She settled into her new anatomical geography without talking about it to anyone, happy just to inhabit the structure that had taken shape for her. But at the cabaret her colleagues sensed the transformation, and most of them reacted to this intuition with instinctive scorn, as if her new-found authenticity somehow discredited her. What was valued in this community was the fact of being both one and the other, of being midway, of never arriving anywhere. Her shift had placed her in a camp from which there was no way out.
This is when Mila decided to resurface. One Tuesday, while Victoria was watching the rerun of Julia Alexandrovna Kourotchkina’s triumph at the Miss World pageant on her little TV, the telephone rang with a miraculous chime. There was an unusual note of tenderness in Mila’s voice as she once again turned the universe upside down.
“You’re a father, Maslo.”
Victoria was speechless for almost a minute, so Mila repeated the message until it found its way from the heart to the head.
“But how?!”
“The usual way.”
“Where are you?”
“We’re at the hospital. Come.”
The wind from the west was almost a gale, making each step a struggle, as in a dream where everything holds you back. At the intersections, the red held the other traffic lights hostage for hours. An endless stream of buses barred her way; road closures forced her to take unimaginable detours. The blood pounded in her temples; a minusc
ule second heart pulsed in her body. She was a father. Father and mother at the same time. She was about to become heaven and earth to a tiny human being that Mila, though full of resentment, had brought into the world. Let the wind blow; she was an arrow determined to fly north.
The hospital loomed up on the mountainside like a Russian ballad. Victoria headed toward Pavilion F, the Women’s Pavilion, where lives began between women’s legs, were greeted with women’s hands and rocked by women who knew the secrets of all women. Victoria approached the entrance with the impression of arriving at a temple. But before she could touch the doorhandle she was hailed by a whistle. Her whole skin shuddered. She recognized this sound from another era. It was the signal she and Mila had agreed on to find each other in the darkness and chaos. Victoria answered, blowing between her lip and her incisors, and then started up the road that plunged into the mountain, unsurprised that her beloved had chosen to wait for her in the woods rather than some yellowish room. In a thousand ways, Mila d’Eon belonged more to the forest than to civilization.
She found herself under the canopy of a massive tree. The ground was carpeted with apples. Mila, dressed in a linen blanket, with her hair down, was smiling. “Unarmed,” Victoria thought. She could not keep from hugging her, from caressing her, from doing the things that usually annoyed Mila but that she seemed to accept today.
“I needed to get some air, so I waited for you here.”
“Where’s our child?”
“Sleeping. I’ll take you in a few moments.”
“Is he all right?”
“Yes.”
“Is it a girl? A boy?”
Mila shook her head, and Victoria realized she’d never seen her this way, her hair floating in the wind. Like the rest of her soul, Mila always kept her hair tightly tied, close against her skull, impossible to grab in a fight or when making love. She took a long time to reply and looked Victoria up and down with a brutal, penetrating gaze that seemed to see through her clothes. She shrugged as if none of this mattered.
“A boy.”
“A boy,” Victoria repeated.
Mila averted her eyes. The apple tree was enormous, evidently very old. Older perhaps than all this, these buildings, these births, these unfathomable loves. Planted by a poor settler with a sweet tooth. The ground seemed to be made of apples that rolled underfoot.
“Have you chosen a name?”
Mila shook her head slowly with a tender look, which suddenly turned fierce. The wind came up.
“We’ll find one together,” Victoria said.
“Yes.”
Victoria breathed in and her chest filled with all-new confidence. She leaned down to pick up an apple and rubbed it on her jacket. Mila gave her a gentle smile.
“No, not that one. It’s pitted.”
She handed her a different apple, smaller and redder, as if the essence of all the other apples had been instilled in it.
“This one. Here.”
Victoria opened her mouth and bit into the fruit, which gave out an almost gleeful crunch. She instantly felt the darkness swooping down. She barely had time to hear the sound, to the east of her body, of footsteps receding.
Victoria Kumari
I was a saint. An icon, an idol. People came from everywhere to worship me, to smother me in smoke, fragrant herbs, and orange peels. I was a living goddess. I was a Kumari.
For seven years, my feet never touched the ground. My meals were brought to my bed, I was carried to my bath, transported to the temple, and I floated over everything like a beam of light. My life was a network of triangles, stars, and crosses that I was able to decipher. The gods are all-knowing; I was exempted from learning. The gods have no one to appeal to; I did not have to pray. I was red, I was gold, with a formidable eye in the middle of my brow.
I can still recall the sound that set everything in motion. The dry clink of a tooth dropping into an empty bowl. My mother wept. I thought I’d done something wrong. The first of my teeth to fall out. But my mother wept for joy. In my memory, it rained milk teeth all over Montreal. Actually, it may have snowed—it makes no difference. That day, the tall chimneys, the decontamination tanks, the doomed districts, the rickety hovels, all became sacred. I closed my eyes for seven years and saw everything.
When the perfect little girl loses her first milk tooth, she is of an age to be chosen. The holy men of the Great All arrive—lamas, cardinals, astrologers, ulema—and examine her mouth, arms, hair, on the lookout for hidden flaws. Then they search her skin for the mark of the goddess Akna. When they find it, they smile and draw the Eternal Eye on her forehead. My skull was filled with warmth while they made their drawing. That is how, in a cloud of charcoal and cayenne, I learned that my life was about to change. Again my mother wept.
After that, I became the one they had chosen. Because Akna, the goddess I incarnated, is fearless, they made me spend a night in a room full of animal heads, with the reek of hooves and missing skins, the stench of blood, and flies all around. I did not cry. In the morning they declared that I possessed the bravery of the saints. They purified me, the embers, the ardent bells, the priests’ hands coated with an oil that penetrated my skin like a serpent’s tongue. They danced. I closed my two eyes and opened the third.
I beheld the gold, the cloths, the sculpted altars inside the palace of the Zenith. Outside, the city was no longer grey, but golden. Its sparkling soot and dust revealed its modest illuminations through the ruins and slums. In the distance, the sacred mountain greeted me. What once had frightened me, I now dominated. I was mistress of the desperate and the survivors. During my appearances at the window I looked out at the faithful and did my best to bestow my grace upon them. I would have preferred to give my compassion to these poor devotees, who laid their misery and miscarriages at my feet. But the White Priest repeatedly cautioned me: pity is the grace of mortals. The grace of the gods is serenity.
I was little, but I was not a child anymore. Thus, it behooved me not to smile, shout, or play. This was difficult. At first, I amused myself by blowing on the confetti strewn over the ground, making them race each other, yellow against pink, blue pulls ahead of black. Or I imagined I was the one who determined the movements of the shadows thrown up from the courtyard onto my window. When I wanted to see them dance, they danced. If I wished for them to lie flat, they dropped down. Gradually, though, I lost the taste for such games, at once too simple and too complicated. What’s more, they were false. My head filled with light. The shadows ceased to exist.
The Kumaris appeared a very long time ago, before the era of the Great All, before the Plague that had preceded it. The world was then a constellation of villages and families, and the water was still pristine and pure. At the time, Akna was the friend of a very powerful king. When he betrayed her, she went to hide among the little girls of his kingdom, condemning the king, generation after generation, to find the one possessed of divinity. When the world was unified, the guardians of tradition migrated here, ready to discover the goddesses hidden among the white multitudes of our continent. But only after the Plague, when chaos took root, did the survivors turn to the power of the Kumaris. Since then, each decade brings a new little girl to be venerated.
The faithful would come on foot from the four corners of the island to supplicate me. The women entreated me to end the cycle of stillborn babies, to stop the blood or make it come back when it was spent. They wished for happy births, twins, triplets, the litters of tigresses. The young men wanted me to bless their makeshift weapons and tools; the old men prayed for water, meat, a dry bed where they might put their final illnesses to sleep. If I cried, laughed, shouted, or yawned; if I turned my head, sneezed, rubbed my eyes, hiccoughed, or if my stomach gurgled, the faithful concluded that their death was imminent, that they would lose their children, that everything they owned would be taken from them and their humble dwellings burned down. I strived
to say still. When I failed, the faithful would go away tearing their hair out.
I missed my mother at first. The statues of Krishna, Calvin, and Nostradamus that stood in my room looked at me with stern expressions. I swallowed my tears. My father and my brother sometimes came to visit. They weren’t permitted to share my meals or sleep in the palace of the Zenith. I kept from crying in their presence too. I didn’t want them to leave under unfavourable auspices. One day I presented them with a gift, a piece of paper that a servant had delicately folded into the shape of a bird for me. They accepted it with a bow. Later, I saw them place it on an altar before crossing the central square like strangers.
From time to time, irreverent individuals would wave to me like old friends. They expected me to wave back. They stayed rooted under my window while pilgrims looked daggers at them; they would point at my Eternal Eye and then leave. The goddess in me wanted to strike them down, to bring them closer, embrace them, and eat their heads. Once, on a stormy night, I waited to be alone, took an apple from the fruit bowl, and flung it at the statue of the Destroyer. The apple shattered against the god’s stomach. The next day Montreal was struck by an earthquake and what remained of the old hospital was engulfed.
I was frightened the day I felt two hard bumps push their way through my chest. It was painful, and it was ugly. My eldest servant, the one who bathed and perfumed me when I awoke, explained that these were chrysanthemum buds on the verge of bursting open to light the world. At night I looked under my nightgown, worried I might miss their opening. It would have given me nightmares, had I not stopped dreaming the day I lost my first tooth.
It was the blood, as always, that put an end to it all. One night as I was undressing, I discovered a dark red trickle on my thigh. The servants were aghast and bowed before backing out of the room. For the first time in seven years I remained alone and naked, with no one to dress me and accompany me to my bed. I clumsily put on my clothes, I had almost forgotten how. I stayed on my seat, waiting for them to come back and carry me across the room. An eternity went by. I realized I was no longer a Kumari. The goddess had left my body along with those first drops of blood.
Madame Victoria Page 13