Madame Victoria

by Catherine Leroux

  The rain returns, lingers, and her body sinks into the mud. A little pond forms around her. Now she is half submerged and must raise her head to avoid swallowing water. But she doesn’t leave her lair. The sound of the drops hypnotizes her.

  Is she alive or dead? Is all of this just a dream; this clan that occupied the centre of the universe, had it really existed? If she expires, here, stretched out in the mud, if she dies with no one to bury her, to pray for her soul to cross the final rivers, if she disappears without anyone even noticing, will she have lived?

  To drive away her doubts she clutches at a memory, grasps it tightly, and forces it to unfold day after day, hour after hour. A stormy night, gathered together in the great hut with herbal teas to keep warm and songs for protection. Babies nestled in the arms of children, children snuggled against the old folks. Nervous laughter between the rumblings of the sky. You had to stay together, resist the evil spirits with wakefulness. At last, a moonbeam shone down to announce the end of chaos, and sleep took everyone by surprise. Each one’s breath, weight, sweat all jumbled together, they slept. She seizes this moment. She holds it.

  Her teeth have fallen out. The earth instantly swallowed them up. She feels no pain, but something is missing. Night falls and falls again, fear returns. The shores move closer. Who knows which giants are preparing to march again, to cross the mountain, to hold back the dawn . . . She’d like to invoke the spirits of the elders, but she fears their forgiveness as much as their wrath.

  The real battle begins the day the water completely covers her body. When this happens, Victoria isn’t afraid anymore. Now there are only two possibilities. Either she gets up, walks over to the fruit tree, eats, dries herself off, regains her strength, builds a shelter, sleeps, fishes, lights a fire, maintains the light. Or she sinks deeper beneath this bush, in this ditch dug by her inertia. Her breathing slows, her voice recedes even more. Her limbs no longer obey. She has unlearned everything.

  At the last moment, rage grabs hold of her, makes her blood surge and her lungs spew out the water inside them. She spits. She wants to get to her feet and race through the forest, climb the mountain, run until she meets a man, an eagle, or a puma that she can mate with and give birth to sons that she can mate with too, she wants to recreate her race from the little that’s left of her. Her fury is such that she could take wing, plunge into the river, grapple with reptiles barehanded; she wants to shoot arrows into the northern sky, as many as it takes to make the rain stop and bring back the sun.

  Has she stood up? Did she shout? What word did she hurl through the downpour, and where did it come down? The night’s dark hands tighten around her throat. She never existed.

  Heavy jowls, bushy eyebrows, doleful eyes, and a receding chin. You’d think this woman was a baker or a janitor welded to her mop, spreading an odour of detergent and mould in her wake. A surly commoner who accidentally fell into the wardrobe of a regent. And yet, Germain muses as he continues to stare at the portrait displayed by his daughter, this really is the woman who held the reins of an empire, even giving her name to an entire era.

  Are they making the same mistake with his Victoria? It was inferred from her tired bones and the sad features attributed to her that she had ended up alone because she had made a mess of her life. But this face, like the queen’s, may be misleading, a mask hiding a heroic life. An unfinished, renewed, undying Victorian age. Germain, his eyes still fixed on the sovereign’s portrait, squints in an attempt to animate her features, to make them smile, frown, and then open up, divulge their secrets, their pains and desires. Everything trapped under the appearance of immutability.

  Shaking himself out of his daydream, he comes back to Clara rehearsing her oral presentation. Curled up inside herself, she seems to inhabit only a tiny corner of her body.

  “Victoria reigned over the United Kingdom for more than sixty-three years. Her name has been used to describe the strict morality of that period. Many cities have been named in her honour, including the capital of British Columbia. Closer to home, the Victoria Bridge, built in 1860, was inaugurated by the queen’s son Edward. At the time, it was considered the eighth wonder of the world. In Quebec City, the statue of Victoria was decapitated by the FLQ in 1963. Finally, Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital has cared for the ill since 1893. That is where I was born, and that is where my father works. Victoria is all around us. She has become an integral part of our daily lives. For me, this is true celebrity. It is when your name becomes something greater than yourself.”

  She gives a comical bow. Germain applauds, congratulates her, but checks the urge to hug her. Without her imaginary audience, Clara becomes Clara again, her energy exploding in every direction and her body, which has grown too fast, contorting with every step. She goes upstairs, leaving Germain alone with the Queen’s portrait, which she plans to take along for her talk on the topic of fame. Oral presentations are absolute torture for her. She clings to the little picture as if she could hide behind it.

  In her bedroom, the half-light has transformed the colour of the walls, the texture of the carpet. The sun has almost disappeared behind the mountain. Clara glides over to the window seat and contemplates the silhouette of Mount Royal, the purple clouds dissolving around it. She likes to sit in this spot and study the landscape as if seeing it for the first time. To identify the turrets of the Royal Victoria, where she imagines her father’s days, the difficulties and the triumphs that are basic to his work as a nurse. She thinks of the beginning of her own life in that stormy fortress overlooking the city. The smoke drifting up from the hospital brings to mind a fire smouldering under the roofs.

  As a small child, she was certain that Mount Royal was a volcano. This legend, passed on from generation to generation in every Montreal schoolyard, was based mainly on the presence of a lake at the top of the mountain, a lake that was said to coincide with the crater’s location. This belief kept Clara in a state of exquisite terror, the feeling that at any moment something huge, extraordinary, and tragic could take place. The volcano functioned as the monster under the bed, the bogeyman, but also as the enchanted castle, the imaginary friend. The horror stories she told hidden under a blanket to her cousins ended with a great BOOM, a spectacular eruption that wiped out everything.

  When she learned that the lake, Beaver Lake, was actually an artificial pond, and the mountain no more than the wooded hill it appeared to be, she felt reassured. There was nothing for her father, her friends, and her to be afraid of anymore, neither the incandescent fingers of magma, nor the deadly volcanic vapours. But over the weeks, a strange impression crept into her mind. Instead of fear, she discovered a sort of lack. The great boiling heart that she had ascribed to Mount Royal was gone. Like a child who finds out that Santa Claus is a myth, Clara was deprived of something important. Her world had been planed down.

  So she secretly began to believe in the volcano again. Encouraged by her readings about how the hill had come to be, she persuaded herself that the magma that had gone into its formation millions of years ago was still there, lurking so deep under the layers of rock that no one, not even the most eminent scientists, had detected it. She then convinced herself that the mountain was just the tip of the iceberg and the entire island of Montreal was a volcano that, sooner or later, would disfigure the map of the world. Now, every step she takes on the sidewalk manifests a kind of occult courage. Every day that goes by without a calamity is received as a happy reprieve. And every rumble she hears contains a threat, a challenge. To stay, to approach, to climb the mountain, to crouch very close to the ground and breathe in its perils, its enigmas. To survive.

  Victoria

  All the women in my family are called Victoria, including me. It’s not my real name.

  I was born in the great flood. The whole lower city, its fringes and underskirts, drenched; Notre-Dame Hospital, flooded; Saint-Luc Hospital, flooded. My mother had to walk north, up to the Royal V
ictoria, where her waters broke too.

  I was born when the first sign came of the end of the world, and I did not cry. I opened my eyes and a shout of victory went up. I grew up quietly, refusing to take the breast, sleeping with one eye open, avidly savouring the caresses of the reprieve. I had teeth before everyone else.

  Now I’m seven years old and standing ankle-deep in water. Seven years of reason, of resignation. I live surrounded by many brothers and sisters, too many to count. And none of this will prevent my already charted future: I will die alone on earth.

  They call me Victoria the same way they say “my girl,” “little one.” “A woman.” It doesn’t matter. Soon there will be no one left to utter my name.

  At the hour of my death, I won’t try to speak. I’ll have nothing to say about the world, about what I learned here. I do my best not to draw lessons, not to become wiser. I want to have nothing to pass on.

  When the time comes I won’t struggle. There will be trees that are too young and a leaf-covered ground, nothing grand, nothing solemn. I’ll be calm and silent. I’ll be a grave that can’t hold down what doesn’t die.

  I’m called Victoria, but that’s not my real name. Because every name they give me is wrong. I have all the names of the world, the words of everyone who lived before me. I’m called mystery, pain, sometimes verdict. I’m an axe, a bomb armed and loaded, an arrow pointed at the last words of the story. I am courage, vestige, bridge. I am light.

  I call myself victory, as in “the final.” The last survivor. My name is love and war.

  My name is eon. I’m an eternity, I’m everything, and then nothing.

  Notes and Acknowledgements

  Behind these portraits is a woman who actually existed. While my book is underpinned by the mystery surrounding her, I continue to hope that her true identity will eventually be discovered. Each chapter of Madame Victoria is entirely fictitious and intended as a tribute to this person, whose name is still unknown.

  I am greatly indebted to the report aired on the ICI Radio-Canada Télé programme Enquête, which was the starting point of this project.

  The poem sent by Hector in “Victoria in Love” borrows from Victor Hugo’s “Je respire où tu palpites,” which appears here in our translation.

  The conversation between Loïc and the serial killer’s wife is drawn from “The Truck Stop Killer,” an article by Vanessa Veselka that appeared in the October 2012 issue of GQ.

  As always, Antoine Tanguay’s involvement was essential for the development of this book.

  Thanks to Chloé Legault, Tania Massault, and Christine Eddie for their comments; to Dominique Fortier, my unsparing and indispensable editor; and to Sophie Marcotte for the final review.

  Thank you, Alexandre, Catherine, Robert, Chantal, and Claude, my brave first readers.

  Thank you, Sabrine Leblond-Murphy for clarifying the medical aspects of my stories, and for taking me on a fascinating tour of the labyrinthine Royal Victoria Hospital.

  In 2015 the Royal Victoria Hospital closed, and a hospital of the same name was opened in a different location. No decision has been taken as yet concerning the fate of the old Royal Victoria Hospital buildings.

  Thank you, Daniel Villeneuve, forever a son of Gagnonville, for his descriptions of the ghost city.

  Finally, thanks to the members of my family, old and young, for understanding, respecting, encouraging, and reading.

  About the Author

  Born in 1979, Catherine Leroux is a writer and a translator. Her three books — Madame Victoria (2015), Le mur

  mitoyen (2013), and La marche en forêt (2011) — were hailed both by the critics and the public. Nominated for Le grand prix du livre de Montréal, Le mur mitoyen received the France-Quebec Prize. Its English version, The Party Wall, her English-language debut, was selected for Indies Introduce for Summer/Fall 2016, shortlisted for both the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and won the 2016 Governor General’s Award for Translation. Catherine Leroux lives and works in Montreal.

  About the Translator

  LAZER LEDERHENDLER is a full-time literary translator specializing in Québécois fiction and non-fiction. His translations have earned awards and distinctions in Canada, the U.K., and the U.S.A. He has translated the works of noted authors including Gaétan Soucy, Nicolas Dickner, Edem Awumey, Perrine Leblanc, and Catherine Leroux. He lives in Montreal with the visual artist Pierrette Bouchard.