Augustino and the Choir of Destruction

by Marie-Claire Blais

  Augustino and the

  Choir of Destruction

  ALSO BY MARIE-CLAIRE BLAIS

  FICTION

  The Angel of Solitude

  Anna’s World

  David Sterne

  Deaf to the City

  The Fugitive

  A Literary Affair

  Mad Shadows

  The Manuscripts of Pauline Archange

  Nights in the Underground

  A Season in the Life of Emmanuel

  Tete Blanche

  These Festive Nights

  The Wolf

  Thunder and Light

  NONFICTION

  American Notebooks: A Writer’s Journey

  Augustino and the

  Choir of Destruction

  _______________________________

  MARIE-CLAIRE BLAIS

  Translated by Nigel Spencer

  Copyright © 2005 Les Editions du Boreal

  English translation copyright © 2007 House of Anansi Press

  AAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  This edition published in 2012 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

  Fax 416-363-1017

  www.houseofanansi.com

  First published as Augustino et le choeur de la destruction in 2005 by Les Editions du Boréal

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Blais, Marie-Claire, 1939–

  [Augustino et le choeur de la destruction. English]

  Augustino and the choir of destruction / Marie-Claire Blais ; translated by Nigel Spencer

  Translation of: Augustino et le choeur de la destruction.

  Final volume in the trilogy: These festive nights, Thunder and light,

  Augustino and the choir of destruction.

  ISBN 978-1-77089-071-8

  I. Spencer, Nigel, 1945– II. Title. III. Title: Augustino et le choeur de la destruction. English.

  PS8503.L33A913 2007 C843’.54 C2006-903673-X

  Cover design: Bill Douglas at The Bang

  Cover images: (top) Ghetty Images, (bottom) Bill Douglas

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

  For Christiane Teasdale

  The longest voyage needs no trunks,

  and what I give is all I have.

  Take my gaze, rich in its poverty;

  It’s made from sky, warm air, cool water,

  so ugliness can one day be washed.

  Take my hands, so alive with caresses

  and the rebellions that they’ve hatched.

  Take my hair,

  untameable,

  it’s always shouted.

  Take my silence, my giddiness . . . the rest

  is for the last great wave,

  the first of the first tide.

  — Georgette Gaucher Rosenberg, from Ocean, Take Me Back

  Petites Cendres smelled with disgust, she said, the drunken man’s breath on her lips and neck, as this stranger pinned her to the wall of the bar: stop, will you, you’re going to suffocate me, what could she say to be safe, no one had any respect for her, the man who had arranged to meet her in the hotel at eight this evening and his strange accent had a heavy violence, a fleshy weight whose oppressiveness she had glimpsed, bald head she didn’t like either, nor the baggy eyes of this stranger under his silver-rimmed glasses, leave me alone, Petites Cendres said again, thinking of how she had to drop by briefly at the Porte du Baiser Saloon where she danced every day for customers as dull as this one squeezing her waist and flattening her against the wall, she could see the pink wooden houses lit by the sun on Esmerelda Street and Bahama Street, a dog sniffing vainly for any trace of the owner who had abandoned it, why didn’t he just head for the sea, at least there’d be some coolness, he probably hadn’t eaten for days she thought, his colour, his colour was the same as hers too, not brown, not black, but at least if she didn’t eat it was simply from lack of appetite, she had all she needed from the shade and the vented air in the Saloon, fed also by what had become her unfilled need, yes, the dog was a dark ochre colour like rust, just like Petites Cendres, nobody was going to feel sorry for him, too old, forty they all said, too late, the man was dragging her out into the street, and she was ashamed that everyone would see her now, hear her whimpering, leave me alone you kids, because that’s what they called her, Ashley, hey Little Ashes . . . Petites Cendres . . . forty years old and you’re teetering on the brink, laughing as they called out the numbers coming up in the Saloon that night, in their evening clothes and stiletto heels, coarse heavily built men, she thought, but they don’t give a damn what happens to me, they’ll see, they’ll see later on, nobody gets respect at this age, nobody, and one of the boys who didn’t have a wig, yawning on the sidewalk, no wig, just earrings and short, slicked-back hair, she noticed, he just thought it was funny, the john’s tattooed arm across her throat, then he tapped the drunk on the shoulder, hey, loosen up on her a bit, will you, you don’t want her to croak on us, do you, and the man shook himself out of his stupor and flung her onto the sidewalk like a rag, don’t forget . . . be at the hotel by eight, girl, he said; that’s it, show him you’re a man yelled the bare-headed, kid with no wig, so are you a man, I’m the man that I am, the way the Lord made me, said Petites Cendres as he watched the bottom-feeder slouch away from him, yes, that’s how he made you all right, said the kid with no wig, bit stuck-up aren’t you Ashley, with those jeans so tight on your skanky ass, your black corset, the zits on your face, your plastic tits, aintcha got a little angel-dust for me while you’re at it, it’s a black silk corset, he said, and I am just the way I am, you get nothing from me, the kid with no wig went on, watch out for your john, he looks like a wrestler in the ring, get a load of that ox-neck of his, he’ll beat you to a pulp, afraid are you, Ashley, come on and prove you’re a man, then they all started laughing again, in their evening wear, Petites Cendres did not know if they were just indolent, mean or ferocious, he saw the sea glittering under an incandescent sun at the far end of the long, narrow street, on the shoreline of Atlantic Boulevard, any moment now that sun would burst into a ball of flame, a furnace to stifle the heart of Petites Cendres, his soul felt blood-raw, liquefied deep down inside him, in a pale, cold sea where the need that gnawed at him would break your heart, a fire burnt out, his heart, that dog should not have been there on Esmeralda or Bahama Street, hunger tottering on all fours, night-prowling around the Porte du Baiser Saloon where he just would not stop living despite all odds; in thunder and light, Lazaro launched his boat from the side of the wharf, thinking he would rather work at sea than be a student and live with his mother Caridad and those brothers and sisters of his, all of them born here of a man not his father, not even a Muslim, his mother had betrayed him by pardonin
g Carlos for his murderous act against her son, none of them, not one, knew who this Lazaro really was, sitting, hatching his revenge against Carlos, ready to kill him when he got out of jail, unless of course Justice did it for him, oh yes, maybe Justice would be fair and kill Carlos, then Lazaro would be recruited for some grander mission, and not only Carlos would disappear but all the others, Caridad the charitable who mangled the faith of their ancestors, her pardon was just a caricature of pity, there should be pity for no one, not Carlos or the others, from a grumpy fisherman resigned to working the sea with his hands, a student with no diploma, Lazaro would become someone, someone . . . who knows what, he needed a pitiless role, one to light a fire under the whole of the earth, he had written to his uncles and cousins, recruit me, I’ll volunteer, be a missionary for some dark work, for he had known from childhood, hadn’t he, that one day the earth would belong to the militant and soldier tribes alone, no more women, certainly none like his mother, Caridad — changing countries so they could unveil their faces and drive cars — none of these anymore . . . the sullen, strong-willed, dry and thirsty planet would be reserved for the young and angry, those destined to sensitive missions of martyrdom, thousands of them, unnamed and unnameable, candidates for suicide, flourishing in disordered ranks worldwide, staging attacks anywhere and everywhere — supermarkets in Jerusalem, hotels in New York — they would be heard if not believed, because of the panache of their murders, the toll rung by the belt-activated bombs they all would conceal under their clothes and in handbags, girls breaking off engagements and hiding mortar shells beneath folds of scarves, in bags, at store entrances, in stations, holding them so close to their own organs, these innumerable unnamed brigades alone would inherit the earth, bombs would be housed in their young and healthy bodies and holy terror would reign, oh yes, in whole cities, on tiled floors in cafeterias of Hebrew universities, where squads of nurses would lean over pools of blood — here seven people died — quickly wrap them in sheets just as quickly soaked in blood, and still gloved, the nurse would take the wheel and drive home to his family at night, something sticky still on his fingers . . . ah, he would say, may God have pity on this blood; in every town and village, on walls of homes and schools, there would be pictures of suicide-bombers with crowns of flowers, brigades of pious volunteers, nurses constantly on call and on the move to massacre-sites, gloved alike, and surgeon-like, who would say that blood is the seat of the soul, and like the kamikazes these new angels of death would become heroes subjected to a familiar ritual, here, in this cafeteria, where seven people died, and now the pile of bodies must be removed amid shards of glass, broken tables, and tomorrow it would be the same thing somewhere else, in a bar another woman would be sitting with her elbow on the counter, eyes open, glass in hand, a marbled statue in sudden death, tomorrow more streets and houses, tanks splitting the pavement, footsteps in the smoking dust of exploded houses, such was the world Lazaro had contemplated since childhood, or it might have been when his father Mohammed beat his mother before he was born, blows that came from a long way off, when his mother said, we must get away from Egypt, this country, this man . . . might there be still more streets and houses or gassy smells, smoke billowing from the sky, I’ll get him, I’ll get that Carlos one of these days, Lazaro said to himself over and over as he walked down Atlantic Boulevard, where the sun was red as it prepared to vanish into the sea, and the air was so sweet you’d think you were swallowing it and getting drunk; Lazaro waded barefoot through the sea, his body shaking with rage as he soaked his face and hair in the salt water, remembered Carlos, and heard a heavy flapping of wings, the sudden, troubled passing of a wounded pelican, frightened and desperately try to scoop up fish and stay alive, still lumbering awkwardly over the water, but seeming only to skim the hard surface of the waves with his beak, the sound of his one good wing racketing skywards; Lazaro climbed the stairs to a terrace and tried to get help for the wounded bird, thinking petulantly that his mother would have done the same, talking on and on as she did about respecting nature . . . Lazaro spotted the bird from the terrace, apparently staying close to shore, looking for shelter beneath a bridge, flying more and more lamely, and panicked now, the weakened pelican suddenly abandoned the protection of the shoreline and headed for open water, and Lazaro could no longer see the yellow-gold plumage of the bird’s head, as though some malevolent fate had snatched the endangered bird away from him, and he felt a moment’s anguish, this world of small and larger birds that could be seen in the wakes of boats, sailboats used by fishermen, and wasn’t this after all the last domain which could still win Lazaro over with its vitality, its diversity and its courage in the face of an uncertain ocean, a world not yet reflecting a dark, deathly light like the mission he could not stop thinking about — avenging himself on Carlos or the militant action he wanted to carry out — when these thoughts of his future were frequently fleshed out and freighted with primitive foreshadowings, this majestic world of birds, for instance, he came close to fainting, he thought, and Mère, whose birthday they were celebrating, heard her daughter Mélanie saying to Jermaine’s parents, oh, but Jermaine doesn’t play with Samuel any more . . . before yes, but not now, he’s a handsome young man whose Asian features resemble his mother more an more, but didn’t he just spoil it all, thought Mère, by bleaching his hair blonde like that and making it stick straight up on his head, Mélanie was saying, women must learn to govern, we need a woman president, because when men are in charge they start wars, but Chuan replied that when women governed, they could be just as cruel and ambitious as men, think about those “enlightened despots,” said Jermaine’s mother, like Catherine the Great they crushed an entire population of serfs and peasants under feudalism, entirely indifferent to the suffering of their people, and it’s often been that way — even nowadays — oh, I don’t mean you, Mélanie dear, we could never get enough of your sincerity in the Senate, but my husband, one of the first black senators ever elected, won’t tolerate any talk of politics in this house, and now he’s retired, he channels his protest through writing, often alone in the cottage over by the ocean there . . . just down the path and through the hibiscus from the house . . . he often phones me, and we talk several times a day, when I’m not off designing in Paris or Milan or Hong Kong, his real home is here on this island near his family, Olivier’s not a nomad like me; Mère told Chuan how delighted she was by her house and everything she created by way of decoration, Chuan knew how to pare things down to their essential forms, and her houses in the Dominican Republic and here, facing the ocean, were as light as Thai cottages out on the water which reflected onto the white blinds of the living room, air wafting through the row of palm trees in the garden, luxuriance and weightlessness, Mère said, thinking neither of her daughter nor of Chuan to whom she addressed these polite words, but seeming to ask herself vague questions, or rather afraid to ask them, at almost eighty, she had made a success of her life, though what that meant for a woman she wasn’t sure . . . on her deathbed with an insidious anaemia, Marie Curie had told her daughter Eve, “I don’t want what you’re going to do to me. I just want to be left alone,” and Mère too wondered what will they do to me when they see my right hand trembling, and some other things are not quite right, Mélanie, who notices everything, what will she do to me, I want to be left alone, her last words must be like those of the great apostle of pure science, “I do not wish it,” but it wasn’t about to happen anytime soon, you never change, Esther dear, they always told her as she sipped her cocktail in the warm breeze, naturally, I still have plenty of time to think about all that, “Sleep,” Marie Curie had said as she closed her eyes, sleep. Yet Marie Curie was a woman of renown, the Mozart of science, Mère thought, but still, born a woman, she might not have thought her life a success, is it possible she left this world with doubts, saying over and over to her daughter that she wanted to be left in peace, not bothered any more, that this life was just too much, so many tribulations, so little grandeur, just too much to bear
, she would die with the true scale of her work unknown, just to be allowed to sleep at last; might an accomplished life go hand-in-hand with success? Maria Sklodowska’s childhood in Poland had not been especially promising, brothers and sisters dying around her of tuberculosis or typhus, very early on she became an agnostic and had to do without whatever support was not as solid as science, the disappearance of God, the loss of her parents . . . all this left her mind free and clear, Maria knew this, the straightforwardness of thought alone would yield rewards, no wandering across snowy fields, no sleigh rides for this little girl, perhaps the companionship of a dog in her study, wars and insurrections had drained the world of its blood, but through the dark emerged the thoughts of one who did not yet know who she was, she could not say with the authority of others before her, I am Darwin, I am Mendeleyev — their theories had penetrated her mind even before she knew who she was, what was success in life, born like Marie Curie, in Poland oppressed by the Russians, and no voting rights for women, in England or anywhere else, to discover as one grew older that academicians and intellectuals were imprisoned in Siberia, then to be swept up in an era of positivity when the emancipation of women would be justified, or to be assassinated for revolutionary politics like her friend Rosa Luxembourg, whose young body would be found floating in a Berlin canal, what was success in life, wondered Mère, knowing how to design, plan and build harmonious coral pathways — as Chuan had done in front of her house — or being Rosa Luxembourg, the falterings, the failings bearing down on Maria’s life, whether teacher or housewife, poverty ground people down everywhere, were the grumblings and ingratitude of others all she could ever expect? In this far-away Polish village, so alone in her mansard-roofed cottage that one had to get to it in winter by a stairway, she devoured literature and natural science, read in French and Russian, got up at five in the grey dawn, stuck doggedly to her physics and math books, still not knowing who she was, a failed schoolteacher, a creature petrified by the sheer concentration of all her faculties, waiting under that mansard roof for her father to send her money from home, and when none came, she sent her own salary to help her brother with his studies, in her isolation, Maria wrote to her family that she had no plans for the future, or at least such banal ones they were not worth mentioning, she would get by as best she could, and one day, so she wrote, she would bid farewell to this petty life, and the harm would not be great, neither Darwin nor Freud, just an ordinary being, it was the time of year when everything was frozen, the sky, the earth, there was revulsion against any physical contact, this too she felt, and why mend your clothes when there was no one to dress up for, nerves were the last thing alive under that ice and clothing and body and soul, all lying uncared-for beneath this deathless winter, the spark came from learning chemistry, though she had written her brother that she had given up all hope of ever becoming someone, failure, thought Mère, yes, the unbearable failure of every successful life, the ascetic face of Maria Sklodowska bent over her work and assembling so many pictures and voices that Mère no longer found her way through them, Chuan had taken her by the arm and was inviting her to meet the guests she called her European group, writers and artists newly arrived on our island: Valérie and her husband Bernard, Christiensen and Nora from even farther away — Northern Europe; of course, arriving in Paris was more stimulating for Maria than stagnating in her village, thought Mère, Chuan shouldn’t have bothered to introduce her to all these charming people, she mused, she would never have time to get to know them, night began to dim everything, and nothing would remain of these hand-shakings or glances as they said I’ve heard a lot about you Esther, dear, and your daughter Mélanie with such wonderful children, Mère was thinking they should have left her in peace for the rest of this life journey of hers which seemed so short, or perhaps Paris shocked the austere Maria, so earnest she was for a city that, after so many fires, revelled in lightness of being, or perhaps she was afraid, then there was that annoying click of Augustino’s computer, the picture of a hundred dolphins on the screen, carcasses rolled over by the waves and deposited on the white sands of an island in Venezuela, what had happened to provoke this mass suicide in just a few short hours, or what poison at the very depths had cheated them of their lives? Mère said to Augustino, turn that computer off, I can’t stand it any more, Augustino, you don’t seem to understand that an old lady just can’t look at everything, there are things I do not want to see, and he had looked at his grandmother without understanding, it was the first time they had not got through to one another, she was always saying, please don’t bother me, and yet yesterday he had done it constantly without her ever complaining once, I mean, who knows, in a few years you might be an intellectual or a philosopher, and your grandmother will read a book of your thoughts with pride, how many fingers could you count those years on, or how many hands, Augustino asked, his eyes suspicious under long lashes, well, right now you’re only sixteen, she said as though she held his youthfulness against him, their social instinct and their psychic skills are more developed than ours, so why couldn’t their ultrasound guide them, and why these multiple beachings on the white sands of l’île de la Tortue, can you tell me, Augustino, she once would have said to him, but her clouded blue eye stared at him as if to say, never mind, don’t say a thing, what’s the point, I don’t want to know, they’re just poor dolphins, one of many species that will soon cease to exist, and Augustino thought she hasn’t answered my question about how many fingers for how many years, it must be because she doesn’t believe they exist, she’s taken so long to get old, and I may not have very long to become young, bottle-nose dolphins are very smart, Augustino had said, but they aren’t suspicious enough of us, and they are often victims of our mistakes, who knows, repeated Mère, perhaps one day I’ll read your thoughts in a book, she could not wish anything more distinguished for him, she thought, something Jermaine’s parents could never say, because their son never even read a book, let alone wrote, sports cars were all he cared about, his father Olivier regretted that, yes, sports cars and those harmful video games, he had them all, and children developed the same indifference, lack of interest to the handling of massive war machines, engines of destruction that no longer make the slightest impression on them, at least, Mère thought, Augustino has no use for them, more restrained than Jermaine, he did not burst into his father’s study, his intimate writing hideaway, in the morning and teary-eyed say, I love you, Dad, can you lend me some money or the car or both; Olivier, holding back a bit, asked his son once more, say you love me, is it true, you didn’t write to me when you were at university, Chuan retold all these little events to Mère, my husband’s very close to his family, she said, but he shuts himself up with his dogs too much and refuses to come out, he’s the one I worry most about, it’s depression that comes out in this paralyzing thoughtfulness, you know; Chuan suddenly fell silent, and Mère thought she could hear the world turning in her silence, it was un-intriguing tumult which took hold, every pore of the flesh was offered up, listening, lies and noise, and Mère said to Chuan, I know what your husband is feeling, but why don’t you come and dance for us like last year, this year I don’t dare do what is forbidden, Chuan said, I borrow a little of that ecstasy I criticize my son for taking, and as she listened, Mère thought how deprived of rest Marie Curie’s life had been, even when she was only twenty-five, Maria shied away from amphitheatres and exam halls where she would be first, what a day it was for Maria, a woman, what a day it was when she came in first for the Physical Science degree, this reticent woman with nervous afflictions, and how she showed her joy despite her persistent fear of succeeding, of easy triumph, yes, Mère thought she heard the turning of the world with its bump and jolts within Chuan’s silence, they might have spoken up, with all that’s going on nowadays, for the earth and its inhabitants, she thought, whether it be surrender or death, perhaps people were aware that a minuscule part of the planet had been wiped out, still life had to go on, and even Chuan must have sensed that night
it was her duty to dance, yes, singing and dancing had to go on whatever racket they made, turning the world on itself, or was it fair and sane to think this way beneath a deluge of gigantic explosions any sensate human being had got used to, however bored Jermaine had become by the on-screen manœuvres of his demonic games, entire territories disappearing, the spectacles of huge structures crumbling, seeing them over and over, we no longer felt disturbed by them, these glimpses orchestrated by an invisible choir no longer troubled us, so now we had, it seems, been won over en masse to our own devastation, these dark thoughts were not Mère’s but Olivier’s, whose articles she had read in the island newspaper, and what exactly was it we wanted for ourselves, surrender or death? Yes, of course I’ll dance tonight, Chuan said, her smile a twin to her son’s, and it distresses me that my husband shares such sad thoughts with his readers since he has retired here, but there’s nothing I can do to change that, so Chuan was going to dance once more and Mère was going to enjoy her solitude with the operas of Puccini, though Mélanie her daughter kept suggesting she get to know the symphonies of César Franck or the operas of Benjamin Britten, and why did Mélanie want every classical rule broken and monumental works filled with metallic sounds and songs of unbearable sorrow in which the human voice was distorted and sometimes silenced, to which absentee gods were these cathedrals, these fortresses of modern sound erected, and these lamentations of the poet Owen contained in Britten’s War Requiem, to what dove of peace lost forever? The Requiem, that Franz (ageing rebel conductor that he was) refused to perform in churches, but only out in the open and under the sun, on terraces and in pavilions by the sea, could be heard in Daniel and Mélanie’s house and across the island, the choir’s libera me wafting to the heavens and toward who-knows-what abysses and resurrections, and Mère thought if only they could just leave me alone, just as Marie Curie said at the end of her life, Puccini would always be a spellbinder to her; Chuan was gone now, running off in her bright red dress and black leather sandals to the vast kitchen she had painted carmine, saying the Cuban architecture of the house demanded these tints of burning sunlight on her walls, and her husband had gone to greet a young man from the caterer’s with an immaculate white singlet and pants under a black apron at the entrance to the garden who was telling Olivier that his wife had ordered the tray of fish he held in his hands, but our table’s already groaning complained Olivier, look, put that down, it’s too heavy for you, what’s your name son, it’s Lazaro, he often comes here said Chuan sidling up to him as Lazaro gazed impenetrably at Jermaine over Olivier’s head and his wife’s as he held it, and Jermaine was laughing with his friends, well-off children all of them, drinking and laughing around the pool, the green water iris-like in the daytime, playing wild reflections across their faces, all of them with the same bleach-blonde hair Jermaine had, the same necklaces, in their festive circle they were no more disparate, no less outlandish, thought Lazaro, than Jermaine’s parents, the father a moody African-American, a giant in this house next to his delicate oriental wife whose smile might have been rebellious or kind — it wasn’t clear — these people were so self-assured living here on life’s margins, far from the troublesome struggle for survival Lazaro had to wage, whether it meant taking to the sea with rough men or working for a caterer or as a waiter in a restaurant, nothing hemmed them in or confined them, Lazaro thought with clenched teeth; to Chuan he said, as she looked astonished at him, look at these kids, they have to drink to have fun, when you could do it just drinking tea or fruit juice, alcohol is forbidden in my religion, it’s poison; Olivier got annoyed and said we don’t talk about religion around here, religion will destroy the world, and who was this sectarian young man that his wife treated like a son, out of kindness of course, Olivier thought, to bridge the class divide, for we are all equal, all equally unhappy, some wearing masks to cover faces streaked with blood from mutilation and slavery, Chuan had been born into it in Japan where for a long time it would have been better not to be born at all and simply wait a long time for the embers to cool just a little, as far as Olivier was concerned, one of the few black senators elected, had he actually put an end to segregation, if only Jermaine loved him genuinely, that would be his true happiness, Jermaine coming into his office in the morning and saying, Dad, you know I love you, I say it often, sidetracked from life, that’s what they are, thought Lazaro, all of them, with their alcohol and seafood banquets, so Jermaine and his friends might as well have fun while they can, said Chuan, because university vacation days would soon be over, and then we won’t see the kids for months, besides what do they know about the other side of town, Lazaro thought, Lazaro’s zone, Carlos, the gang-fights on Bahama and Esmerelda, suddenly Lazaro had a flash of rapists being executed in Tehran, a vision which could only emerge from past shame, perhaps he’d been present at public executions with his mother and she had said, cover your eyes, let’s get out of here, don’t open them, was he one of the ten thousand people of Tehran one cursed dawn, numbed into compulsive stupefaction and fascination, like all the rest, as they saw five condemned twenty-five-year-olds hanged from a crane for rape and racketeering . . . a long, agonizing time dying at the end of a rope hoisted from the back of a truck, the crowd chanting in unison, good, that’s what they deserve, so thought the families of their victims in amongst the crowd, not a voice raised in pity, and the dawn called forth a misty day, a pink dawn already dipped in rain, five black vultures as they called themselves, the black vulture gang, hanged from the backs of truck-mounted cranes, a journalist counting the five to six minutes of their death-throes and jotting it down in his notebook, at Lavizan, Lavizan Square, rapists, of course, but what if they were falsely accused, not really rapists, conning and robbing young women in parks, what if it was a plot by women, for it was they who had called for their public hanging, after all, these women had all been seen later on in Lavizan Square with their children at the dawn executions, men, women and children, everyone a hungry spectator, some perched on fences or electricity poles, a vendor of dry cakes weaving through the crowd, and if this wasn’t a conspiracy, thought Lazaro, then these five black vultures had been hanged for no reason, hadn’t they? Yet it was a man who carried out the contemptible ritual, slipping the knot over their heads, and two of them had murmured their innocence at the last second, and a third had asked for forgiveness, another who resembled Lazaro had held out, and before the bodies were lifted skyward, held himself upright, hands and neck bound, contemplating the early dawn and reddened mists, defiant, plump lips barely moving in an impassive face, this is how Lazaro would have done it, he thought, thinking they were hanging him by mistake, it was a conspiracy; what’s wrong, Olivier asked Lazaro, let us give you a strawberry drink before you go off on that motorcycle again, but Lazaro was suddenly heading off toward Atlantic Boulevard, walking rapidly, his black apron flapping in the wind, that boy gives me a strange feeling, Olivier told Chuan, you’re the one who’s always too serious, so don’t blame me tomorrow if that loud music of Jermaine’s makes me deaf, said Olivier impatiently, I just love it, said Chuan, loud and screaming, said Olivier, Mélanie says Benjamin Britten’s music illustrates the anxiety of our time, thought Mère, that fugue with such stunning energy like the hammering boots of young soldiers marching impetuously, joyfully to battle, that old European youth and its longing for battle . . . isn’t it still true, that’s what scares me about this music, Mère thought, it would be better if it were just soft and melodious without the sound of cannons to the beat of the young soldiers’ march, but rather the early spring-song, the cooing of doves, white pigeons of love’s time, letting us feel the joy of their coupling, so hasty to unite these pigeons or doves that they bump into one another’s bluish breasts in flight, perhaps Mère might have said, like Mélanie, that Britten’s War Requiem was really the opposite — a solemn mass for peace — so exclaims the choir, “Lord, grant them eternal rest, and let the perpetual light shine upon them,” but alas, what rest can Britten’s work bring to those al
ready dead, laid to rest beneath their arms, surrounded by officiants holding candles and praying for them, better the music should be solely melodic and soft, like the protracted song of mourning-doves or the cosmic chant of Olivier Messiaen, composer and ornithologist, in nuanced notes of birdsong, hearing the birds stirring at morning makes one think the world is reborn, it was he who wrote Réveil des oiseaux for piano and orchestra, thought Mère, he felt for a moment, didn’t he, that he had created a garden of wonders, the original paradise complete with all its beasts and trees, the birthplace of music, the initial song of birds still coming to us in distant crystalline echoes, as though spilling forth from a tunnel and through our assimilated rhythms and sounds as musicians use them, surprizing and multifarious, from brass to Martenot waves in works with bird-whistles and chirps of nestlings, thus for a moment the composer had re-created the world, decomposed it like Britten’s requiem, showing us who we really were, incapable of change, the same annoying portrait of ourselves, violent and warring; in his physical adoration of nature, Messiaen was saying, listen to this redemptive song, spilling out so pure from the tunnel of darkness, a pious music of belief, borne away by faith, something Mère could not understand, better if it were not so, just this magnificently gifted composer, lyricism a mere short breath of beauty, but that was not belief nor what he felt of our way through life, the composer dared to weave, insistently sometimes, into this birdsong awakening amid the rustle of leaves, this whistling outburst of joy, the idea that there was a beyond, there were cities, colours, a divine kingdom somewhere, in his harmonic prophecies he went so far as to describe colours, dawns which could only exist in heavenly cities, and where were these cities without crime or meanness, by what marvel could a musician still be able to dream of these mere decades ago in a death-camp at Terezin, where a choir of emaciated men and women sang another requiem by Verdi or Mozart before their executioner music-lovers, a requiem for their own interment, music with which they would be buried alive, the men and women of this choir, voices suddenly suspended, cut out, sliced off, on what birdlike migrations would these requiem voices and notes wend their way back to the city free of peril evoked by the musician? Mère was right to like Puccini best, a musician of feeling who understood women so well, and the Britten requiem conducted by Franz could be heard everywhere on the island, through the rumble of ocean and lower, quite audibly, the muffled, filtered carnage on TV, this was no longer a place of rest for Franz between his European tours with his wife and children, lingering in sleazy bars late into the night, it was now late, he thought, and you would think they had heard the anger spread through Britten’s War Requiem, yesterday he had taken refuge in a house rented from a mistress, now today he was alone, wandering from one rooming-house to another along the ocean-front, once you could sail off to Cuba and be even more isolated, no one looking for you, no phone, no mail out there, he’d write his sonata for clarinet and piano, just back from a concert-tour of Vienna, London and Mexico City, he’d be straight off again, Franz was unstable, a wild sort, Mère thought, a man with everything who wants still more, he piled up knowledge as well as doubt, love and disappointment, and where was the procession that preceded him in triumph yesterday when he arrived on the island with his wife, children and sister Lilia — herself a musician — with friends, assistants, a maid or two . . . an unending feverish round of solid friendships and chance acquaintances sent him ranging round the beaches meeting fake artists and pushers who robbed him, all in the same day he played tennis with illustrious poet-friends, dined in splendid restaurants opening onto the sea, and what laughs and tipsiness tinged the air on those nights, even though Franz always held onto a side of himself that remained obscure to those who knew him, some irrepressible force whose strength was unknown to him, he would put his wife and children to bed with the vision in his head of the stranger he absolutely had to embrace tonight, the face was Renata’s, or perhaps, later on, another woman’s, for those who knew him, thought Mère, a whiff of scandal always clung to Franz, how could someone compose a sonata, often even an entire commissioned opera, and still get stiff drunk with whiskey in sailors’ bars where he would recite Milton and Blake, poets he knew by heart: Songs of Experience, Paradise Lost, his anarchic thoughts overriding memory, as though his long hands (also capable of memory) rested on the piano keys, a man whose spirit and senses certainly bathed in the darkest waters, thought Mère, but now he was bereft and alone, alone to guide himself when not at the helm of his orchestra, dropping anchor alone on his barque, incipient songs lingering always on his lips, the first act of an opera he knew by heart, voices, a song to which, crying, he had rocked his first grandson many years later . . . oh, he’d see them all once more, but now it was time, time for Britten’s War Requiem, and for dreaming of all, all those women and children, all those songs and fruits of experience, his paradise lost, limitless, his happiness and his sentence, it was time to silence for them the too-intimate music hidden beneath the immense War Requiem, just as life ebbed away tomorrow, who knows by what means, a heart attack or something more insidious, he, Franz, born to music, must spread his great arms over those he loved and protect them from that formidable and ineluctable choir, for the warriors had breached the room where Lilia, his musician sister, held his sleeping grandson in her arms, Britten’s requiem had to be heard, voices unfurling like waves on the sea, Mère thought she heard the trace of song languishing on Franz’s lips, do not come in here, let our children sleep, while Franz glided solo towards port, where his too-active imagination, although untroubled, free of Franz’s dark shadows, was still as aware as he was where he would be in ten years, perhaps like Mère he would be afflicted with a disturbing tremor of the right hand, Mélanie had noticed this anomaly but said nothing, always on the lookout for her mother, she was suddenly cautious, stepping ahead of her mother into that night, sensing the same premonitions in the symptom sketched in air by a trembling right hand, Mélanie told her mother you must not overdo it and tire yourself out like that, Augustino can carry packages for you while he’s at home, do the gardening, her gardening, even that they would take away from her, her roses, banks of acacia, already they were pressuring her into renunciation and Mère recalled that dream, more than a sign it was, but still prescient, and in it Mère held out a glass of wine to Mélanie, which split in two before Mélanie could ever grasp it, Mère’s fingers, her right hand, bled onto the crystal, and she awoke with a sharp pain as though in the breakage her daughter Mélanie had been snatched from her, so it was true that the day would come when she no longer saw Mélanie, the jewel of her life would be gone, although they were so different — the maternal instinct Mère did not have but Mélanie did, Mai was only six but a difficult child, often worrying her mother by disappearing, would she one day disappear forever like the little girl whose name she bore, and Mélanie would have a lot to worry about with this much-desired child, a daughter, Esther, my mother, I will have a daughter, the glass was beyond repair, the augury irrevocable in that trembling right hand, the fabric of life folding into the gap of mourning, one must simply wait and not flee, hands cut by the glass, and Mère’s fingers hurt only remotely as in a dream, there Mélanie was beside Daniel in Chuan’s flowered courtyard, and Mère dared not look at her for fear of loving her too much, all they could talk about was how well Samuel was doing in New York in Arnie Graal, his teacher’s, latest choreography, it was wrong that Mère felt more love for her daughter than for the others, even Samuel and Augustino whom she adored, but Mère could not touch the heart of all these young beings anymore, it was a world she couldn’t reach anymore, thinking of Mai was as dizzying as any moonscape, who knows what it was filled with, all the perils life held piling up around that little head which bowed to no one, while Mélanie would rather have a sweet, cuddly child, all-seeing Mélanie had noticed the trembling right hand but said nothing, she had felt the glass slivering away, my fingers gushing blood on the edges, thought Mère the way she would like to have said to Mélanie,
my thoughts pouring out to you, perhaps also a flood of thankful tears at having borne you, Mère did not say these words out loud, all they discussed was Samuel’s success in New York, and in still another dream, perhaps in ancient temples or in a Scottish castle, the dimensions of the place were overwhelming, one could see the rows of mortuary rooms, dressed all in furs, Mère approached one of them, removing her furs and jewels as she went, and knowing fearfully all the while that she was never leaving this place, temples, morbid nests, Mère was walled up, in another dream, she and Augustino were out looking for Mai and got lost themselves off the polar shores, what were they doing so far away calling Mai and getting no answer, Mai where are you cried Augustino, it was the day Jean-Mathieu’s ashes were scattered off The-Island-Nobody-Owns, when Mai had disappeared just after being photographed by Caroline, they called out to her all along the oceanfront, and she never answered, turning up only in the evening under some Australian pines, and in this dream, she continued to refuse to answer, Mère and Augustino had swum in freezing waters beneath packs of ice all the way to an iceberg, and there Augustino saw a bureau with Mai inside it, but we have no key to open it, he said, then suddenly they heard a voice begging them, Grandma, Augustino, I’m here, let me out, and Mère awoke from the weight of these dreams thinking she would no longer be there to help Mai grow up when Mélanie was in Washington, the nanny Marie-Sylvie really only felt overwhelming affection for Vincent, and Daniel had already been forced to forbid her to take him to the seaside, even on windless days, she might be responsible for more of his repeated episodes, Samuel’s boat Southern Light tempted them toward the waves, Southern Light, said Vincent, Southern Light, and he may have loved Marie-Sylvie more than his own mother, and it may have been to Mai’s detriment that they never left each other’s side, and Mère again thought, yes, it’s true, one day or one night, I’ll not open my eyes, not see my daughter Mélanie, so many regrets, especially at being so far from perfect, I’ll miss her, she is so attentive, I’ll say to myself I did everything there was to do here, at least all I could, but was it really enough, things will go on without me, manoeuvres, battles, cities decimated under a rain of missiles, generals, ministers taking refuge from the sound of these bombings on women, men and children in their country-house for the weekend, life is well-worn habit for the good and the evil, that I will no longer be able to talk about with my daughter, what is a successful life anyway, Marie Curie herself never knew, the upright and misogynist Pasteur grew old, a young woman who might have been resplendent wore herself down acquiring knowledge, sharpening her devotion to science all the while, and she would soon have a husband as brilliant and disinterested as herself, like kindred spirits meeting and fusing into one another, did she recall the young man she had met writing one day that there were few women of genius, or at least he had written, said, affirmed somehow, that women of genius were rare, the phrase she heard in the interweaving of marriage, the abandonment of marriage, but the young Marie Curie bowed her head and said nothing, she needed most of all to act, not to interrupt her thoughts, her inner discourse, also to be wary of a long tradition of prejudice when in the company of men, she would be no rival to her husband Pierre nor to anyone else, all feelings of rivalry would be banished, she must be mistress of herself, and how beneficial it would be, this rigour, uninterrupted self-discipline, bringing into the world two daughters, two Mélanies, one consumed by love of the pure sciences like her mother, a blazing and attractive replica, just as independent, straightforward, disinterested, and — like her mother — destroyed, sacrificed too soon to radioactivity, both working hard into the night in uncomfortable sheds, suffering from the dampness in the walls; Marie serious always, drably dressed, absorbed in her thoughts about uranium rays, orderly, minute, here in this shed, radium is treated exclusively, while the first little Mélanie was cutting her teeth, Marie Curie’s first daughter, later to be her own mother’s colleague, and whose studious shadow would in turn later haunt the laboratories in this shed, but before growing up, as Mère had done with her own daughter, Marie kept a diary recording the fifth, the sixth teeth to come through the baby’s gums, her bath in the pond, the cries as the child refused to drink milk, Irène cried today, I hope she’ll stop, though Mère thought Mélanie cried relatively little, at least wrote nothing to that effect in her own diary, along with the study of new rays, Marie had dated her discomforts shortly after Irène had been born, suddenly this phantom lesion diagnosed in the lung, it was this shed with walls that dripped humidity in autumn and winter, the stubborn adherence to work, still Pierre was by her side with so much to lighten her life, so close as the day wore on, a friend, a companion to go home with at night on foot or by bicycle, that too she had written in her diary at the same time as the baby’s teeth and tears, few words in a solid hand, a hundred-and-fifty times more active than uranium, then there was the phantom, the shadow of the lesion, atrophied lung and those fingers, why were they suddenly so chapped and swollen from handling murderous substances, Irène may have been her mother’s cherished one, but so was research as well, radioactivity is my life and my child as well, and what is my future life to be if not devoted to it, usually so discreet, this she confided to a disciple, a young girl who would study with her, she was mother to her work, a creation slow in coming to birth, and who knows if the student remarked on the bloodless face of her teacher there in that shed, that factory for heating poisons, that airless shed, heated by an iron stove in winter, and what was she to think of this diminutive woman, working silently on chemical operations amid the odours of gas burners, her creation on the point of consuming her at the very moment her daughter Irène needed her at home, working on her first teeth, crying ceaselessly, later her mother was to say I’ll tolerate no cries of sadness or of joy, my husband and children must be silent, no, no noise at all, and Mère thought that if Mélanie had cried very little, it was because her mother was always with her, no, Mère was wrong about that, Mélanie had cried the day her parents divorced, the day her grandmother was buried, when the distance between her parents suddenly showed itself in such savage hostility, they no longer saw each other, spoke together, even on a day like that, her grandmother’s funeral, and Mère recalled Mélanie shedding finally the tears she had held back the day of the communicants in the Pyrenees, when one little girl had separated herself from the line of communicants on the edge of a highway and had in an instant been struck down by a bus, the flash of white thread from her dress caught between the wheels, Why Mama? Mélanie had asked her, her long hair masking her crying face, she was the same age as Mélanie, what was unexplained, what failed to explain the undefinable, the indefensible, and above all the word not to be spoken in front of Mélanie, Mère had managed to extricate herself from all these entanglements . . . you see, it’s like a moth, it comes, it flies away, the communicant was that white moth, the shining blood on the snow, Mama, tell me why? Don’t look back my dear, Mère had said, we must learn that in life, don’t look back, I can’t explain any of it, Mélanie, except that when a child is struck down like that, it is a crime, a crime of God, this was how she tried to distract Mélanie from her sadness, for Mère had never spoken to her of God, and Mélanie fell quiet, never did Mère see her cry again, yes, perhaps on the day Samuel left for New York, but it was her son, her flesh, pulling away from her, she had been expecting that, hadn’t she, Einstein said glory had not corrupted Marie Curie, but how could such glory corrupt a woman who deemed herself so ordinary, who had never considered this glory for herself? Notoriety was a man’s business, a ridiculous ambition which did not concern her there in her shed, her shadowy laboratory, and with these numb, swollen hands impeding her progress, would she have time to finish, thus was the simple, pain-filled woman Albert Einstein was to meet later on, someone who thought of herself as she had been before, an ordinary being riddled with doubts and privation, then Mère remembered Chuan’s question, Why aren’t your sons here for your birthday, Esther? Oh, I invited them, but they don’
t have much time to visit their mother, Mère had replied abruptly, my sons take after their father, cosmetic surgeons, they don’t have time for me any more, Mère slid out from under Chuan’s questioning intrusion into her family life, which seemed complex to her, forcing deeper inside the shame her sons had made her feel, lining up as they had with their father at a time when he was unfaithful to her, she saw her sons again on the back seat of the white limousine, they had mortified her, but still why couldn’t she forgive them, it was time to erase past wrongs, these boys were young and already successful in life, she ought to have spoken of them with pride to Chuan and Olivier who were covered with pride in their son, well yes, Jermaine was charming, not contemptuous of his mother for being a woman, if you could call life successful when it concerns only material wealth, thought Mère bitterly, neither of her sons was as sensitive as Mélanie, though really she could not complain about them, whether she felt humiliated or not, the boys were her triumph like Mélanie, they had a considerable place in society, even if they did have precious little time to visit their mother, and they did live far away in California but phoned often, more polite than before, not like a friend of hers who had no news from her son for years, and then suddenly learned by accident that he had died of AIDS in a Los Angeles hospital, or had she found out by messenger or letter, the mother had often said our son Thomas never told us anything about his life, we know nothing about him, and why had these middle-class parents entered into a pact of mystery when they suspected how their son lived his life, the same bourgeoisie as Mère with its way of plastering over its shameful secrets, rejection, when really Thomas’ parents had known all along where he was and how he lived, but they did not want to know, rejection, dismissal suited them better, like a bum living in the street or under bridges, they covered up for him, he would die alone with his skin diseases and rapidly deteriorating eyesight, an outcast in a Los Angeles hospital where he had come for pneumonia, and then without understanding why, he had died from the radical rejection that had befallen him, depressed, hopeless of any cure, might his mother have received a last phone call from him begging her to take him in, and had she perhaps refused, saying no, Thomas, you cannot come back to us, thus the bourgeoisie patched up its shortcomings, one more scandalous than the next, like the wounds on Thomas’ face, denying everything, seeing nothing, so Mère could not really complain about her own sons, she would tell Mélanie how proud she was to see them so well set in life, and if she didn’t forgive them now for her birthday, when would she, who knows which will be the last birthday, this right hand trembling more and more, and Mère recalled her dreams once more, each one perhaps the symbol of life’s approaching end refined to the point of sadism, an indicator of failing health, wasn’t that to be feared more than all the nastiness of dreams, in one such dream, Mère was asleep in her room, a little afternoon nap in the languid heat, it would have been so sweet if Mélanie had not suddenly burst into the room and her bed with a suffocating mass of lilies and delicately spread them around Mère’s face, I’m just resting, Mère wanted to say, Mélanie can’t you see my eyes are open, it’s not yet time for flowers, they’re choking me, wouldn’t they be better opening out by the Mediterranean than here in this room where we’ll all suffocate together, they’re for you, Mama, said Mélanie, no, no, Mère wanted to cry, but no sound passed her lips, and when she awoke, Mélanie was no longer there, that was the day she took Vincent to the doctor’s, so she couldn’t have been in the room, could she, still the choking smell of Asian tiger lilies seemed to linger, sometimes in a dream, the putrefaction seemed to be stealing some other body than hers, one of her sons returning disfigured from a war, then leaning over him she realized it was herself, her eye colour, the son’s pained mutterings became her own, this too seemed to her too hard to put into words, Mère wanted to tell her sons she had always refused to send them to war, she had not done this, but still she was mute, dimly aware that a disproportionate and sinister misfortune hung around her, and Mère remembered the story of Caroline’s little bag, a small, flat, cloth handbag that she had mislaid that day they scattered Jean-Mathieu’s ashes near The-Island-Nobody-Owns, the story of the bag was an absurd one, Caroline asking everyone if they had seen it, when, only seconds before, Jean-Mathieu had been scattered on the ocean, but this event still seemed fantastic for Caroline, who could not believe that her friend was really dead, expecting him to come home from Italy that evening, as he had so often done, she said he had given her that bag, almost as though he might scold her that evening for having lost this old gift, just a little bag with a compact, house keys, never mind the car keys, the chauffeur would be waiting for them in the port at sunset, Mère had noticed Caroline’s sudden mental dislocation, usually so haughty, and now here she was asking everyone, where’s my cloth bag, have you seen it, her face largely hidden by her broad-brimmed hat, but Mère heard increasingly rapid breathing, and Mélanie at the same time worriedly asking everyone if they had seen her daughter Mai, yes, she’s run away again, Mélanie fixing her gaze on the empty swing where Mai, yes, we saw her there, swinging, but where is she now, and there was Mélanie, beside herself with worry, who had said to Caroline, here’s your bag, you forgot it in the wicker armchair on the patio, and possibly there had been wicked smiles all around when Caroline had confidently mentioned her chauffeur, because they all knew Charly was an addict, all perhaps thinking, like Mère, about how they could get rid of this unsavoury character who might even be drugging her, Caroline hasn’t been the same lately, she needs help soon, expressing child-like gratitude, Caroline had taken up the bag, thanking Mélanie, thank-you, thank-you, young lady, lady — a dated, old-fashioned word to address Mélanie, and she, a mother of two big boys, was at a loss to respond, eyes riveted on the swing Mai had abandoned, and where was she anyway, it would soon be time to get back to the boat she murmured, and Caroline went on, my dear young lady, Mélanie, I call you that because I was present at your birth, and yet here you are pursuing that frightful thing called politics, now her handbag was recovered, Caroline’s face had composed itself again and become protective of Mélanie, reassuring, don’t torment yourself, Mélanie, your little daughter never wanders far, you know, I used to want to slip away from my nanny at her age, and perhaps they had all noticed beneath the broad-brimmed hat the child Caroline who was every bit as unreasonable, an ageing adult now, still mixing with bad company like Charly because she fancied herself still young and had a fondness for youth, and although Caroline’s friends showed her respect, knowing that with the loss of Jean-Mathieu today she was the most desolate of creatures, the thought that someone pitied her was repugnant, and Mère thought I am Caroline, this sudden dislocation is me, and perhaps today, five years later at Mère’s birthday celebration in Chuan’s garden, Mère would have loved to know where Caroline was, why did she go out so rarely, was she still in town, well, of course, it was gossip, vicious talk when people said they saw her silhouette sliding around at night, walking around the block with her dog in front of her unable to recognize her own house, none of it was true, Mère thought, rumours and nasty tongue-wagging, but still why had Caroline missed the party, she never would have skipped one before, of course she would have been with Jean-Mathieu, what a touching couple, travelling together, learned about painting and opera, unparalleled friends, an accomplished life she had, her photographs known round the world after those last exhibitions in Paris and London, and his life too was a success as a renowned poet Adrien said he envied, how had a poor boy, a sailor from the port of Halifax, so mastered his art, the love of Caroline had won him over, would he have travelled and written so much without her, she had never known he was born poor, she had learned not to speak of her modest fortune in front of him, he not realizing she was sharing it with him, and where were they now Jean-Mathieu and Caroline, and what was an accomplished life, the life of doubt led by Marie Curie there in the greyish photograph talking to Einstein, they were in Geneva by a lake, a prematurely aged woman draped in a
shawl, shivering with cold, a life without triumph it would seem, a life triumphed over by the word solitude, solitude by Lake Leman, talking to Einstein — was he even listening, heavy in his coat and smoking his pipe, the immovable empire of knowledge and absent-mindedness, not listening, actually, and she knew it, just an enfeebled woman with numbed hands and wrapped in a shawl, more isolated next to this man than in her laboratory at the Institute, alone she was able to make advances on all fronts, visiting a radium plant or on the arm of an American president in the White House, always the lone woman at international commissions, alone next to Einstein, or to the right of Bergson and male colleagues, the only one at conventions, an elevating personality notable by her austere face, from its white hair among all those men, never smiling, and that ultimate triumph, thought Mère, that word solitude on the verge of death, when Marie Curie contemplated through eyes gas-burned and uranium-seared in her lab, that which approached her and which she awaited uncompromisingly, death, the end of a life she still thought of as too banal in her abhorrence of vanity, she demanded only one thing, to be left in peace, and Mère strolled among Chuan and Olivier’s guests wondering why Caroline, who professed to love her, had not shown up, if she had, Mère would have embraced her joyously, she might have told her what was really on her mind, my dear Caroline, here we are, you and I, about to make the same journey across, whatever lies in the past for either of us, we could say we weren’t meant to be the motherly sort, I had several children, and you a fruitful career instead and so many lovers and adventures, and finally Jean-Mathieu who gave you the gift of charming companionship, and the art with which you froze time through the play of light on so many faces of writers and poets, and in each photograph recreated a place, a time or an elite spirit fixed, immortal it would seem, like the English poet resembling a crucified Christ emerging from a trellis, how did you capture that tortured pose, and the artist’s studio, the office, were not for you, better to go off and travel, intrigued always by the complexity of your subjects, adventurer and portrait-painter, with only the arm of Jean-Mathieu to lean on, around the world you went, while I, often with children to look after, would remain in one place, then suddenly you turn humbly to us and ask where is it, my little cloth bag, how time has passed, and if you were with us tonight, Caroline, I would hold you with joy, for who knows what is going to become of you or me, who can really tell, Mère thought, pretence and lies are the thorny gifts that parents leave to their children, Daniel thought, Vincent would be spending the summer at camp, he’d have everything he could need up there in the mountains, riding, biking, footpaths through the woods, but why so far away from you Papa and Mama and Marie-Sylvie and the beaches and Samuel’s boat Southern Light, why Papa, they have rooms and dormitories there, and in winter you can travel by dog-sled, catch whitefish, you’ll have tasty meals, you’ll see, and you’ll be back here before the fall, you need to learn to breathe better, Vincent, and there’s only the mountain, why not tell the truth, Papa, your inn or your castle is for sick kids, but Vincent, ever docile, said nothing and let his father take him there to woods in Vermont, Daniel thought with shame he had not been truthful, sure they would camp out in tents, in cottages and pavilions and dormitories, they would ride and fish and bike, naturally, two lakes, the view of the turrets and the river, but what wasn’t said was that not one of these young campers could exhale properly, at night one could hear the whistling noises from their narrow chests raised up under the sheets by convulsions, the spasms, the contractions, pneumonia or bronchial asthma would go from one child to another, without ever alleviating the nightime breathing difficulties, come, it’s time to sleep, they would say at the window as they watched the mist rise over the fir-trees, goodness how could their blood not manage to regenerate itself in such pure air, and through the rooms and dormitories the whistling noises Daniel could not bear to hear, but put his son in the care of specialists in hope of a cure, never would Vincent dare to complain, his father felt the tensing, the spasms, the father who forced these distant visits on him, for all at once, Vincent was the bird flying around, trapped in a prison of cables in Madrid, a pair of bees, flies or horse-flies, Daniel had seen them so often, their eggs frozen in their first winter, Daniel had lied to Vincent once again, he thought, never telling him what had to be said, and what Chuan and Mère were saying about Caroline, that, yes, if she’s not here with us tonight, it’s because someone won’t let her out, because she must be kept inside that residence, what residence Mère called out to Chuan as she disappeared, there was so much for her to do with the friends and husband and son who were looking for her, and Mère stubbornly went on, what sort of residence, a residence for women artists of her ability and social class, idle chatter and slander, Mère thought, none of it could be true, nasty gossip, leave me alone, that was what Marie Curie insisted on, a bit of peace, and said Caroline, I’ve got my hat and gloves, I want to go out, they’ve invited me to dinner, but a voice came back, no Ma’am, you’re not going out tonight, it’s her, I know it, my black governess, Caroline thought, she’s got back into this house I used to live in with my mother when I was small, though that was in Louisiana, not here in New England, Charly my chauffeur is waiting for me in the car, or rather the car I gave her, and all the gifts I have given people, all those presents are lost to me now, Caroline thought, for she felt she could no longer run her own life as she used to, what was she doing in a house she was told she could not leave, but a voice — she recognized it from the warm, melodious timbre as Harriet the black governess’ — kept saying to her, Ma’am, if we pull up your armchair, you can see the bay and hear chickadees singing in the pine trees, but what’s the point if I can’t go out and play with my cousin or take my pony out past the dunes, said Caroline, Beauty he was called, do you remember, Harriet, my father and grandfather were wonderful sailors, and we always lived near the sea, I’m sure that’s why I’m here by the ocean now, dear, exactly where are we, can you tell me, the walls weren’t this high before, and I could play with my cousin, although my upbringing was always too rigorous, in the morning when my mother welcomed her lovers, everything was forbidden me, that’s when my cousin and I used to wander off with the pony among the dunes, Beauty, that’s what our pony was called, Caroline knew she was repeating the same long sentence whose words eventually faded towards the end, a vague, nebulous sentence, occasionally lit by memories and vivid, elusive images, but it had to be enunciated right to the end, this sentence hammering the brain and the heart, Charly, where is Charly, I really don’t like those young people she hangs around with, Madam, please do not use that name, the voice said, my name is not Harriet, I am Miss Désirée, I do remember you, why are you always contradicting me, Caroline said, irritated all of a sudden, I knew you long ago, remember Mississippi, my photographs of the South are famous, remember that mother with two children, that was you, Harriet, erect and so proud with your children, almost a haughty expression, and that’s how I photographed you, a poor but majestic woman standing on that veranda with rotted boards, and that other photograph, who could forget that, our shame it was, a restaurant façade with words written in wood and stone: whites only here, reserved for whites, a black passer-by wearing a cap is reading this, remember Harriet, I took that photo myself, how strangely numb I felt, as though I were making a film, photographing without feeling anything, sometimes these poor people, with broken bottles placed in the spindly branches of trees to ward off evil spirits, spelled out on the roofs of their huts, where will you spend eternity, I didn’t know we were those evil spirits, it was a way of calling up the dead to help them, strange isn’t it, where will you spend eternity like a preacher’s threatening finger, the sky seemed close, the plaintive wind whipping into the glass bottles like gunshots, it seemed, how sharp it sounded, I remember, far better to feel nothing, believe me, Harriet, especially when I took pictures of the gazelle-hunt in the desert from my first husband’s convertible, that was certainly sobering, killing them while the car tore through
whirlwinds of sand, it’s always been wiser to numb oneself, we weren’t alone in this grotesque appetite for hunting, I remember the cruel falconers in the desert with their trained birds, eagles tracking the buzzards or perhaps some sand-coloured bird behind the odd bush, unless the eagles and falcons cut its throat first, the falconers killed it amid strident cries, and I still hear their shrillness like the sound of bullets, go falcons, kill, kill, and we ate the bird, which tasted like pheasant, wild turkey, falconers who could not eat the meat themselves because it was on offering to Allah the merciful, the compassionate, I heard them praying and offering the slit throat of their prey to the falcons and eagles they prized so highly and raised on the taste of blood, possibly they would one day cut our throats as well, and we expecting none of this, once more by Mère’s side in her red dress with ruffles, Chuan was not reassuring, if Caroline has to be confined to the house, she said, you can well imagine, my dear, that it for her own good, so she can detox, what are you talking about, Mère replied, well, you have guessed that our dear friend has been addicted to morphine more and more each day, the stillest waters run deepest, you know, the more quiet and respectable one seems outwardly . . . Chuan’s attention swiftly turned to her husband who was speaking very loudly, and she reddened with distress, oh my poor husband is making his speech, I warned him to steer away from certain topics, to lighten up, still Olivier’s voice seem to redouble in volume, we are toys in the hands of religious hypocrites who want to tell us what to do, he was saying, beware of those who cling to a land of redemption and oppress us with their prophecies and biblical presages, they build in the desert where a bloodbath is sure to follow, beware these messianic madmen, we are no longer ruled by reason, God, why doesn’t he shut up, Chuan said, wait, this arrow will come back at us, Olivier continued to those who were still listening scattered around the pool, only Mélanie seemed to be listening with an air of utter gravity, she knew the retired senator’s oratory fire when addressing a crowd, and wasn’t there some truth to it when he said we are no longer guided by reason, and what might that mean for the future of her children, she wondered, beside herself at the thought it might be true, were we nothing more than playthings in the hands of madmen, was this our ludicrous fate, was that it for us, to be falcons so falconers could revel in our decay, Caroline thought, imperiously she had demanded that her armchair be moved near the window with the angora cat she never let go of in her lap, the cat Charly had given her, my Charly, one day at a bullfight I filmed in detail at Lima the delirious, enthusiastic shouts of the bloodthirsty spectators burned on my temples, women, men, the killing of the bulls, and this is us . . . as corruptible as the animal hanging on to life amid their cries and their joy, and that image, fixed forever, of three horses in harness and ten men, workers recruited at the last minute, dragging the defeated bull from his dusty arena with ropes, as they will remove me one day, head dragging on the ground, last-minute hires with their lifting gear, and I won’t want to go, the laughter and shouting were contagious, the dance of the bull during the rites, always the same ending, I lingered over that image of the bull being led to burial, lying on his side in the dust, feet still raised, their sharp cries, oh I remember, where are my hat and gloves, Harriet, I want to go out and not hear those shouts any more, and that summer trip to Italy in 1946, I think, who was it who went with me, was it Jean, what was his name . . . what did he look like, a short while ago, when I wanted to see him, they told me Italy was the last place he went, he was so close to me, wasn’t he, so why has he broken things off, why is he withdrawing, no letter, no nothing, that interference when I phoned him, no connection, no voice, the cries of Charly who really didn’t like him, who was he, when his body had been reduced to ashes, I wanted to keep them near me, but they made me give them up, it was at the Palazzo Vecchio, and I had bought a new camera, you should have seen the flash set-up, the pictures, my fevered longing to capture the energy of those shadows, statues, sculptures, bronze horses and eroded clock-towers, Palazzio Vecchio, just him and me alone, the last place he travelled to, they said, I don’t remember much of him, but they tell me I was there on no one’s Island, The-Island-Nobody-Owns, that’s not true though, my hat and gloves, they say they saw me, and dragged him away from me, but that’s not true, that word him weighed on Caroline’s spirit and was just a pronoun referring to a blank face or a sudden absence of any face, but still I knew him well, she repeated to herself, the lightweight scarves he wore, his citronella colognes, him, what wavering, what dismay at not knowing who he was, didn’t we argue in the Paris museum about the pre-Raphaelites, that assertive male tone of voice when he insisted there were no precursors to Raphael, and my cheeks were purple with anger, I had indeed succeeded in capturing the energy, the firm shadow of Michaelangelo’s sculpture, and there he was next to me, saying, put down that camera dear friend, and let’s talk a bit, look how full the shadow in that statue is, he was fidgeting impatiently next to me, the walk has put me out of shape, he said, no memory-lapse there, he, a hole, an air-pocket, a perforation in the heart, I was holding the little casket, they snatched it away from me, a perforation, open the box where the ashes lie, never mind, I’ll forget him, something Adrien whispered in my ear, Caroline, the boat’s waiting, Caroline, we’ll all slide into that perilous sea, a word, a remark about him, I know how much you’ve loved him, they forcibly took the box from my hands, he was the one who would slip into the ocean waters, unfeeling he, slipping from my hands by accident, and there was nothing I could do, in the summer of 1946, I had left a tiresome husband for him, eyes scarcely find a place in a forehead too vast, how wearisome when everything was so standard and precise, the proportions of shadow in the sculpture, the stimulation of my eye behind the lens, then suddenly this void surrounding a head, was it a beautiful one, off-centre, and here it was bursting out of its frame, fruitless, uprooted, the body and head of him, even his name no longer within my grasp, am I to blame, he had not been accessible for quite some time, perforated brain cells and heart, better to picture Italian Renaissance architecture instead and forget him, think about him no more, for there is no horizon in the gap of a viewfinder, schools and colleagues will study my photographs, I had no assistant to help me to the Tower of Giotto, they had been thinking of all those Renaissance engineers, then once up there, it was as though the light obscured my vision, veiled it, just as now I am losing the ability to register the light from his face and head, what I do know is that he was right to see that shadow, that veil over the face of the young London painter, whereas my unaware eyes hung greedily on the shadow, the veil over the face and head in their migration toward death, he said, it alarms me, don’t photograph that young man, what you’re photographing is not the life he transmits, it’s the hand that holds the pencil, chalk on the open notebook, of a young man about to kill himself, tomorrow, in a few hours, it will be motionless, motionless perspiration on my brow and under the dark hair over my left ear, and I saw neither the shadow nor the veil that kept me from seeing, for the light from that dark sun stuck to my eyes, concentrating especially on the painter’s right hand as it held the pencil to the book, and you could see the knot of veins and the squareness of nails, who could have detected the death sentence already on this body while it still breathed and perspired, it was like that when they asked me to photograph a group of soldiers just after a mission that had nearly proved fatal to them, I felt like suppressing what I say beneath those laden, hallucinating brows on a respite in some rest-house, it was as though the Grand Inquisitor had laid hands on them and caged them in their tormented postures, like the Allegories in the paintings by Max Beckmann, heads and bodies sadistically vice-gripped, or was I able to read in their hollow eyes what they were able to rescue of themselves from the trenches, cut off, decapitated, but still imprinted there on the painter’s canvas, still breathing and alive, like marching ghosts, Max Beckmann, labelled a degenerate and forced to flee Germany, banished, had carved out the future of all monsters, the demons of a da
rker Europe, and there they were before me, sprung from the triptych panels by a painter who himself was demolished, painter or poet of the trench-mud, I said to myself, and is this how we face tomorrow, and our destiny still further on, and I wanted to suppress all I saw, for I was young then, barely out of my university internships, then the very same day, in that dark, ruined Europe, I heard a choir of voices so intensely jubilant that I just froze there in that dark, cold street, through the hearth of a destroyed building, I saw a stairway leading to a music academy, the teacher was a woman smiling at her students and letting herself be carried away irresistibly, guiding them with the baton and a wilful hand, it was a dress rehearsal of Così Fan Tutte by some very young people with voices that seemed already round and perfect with notes of joy spilling forth on this glacial night under the rhythm of the hand that led them, the banality of the libretto was forgotten — the drama of a few infidelities — all gave way to the songs of love and desire, almost the whistling of a bird or a mocking child warning you of the perils of love, and those who had burned the earth in hatred and vengeance were no more, each and every one joyfully buoyant on stage, a delicate tumult giving voice to the sensuality of living, Mozart, acute psychologist that he was, knew in the end that loving was needed and nothing more, of course it seemed that every struggle was pointless combat, senseless stubbornness, voices, notes of a purity we somehow could no longer hear in our bellicose moods, notes of joy in this glacial night, pitiless, and listening, I said to myself, yes, I will face my fate, but how, if only the ecstasy had endured, if only I were still preceded everywhere by these voices, their enchantment, and tomorrow that young man I photographed, his artist’s pencil between his fingers, sad-eyed and melancholy, would have had enough time to end it all, to leave his studio and his house empty, and I would have been helpless to stop his over-thought act, helpless to say to him, come hear this music with me, Così Fan Tutte, a flight of birds or laughing angels brushing against your deep shadows, cold halo around your body, come, follow me, and why was I not able to communicate this knowledge of joy, because it was not just for me, do you hear Harriet, Désirée, Miss Désirée, in complete dismay, one must still sing, Désirée says, when you’re shining white folks’ shoes, or washing floors in airports and public places, you’ve got to sing, my mother said, for God is there to listen, and I don’t know if my mother was right to say this: you must sing through gritted teeth or right out loud, but do not be silent, pray, she said, spare me the prayers, Caroline said grumpily, how can a black servant, a simple girl, call her back to God’s existence or resign herself to it, you’re getting on my nerves, I told you to move my armchair over by the window, how can one love a God of cold, Frédéric said, just as I thought, oh, I hope, Mélanie said to Olivier as she breathed the perfumed night air drunk on music filtering into the gardens and up to the open doors of Chuan’s house, she was saying, I hope that this does-n’t come back to haunt us, she had the impression Olivier had forgotten his pride in oratory, so as to listen to her with full attention and anticipation he had placed his hand on her shoulder and said, I think of you often, you’re a very active woman, full of fight, and you look out for the general good; your children will inherit those values too, but be careful who you rub the wrong way, their exasperation will quickly turn to intolerance and irresponsible fury, every day in the papers I read the sad story of anonymous madmen killing activists, one had founded two hospitals in Somalia and taken care of tuberculosis patients for thirty years, be careful my dear Mélanie, how serious you are, Chuan said, come dance with me, or shall I just dance by myself, Olivier, stop weighing Mélanie down with your advice, Chuan’s red dress rippled by them like a wave, and suddenly the lightness of her spirit settled on Mélanie and Olivier, welded to one another by the weight of their thoughts: could it be that Samuel has really found the path of commitment in dance, Mélanie said, our children will go farther than us, accomplish more, and Mélanie replayed in her head the new choreography by Arnie Graal, it seemed that the work in which Samuel represented his dance school was defiance in the teeth of cruelty, or might she be thinking onerously of the over-wrought cruelty in the pillaging of scenes, tableaux, even dance steps which appeared fragmented and deformed? All at once, musical norms were fractured, and the show — one they had watched all night without sitting, no passivity, no seats, the inflexible choreographer said — could be compared to electronic music which was abstract in colour, was no more, and how was it that a show demonstrating such discomfort elicited so much popularity, Mélanie wondered, for the textures and sounds of synthesizers and sequencers, entangled with noise of a funereal fanfare, fires, the exceeding slowness of the dancers emerging like ghosts from walls of concrete and burnt asphalt, some on skateboards, toy vehicles, attacked in their positions by fire, could only increase in us this sense of uneasiness, indeed, the insistence and unbearable slowness of these bodies tumbling into the void became oppressive, one saw in it what one did not wish to, the huge collapse of a city, multitudes of inhabitants fleeing into one another, like bees smoked out of their hive, was Arnie Graal’s choreography too suggestive or was the spectator too suggestible, moulded in the clay of dance-steps and images he saw, there was no mistaking the terror still inspired by the event from which Arnie and his dancers had created an almost too-vivid creation, you have to think, Arnie said, of the collapse of a cathedral in ancient times, when artisans and sculptors hung onto tower stones, tools in hand, constantly working, tied to the translucent wall stones, stained-glass, huge windows, luminescent at this hour, and from where all these bodies, stooped or spread-eagled under the violent shock, will plunge into the void with a slowness accentuated by stupefaction at the very moment the glass cathedral moves in seismic oscillations to its foundations, Mélanie thought she disliked Samuel’s being one of these dancers, like a dominant, isolated figure falling headlong past a wall, his left leg advanced in a lamentable gesture of revolt against heaven, all of it was only too true, she thought in horror, it seemed to her that her son, in that fall to rocky ground, forgetting the stage onto which he would re-emerge . . . Arnie had so masked the sight-lines . . . would have his spine, kidneys, and neck broken, when for too long his head, brain, and all his faculties would be intact, and his memory-centre would have too much time, if only two seconds, to think, suffer the ultimate, in a reflection too agile, many a mother had lost sons thus, Arnie would have told them, she ought to have added that in the inconsolable part of herself, she was close to those mothers and sons, but Arnie also distracted the audience, those bodies falling with a slowness exacerbated by the artifice of choreography, he said, are bodies that have been thrown from helicopters into the sea in their hundreds by dictator-generals, a lone man capable of carrying out all these villainies with his military apparatus, prisoners and political detainees were tossed, still breathing, above the Pacific waters, and these operations are still going on, what do you feel when you are the pilot or mechanic of these helicopters after dropping their human bundles from Santiago or wherever it is into the sea, those who disappeared into the waters will say nothing, of course, but what do you feel when one by one the bodies fall with measured, concentrated slowness, Chuan said to Mélanie, remember, tomorrow at dawn will be the flotilla of sailboats for the summer festival, and at night the quays will shimmer with swaths of light, we’ll see an exquisite chain of white boats beneath banners and decorations, I’ll be up at dawn to see who wins the race, Walzer or Compass Rose, we won’t sleep all night, of course, my wife’s active and indefatigable, while my strength wanes, thought Olivier, admiring Chuan’s intense appetite for life, the night is just beginning and she’s already talking about tomorrow, did he need to approve of her agreeing with Jermaine on this hard-driving music that filled the house, and those boat-races on the ocean were so boring and especially loud, it’s so hard to write my articles at this time of year, Olivier told Mélanie, but at least I see more of my son, he’s like his mother, he also loves partying too much, Samuel’s teac
her in New York, Mélanie resumed, is our black Balanchine, that’s what my son says, it’s too bad everything he creates is so close to real life, you do have to respect tradition a bit after all, Olivier said absently, while admitting he understood nothing about the choreographer’s controversial ballets when Mélanie referred to him, perhaps he’s too innovative, don’t people criticize him for pushing the limits of the human body too far? Is it necessary to break these young dancers at the beginning of their repertory, Mélanie wondered, then she remembered seeing her mother in a dream the night before, another of those same dreams, obsessing, rampant, perhaps indicative of Esther’s difficulties and shoals; Mère invited Mélanie to dinner in her gazebo, but instead of the place settings, there were two black leather gloves on the tablecloth, difficulties and shoals, Mélanie thought when she saw her mother’s serene and smiling face among the evening’s guests, Esther always sprang to life when the conversation touched on something she knew about, no, Mélanie’s mother was not showing any sign of weakness, except perhaps a trembling in the right hand, scarcely noticeable, a dream to be forgotten, except that the scene of the two gloves seemed bothersome, and Mélanie couldn’t manage to rid herself of it, why not wait for dawn and the arrival of the boats on calm waters with Chuan and her impetuous feelings of joy and astonishment, all these forebodings would vanish out there on the beach, face and hair wet with the salt and the air, how could Augustino be left out, transparent water at dawn, salt air, and Caroline said, thank you Désirée, I am finally comfortable here by the window with Charly’s cat on my knee, I don’t want him taken away, he’s fine here, affectionate creature, all that remains of Charly, I loved Charles too, when the man with thinning hair, whose name escapes me, still came to visit, till everyone began withdrawing from me, Charles who once confided in me, only you, dear Caroline, can understand me, he said, because you are a woman and a great spirit, shouldn’t I admit that this wonderful essence of a spirit, so great that nothing can quench it, was really more Charles’ than mine, noble ascetic of poetry that he was, perhaps he shared with me only that affinity, out of love, and he agreed to lose his soul, if soul is the flesh that submits to the tortures of love, if soul is also the body that marches on blindly, what do we really know, Charles had a loyal companion in Frédéric, with whom he shared a life in Greece whose splendours he praised in his books, already a distant happiness, so many books read and written, then suddenly those wrinkles at the corners of Frédéric’s mouth, his first dizzy-spells, his fall when he was smoking by the pool, Charles thought the grey curtain of mortality was descending on them without warning, he thought he could heal his reluctance to write in his room with the blinds drawn and through which the emanations of jasmine and acacia drifted when opened, but denser than these perfumes was the melancholy that gripped his chest, he thought he was doing the right thing by withdrawing, this time so inaccessible, the misanthropy of the unapproachable poet was well known, every year he left like this, all alone and no one knew where, Eduardo stood his green Sunday-outing bicycle against the fence, where it rusted while he did the gardening, Charles preferred to spend Sundays in the deserted town, going by in my car, I pretended not to recognize him by the water-line, though that neck and delicate man’s head were familiar to me, so often I had photographed them throughout Charles’ literary life, from its precocious beginnings, I knew him as well as if he had been my own child, a dreamed-of adolescent that time altered so very little, now so impenetrable that no one could find him out, he would go to India, an ashram in Delhi, and that would be his fortress where he could meditate and write. He didn’t know who was expecting him there, or under what sun he would melt, cook and be struck down, was he forgetting, in these spiritual shadows he looked for, the meditation, the going-beyond individual consciousness, a denatured mental concentration, how could Charles forget that, beyond this iron thought supported by pride, there was another Charles, still a man of the flesh, subject to temptation as others were. We never know when a star will detach itself from the vault of heaven and make us stumble. I can say that I knew nothing of it, yet love came easy to me, before I met the man whose ashes now sleep at the bottom of the sea, at that island no one owns, and as for Charly, you forbid me to speak her name, as if you had any right, Harriett, she phoned yesterday and asked to speak to me, didn’t she? Now why can’t I see her, you’re all plotting against me here, my hat and gloves, I want to go out, you say I might fall down in those rainy avenues with my dog, and I assure you it was the dog that got me lost that time, don’t give me any of that medication, tell Charly to come and see me, I can show you the club she goes to in the evenings, it’s just a matter of cheques and stolen goods, I can forgive for all of it, you, Harriett, and Miss Désirée, you misjudge her, you’re a zealous woman, always off to church to pray when you’re not here with me, and if I decided to stop eating, what would you do, let me die in peace, just one star detached from the heavens and we see nothing anymore. I don’t think it’s good for you to pray so much, good thing you sing as well when you’re in church, and sometimes I go to sleep to the sound of your voice, but I sense too much begging and prayer in it, as though you were reciting psalms to get on my nerves, yes, like you were doing it on purpose, Désirée, remember how I used to love hearing the guitar-players in the streets of New Orleans, the rhythm of those blues, and the Mardi Gras celebrations, remember, Harriett, my mother used to say those rhythms set me loose, even then I felt myself possessed and ready to break all the rules, though they left everything up to you, Harriett, because my family didn’t have much time to bring me up, so you had to decide everything for me, like Mai, that girl of Mélanie’s, you couldn’t do anything with me, and if that one is already a runaway, just wait and see how much trouble Mélanie’s going to have with her, and in Delhi Charles meet his devastating angel without knowing it, theatre was Cyril’s stock-in-trade, true or false, was Cyril a comedian, lazy and unemployed? The young man certainly had the key to reciting poetry with a deep voice, you like the contemplative poets, like me, Charles said, Milton, Blake, how could one be still in the company of a thirty-year-old, whether it was all lies or truth, and Cyril said to Charles, wasn’t it like a fiancé’s promise, and Cyril lacked Charles’ modesty, Charles who was truly great, I will read your poems all over the world, here in Delhi, later in Holland where they’ve invited you, not without vanity, Charles basked in this new discovery, Cyril was excessively lanky, more than Charles liked, without being wiry, his back and shoulders being muscular, it would be very pleasant to travel, continue those professional travels that Charles had told everyone he was giving up, but meeting Cyril changed everything, he would go off tomorrow to those conference halls he so hated with this alter-ego whose clear and azure eyes — so clear one saw nothing in them — one got lost in, this double lyrically reciting Charles’ poetry, contemplative, reflective, like the work of Milton to whom the critics compared him, Charles, who was reserved, relating to his admirers only through letters, forgot his reserve, welcomed Cyril’s spontaneity, he who dressed Charles up in his cajolery, and how can those accustomed to discreet, almost cold, personal relations with others, not be suspicious of the comfortable bodies of such liars? Perhaps at this moment Charles missed the peace and safety of his correspondence over many years with Vladislav, the young Russian poet, one of Charles’ passionate admirers, whose face, praise heaven, he had never seen nor whose tempestuous heat he had never felt close to him. Cyril, though, was simply there, never asking Charles if he was wanted or not, but just there waiting to be taken in his arms, at once abandoned and compromising. Heavier still, and bulkier than Charles had ever imagined, when he constantly felt the attraction of eyes so very clear, yes, perhaps at those moments he missed the unpremeditated quality of Frédéric, the subtle words of Vladislav, the Russian that Charles knew how to translate, disconcerted, Charles wondered what was happening in his life, he felt spoiled and put upon, like his friend Caroline, where had he stumbled and into what trap? He recalled Ja
cques, so loved by Tanjou, and who knows, these things are as unavoidable as they are brief . . . he would write to Frédéric, he would phone him tonight from Delhi to say he would soon be back, as a prisoner of his senses, he did feel so unworthy of the Hindu tradition he’d wanted to take up, didn’t he? Frédéric understood him, didn’t he? He had just written to him, warning him to be financially prudent and not to let into their house everyone who came to the door begging for help, Frédéric’s weak point was never being able to say no to the most off-the-wall and marginal of people. Whenever Charles was not keeping an eye on him, wasn’t he always giving his money to whoever needed it without discriminating, it seemed an incorrigible fault in him, Charles thought, exhorting his friend to exercise caution and not go out to jazz sessions alone at night, but in his declining health to make sure Edouardo was always nearby. In his letters to Frédéric, Charles omitted Cyril’s name, surely it was better that way, and he repeated to himself that the burn he got in India would certainly heal soon. My dear Caroline, he wrote me, I can tell you everything, including what to do, but I no longer know what to think. The problems I have with Charly, her disobedience, her nastiness, keep me from replying to Charles. I think it all began with Jacques, who left us before he was fifty, the just man, the Kafka specialist, impartial, exuberant, how is it he was struck down like the patriarch Job on his bed of manure, with wounds, low blows, and so on — for that is how he is seen in paintings — Jacques the first of wave in an infinite ocean? The first breaker before so many others? He left us so suddenly, we all felt ourselves going with him. We were dismayed, not even able to shed a tear, unlike Tanjou, to whom Jacques had promised to return every evening as the sun set on the sea, his faithful visits would be heralded in pink to recall his exuberance in life, Tanjou waited, but Jacques never came, perhaps only in a slight breeze, a summer’s breath on Tanjou’s mouth. We need to be concerned when we completely change our habits or build up fantasies, Charles, however, wasn’t, he walked down Delhi’s lush green streets, hand-in-hand with Cyril, seeming to put on his partner’s daring, his limitless temerity, and his former virtue of temperance was gone, now his life was stormy and exalting, and he wrote these new verses as soon as he was alone in his room by the river, no dryness, no dessicated regimentation for him, there were no rules for poets, all at once his lines took on a volcanic quality, ardent and sensual as his writing had rarely been, that he had always avoided these excesses and was now metamorphosed did not bother him. I wrote to tell Charles that his friend, the poet Jean, had let me down badly, never answering the letter I sent via Charly. Never. I was certainly not expecting that moment of ashes on the ocean near The Island-Nobody-Owns. I thought we all had so much time ahead of us, Charles did too. Jacques was the one who caused all this upset, Harriett, Miss Désirée, he shook us all up, the last time I took his picture, it was summer, but he was cold, and I could sense him shivering under his corduroy pants and turquoise sweater—almost the colour of his eyes—do you know what Tanjou says to me, Caroline, that I don’t love him enough, is it true, Caroline, I’m not detached nor impassive, or that’s just the way I am, this feigned frigidity, and then he wept, poor child, and went on repeating, you don’t love me enough, God what can you do, tomorrow, later on, tell him Jacques loved him well enough, very much, don’t forget, and through my lens I captured Jacques like a painter, his ironic expression, his pale cheeks, saying good-bye to him all the while. Was it the loss of the little cloth handbag or the loss of her memory that affected Caroline more on The-Island-Nobody-Owns, it seemed catastrophic to Mère that she had dreamed about two opaque travel bags someone had put on that rough, back lawn in autumn and winter that had gone unmown for a long time, what was the figure two that ran through some of her presentiments, or that confrontation between Mélanie and her mother, two women telescoped into one when death made its entry, the faded condition of the garden had moved Mère to call Julio, Jenny and Marie-Sylvie to help her with the clearing of it, and where were they all, why weren’t they answering, an icy wind whipped at the windows, they’ve all run off and left me alone, even my daughter, she’d thought, when just at that moment, Augustino appeared with one of his birds sitting on his shoulder, not Samuel’s parrot, but an odd sort of parakeet that moved bizarrely on his shoulder, you called me, Grandmother, he asked, look at our garden, where did all this rain come from, the frost on the palm-leaves, and why are the trees so bent over, as soon as Mère and Augustino were outside, the parakeet flew off its familiar perch but seemed to have forgotten how to fly, don’t let it get away, Grandma, Augustino yelled, where’s it going anyway, it might break a bone, whose travel-bags are those, Mère asked him, two, always the figure two, and as she awoke from her nap, she saw Augustino next to her with the parakeet sitting meekly on his shoulder, could you keep an eye on her Grandma, I’m going for a swim, isn’t too cold, said Mère still in her dream environment, then she felt the bird’s plumage on her cheek, saved again, she thought, she had been saved, and those bags were there ready for her visit to her sons in California, it reassured her that Augustino had woken her up before dinnertime, she’d have time to get dressed before the evening meal, it seemed that whenever his grandmother insisted they all get dressed for dinner, Augustino went out, she’d put the parakeet back in its cage, it bit everyone with its pointed beak, except Augustino, whom it loved, yes, those travel-bags would come in handy, she thought, if ever she decided to visit her sons; what a magnificent night it was in Chuan’s gardens for Mère’s birthday, now just bury the thought of those bad dreams, nightmares actually, she smiled and spoke to everyone but was concerned that Caroline was not among them, there were very few friends of her own venerable age, some did not seem to change over time, like Suzanne or Adrien in his black jacket and white pants, listening to Daniel with polite coolness, what was it they were talking about, the lengthy follow-up to his novel Les Etranges annees, ah yes, said Adrien in his professorial tone, I’ll be most curious to read you soon, a lie Daniel paid no attention to, thinking he would retreat to his monastery in Spain, worn out by this boring socializing, he’d only gone along with this party to please Mélanie, his book was his whole life, so why did he let himself get torn away from it so easily? Yes, he thought, if he had let off Hitler’s dog, why not also exculpate the children of treacherous, reprobate officials, what would he, Daniel, have done if he had been the son not of one of history’s victims, but of one of its executioners like Himmler or Göring, if his birth had been in that apocalyptic shipwreck? If his parents, his father, had held macabre sway over the execution of so many innocents, they would have revolted him, but he and his offspring, what would they have done? He’d have been the son of a man hanged at Nuremberg whose vicious ghost would have tormented him everywhere, destitute, he would not have hesitated to sell his father’s story for food, even if he knew nothing of it except what they told him — though would he believe it, missing his guilty suicide-father, hanged in some murky past, he’d have been like all children, reliving family scenes in which he sat by his mother’s and sister’s sides and felt a kind father stroke his hair, no denying that hand, a kind, always affable father, blameless except for an affair with his secretary, something the son only learned about much later, and with chagrin, the sons and daughters of cursed, reprobate men would always have to hide, flee the partisans of hate, and why were they hated, they wondered, fleeing from interrogation, little children locked in with these men’s wives in hotel rooms with no way out, internment camps, the pretty estates given to their father by the good Führer in times past, where were their dolls, their croquet set, they no longer knew where they could live or hide, these little ones and their mothers suddenly stripped of everything, taken in by nuns in homes for the sick, these little ones and their mothers, bereft, had not understood that, if these hotel rooms were empty and the beds deserted, it was because the whole place had been purged of its infirm, all injected or gassed, and the stoic nuns welcomed the offspring and wives of those who had commi
tted these crimes, saying God will not forgive them, God will not forgive them, and they, so little, had understood nothing the nuns said to them, because they were the sons and daughters of those who would never be pardoned by Man or by God, and they gave the sons and daughters of these officials chocolate and sweets out of pity, knowing well that these small ones must be rendered blameless, if they had known, if they had seen their fathers enter here to get rid of all the defenceless infirm and sick, the ones their fathers called rubbish, garbage, if the sons and daughters of these fathers had seen what they had, the injections and the excruciating agony, they would not have wanted to live a second longer, no, faced with all those cries, these sons and daughters would not have wanted to live and carry the seed of evil, these sons and daughters of the same age as those who were gassed, four or five years old some of them, understood nothing of what the nuns were saying to them, where were the dolls, the croquet set and the pretty German estate given to their father by the good Führer, you must never say your name, your father’s name, because you too will never be pardoned for anything, innocent as Hitler’s dog and with that same animal candour, betrayed, they listened wide-eyed in fright, still you will grow up like all the others and be courageous, the nuns said as they washed them and cared for them, just like the infirm and feeble in spirit, tomorrow, bringers of justice await you in their hundreds, and what will you say to them, we will pray for you, little angels, and already judged by the justice-bringers in their hundreds, they listened in tears, where was Daddy, would their kind daddy come, these sons and daughters had no idea that at the same time, their fathers, conceivers of carnage and irredeemable, definitive solutions, would be signing agreements this January on the shores of Lake Wannsee, it was too bad that this time, indeed, the problem could not be solved, the conceivers said as they signed, ordinary bureaucrats following protocol, they had no choice but to eliminate human beings, signed it was now in the building on the edge of Lake Wannsee, one of the bureaucrats had picked a few scavengers to pick up belongings after it was all over, death was a factory, an industry from which fabulous gifts flowed: hair and jewels, an operation their fathers were be proud of, the kind fathers of little ones called Gudrun, Sylke, and Lina, safe in their infirmaries, would these nice daddies be home for the holidays, their mothers barely survived out wandering the streets disguised as peasants, and destitute, paperless, in an exodus like a soldier’s flight, pushing carts filled with vegetables and rabbits, in this month of January, in this locale near Lake Wannsee, the fathers of Klaus, Sylke, and Gudrun had opened their secret files and smoked cigars as they put the finishing touches on their strategy, oh yes, this time there would be an unredeemable, final solution, the decision had been made, Sylke and Klaus wondered why their fathers had forgotten them here with these nuns, would they ever be a family again, or would they just visit their fathers’ graves once a year, and tomorrow each one would have their father’s ghost sticking to their skin, each would have a hanged man or suicide, why would no one have pity on these innocents? You’re wandering into forbidden territory, Adrien said with that professorial voice of his . . . which interests nobody, he might have added, it might be different if Joseph, your father, were the writer in the family, but you weren’t a prisoner in Buchenwald like him, he seized control of himself under Daniel’s smouldering gaze, is he fishing for compliments the way all these young authors do, Adrien wondered, well, bravo, my friend, I’m glad to see that you’ve been doing such good work, say, is your father still going to play the violin tonight the way he did for the millennium festivities, it was very moving to hear, Daniel knew only too well these gambits of Adrien’s when he refused to talk about Daniel’s books, this attitude was one more reason to retreat to the monastery in Spain, he thought as he explained that his father had little time for the violin now that he was Chairman of the Institute of Marine Biology, and so his technique had suffered, talking to Adrien, Daniel had the feeling that he was just chatting, going on, when he would rather be talking literature with the nationally renowned poet who was snubbing him and whose wife then came over and hugged Daniel as if to intercede for him, Suzanne’s sudden kiss, full of spontaneity, and Daniel blushed with pleasure, when you’re in Spain, I’m going to miss our Friday breakfasts on the terrace when I can read you my poems, she said, you’re not hard on me the way my husband is, too bad so few writers of your generation like being around us, Daniel, sometimes I say to myself, you are my only friend, at least I know you won’t make fun of me if I laugh and push away that word, old-age, which is the enemy of joyfulness. Children inherit their father’s past, even if it’s only partially revealed to them, Daniel thought, and Ari walked farther out onto the jetty with his daughter Lou in his arms, look at all the stars in the sky and the boats lit up like cakes with candles on them, tomorrow’s the race all those sailboats are waiting for, too bad one of them way over there is the eerie recreation of a torpedo-boat, your real name is Marie-Louise, no, Lou, stammered the child, then she let out screams that pained her father’s ears, Lou, Lou, Lou, father and daughter, wrapped up in the same night-shadow, high on the stone road, so small-seeming, so far, at the far end of the wharf, Lou’s face showing the grimace of pain that comes so quickly to small children, resolute, she did not cry, but her father saw that the large movements of the waves under the planks of the jetty did not scare her, though she didn’t much like it, all that blackness around them, the stars that barely lit the rippling waves, why did her father make her do this walk every evening, water and waves didn’t reassure her much, except when they were warm, calm, and contained in the pool at home, where she could wade after she had painted her body with her father’s pencils and brushes, that liner over there, that’s Le Commodore, Ari said, that’s a pretty big vessel that’s going to pollute our beaches, and the boat watching us is L’Ange de la paix, The Angel of Peace is watching all of us, hear that, Lou, that’s nothing but the wind and the waves, the ocean breeze forever in you hair and mine, as everlasting as the sky and the sea, as you and me, and these thirty-kilometre winds are common at sea, later I’ll teach you to navigate, then Ari buttoned Lou’s sweater, the one with kittens on it, she’d never be cold in her chequered overalls, though her feet were bare, how good the wind is, how much good it does us, he felt as infuriated as this sea and wind, not wanting his daughter to be baptized, but no one had paid attention to him, and he hated the idea that a priest, a complete stranger and signed by the message of a religion, put ablutions on the forehead of Marie-Louise, a child born free, listen Lou, what your mother did in that church that day made me mad, it’s a fraud that I, your father, would never have allowed, a mistake, a misunderstanding, you’re as free as the wind and the air, and always will be, that religion always takes advantage of newborns, and what could you do about it, loud cries, I don’t believe a thing they say, your mother wanted you in that ridiculous white dress and bonnet, and me there in church too, a day of futility and humiliation for you and me both, non, she and I will never understand one another, it’s low tide, you’d like to back to the car, sweetheart, you’re already instinctively good in the water, and soon you’ll be able to swim, OK, let’s go home if you’re going to sulk, if that’s what you want, you have to want to, that’s fine, why didn’t I just grab you out of that priest’s hands before all those ridiculous immersions and ablutions, but no, your mother, Ingrid, forced me to be reasonable, standing there in that church, not angry, remember, you are free, and the monk Asoka had written to him, oh dear Ari, be as patient as those oriental flowers, so persistent they flourish and bloom in the mud, be respectful of your child’s mother, unfortunately, you are not separated or divorced, sad really, Ingrid is entitled to the Christian sacrament of baptism for her daughter, isn’t she, just as you are a convert to Buddhism late in life, cultivate the flowers of patience and acceptance in yourself, my dear Ari, be persistent as the tea bush, the camellia flower, for we are different, all of us, I am in England after a trip to the south-central United States,
I was meditating with some students in Dallas when a large man came up to me with hostility and said, aren’t you ridiculous in your orange robe from shaved head to toe, I am an itinerant monk, and in my country this is how monks dress, it is the habit of poverty, well, if that’s the god-awful way you dress where you live, why don’t you just go back there, the big man tried to insult me, but I just threw him off balance by being gentle, which, as you know, my dear Ari, is also a form of patience, then suddenly I started questioning this man, a man piqued to hostility by my appearance — what is appearance anyway — and little by little he started to tell me about his family, his house in the country, and forgot all about my orange pilgrim’s robe, when you get bitter with your wife Ingrid, you are certainly not free from desire or hurtful thoughts, Buddhism is based on responsibility for oneself and the fulfilment that emanates from it in adulthood, Ari thought, they baptized my daughter when she was barely born, and without her willing consent, Ingrid, her mother, even had her own doubts about some of the mysteries of faith, Christianity defined hell as the place where souls were tormented perpetually, but if those souls were damned, hadn’t they already had enough in this world, Ingrid could not understand how a subterranean place discharging rivers of fire onto spirits could exist, Lou, her daughter, her lamb, would not have her mind tarnished by the sadism of such a mystery, after all, they both told her, each one separately every day, that she lived in a paradise, they knew how cruel the world could be, this reality of a true hell, and Lou would realize it quickly enough, Ingrid and Ari had been ideal couple so recently, and already that was no more, Ari thought as he held his daughter close against the wind, the perfection of it had been poisoned by so many disputes and quarrels, and who bore the brunt of them, thought Ari, Lou, Marie-Louise who got bundled from her father’s big house to her mother’s cramped apartment, where she shared an apartment with Jules, Ingrid’s first child, Lou, an unhoped-for child in parents over forty, their gift, a couple once perfect and now in dissension, gradually dissipated, scattered after the birth of their daughter, Ari had painted and drawn the couple, and on this solid foundation, this beauty and love, had sketched out several plans for sculptures, sketches he felt were so irresistibly sexual, but which he did not dare destroy, and which he looked at with regret in his studio, could it be the influence of these religious notions that had split them apart as it split and annihilated nations; having scattered and reduced one another to nothing, Ingrid and Ari still had Lou, and who knew where she was going to sleep tonight, at Daddy’s till Sunday maybe, then on Monday her mother would take her back, still Ari would so have loved them all to be inseparable, be patient my dear Ari, Asoka wrote his friend, I’ll be in Mali in a few days, where so many children carry their mothers’ viruses, already I am wondering if it isn’t too late, if the situation isn’t desperate, what will I say to those mothers who ask me for help, when I know how badly the whole of West Africa is ravaged, meditate and pray for us all, my dear Ari, kiss Lou for me, this will be my third trip to Mali, and Petites Cendres waded through the sauna at the Porte du Baiser Saloon, it was not him, Ashley, looking mismatched and ugly, that men came looking for here, he thought, there was a fresh crop of New York models hanging out in the bar, too young perhaps, but tantalizing to the old guys . . . sweet, nice, white boys with milky skin, Ashley thought, must have just let go of their mothers’ apron-strings, all very with it in their tight-fitting tops, strutting like models in a magazine, and one, slender as a girl with straight blond hair, insolent, but sweet as candy, didn’t laugh like the others when he saw me come in, just smiled, hey Ashley, there you are, where’ve you been, someone was looking for you, guy with a thick neck you should stay away from, if you want to know, we’re clean, all three of us, going to a show tonight, and the cocktails are cheap here, I bet they don’t pay you much either, though you’re a good guy, Ashley, there were the milky-skinned boys and the blonde with straight hair who’d smiled at me, and near him, noses in their martinis, a couple more teenagers, one was a model too, I bet, a graceful, Asian kid that the straight-haired blonde was hugging, his brother he said, and the third with a dark fringe over his forehead, a Mexican, Ashley thought, the trio formed a circle, then these kids waltzed, hands on shoulders and laughing, their teasing relaxed Petites Cendres, and after the show, they were going to surprise the Queen of the Desert with splashes of champagne in her dressing room all over her expensive feathered coat, but she wouldn’t mind, she’d say, come on you jokers, let’s do some dancing and singing in the streets, but watch out for the cop and his checkpoint, and these rowdy kids would say, oh how beautiful you are, Queen of the Desert, pearls wet with bubbly and all, you’re why we came to this island, to whistle and stomp at your shows when you can’t get mad at us, how could anyone get mad, she said, you’re way too cute, where’ve you been anyway, come on into the dressing-room and let’s talk awhile, and Ashley would be alone in the sauna, did you know the instructor wouldn’t let me into the gym today, she said in a plaintive voice to the three boys who weren’t listening anyway, yeah, he had the nerve to say that to me, he didn’t mind my darkish skin, he said, he lives with a black boxer, it was the marks, these swellings on my skin that might infect the other athletes, one of the boys raised his head and said, we’ll beat him up for you, though he hadn’t listened to Petites Cendres’ complaints, they were playing, having fun, see those swellings and marks, it wasn’t true, he just said that so he could throw me out, how can I infect the others just working out on the mat or the parallel bars, then the instructor said, what about hugs in the shower, sweat, sperm, this is a classy gym here Ashley, not a bordello like those hook-up joints, is that any way to talk to me, I feel humiliated, I’m a real person, yes me, said Petites Cendres, but an offended person, said the joking boy, God bless you, Petites Cendres said to the straight-haired blond, you smiled at me when you came into the saloon, it makes me feel better after what the gym instructor did, if my ancestors hadn’t prayed to God, they’d still have chains on their wrists and ankles, but God was there to beg to and sing for in their misery, though he watched helpless as they were lynched and their blood dried in the sun, with God they had everything, no matter if they were humiliated with dirty work day after day, may God always smile on you and protect you from people’s meanness, boys, Petites Cendres said with his hand over his heart, for he felt the God he praised was inside him, others may have empires, but Petites Cendres had God within the temple of his withered flesh, although the rejection by the gym instructor who had shut the door on him that morning had left an impression like spittle on his face . . . was this the Manhattan street where Samuel had seen Our Lady of the Bags, a thirteen-year-old itinerant with a delicate face haloed in golden curls, an unlettered child in a pleated skirt, sitting on the sidewalk with an open Bible in her lap, the same one Samuel had shouted jeers at from his car, you and your predictions, lies, that’s all they are, lies, when are you going to shut up, you liar, and what are you going to do when heaven unmasks every one of you, children of the shadows, Our Lady of the Bags had recited in a monotone, when the heavens open and engulf your houses and buildings in flames, then what will you say? Yes, this was the spot where Samuel had seen and mocked the destitute prophetess, more in high spirits than in hardened ill-will, what had become of her, where was she, if among the disappeared, under what pile of rubble would she be, and if alive, maybe she would come back to this street and Samuel could apologize to her, for however ignorant and desolate she was, Our Lady of the Bags seemed to be right, Samuel would have told her he danced every night in that unwieldy choreography of Arnie Graal’s from which he barely seemed to emerge in pieces each dawn, so crushing and rigid was the discipline that, if he danced these steps with a fire that the art of dance could reproduce in its physical depth and density — at least with the images of bodies broken in pieces, taken apart — it was so no one could forget what he had seen and lived through that day when the predictions of the unlearned Lady of the Bags came true, and so no
one could forget that, no sooner did one recover from these punishments than others went on elsewhere or had been continuing for such a long time, and Samuel wanted to say to Our Lady of the Bags how perplexed and torn he was, unable to confide in any one, except perhaps to her whom he had derided, the unlettered, uneducated little girl with her diabolical reflections on that sunny day in New York, but where was she, under what mountain of granite was she lying, her halo of hair beneath the muck and stones, he would like to tell her, I dance too, as others have done around me, in fact that very day with their tributes, saying, come, let me give you a bit of joy, a caress, a moment of happiness in the roar and the calamity, so that hope for the young like us revives and does-n’t die, and she would have said, the unlearned Lady of the Bags, I can’t read, I don’t know what I’m saying either, it’s delirium of revelation from heaven, for Our Lady of the Bags did not know that both latent and overt terrorism had threatened her country for a long time, and she had no country but the street and the greyness of the psychiatric clinic she had escaped from, now sitting out on the city sidewalks, with an open Bible on her lap and surrounded by bags, he thought he sensed a turbulence surrounding her, whirlwinds raised as a closing to her hymn of imprecations, she had asked Samuel where she would sleep tonight, whether it would be in the park where she listened to the preaching of the Apostle in the morning dew who had said to her, go to your parents, you cannot follow me, for my mission is to live alone and preach hope everywhere, whether it be in a station where hoodlums and skinheads persecuted her, Samuel had a home and parents, but Our Lady of the Bags had nothing, like so many others of her wandering tribe, she knew nothing of a country that would defend her or protected her rights, and Samuel, who had it all, had mocked her, saying, what are you talking about, you little idiot, shut up, will you, and she had said, at last you understand, son of darkness, and it will be too late, Samuel’s inheritance was the earth, he thought, handed down from his parents and grandparents, and they had read and heard everything about goodness over decades and centuries, they knew what belonged to them, and they had their saints: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, philosophers and poets to awaken the conscience of nations, pell-mell in the same pack as leaders, presidents, thieving out-of-favour ministers, passing nobility and others, how was Samuel supposed to guess what had been plotted against those near to him, before he had even come into this world, in 1924 by an insignificant political agitator writing a book in his comfortable Munich prison and free from any sanction, dictating his memoirs to advisers every bit as poisonous as he was — Rudolph Hess, his chauffeur and associates, dictating a book that would soon sell in the thousands, a subversive anthem to racial hatred followed by millions of deaths, including distant cousins in the village of Lukow, Poland, and the great-uncle whose name Samuel bore and who was shot in the winter of 1942, Daniel his father had told him that he, Samuel, would be the rebirth, the continuity of all that had been irretrievably lost in the village of Lukow, the rebirth and the life he would be, and now it seems, thought Samuel, that nothing can erase those words from the Book of Hate, the inheritance from Samuel’s grandfather Joseph and his great-uncle shot there in the snow, it had so distraught Daniel in his youth that his sole refuge from the memory had been in drugs, and now it was Samuel who was torn apart by the revealed violence of the world, history’s spectator assimilated all he saw of the unfolding documentary, the filmed events were confusing, here one recalled Lenin’s death mask held up to the crowd, why, though, had an unidentified young anarchist woman shot but not killed him, for a long time the bullet from the revolver had stayed in the revolutionary’s neck, and it troubled Samuel that this young anarchist had carried out this irrational act of courage, but why, there would be no answer because the anarchist was killed, what was it that made her throw away her life and youth for some never-to-be-understood higher purpose, our lives are just such ephemeral gestures as hers, ending in the death she intended to deliver to someone else, she had learned her radical lessons from master theoreticians she had read or contacted, and become the enemy of all hierarchies and states, but in taking aim at Lenin, she had acted alone, a sterile act of suicide in which perhaps she had seen a liberating, evangelical dimension, who would know since she had been killed on the spot, something comparable would have happened to her today, piloting a plane with which she would go down in flames on embassies in Africa, the army of terror to which she would belong would send her to destroy herself along with the consuls and consulates, and no one would ever know her name any more than they would have in Lenin’s time, because these volunteers were punished with silenced names, even though every day they were there ready to die, everywhere the anarchist would be the archangel of death with her wings striking Kenya yesterday, Tanzania tomorrow, or maybe even Samuel’s dance school, or again the theatre that performed Arnie Graal’s choreography each night, perhaps he lived, Samuel thought, lived and breathed inside the unstable framework over which the deity of anarchy reigned from on high, like the painting by Hiraki Sawa, which was both animated film and a changing black-and-white picture, the artist who paints or dances in his studio while airplanes take off from his kitchen table and land on his bed, the sky of studio and bedroom intermingling with the sky outside where impersonal planes do criss-cross, and this now is how we live, watching the stormy trajectories in the sky from over a cupboard, as in the Japanese painting or from his unmade bed, the planes streaking at high speed across the plasma screens that broadcast their jagged and wavering journey, the life and art of Samuel, his predilection for music and dance were, after all, transposed onto a living drama, the immense tension of an immediate present not yet ready to be archived like his parents’ and grandparents’ past, while the planes seemed to take off from the kitchen table in Samuel’s little studio and land on his bed — like in Hiraki Sawa’s filmed self-portrait — a voice said beware, we are here at your door, whether you want us or not, you are part of our design, on the grid, woven into us, the design of your future life, whatever happens, you must bend to our service, and Samuel walked along the street where he had seen Our Lady of the Bags, wondering where she was now, under what pile of rocks or toxic stones, he longed to say to her, as the morning sun dawned on the city, maybe you were right, Lady of the Bags, won’t we both be, as you said, you and me tomorrow or whenever, witness to all killings, where are you living, I can’t find you, and Caroline said, I don’t want this breakfast, Harriett, I don’t want anything, oh I know they’re all just waiting around to get the inheritance, cousins and all, but they won’t get a thing, I’m giving it all to Charly, it isn’t much of a fortune now, Ma’am, said Miss Désirée, that girl Charly that you let in here, why what a shame, be quiet Harriett, said Caroline, she waited on me, so don’t speak ill of her, but I will have a bit of tea before I go out, where are my hat and gloves and cloth handbag, the one with the compact and keys, Miss Désirée, and why am I shut up here like this? Will Adrien and Suzanne be coming to dinner tonight, and Charly, where is she? I must go out, I just have to see her, I understand everything, her meanness, her thieving, her swindles, when I pretended not to notice, she told me all about it, even where all the injustice began: no one wants to remember, but the memory punctuated her life, her delinquency and her mistakes, the Henrietta Marie left all those African and Jamaican slaves to drown, that’s memorable enough, so why would Charly, as a Jamaican, not remember? I couldn’t bear it, I was as guilty as the others of the Henrietta Marie, and what if the servants in my parents’ home were well treated, I was the one who said to Charly, take everything I have, send this money to your family in Jamaica, no, she said, now wasn’t that honest and upright, because of the white man, my father and his pirate ancestors, slave-merchants, alone carried the blame, or maybe when I could no longer stand seeing that boat at night with the pitiful shadows swimming around its machinery, I said, Charly, what’s mine is yours, you sign these cheques for me, it’s OK, I’ll let you, why would I want to live now that Jean-Mathieu is gone, ther
e now, his name isn’t slipping away from me, Jean-Mathieu, that was his name, without him, why was I living anyway, and the vessel Henrietta Marie massaged the waters, that was the nightmare that haunted my nights, obliterating all, chewing up one-by-one all those who were lost, including Charly’s mother and sisters whom I photographed on the beach, and I said take it all, Charly, then she kissed me and said, aren’t we great together, just the two of us, Caroline, please get rid of that cook and that secretary and that maid, and let’s just be alone together, and I told her they’ve been with me for many years, from my parents’ house to here, I can’t live without them, nor could I offend them, like Charles with Cyril, how did it come about that I obeyed and submitted to all her whims, when more than ever the Henrietta Marie went down in my dreams leaving behind her a wake of slaves, in the pool naked, Charly snorted out water, so perhaps I liberated her by giving her what she wanted, didn’t I? Charles wrote me that Cyril was under contract and often had to leave for England or the US, was that really true or not, he was hailed in plays by Tennessee Williams, Charles wrote, he and the heroes of the plays shared the same sensibility and aversions, I don’t know if Charles was exaggerating, but he was often alone in the Indian springtime, writing solitary in his ashram, springtime and his flowers, the greed of Cyril’s young and tempestuous body along with the ecstasy of Indian spring, perhaps it was a bit evanescent, where Charles saw in Cyril a vigorous animal of youth, and I wonder if Cyril was as acclaimed as all that, perhaps he was more like an illusory peacock spreading his magnificent plumage around Charles, bewitching him with the metallic glint of eyes so very clear that Charles did not properly realize their numbing effect, was this what it meant to love, he wrote, these departures and absences, I’m still waiting for the reviews that will prove all this really necessary, but so far, nothing, doubtless, Cyril’s being so non-conformist and visited with a natural disobedience, he must have shared the nervous sensibility of the great Southern author’s main characters, just one thing missing, though, no matter what he did, Cyril was never at fault like those heroes he played; he was never culpable or unpardonable, though Charles often had proof to the contrary, he was a being devoid of any sense of culpability, no matter what he did, and yet didn’t an actor have to experience every state of being? It was something missing in Cyril, wrote Charles, and where was he, why hadn’t he written yet, and I thought, here we are, Charles and I, under the spells of our respective witches, waiting for a word on the cell phone, a letter, the parsimonious charity of a friendly word, when Jean-Mathieu hadn’t written or phoned, I used to ask Charly, what’s that liquid you pour into my glass, and she said, it’s to help you sleep tonight. The Henrietta Marie dissolved into the night waters, I did sleep better and stopped waiting up for Charly when she came in at dawn and the noise of her shoes thrown against the wall. The sad part is that Cyril glories in seducing women as much as men, Charles wrote, imagine all the hearts he breaks, but he never gives them a thought, it’s like the way he crushes beer cans one after another between those long fingers of his, I can’t stand the noise or the damage he does to himself with too much alcohol, women and boys, of course he did not actually write any of this, but I could read it in what his solitude left out, his disappointed tenderness, or maybe it was my own, I asked Charly, what is that you’re pouring into my glass and why? She would say, well, it’s to stop your migraines, you’ll see, you won’t feel a thing, and she was right, I gave in to the mysterious numbing of pain and slept better for it, all at once, I got a letter from Charles, Cyril was back from Delhi, and they were happy together, really, no lie, oh Charles, how could you have been touched by doubt, he reproached himself, Cyril had been hailed in London and Boston, what a gifted actor and friend, whether it was true or not, I believed it too, after all, Cyril could probably play any role, including the gigolo with a loving and unfathomable heart, or a character with more sophisticated inner disapproval, he was as stimulating on the stage as in life, awoke the sleeping flesh, and people threw themselves at his feet with gratitude, I dreamed around that time that a letter arrived from Charles in India, no words, just staples, needles and pins glittering like delicate silver signs on matte paper, my eyes burned to read these symbols, each one finely chiselled, was it my concession to Charly, or did I simply hear about it from Charles, like each one of his concessions to Cyril, an increasing number of them by both Charles and me, I don’t know how I ended up arguing with Charly, I think she had her eye on a piece of jewelry I could not give her, a family gift I held very dear, it was crazy, but all of sudden I dug my heels in and said to myself, no, not that, my fierce child, I’m not giving in to you, must you strip me of everything, well, what had I done for her to become violent like that, her hand on my face, I could have fired her on the spot, but I didn’t, I just locked myself in my room for days, although she begged forgiveness, seeing the mark on my face, I decided to stay there and not come out, after all, what would my friends say, Adrien, Suzanne, Chuan, Olivier and all the others, Charles hit his head accidentally against a tree during a race with Cyril, and both of us were degraded and humiliated, we were shot through with pins and needles as Charly had done many times to her voodoo dolls, so why didn’t I fire her then, and Charles wrote that what happened with Cyril was a little accident, you know, dear, how hopeless I am at sports racing, I should simply not have been so hardy, that’s all, young people are always right to be intrepid and daring, but us never, we’re going to Holland for a few days, Cyril and I, was it a mere accident or not, still I mustn’t see my friends like that, no matter how slight the mark, in fact under a wide straw hat it didn’t show at all, just vanity of course, but I got in the habit of not going out, not that Charly had to force me to it, that was what I wanted, or at least my will was like a flickering lamp, and thought about the time when my villa, with its gazebos and cottages, my house had welcomed all of glittering society, oh, it wasn’t like Mélanie and Daniel’s, which became a home for refugees like Julio, Jenny, Marie-Sylvie de la Toussaint, but I did host an intelligent elite with Charles, and Frédéric in my garden and around my pool, if I was a woman of the world, it was with artistic passion and the intention of photographing all those faces around me, I had the impression of being the architect of all this . . . I had retained something of my unused training in architecture, studies interrupted by the war, plunging into a first marriage, so many mistakes, I still had the feel and manual bent for plans, constructions, faces, and images of friends and people I knew less well, I felt like an architect when I collected and consolidated them with my camera eye, put them into a structure and aesthetic ordering, that was before Charly, when I was with Jean-Mathieu and dignified, I used to say, welcome to my house and my table everybody, it wasn’t Charly adding something to my drink back then, it was the euphoria from an intoxication I really benefited from, drops of a deadlier poison; ah yes, a feeling of guilt I had never had before, what wasn’t yet in my nature became so, actions, even those I hadn’t performed, were prejudicial, the boat Henrietta Marie with all those drowned aboard began appearing in my dreams, why had the worthy, light-hearted, complacent woman in me never before had this impression of letting others down, this poison was the shadow of all my thoughts, I could have told Charly, enough, I won’t hear any more, but I didn’t, perhaps my whole started to go tip with the Henrietta Marie as it went down amid the waves, the memory of the falconer’s return and of the child, the little girl that we dropped from the boat at sea, my first husband and I, there you go, we don’t want you, you have to be gone from your mother’s womb before you are viable, this was neither the time nor the epoch to be born, quick, let’s throw her overboard, for many women abortion was butchery in those days, I was hatefully indifferent, I felt mutilated but indifferent, true or false, we went out so much it was dizzying, shallow, cruel amusements, hunting gazelle from an open convertible, deer captured dying on the railway tracks, either this is how we thought of it or this is what he said, this is not the time nor the epoch, da
rk days, a fascist era in Europe, darkness over the earth, the disillusioned unemployed, the hungry everywhere waiting for bread, lines of men and women in the streets hopeful for what never comes, desperate farmers, women sitting on barrels in front of tents, young immigrants already so tired in their cotton dresses, worn down by poverty, cold and hungry November days, the brutal forces advancing everywhere on women and children, we had no choice, that’s just the way it was, everything went too fast, perhaps we simply had no time, and in the darkness there was nothing else to be done, the child was not to be born, come to grips with it, yes, those drops Charly put in my glass every evening weren’t good for me, the child, one of the wrecks, the Henrietta Marie in the sea, said to me at night, Mummy, I can’t get back up to the surface, help me, and I answered, it isn’t me, it’s this darkness all around, there’s nothing I can do, I never wanted a child to hear the explosions in Pearl Harbor while eating his pancakes in the morning, nor to run in fear through the rice paddies, no, no, I did not want that, the Pacific waters may be far away, but we cannot cut ourselves off from others in a few instants of fear, the sand of the bay, the banks, the keys extending all the way to the ocean, and the entire town of Aiea were covered with corpses, was this a time to be born, when life itself was scarcely viable, I could not think about it nor about all those other embryos that mothers were getting rid of, so many wrecks to surround the Henrietta Marie, small hands and feet malformed, not yet perfected, undulating on the waves, true or false, I could not think about them but saw them in my dreams, when a voice fraught with indecision said, regretfulness is not for you, you may have given up on architecture, but you can still defend your country, where now women can learn jobs usually meant only for men, airplane pilot, marine lieutenant, and who knows what else, but I was forgetting the little one, her life hardly viable, I didn’t have the nobility of Justin, whose book I’d later discuss with him, a book that came out amid controversy and which I judged harshly, I envied these scientists with the secrets that went into building their bombs, holding the future of humanity in their hands, I envied and admired the physicists, gods of learning, without understanding the idea of superiority’s universal triumph, this is the thinking of those who feel inferior, women and children admiring what they think of as being on high, beyond their station, in a burst of sincerity, no doubt, but where would this pride and superiority of those I admired lead us? Justin could never get me to admit I was wrong, I just couldn’t side with him, the so-doubtful life of my child forbade it, have you never thought, he said, two young boys playing in the yard under a cool August sun, who then fall down in the grass unconscious, both of them, and their sisters barely turn to look at them as reddish bits of flesh are torn from their bodies, those who recall it saw that August sun consume itself in seconds and drop black rain on them, they call it the black rain of ruins, the instant ruins of liquefied glass, everywhere a dusty fluidity smelling of death, have you never thought, Caroline, for several days in a row, as though it was never enough, never ever enough, that black rain, a rain of oil on the bodies and faces, was just an idea thought up in some scientist’s office and written out on a blackboard in a classroom, a superiority that would taste victory though not vengeance, in this time of such scarcely viable life, and he won me around, thinking of these great men in their conference rooms, I said to myself, who are they protecting with so many secrets, it was the explosion of the sun with all its black rain, aren’t these men defending and protecting me, without them, wouldn’t I be more vulnerable, haven’t you ever thought, Justin would say in his soft voice and wanted to repress any desire for victory I had, no victory is good, you see, we have proof of it, he was moral, I was not, but above all I was alone with my first husband, I had committed my act of expelling this barely viable life out of me when the oily rains devoured a population, and this is the poison of blame that Charly insinuated into my veins every night that she worked for me. Immobile on the glittering waters of dawn, Julio waited in his motorboat, what peacefulness when the waves were calm, Julio thought, only the rocking of the boat could be heard, the cries of the seagulls as they streaked in to make off with the pelicans’ prey, landing as though squatting, so as to snatch in an agile twist the whitefish hanging from their beaks, the grey herons and egrets unfolded their feet on the water, perhaps this was the hour when all was mirrors and mirage like the first day of flowering on the planet, thought Julio, he would see the ghosts of Oreste, Ramon and Edna at the oars, shaking the air, in their inflatable boat, voiceless rowers, lying down or upright on their floating platforms, no, they weren’t what Julio was watching for like José Garcia’s mother, they would never be coming back to shore, it was for him, José Garcia, the Cubans and Haitians that Julio was looking out, though he did not hold out much hope, still it is true, or was it an illusion, it was here, among the marble-necked doves and lilies, that fishermen had spotted and picked up José Garcia one Thanksgiving, a miracle of fate, he said, crying, where’s my mother, where’s the boat that brought them from Cuba into deep water, where had it sunk, dehydrated and lips chapped with fever, José Garcia asked, where is my mother — who thought of everything — who had wrapped her son in her own clothes, taking them off now one by one, she knew which ones she would not be needing any more, and she touched her son’s forehead, saying, go there for me, be free and happy, don’t forget, he saw her plunge beneath the waves under a fiery sun, was it an illusion, a mirage, he asked the fishermen, where is my mother, but they said nothing so as to spare him further pain and to let him recover from the strange sort of coma he was in after being carried by the Atlantic waters for several days and nights, why did my mother and all the others with us suddenly stop rowing or did they just wait till nightfall to slip one by one alone into the ocean, so that he, José Garcia, could remain unaware, you know his mother was only twenty-five, yes, better that he continue to know nothing, illusion, mirage, they had thought he would not know what was happening at night, wrapped up in his warm nest under the stars, José Garcia had fallen asleep on his raft, dreaming of his kites back there at home, would his brothers and cousins bring them for him, and what was it that weighed so heavily on the back of the beat-up little boat, what, maybe the weight of one or two of the drowned, lying among the knotted ropes as though they’d been strangled, an illusion, a mirage, when José Garcia slept under the stars, and when they had all fled, his mother had said to him, good-bye and sleep well, my angel, may your kites fly to you on your makeshift raft, my son, farewell, life is made of courage and innumerable fears such as this, I have dressed you, fear nothing, sleep, and you will have other toys where you are going, I want you to get an education, like your brothers at the Little Havana school, goodbye José, José Garcia heard these words as his mother watched over him while he slept, the sea voyage would be long, his raft constantly surrounded by sharks, a single drop of blood at the temples of one drowned man would have been enough to draw them, my mother, where is my mother, he asked those who had picked him up, my mother, breeze, sweet breath of wind, breeze, breeze of his mother’s fingers in his hair, warm breeze of the fishing village where he had grown up, he drifted along the channels of seas and oceans suddenly grown cold, where was that breeze, under what clouds swollen with rains and storms, where had they all gone, his mothers, their companions, balseros, balseros, was it an illusion, a mirage, suddenly they were invisible on the water, but they saw a thin bundle drifting toward them on the waves, what was it, a child, and, so small, the body of a man who had clung to the knotted ropes drifting behind the boat, the fishermen took pity and called the Coast Guard, a bundle so small, was it an optical illusion, we almost didn’t see him, he recalled, José Garcia, delirious from thirst, his mother and the balseros, too poor to pay thousands of dollars, a boat with a faulty motor, did he remember the price of this journey, depopulating their forests of the most beautiful birds, no longer hesitating to sell them for a more-than-ten-hour night on the water, and the crown of these captive birds sold on the black m
arket, might it be drifting somewhere in the wake of José Garcia’s raft, resplendent birds with nothing left of their song, torn away from their trees and forests, José Garcia thought he heard them, and wouldn’t he too be bought and sold once the Coast Guard handed him over to the all-mighty of all countries, the rapacious interests already divided among themselves, in cities everywhere, José Garcia’s face on placards, posters, and highways, some saying you belong to us, other saying we’re sending you back home, they split him among them in their greed and ambition, José Garcia, sold, a media phenomenon, scarcely saved from the waters and already the owner of a bicycle, phosphorescent green phones, so many toys he did not know what to do with them, birds silent with fear, birds sold by the balseros on the black market, where were they, José wondered, and my mother, who has seen my mother, on one of phones hanging from the belt of his new jeans he heard his father’s voice saying, come home to me, son, you know I was against leaving, and now, look, you have no mother, I am all you have now, don’t listen to your uncles, come back, my hair has grown long, and I’m waiting for you to come home before we go cut it at the village barber’s, only when you come home will it be cut, not before, I love you son, come home, I don’t want you studying in that school in Little Havana, you’re going to be a communist like me, that’s what we’ve chosen, I’ll explain it to you later, come back to your village, your friends wait for you every day, I had to sell everything to phone you, I know our choice is the right one, you have to be the pride of the country and do as I say, I let my hair grow thinking of you, José Garcia, come home my exiled son or it is something you will regret, there are penalties for those who break the law as your mother did, I’m your father, I am all you have, I’ve had to sell everything I own to phone you, you are mine, do you hear, José Garcia didn’t know how to get away from all this shouting and gossip, my mother, where is my mother, he seemed to be saying to all those who assailed him, from the colossal poster on the highway, or in his striped shirt, he seemed to be asking the crowd this question, do you know what will happen to me tomorrow, Julio watched and waited, what was that black dot on the horizon, an illusion or a mirage, could it be a wreck filled with men and children, many without mothers, and if they were Cuban, a ridiculous minimum of legal protection would be given them, but if they were Haitian, they would be sent right back out to sea on their rafts, and Julio thought they would be shut out of this country, not what you could call a promised land, more likely conquered by owners wherever they were, from one coast to another, they expelled these pitiful cargoes of Chinese, Haitians, deaf to their laments and cries, but Julio would continue to watch and wait, he wrote to Samuel in New York that he and Daniel, with the help of a Cuban association in town, had founded a House of Refuge for the survivors, and that he, Julio, waited and watched from dawn to dusk in his boat, Samuel, whom Julio had loved so much as a child and who had replaced Ramon and Oreste, lost at sea, he had changed, a little more distant now, more remote, Mélanie said he didn’t show the same attachment to her either, though he didn’t hold out much hope, Julio continued to watch and wait for the dark dot on the horizon, illusion or mirage, it seemed amid shouts of joy that the silhouettes of Ramon, Oreste, and Edna were outlined against the sky, Augustino got up early like his father, often before dawn, and wrote, reading the words he had written from a screen placed up high where he could see the ocean, an invisible choir of destruction, I’m convinced that there are strategic missiles hidden on this island, but no one really knows, how was Augustino to face his father, Daniel, who adamantly resisted his son’s desire to become a writer, what was this craziness about writing alone in his room for hours when Augustino had received a sports education, you can’t see these missiles, Augustino had written, but they’re here everywhere in the light of dawn and on the water, in the lukewarm colours of the sky, though he felt too inexperienced to describe the hold of outside forces on his life, inexorable as they appeared to him, living sheltered from all outer conflict in his family’s home, and this further jumbled his thoughts, it was this dream, so real and palpable for him, this story of missiles he was writing, the weight of this dream that he could feel beneath his sleeping eyelids, he was certain he had seen his grandmother holding her arms out to him in another life, and moving toward her — though she no longer existed, yet still seemed the same — very small now that he had grown so big, seemed to be crying on her shoulder, please don’t leave, sweet Grandma, for she had always been so tender and refined, and remembering this dream in a diaphanous mist, Augustino felt tears run down his cheeks, it was true, one day his grandmother would no longer be there with him, as adoring of her grandson as constraining, imperious as this insistence that he dress for dinner in the evening, Augustino thought, how could one give in to all these rules, children sitting in morose silence in their stiff suits at dinner time, and that other tyranny of hers, insisting on exaggerated politeness toward the ill-tempered nanny, Marie-Sylvie, who camouflaged her cuddlesome moods, keeping them only for Vincent, and annoying Augustino with sly smiles, a little off-kilter like her brother’s, He-who-never-sleeps, whom she had coddled too much in his madness, sure the problem had been eating away at her brother for a long time, she said, since they’d left the Cité du Soleil by boat, look at that country burning up, bursting into flame, savannahs and bare-boned plains, how could you cultivate bananas, cotton, or cocoa now, and look at Augustino outrageously taking three meals a day, it was from listening to the imprecations of Marie-Sylvie de la Toussaint that he thought, I’ll be a writer, this nanny’s not fair to me, she may have her reasons, but I’ll write her story and Julio’s, however repressive his grandmother might be, she had always accepted that Augustino would be a writer or philosopher, Samuel’s dyslexia would prevent him form lengthy schooling, and you had to admit he had unusual gifts for theatre and dance, and that’s all there was to it, it was in him, and Augustino, well, his grandmother said, it’s true he was born to write, first he must study and learn, now to what prestigious college or university would he be sent this fall, to the math and science college where two thousand students of the twenty-first century would have the benefits of the latest technology, then later Yale or Harvard, the list of well-known universities drawn up for him by his father and grandmother would be a long one, Mélanie preferred to steer clear of the scheming, and she was still tormented by Samuel’s absence, is this how our children are torn away from us one by one, frowning, Augustino imagined groups of students on the campuses, in the labs and libraries, destined to graduate studies, the crowning glory of knowledge, victory at university, each with a late-model car of his own, insolently parked in the campus lot, Saab, PT Cruiser Turbo, performance car and performance student alike, how do you place a value on a life like that, when Augustino thought about the miserable existence Marie-Sylvie de la Toussaint had led before, like her convict brother, He-who-never-sleeps, would he, Augustino with his intelligence, be the one at the head of this elite class of two thousand students of the twenty-first century, would it make any sense that the century was meant to be cut short and determined by the launching of missiles that all refused to see? If Daniel, his father, had really determined that he was going to a doctor of neurology, not a poet or a writer, well, then Augustino would study the afflictions of the nervous system, his father would effectively have assigned him that role, not writing, which would unbalance his health, all he had to do was think of Kafka’s tuberculosis, if that’s how it was for Augustino’s future, whom the missiles pierced like spears, then he would be the doctor to trace a neurological cause for his brother Vincent’s shortness of breath, his spasms and his convulsions, whether he became researcher, a doctor, or a poet, Augustino could not conceive of a future without his grandmother, without her it would be like walking through the storm-tossed thickness of an unknown jungle, and this night perfumed with jasmine in Chuan’s garden, Daniel thought about Augustino writing next to the lamp near the covered perch where his parakeets slept, what a pity if the boy got
it into his head to write, Daniel thought, he felt pressured by his own book, thinking that if Hitler’s dog could be declared innocent, like the children of out-of-favour officials, where would the fertile infamy of these fathers lead, for it could not be expunged, but would influence several generations, suddenly sheltered like atomic dust in the wind, just as deadly, in the hearts of two young boys: Alex, age twelve; Derek, thirteen; pious altar boys, hair nicely combed, with barely a hint of pink ear showing, tight collars, white shirts and grey ties, church angels, how had they come to condemn their father, by what mysterious tribunal, brutalizing him under a rain of blows from a baseball bat till he died, surely they knew that the aluminium covering of the bat would cause pain, but the ineffaceable infamy had lighted on them, how many times did you hit him, asked the judge, ten times, maybe eleven, then we set fire to the house, our parents’ room first, then we took off, it was at home in Pensacola, and Dad was sitting on the sofa drinking his coffee and relaxing after work. What time was it, Derek, just after midnight, Your Honour, Dad called us his little masterminds, and he was right, we’d been planning to get someone else caught instead of us, Rick the child molester who’d already been in prison, our dad was one too, so we punished him, Alex and Derek’s biological mother had denied all the accusations, the father of my kids was a good, protective man, she said, so were Alex and Derek just piling one trick on top of another, or were they telling the truth, the choirboys in this criminal ritual would be tried separately, sent to juvenile detention separately, but what did they feel together as they delivered blows to their father’s head, Daniel wondered, one of them told a detective, boy, was it ugly, that hole in his head, his face all swollen like a really bad cold, nose blocked up, really gross, but things just couldn’t go on the way they were, we’ll wait till we’re twenty-three, then we’ll be free, what were Derek and Alex really, if not a fetid swamp, their two souls mere receptacles for the unspeakable things of the past, those of nazi fathers and torturers whose work was still being carried out, Derek and Alex in white shirts and grey ties, angelic, lying faces, a cesspool, two spirits numbed by cruelty, shouldn’t they too be declared innocent, wondered Daniel, and looking around to make eye-contact with Mélanie, who was talking with Olivier, late as it was, but what sweetness this night under the stars, the ringing of his phone sounded like a crystalline harness-bell, and holding the thin object to his temple, in an effervescent glow he heard the breathless voice of Vincent, Dad, it’s me, I can’t get to sleep, Dad, and Daniel replied that it was time to sleep, and hadn’t he already phoned twice today, so tell me Vincent, did you like that outing in the kayak, tell me all about it, hectares and hectares of mountains and lakes, you know, many years ago the entire northern part of the continent was covered in ice, you do go for a walk in those leafy forests every day, don’t you, and before you were born, Vincent, your mother and I climbed Mt. Mansfield — don’t forget your raincoat when you go out on the trails with your instructor — your mother got the tent ready, and I prepared the stove for the meal, what we liked the most was going to sleep that way, it was like being at the top of the world among the deer that would come to drink at the ponds and rivers, are you listening Vincent, never go out without your raincoat, you’re still coughing a bit, do you feel any better, Vincent, but was Daniel really hearing his son’s voice this late in the night, Dad, said the breathless voice cut short, I want to see Marie-Sylvie again, even though you say I shouldn’t, the sea air, Dad, Southern Light, oh Southern Light, our boat anchored in the marina, and Mélanie your mother, don’t you want to see her, Daniel asked, she’s here with me at Chuan and Olivier’s, did you remember it was your grandmother’s birthday, all Daniel could hear was a murmur in the fog, Marie-Sylvie, the sea, Samuel’s boat Lumière, Southern Light, yes, it really would be better, thought Daniel, that his son Augustino never become a writer, and Olivier was saying to Mélanie, you’d never think so, but there’s been progress since that August 28th, 1963, when we marched on Washington, president of the black students in our student committee for non-violence, I felt very alone despite the huge audience, white cops eyeing us and our speakers with hostility, maybe I was very much afraid, even in that crowd of 300,000, I said to myself, pray Olivier, concentrate and pray that you behave like a leader and a man, then all of a sudden, it was as though I’d been lifted up by the waves on the sea, and what I saw calmed me again, to my left, groups of young people on their feet and sitting in trees, listening to me, I was floating with those close to me on this sea of humanity, and all around me, every single person seemed to be saying, shouting out the words with me so all could hear, they call us niggers in this rich country, Mr. President, and regardless of what you want, we’re not moving from here till something changes . . . here we are, marching through the streets of Washington towards you, Mr. President, these streets belong to us now . . . we’ve been patient, too patient, but we aren’t any more, doubting that their society had really evolved after all, Mélanie was listening to Olivier, and these women who not so long ago were still gagged, censored, and imprisoned like Margaret Sanger the obstetrics nurse, simply because her ideas were my ideas and those of so many women today, that every woman had a right to contraception and safe birth-control, did Olivier shrug knowingly, seem less attentive to Mélanie’s words, though it was a splendid evening, and the arbour Mélanie and Olivier were in, a little way from the noise of the celebration, was embalmed with the insidious intoxication of an assortment of bougainvilleas and African lilies, Mélanie was distraught at not being properly understood by the man she so admired, but perhaps it was not so, Olivier seemed carefree and amused as his dogs bounded toward him, my friends, my fine friends, he said, I just can’t get away from you, and Mélanie saw his strong hand seize an orange from a vase Chuan had filled with them and with lemons, what delicious fruit, he said as he peeled it with his teeth, it quenches one’s thirst on a hot night, if Olivier could be so easily distracted from what he was saying, well, of course on a party night, Mélanie thought, a heady, sensuous evening to which even Olivier had to give in, tasting an orange, scenting the corollas of African lilies that seemed to spill from the arcade of the bower right down to their faces, while Mélanie could not help being preoccupied by her own struggle, they would see tomorrow, not thousands, but millions of them, she mused, women marching through the streets of Washington, emerging from every epoch of their history, daughter of an Irish Catholic mother of eleven who died so young, Margaret Sanger would no longer be alone, in the rush, eager to judge their obscene censors, we will be seeing those who had kept them so long in ignorance, the perpetrators of epidemic deaths of newborns and mothers, perpetrators of secret shames, syphilis and gonorrhoea, yes, we’d meet them all again, Mélanie thought, a living mural by young artists from New Mexico like Erin Currier who painted political demands with collages, like that grandiose mural of women cut off from the world, veiled and showing their hands tied, widowed of their lives, eyes submerged in fatalistic pain, hundreds, thousands of them, when Mélanie thought this tableau of widows, grieving women beneath the veil, would be broken and fragmented, baited by a new ethic, that by painting slavery, the artist proclaimed liberty, now, now, you’ll make me all dirty with your paws, Olivier was saying to his dogs, it was true, wasn’t it, what Mère was saying about the African lilies, you could get drunk on their perfume, dizzy in fact, like an intoxication of the senses, and Petites Cendres left the Saloon and went out into the street, lower back soaked in sweat after the dry vapour of the sauna, there were all kinds of people, cop cars screaming through the night, what’s going on, Ashley asked the Queen of the Desert, who showed up wig in hand, a cloud of red streaks she held onto carefully, it’s one of the New York models, my favourite, Blondie, she said, he’s stolen a motorbike, and he doesn’t even have a license, practically still at his mother’s teat, Petites Cendres said, they won’t arrest him, will they, he’s the boy who smiled at me so nicely, button up your front and zip your pants, said the Queen of the De
sert, what do you want to go out in the street like that for, I heard the siren, and God, I just knew, said Petites Cendres, they’re putting cuffs on him and humiliating him the way they did me so many times with those chained bracelets, oh those stinking rats, they’ve arrested my boy, we’ve got to call his mother in New York, she lamented, wait, let’s be reasonable, said the Queen of the Desert pointing to two of the blond kid’s friends, the charming Asian and the Mexican with the dark fringe, look at how those three kids carry themselves, each one has a lover who’s a fashion designer and maybe a constellation of handsome gentlemen, so don’t you worry, Petites Cendres, he won’t be behind bars for long, stinking rats, Petites Cendres repeated, snatching up a child like that, the other two boys bent their heads in astonishment in the direction of their friend who’d been admonished by the police, like some bundle on the back seat of their car, he’s innocent, they were saying, it was just a game, we all bet he’d drive the motorcycle without a license, we’re tolerant of minors in this town, said one of the cops, but theft is theft, Petites Cendres saw the hubbub was subsiding beyond the barricade of police cars, when suddenly she saw the blond boy, barely visible on the other side of the car window, smiling under his curtain of hair and making a sign with his cuffed hands, as if to tell her, I’ll be OK, you’ll see, God bless you, sweet ruffian, yelled Petites Cendres, Christ be with you, after all, he was the one that said, suffer all the children to come unto me, yeah, well, it’s nearly time for my second show, said the Queen of the Desert, don’t worry too much about them, they’ve got good uncles, godfathers (though maybe not real fathers) and mothers, it’s not the same as those boys who sell themselves in the streets of Moscow and sleep in cardboard boxes, shivering from cold, huddled against their puppies, Petites Cendres said, I always said, God help this furnace of an earth, God has nothing to do with it, I don’t even know who you’re talking about, said the Queen of the Desert, if this earth is a furnace, it’s because cold and indifference reign supreme, I’ve got to get going or I’ll be late, and you’d better get dressed, Ashley, what a way to go out in the street, all undone like that, God help you, said Petites Cendres blown away that the blond kid had smiled at him, you may not know it, but God exists, I get proof of it every day and every night of my miserable existence, you and your chatter, interrupted Timothy appearing on the doorstep of the Vendredi Décadent piano bar, one of the pubs where he hung out, Timo, my Timo, said Petites Cendres, you look like some kind of businessman or banker, well, hey, said Timothy, that’s what I am, and no familiarities, don’t kiss me in public, I’ve got a chic clientele, you know, a journalist interviewed me inside the pub, I didn’t tell him my name, you’re no ordinary pusher, Ashley told him as they went down toward the ocean walking side by side, as Timothy covered Petites Cendres’ eyelids and forehead with cigarette smoke, a somewhat saliva-laden smoke, she thought, you’ve shined that leather jacket up nicely, and brushed your hair so it’s glossy, I could help you pluck those eyebrows, though, they often get me to do that at the sauna, nope, you’re no ordinary sex-trader, Petites Cendres said, and what did you say to this reporter, that for me it didn’t count with men, it was just about the money, but my relationships with women last a long time, maybe a year or two sometimes, they don’t know anything about what I do down here, I said one day I’d be an oceanographer and study algae and oceans, that’s all we really have, that I’d go back to Savannah, when, asked Petites Cendres, oh in a few years, but first I have to get rich, said Timothy, that idiot asked me about my family, nothing to say, my moral values are my own, since I was ten I’ve made it alone, and drugs, he wanted to know all about that, whether my clients were old or young, up to seventy-five, I said, and I don’t like the cops, in this business they beat you up, not all of them, he was particularly concerned about condoms, I said, once in a while, but I often forget, oceanography, that would be a cool profession, Petites Cendres interrupted, there’s no future for you on this island, you need customers who get around less than the ones in the Vendredi Décadent, then Timothy tapped him on the shoulder and said he had an appointment with someone in the navy, I’m due there now, and off he went, confidence in his stride and a cigarette between his lips, Ashley thought back to the thick-necked man who had ordered him to come up to his hotel, brutish he thought, well, he wouldn’t, he just wouldn’t . . . unless the envelope of white powder in his front ran out before the night was over, unless his need began to hollow him out like the point of a knife, what a furnace of torture it was to need, he often thought that, the earth was a furnace — cold for some, comfortably tepid for others — so what can you do, that’s life, Timo was a lucky one, all nicely slicked up and groomed, no buttons, he wasn’t going to get hurt, and they weren’t going to call him Black Dog, but God would look out for Petites Cendres, as He had always done, tonight or tomorrow when dawn broke over the ocean, as cigarette smoke rose in the air, and doves cooed, Ashley knew for certain that God would come to the aid of His son Petites Cendres, and His voice would burst forth in the singing of the waves, and He would say, they have offended you to your face, wash it in this water, my son, and be relieved of all your pain, I say unto you verily, it is you I love. Mai could see a ray of light under her brother’s bedroom door, she’d have loved to know what time her parents were coming home, Daddy had said it would be very late, and he’d be angry to know Augustino’s lamp was still on and he was writing at his desk, and that Mai refused to go to sleep as well, with her cats rolled up in a ball against her knees, sometimes she thought she was asleep in her bed and dreamt of an empty swing, and the day they scattered Jean-Mathieu’s ashes near The-Island-Nobody-Owns, she also thought she was awake, stretched out on her bed with the cats, the scenes that tumbled pell-mell into her brain also seemed real, although she was afraid of their being true; when Mélanie had noticed Mai was not on the swing any more, the seat was empty, she had asked everyone, Mai, where is Mai, have you seen her, Mummy’s voice was overlaid by the slightly cracked voice of an old lady, Caroline, asking them each where her little cloth bag was, and that must have annoyed my mother, thought Mai, suddenly the shouts of Mummy, Caroline, and Augustino echoed to the sky, Mai where are you, I could hear them, but there was a little boat near a rock that I really wanted to get to, my feet and my sandals were covered in mud, what would my mother and grandmother say, you were so pretty this morning, that never-ending funeral service gave me plenty of time, walking along the low tide to the sky-blue boat that seemed to be tied to a stake, there was this mist on the sea because it was summer, the closer I wandered to the boat, the more I could see beach after beach of white sand, deserted clearings, then all of a sudden I was under an umbrella of Australian pines, Daddy told me these were the tallest and the strongest, and as I sat under them, I could see the boat was still there, and I knew there was a man in it, a fisherman dozing with his hat over his face, the boat shifting on the waves, Mai, where are you, they were all yelling, the voices of my parents faded to echoes as I went over to the boat, in that thin film of water where my feet sank in among the seashells, the man in the boat woke up with a start, isn’t this a surprize, where are your parents, he asked, not far, I went off while they were reading Jean-Mathieu’s poems on the podium, they were crying because their friend is dead, dead how, the fisherman asked, stowing a supply of shellfish in the bottom of the boat, Daddy says old age, but my Grandma says you only die from living well, don’t you want to get into my boat, asked the man from beneath his hat, eyes reddened by the sun, is this how it was supposed to be, Mai wondered, why should she get into a wet, dirty boat with her nice dress on, or would you rather go collect some rare shells on the beach, that would be over by the Australian pines, Mai thought, she could find her way back more easily, by now they must have noticed the swing was empty and maybe begun to worry a lot, she could still hear them calling out, Mai, where is Mai, the man jumped out of his boat, let’s get to the wharf before the tide comes in, he said, because I have to make out to that other boat over ther
e, see, imagine all the men fishing for days out in the middle of the ocean, the things they say about women, boy, you wouldn’t want to hear that, they’re drunk and raunchy when they get into port, women waiting for them everywhere, sometimes very young ones, I only like delicate creatures though, as brittle as shellfish, you’re OK, just a little girl, no need to be afraid, we won’t get lost, when Mai asked his name he grumbled back, it’s not nice to want to know everything, I don’t have a name, the men on my boat call me a lunatic hermit, I don’t have a name any more than The-Island-Nobody-Owns, and don’t forget, everything between us is a secret, no yammering to your Ma about the man with the bushy beard and hair and no name, here give me your hand so we can walk over to the pine wood, what are you waiting for, I won’t hurt you, Mai begged him to let her hand go, it’s full of fine bones this hand, l like subtle, delicate things, look at the eagles and hawks up in the sky, I know the Caribbean well, you know, and the Antilles Sea, the Inner and Outer Antilles, I’d love to take you there later on, anyway, how to remember the rest of the story, no telling tales, no gossiping, and Mai wouldn’t say a thing, after all, she had promised bushy-beard-and-hair, about how he had sheltered her from the wind with his smelly shirt, now you’re under my wing, next to my skin, and what had he done besides defend her from the eagles and the hawks that would rapidly have preyed on her, like mice and ferrets, caressing her legs under the dress with the neck undone, what would Marie-Sylvie have said, dressing her that morning, the fisherman had stood up in that cave under the pines, thought Mai, he would row to his boat on the incoming tide, with a single expert finger he seemed to trace the perfect line of Mai’s legs, he said, and listen, no chattering, don’t tell anyone anything, or else the eagles, hawks, and all those vultures will descend on your parents’ house, and your little brother’s the first one they’ll gobble up, there’s your mother calling, can you hear her, quick, go find them, you careless kid, ’bye, it was nearly night, and the sun was setting on the water, Daddy was there saying, Sweetie, Sweetie, and sat Mai on his shoulders, and he didn’t ask any questions, though her dress was soiled and she was missing a sandal, he said, Mai you had your mother really worried, you must never disappear like that again, besides what could a little girl be playing at alone in the pine woods like that so far from her parents who are looking for her everywhere, no telling tales, no gossiping, I saw some big vultures, Mai said, her legs hanging over his chest on either side, he seemed very hot, and she understood she had upset him, there were tears behind the tremor in his voice, she had upset him, and he was pretending to forget as she returned triumphant on his shoulders, everyone running to make a fuss of her, even Caroline, the elderly lady with a cracking voice, showing veiled sympathy by admitting that she too had tended to run away at that age, but they were all so happy to see her that she felt it was more a holiday than a day for ashes as they were saying, down they went in clusters aboard electric carts to the marina where they would all meet on the Grand Catamaran, and the captain had iced drinks ready for them, they had spent a long time at sea, Mai, still perched on her father’s shoulders, had managed to fall asleep there amid the staccato sounds of the motor; she no longer remembered the rest once she saw the sliver of light under Augustino’s door, what did she have to fear from those vultures in the sky, and when would her parents be coming home, no one had better be able to come in through the half-open window, she’d tell Marie-Sylvie to keep it closed, you could sit on the window-seat with the cats and soft cushions in the daytime and see the roses in the garden, then stand up and watch the ocean, no worries, of course Grandma said that was no way to do your homework, there was a ladder in the room, and Mai would climb it with Augustino to get books off the shelves in the library, Grandmother thought every room should seem like an art gallery or an exhibition room, in Mai’s room, against the beige wall, there was a framed black-and-white photo by Robert Mapplethorpe of a bouquet of dried flowers in a shaft of light, like the open window onto the rose garden, it looked as though someone could just part the flowers and attack you in your bed, there was nothing to it, but Mai believed it, the man who showed up the most was not a tangle of beard and hair, a funny, clean-shaven young man, sitting on the soft cushions of the window-seat, he said to Mai, don’t tell anyone you saw me, they call me molester, rapist, and my picture’s everywhere, at the town hall and the post office, then under my name they’ve written WANTED, but what for, I’m already in prison, you can see the fence of the state prison, they say watch out, behind my smooth exterior, sometimes it’s the likeable ones, they say I exploited you, kidnapped you, but I’m just a respectable citizen like all the others, how would you like to go out for a walk with me, first take off your pyjamas and let’s have a look at you, with her cats by her knees, Mai was not afraid of anything, the ray of light under Augustino’s door was still there, you were supposed to fall asleep right away to the sound of the waves, Daddy and her grandmother said so. Here it is, nightime, Caroline said, and Harriet, Miss Désirée, half asleep in the armchair, what servitude she goes through with me, never loses patience, a good nurse for an old lady, can she sense it will soon be over, today I had a bit of tea so as not upset her as much by being finicky, when I think about Charles, I can see he needed to be in love, in love with Frédéric, in love with love, in love with Cyril, and the idea of fertile love for literary creativity, loving and passionate, that’s what he said, or was it Frédéric, that the poet and writer’s life was an act of love that consumed, even destroyed one, Charles’ life should have been like François René de Chateaubriand’s, a life of nothing but action, filled with pitfalls, sandbanks and reefs, action, travels, creation and a career as bursting with carnal intensity as scrapes in a very personal mysticism, for thus was written the unending Mémoires d’outre-tombe in a torrent of ardent living, powered by all its excess, some days Charles was the incarnation of the most turbulent poets, no less taken by love, he was Walt Whitman, a bard of liberalism who sang the praises of equality between men and women, the innocence of the body, love, his headlong passion fearless of words, this was the effect Cyril surely had, the praise of love received, and writing hundreds of poems, building so many Leaves of Grass, building a temple of meditation of ripened thoughts on life, death, and our eternal vagabond wanderings, Cyril listened and learned, the desire to love seeming so simple to him, so spontaneous, he recited for Charles from a memory which rarely faltered — a privilege of youth — the words of Raymond Radiguet, who like Charles, had written poetry at fifteen, “I burned, I hastened like those bound to die young,” these words must have tortured Cyril, the typhoid fever that killed Radiguet shortly after this joyously pronounced premonition, or was it frivolously, what we now call viral pneumonia, let’s lay out the real evil that will carry me away, thought Cyril, it wasn’t there in the arms of a man that the ghost of fear slipped by, Cyril was burning up too fast, and in loving, Charles’ gaze spread out, sudden and lonely, to those melancholy landscapes of his life where Jacques and Justin still called to him, the kingdom of death clinging to him by a mere thread of dew, it seemed, like the life of spiders, and the spouse still alive, Frédéric, his Frédéric, the most perfect of all, and the one who asked nothing except that Charles be happy, so delicate that Charles could sense his indignation, oh, if only the fascination and temptation were never to end before this poet’s gaze, Cyril thought, and yet there he goes without saying a word to me, off to the ancient lands of his world, that’s what it was, completion of one another, however dissimilar Charles and Frédéric were, they came together harmoniously, these thoughts suddenly enraged Cyril with jealousy, their geniuses completed one another with the extravagant diversity of their gifts, between them, nothing was beyond their grasp: painting, drawing, writing, and they were highly praised musicians as well, did Charles love Cyril or was he just the beautiful creature of an interlude, gifted actor that he was, he could see in Charles’ eyes, as though they had suddenly taken on an amorous glimmer, what the entity of Charles and Fré
déric was, Charles thought of all the books he and Frédéric had written together, and the ones for which Frédéric had done illustrations, art books bound in night-blue, hands joined, Cyril thought, what did Charles revisit while they played the piano together? So many pictures, places and faces erupted from the portfolio of their lives, an ethereal temple Frédéric had drawn in Athens, so many portraits, though Frédéric was the painter of dark tints unto which he infused lightness of being, his portraits were so real they seemed made of flesh and blood, the peach colour in the cheeks and lips of a seventeen-year-old Greek boy brought the freshness of the outside indoors, he was sitting in a yellow armchair, and the model’s head seemed to be crowned with yellow and blue flowers, though the illusion was created by the mirrored reflection of the vase they were placed in, that yellow, Charles said, how can you forget that, it’s as vehement as Van Gogh’s, the colour of buckled gold, Van Gogh’s fist, painting his miners and paupers in a hallucinatory state, the virulent yellow belonged even more to the fields harvested with a scythe by the Greek boy now settled into the armchair of the house Charles and Frédéric had rented on one of the islands surrounded by the churning seas where they had washed up sometime that August, Frédéric suffering from seasickness, they had slept on straw in the barn belonging to a family of peasants, and that morning at dawn, Charles was soaking his face at the fountain with a towel around his neck when the daughter of the house asked the stranger, who are you, or maybe she said in Greek, eisai Kalos, you’re good-looking, feeling bashful for a long time, he had hesitated before finally answering eisai Kalos, both of them reddening, and you of inexpressible beauty, he had said, when the grandmother came and separated them, saying to Charles, you, stranger, move on, my granddaughter is not for some foreigner, a boat would be leaving for Athens at one o’clock, well, the critics should have mentioned it, Charles said, that Van Gogh’s yellow was compassionate, that’s the only way to describe it, the bitterness of that colour moderated by sympathy was the yellow of death, the virulent death of Jacques, whom Charles could not stop thinking about and would carry in his heart like a tombstone which weighed on his pleasure and his love, where is Tanjou, Jacques asked from the depths of his reincarnations, Tanjou, the unfinished book on Kafka, is this what we have inherited with Kafka’s revelations, a bunch of malevolent demiurges running the world through their totalitarian regimes, ants that we are, insects crawling in moonlight to the labyrinths of the Castle where all are forbidden to lay their souls to rest, it is madness that Kafka wrote in the language of the enemy and lived in a country lent to them by the enemy, or had he already learned this frightening comedy in the ghettos, the writing hand caricaturing this pact with the enemy or resigning itself, this stone weighing on Charles’ heart, heavy book, now Jacques’ book was taking root in the very fibre of Charles’ being and in his love, though disappointing for Cyril at times, the book that had reached fruition called out to Charles to be written, recount all of Kafka’s humiliation, living and writing in the language of his persecutors, wouldn’t it have been better to leave Prague for Vienna or Berlin, thus his presence would have been just one more shadow among others, a beggar, just as destitute, he was a beggar of cultural magnificence, of knowledge, his shadow pivoting on the fragile consciousness of an insect in the universities where he was initiated into the science of law, then, small as he was, he gazed up at the pillars of courts, all those emperors who for centuries had barred Jews from their territories, Kafka was born to a state of mourning, too sensitive to ignore past and future riots, synagogues had been vandalized for many years, attacks had occurred in the streets, store windows had been broken, archives had been plundered, and by writing fables and allegories, Kafka was displaying his ancestral anxiety, perhaps his father, a hard man, had shown the same heroic courage as the cockroach by stubbornly continuing to live in the hell of Prague, son of a butcher and meat merchant in peasant villages, this dominating and poorly educated father of Kafka’s and his obsessive curse would turn the son against his meat-eating father and make him a vegetarian, excessively prudent about his health, till his pores and respiratory passages were infected by Koch’s Bacilla, an infestation Kafka called the Animal, Jacques would have said that the Animal of Pain was his too, he would have begged his doctor, as Kafka did when they brought him comfort in the form of morphine, Kafka’s irony would have been his, I’ll be a rock in the face of the Animal, Jacques said, all the while he was writing, Jacques was confronted with a Trial he did not deserve, jurisprudence sneered at him, their tribulations were the same, the verdict would be pitiless, still Tanjou laid the balm of his caresses on Jacques’ wounds, Charles reflected, Tanjou, about whom we knew nothing and who had fled inconsolable, they said he had rebuilt his life and was living in poverty in New York, having given up his dance company and his stripped-down choreographies to music by a Chinese composer, he wasn’t the same Tanjou that Jacques had loved and stimulated, was he account-administrator in a less well-known dance company, was he a silhouette bent over files in a huge building, who knows, you had to take the chance of hastily formed relationships, adventures, thought Cyril, burn up before rows of coffins piled up on acres of greenery, speed up the pulse before the flu or yellow fever came back, despite the fact that this was the century of medical miracles, Cyril would have liked to rejuvenate the theatre, the century, and the metamorphosis of art, that could be done in a cave, an underground bomb shelter, there one would see a painfully modern Phaedra, as Cyril explained it to Charles with such ardour as he would have felt playing Hyppolitus armoured in leather, as a young prince more nihilist than punk, and with as many violent liaisons with Phaedra as with the rest of the world, the world as her country, her prince, like Hamlet, would be especially emotional beneath his angular armour, incapable of fighting the violence that had been bred in him, the bitter fruit of years of service in deserts of blood, his passion for Phaedra or hers for him would have been like Charles and Cyril, the sign of fate, an inevitable predestination, like in the dramas of Euripides, and Charles said the fate or predestination was null, though the presentation of Hyppolitus as someone violently aggressed by the world was interesting, Charles wondered why Cyril, so gentle-seeming, had always felt such repugnance for violence, scars of a disabused, sabotaged youth perhaps, he thought, he resolved to be more attentive and understanding; so it was that there grew up around Charles and Cyril, Charles and me, like in the plays of Euripides or Seneca, that vague something that appeared to be the workings of fate in each of us, and we did not know how to avoid it or defend ourselves from it. If planes took off from the kitchen table in Samuel’s kitchen, he could also see very young people he’d never seen before from his window, clusters of adolescents, black and white, adhering to one another in airless half-smoke rooms, some passed out on the floor, cigarettes in their hands, motionless, as though having given in to exhaustion from a long dope session, others, barely worked up, looking fixedly in front of them, as though they’d seen Samuel without seeing him, a girl, a boy, or two girls and boys, in sloppy underwear, looking like little orphans wearing themselves out in deeply sensual postures they’d long been practising since their addiction to crack and cocaine, they were suspicious, Samuel thought, as troubling as the teenagers in photographs by Larry Clark, the debauchery and lasciviousness in unmade beds and dirty sheets seeming to limit themselves suddenly to hallucinogenic prowess, still Samuel would appear to have no control over them and their carousing, busy with their swapping, among his books, appearing to have no visitors, parents or guardians, spending entire days in blissful unawareness, always lumped together, wired to one another, and before them the monumental dream that life was not worth living, sex, stupor and being stoned, well yes, that was alright, all at once Samuel shut his eyes and saw them no more than he saw planes taking off from his kitchen table, was he dreaming or awake when he examined in detail faces and bodies in newspapers and magazines just in case Our Lady of the Bags was among them, one of the homeless that had made it through
the earthquakes, along streets filled with debris, indescribable horrors reflected on their faces, in below-zero temperatures without tents or covers or food, under some ruin or other, at some level below a citadel, tower, or fortress of which the steel beams had melted in less than an hour, where had Our Lady of the Bags been sent, Samuel wondered, or maybe during reconstruction of the city, by an oversight she had been poured in cement and walled up with bricks where even dogs could not find her; a mute woman with pleated hair took Our Lady’s place with dignity in that Manhattan park on South Avenue, and her eyes were sad, her face tense, as she sat upright drawing the attention of passers-by to a piece of cardboard on which she had written, I can’t speak, money or food, it was as though she stood apart from any request, like Our Lady, all the more devastating because she was mute, Our Lady had no place to fall from, there was no precipice where she could twist her ankle, nor tip over her Bible on her chest, because where she solicited people for prayer, there was nothing to give altitude, and when she had to go from one place to another, it was always by lower passageways, flagstone walkways, asphalt passages sloping downwards to the innards of the subway, perhaps one would pick up her trail among the grey, gravelled, rock-strewn lots from a few definable objects — the comb she used to wave her hair in moments of vanity, or her Bible, or her plaited skirt, but so much dirt had been shovelled, a tide of pebbles, she would have found her home at last circled like grass around her compact grave, flagstoned, asphalted and well below the earth from which strange flowers would spring again, how evanescent this world was, didn’t they always say that at bottom it was solid and material, all those office workers, bureaucrats, obscure secretaries dictating the order of things free of panic, evanescent this world now gone, Samuel thought, after morning coffee, men and women gathered together before reading the day’s first e-mails, and before the cataclysm dispersed them in whirlwinds, in stairways, against window-bars, where all could see they were still alive, piled on one another, perhaps giving a last word of consolation, was Samuel asleep or in a highly agitated state of consciousness while he slept, from his window he could see the wall facing him brighten with autumn sunlight, endlessly replaying the act of falling, some as if with limbs as powdery as sugar, interwoven with one another, leg, head, arm glimpsed outside against the azure, spilling from concrete columns, characters in a tableau that had ground into motion, with nothing but emptiness for them to fall into, an arm, a leg, a head bursting forth with a white flag, the torch showing its colours, help us, they cried all together, their voices modulated like a choir, handkerchiefs, white flags, who could they save, or were these messages of farewell, others jumping solitary, a plunge that seemed infinitely long and deliberate, a fall whose stiffness, step and bend of the knee, Samuel had studied, the step between heaven and earth, already celestial, no longer that of someone walking, will never walk again, moving in air, distancing themselves from bodies, ties, scarves, stoles whose flight became as agile as doves, along this wall fell the solitary man with his boots on, of whom Samuel thought, once a friend of the family, perhaps only ten years older than me, this is how he looked when he was a dancer, Tanjou the student from Pakistan, he who stumbled, finished, no future, smoke had blackened his forehead, the lone falling man was him, Tanjou, Samuel could have kept him from falling by stretching out his hand and saying, let me take you home, you’ll be safe, before the rescue teams and paramedics arrive, but there hadn’t been time, the string of bodies from the sky went on, Tanjou stopped a second in front of the window then continued far below, if it was him, he was among that pile of legs, feet held on by boots, an ear, that pile on the pyre over which a rescuer had wept, saying how can I see this, and why didn’t Samuel run down into the street saying, this arm and foot, that’s my friend Tanjou, or is it someone else, after seeing all this and examining the pictures, Samuel had figured out how to dance Tanjou’s last step, but at night on the opposite wall outside it seemed like Samuel’s set in the theatre and the planes circled before landing on his kitchen table, an evanescent world now disappeared during the coffee-break, Tanjou had read his first e-mail of the morning, saying it was going to be a beautiful day, he had on boots that had picked up red leaves in the streets and avenues leading to work in that moderately cool light of September-October, soon to begin fading, it seemed like a leisurely stroll, it was his ultimate step, it was going to be so nice today, not a cloud in the sky, Tanjou had mused, all that was needed was for Samuel to open the window and stop the solitary man from falling, before the boots disappeared into night, where were they, Tanjou the Pakistani student he’d met a while ago in Jacques’ garden, the professor, Our Lady of the Bags, where were they, then once Samuel thought he had found her in a station or in an airport, she’d grown, she might have been living with some ideologically oriented group in the terminus, a group of very young women kneeling in prayer, touching their Bibles compulsively, mumbling incoherent phrases, while their spiritual guide, an older man, the clown of the sect who knew the strength of his revelations to these women, standing among the kneeling women, gently nudging their heads close together, implanting the mark of servility in each one of them with the incompetence of his doctrine, I’ll teach you how to survive the Apocalypse, he said, yes, my sisters and children, pray, pray, his voice was sententious and ordinary, one of them had raised her head, Our Lady of the Bags, she had asked, is it true, tell me the truth, where is my friend the Apostle, where am I, and the guide had replied, lower your head, obey, submit, her face, the face of she who was Our Lady of the Bags, still had its purity intact, her tone of voice was limpid and detached, but perhaps this voice had a higher timbre, her hair was no longer wavy but short, dogmatized, stigmatized, who was she really, and Samuel longed to say to her, so you’re alive after all, can you find it in you to pardon me, then, like waking from a dream, he knew it was not her, but someone equally pure begging and praying, head bowed to the ground amid all these travellers passing by, tightly bound to her master and guide by that renegade force that is servility, and feverishly turning the pages of her Bible, unlearned and broken, just as Our Lady had been, for this is how her guide, the head of the sect, liked them, tamed and repressed, tossing and turning in her bed, Mai revisited her dream, possibly it was as real as the photo of a dark bouquet framed on the wall, there were oyster-fishermen on the wharf, enormous, she’d never seen men that corpulent all at work, like the fisherman in the blue boat on The-Island-Nobody-Owns, leaning over his molluscs till she stumbled on him and he said, come with me over to the Australian pines, she knew these men were a larger reproduction of the same man; beneath the oyster flesh was life, she thought, the precious milky pearl he had spoken of, they were all just common fishermen roughly manhandling this abundance from the gulf whose basin of troubled, muddy water Mai could see and in the shells of which swam a lime-like substance which was life, shouldn’t these men have been especially careful at every instant, for they were conceivers of life, allowing reproduction and life, like them one entered the vast cycle of birth and death, and that was the secret Mai had deciphered, knowing she would never tell anyone, for it was a fearful thing, attractive too, and thus one day she would yield to the clean-shaven young man who came in her bedroom window or took out his pocket-knife and slashed the flowers in the Robert Mapplethorpe photo, saying, here I am, I’m the one they’re looking for, can I sit on your bed, even if you can see the fence of the state prison where they kept me, I’ve come back, he’d say to her, I’m your father, and I’ve come to kidnap you and take you far away from here, why not follow me, Daniel and Mélanie aren’t your real parents, I am, I followed little Ambre who was nine on her bike in Texas, and they found her body four days later in a thicket, and despite the laws of about thirty states and counties, they’re still looking for me, look at that tender skin under my penknife, when they’re only six, like Adam and Ethan, grabbed and taken off from toy stores in New York and Hollywood, their deflowered ghosts wander and wander the canals and rivers, I love birthday
parties when parents put their kids to bed very late, then I come in here through the open window and take them in their sleep from beds perfumed with their own smells, still a taste of chocolate on their lips, sweet breath, so who loves you more than me, Daniel and Mélanie aren’t your real parents, Mai, come with me, do you hear me there under the sheets with your cats at your feet, oh I’ll bring you back, just like lots of others, and you won’t say a word, and your parents will say, what a miracle that she’s back, she’s so silent, won’t say a word, still just as normal as yesterday, her room a mess as it was before, she’s forgotten it all, our joy, our hope is home, and your black nanny will take you to school every morning again, and you’ll keep up your cello lessons, then later on you’ll go out dancing with boys, you’ll be perfectly normal, even after months of privation and deflowering, and they’ll go looking for me again, parents, psychiatrists, judges, I’ll hold them all captive in their fearful unawareness, their apathetic bigotry which works on them like an anaesthetic, for they’d like to put me on trial for my offences, but they don’t want to know about my inappropriate acts, they don’t want you to talk, because you might upset their prudery, and you’ll go to the prom, you’ll be the hope of the family later on, but you won’t tell them a thing, not your parents, not judges, during a trial they’ll say, the predator, the one who called himself a prophet, was with a woman, a mistress, wasn’t he, and they both abused you, and when you left the house that night, they dragged you along with them to their hangout in the mountain, you have to talk about what happened there, but I know you won’t say anything, you’d rather let them think you’re just the same as you were before you left and came back, obedient to your grandmother, normal, totally normal, you’ll never mention the days without eating, just some water in a dirty cup, one week, two, when you were our prisoner below ground, then one morning you’ll say to your father with no feeling at all, you know, Daddy, I’ve gone a week without eating, and he won’t ask any questions, because he doesn’t want to know what we do with our captives, all of them, year after year, in caves, underground hiding-places and hangouts, some of them we simply left to die of thirst, starvation, and the accomplice — wife or mistress — had doubts, I think I ought to go down in the basement and see what’s happening, then gradually she gives up on it, I can numb her into anything, guilt becomes more and more dormant and sterile, your parents will say, no need to rush to trial, they just don’t want to know, parents and psychologists, none of them want to know anything about those lower depths, maybe you remember those underground storage cellars for fruit, well, that’s what we did with some of you, eight-to-twelve-year-old boys and girls, we kept all of you quiet in the cellars, petrified with hunger and exhaustion, our best fruit rotted one by one, then suddenly the woman would say, I can’t go down there anymore, there are too many bodies under the stairs and under the earth, I can’t, I won’t, and we’d take off again, walking to different mountains, I don’t know why we let you get away back home, but at least you’ve got to let me come and visit you every day, open the window onto the rose garden wide, then the day will come when you’ll give in to me again, and now, as she sat on her bed, Mai saw a shape moving in her room, she thought it was him again, the same odd young man the police were looking for, but it was Marie-Sylvie, the nanny, hey, how come you’re not asleep yet, and the light’s on in Augustino’s room, your parents won’t be in till late, not before dawn I bet, because it’s your grandmother’s birthday, Mai heard Marie-Sylvie de Toussaint’s impatient voice, back where I come from, you wouldn’t have a roof over your head, not a bed, nothing, she said, then brusquely she laid Mai on her bed, wishing it was Vincent she needed to comfort and relieve of his nightime fears instead, Vincent was in a sanatorium for the summer, that’s really what it was, they had talked about a summer school for bronchitic children, but sanatorium said it better, for two or three months, Mélanie had taken him away from her, Vincent was her own child since she looked after him, my brother’s going crazy in that ghost-country, no house, no home on an island that didn’t even export coffee or sugar anymore, she went on as she slid Mai between the covers, then one day they discovered the victims had turned into torturers and fled the country, whatever their crimes, good citizens, barbers, higher-ups who had tortured my brother, you’d never know them abroad in their disguises, these words ran like a litany, and Marie-Sylvie told Mai she had to sleep, she wasn’t going to put out the lamp until Mai had her eyes closed, she’d got a letter from Jenny today, Mai didn’t remember her, she was too small, when you close your eyes you forget everything, then with the first cooing of the doves in the garden, it would be dawn, Mai, like her brother Augustino, recognized bird-songs when the wind stirred the chimes in the doorways, what innocent happiness those moments were when Marie-Sylvie carried Vincent to bed, calling, my angel, murmuring in his ear that they would take to the sea in the Southern Light, but not to say anything to his parents, no, no, they laughed together, Vincent, her child to protect, defend and cure, above all to distract from his coughing bouts, both of them rocked by the calm sea, navigable in fine weather, Southern Light, Southern Light, and in the arbour, slightly heady from the perfume of African lilies, Mélanie told Olivier that, if that shameful segregation had gradually come to an end in restaurants, hotels, and theatres, everywhere the crime of segregation had been legalized for so many years, it was thanks to one woman aged forty-two, Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, in forty-eight hours she had overthrown those inexorable laws, Rosa said, no, I’m not getting up, take my fingerprints, set on your fierce dogs, I’m not getting up, no white passenger is going to sit here in my place, because I’m tired standing up, arrest me, every bus in town will be boycotted, we’re going to march, get our mules and horses out of the countryside, but I’m not getting up to give my seat to a white man, a young Baptist pastor called Martin Luther King heard the voice of the young woman with a defiant look, sharp under her thick glasses, was the hour approaching when men would be delivered from their chains? Send on your packs of dogs whose souls you’ve twisted, it isn’t they who are biting our legs but you, their masters, those are your teeth we can feel in our flesh, Rosa Parks says she was not alone, completely calm in her white cotton dress, a black student with a binder under her arm, walking to Little Rock Central High School, picking her way through a hateful crowd, women insulting her, in the front row, imperturbable, she continued forward, she could not go back, but only go on to college and university, send on your dogs, Rosa said, point your garden hoses at us, I’m not getting up, a president sensitive to our oppression, seeing these images of violence on television, will say, that makes me sick, he ought to have said sick with shame, that was it, a young woman with a defiant look had changed the world, said Mélanie, this time it seemed that Olivier had listened to her, still complaining that Jermaine had turned up his music, what do you call this, blues, rock, sometimes it even sounds like off-beat church singing, my son really loves it, and he even got his mother to dance with him, come on, let’s join the others, Olivier said, taking Mélanie’s hand, we really shouldn’t be so preoccupied, look at my wife, she knows how to escape all these problems with her joie de vivre, when they got near the pool, Mélanie saw Chuan and her son Jermaine dancing to music that was way too loud in the phosphorescent rays from the water under a starry sky that was gradually getting paler and paler, come on, said Chuan exuberantly, come and dance, my friends, a group of young people, as colourful in their hairstyles and clothes as the house was in Chuan’s orange-and-pink walls, bounced around her and Jermaine, Mélanie spotted her mother looking concerned at this frenetic celebration which she hadn’t expected to be endless, really these young people do go to bed late, or maybe they just didn’t sleep at all, one could see the tiredness etched into Mère’s face, who was also wondering how Chuan managed to get along with a misanthropic husband like Olivier, who hardly appreciated the qualities of a woman specializing in design, creating comfort and beauty, C
huan said she had decorated the house pleasantly so he would have peace to write in, but Olivier was a man steeped in sadness, there he sat in his hut, compiling the political errors of the past century, the catastrophes that could have plunged us into an apocalypse and were avoided by a hair’s breadth, whether it be the Cuban missile crisis resolved by the voice of a head of state on Radio Moscow, or the memory of infamous assassination in Dallas, from October, 1962 to that day of November 22, 1963, in his articles, Olivier still felt disturbed by grief, yet all around him, Chuan, the good fairy of harmony in an unharmonious world, aimed at a form of weightlessness in industrial fashion design, whether she was decorating an ancestral home in New Orleans where she allied present to past, a multi-branched crystal chandelier with shaded candles to illuminate a stairway whose steps looked like sand-coloured velvet and made one feel as though they were flowing in a torrent of water in this decor, Mère thought, modernity or old-fashioned elegance with antique clocks over marble fireplaces, Chuan evoked shades of the sun going down or already set that were her own, writing in the red room, did Olivier notice the way the Chinese porcelaine pieces were placed in the alcove, or the gilded horse sculpture on the wall-shelves by the window, or the loggia with French doors where he came for a rest with a book in hand, not even the explosion of lunar and solar colours could assuage his eyes and heart, and that fruit, all of it brought in every morning, avocado, lemons, pineapples, brilliant daffodils, did he see the flowers arranged on the patio each day, did he breathe them in, he liked the circular pool that had a view of the dwarf palm trees and the sea, the turquoise sea and sky flowed together completely, suddenly he would be biting into some fruit, chewing the twig of a plant, vaguely remembering that Chuan had brought the silk for the curtains from Brazil and the porcelain pieces, slightly too exquisite for a man’s room, from China, and why was this room as red as Chuan’s dresses and shoes, then he stopped thinking about it, repeating what he often said to Jermaine, all I want, my dear son, is for you to love me, and even if he was always just as ill at ease with his thoughts of the evil century past, he admitted to the comfort of being loved by his wife and beloved son, if he’d been a little more reasonable, perhaps he would have been less tormented by the irreversible repetition of events he resented, this was how Mère imagined the particular understanding between Olivier and Chuan, wasn’t every couple just as unique; those charming couples, Bernard, Valérie, Nora, and Christiansen were carrying on their conversations amid the noise, would Mère have a chance to know them better when her right hand hurt, our physical maladies tend to keep us apart from those we think in better health than ourselves, she thought, younger, stronger, and Caroline said, take this tray away, Harriett, Miss Désirée, this bread dipped in soup is for old people forgotten in homes, not for me, no bouillon, nothing, I don’t want to be one of those animals they stuff before the slaughter, yes, a little more green tea, I’d like that, I love you, Charles had written to Fédéric in the years when their union was flourishing, I am your drawing and painting hand, you are my writing hand, even apart, we will always be together, we are already, aren’t we, Frédéric had painted the walls of a spacious house they had lived in a sanguine pink, almost orange, and although the living room was empty, it seemed as though they were both still there under the domed lighting-fixture that hung from the wooden ceiling, reading, painting, writing, hands on the glass table, friends and lovers always, seeking each other out from time-to-time over the books and notes, when you’re no longer there, I’ll look for you and see you everywhere, even in the arms of strangers, and summer dappled on the windows through the acacia branches, I’ll love you tomorrow and always, see you everywhere, and neither of them seemed to foresee the last glimmers of summertime and the return of winter’s chilly light, still less the boundless love that Charles would feel for Cyril years later, when I think of that picture of Frédéric, I can still see and hear them in that huge house, I’m still there beside them taking pictures, Charles’ refined head against Frédéric’s athletic shoulder, hearing the ripple of water from the fountain in the garden, flowers crowding the window in summer, Charly and Cyril not even born yet, perhaps growing like embryos in our respective limbos, gnawing on us without our knowing it, Charles and Frédéric writing and painting a lot, in those days, my husband and I went deer-hunting, killing the deer, I remember the animal fallen on the tracks, and my daughter not a viable fœtus, so unhealthy the world, I’ll love you through all that I no longer possess, under the chandelier they write and paint in the New England woods, the deer at dawn are as free and happy as in the painting by Courbet in which they stretch out to reach the leaves, wild and free and happy, not knowing we exist, my husband and I, with our dogs and hunting rifles, the deer heft their weight upwards into the tree and its sweet fruit, stretching their bulk and shaking themselves; perhaps it’s their voices I hear in the roomy house, back from Greece, what a grand and beautiful universe, while I’m taking their pictures I don’t tell them I’m pregnant, nothing about the scarcely viable little girl, I’m just a woman with a husband she doesn’t love, I’ll take a lover, I think that Charles and Frédéric will always love one another, I tell them, sit quietly together so I can photograph you, Charles unbuttons his shirt-collar, he doesn’t like having his picture taken, but he has to because it’s for the cover of his book, Charles, Frédéric, and I make up an independent and solid trio, enthusiastic about the same sports, riding and tennis, Charles is amazed when I tell him I’ve flown a plane and got a diploma in architecture, he says, I’ll introduce you to my friend Jean-Mathieu, this winter I’ll have a lover, and it will be him, we’re in the most torrid of regions, by the sea, I meet Jean-Mathieu in a sunny February, and we languish on the terrace under the sun, Jean-Mathieu is wearing classic Italian shoes with no socks, I spot a scorpion and kill it with a swift blow of my book before its venomous stinger can reach him, we should go to Italy, Jean-Mathieu says, that was a long time ago, Harriett, when my villa was open to so many venerable friends, Jean-Mathieu, Adrien and Suzanne, Charles and Frédéric, later the European writer-painter couples, Bernard and Valérie, Nora and Christiensen, it’s a crying shame that I’m shut up like this, no villa, no friends, no Jean-Mathieu by my side, can you tell me why Harriett, why force-feed me when it’s nightime, it is night, isn’t it, you’ll panic Charly’s cat, where is Charly, always out dancing and drinking in the discotheques till dawn, it’s a crying shame, where has my house gone, Ma’am, she squandered your fortune, that Charly, a really nasty piece of work, Ma’am, remember that gap between her teeth, degrading a lost tooth like that, it was her, she got on your nerves so many times, so much bad temper, it was nothing, said Caroline, it wasn’t her, it was the ecstasy, it wasn’t her behaviour, my sweet child would never do that, but she had to buy more and more expensive drugs, I know it wasn’t her, Caroline repeated, and they say the motivation for his actions was racial hatred, Olivier thought, that’s what he would emphasize in his article, hate had pushed the skinhead to kill a black girl driving her white fiancé, they were both twenty, the skinhead had shot from his car, five shots had been heard, some said a trucker was about to pass both cars when he saw the racist, the engaged couple were students at the Atlantic University of Florida, adolescents in love, their killer was twenty as well, hate, hate was still killing these days, the bullet had hit the girl’s temple, they had been waiting for the light at an intersection, and they were found still wrapped in each other’s arms, hate, hate, thought Olivier holed up in his office, he was waiting for the night to end, the contralto voice of Nina Simone in his headphones revived his anger, Mississippi Goddam, sang the voice, liberated but so pained, so that’s what it all comes down to for us, passion and pain, Olivier thought, this music was once banned in the southern states, still no matter, passion and pain have survived, you know, I don’t regret a thing I said or sang, said Nina Simone’s contralto voice, nothing, I don’t regret a single word, might that voice have warded off the hatred of the skinhead, a killing
in broad daylight from a grey convertible, Mississippi Goddam, cursed be you for killing the black fiancée of the white boy, you’ve killed love, destroyed two lives and more besides, cursed be you, whether free or in jail, may you never enter into the kingdom of men or of God, Olivier thought, for they had to be examined rather than cursed, what purpose did it serve, and did Olivier have the right to punish and hate when he had a wife and son who adored him, what is the point to our love and our tolerance and our pity, what point, for every day hate kills, hate kills, and Ari looked at his daughter as she slept with her toys all around her, she was already asleep on his shoulder when he walked to the car amid the rumbling of the waves and the wind on the beach, there were stains of brilliant colour on Lou’s round fists, she so loved to cover herself in the gooey gouache in her father’s studio, and it wouldn’t come off with soap and water in the bath, it was even in her tangled hair, soon Ari would teach her to cut her own hair, essential lessons were the ones that taught autonomy, you need to have the courage to discover that you are practically alone in the world, even if you have parents, Lou would be able to muddle through, you have to be able to find your way out of any mess in life, even if you had good parents, Ari and Ingrid were, and before she was ever born they too had been abandoned, Ari said Chagall’s lovers were flying up to a red sky holding one another in their arms, it now seemed to him that the reproduction was inappropriate for Marie-Louise’s room, for the charming bodies, no longer feeling desire for one another, were not flying up to their charnel ascension any more, as seen in the painting, drifting joyfully over the rooftops of the city into a red sky with unusual creatures orbiting around them, a man with a fish-head coming to offer them a bouquet of lilacs, a bird that ran but did not fly, this was the sweet story told by the Russian painter, Ari said, but life was very different, two lovers could suddenly find themselves waging interminable battles, hating one another, for love was also a world of pettiness, a terrain of rivalry, in his profound naïveté, the painter of fairy modernism had seen nothing of these base squabbles, in gentleness he had painted a world where order reigned, what would Chagall think of this order or communion between the animal world and God when he returned to his country torn by war and revolution, well, if Marie-Louise liked the painting, lovers in the red sky of revolution, he wouldn’t take it from her, Daddy, Mama, she said, what was true yesterday is no longer so, fallen from their flight, her parents were separated and wounded, Ari thought, but Lou would be with him until Sunday, he was happy after all, and as soon as the winds calmed, the boat would be ready, he had explained to Lou that her first boat would be shaped like a ballet slipper with a reinforced toe, he’d call it Lou’s Slipper, the boats and yachts were anchored in the marina of the sailing club, and that’s where they’d go tomorrow, Ari had washed and polished the mahogany sides of her boat ceaselessly, on the water it was a marvel of agility, though for now, Lou wasn’t sure she liked the sea and big waves that pushed at you all the time, and those noisy gulls everywhere, the pelicans gathered in so close to the fishermen’s cabin, Lou’s boat looked as though it would hold up well at sea, how pleasant it will be to live in our cabin at anchor, just the two of us under a perfect blue sky, father and daughter at work on their gouaches, today’s conceptual artists are so entirely different from Chagall and his mystical thinking or his dreams of a Russia without madness, they’re loaded down with instruments, videos, installations, sound effects and stimulation, sets of posters and collages, their voluntary distortion of painting, the life-shock of these contemporaries, how restful and fresh were Chagall’s lovers in a red sky, what culture is it we’re living in when we can’t even recognize beauty, tomorrow Lou’s boat would be ready, Ari was never through polishing the hull, it was for her, so beloved of her father, they’d have a little time, as long as the winds died down, and Julio thought that this night would be a memorable one; he’d seen them before the navy officers and Coast Guard, they were a woman, three children, and a few men, who had arrived, compass in hand, in a boat they had built themselves, a huge pile of wood and steel sixteen feet long that sank in the water before the officers on night patrol or the Coast Guard heard their cries, Julio had thought, those are my people, what storm with easterly winds had brought them here, are there broken bones, why no baggage, yet cards hanging like medallions from their necks with addresses of those they hoped to find almost erased and illegible, then an officer appeared on the scene saying, I’ll translate for them, but they just looked at him, suddenly wordless and voiceless, the addresses and phone numbers were their families, but where were they, we don’t know them, they were given blankets and energy drinks, they had to be identified, those who had made it to shore could stay, those caught at sea had no rights and would be sent back, what Atlantic storm brought them here on the easterly winds, and that was the end of a memorable night, Julio thought, among them a woman and children, no baggage, Ramon, Oreste, their mother, they’d been calling for help a long time in the night, then carrying blankets and sweet drinks to them, Julio said, don’t be afraid, you’ve reached shore, I’m Julio, the one you’re looking for, there’s a house ready for you on the Island, you can rest at last, come, quietly stumbling, the survivors had followed Julio along the sandy paths between the pines to the house of refuge, and Marie-Sylvie was delighted that at last Mai had closed her eyes and seemed to be sleeping, now she’d stop asking for things, Marie-Sylvie left a small light on, she could read while she kept watch over this child her parents had spoiled too much, what wouldn’t they buy for her, just as many electronic games as her brother Augustino, though their grandmother disapproved, a more rigorous upbringing would have been better, no one knew why such a little girl was always running away or why she still wet her bed, the pediatrician they went to spoke in veiled terms, it’s true kids nowadays are sexually precocious, he’d added, fixing Mai in the ambiguity of her unease, who knows what, thought Marie-Sylvie, to whom all this concern seemed unnecessary, this pediatrician hadn’t seen the kids in her country covered with flies, did he even know they existed, Marie-Sylvie was irritable around Mai, though she’d been her nanny ever since replacing Jenny in the household, she despised being in Mai’s service without Vincent around to coddle, frail Vincent, but what an illusion it was that one could give love when it wasn’t a choice, naturally, all others were just a burden, with Jenny’s letter in her trembling hands, she thought, you left me alone Jenny, as soon as your studies in medicine were over, you left, Doctors Without Borders, when am I going to see you again, I know so much less than you do, I used to keep bony goats on a hillside with my brother, you Jenny, you’re different, you have a destiny, we’ll always be stripped of everything, poverty stricken, Jenny wrote, in this remote Chinese province we’re living a hot, steamy, suffocating summer, just me and a few doctors, these poor farming areas are hit by an epidemic, a short while ago we weren’t even allowed to name the sickness, everyone is masked, and there is a crisis in these mountainous areas that they would rather not know about, every day, we stop before huge granite blocks which stand as tombstones for those buried (names withheld) under the scrubby grass, no one has any respect for them, just humble villagers who received transfusions from an infected blood-bank, now they have no names or identity either, as though they had never existed, couples who had worked hard on this land for their children, worthy men and women worn down by farming soy and corn, even whole families disappeared, fathers, mothers, children, sometimes aged grandparents take care of the orphans, many thought they could cure their skin lesions with herbs without knowing what was wrong, someone told them medicines bought in Thailand would help, that a vaccine would save them, but help could not reach them from so far away, we went to the dangerous parts of town where young prostitutes die every day, like the heroine addicts that visit them, with our surgical masks on, who could we help with so little medication and vaccine, I am haunted by the tombstones with no names on them that spring up everywhere, even between hills, in valleys under the sun-scorch
ed grass, an epidemic they long refused to name, yet the number of victims kept growing, it must be nice where you are, Marie-Sylvie, far from the sepulchres and this humid heat, how can I see the unbearable things I witness here every day, parents of decimated families too weak to walk, pushing their ten-year-old children before them in squeaking wooden wheelbarrows, packets of bones, fleshless arms on stretchers, how I envy you where you are with healthy children, and Marie-Sylvie thought, why doesn’t she stop talking, I wish she’d stop writing, what’s she doing in China when she ought to be here with me, all at once she had the impression Jenny was writing in order to crush her, grind her up, working her indignation like a woman subjected to the laws of the rich, of course Mélanie’s children were healthy, well-loved, if love was that superabundance, excess of caresses from Mélanie on Mai’s hair and forehead, kisses and cuddles that so annoyed Marie-Sylvie who had never had any of that, the little girl need only scrape her knee and her mother was down before her, weren’t those three women — Esther, Mélanie, and Mai — more than blood relations, more like sharing a single wavelength, possessing the same certainties, and also gifts of sensibility as well as seductive qualities which made them disrespectful of a creature so undone and wounded as herself, thought Marie-Sylvie, born under a bad sign . . . didn’t they all, Mélanie, Daniel, and Esther, try to detach her from the only one she loved, Vincent, taken away from her for the whole summer; her long silhouette curved towards Mai’s bed, she thought of herself as a dried stem bending under every servitude, as though without Vincent, she was just another black servant, she heard Mai murmuring in her sleep, however imperceptible her moan, her mother would have heard right away, woken her daughter and asked, what is it sweetheart, another one of those nightmares, whereas Marie-Sylvie steeled herself and pretended not to hear, what could Mai be complaining about since she had everything, Marie-Sylvie touched Mai’s brow with her fingertips and said, it isn’t day yet, you have to sleep, Mai trembled in her sleep, walking alone without Augustino, her parents had told her so many times not to go along the sea by the path to the stadium alone, where they practised team sports like football or beach hockey under the midday sun, there never seemed to be anyone in the bleachers or on the stands, nor on the pathway that Mai took alone with her skateboard under her arm, she could feel the silence dripping down into her footprints, nobody would find her here, there was a black telephone near the stands she’d rather not hear ring, might it be a connection to her parents, but she was a separate person from them and her brothers, wasn’t she, and why was she strictly forbidden to come to the stadium alone, strange people went through there, her mother said, and especially Mai was not to talk to strangers and certainly not take it into her head to follow them, you never knew what to expect with Mai, said Marie-Sylvie de la Toussaint, Mama kissed her in the morning and said, Mai dear, today try not to upset me the way you did yesterday, you wouldn’t answer when I called, how am I to know where you are when you won’t answer my call, if she were a boy, they’d have more respect for her, for several minutes no one showed up, and Mai didn’t hear a sound, it was as though the grass-lined road beyond the stadium was being petrified in the sun, there wasn’t even an occasional lost egret or heron to be seen, but someone had whispered and laughed, and this eruption of voices in the all-enveloping stillness had made her start from the highest platform, she’d seen him and her, but they hadn’t seen her, a very young couple, the boy was pulling the girl’s hair, Mai couldn’t tell if this game was playful or nasty, but she didn’t like hearing them quarrel, then all of a sudden, the girl didn’t seem to be laughing anymore, but shouting and weeping, Mai was far enough away that they could not see her, was he teasing the girl or bullying her violently, she couldn’t tell, although the girl stopped crying after a few moments, they were haranguing and tormenting each other now, her mother was right, you did see some weird people here, if she were asleep and this were a dream, she would wake up from this painful dream and not hear the screams of the girl being beaten by the boy anymore, was he beating her, or was it a game like when she had let him pull her hair and laughed, about-facing in an instant, Mai couldn’t really tell who these adolescents were, the way their shadows flailed about on the stands, or if the boy was beating the girl, oh why didn’t her nanny wake her up, Mai should never have come to the stadium, and Marie-Sylvie saw Mai tremble in her sleep, touched her forehead and said, it’s nothing, just a nightmare, I’m putting the light out and going to my room now, as Mai half opened her eyelids, she saw the silhouette of Marie-Sylvie disappear down the hallway, where is Mama, she asked, but got no answer and so went back to sleep, the cries had stopped now, and Caroline repeated, Harriett, Miss Désirée, all this degradation isn’t the fault of Charly but those young people she hangs out with in bars and discotheques, she comes back to me at dawn looking devastated and tottering, doesn’t even recognize me, as though all at once she doesn’t know who I am, this degradation, this being shut up with you in this house, Harriett, meanwhile an exhibition of my photography is touring the world, London, Paris, here you are treating me like a retarded old woman, when my mind is clear as it’s ever been, this is not all Charly’s fault, it’s fate that caused us to meet, just as surely as it did Charles and Cyril, and whether that’s sad or happy, it’s our fate, even as a child, I knew nothing could be done about that, on beautiful days by the sea, when my mother had appointments to go to, her lover used to beckon me into his room, sat me down beside him and said, my, how you’re growing, come over to the bed (their bed), and even as he was stroking my hair, I could see outside the window my cousin on his pony saying in his child’s voice, Caroline, come and play with me, the man’s hand slid along my back, hmmm it’s rounded-in here, he said at the start of my waist, when a servant approached, he said in a low voice, you absolutely must not say anything about this, it’s between us, isn’t it now, let’s just keep quiet about it, I kept quiet, complicit in the fate that gives each one of us our share of experience, intrigues and ruses, do we have any choice, running headlong over myself to perdition, as I ran to the man whenever my mother went out, the lovers’ bedchamber, their love and pleasure, the man opened his arms to me, I was an accomplice in their affair, this conspiracy of the flesh they kept up night and day under sheets washed and ironed by the servants, my mother was not aware of my carryings-on with the man and his too-intimate kisses, of him, of us, of our silence, he said come, and there I was, what should we go discover this long afternoon, my cousin asked wandering through the dunes on his pony, I lost no time in joining him, slowly, gently, showing him how to bridle our skittish pony, my cousin was so naïve, he knew nothing about man or woman, and my sweet afternoon indulgences with my mother’s lover who derived a special pleasure from picking up little girls, I loved the fact that this man was destined for me, because it was something forbidden, unimaginable, and that’s how destiny got its claws into me, close against one another, my cousin and I went down to the dunes on our pony to where the waves broke, he candid, me uncontrollable, because I wanted to know everything about life, just as well you aren’t listening to me Désirée, for you life is simple, you have God, I don’t want this bouillon you’ve brought me, I don’t want anything, you look on me with kindness and take my hand, I’m telling you I don’t like the smell of that soup, I can’t eat it, your black hand in mine, a union of pity or desolation, here we are the two of us, the way we used to be in my parents’ house when you used to tell me to say my prayers and I wouldn’t listen, uncontrollable, uncontrollable, you said, Harriett, Miss Désirée, in your hand I see a vigorous nobility, mine, well look at these fingers that drop everything, no longer agile, these knotted joints, this isn’t me anymore, these are the hands of blind people I photographed, frozen still on a white page, but remember, it was only for an instant while they groped their way in the night, suddenly these hands were sighted and as light as Charles’ fingers on the piano, he was so young and prodigious then, I remember how they all looked, and what surprises me
even more is that I loved it when models sometimes had their lips half open, it was as though they were all going to be speaking to us long after they had disappeared and only then betray the secret of their voluptuous living by spilling a few words, your hand in mine, you patiently suggest that I sleep, give me a sleeping pill that I turn down, annoyed, and say Harriett, Miss Désirée, leave me be, you’re always watching over me, you obey, you’re never far off, when I start to feel sleepy, I can feel you behind me, like the flinch of an animal, all those portraits I’ve done, all imprinted in the memory of my eye, it’s an unending photogravure, too many images and faithful reproductions, I always go back to my mother’s lover in the bedroom, or my cousin in the woods on the pony in autumn, he who knows nothing about me, this plate is engraved and can never be effaced, not a word, not a gesture, an exasperating image because it endures forever, whether disorganized or not, it lasts, etched in the phosphorescence of the past, as though present, it sees me with precision as I see it, my models’ mouths half open to say, today I live and tomorrow I die, whether it’s Charles, Frédéric, Suzanne or Adrien, they all say it, the young Caroline is busy elsewhere in the half-shadow of the afternoon bedroom, when she hears her cousin’s voice, oh, when are you going to come and play with me, the pony’s getting nervous, then she hears rumours of war being declared, and her parents send her away to elite colleges and universities, she’ll become an architect, she tells her classmates as she photographs them in studied, stilted poses in luxuriant gardens on campus, then all this carefree happiness ends, and the skies bursts into flame, the elegant world she lives in will no longer exist, she is afraid when she takes her first flying lessons, but still she wants to fly solo once, just once, and now here I am alone, high in the sky with no visibility, solitary, just as I wanted with all my preoccupations elsewhere, young Caroline learns to fly with the man who will become her first fiancé, her first death, hero or angel thrown from a flaming heaven, here is the fiancé, the uniformed lieutenant in his flying-suit, my first death, heroic, no time to think about it as I have, in battle, one doesn’t think, one dies, maybe even without knowing fear, young people give their lives without holding back, bravery is not an act of reflection, thought does not hang on, one just dies, I received the telegram, it might have been the same day I learned to use a hunting rifle and gathered up a young pheasant whose plumage had dripped blood all over my hand, perhaps the day I remember my grandfather’s words, don’t point your weapon upwards to the sky, that will bring out your determination to kill, the plumage with iris-like glints, plumage of a bird fallen on the same day as he did.