Cruelties, page 9
Which persists. And rises in spurts. Élise turns without a sound, she thinks she sees the confessional’s red velvet curtain move, it is suspended from a roughly rounded wooden rod, the limp enclave is closed on the right side by latticework, the kind used for enclosing pergolas. The kneeling bench is vinyl, red as well. Someone is crying behind the velvet, the lamentation is more distinct now, it is tender and moist, it has the hoarse sweetness of a violin trying to set the tone and persisting, only to spit out the wrong note, fllise bends and leans into the shadow, it’s been so long since she was penitent like this, it goes back to the first sin of the flesh, which she never regretted, but suddenly she misses the blank murmuring among strangers, made up of the permitted lies. She holds her breath but the black panting form can hear nothing, now she is merely untidy flesh and if daylight should enter the deserted church filise would see the final contortion of a sad orgasm. She allows the final flayed A to emerge from the throat of the man in black before she interrupts the sighs, slower now:
“Forgive me, Lord, for having heard you moan behind this red curtain.” He is not startled. “I knew you were beside me, Madame.”
For a long time they stay there, she kneeling, he leaning towards her, taking pleasure in the story of evil that has just gushed cold.
The church had been deserted for two years and would remain so. He was the last of the oblates but the one least bruised, the one who could be assigned twelve churches in the countryside and the forest and would not complain. For that would entail the same number of confessionals in which to dream of hearing sins, which was what he’d wanted when he took his vows. No one came there now to prostrate themselves, but still he sat from day to day and recited the sins of the absent penitents. It was easy to do while he read the morning paper. Yesterday, he’d heard the rapist with the scythe, the one who surprised little girls in the strawberry fields and cut them so delicately that they fell asleep very gently when their blood had run out. But also the accountant who’d had his wife passed off as a thief and she believed him, and confessed before her children. And then the madwoman, the same one three times, who broke the hammers of pianos to make touring musicians weep and the last pleasures of the villages vanish.
He judged them, he enjoyed judging them before he imposed on them different ways to make a fresh start, to cut little girls with stilettos, to kill wives with words, to burn the wood of guitars, which could have replaced the pianos. Today, there was no newspaper. Was she aware of that? No, she doesn’t read newspapers, she’s afraid of turning up in one herself, dead before her time, you never know. “You’re mistaken, Madame, for I invented one that you were in, on the front page, this very morning.” He’d had a black coffee, he had foreseen a woman in a long yellow dress who would commit a sacrilege in the church of the dancing rapid while she listened to him come under the eye of god. “You are my accomplice, Madame.” He explains complicity to her. The most perfect kind existed only in the confessionals where the man in black was a receptacle for poisons, until he got drunk on depravity and lost his awareness of beings. The complicity disappeared with the penitents who went away, who, henceforth, confide in their friends, the police, and the papers. But how would a priestess in a yellow dress be set free without the state of grace? She would be forever covered with the odour that rises between them. “An angel perspired, Madame, and you must impose upon him a different way of making a fresh start.”
They go out into the light of three o’clock, the sun still very high because they are in the North. He gets into Élise’s lilac-coloured car. He’s very handsome, the last oblate. His cream-coloured shirt opens under a long black jacket and over a cross tattooed at his neck, the colour of the shadows under his tawny eyes. He had washed his hands in the holy water stoup, they taper, damp, onto powerful knees. Élise knows where to drive till nightfall.
He has never slept in a hotel. This one is a Hilton with sealed windows, in room 610 float the fumes of heating oil that pass through the walls overlooking a runway where airplanes touch down before the curfew. He sits upright in the high-backed easy chair; she forces him to begin again. On her knees, she loosens him and swallows him at the moment of the flayed finals, she is wearing the black jacket, the lace bodice won’t be stained. He does not yet know how to touch her. Now he believes that he can learn and she believes that this angel won’t kill her.
At dawn they wake and think they have repented. She tells him how he is to enter her, presently, after they have rubbed each other. She wants him on the carpet, which is stormy with the trails left by other men, other women, stale and faded from the truest passions. Full length, he positions himself and covers her. It happens inside, like eternal life. Warm rains that blend and whose odour they no longer notice.
At eight o’clock, at the Air Canada counter, they are betrothed. The flight that’s about to leave is bound for Newfoundland. It’s foggy there, says the ticket lady, but they’ll arrive by noon. They munch croissants, sip coffee, hold hands in the cabin; the hostess smiles only at them. They do not notice that the sky is still water and the travellers are wax.
Here is St. John’s, faded soil, the shadow of the airport through the window. At Hertz all that’s left is a grey car with dove-coloured upholstery and a radio that crackles the news of the day in English. A deep-sea fisherman has sacrificed his child in a pond, he bound her with seaweed. A prostitute has slashed her wrists on the steps of the House of Assembly and ihe guard satisfied himself before calling for help. The queen has called off her trip because an attendant killed the lieutenant-governor, who was caressing him. But the last oblate doesn’t understand English and the Protestant churches along the winding road don’t have confessionals.
They go. Towards Trouty, which is at the seaside on the map, the place where they will find a house forever. The houses must be blue, and pink, and mauve, perched miraculously on bare rocks beaten by a wuthering wind.
Élise says that she’ll wash her yellow dress in rainwater, that she’ll let it dry during clear spells, and that he will be able to take her at any time in her silk slip with the lace bodice, and that she will prepare cod with white wine imported from old countries whose language, still spoken here, she will learn. Sundays they’ll spend at home or they’ll cast bottles into the sea with messages of love that will come back to them with the tides, while the neighbour women speak ill of them and it gushes cold in the village at prayer.
Trouty is a town with the summer before it. The main street is a hill, the aluminum-sided houses are massed around the grocery store, the church is wood whose paint has worn away, its door is open onto faded rushes. That very evening they purchase the shack with its beautiful lanterns extinguished, the last house on the road out. Its front stoop seems to glide into the arm of the sound, the water that foams beneath a thickly veiled moon comes from as far away as the dancing rapid. At night they sleep in a narrow iron bed. They’re hungry for milk and for strawberries, which are hard to find between their legs, for they too are cold. Tomorrow, they’ll see to all that.
The cotton curtains turn pale and that’s why it is six o’clock, filise wants to touch the sea, which has withdrawn onto the mud where Trouty’s debris dies, the shiny cans from the night before and the carcasses of yesterday’s two-burner stoves. She turns around, her gaze empty, towards the man in black who is walking along the balustrade on the stoop, then she freezes. A fine rain falls onto their grey bodies. They will not touch each other until everything has been cleansed.
THE SON
“I’m forty years old and you aren’t,”
sighed the woman seated at the table
(At that time the fruit of her womb
was deep inside another woman’s belly)
He placed on the table a sex
that lay there, docile and white
as the neck of a dead bird
It was the end of their affair
When I was a child you were always losing me. The first time I remember — for there were others of which I know nothing save for that scratch on my forehead, inscribed there on the night when you expelled me from your womb, insisting on forceps — was at the cemetery. I had to pee. You were wailing into a big bouquet of white lilies, you whispered to me to go behind the granite column, over there beside the willow tree. My father was already in his grave, the earth was falling at the level of his navel, the sun was rising onto mine. When I came back the lilies formed a trail to where the limousine had been, it had disappeared with you in the back seat, and the young priest. Already he was promising you communion.
I was perfectly happy, you know, watching them fill the hole. I threw in some pebbles, the digger popped open a can of Pepsi that was nearly boiling, with him I drank the clotted blood of my father who would rather have died in the winter. The digger told me it was normal for a grieving woman to forget her child in the cemetery, some lose their minds as well, it could be that you didn’t want to see me ever again. He had me chasing squirrels, then filling in another hole, a lot more cheerful because it was for a grandmother who was rich, and there were fifteen of them who left behind roses and more roses.
At five o’clock he pointed, he settled me at his back on his motorbike, and I gave him the neighbours’ address. They kept me there for a barbecue and their daughter poured me a few drops of wine. Her legs smelled of roses, too, it’s entirely possible that I remember, it was such a beautiful day. Her name was Sylvia and when she took me home through the back door, she saw the beginning of the slap, which I dodged; she still talks about your criminal eyes, I always replied that they were the eyes of death because of my father, but probably I’m wrong because it’s true that you didn’t love him, and the very next day there was nothing left of him in the drawers or in the bathroom.
What was left was me, upstairs, at the end of the hallway, in the square bedroom you never set foot in. Sylvia also maintains that the blessed evening when the firemen came, when they flooded the square bedroom and I was able to sleep in my father’s bed, it was you who started the fire. You didn’t want to kill me, she said, you wanted to send me to a hospital for children where other widows would eventually take me as their son and call me Xavier, Vincent, Léon, Mathieu, depending on the day, there were so many places to fill inside their empty heads. My own name was Damien, do you remember that the room burned without me, that I was sleeping in the chaise longue next to the pool, that the noise of a siren wakened me? You never tried anything like that again, Sylvia suspected you. You forgot me at school, from one five o’clock to another, at the beach, at the movies, at Santa’s Village, and on the slopes of Mount Orford. But by then I was thirteen and I wasn’t lost any more.
I clung to your shadow, to the point of stealing it from you.
You were not as beautiful as you thought you were. It took me one hot summer, the harsh light on the patio and on your dips in the pool with your ingenue’s cries, to work it out. I consigned you to a notebook, then to my computer, which you didn’t even know how to turn on.
You have long toes, manicured all the way to the half-moons and painted a transparent ivory by Dior; but there’s a bunion at the base of the big toe on your right foot, you hide it with wide-strapped sandals, you spend days locating them, in the spring, in shops where only saleswomen preside, you wouldn’t want a man’s eyes on the little bump that always spoils the shape of the leather, in the end. Your legs are slender and fairly well-shaped to the knee, they go well with your porcelain complexion; but some blue blood vessels show through there, one, on the left, in the fat of your calf, is twisted like the beginning of a varicose vein, it snakes and then fans out in pink threads, the capillaries make old ladies’ patterns. You have spindle-shaped thighs, the kind that go on forever on the virgins in magazines, their flesh is hairless and it moves in fine waves even on the hardest chairs; but you have two stretchmarks at the edge of your groin, milky grooves, they dig into your belly, which I’ve never seen, under your bathing suit, but I know those grooves, they’re mine, I think they run all the way up to your navel, taking the time to widen at the swelling in your abdomen I also left you, which you sometimes forget to pull in under a slightly protruding thorax. You have beautiful languid arms and the hands of a pianist, with fingers so long they tolerate nails that are barely rounded; but the middle finger is deformed like the toe, the knuckle knotted by housewife’s arthritis. Your back is perfect, it flows straight from your shoulders to the small of your back without a mark, slate beige barely rippled by the line of the vertebrae that hold the nape of your neck so well; but under the left shoulder blade there’s a brown spot, the shit mark that has grown along with you, the exact shape of a crab with one claw open, you can only see it in reverse, in a mirror, I assure you that when you see it the right way around you can tell that it’s slimy, even scaly. I know about another, smaller one at the end of your long neck, at the base of the ear, which will shrivel and trickle at the first creases of old age, it won’t be long. You have the Victorian face that suits untamed coils of hair, and matte cheeks, graphite eyes under heavy lids, a peaceful brow; but your lips have a rancid fold when you smile, one might say that they’re closing, that they’re holding onto what they seem to be giving, their corners will freeze if you continue like that. Your hair is fine and without colour, for the moment it curls slightly but it’s the kind that falls out early, that leaves the lines of the skull uncovered.
I’ve also added up the beauty aids. The exfoliating and slenderizing creams by Clarins, the Dune body milk by Dior, the moisturizers for both day and night by Lancôme, the clay masque by Clinique, the firming capsules by Elizabeth Arden, the jellies for the delicate skin around the eyes by Estée Lauder, the Azulène mousse for the hair. Your colours are all by Lise Watier, they’re made for our local brunettes, your perfume is also Dune, it’s pervasive, I wonder if you’re hiding the odour of the crab, with its traces of rotten seaweed and dread. When you’re stripped of all that, when the chlorinated water of the pool evaporates after your brief afternoon swims, I smell it and I know.
For a long time I saw you entertain men at dusk, wearing yellow dresses that graze your ankles, delineate your hips, reveal your back but barely, that mingle with the glow of the lamps. You would pour them brightness along with the vodka, it would warm the first caresses, which always come from behind, which make the strap slip over the shoulder blade, then it was time to move on to your room, where I think you relaxed in the dark, for there was no shaft of light under the door. No men slept at your house, I heard nothing but the slamming of car doors around midnight. In the morning there wasn’t even a droplet of strong sweat floating in the air, your sheets were in the laundry, you were fussing with the coffee.
Today, I don’t know. I’m not there any more. Every evening I go to your friend’s place, the blonde, short, round one who opens to me legs scraped clean with Ivory soap and who talks to me about you after I’ve been deep inside her, after I make her come with all your secrets. She said that you’d lost me for the pleasure of getting me back, that you’ve always hidden your breasts from me because I had drunk there and I had to forget your sour milk, that the night of the fire was a first wild desire, that men are appellants at dusk, that your door is open for me after midnight so that I can follow those men. It seems to me I’ve seen none of that in your eyes, which are still as they were at the cemetery. If you want to touch me, it’s in order to lose me again.
I’ve mixed orange juice with the vodka you served me, that makes it yellow and yellow again with your July pareo, it bares your neck and the crab child. The weeping willow shivers and a shadow moves across the marble of the table, the temperature is thirty with a breeze from the northwest. In Archives of Crime, on the Internet, I read the story of a woman, ripe and ugly, who had adopted a crazy boy to marry when he turned eighteen, a priest blessed them, either to save them from hell or for a donation. They killed all the children they had, I printed up for you the drawing of the little crosses in their garden. It’s just another story, you’re much prettier than that monstrous woman, I am your son and I’m not lost.
You’re sighing now, you say that you’re forty years old and I’m not, that I don’t understand anything. What do I have to do, Mama, with your smile that is shrinking again? I hold out to you my sex, docile and white, which your hand
would not arouse. Don’t tell me that it looks like the neck of a sleeping swan, I’ll tell you that it’s dying. Don’t move, all I desire is some slight thing that’s not you. And we shall never know what it was you wanted.
It’s a magnificent day for moving to a new address.
THE ARABESQUE
She found love in a book
It was black and covered with ink
It left signs on her breasts
When the time came
she had trouble closing it
In musical dictations my score is always perfect. No one around me does as well. I can even distinguish a G sharp from an A flat at the beginning of a phrase, before I hear the rest, simply from the way that Florence Hébert presses on the black key, preoccupied on the sharp, lighter on the flat. Yet Florence’s hands are always cold. She learned to play piano in the convent, a big wooden building on the shore of Lake Osisko where the frost seeped even into the stringed instruments. She claims to have been a boarder but it’s possible she was a nun, it was at the end of that time. She wrote in pencil on the scores and only the sisters, it seems to me, would have used lead and eraser to make the sheets of music look like new, then unload them on beginners. Florence does so all the time with little girls sent by their mothers, long enough for them to stumble over the first eighth note, never to return. Florence’s notebooks even have brown paper covers.
