The First Garden (5 page)

A
T TIMES A SORT OF
feverish anticipation appears on Raphaël's face from looking at her so hard, when he is no longer altogether sure of what he's saying, caught unprepared, waiting for her to ask the questions, to answer them herself. Suddenly, he hopes for everything from her. Absolute revelation. Is she not in the fullness of her womanhood, an accomplished individual for whom love and the pain of love have no secrets?

Raphaël's beauty, his profound and untouched youth, his look of enchantment when he recites a poem.

I am the child you love to sing to sleep.

They are both alone in Eric's apartment. She, on the chair that is intended for her; he, kneeling at her feet. He buries his face in the folds of Flora Fontanges's skirt, complains he's been dying of loneliness since Maud's gone away.

She takes Raphaël's head in her hands, her long slender fingers graze the forehead, the soft eyelids, the slender bridge of the nose, the damp mouth, the smooth cheeks pierced by a surprisingly rough young beard.

For a moment he shuts his eyes between her hands, surrendering himself like a cat. Then leaps to his feet. Pleads with her:

“Please, Madame Fontanges, you can do better than that, you can console me like a real woman who fears neither God nor the devil. Like a real mother endlessly bringing new life into the world, generous in forgiving. Take me with you tonight to the hotel, I beg you. I don't want to sleep alone and I don't want Céleste in my bed.”

Flora Fontanges says that she fears neither God nor the devil and that she's not sure she has ever been a real mother. Only the streets of the city frighten her and perhaps, too, the sorrows of others when she can do nothing to console them.

“You're tough, Madame Fontanges, but I can get along very well without you, you know . . .”

“That's too bad for you, Raphaël dear, and too bad for me.”

They walked together through the summer night, along fragrant streets murmuring with life. He began very soon to look around him, noticing all sorts of charming and amusing things in the city, so that when they reached the hotel on rue Sainte Anne he seemed altogether comforted and happy.

He fell asleep almost at once, fully clothed, on one of the twin beds, while Flora Fontanges watched over him in the dark, as one watches over a sick child.

Raphaël's finely delineated features persist in the room, where all the lights have been extinguished. Her fingers preserve the memory of them, as if she were blind.

S
HE DISLIKES BEING WATCHED BY
the director. Gilles Perrault's blue eyes through his little round glasses make her think of his resemblance to an old owl. However, in reality this man, apparently innocuous and bland, is a fierce hunter lying in wait for whatever will claw, bite, damage the soul and body of Flora Fontanges. Ever since he started dreaming about an emaciated Winnie, confined to her sand-pile, slowly suffocated grain by grain, facing an enraptured audience. A small corrida for an old woman whose death never ends.

He insists that she go on a diet, even though she is already very slender and tall. He rubs his hands. He will wait as long as necessary for the degeneration of Flora Fontanges to occur. He wants her to be as brittle as glass, to be gravely wounded and totally submissive to old age and death. He grants her one final extension before the first reading. All that matters now is July fifteenth. Once again he looks defiantly into her face. The myopic's single-minded insistence. He cracks his knuckles. Swallows.

Flora Fontanges promises herself not to touch the script of
Happy Days
before July fifteenth. Vows that she will enjoy her pathetic freedom until July fifteenth. The first reading will be unsullied for her. She will probably stammer as she faces her partner, grope in the dark of her own soul for the fleeting soul of Winnie. In the meantime she will let Raphaël, Eric, or Céleste keep her company, their radiant youth surrounding her, a kind of feast.

There will always be time for Flora Fontanges to offer up her spirit on the stage, just once more, until death ensues.

E
RIC SAYS STRANGE THINGS. IN
his mouth words are urgent, they jostle and clash, inaudible, evasive, they explode, then silence briefly falls and they break out again, brutal and sharp. You could believe that voices other than his are seeking an outlet on his tongue and in his mouth. He is saddled with incoherent voices. He never knows exactly what is being spoken by his lips. Sometimes he thinks he is alone within himself. For a moment, he breathes and is appeased. Then it all begins again. Eric is haunted by the living and the dead. The whole city, starting with his closest relatives, seems to have chosen him as a spokesman. Some voices call for absolute love, others for money pure and simple, all complain that earthly goods are insufficient though they look fine, a broken voice is heard among the others talking about the promise, never kept, of eternal life. The voice is that of Sister Eulalie-de-Dieu, a distant cousin of Eric's who died at twenty-three, at the Hôtel-Dieu, speaking out of the heart of death.

His head slumps to his chest, his hair plastered down incredibly smoothly and falling on either side, making him look like a drowned man. He says we must return to the source of the earth, back to our original brotherhood with plants and animals, stop believing in the arrogant separation of woman and man from the rest of creation.

“All evil stems from the pretentious invention of the soul that's been reserved for human beings. Either this mysterious soul doesn't exist at all or it is incarnate everywhere, rudimentary or complex depending on the bodies, the splendid terrestrial bodies. The same breath of life, the same energy, makes a leaf stir in the wind, creates a small pink shrimp or a nervous and sensitive cat, and creates the man and woman who study the mysteries of life.”

Eric hears scraps of conversation. The everyday words of his parents come back to him, greedy and stupid. Speculation, markets, real estate, selling, buying . . . Eric refused his legacy when his parents died in a car accident. He took a vow of poverty in the secrecy of his heart. He fidgets, stammers, talks about business offices and banks—dens of iniquity.

Eric's incoherence bothers no one; an obscure thread at the very root of his being seems to link his muddled words. Eric wonders about the inhabitants of the city just as persistently as his parents used to keep an eye on real estate fluctuations. The living and the dead cry out in him with broken voices.

“If I get to sign that contract, I'll go crazy with joy. This time, it'll be the salvation of me.”

What can he do about his mother's final words? If it's true that she had no time to sign the hoped-for contract, did she see in a flash the blind face of her salvation before death burned her eyes? And what kind of salvation is there when the body no longer exists, is a blazing torch amid the twisted metal of an automobile in flames?

Eric keeps repeating that the only good poverty is voluntary, that the other kind, the kind that is imposed and causes pain, is criminal and destructive. Sometimes when he and his friends are together, he denounces the poverty of little Claire Lagueux, who was crooked and bent because she never slept in a real bed of the proper size, but in a deal box set on the kitchen floor, until she was five.

Eric thinks that knowledge and learning must pass first through the body. He has only pity for those students who live in an ivory tower, retreat their only way of dwelling in the world.

“I have chosen you and you have chosen me. Together we shall possess the earth.”

All these boys and girls around him have trained themselves to be patient through manual tasks. They are attentive to their five senses, cultivating them as if they were miracles. To tell hot from cold, to experience dry and wet, bitter and salt, smooth and rough, to learn how muscular effort bears and supports the weight of things, to breathe the smell of the city, grasp the passage of light on the river, communicate directly with the earth, to have no car or motor-scooter, to travel through the city step by step, at the rhythm of one's heart, to study the earth with one's entire body, like a small child discovering the world.

They set themselves to work at it courageously, giving up their parents' money and often their education, which depends on money. Sometimes, at night, before they fall into a heavy sleep, they listen to their aching bodies vibrate with the accumulated experience of the day. What they hear is like a harsh and pungent song as the whole body gives over its secrets, which the heart can hear distinctly in the night.

To rediscover the initial poverty, the first freshness of all sensations, with no recollection or known reference. The taste of the world at its birth. What dream is it that makes Eric live in his gentle madness?

They wash stacks of plates in restaurant kitchens, peel tons of potatoes, drive horses and calèches crammed with tourists gobbling chips and popcorn, pick strawberries on the Ile d'Orléans and peaches in the Niagara Valley, they deposit their cash in the kitty established for that purpose, and they eat like squirrels.

Céleste and Raphaël escape now and then, long enough for a good restaurant meal which they talk about afterwards, with delectation, after they've repaid the common cashbox.

Eric presses his face against the window which glistens with rain. The whole city is there, half-hidden by its old sick elms, a few skyscrapers emerging from the close-packed mass of houses. Eric listens to the song of the rain as if he can hear a mass of little voices telling him about the city, secretly, in the night.

S
TREETS, LANES, PUBLIC SQUARES: RAPHA
Ë
L
has started to peel away all the lives of the city, century by century, as if stripping layers of wallpaper. A historian's job, he thinks, not wanting to be like Eric, with his nostalgia for a lost paradise.

Raphaël wants Flora Fontanges to accompany him on his search.

“I'm going to awaken the past, bring out characters still alive, buried under the debris. I'll give them to you to see and to hear. I'll write historical plays for you. You'll play all the women and you'll be enthralling as never before. You'll see.”

They scour the city from top to bottom and from bottom to top, they follow the irregularities of the cape in successive stages, from the Citadel to Les Foulons.

Here, there are only hills. Generations of horses have broken their backs on them. The girls have dancers' calves. Exhausted hearts. Côte du Palais, Côte de la Montagne, Côte de la Fabrique, Côte de la Négresse, Côte à Coton, Sainte-Ursule, Sainte-Angèle, Stanislas, Lachevrotière, Saint-Augustin . . .

These abrupt names have long haunted Flora Fontanges, a strange jumble, touching her suddenly, without warning, in the foreign countries where she was an actress, sometimes at night on her way back to the hotel after the performance, or in a restaurant in the middle of a meal, around the table with the cast after a few bottles, when a last toast was being drunk in honour of someone who had no name, when they suddenly ran short of imagination and could think of no one in whose honour to clink glasses. Flora Fontanges would raise her glass.
Salut,
she would say, Côte à Coton, des Grisons, Stanislas or Sainte-Ursule, and no one knew what she was talking about.

“The most wonderful thing,” said Raphaël, “is that if you turn around after you've been climbing, you can see the mountain in the distance, and the open sky above the valley.”

A thousand days had passed, and a thousand nights, and there was forest, another thousand days and thousand nights, and there was still the forest, great sweeps of pine and oak hurtling down the headland to the river, and the mountain was behind, low and squat, one of the oldest on the globe, and it was covered with trees as well. There was an unending accumulation of days and nights in the wildness of the earth.

“Only pay attention,” said Raphaël, “and you can feel on your neck, on your shoulders, the extraordinary coolness of countless trees, while a roar, loud yet muffled, rises from the forest deep as the sea. The earth is soft and sandy under our feet, covered with moss and dead leaves.”

Is it so difficult then to make a garden in the middle of the forest, and to surround it with a palisade like a treasure-trove? The first man was called Louis Hébert, the first woman Marie Rollet. They sowed the first garden with seeds that came from France. They laid out the garden according to the notion of a garden, the memory of a garden, that they carried in their heads, and it was almost indistinguishable from a garden in France, flung into a forest in the New World. Carrots, lettuces, leeks, cabbages, all in a straight line, in serried ranks along a taut cord, amid the wild earth all around. When the apple tree brought here from Acadia by Monsieur de Mons and transplanted finally yielded its fruit, it became the first of all the gardens in the world, with Adam and Eve standing before the Tree. The whole history of the world was starting afresh because of a man and a woman planted in this new earth.

One night, unable to sleep because of the mosquitoes, they went outside together. They looked at the night and at the shadow of Cape Diamond which is blacker than night. They realize they are not looking at the same sky. Even the sky is different here, with a new arrangement of the stars and the familiar signs. Where are the Big Dipper and Canis Major and Canis Minor, Betelgeuse, and Capella? The sky above their heads has been transformed like the earth beneath their feet. Above, below, the world is no longer the same because of the distance that exists between this world and the other, the one that was once theirs and never will be theirs again. Life will never again be the same. Here in this night is their new life, with its rough breathing, its sharp air never before inhaled. They are with that life, they are caught in it like little fish in black water.

The children and grandchildren in their turn remade the gardens in the image of the first one, using seeds that the new earth had yielded. Little by little, as generations passed, the mother image has been erased from their memories. They have arranged the gardens to match their own ideas and to match the idea of the country they come more and more to resemble. They have done the same with churches, and with houses in town and in the country. The secret of the churches and houses has been lost along the way. They began floundering as they built houses of God and their own dwellings. The English came, and the Scots, and the Irish. They had their own ideas and images for houses, stores, streets, and public squares, while the space for gardens receded into the countryside. The city itself laid out, more and more sharply defined, more precise, with streets of beaten earth racing against each other up and down the cape.

Flora Fontanges is struck by the early days of the city as Raphaël evokes them. He becomes animated. Thinks that the old life is there waiting to be recaptured in all its freshness, thanks to history. She says that time recaptured is theatre, and that she is prepared to play Marie Rollet then and there.

“A headdress from the Ile de France, a blue twill apron with a bib, earth under my nails because of the garden, and there is Eve who has just arrived with Adam, the King's apothecary. And Adam, Raphaël dear, is you.”

She laughs. Shuts her eyes. She is an actress inventing a role for herself. She manages the passage from her life today to a life of the past. She appropriates the heart, the loins, the hands of Marie Rollet. Seeks the light of her gaze. She opens her eyes. Smiles at Raphaël.

“Am I a good likeness, Raphaël dear?”

He asserts that the creation of the world was very near here, and that it is easy to go back to the first days of the earth.

She goes through the motions of adjusting an imaginary headdress on her short hair. She has been transfigured, from head to foot. At once rejuvenated and weightier. Laden with a mysterious mission. She is the mother of the country. For a moment. A brief moment. Before declaring:

“That's all mimicry. I'm a chameleon, Raphaël dear, and it's terribly tiring.”

Suddenly she goes numb, like someone regaining her foothold in everyday life. She wants to go home. Says again that she's very tired. An ordinary woman now, lacklustre, on her son's arm, walking through the city streets.

That evening, Céleste assumed an injured look and declared that this whole story Raphaël and Flora Fontanges had made up about the city's founders was phoney and slanted.

“The first man and the first woman in this country had copper-coloured skin and wore feathers in their hair. As for the first garden, there was no beginning or end, just a tangled mass of corn and potatoes. The first human gaze that lit on the world was the gaze of an Amerindian, and that was how he saw the Whites coming down the river, on big ships rigged out with white sails and crammed with rifles and cannons, with holy water and fire water.”