The First Garden (8 page)

T
HE GRANDE-ALLÉE IS LIT UP
like a fairground, even though the sun has not completely set over the mountain, behind the parliament buildings. A pink glow trails in the sky and the harsh glare of the street lights cannot drive it away altogether.

Boys and girls cluster on the terraces, while tired horses endlessly drive American tourists about in their calèches.

As they do every evening, Flora Fontanges and Raphaël go from terrace to terrace in the hope of seeing the smooth black head, the small pale face of Maud stand out suddenly, like an apparition, among the young people clustered around their tables.

Someone claims to have seen Maud on Ile aux Coudres, sitting by the road next to the peat marshes. Céleste suggests that Raphaël come to the island with her the next day.

She must face facts, now that the women are no longer there: if the old city and the Grande-Allée have endured with their grey stones and their green shutters, it has been because of the maids. Chambermaids, cooks, nannies, general help, at arms' length they have kept whole streets intact and fresh. There's not an inch of windowpane or mirror, not a single piece of silver or brass they haven't polished and polished again, not a speck of grime or dust that they haven't eradicated and beaten from carpets and furniture, no drape or curtain they haven't washed, blued, starched, and ironed, not a diaper, not a single small flannel blanket they haven't cleaned and bleached. Their main assignment was to make the houses worthy of the most elegant receptions and to make everyday life as exquisite and agreeable as possible. In uniforms of black dresses, white aprons, and caps, they washed, dried, scrubbed, waxed, plucked, boiled and roasted, fried and browned, wiped and rocked, consoled and cared for children and the sick, climbing up and down, day after day, three or four sets of stairs, from cellar to attic.

Now that they have gone, having disappeared little by little over the years, the great, inconvenient houses with all their storeys, impossible to maintain without them, have had to be abandoned.

Some women lost their family names by returning to the city, through the little doorway that led to the Protection of Young Girls. They retained only their Christian names, sometimes changing even these to avoid confusion with the name of Madame or Mademoiselle, in the households which they joined as servants.

Marie Ange, Alma, Emma, Blanche, Ludivine, Albertine, Prudence, Philomène, Marie-Anne, Clémée, Clophée, Rosana, Alexina, Gemma, Véreine, Simone, Lorina, Julia, Mathilda, Aurore, Pierrette . . .

Ah! how pleasant was the past and how well the Grande-Allée was maintained!

Pierrette Paul escapes her destiny. She will never be a maid in someone's house. Has she not been adopted, according to proper procedures, by M. and Mme Edouard Eventurel?

Raphaël looks at Flora Fontanges's impassive face, her expression suddenly obstinate as she sits there, lost in thought. He is faintly surprised, still under the spell of a litany of women's given names, strange and beautiful, and tries to list them as in a nursery rhyme. Alma, Clémée, Ludivine, Albertine, Aurore ... He says Aurore and gropes for the next. Repeats Aurore, as if he were expecting someone to appear before him, summoned there by her name.

“Pierrette Paul! You've left out Pierrette Paul!”

She calls it out into the middle of Raphaël's daydream, like someone tossing a pebble into a pond.

“It's a pretty name, Pierrette Paul, don't you think? That was my first role and I've never recovered from it.”

She chuckles and drops her head, then looks up at him with a sly, guilty expression. Her voice changes, becomes nasal and drawling, speaking in the country accent.

“Don't give me that look, Raphaël dear. It's just a little girl from the Hospice Saint-Louis, not yet adopted, who's putting in a brief appearance. She's a wretched little creature, quiet as a mouse, an urchin who turns up in my head from time to time and upsets me terribly.”

Will she ever accept the entire weight of her life in the dark night of her flesh? Why not evoke instead the Grande-Allée in the time of its splendour, and little Aurore who worked in one of these houses on the other side of the avenue?

They are all clustered there, at the windows and on the steps of the high front stoops. They hold the smallest children in their arms, so they can have a good look. Aurore has barely had time to leave her cardboard suitcase in the room set aside for her in the basement, next to the furnace and the coal chute. She has come to her new situation on the day of a military funeral, and now she is watching and listening, heart pounding and dazed as if she were about to fall. Even at her village church she has never seen or heard the like. As if the sky were about to be torn open. The usual mass of grey or blue is split from top to bottom, as if to make room for the northern lights. The other side of the world shows itself and is heard, with its heartrending music, its solemn procession. Most poignant, unquestionably, are the sword and cap laid across a gun carriage, covered with a white cloth on which are drawn stripes and crosses of red and blue which little Aurore does not yet know to be a foreign flag. Slowly the procession is making its way towards the hereafter, she thinks, and the military music plays on and on, wrenching our hearts.

Aurore blows her nose and wipes her eyes, her bosom rises and falls inside her black sateen bodice. The son of the household looks at her, half smiling under his blonde mustache.

This girl is doing it deliberately too. How is it possible to be at once so slender and so round? Each of
her movements traces marvels in the air with just enough energy and softness to bewitch us. The son of the household, a law student, follows her from room to room the minute he has the chance! How is it possible, in his father's house, to allow an unknown creature of seventeen to move about so freely before us? She stretches her arm to draw the curtain in the sitting room and you can see the outline of her breast as it moves under the bib of her embroidered apron; she kneels to dust the coffee table and the line of her back describes a perfect arc. But when she hunkers down to wash the kitchen linoleum and her little behind is higher than her head, he thinks such ease of movement should only be possible during a night of love, and then not in a respectable bed, while the smell of sweat that accompanies even the slightest movement of a lusty partner transports us out of this world.

But the moment when it becomes utterly unbearable is one Saturday morning, on the main staircase that goes from the ground floor. The highly polished banister gleams dully, the green carpet, freshly swept with tea leaves, stretches tightly from step to step, held in place by strips of shiny brass. She is there, halfway up the staircase, holding a rag and the brass polish. She is rubbing and humming, her lips closed. She does not hear him. He was just passing by as he went to fetch a book, and here she is barring his way. A warmth behind her draws nearer, a warm breathless mass is draped over her shoulders, her back, her loins. She stifles a cry. Straightens. Turns. Flattens her back against the dark panelling of the staircase. The boy's pale face is there, very close, scalded looking, as if he has just shaved. He seizes her wrists. He breathes in her odour and it is everything he loves. He murmurs Aurore, as if he has lost his voice. It is at this moment that Madame comes down, rustling her skirts. Aurore disappeared at once with her rag and her flask. He has only enough time to spy in passing a restless little sunbeam that darts here and there over the staircase, dancing from the brass strips to the reflected shimmer and the copper glow of Aurore's chestnut hair.

And I rub you and I polish you and finally I touch you, not with a rag now but with my two bare hands, and all your skin from top to toe, gleams like brass, like gold, like the sun and the moon, it shivers with russet light and it is so good we could die of pleasure. He can still dream. He's a young man of good standing who studies the law in his closed room. He is blind before his open book, so obsessed, so haunted is he by Aurore. The Civil Code prevents nothing. It is useless to study the law when one already lives outside the law, in the violent regions of the self where desire is the only master.

He will fail his year-end examination.

All that Flora Fontanges says and does since she first met Raphaël is an attempt to appropriate the city along with him. They have summoned creatures now disappeared, drawing them out by their names, as with a rope from the bottom of a well, to bring them on stage, bowing and speaking their names aloud so they may be recognized and acknowledged before disappearing again. In this way do obscure heroines of history come to life and then die, one by one. Now it is the turn of little Aurore to gesture to us from the depths of her violent death.

This time it is not the history student who evokes the past, but Flora Fontanges, whose memory is unreliable and concerns her selectively, depending on whether or not the fear of compromising herself forces her to ransack the memories of others, helter skelter, along with her own, until all memories grow unrecognizable.

“My false grandmother used to tell stories in my presence as if she were talking to the wall through me, as if I were transparent, but she told them so
well, with so much pent-up passion.”

“And little Aurore?”

Little Aurore suddenly shifts to the middle ground in the heart of Flora Fontanges, as a tall old woman, very erect, bony and white, rises and begins to speak. Little Aurore's tragic end seems to have been evoked by a strange voice as Flora Fontanges drones on, word after word, as if she were listening to each one being dictated in turn from the shadows of her memory.

“On the day she turned eighteen little Aurore's body was found, raped and murdered, in Victoria Park, near the St. Charles River. Police investigations were fruitless. The murderer was never apprehended. The case of Aurore Michaud, daughter of Xavier and Maria Michaud, who was born at Sainte-Croix-de-Lotbinière on August seventh, 1897, and died on September seventh, 1915, was quickly closed.”

The news caused horrified shudders, from the upper town to the lower town, providing fuel for conversation for days and days. But ordinary life, after being briefly withdrawn, reclaimed its rights, like water after a pebble falls.

People are cared for with mustard plasters, with leeches, with flax seeds, syrup of creosote, and balsam of tolu, women give birth at home and remain two weeks in bed after the confinement, girls study the piano (for boys, it's not worth the trouble, it makes them effeminate), funerals, weddings, and christenings are numerous, life and death jostle one another in the porticoes along the Grande-Allée and in the old city, the most stable fortunes are bound up with income from the land, down below, in the seigneuries. The elder Madame Eventurel promised her only daughter, Elodie, that she could have a blue silk gown as soon as the notary had given her the year's rent from the farmers.

W
HAT SORT OF DREAM IS
it, to act as if one had never been alive in the city, to create a vacuum? thinks Flora Fontanges, who has just brought to life a clear, sharp image of the elder Madame Eventurel. Perhaps she need only concentrate on the Grande-Allée as it is today, in the company of Raphaël and Céleste, and she will escape from the house on the Esplanade. Will no angel ever utter in her ear the remark, blessed above all others: “The past no longer exists”? How can she not imagine, occasionally, the leap of joy of the prisoner who breaks her chains, becomes free and light, without memory, aware only of the night falling over the city?

Raphaël has walked away with Céleste. They are making plans to go together to Ile aux Coudres. She sits by herself, at a table on the café terrace. She feels intensely alone. The moment no longer supports her. From here she has no choice but to return in spirit to the house on the Esplanade, as if it were no longer in her power not to go there, summoned by her indestructible, stubborn childhood.

A little girl sits on a stool at the feet of an old woman, in the chalky silence of the house on the Esplanade. The steady rhythm of a great ebony clock. The vacant air of Sunday enters everywhere, slips under doors, through the cracks of windows, it throbs, massive and hollow in chimneys.

She is a little girl who escaped from the fire at the Hospice Saint-Louis in 1927.

She has been without roots forever and she dreams of a great tree anchored in the night of the earth, beneath the city, lifting the asphalt from sidewalks and streets with only the dark wisp of its subterranean breath. This tree with its gnarled trunk would stand higher than the towers of the parliament buildings, dense with branches, boughs and twigs, with leaves and wind. Perhaps the little girl might even be the single bird at the top of this tree, rustling with breezes, for already she desires more than anything to sing and tell the story of the life that is in the tree, making it her very own, her family tree and personal history.

This sometimes happens on Sunday afternoon, in the house on the Esplanade. The adoptive parents are at vespers or visiting, depending on the day, and the false grandmother is tending the little girl. The false grandmother describes so well the bright and shady sides of the Eventurel family, evoking her own childhood and youth and those of her father and mother, as far back as the first days of the colony, declaring that in the seventeenth century the seigneury at Beauport already belonged to her own blood, planted in the earth like a tree in May. The little girl, without father or mother, who sits at the old lady's feet, longs to appropriate the Eventurels' tree for herself, the way one takes possession of one's own property when it has been seized by thieves, in dark times of severe injustice.

Soon, from Sunday to Sunday, the old lady's stories extended to the whole city, as she took pleasure in recalling
habitant
life in all its ramifications. The little girl's ambition grew with the growing fullness of the stories. Soon she dreamed the extravagant dream of having her imaginary possessions extend to an entire society, the way one turns over family matters, births, marriages, and deaths, she herself concerned from generation to generation, building a past for herself that consists of several generations and of solid alliances with the whole city.

But the little girl fell from her perch when the lady from the Esplanade dropped her impassioned and engaging storyteller's voice in favour of her everyday metallic tone to tell M. and Mme Eventurel, home from their Sunday calls:

“The child never opens her mouth; it's a waste to give her lessons in diction and music, she'll never learn how to speak and sing as you'd like, nor even to listen politely. Whenever I say a word she seems to throw herself at it, as if it were a bone to be gnawed. Oh yes, that hunger of hers is very shocking, like a stray dog's. And as I've told you before, you'll never make a lady of her.”

One day the little girl was witness to the old lady's solitude. The door that opened onto the upstairs hallway was ajar, revealing part of the mysterious place to which Madame Eventurel liked to retire. From the door one could see very clearly the old rose boudoir, barely lit. Muted glimmers seeped onto the flowered carpet. A great black clock with hands, numbers, and pendulum of gleaming brass stood against a bare wall. Madame Eventurel was sitting there, facing the clock, very straight in an old rose-velvet wing chair. She was listening to the time that passes and never returns. Madame Eventurel's attention to the tick-tock of the clock was total and obsessive, as if she were following the beating of her own endangered heart in her old woman's breast. A sort of solemn ceremony between Madame Eventurel and her ebony clock. The fear of being hurled into death from one moment to the next if a single tick-tock of the great clock were skipped. She was watching her death approach her as in a mirror, she was listening to her pulse outside of her, as if it appeared on a screen. It was her wish to look her death in the eye, and she dreaded the shock of its coming.

The little girl was convinced she had just unearthed a dreadful secret. When on Sunday she found herself alone with her false grandmother, she feared the revelation of that secret, concealed perhaps in one of the old lady's stories.

Sometimes the old lady would interrupt herself abruptly, marking a long peevish silence before she picked up the thread of her story. As the silence persisted, the little girl thought she could hear Madame Eventurel concentrating hard on spiteful remarks about her.

In reality Madame Eventurel was musing that the little girl sitting on a stool at her feet should never have been born, that it was inconceivable for her to try to ingrain herself into one of the oldest families in the city.

Although Madame Eventurel never addressed the little girl, she would sometimes talk about her in her presence, calling her “the little schemer.”