Wonder (17 page)

The doctor arrived shortly, irritated without daring to let it show, then the pastor. The neighbour reappeared now and then with a cup of tea. With half his brain, which absurdly continued to function even though it seemed to him that his heart had stopped beating, Edward wondered if she’d found a use for all the water she’d thought it advisable to boil. People dropped in, some he didn’t know, others he did know, none of it made the slightest difference. In the empty sky dark night gave way to grey dawn and an ashen light came into the room.

Far, far away a bird called.

—

It was when he stood by the grave where, in a lavish mahogany box lined with silk and velvet, lay the body of the woman he loved, when he had stopped seeking, when he thought he himself was dead, with his silent babies in his arms, that Edward grasped in a pathetic flash something that had always escaped him: understanding what it meant to be alive on this planet was nothing unless you understood how the planet itself was alive.

Once the grave was filled in, when everyone had left and the infants had been taken away, he knelt on the newly dug earth that made a brown slash in the green grass, then lay on his belly, arms outstretched, and pressed his ear to the ground. During an eternity, all he heard was a humming, gradually transformed into a kind of tinkling that grew until it became deafening. All of Earth rang out like a death knell.

The twins – they were named Hyacinthe and Violette – were entrusted to Mrs. Love who, now in her fifties with nothing to do, played with them like dolls. Edward came now and then to see the little ones, who called him
papa
the way they’d have said
uncle
or
Mr. Mayor
had they been told that it was the name of the visitor who was usually content to look at them without a word and on his way out leave some little pebbles as pretty as marbles.

He made a number of attempts, all without success,
to get to know these tiny creatures born to Garance. When the twins turned four, he came for them one August night so they could admire the Perseids, which Garance had always called the
tears of Saint Lawrence
in honour of the unfortunate saint born at summer’s end. She had maintained that the stars were the tears he shed at the same time every year. Sullen and shivering in their nightclothes, barefoot in the cool grass covered with dew, Violette and Hyacinthe stubbornly refused to look up at the sky, the little girl grumbling that, “Grandma never lets us go outside without a bathrobe, she says it’s dangerous and we could catch our death of cold,” until Edward holds up one finger and whispers:

“Look, there.”

Hyacinthe spied the fine line of light and asked doubtfully, as if he suspected some magician’s trick:

“What is it?”

“A shooting star.”

“Is it falling?”

“It’s flying.”

Violette began to sob noisily, pressed her fists against her eyes. She only stopped crying when he had tucked them both tightly back into beds so small they looked like furniture for a doll’s house. He tiptoed out of the room.

He went on with his work but almost absentmindedly, at times with the impression that someone else was performing through him a task supposed to be his but which brought him neither joy nor satisfaction. Day after day he covered stacks of paper with his spidery writing as if someone else through him were dictating the equations and demonstrations he was simply copying down.

During that time he rarely spoke except to himself, repeating in an undertone the reassuring series of his childhood, to which had been added a new sequence of numbers that ended in a finite manner he refused to accept, whose meaning therefore continued and would forever continue to escape him: 3, 8, 1, 2.

On the street people stepped aside because he was frightening and he smelled bad. At one point he had stopped shaving or changing his clothes, which now, stiff with dirt, created a kind of armour that he never took off, not even to go to bed. Most often he fell asleep at his work table and waking a few hours later, sometimes in the middle of the night, realizing that his greasy hair had smudged the latest formula he’d set down in handwriting that dwindled and slanted down like a drying trickle and left on his cheek a partial and inverted mark. He took notes on anything within reach, finally using his hands themselves, spangling them with numbers and signs that crossed each other and became tangled in an ever-changing labyrinth.

Inaugurating a new notebook with a stiff cover that made a grim cracking sound when he opened it for the first time, he finally set out to note the fruits of his labour, his complete theory. He inscribed in blue ink on the first page the following words:
Mathematical Theory of Elasticity
, and kept writing until he had covered the last page and as soon as it was turned, started a new one. Under his pen sprang up the volcanoes and earthquakes he’d been pursuing for years, that he felt he had briefly managed to imprison in his inkwell, before setting them free and fixing them once and for all on the page, the way one pins butterflies to paper. It was all there finally: fire and water; Earth and Moon joined by the tides in which their mingled breaths were combined; waves that made both earth and beings quake; music and silence that united to give birth to the mysterious song of the world that was their most perfect incarnation, Garance herself who in those lines, inspired by her from first to last, would continue to survive beyond both their deaths.

Then one day, without having to reread what he’d produced over the previous weeks, he knew he had finished. The certainty was a relief. He placed the thousands of manuscript pages and the five notebooks on the dressing table, next to the dragons and the frogs that were waiting, jaws agape. Then he lay down fully clothed on his bed
amid the silence of the deserted house, as he had lain down years before in the Italian villa taken from the earth. He was found the next morning, eyes wide-open, his hand gripping a grain of obsidian.

I
T IS BARELY SNOWING ON
M
OUNT
R
OYAL
. Maple branches – big hands with splayed fingers – reach for the sky. The winter sun filtering between the clouds polishes the trunks of beech trees; hanging from a thin twig, a single bronze-coloured leaf flutters in the wind like a tiny flag. A young birch grows on the edge of the path, its trunk a light brown, nearly pink, that pales and whitens as it grows farther from the earth and plunges into the sky. The mountain top is still bathed in bright light, its base already drowned in shadow.

She exhales clouds of mist in front of her; the breath that escapes from the noses and open mouths of the dogs wraps them in a fine haze. The cold is biting. The path is still nearly unsullied, the snow broken through by just one trail, tracks indistinct but regular, small craters whose powdery edges are collapsing inwards. Without realizing it, she tries to place her feet on them but her rhythm is broken, the distance between steps too great. Lazy and playful, Vladimir, Estragon, and the others wait for her to
lead the way, happy to be rooting around in the fluffy snow where they sometimes find a piece of branch and fight over it with mock-threatening barks and growls. Damocles brings up the rear, as if it were his mission to watch over them all, his quick bark calling to stragglers. The long morning shadows are a faded blue against the white surface. Squirrels don’t show themselves, huddled in their nests in the highest branches, like sailors’ lookouts at the summit of those gnarled poles. Midway into the climb, the silhouettes of alders begin to stand out against the snow like the more and more widely spaced rungs of a ladder that go from dark to light.

Bare, the trees appear more clearly as what they are: mirror and infinite reflection of themselves, the smallest bough, the slightest branch takes on in miniature the tapering shape of the trunk. The branches rise towards the sky with the same movement, the same formation as the roots diving into the ground. As though driven by a similar force, each part is a faithful copy of the whole, present, in a state of possibility, in each of them, the apple tree bearing the apple, the apple, in the secrecy of its heart, the tree.

She wonders briefly what a universe would be like in which humans were made so that every deed, every word contained and revealed them entirely, then reflects that nothing proves this is not the case.

Slightly winded, she goes on climbing, hollowing out alongside the first trail a second series of tracks whose outline blurs as soon as she lifts her foot, just as a hole in the sand is filled in as soon as it’s formed. When she reaches the clearing at the halfway point, where all that can be seen are a few brown stems, dry and stiff, sticking out of the snow, she realizes vaguely that if there is only one set of footprints, it means that someone has gone up and not come down.

Freezing rain falls all evening and all night; the next morning, the trees are covered with a thin, glittering film. The narrowest stems and trunks that line the path curve gently to form an arbour under which she sometimes has to bow her head to advance. The branches she parts as she goes on, weighed down and made supple by the ice, tinkle like clinking glasses. A white sun shines in the perfectly blue sky and the forest shimmers under its rays, as if someone has taken the trouble to decorate every one of the wild saplings with sparkling ornaments. At the edge of the path, under a smooth coating of frozen snow, large chunks of bark resemble driftwood run aground. A few bushes still bear red autumn fruit, now imprisoned in transparent shells, as if preserved for all eternity in amber
made of water. At the summit of the mountain, she finds the beech tree, diamond-covered, its branches like garlands of silver and glass.

She stops for a moment to gaze at the landscape spread out before her – flat roofs covered with snow; steaming toy-sized cars; the verdigris steeple of the church of Saint-Germain; the trees sparkling in the sun; a few tiny, rushing pedestrians. But that day, on the big flat rock under the beech tree where she usually sits for a few moments before continuing along the rocky path to the university, stands an inukshuk, firmly planted on two short splayed legs, one long arm parallel to the ground, the small square head sitting on a solid neck. It is a paler grey than the rock it stands on, composed of stones each a different shade from its neighbours. She contemplates it, then whistles to round up the dogs now chasing each other, noses to the ground, paws covered with snow.

Floating in the air the following day is a very fine dusting of snow that glitters in the sun and flashes silver as it dances along tiny invisible currents, like schools of fish moving together in their thousands, all at the same time showing their black eyes or the glint of their bellies. At the edge of the clearing, metal posts of different heights and sizes have been driven into the ground and someone has left a section of fence with lozenge-shaped links.

At the summit, the inukshuk from the day before has disappeared, and now a new man of stone stands at the foot of the tree as if he has grown there overnight. This one is made of the same dozen stones, arranged this time to create a silhouette that one might meet on the street. All the same, she wonders briefly if her eyes are playing tricks on her, if she hadn’t observed the little sculpture the day before carelessly or made a mistake recalling its shape. The day after that, her doubts melt away: a third inukshuk, this one more slender and, strangely, nearly ethereal stands in the shadow of the beech branches as if it had stopped there to rest.