Wonder (18 page)

From then on, when she climbs the winding path to the summit with the barking dogs she wonders what new little figure will be waiting for them. Every day brings a new one, different yet always made from the same stones, and she has the impression of finding a long-lost friend, whose features she can make out under a series of masks.

In spite of herself she now looks with a certain curiosity at those she meets on her way up or down, trying to imagine them kneeling at the foot of the beech tree, assembling the stones like the pieces of a puzzle. She often sees the same faces: an actress she recognizes from commercials but whose name she can’t recall, who walks, always alone, repeating in a low voice, with different intonations, the
lines she is learning; two or three joggers in black tracksuits and huge hiking boots that make their feet look like astronauts’; a man around forty, his whole body covered with a kind of plastic or rubber armour, head enclosed to the chin in something like a medieval helmet, astride a mountain bike and pulling behind him a tiny bichon white as snow; an old lady who leans on a long, gnarled stick as she walks, who greets her with a smile every time and also greets the dogs one by one; others, too, whom she only sees now and again, young adults with backpacks, probably on their way to the university; hikers on snowshoes with ski poles, and sometimes walkie-talkies, carrying bags no doubt stuffed with energy bars, bottled water, even flares; birdwatchers lugging heavy cameras and lenses that look like telescopes. Does she want to recognize a man or a woman? She doesn’t know, and soon decides not even to try finding out, satisfied to discover in the shadow of the beech tree every morning a form at once new and familiar.

Most of the time she is alone on the mountain with the dogs, a few birds, some ever-present trees and the capricious winter sun, as if in a realm hidden from the city and that belongs only to her. Against the wash of the sky, the black branches seem traced in India ink. Veils of snow hide them for a moment before revealing them again,
naked and petrified by the cold. Seen from the summit, the entire concrete structure of the Sanctuaire du Mont-Royal is a beige and bloated scar crushing the houses surrounding it with its mass, a gigantic cement creature winding through the trees, its curves reminiscent of some sea monster that haunts sailors’ legends.

While Vladimir, Estragon, and Lili are pursuing one another in the scraggy bushes, stirring up plumes of snow, and the others are waiting calmly for her to give the signal for the descent, she finally bends towards the inukshuk, lifts away its little head – oblong that day – its broad neck, the flat stone that represents its arms and part of its torso, its legs, and even its one big foot. Rearranging those same stones, she erects a miniature statue with a wide skirt, a slender waist, and a long neck.

The next day she finds a small man made of those stones in the shadow of the beech tree, but near him stands a mound of new ones, like an invitation. Mechanically piling them according to their size and the way they naturally fit together, she thinks about the tall, slim silhouettes by Giacometti she has seen in a book. They gave off, along with a faintly quivering fragility, a nearly magnetic force, inseparable from their obvious delicacy.

At first she tries to assemble one of those willowy shapes that seem to be perched on the long legs of a wading bird, but she must abandon it almost at once: the
stones won’t follow such a fractured line, and the flimsy structure collapses before it’s completed. She considers making instead a wooden man, using some of the broken branches strewn on the ground, ones that resemble the fleshless limbs she’s trying to reproduce. Then, taking one last look at the small mound of stones, she has an idea. She selects four of more or less the same size and arranges them two by two so that they rest against each other the way two playing cards are stood face-to-face to start a house. On these pairs of legs she sets a long flat stone, and atop one end she adds a final one, whose slightly pointed end suggests the muzzle of a dog.

This novelty seems to be taken as an invitation to play because on the following days, she finds at the foot of the beech tree: a heavy turtle with a rounded shell; a ship with three smokestacks, the second one slightly wobbly; a long-necked animal that could be a fat giraffe or a thin dinosaur; and, one morning, a small silhouette of stones with slightly deformed wings that looks like the guardian of everything that came before.

To the right of the path that she walks every day she finds three new metal posts equidistant from one another.
Someone has begun to unroll an iron fence between them. Vladimir and Estragon, intrigued, stick their muzzles into the links, trying to see through with the stupefied gaze of animals in a zoo. Nearby, in black letters on a freshly planted white sign, can be read:

At the bottom of the sign were a fire and a bike, each in its red circle with a line of the same colour through it; next to them, this time surrounded by a green circle, a dog and its master were joined, most appropriately by a black line supposed to represent the authorized accessory. Briefly, she pictures herself holding the leashes of six dogs capering around her and sees a maypole with peasants and shepherd girls in their Sunday best, skipping merrily around it, each holding the end of a long ribbon that they weave together to create a multicoloured braid.

Damocles stops at the notice too, sniffing it cautiously with a suspicious air. He circles it slowly, lifts his leg, and begins to water the base with a powerful golden stream.
She lets him finish before calling him softly and giving him a biscuit that he downs in one gulp, unflappable.

“It’s cold enough to split nails, cold enough to freeze the balls of a brass monkey, cold as a witch’s tit, cold like there’s no tomorrow, cold as a penguin’s toes, cold as the heart of an iceberg,” she recites as she climbs the path under the downy flakes that give the dogs white coats.

Vladimir and Estragon wear identical mittens, flame red, and they lift their feet good and high with every step, like circus horses. Doormat the basset hound, feet likewise covered but in blue, has legs so short the snow comes halfway up to his chest and he advances like a submarine, now and then sticking out his black nose to breathe. To scrape up the maximum of powdery snow, Damocles moves his nose just above the ground, mouth wide open like a whale snapping up plankton.

When she has nearly reached the summit, still invisible in the screen of snow, a big bird, its white wings speckled in very pale beige, goes by in a velvet rustling above her head. It’s flying low, with a slow steady beating of wings nearly as wide as the path. She looks up to catch a glimpse of its light-coloured breast and tries to keep her eyes on it through the large wet snowflakes that fill the sky, but it soon disappears, a white form that dissolves into the white of the surrounding forest. For a
long time, she searches the highest branches and those that provide the best view for glimpse of its silhouette. She finally spots it a little farther away, calm, unmoving, on a gravestone. She heads for it, stepping cautiously. The dogs follow her in silence, as if they understand that the bird is liable to take fright and fly away. When she finally reaches the stone where she thought she’d seen it, she realizes that it is the delicately carved statue of a granite angel with folded wings, face turned towards the ground and covered with a thin coat of snow as fine as down, like a veil that moulds its features, revealing more than concealing them.

White masses break away from the treetops and collapse on the ground with a sound like a pillow. The spines of the blackthorns are covered with a padding that masks their points. Holding out her hand to brush one she slashes her thumb but only notices it later when she looks down, surprised to see on the white wool of her mitten a delicate flower of blood.

At the top of the mountain she leaves behind a little woman, lame, lacking an arm, standing lop-sided on uneven legs. When she sees her again the next day, the woman is leaning against a new inukshuk that serves as a crutch.

A few days later, near the summit, she spies a hooded figure from behind, busy attaching to the cemetery’s iron gate a new sign that shows a dog with a red line through it.

“So you’re making the forest off-limits to dogs?” she can’t stop herself from yelling indignantly. “What will you do next? Track the foxes that dare to put a paw down on your precious ground? Set snares to trap the moles and hares that spoil your lawns? Wouldn’t it be easier to just pour concrete over everything?”

She used the formal
vous
with him.

The dogs, who have sensed the irritation in her voice, now add theirs and the end of her question is lost in a cacophony of yelping and growling. Eventually the figure turns around. Of his face only the eyes can be seen, blue slits. She couldn’t say why but she would swear that he’s much younger than she’d first thought.

“Are you talking to me?” he asks through the scarf that covers his nose and mouth. “How come the
vous
? Do you think there’s more than one of me?”

“I mean you and everybody like you.”

Then, she can’t resist:

“In case you didn’t learn this in school, the second person plural is used to show respect when one meets a stranger, or to establish a distance.”

“So how come you’re saying
tu
now?”

“I’m n … That’s not the point. This sign talks about
a ‘mountain interpretive route,’ and those prohibitions, those markers – it’s ridiculous. What do you want to build here – a tiny little Disney World for hikers? Will you put a turnstile at the entrance and require hard hats on everyone who’s prepared – at his own risk, naturally! – to venture into the woods where you’ve already driven away anything that might be alive?”

He looks at her, unblinking. Then, never taking his eyes off her, he observes:

“I think your dogs are cold.”

She looks down at Damocles and Doormat. Both look pitiful, standing on three legs, the fourth raised in a silent gesture of reproach. She whistles at them and is about to leave when he points out in the same tone:

“You’re saying
vous
again. For respect or distance?”

She shrugs and leaves, not looking back. He shouts after her:

“Last month a dog ran away in the middle of the night and wound up here. He fell into a grave that had been dug in the autumn, broke a leg and couldn’t get out. He was found two days later, frozen to death.”

She has stopped to listen to him; now she whirls around, beside herself:

“Do you think I’m an idiot with your lost dog stories! Do you think every puppy dog that sees your sign will turn around and go home? That’s ludicrous!”

“No, but if their owners stop bringing them here to run maybe they won’t try to come back by themselves in the middle of the night … Don’t you think?”

Inexplicably, she doesn’t know what to reply. She walks away, dignified, the pack of hounds at her heels.

W
HAT DOES SHE DO WHEN SHE ISN
’
T PACING
the mountain? Tries to read. Draws from memory or from life her trees and her dogs in a few quick pencil strokes that are never altogether satisfactory. Forces herself to eat a piece of fruit. Takes short naps, wakes up with her fatigue and anxiety intact. Swears approximately once a month that she’s going to put some order into her house and into her life. Starts by arranging her books in alphabetical order. Invariably stops at B, exhausted. Spends whole nights watching without seeing them old black-and-white films or infomercials vaunting an exercise machine or a rotisserie – once, under a weird impulse, even ordering the object in question by telephone, throwing it in the garbage still wrapped when it arrived two weeks later. Spends hours looking silently at colour photos, chases away the images that have been tormenting her like a swarm of flies for months, hears the same music again and again, in a loop that suddenly ends, listens in the dark to her own irregular heartbeat, like the
wings of a distraught bird, rests her head against Damocles’ warm flank.