Wonder (22 page)

We talk about her – for it’s obvious that by her very nature she is female – in the singular, but like some mythological dragon she has three heads, each standing on guard in turn. She also has labyrinths of paths, stairways, and steep ravines, like a gigantic game of snakes and ladders.

Her very nicest terrain, where the slopes are gentlest and offer the eye the most pleasing landscapes, is occupied by four cemeteries, peaceful cities of the dead in the heart of the metropolis of the living.

It’s in the oldest and most densely wooded of these that he works.

Some of the stones are so old that the name of the person in whose memory they were erected is illegible, as are the moment of their birth or the hour of their death. Lying in the grass, their once-smooth surfaces now covered with delicate blackish lichen, they resemble flagstones that trace a winding way into the shadow of hundred-year-old elms, a garden inhabited by trees and souls.

When she spots him in the distance among the stelae, the crosses, and the angels with folded wings, he is the only living being, save for the birds and squirrels that are the true inhabitants of the place. At this precise moment,
at the sight of his long silhouette standing out against the blue of the sky, she has the impression that he is life itself, that he keeps the garden from foundering into a sleep like the one to which Sleeping Beauty succumbed for a hundred years – or was it a thousand? – that if by misfortune he felt an urge to lie down among the dead, then the Earth would stop turning, the stars would veer off course, the Sun and the Moon would collide.

He watches her arrive, one hand shading his eyes against the blinding light. His cheek and forehead are smeared with brown earth, like war paint. At his feet, spindletrees await planting, roots wrapped in damp burlap. The brass bell of Saint Germain church rings twelve times.

“See what I found this morning when I was digging,” he says, taking from his pocket a flat grey stone that she accepts though she doesn’t understand. Then, turning it over, she discovers, miraculously, a fish from the depths of time, from the belly of a sea dry now for millions of years, but upon which one can still see each of the fine bones and even the memory of its round eye.

“I’ll call him Bubulle,” she announces, tracing the jagged outline of a fin.

Sitting at the foot of the beech tree, each of them is eating half of the sandwich she has brought. The dogs hang around with innocent looks, then leap, jaws clicking, when a bit of bread is tossed to them.

“I have a heart murmur,” she announces, not looking at him.

“And?”

“And apparently I have to avoid violent exercise and strong emotions.”

“Are you serious?”

“Of course.”

“And you can live like that?”

“As you see.”

“But what is it anyway, a heart murmur? Something like an air current that runs through it?”

“Not exactly. They say it’s congenital. Something about a valve and an atrium. Blood goes in somewhere when it ought to be coming out, or the opposite, anyway something that circulates against the tide.”

“You mean there’s part of your blood that refuses to go where it should and just does as it likes.”

Slightly offended, she retorts:

“I’ve never seen things that way.”

Silence falls between them. Damocles chews conscientiously a tiny piece of ham forgotten by Lili. He makes a new attempt:

“Or else it keeps fighting, even if it’s already lost …”

Yes, that seems more acceptable. They exchange smiles and for the first time she discovers that one of his front teeth is slightly chipped.

The earth’s core is made up of a blend of iron and nickel. Even today, the exact proportion of the elements that compose it, its behaviour, its effects on the rest of the planet and on the Earth’s satellites are still relatively unknown. What is known is that the temperature of the external nucleus is around 4,000 degrees Celsius, that it is liquid and not dense and viscous like magma but has a consistency close to that of water. The waves and tremors that stimulate it create Earth’s magnetic pull. But that core conceals another, hard like the stone at the heart of a fruit, whose temperature is some thousand degrees higher. Thus the Earth is like an onion, made up of a certain number of strata of varying thicknesses. We know this thanks to seismological instruments that make it possible to determine the density and composition of these layers by measuring the speed and force of the waves inside them.

What is hidden in the core of the heart no one knows. It has been discovered, however, that its speed of rotation
is not exactly the same as that of the planet, a breathtaking observation: the heart and the celestial body spin together in space, with the same movement but at a different rhythm.

At the edge of the clearing grows a clump of birches, their thin trunks gathered together like the stems of a spray of flowers clutched in a hand. The bark of one is ivory, the skin of another a delicate cream that intensifies towards a light beige, a third has shades of pink that verge on cherry-red; together they present an entire palette of flesh tones subjected to the whole range of human emotions, from dread to embarrassment by way of joy.

The young saplings stand brown and pointed like the quills of a giant porcupine that has curled up in a ball and gone to sleep for thousands of years. Low clouds trace long-necked, hunchbacked creatures on the horizon. In the branches, bare for months now, bulges have appeared that resemble large musk strawberries, which crack open, showing green. He came by later than usual, a spade over his shoulder, loping along, afraid she might have left. She offers him a piece of chocolate. A butterfly flutters nervously around them, its wings dark brown, nearly black, edged with white; it seems for a moment eager to touch down on a twig before resuming its pursuit of who-knows-what.

“Did you see that?”

“A butterfly,” he observes.

“Yes, but the earth has barely started to thaw, what’s it doing here?”

“Who knows? Maybe it’s coming back from somewhere.”

“But don’t butterflies travel in groups? Hundreds of thousands of monarchs all opening out together along the coasts of Mexico then coming back here to gorge themselves on milkweed. Could that one have migrated on its own?”

She looks at the insect circling them, imagining all at once the utter solitude in which it would have had to survive.

“Look,” he begins, “it’s alive, that’s already something, isn’t it?”

But she’s not certain that it really is a life if it must unfurl in such a desperate search for a fellow creature and not find one.

When she comes back to the cemetery gate the next day, he is waiting for her, smiling. He tells her to sit down, close her eyes, and hold out her hands. She complies unwillingly. He places in her palms a round object, smooth and cold. Opening her eyes she discovers a glass jar with holes pierced in its metal lid, and at the bottom a
brown-black butterfly rimmed in white, its straight wings together like hands in prayer.

“See that? I’ve found another one!”

He seems thrilled at her surprise.

She taps on the glass with her fingernail. She could swear that the butterfly shrugs its shoulders.

“Good for you, but how do you know it’s another? How can you be sure it’s not the same one?”

“Crap!”

“That’s right.”

She unscrews the lid, taps the jar to encourage the butterfly to leave. The insect doesn’t make a move. Finally, she turns the jar upside down and slaps the bottom. Sluggishly, the butterfly flies away at last.

He looks at her, shamefaced:

“I was so happy to find it, it’s crazy, I didn’t even think …”

“Of course not.”

Just then though they both see out of the corner of an eye two dark forms, each the size of a hand, chasing each other near the ground.

“D’you think one of those is the one from yesterday?”

“Who cares? We know at least two of them survived.”

The clouds on the horizon part to reveal a patch of sky, a blue window in the surrounding grey. The wind rises and whispers in the branches where the first leaves
have come out, bashful and fine, nearly transparent when they emerge from the sheath that served as their cocoon.

“Are you on your own?” he asks without looking at her.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean: have you got a family?”

Damocles, lying at their feet, raises his big head. The other dogs, farther away, are fighting over a ball that squeaks whenever one of them picks it up in its jaws. She takes a branch, its bark already nibbled at by the dogs, and begins to strip its leaves, as if she were removing the petals of a daisy one by one.

“Yes, I have a family. Everyone does, don’t they? Unless they’re born under a cabbage leaf.”

If that is a perch held out to encourage him to open up himself and spare her from answering the question in more detail, he pretends to see nothing and waits patiently for her to go on.

“My parents live in California during the winter, they come back in the spring and move into their house in the Eastern Townships. In good years, we spend a couple of weeks together here, just enough to make me want to hop on a plane as well.”

“Why don’t you?”

She looks at him as if he had just said something outrageous or dictated by a questionable sense of humour. But apparently the question is serious.

“I hate flying.”

“Ah.”

At their feet the leaves she continues conscientiously to pull off are piling up, a tiny, soft green mound.

“Is that all?” he asks after a moment.

“Well … I mean … no. I don’t like snakes either or needles. I’m not crazy about pizza and I find the Coen brothers’ movies totally uninteresting.”

He laughs. Slightly offended, she adds as if to justify herself:

“Their reputation is very overrated you know. They haven’t written anything really original since
Barton Fink
.”

“I don’t know who Barton Fink is and I’m not sure I know the Coen brothers either, but that’s not what I meant. I was wondering if you had any brothers and sisters.”

“Okay, yes, if I have to tell you everything. A brother two years older than me, Éric. Who, need I mention, loved snakes when he was little, and in his teens ate nothing but pizza.”

“Wait, let me guess. He became an acupuncturist, right? Or an airline pilot?”

She smiles in spite of herself and he feels as if he’s won an important victory.

“No, an accountant. So’s his wife. They live in a renovated bungalow in Laval, they play golf, take courses in wine appreciation, and spend two weeks on Cape Cod
every summer. What else? They like Swedish mysteries, drive only American cars (on principle, but they do their best, also on principle, to take the Métro as often as possible), and they never go grocery shopping without a dozen reusable bags. Oh, and I forgot, they have 1.4 children.”

Now it’s his turn to smile.

“Aren’t you overdoing it a bit?”

“Not at all. They have a two-year-old little boy who is totally unbearable and Valérie – that’s her name, Valérie – is four months pregnant. Do the math.”

A cloud sails by, veiling the sun for a moment. A breath of wind lifts a few leaves from the fragile castle at their feet, then the small mound takes off and is scattered almost instantaneously. One leaf glides over their heads before it touches down on the ground between them, where it goes on whirling for a few moments, like a compass needle gone mad.