Читать книгу Silences, or a Woman's Life - Marie Chaix - Страница 9

Then one night, a city night like any other, it happens. Later you think: you weren’t expecting it but you needn’t have been surprised. By then it’s too late: it’s already happened. A moment when the threads that hold a life together loosen and stretch and split and are left dangling. There is nothing to be held together now, no days to be linked to other days, nothing to be collected and clung to. The knot forgets to reknot itself and sunders. It’s the conclusion to a long story

That’s all there was to it. On a mild autumn night, a night when you light up a cigarette after the movies on your way home to listen to Mahler’s Fifth; on an October evening when you leave your windows open on the horse-chestnut trees (now shedding their plumage); on an evening when you’re not expecting it, it happens. The phone rings. You don’t like hearing the phone ring at night; but after all, it may be a wrong number. Juliette’s voice sounds unnatural:

“Come over. Come over right away. Something’s gone wrong. Why weren’t you here? How could you go to the movies just when . . . ! Come over right away, something’s gone wrong.”

It was the right number after all. That evening I had felt engulfed by the city, safe from anything unexpected. But it’s here, I’ve been found out, there’s no escape. I begin an interminable descent, sliding down a slippery rope without any knots to break my fall.

I’ll take my time. Since she didn’t wait for me before taking flight or warn me that the time for her departure had come, she can wait now. Time enough for the sluggish flow running up and down my nerves and paralyzing me to withdraw and let me walk again; for the far-off gray swell to reach, overwhelm, and drown me; time for me to realize that this night, let’s face it, is not a night like any other, that now you—you too, but why must it be you?—have become someone I shall have to usher to the gate of the stone garden.

Only a few blocks separate my place from hers. I walk them slowly, drinking in the darkness, making it last, inching along like someone afraid of arriving early at an appointment made long before. We’ll meet again somewhere, you and I, under an unknown sky. Neither of us will be the same. I’m practicing a mute language that will communicate with your silence. I want to be indifferent and look at you without trembling. I’m creating a void inside me that gets colder and more intoxicating with each gulp of darkness, with each step that brings me closer to you. This void, weighty as a suit of armor, is the one guarantee of my strength. (Something’s gone wrong. Of course something’s gone wrong. Something was bound to go wrong. We knew that. We’d been told that. Miracles don’t happen.) I stop. Ridiculous words start assailing my throat. I try inhaling cigarette smoke to keep them down. I’m babbling. Keep calm. Keep moving. Only one short block to go.

Something has certainly gone wrong. Things have been going wrong for ages now. “She’s living on borrowed time” was what they said. I’d been hearing that for ten years. I’d grown accustomed to this shadow-woman, to this frail survivor of a collapse that had cost her half of her self; accustomed to the slowing down of her entire being—that was how she kept going, it seemed, eking out her life at her own pace. Her gestures may have been clumsy, but in every instance they were planned and evaluated ahead of time. Her mind may have been in some way unsettled, but it manifested a fierce and unshakable longing to not lose control. And those eyes: blurry, then emerging from their misty pools to follow the other person’s least utterance and gesture, not missing a thing, and then missing the point of the story, the most obvious attitude, drifting off again, eyes now foundering and crying out for help. And that voice of hers, a little faint, cautiously articulating its words lest they be mistakenly shunted into inappropriate sentences by her disobedient brain; words repeated again and again, forced out in spite of her impatience: “Wait, I’ve lost track, you’re going too fast—please, start at the beginning.” Her ponderous, shuffling steps, dependent on the stability of a cane (you who were so erect and proud and beautiful!), a pathetic staff that she tried to forget by leaving it in corners or behind the curtains (“Juliette! Where did you hide my cane this time?”)—maintaining the illusion, as long as she remained seated, that she might get up by herself and start walking. How did I manage to accept her slowness, her lurching, her falls, the tears she held back, the formidable courage demanded of her by every passing minute? How did I manage, until tonight, to watch her living between parentheses?

Startled by my approach, a black cat concealed by a garbage can jumps out of a pile of litter and streaks across the sidewalk in front of me. She’d always said that this meant bad luck. It was something she’d learned from her grandmother’s grotesque behavior whenever a black cat provoked her in this fashion. She would let out a shriek, tightly shut her eyes, cross herself, and, in a swirl of starched petticoats, turn around three times wherever she happened to be standing. All of a sudden I can’t go on. It’s stupid, but the black cat has reminded me of a gray one and a dark association of images makes me flop down on a bench between a row of overturned garbage cans and a foul-smelling outdoor urinal. The questionable charm of my surroundings scarcely bothers me. This is no place or time for daydreaming, but I’ve been turned to paper, rags, sawdust, succumbing to the nightmare that has so often entered my waking hours since Kienholz’s merciless revelation provided me with the images of a reality I was incapable of mastering. Tonight, as I sit on Rue de la Convention and stare at a depressing hospital wall, she looms in front of me with a gray cat on her lap . . .

I’m afraid. Afraid of opening the door and finding her immobilized in her chair, turned to stone inside her waxy tatters, one hand clutching the cat, the other crushing her glasses. Afraid of a muddied glass eye in its white socket, of the orthopedic shoes permanently glued to marble feet, of the useless spools of cotton spilling out of a sewing basket. Afraid because she is no longer waiting for me. Where are you? Why are you abandoning me to the bony ghost that keeps haunting me?

Stop. Imagine a different scene. Get up off the bench and start running. I get up and start running. I needn’t be so sure—I haven’t seen what’s happened yet. Maybe it’s just a plain dizzy spell. Juliette has fits over nothing. Ten years of struggle. Why precisely tonight—on such a mild night—would she decide to play tricks on me?

Running is warming me up. My steps clatter and resound in the sleeping street. I’m already laughing about it. In a while we’ll be laughing together. I’ll pass her a glass of water with a few multicolored pills cupped in my hand to make her feel absolutely fine. Drawing a shawl over her breast, she’ll say to me, “You shouldn’t have bothered. You know I have my little weak spells, but I get over them. Now it’s time to go to bed.” I’ll breathe in the downy scent of her powdered cheek against my cheek, and tomorrow everything will go on as usual.

I’ve reached the door of her building. I ring. The railing voice on the interphone makes me jump: “Finally! You sure took your time.” Took my time? But I’ve been running. I’m here. The door swings open with a long squeak. Quick, get inside and see her. Juliette rushes up to me. My head starts spinning.

“Everything was going fine, we were watching television after dinner . . .” What I see is the slant-backed empty armchair; the flowered curtains are drawn; her unhidden cane against the arm-rest. “The cat was asleep on the table. We’d had a cup of chamomile tea. The program didn’t interest her, although it did me. ‘Juliette, pass me my knitting.’ Then, you see, I saved two stitches for her . . .” What I see is her workbox on the floor by the chair, and strands of colored wool untidily spilling out of it; her glasses have been placed on the stand.

“We hadn’t been talking; and then she said to me in a funny voice, ‘I’m through with this. It’s finished.’ ‘But, Madame, you’re hardly started it,’ and she was stopping, you understand, she was stopping—look!” I see the photographs on the wall over the piano; there they are, all of them, with their gilt frames and fixed smiles, their gestures frozen on one particular day in their lives. “So I knew something had gone wrong. It was hard getting her to her room and helping her undress. She did what I told her to, like a robot. She didn’t say another word to me. She’s been asleep ever since—well, come and see.”

I sit down instead. The cat jumps onto my lap and settles there, purring, kneading my skin with almost clawless paws. I don’t stop him and I stroke the gray back undulating beneath my fingers. Crossing her arms, Juliette paces around the table. “This time, you know—this time . . .” and she starts telling me what happened again from the beginning. By repeating her words she is trying to gain some understanding of what is awry in the situation. She’s irritating me. I’d like to understand, too, quietly and coolly. I’d like to find an explanation simple enough for us to grasp. To reassure us.

“Stop walking around like that, you’re making me dizzy. She’s asleep? If she’s asleep, it can’t be too serious.”

(A shrug of the shoulders.) “You don’t understand a thing. First of all, there’s the knitting. It’s crazy, all those unfinished stitches.”

“That’s true—the knitting. That’s it. That’s the whole problem. Tell me again what happened with the knitting.”

She hands me the unfinished work. Her tight-lipped expression chides my foolishness, my slowness in accepting a story that she already knows by heart. She watches me turn the woolen square over and over. A strand hangs from one of its corners—I give it a yank, and a ball of yarn tumbles out of the basket. The cat sits up on my lap and jumps on the ball.

I can see her bent over the knitting needles. Her glasses have slipped down her nose. She hasn’t gotten very far with her work, three stripes of different colors—her first scarf of the winter. She’s making laborious headway—knit one, purl one; she straightens up from time to time to look blankly at the television screen. She takes a slightly longer break, shutting her eyes, shaking her head, trying to get rid of the stiffness invading her neck. Nothing serious, she knows, something that comes and goes. The sound of the television set suddenly starts hurting her behind the eyes, piercing her forehead like bright flashes of a neon sign—she wants to ask Juliette to stop the awful racket but the words are stuck in her cheeks. Something thick is rising in her throat and weighing down the bones of her jaw. Abruptly she turns into a fly: her big, multifaceted eyes can distinguish every fiber of the wool. She’s frightened. She wants to call out but can’t. Fly legs are muddling the stitches, which fall off the needles with a limp mucky sound and form holes as big as wells—she’s teetering on their edge. She’s certain of one thing: she has no more time, she has to act fast and can’t do it. She has to finish her stupid knitting and cry out for help. Juliette can’t hear her, she’s enthralled by the program. The cat’s asleep. Why are these thousands of flies flitting now around her head, and this viscous stuff in her mouth that’s so hard to swallow? At last Juliette turns around. Why is she shouting through a glass wall? “Madame! Madame!” She feels so, so far away, a little fly among flies. She starts blowing words through her proboscis, sticky bubbles floating in a fish tank: “Stop-this-knitting-it’s-done.” What a relief! Done. She’s said done. It’s done.

I can see the stitches linked one above the other, and the last three, wobbling little loops slipping off the needle as it falls to the floor with a metallic sound. The flies have taken off, preceding her in a humming cloud that congregates on the ceiling above the window. She follows them awkwardly, her buzzing wings grazing the shag of the curtain, and alights on the cold curtain rod. Up there, with her overall view of the room, she sees an old woman’s ponderous body start moving like a stone statue ineffectually pushed forward, dragging itself down the corridor to her room, falling onto the bed and sinking into darkness.

(Borrowed time. Living, knitting, on borrowed time: ten years of it. Ten years knitting nonstop. Always a piece of work in progress, yarn to be bought, a perpetual knitting spree. One hand lifeless, its only use to hold down one tame needle under its weight of flesh; the other hand going like crazy, pulling the yarn, pushing the other needle back and forth, making loops and knots, working away till it cramps. Let’s not waste time: knit and keep knitting. Scarves, coverlets, and lots of little patchwork squares, that’s easier, you just follow a straight line, no decrease or increase. And bootees—lots of baby’s bootees. Can’t do anything else, so might as well keep knitting till your brain is snarled. Poor old brain anyway, it can’t think anymore, it can’t keep up. So keep knitting. It’s your only hope. Ten years of it. It had to end sometime, didn’t it? There. My dears, I’ve knitted you ten years of old age, and that’s enough. This is my will and testament, these are my last woolen wishes. I can’t write or speak anymore, so I bequeath you these few little patches to wrap your winter thoughts in. Good-bye.)

The cat has torn the ball of yarn to tatters. I cut the thread that connects it to the knitting and set it on the table.

“There’s something else I should have told you,” says Juliette with a cunning look. “Last night she had a nightmare. She heard a humming all around her, and when she turned on the light the walls were swarming with black flies. That’s a bad sign, for sure. And another thing I forgot—she kept vomiting. She couldn’t stop. Come and see.”

Everything is getting clearer. No more time for pictures. I go to her room. She is lying on her back; she’s breathing; her hair is strewn over the pillow. She’s breathing: for the time being. Occasionally a mild spasm shakes her, but the vomiting has stopped. Her breathing is steady, the skin of her arm silky and warm. Under her nightgown her breast gently rises and falls to the beat of a heart that remains loyal to its husk and does its work gallantly; does whatever is necessary for life to be present, for blood to run through veins and give color to the skin—that silky, warm skin. Nothing, for the time being, has changed. All is calm.

“Everything’s going fine, really. She’s just asleep.”

And I tiptoe out of the room. Juliette shrugs her shoulders and lifts her eyes to the ceiling. (The chandelier is truly hideous. Why is she so attached to that chandelier, with its teardrops and its dust-catching pendants? What melancholy hides behind these prongs of twisted metal fashioned into coarse ivy leaves and hanging all askew?)

“Whatever you say. Let’s wait and see. But if you expect her to wake up fresh and pink tomorrow morning—”

That’s it—we’ll wait and see. Wait for what? Let’s wait for the sake of waiting. Let’s wait, all three of us, for day to break.

So now here I am sitting in your chair, amid your walls and relics. You’re through with watching over a distant past that was crumbling in your memory, through with assembling scraps of life like ill-matching pieces in a puzzle where you would never recover your own likeness. You’re tired of waiting; you’ve gone off without a word, leaving me to renew your patience. You’ve fallen asleep without warning, without complaining, but leaving no message. It’s up to me to decipher your sleep and hear the sentences your silence speaks. Are you planning to desert this hostile body that you’re sick of? Will you start moving in darkness back through all the nights of dreaming, waiting, and loneliness that have punctuated your life?

As you walked in your sleep, how many rooftops, peaks, and cliffs did you pass? From how many dreams were you woken up by sudden voids opening beneath your hesitant steps, by streams that all at once gushed forth and undermined your precarious path, by abrupt halts at the threshold of shattered bridges, leaving you to stare at an inaccessible shore whose riches turned to sand between your outstretched fingers?

As you teetered in your sleep along the ridge of your life, could you count the shocks that had hurt you? If only you could go your own free way at last, far from this broken body! If only you could take wing without hindrance, without being summoned back to the ways of the world, without waking up to days of which none were improvements!

I wish that this night that you’ve chosen for your excursion would stretch into infinity and that you could go on wandering peacefully among the hills of sleep. I don’t want to give you up yet; I want to imagine your itinerary and follow you down the winding path of oblivion you have taken. If I must lose track of you, don’t let it happen too fast. Give me time to bid your silhouette farewell as it falters on the rim of the horizon.

I’m waiting, and I have time to wait. Something in the color of this darkness, in the best of your pulse, something in the rhythm of your peaceful breathing and the stubborn convexity of your closed lids tells me not to expect you back. This time your sleep masks a real departure. But I’m not frightened. I’m keeping watch.

Soon, in the new morning, you will be already far away. I long to fall asleep at your side; but I have to get moving. I’m still one of the living, and we aren’t allowed to go to sleep in the daytime and converse with a shadow. And the sad fact is that I’ll have to call them to your bedside. They’ll come on the run.

They won’t realize it, but I’ll be leading parallel lives: a visible life, in which I’ll follow your body wherever they decide to take it; and a second, nocturnal life, the legacy of shimmers and shadows, of fugitive moments, of scenes half-lived half-dreamed: the life of a woman who is now taking her leave.