Fragments of Place Read online

  Inside her, everything was flying out of control, breaking apart, scattering, winging back to her in cutting shards, turning circles.

  One day. Or two. Sometimes five.

  Then it passed.

  Or didn’t. She would enter the black water full of dead fish and rotting algae.

  And wouldn’t emerge for another month, half dead.

  The house was cool, empty, and quiet. Virginia heard Nessa, Leonard, and the others laughing in the garden.

  It was her birthday.

  Virginia examined her face in the foyer mirror. She was searching for her mother who had died at the age she was meant to be celebrating today.

  Julia was there in her features, but also, and always, in the emptiness she’d left around Virginia, and in her, when she departed.

  In the big childhood house, everything was emptied of its substance, everything died with Julia. Nothing left but stick figures. A papier mâché set. Empty shells.

  Virginia was making rice pudding for herself and Leonard.

  Leonard was ill. Maybe even seriously.

  Virginia’s lips moved constantly. Day and night, she muttered prayers she didn’t believe in.

  The world was crumbling.

  Tell Leonard how much… Hold his hand so he won’t slip away.

  It was cold. They’d run out of coal. Virginia was writing. Her fingers were frozen like the pond she looked at through the window.

  Something was missing in her story. Something was always missing.

  She consulted the pages again, covered with scratched out words. She added more. Corrected. Recopied. Changed.

  Suddenly it happened. Like galloping horses. Images fighting to be written. She could see it all. Her mind was knotted and tense. The entire book was in her head.

  Don’t lose anything. It flowed from her fingertips. Three weeks of grace. The rhythm, frenetic.

  Then, inevitably, the fog. Once more.

  No letter from Nessa this morning. Nessa hadn’t written for ten days.

  Virginia walked circles around herself. Accused Leonard of spending too much time in London. Neglecting the dogs.

  Virginia locked herself in her room. She composed a letter to her sister.

  When you’re not there the colour goes out of life, as water from a sponge; and I merely exist, dry and dusty.

  THE WOMAN IN THE RIVER

  On this February morning, the woman went down to the beach, though she had sworn she’d never go back there during the winter. For several years now, before resuming her long walks, she would wait patiently for the ice to break up on the river in a powerful, low-pitched uproar, with constellations of broken glass and the floes drifting toward the sea, urged ahead by contrary currents.

  But now she had returned, attracted by the call of open space. The call was the one she dreaded.

  She took her time deciding. Her footsteps in the snow proved that much as they followed a path a little lower than the one she often took in summer and fall, alone most of the time.

  First the woman walked back and forth, ten metres or so in each direction, compulsively repeating the same short trajectory. Slowly, at first. A swaying kind of walk. Her traces showed that, too. Then she went faster.

  She even fell at one point. Unless she let herself go on purpose. The imprint of one of her hands, fingers out-spread, was clearly visible on the hardened snow. She was wearing red woollen gloves. The fibres were found in the hollowed out spaces left by her palms and fingers.

  It was twenty-eight below at dawn. In the distance, where the fast-flowing water resisted the terrible grip of the cold, the river was smoking, like a warm house in the glacial hours before dawn.

  Then a single track, perpendicular to the traces of her pacing, led toward the ice. There was no hesitation in her steps. No hurry either. The traces were clean, from the heel to the tip of her toe, and well marked, like someone who knows where she is going.

  At the shore and a good distance past it, great plates of ice had cracked, pushed by the slow, early winter tides, lifting, jostling, and riding upon each other in a strange ballet. The icy air caught them in their movement and created new landscapes of uprooted conglomerates of blocks rising between the smooth, shiny surfaces. But now nothing moved, even when the tides were at their highest. The wind swept the snow ceaselessly to keep the tableau clean and hard.

  It looked as though the footsteps stopped abruptly where the bank ended and the river began. The woman seemed to have disappeared into the water at the very spot where she crossed the line. As if, once this limit was transgressed, a hole had opened at her feet, then closed over her, the ice lips of the river knitting together immediately.

  But further on, now and again, the contour of a heel and or the imprint of part of the sole of a boot could be seen, stamped into the small accumulations of snow that succeeded, despite the northwest wind, in huddling by the protected edges of the icy mounds.

  The woman had walked to the extreme limit without the frozen surface giving way.

  Before her, there was nothing but a mass of black ink moving sideways, dizzying in its progress, with thick vapourrising from it. In the air was that strange, grave music of the white blocks of ice tinted with azure that the water shepherded together as it rushed forward frantically; the blocks lowed and grunted as they crashed together.

  Now everything had to be thought out again. As if, standing on the bank, the woman hadn’t made any decision, except to come to the edge of this liquid abyss, just to see.

  Again, fear took hold of her frozen body, with all the cries held in, like a gag jammed into her mouth. The woman was paralyzed, hypnotized by the mad current flowing before her eyes, the same current that flowed under the ice that vibrated and protested beneath her feet.

  She could have been discovered there, standing, covered with frost and wind-blown snow, not drowned but petrified by fear forever, never having suspected that death would come from somewhere else but the water and her desire to give herself to it.

  But the woman ended up tearing herself from fear’s grasp.

  She knelt down and stretched out on the frozen sheet. Then she crept slowly toward the narrow border that separated still time from too late.

  She slipped her body into the water, holding herself back a brief moment with her fingertips on the edge of

  the ice. Small traces of red wool stuck there, too. Then, in an instant, the woman passed over to the other side of things.

  From a house, not far off, an old lady watched what happened, and could do nothing.

  When the rescuers arrived, everything was quiet and deserted.

  The man couldn’t imagine it. The woman travelling under water. With her wool gloves and her scarf around her neck. Irredeemably alone.

  When they took him down to the beach, it was nearly noon. Sparkling with crystals, the air burned his eyes. The silence swallowed up human voices. The dazzling light would have you think that everything was clear and without mystery.

  The man couldn’t stop shivering, but couldn’t tear himself away. He stayed on the bank, looking out over the emptiness. Defenceless, incredulous.

  He couldn’t help thinking that the woman was still standing in front of her easel, as she did every day for months at a time, pushing herself to paint another picture, though whatever she did, the colours would slough off all pigment, fade before her eyes as they always did, and turn livid. A cameo of absence.

  The woman was travelling under water.

  She thought she was going to die, strangled by the cold, her heart twisted in a vise. But she was there, her eyes wide open, aware.

  As if in death, you could remain alive.

  THE WAIT

  The smell of cement dirtied by urine and excrement tormented her senses, and every pore of her skin, all the way to the bone.

  The walls were covered with graffiti written in dried blood.

  You might think the woman was sequestered in this hideout, but she was there of her own free will,
though we couldn’t really call it free.

  She was sitting on a rickety chair, hands on her knees. She was looking through the windowpane.

  She was totally absorbed by the scene outside. Her posture showed as much. Her body was not leaning against the chair back. She was sitting on the edge of the chair, very straight, though bent slightly forward. She had been there for hours.

  The dress she was wearing was so threadbare you couldn’t say whether it had been black or charcoal. It was cold inside the dank cell, even in the tropics.

  The window was made of six squares of glass. Five of them had been whited out. The sixth was as well, but the woman, or someone before her, had scratched away the paint with her fingernail, like frost on a pane. The light came through the glass, dull and showing no details. It was daytime. The spotlights were blinding at night. The afternoon was running down on the square outside. Inexorably, the shadows stretched and lengthened.

  The woman’s hair was almost completely hidden under a scarf. The little bit you could see was black. She was not an old woman. Nor very young either. Or maybe so, though there was a kind of gravity in her attitude. A body hardened and harmed, even at her age.

  The way she was positioned, you could not see her straight on, nor could you see her profile. More at an angle, an imperfect silhouette. The contour of her thin face was harsh and bony. Her cheeks were sunken, her cheekbones protruding, and her eyes deeply hidden in their sockets, her features concave.

  She had been there forever, centuries, maybe, and had not moved. You might think she had turned to stone, and entered the realm of the mineral, or the dead. But that was not the case. She was alive, though she wished she weren’t. Her breast scarcely moved when she breathed.

  Slowly she grew aware of the unbearable through the scratches in the window glass. As if someone had poured cement into her mouth. She would never be able to scream again. She had gone beyond. Though she would go on speaking, the words would fall from her mouth like shards of cold lava.

  She did not flinch. Her eyes were open, even at night. She would take in the world through the screen of what she had witnessed. Blind and all-seeing, having seen it all.

  Her forehead was unlined. Her features were not twisted by tension. She had gone beyond terror. She would not know fear because the worst had already happened.

  She was sitting, though her spirit was on its feet. Nothing would make her bend, whatever else happened, and despite appearances.

  Outside, people were shouting. Vulgar, barbaric slogans cut through by screams of suffering.

  Through the tumult, she made out the single lamentation of one man. Soon she heard only him. She was deaf to any other voice if his cry was not within it.

  The woman looked out the window. She was simply that: a woman seeing and hearing. She stared at the wall; bullets had shattered the cement in many places. Others would soon come and write their chapter of horror.

  She did not look away. She needed to see, to the end.

  The crackling of bullets had not yet split the air. But there was blood everywhere. Men in their suffering were unrecognizable.

  Worse than the detonations that had not sounded yet was the metallic laughter of the other side. Humans, too, apparently. She knew most of them.

  The woman waited, unmoving.

  Finally she heard the sound of machine guns.

  After their work, the killers would go home. They would wash their hands carefully, then sit down at the table for the evening meal with their families.

  Here, there would be silence.

  For a long time to come.

  Sooner or later, night would fall.

  The woman would step outside with the other women who were waiting, like her, with neither cries nor tears, in adjacent cells.

  Slowly, they would walk to the wall stained with death.

  A LIVING SOUL

  She tapped on her skin with her fingertips. Probing, tapping, she travelled across her entire body. It echoed like a staved-in drum. She was empty.

  Behind the wall of soft flesh, she listened for a sound, the way she had been taught to, through the uprights and the crossbeams of her construction. But there was nothing. They couldn’t even crucify her. The nails would find no purchase.

  She paced circles in a room that was sealing tight around her. Her life was dominated by the imperious need to know. She couldn’t stand the riddles anymore.

  She subjected herself to endless cross-examination under a violent spotlight that burned her eyes and split her lips. But she never managed to find the question, the only true one that could have counted. She went astray in the labyrinth of her thoughts, formulating complicated questions that led only to further ones, ever more obscure, in which she bogged down. Toward the end, words began to dissolve of their own accord into meaningless prattle, and finally into lallation; only “Mama” could be identified.

  Long before she sought refuge here, she walked through sweet-smelling forests and feverish cities. She lingered at length in broad gardens and museums. She partook until she was slaked. But her thirst returned soon after, every time, and more intense, like a tearing in her throat, shifting sands in her larynx. A cramp in her solar plexus.

  She was thirsty but hungry, too, ever since she could remember. A void inside. To eat or drink, she would throw her head far back, set an enormous funnel in her mouth, and empty demijohns of red wine and bags of groceries full to the brim into it. Sometimes she inhaled whole animals, feathers, fur, and bones included. She was appeased, but the appeasement lasted only a few hours.

  For a time, her voracity, that still tormented her, made her hope there was someone inside her, someone or something. She believed she was inhabited. When she stuffed herself, she imagined she was feeding that presence, the way she might feed a fire. And even if it were a monster, an ogre, she would have preferred such a creature to being an abandoned house, a deserted city. But her insatiability was tied to the feeling that everything that entered her would escape sooner or later, there was no alternative, since she was full of holes.

  She resolved to stop being a transit station for perishable items. She would not dine at that table anymore. Even at the cost of her life.

  She sought other nourishment elsewhere, more substantial. She would let someone penetrate her and be implanted within. A graft of being. Men arrived, but they all ended up leaving. The same happened with children she would have liked to keep forever as her final asylum.

  She came to believe that the secret resided in the Verb, the eternal source of life, a permanent presence. She travelled from temple to temple, so that the sacred seed might be placed in the palm of her hand, and she might deposit it on her tongue. But as soon as she closed her mouth, the miniature man on the cross would be there, like at the end of her grandmother’s rosary, but alive, thin, and bony, squirming, a little clot she couldn’t swallow in one gulp. She ended up gnawing on the fine bones and spitting them out so as not to choke.

  But now she stopped trying to absorb anything into her body. Quite the opposite: she made sure nothing foreign penetrated her. She cleaned house because hope had returned, though tenuous, because of a distant sound within her she wasn’t even sure she’d heard, that might have been all in her head.

  She wanted to see what it was like inside. Like in the old days, the way she did with the dolls people gave her. A few days after she got one, the doll mysteriously disappeared. The gifts stopped arriving the day her mother started finding the debris of dismembered dolls, ripped open and massacred, scattered through the house and yard.

  She wanted to see inside, she couldn’t help it. Split the seams, open slowly, lie down on her stomach, and feel around. But avoid all barbaric carnage. She had sounded out the possibilities and made her calculations to avoid making a mess.

  She started by opening what opened easily. With both hands, she held the jaws wide open and thrust her head into her mouth, pushed past her narrow throat, and found herself at a crossroads. She couldn’t s
ee anything, but the sound inside was clearly audible. She stopped doubting her presence. Over and over she cried, “Who’s there?” Her cries echoed back, deformed by distance, and she didn’t know whether that was her voice coming back to her, or if it belonged to someone else who might be searching for her. The thought oppressed her so deeply she started suffocating, and had to go back outside.

  For several hours, it seemed she was sleeping, or had died, stretched out full length on the floor in the middle of the room, perfectly motionless. But she was listening. At times she stopped breathing and listened for the furtive sound inside. It was as though someone was moving away, then growing nearer, perhaps just as thirsty for knowledge as she was.

  She ended up slipping her fingers into every opening, exploring every breach, each discreet fold as if someone might be taking shelter there, having withdrawn under an overhang or behind a membranous screen.

  Soon her feverish hands were thrusting in, exploring, palpating, pulling out into the light everything she could grasp onto.

  On the white sheets with which she had covered the long wooden table, the kidneys and heart, the ovaries, some lengths of tripe and other things she could not name were lined up in orderly fashion. She was fascinated by the lapping of her hands in her humours and phlegm, and the sucking sound of organs pulled from their nests.

  Soon her hands were not enough. She thrust her entire body into her abysses and gaping spaces. She travelled down her main arteries, then dove into the labyrinths of vessels, and quickly lost her way. Exhausted, she moved through the darkness, wondering out loud, “Where am I?”

  She was running out of air.

  She used a machete to cut a path and find her way back outside.

  This time, she afforded herself no rest. She washed her hands and went back to work immediately.

  Each organ was minutely dissected. Nothing was left to chance. Someone had to be there, somewhere.

  When she reached the end of the autopsy, the body was everywhere, in disparate pieces.