Fragments of Place Read online

  After a few minutes, the conversation took a different turn. Catherine felt her body stiffen. Once again, she reminded André that she preferred to maintain a professional friendship with him.

  Before, they used to enjoy having lunch together from time to time, to talk about work and other more ordinary things. Their enjoyment grew. One day, André invited Catherine over for dinner. The invitation was a threat in her eyes. They broke off their lunch dates.

  She hung up and stood there, her hand on the receiver. Then she began to hit her head against the partition, gently.

  When she was little, the neighbours had a Dalmatian. She used to watch it between the boards of the fence that her father made the dog’s owner build. She would slip her fingers through the crack and Pichou would lick them.

  Catherine’s parents told her that all dogs could turn nasty. They showed her a photo in the newspaper of a little girl who had been bitten in the face by a golden retriever that was supposedly very tame. The day her father caught Catherine in the yard next door, petting Pichou, he grabbed her by the arm and dragged her back home, then hit her. Behind the fence, Pichou barked and barked, something he never did.

  She didn’t know why she remembered the Dalmatian now. Maybe because of the deer on TV. Or André’s call.

  You can’t trust anyone, her mother used to say. Even Pittapat. Catherine had been naïve enough to think her cat was different. The scar on her cornea proved otherwise. She shouldn’t have trusted him.

  The world backed up what her parents had driven into her: without exception, other people were her enemies, and they wanted to devour her. All predators. Most of all, she had to watch out for nice people. The nasty ones were no problem, she stayed away from them anyway.

  She sobbed this time as she pounded the wall with her fists. She couldn’t stop. Catherine didn’t hold back, even if her neighbours might hear. When she finally stopped crying, she felt completely exhausted, but the tension had left her throat. She could breathe easily, and that surprised her.

  She walked to the sliding door and opened it wide. The air felt good. The late afternoon light was soft. A pigeon flew past and settled on the edge of the roof at the corner of the building. For the first time, she didn’t think about the droppings. The sun turned the bird’s feathers iridescent.

  Catherine wanted nothing more to do with the blind spot in her life that stole a piece of reality from her – the most beautiful part.

  She turned to the phone and called André back. Her voice was raspy, her tone unsure. She didn’t try to hide those things.

  Tomorrow, Catherine would go to his house for dinner.

  HEART OF ICE

  Easter. The women were walking along the snow-covered beach. Their arms were linked and they were talking in low tones. And laughing.

  The two were in what people call the prime of life. They had passed several milestones. They were happy with themselves these days.

  Jacques Cartier Beach, where the story first began. They were together by the water, the way they’d been as girls on the Richelieu. The water, their mother.

  Normally they never went down to the beach before the snow melted, and the ice on the river broke up completely. But they wanted to see the spring tides. An astonishing landscape, both violent and tender. The waves casting blocks of ice onto the banks. Then taking them back. And returning them again.

  Everywhere, at their feet, were small transparent shards of azure ice. The older woman’s birthstone.

  Here and there lay metre-long blocks, transparent and also shaded with blue. The light made them iridescent in places. The women ran their hands along the rounded edges. The ice melted slowly in the warmth of their palms.

  They would have liked to lick the cubes the way they did when they were little, along the Richelieu, when they licked salt blocks in which the cows’ tongues sculpted pretty little hollows.

  But they wouldn’t lick the blocks, even if they did look like barley sugar. They were adults now, and knew the river was sick under the surface.

  They were big and they knew, but they didn’t know everything.

  They didn’t know, but would find out in a few days, that one of them was sick under the surface, too. One of them was not, as they thought, in the prime of life. One of them, very soon, would enter the ice and be lost in the heart of a nameless ocean.

  THE PERFUME OF YLANG-YLANG

  The first time she appeared to him, it was just before noon in the latticework of alleys in a Mediterranean city. She was walking straight toward him. Her face was pale and her ecru suit must have been linen. When he saw her, he stopped in his tracks, as if struck by a dizzying flash of light. He thought she would accost him, or maybe run right into him. But at the last moment, she turned and moved into a side alley, leaving a flower perfume that he recognized, though could not name.

  He moved into that alley and watched the woman until her image faded in the distance, into the white and ochre walls and their load of light. As if she had issued from those walls, and was now returning there. He hadn’t seen where she had come from; he was too busy gazing at a window from which a song of incredible sweetness flowed.

  All afternoon, he walked in search of her, through the labyrinth. He had no eyes for the entryways to the houses where women and children gathered in the coolness of the shadows, nor for the red geraniums in clay pots set on the ancient paving stones, nor the small rickety chairs leaning by the doors, nor the Venetian blinds the same blue as the sky, nor the borders of the terra cotta roofs. His eyes criss-crossed the space in front of him as he scrutinized intersections and examined each direction, hesitating, then hurrying down the street he chose, nearly running.

  He had decided to begin his journey here, a place he had already been, to avoid that morbid frenzy that overtook him every time he entered a foreign territory. At times like that, something grasping and nervous awoke in him, an uncontrollable appetite, a voracious hunger he could scarcely master. His solitary travels in foreign lands were the only time he lost the cool-headedness that was his trademark.

  He did not do anything extraordinary during these trips. He walked, from morning to night. Quickly. In search of something, though he knew not what. Late in the evening he would return, exhausted, to his room; despite the days he stayed there, it remained totally foreign to him. But that was what he was after, that strangeness and the dissociation that put him in a state of anxiety, but with his mind completely open.

  He needed to be shaken up that way, painful as it was. He prepared himself for the transition; he began most of his travels in a city he had some knowledge of, and often ended his trip by coming back for several days to the same place that acted, in a way, as his decompression chamber. The few times he did not employ this strategy, the trip was difficult and the return disturbing, as if his mind had not been able to catch up to his body.

  This time, something unexpected had shaken the decompression mechanism, and he found himself lost in the depths.

  The woman he had seen, and lost, had that effect on him.

  When the walls grew dark and the alleyways began to fill with footsteps, voices, the rattle of cooking pots, and the smell of spices and lamb, the man emerged from the labyrinth and headed toward one of the wide squares. The outdoor cafés were packed with men, and only men, drinking, smoking, and talking loud, their arms wide open and their hands like windmills. He glanced at his watch. The routine would last another hour. Then the men would go home, and return when night settled in.

  The man was hungry and thirsty. He sat down on the lip of a fountain and splashed his face. As he stood again, he cursed the thing in himself that, every year, pushed him to leave for two months and immerse himself in worlds where he was fated to be an outsider, a man excluded, a foreign body.

  But he needed that panic and the distance that made everything seem different, even him, even his life. When he was in the trance of travel, death itself lost the power to terrify. During his many trips, he had had three brushe
s with death. He was shaken, yes, but in an unexpected way. As if death had been one more experience, a deeper kind of travel. Another place to explore.

  He didn’t eat much that evening, but he drank a lot. He lost his way going home. Old women were sitting outside in the cool of the evening, but he didn’t ask anyone for help. Dogs were drinking water from a gutter in one of the streets. Children were rolling metal hoops down the uneven cobblestones. Women were folding sheets in half, and shaking them out vigourously. He preferred to stay lost and walk forever, despite being tired, than speak to another human being.

  Except at the hotel and other places where he had no choice, his travels were carried out in complete silence most of the time. He didn’t want to hear or use a language in which he might recognize himself.

  He ended up finding his hotel and he went up to his room. He sat down on the unmade bed and cried. That hardly ever happened to him. He lay down without getting undressed and fell asleep.

  Voices in the next room woke him at dawn. A couple was quarrelling. A door slammed. The man went to the window. A woman dressed in black was leaving the hotel. Once, in a village in the middle of the country, he saw a woman being stoned. His whole body trembled as he watched, and his hands grasped at his face and his head shook. The execution didn’t take much time. Once the square emptied out, he went to the woman who had been left for dead and saw she was still breathing. The cuffs of his pants were stained with blood. He hurried away as if he were guilty of her murder, and left the village as fast as he could.

  He lingered at the window a while. Day was breaking through a light mist that cast a lavender hue on the walls of the houses.

  He took a shower and dressed, then went out. The café he chose wasn’t open but it wouldn’t be long; the waiters were busy inside. He stood in the middle of the quiet little street.

  Then he heard the sound of high heels slowly beating the stones of a nearby street. The footsteps drew closer.

  The woman he was looking for the day before appeared. She turned in his direction and moved toward him. She wasn’t a woman of this country, but she belonged to these walls and this light.

  She swept past him, very close, and went into the café that had just opened. He closed his eyes and thought of the flower whose perfume, in another place and time, had once touched him so deeply. But the name escaped him.

  In the café, he chose a table from which he could watch her. She was sitting near a double window that opened onto a tiny garden.

  When she left, he followed her at a discreet distance. It didn’t take long before he lost her. All that day, he walked in vain.

  This morning, at dawn, he returned to the same café. She wasn’t there. He sat at one of the tables overlooking the garden.

  He didn’t have to wait long. She came and sat down.

  She looked outside, her hands clasped on the white tablecloth.

  They sat that way until the waiter brought their coffee. He hardly dared look at her.

  Then she began speaking to him in a foreign language he did not recognize, and that probably didn’t exist, or if it did, it hadn’t been discovered. She spoke slowly. Her eyes were like the nearby sea. She leaned across the table, speaking low, gently, at length. It was as if she were singing. He could see the tops of her breasts and felt their warmth.

  Then she went quiet, lowered her eyes, and touched the man’s hand on the table.

  Then it was his turn to speak. He didn’t try to find out whether she knew the language he used. His voice was broken, as if he were about to cry. She listened to every word, with the same intensity he had when he listened to her.

  Later, when the customers started coming in for lunch, she stood up and bent low to give him a soft kiss on the mouth. Then she went outside.

  At that moment, when she bent slowly over him, and the jacket of her ecru suit opened gracefully over her naked breasts and dark nipples, he remembered that little island, part of the Indonesian archipelago, Sula, it was called, and not only did he discover the heady perfume of the ylang-ylang flower, but he recalled where he had seen her, a fleeting vision that had struck him dumb for a moment in his wild headlong rush, like a premonitory dream quickly forgotten.

  He followed her out of the café and through the labyrinth of alleys where he had spotted her the first day. They walked for a long time as if, between the two of them, there was still much distance to cover.

  She led him into a cool, dim corridor that opened onto a tiny inner courtyard full of greenery and flowers. They made love slowly, standing, against the wall bathed in sunlight. She spoke to him in a low voice, not stopping for breath, and her words entered him like an enchantment.

  He never saw her again, and he did not need to search for her anymore.

  He went on his way, but without haste now.

  In every city he travelled to, she would write to him. He would recognize her perfume on the paper. And the accents of her language that, little by little, he would recognize as his own.

  When the man returned home, she would be inside him.

  SAPPING

  With his tongue, Gaël tried in vain to catch the chocolate ice cream running down his hand. If it dripped onto his overalls, his mother would bawl him out for sure, maybe even hit him.

  The afternoon heat gathered in the asphalt of the parking lot. His mother made him sit at the edge, on the concrete border, to eat his ice cream cone.

  When she was pregnant, the woman dreamed of a child who would look more like a doll than the little boy who always wanted to run off somewhere. So she wouldn’t have to track him down, she kept him on a leash she tied to the clothesline in the backyard, or to the service tree in the front.

  The boy was completely absorbed in licking his ice cream cone without making a mess.

  He didn’t see his father’s jeep at the corner. He didn’t hear the sound of acceleration. He scarcely noticed the squealing tires and the metallic protests as the vehicle turned and pulled into the parking space next to where he was sitting.

  The sudden encroachment of the red mass in his field of vision made him look up in surprise.

  His ice cream fell onto his clothes and landed on the ground.

  The jeep came to a stop inches from his gym shoes.

  His father jumped out. His voice was mocking as he moved toward the house, calling out to Gaël.

  “Got you again, eh, kid? You have to keep your eyes open!”

  THE WOMAN IN THE ALLEY

  A shot of caustic acid ran through his brain.

  It never lasted long. No longer than rumblings of an earthquake. But always damage, a little more each time.

  He experienced something similar at the beginning. As soon as he dozed off, nightmares erupted behind his eyelids.

  With time, he built a defence against them, and slept nearly three months without the debris of horror sticking to his retina when he awoke.

  Then it came back. By day and by night. When he was awake. He wasn’t struck by the horror – it was something much worse.

  The man leaned against the concrete wall. He was soaked with sweat. He tried to recover his sense of self. The air was burning, heavy with dust and nauseating smells. He wiped his face with his shirttail.

  He was alone in the alley, except for the woman he had killed and a dead dog.

  He didn’t look at either, but he smelled the putrid stink of one and the metallic odour and the oversweet blood of the other that mixed in with the clotted brains seeping from her right eye socket. The viscous matter had splattered back in his face, and he had vomited on the spot.

  The man had never done that before: aimed for the eye.

  He wasn’t a real killer, that’s what he always told himself, even though, over the last year and a half, he’d killed eight people and missed a few more.

  He never chose his targets. He received instructions.

  Like for the woman lying next to him. He’d had to track her for over three weeks to get a bead on her. Usually, she had
a bodyguard.

  A secret encounter sent her out on her own despite the danger, and she went walking, disguised as an anonymous citizen, down the alley of this unrecognizable city with its high-tension atmosphere.

  When the bullet burst her skull open, the grey wig she was wearing lifted from her head and fell sideways across her face as she crumpled to the ground.

  He hid in exactly the right spot to step out in front of her and take aim.

  The first time he waited for her, he hadn’t chosen his place well. And he didn’t recognize her right away. She was wearing the same wig, now thick with blood, and the same makeup that made her look older, with the same threadbare clothes and black lace-up shoes.

  He recognized her too late; her hand that swung with each step and brushed her dress gave her away. He knew it was her when he saw the smooth white skin of her hand, her long thin fingers, and her perfect nails that she had stripped of polish and left bare for the occasion.

  He liked it better when he was given a man as a target.

  He loved women in a way he considered infantile and naïve. It was absurd.

  He couldn’t help believing that all women held something sacred in them, naturally, though it might be solidly locked away in the unreachable depths of their being. Even the most vile and inhuman among them, like the one on the ground by his feet, almost touching him.

  It was because of his mother, though there was nothing exceptional or exemplary about her, at least not that you could see. But when he was very young, he felt the presence of her luminous heart that was greater than her completely mediocre life. The presence of a kind of beauty that transcended her, whatever awkward and miserable things she did in her everyday life, with him and other people, when she was at the end of her rope. And she often was.