A Fine Passage (2 page)

“Many people pray without knowing it.”

Now that Claudia understands that the pope-rabbi is not the least bit embarrassed about talking to himself, she leaves him to his monologue and continues to drift among the gentle clouds.

“Joy is the most beautiful prayer, don't you think?”

Unable to pretend any longer that she doesn't hear him, Claudia turns to her neighbour.

“Simple joys are already luminous in and by themselves, so imagine boundless joy.”

To paint. What a joke! It had all begun with a ludicrous idea. Apparently, one day an uncle of his mother's, an old uncle he'd never met — sometimes he wonders if there really was such an uncle — abandoned wife, kids, and worldly goods and exiled himself to Vancouver, Canada. He was a child when they told him this family epic, neglecting to specify that the name of the tale's mythic land was spelled V-a-n-c-o-u-v-e-r, and not V-e-n-t C-o-u-v-e-r-t, meaning “covered wind” in French, as he had imagined. How many times had he tried to picture what a covered wind was like, not to mention a city of that name? Only effects of colour came to mind, the kind of effects that seemed increasingly to occur to him whenever he found himself confronted by concepts that were relatively abstract or downright unfathomable.

To paint. To this day, he cannot quite believe that this way of apprehending the world — this way of spending, or wasting, one's time — has actually allowed him to earn a living. What luck, and what a scandal! And what a relief to think that all that is more or less finished. A few traces of that past continue to tinge the edges of the life of the man who shows no sign of reading, but they do not weigh heavily in the balance. That Pierné score, for example. So tenuous, almost completely incorporeal.

Strange how, even in death, I seem to be swimming against life's current. Here, in the suicides' wing, no one is trying to come back to life. They are all precise suicides. They have nothing more to do with the living. Oh, from time to time, I may come across a faint ray of melancholy, an evanescent memory in a glance, but none of that lasts long. Precise suicides don't struggle with such things. They're done with struggling.

The man who shows no sign of reading is well aware that his desire to give proper names to the warm, caressing winds of the planet springs from his dislike for the cold. To tell the truth, the man who shows no sign of reading has a kind of aversion to all things that appear difficult.

“. . . so imagine boundless joy.”

In this fragment of a phrase, the man who shows no sign of reading recognizes the voice he heard earlier coming from one or two rows behind. Until now, he'd paid it no mind; it was merely part of the general murmur of the flight. The voice continues:

“Can you imagine boundless joy?”

The man who shows no sign of reading hears a younger voice reply in the negative.

“Of course, it's not easy to imagine. But at times, we get a taste of it. You'll see.”

The man who shows no sign of reading is tempted to turn around. At last, some entertainment. To make the most of it, he decides to make his way to the washroom. By chance, he gets up at the same moment as the girl who is seated next to the pope — or rabbi, he can't tell which — to whom he attributes the inspired phrase. The man who'd shown no sign of reading allows the girl to go first. They proceed in single file towards the rear of the airplane, both of them feeling they are going against the current.

You've taken up your model cars again. A fine idea. But it does worry your mother to see you re-enacting the sort of collision in which I died. Of course, you can't help it. You're not sure what happened exactly, but you've heard things. You suspect — maybe it's something you overheard — that I may have done it on purpose, that I caused the accident as a way of getting out of life. How can I make you understand, my son, that I'm not a suicide? Or only to a very limited degree.

Like everyone else, I had wanted once or twice to die. Well, perhaps more than once or twice. Dying, after all, is also part of life. Sometimes I suffered terribly from a lack — a lack of perspective that would have allowed me to get out of myself, to escape my limits. I experienced this as a kind of imprisonment, as though I was enclosed inside an airplane in mid-flight. I accepted to live my life this way, though I occasionally deplored it. But how to explain to you, my son, that I am an involuntary suicide, an imprecise suicide? That the intention to die that has been attributed to me is a mistake? In any case, I would never have chosen to die on a Thursday.

All the washrooms are taken when Claudia, followed by the man who'd shown no sign of reading, arrives. But no one else is waiting, aside from, perhaps, a young man standing there, his head lowered, with an ear almost glued to one of the doors.

Claudia and the man who'd shown no sign of reading can hear someone throwing up in the washroom. The young man seems anxious.

“Carmen?”

In reply, he is greeted with another heave.

“Carmen? You all right, then?”

No reply. The young man raises his head, looks at the girl and the man, his witnesses. Worried but powerless, Terry shrugs and offers by way of explanation:

“She's preggers.”

TUESDAY
Attack

HANS IS BEGINNING
to like the man standing before him, a sort of cowboy of the vineyards who doesn't bother with niceties in order to spare people's feelings.

“So are you ever going to finish that jigsaw puzzle?”

It's the second time Hans has crossed paths with this man at a wine tasting, and he has no qualms about responding in an equally direct manner.

“It seems to torment you as much as it does me.”

A pretty hostess passes again with wine. Both men take new glasses. At which point a small, inexplicable group movement occurs, and Hans wonders if the ground is not once more beginning to shake, a sensation he has found surprisingly pleasant since coming to live in California.

And yet, when he decided to come to San Francisco, Hans had not even thought about the famed San Andreas fault. He had never, in his entire life, been the least bit concerned about earthquakes. Now that he has experienced them several times, he's taken a liking to these underground rumblings. They shake him up in a new and intensely intimate manner, as though some sort of primordial coherence was being awakened in him.

The two women are the last remaining customers in the dining area of the small restaurant.

“And how's work?”

“Bah. They decided people want to reread Balzac, so we're doing Balzac all over again. But we're almost done.”

“And then what?”

“Gorky.”

The woman who'd struggled with her lettuce draws a cigarette from her pack and lights it.

“I've got to go after this.”

“I thought you'd quit smoking.”

The woman exhales her smoke, nodding her head in a way that signifies neither yes nor no, before adding:

“I smoke only in public.”

When he bought this second jigsaw puzzle, Hans was under the spell of a minor Tuesday psychosis: he was feeling particularly courageous, Plutonian, Chinese. He had already completed a reproduction of the
Census at Bethlehem
by Bruegel the Elder when he came upon this
Winter Landscape
by the artist's youngest son, Jon, known as Velvet Brueghel. This one was also a three-thousand-piece puzzle; it depicted a number of small figures engaged in various activities on the outskirts of a snowy Flemish village. On a door that served as a table in a corner of his large rented room, Hans had successfully assembled the outer edge of this second jigsaw, but he had barely begun to work on the interior. Something was stopping him from going any further. It had been like that for weeks now.

“There's something in that puzzle beckoning to you, but you won't give in to it.”

Hans had sought among the people around him someone whom he could truly look up to as wise.

“Maybe you just don't want to finish it. To be done with it.”

As he was paying, Hans had noticed that the skin around the woman's fingernails had been chewed up. It made him feel strange. And yet, she had been highly recommended.

Terry and Carmen are in line to go through customs. The line they chose moves forward at more or less the same pace as the others. No one seems to have any emotions. Terry and Carmen step forward to the counter together. The official does not take kindly to this infringement of the regulations.

“One at a time.”

He gives a cursory nod towards the waiting line. Terry understands that one of them must retreat behind the line traced on the ground. This does not seem possible to him, and he attempts to explain it to the man before him.

“She's preggers.”

The officer understands the word, but he's not immediately sure what he is meant to apply it to. He raises his head, sees the young man's eyes brimming with sincerity, then sees the young woman, who looks like a homesick schoolgirl. He chooses not to give himself any trouble, pretends to understand, checks their passports, returns them, and lets the couple pass without asking any questions.

Terry and Carmen pick up their luggage and make their way to the taxi stand, where yet another line awaits them. Terry did not expect things to be so organized. When it's their turn, he pushes the bags up to the trunk of the cab and even tries to put them in. This does not appear to please the driver, who is in a less-than-cheerful mood. Terry feels compelled to explain why he is doing all the work himself, without Carmen's help.

“On account of she's preggers, see.”

The driver takes not the slightest notice of what's being said, instead shoving the last of the suitcases into the trunk and muttering all the while into his moustache. The two travellers realize this is no place to dawdle; they get into the super-clean BMW. Terry pronounces as clearly as he can the name and address of the small hotel a friend recommended. Unable to understand, even after he's made Terry repeat it several times, the driver asks to read the address scrawled on the paper, which turns out not to be all that clear either. Nevertheless, in the end, the cab does make its way into the heart of Paris.

Here, in the wing for precise suicides, they laugh at me a little. As far as they're concerned, there's been no mistake. I quickly realized how useless it was to try to convince them of the contrary. At first, from time to time, they listened to me — out of a kind of charitable spirit I haven't been able to figure out — but I could see my appeal was falling on deaf ears. It was written in their postures, in their immobility. It is impossible to describe just how completely they have ceased to live.

It may seem somewhat contradictory to see them as entirely dead, on the one hand, and then to feel that they are laughing at me, or that they are capable of charitable feelings. And yet that's how it is. But instead of reassuring me, these slight infringements on the rules of death only increase my feeling of solitude, my inability to join them. I never believed much in heaven and hell, but if I were to imagine them for a few moments, what I've just described would be pretty close to hell. There's something unbearable about this gnawing feeling of not being where I belong. On the other hand, I can see that lots of people on earth suffer for much the same reason.

Claudia must wait almost ten hours in the airport before embarking on the second phase of her journey, which will take her to her destination. She will join her parents on their kibbutz in Israel, for an unofficial holiday — her college's policy on holidays being rather liberal. The goal of the vacation is of course to reassure her parents of her well-being, and to help them feel right about their own choices.

These trips are nothing new to Claudia. For several years now, her parents have been unable to live without a cause. Which is what she explained to the pope-rabbi, because even though he was a bit odd, Claudia sensed that he wished her well.

“At least they're not a pain in the butt, right?”

The pope-rabbi's reaction made her laugh, because Claudia does indeed feel rather lucky that her parents have decided to leave the nest. And though she doesn't mind seeing them once or twice a year, a single week at a time rather than two would be quite sufficient. She can see herself in them, but within a few days, she always ends up feeling that this particular natural resource is non-renewable.

The pope-rabbi was reassuring.

“We must be dead to one's parents, you know. It is written thus, so don't worry about it.”

And he turned back to his book.

The woman who smokes only in public is quietly enjoying her cigarette. Her friend, meanwhile, leapfrogs from one thought to another.

“Do you know if he's painting at least?”

“Oh, I doubt it. I don't know. He hasn't said anything about it.”

“He's wasting his talent.”

The idea that talent is something someone can waste seems suddenly odd to the woman who smokes. She could debate it, but today she lacks the energy to tilt against clichés. Not all Tuesdays are alike.

Her friend switches topics.

“Someone's moved in next door. The movers were in yesterday. There wasn't a single piece went in that house that wasn't gorgeous.”

And in conclusion:

“You should quit smoking. You're racing to an early grave.”

The woman who smokes crushes her cigarette butt in the ashtray.

“Funny, I feel as though I'm calmly walking towards it.”

Terry and Carmen have piled their suitcases as efficiently as possible in the small space of their room. They have also pushed the two single beds together. Carmen is in the bathroom washing up. And talking to Terry. She's always enjoyed talking to him like this — he in the bedroom and she in the bathroom.

“You don't have to go telling everyone I'm pregnant. Doesn't even show.”

It's as though the intervening walls allow each of them to take a firmer stand.