Following the Summer (7 page)

Thirteen

A
CCORDING TO THE BOY, THEY HAD
taken an apartment in town. He didn't know
where. Their life at the hotel had become unbearable. Pietro rarely left his room, they couldn't even clean it, now and then, he'd fly into a rage, pound the wall at the slightest sound. He never went downstairs except to force Corrine to go up, in the middle of the night. “He's psychotic, you know.”

The boy, the owner's son, was at the age to be studying social sciences. He mentioned it because they were both incongruous here, he in his almost clerical garb, she in her well-cut coat, and also because he wanted to keep her here for a moment. She could have claimed to be Corrine's cousin or a childhood friend. Say that they'd lost track of each other, that she had conducted a lengthy search before coming here. Talk with him about living in some hovel when luck has passed you by, and the country, vast as it is, is basically so small for human beings and has so little to offer the poor.

But she invented nothing in a story that boiled down to so little. She had met Corrine last summer, Pietro had been sick, they'd talked just like that, in a park, and with marriage, moving, travelling, going back to school, they'd got out of touch. She'd come to catch up, now that winter was here to stay, and she'd been able to find the time. It would soon be Christmas. Had she not left an address? “No,” he said, “but I can ask.”

He walked her to the door. Under his eyes he had a peculiar square ridge, it stood out very clearly on his pale face, exposed by his close-cropped hair. He repeated his promise to look. She promised to come back. Soon.

It was a Monday, and he behaved as if he'd been expecting her. He took her coat, seated her at the bar, offered her a beer which she refused because of the smell and because of Ervant later, offered her a coffee which she barely touched because of the faded cup. He didn't know exactly where Corrine lived now, but she was working in the little grocery store at the corner of Rhéaume. Marie said nothing, wanted not to believe him, but he had his theories. About women who aren't as strong as they seem, who dominate the weak, a common characteristic in a nation that is itself subservient. People raised their heads only to find out when to lower them under blackmail. Running a grocery store had always been a job for immigrants, who served there before going on to be served, and you could be an immigrant in your own country. For someone Corrine's age, though, it was the end of the road. At forty she would wear flowered dresses and an apron, and then Pietro would be able to sneer at her as well as tyrannize her.

He tried to make her shed the image of Corrine the survivor, the thistle. He gestured with his hands and brushed against her, but it was with words that he tried to get her on his side. There was no need to spar with her, she'd have been easy to take. Now that she had crossed the threshold it would have been good to go up to a room with him, spread a clean sheet, let herself be penetrated while she breathed in the musk of damp walls and of the long neck of this tense young man. There was a sensation of warmth in her groin, but he was looking at her like a girl you take to the movies and then to the Paris Café, a girl to be slept with only by candlelight and to music by Schumann, many weeks after the first kiss. What would Corrine have done to capture him?

She went out into a night filled with wind that lashed her under the layers of wool. She was five minutes from Corrine, from the grocery store that would be closed by the time she got there. She knew it well, it was the grocery store of her childhood, of errands done with bad grace. A place that smelled of canned goods, of stale apples, of cold meat at the back. A sleepy place where you only went when you had to, for a loaf of bread or a quart of milk. Marie remembered the grey cat, always in motion, that drove the mice towards the warehouse next door. She'd never been back.

But now she had no choice. She went along the main street that led directly there, the one she'd taken thousands of times between school and home. She could no longer travel it with her eyes shut. Everywhere service stations had replaced the old apartment blocks, taverns, restaurants, beauty parlours with apartments upstairs. The town had always been ugly, now it was becoming hideous. A harsh light fell onto snow mixed with oil, the few trees had given way to garage billboards, there was not a living soul except for vulgar men around their cars, and two stray dogs that sniffed at one another.

She moved quickly, into the trap. Never had the shadows felt so close. There was nothing here now to erase her anger and her isolation. She had expected to be able to borrow from others their notions of elsewhere, to steep herself in their images and to break up her own, to triumph day by day over those who had narrowed these hard places, places of evil spells, of rocks and burns. But they had won, those who put up new churches and gave streets the names of monsignors. Their wind rose from the earth, it meandered through their boundaries, whistled across her skin and made it blotchy, it took her apart, and delivered her finally to their small businesses, her culmination.

She had taken whatever she could from Ervant, who had been able to live with ruptures, who had stubbornly consumed them all. But she was wrong, he had evolved instead from desertions to renunciations, driven here by his fear of the past and ready now to settle down in turn, to eat away a little more from this earth of rust and metal, to plant some grass and a child that resembles him, to keep his wife clean and to grab a piece of any passing ass.

She had never had girlfriends, so inane were the girls in the convents and the wives of others you meet when you're twenty. But she'd had Corrine, so late it was already in pieces, scraps of history, scraps of bodies, scraps of summer. She knew very well what she had wanted: to slip into the nights of a woman who does not dream. Who laughs at the fearful and at the thousand subtle shades invented by feelings to hold you back, to turn girls into whimperers and later into women who lie in wait.

She was cutting, Corrine, and now the boy from the tavern who claimed to know everything had told the truth. She was cutting when she didn't belong to someone else, who kept her warm.

Marie would go there directly, to see that and to understand it. It would be two minutes to six, she would push open the door whose latch set off the two-note bell, she would meet a little girl carrying a paper bag, who would turn left near the middle of the hill. She might even be Diane, who was of no interest to her now.

She was going to see Corrine between the cans of soup and the cookie stand. She would pretend to have come here by chance, feign surprise at seeing her. They would exchange a few words about Pietro's illness, which was curable, and about her own more peaceful life. She'd buy her milk or her bread as she'd done in the past. In any event, that's what brings you here at six o'clock.

But it was from the cold room at the back that Corrine emerged. The metal door creaked on its hinges, she wore a white smock over black slacks. She looked the same but rounder, her face softer around eyelids that were still overly made-up. Marie didn't understand.

Corrine greeted her, laughing, took a long time to clean the big empty refrigerator, then she switched off the lights and went to the front to close up. She pulled a stool up to the cash drawer which had to be counted, and leaned on her elbows briefly to look at her. “I'm pregnant,” she said. A radio at the end of the counter droned the sports news.

Fourteen

N
O ONE WOULD EVER KNOW WHERE THE
child had come from, the child she dared not kill. Pietro had wanted it furiously, thought it was his, from him. He saw a fence around the aging womb, and from that cage would be born a dark-haired girl with the curly head of southern Italy, whom he would one day show off while the cousins looked on. She would wear a dress as yellow as the sun, in a town square covered with dust.

It was a boy with tawny hair, and his ivory complexion would make him a local man. Pietro saw him once, his face impenetrable, eyes closed on the secret, motionless in a refusal that was not sleep. This creature had been forged between the thighs of a woman who had shunned his seed before accepting others, he forebade the child any journey out, any return. He had broken the cage and there would be no other.

This time Pietro would be discovered, twice dead, first poisoned, then drowned in the lake that washed him back to shore, just one more piece of trash.

The start of summer. The women saw that the child's eyes would be reddish-brown. He gave off an odour of acid that they would smell on their own skin long after. They gave him no name because they knew none for a child of that race, one who was made of lime and flint.

Very early he had the powerful breath of those beings whose lives will be long. He murmured cries without tears, a language of his own, carved from the very silence that others would maintain as they approached him.

Corrine feared the curse that was every day more present in the child's sandy eyes. First her breasts dried up, then her throat. Small creases formed at the edge of her shoulders, she thought she saw the bones peek through under the friable flesh. She would be the desert from which only scorpions emerged, now that she had driven away the animal of all her nights. No shadows now, no games, she would be an old woman and a child would reduce her to its own bright space. The paper came away from the walls, there were fires under the floors, and warnings that condemned the house. The neighbours left, she stayed behind, alone; in July the block would be razed.

Marie hovered over the child, serene. She put honey in his milk and answered his cries with phrases that, in the end, were stories. Wherein one could drink salt and eat oils, crush serpents and cast stones. Everything was possible in stories that no one but they would dare to know.

At three o'clock, on a day of brilliant sunshine, they went back to the park. Under a tree a radio was shrieking, a number of them were jumping around, young and pale. Two nearly naked girls danced on the moss. A languor fell like soot and drove them away, with the child, to where the burned stones were.

Nothing moved now in the undergrowth or along rocks dry to their roots. Not a dog. Muffled pounding came from the water tower, a mirage that quivered deep inside the light. “They're tearing it down,” says Corrine. How does she know? From the child, a cry, softly.

It was then that Marie saw the lake, its rust marbled now with mauve water weeds that sprang from new crevices. The meeting with Isis. “It's midnight in the middle of day, the moons devour you alive, your blood will wet the stone for all eternity, reeds will grow from it. Ivy. Bonds. Lilacs bred of dead waters. The wound would be nothing, she had said, this woman whose shadow still covers your ankles. Her bones jut out now, they cut, they tear. She has no saliva. And you, you will flow forever.”

The scar turned pink in the sun. “You remember,” says the rasping voice. She didn't expect a reply. She said that she'd leave soon, go north where her thirst would be quenched, to the ice and cold the child would need, to be like the others. Here, fevers consume him. For the first time she was afraid. “I should have killed him, I told you I'd kill him.”

A brown toad zigzagged between their legs. They had mistaken it for a stone.

Fifteen

W
HERE THIS COUNTRY ENDS THERE IS
no road, for all roads lead there. Ervant goes unburdened now, relieved of all the traces he dragged here, to the beginning of the world. Everything he has will not last for a thousand years, as it would over there, where his letters no longer arrive. Not his wife, not his house. His children will be born without memory, he will give them the music of metal and if he has a daughter she will have short hair. He has won this victorious place. The subsoil dies, neons reach to the gates of the city, to the rooftops of new motels where women lie down who can be seen in the offices, too.

He will not know about Marie's departure, she will remain. She smiles, she is getting ready to stay. After the house there will be a car, for trips to New York and the return, the fence around the garden will be fibreglass, the windows triple. A boat, some day, once the marina has been built at the base of the old water tower, and a pier with a bicycle path to the point. It's been announced next summer the work will begin.

At noon, alone, she goes towards the hills. It's easy to walk there, they are bare and no one comes because of the smell from the swamps on the western slope, where ferrous water from the mine stagnates. There is only undergrowth without a tree, feet creak on branches dead for years before the arrival of men, when the sun set fire to the useless trees. Their ashes would make a bed for a child of the embers, now gone. He would hear the crackling sound of dying bees. No flowers, no sap, they fall sputtering into the mud, the way we would like to depart, laughing.

The pavement whistles under cars come from the west. The first beasts of burden in this place were men, already shut up in their carcasses. They have brought the road with them and finished it here, where they met other men like themselves, come from the east. As a child she had thought she could lose herself here, but the boundaries are never far. She had only to skirt the swamps to find her reference point. You do not leave, do not learn how to lose yourself, in a prison. Barely time enough for touching terror, which was neither hot nor cold.

It is enough to dismantle desires, fling them to the bottom of the marsh, inspirations that she almost recognized, they plummet under the weight of a summer of rocks. They make bubbles. They rise up nowhere. Their shimmering dots the sky.