The Perfect Circle Read online

  Soon, one day, Marianne will return to the schedules of her atrophied city, and gaping inside her will be the valley of dreams. One day, back in reality, she will feel like a bouquet of flowers thrown in the middle of the street. She’ll have to muster all sorts of courage to trace within herself the frozen clock’s hand, the hand that could mend unstitched time, so she can pay her rent on the first of every month without vanishing entirely against the grey of the city. After Marco, she will try more than anything to protect the space that she has recognized thanks to him, the encroachment of sand into the rooms of the hotel.

  I’ve considered hanging myself from the living-room ceiling, the doors all open, the tramontana would have blown onto my limbs, a door slammed. I’d have unburdened myself of the irksome duty of inventing a meaning. Every time, though, out of respect for the mystery, I’ve gone out and drawn any little piece of the country struck by shade and sun together. Slowly, so as to be absorbed by them. I was more and more silent. I was moving towards a state of stone, towards a passivity that doesn’t even refer to activity as its opposite. Nothing.

  I’d gone beyond the stage where it’s still possible to secure oneself to reality. I had toppled into the absence of will, attracted more by the fact of falling than of walking.There’s a name for that trite state — depression, I think. I would sit in the garden and busy myself with despair at being nothing, sitting on an old canvas chair taken from a garbage can and therefore perfect, worn just enough to be uncomfortable so you won’t spend your whole life in it.To be nothing: that’s what was still available. Sometimes, in the midst of all that, I would hear you coming — you, your dogs, your offhandedness, your careful ignorance of the desert’s extent.

  You’d ask:

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Want to go for a gelato?”

  “I haven’t got time.”

  You would smile, I’d get up, fold my chair, I would choose lemon and you, chocolate, you’d complain about work and the thousand things you still had to do, then you’d say:“Well, I’d better be going.”

  “Okay.”

  “Where shall I drop you off?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Nothing.”

  You’d start the Jeep, the dogs would wag their tails, you’d disappear again into your invisible occupations. I would watch you go in a state of decrepitude that amazed me.Your coming, your going, and on either side — before, after — absence: you were the lifeboat casting me into the sea. No land in sight. I’d walk back, appallingly sluggish, as if between each of my footstep, time rushed in to take a long, an extravagantly long step and in the end, I’d never get to the house, I would sit by the water somewhere and listen to the lake, filled with itself, matching itself. I would close my eyes and only listen, become the slow sound of the waves passing over the dead streets of legend all the way to me, without asking where I lived or where I came from or how long I was going to stay — gratuitously.

  As well as your own, you possessed my destabilized life that you didn’t know what to do with. Horrified, I saw the meaning of everything crystallize in your presence and I saw you push away that overly heavy role, it was your lawful right, your legitimate cruelty, I knew that, even as I was sinking into the obsessive hope of once more hearing your car stop at the entrance to the garden.

  “German?”

  “No. Québécoise.”

  “What?”

  “Canadian.”

  “Ah, I see! Ah! You’re Marco’s girlfriend?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Where’s Marco?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Aha. And how long do you think you’ll stay here?”

  “No idea.”

  “I bet he’s hunting.”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Is that so? Hunting, most likely.”

  The perfect circle.

  The round life of Marco. As airtight as an egg.

  The universe on the scale of a village that you never leave. Every face is known, every word predictable.

  The lives of those who’ve decided to be alone. They lack nothing.They are what they are.The lives of those who only work with their hands. Of those who belong to the place where they were born. Geographical contingency brought to the rank of fate: I was born here, therefore I am staying.

  Marianne would like to live the contented life of Marco. She would also like to have the wonderful smile given him by the mere sight of a family of ducks. He runs through the rain to count them. His footsteps don’t make a sound on the ground. They are the ground. He enjoys everything. His everything consists of very little.

  Already, Marianne has travelled too much, read too much. The wind introduces into her hopes and desires for justice. Nothing is ever enough for her. She pictures her life nowhere, she wishes it were everywhere. She is cold then in the opening of possible worlds. She would prefer a life like Marco’s, a round, closed world, a perfect circle. She would prefer not to ask for anything.

  Now and then he gets into his Jeep. Drives along the main road, turns left without signalling, the left being, as he says, his natural tendency; he drives along the lake, goes home. Back to square one.The meal is ready. He eats, it’s good, he’s content.

  At first, Marianne has the illusion that she’s entering Marco’s egg and looking for her place there. She has the illusion that she is modest. She believes that a modest place in a closed egg will be enough for her too. But it’s Marco’s egg. Others don’t enter it. He doesn’t need anyone. Besides, it’s too small.Too small for two to fit.To tell the truth, even if she were alone she wouldn’t fit.

  I looked for you in your perfect life.

  You are, with no object, no adverb, and because of that distinctiveness no preposition will ever join us.

  To come close to you and through your silence, slowly and painfully come back to myself, to return to my more succinct reality, to my dullest name, you said that by dint of saying nothing: be.

  Behind the three windows of the empty house, I was incapable of surviving the brutal fact of being alive, of being naked inside my life. Behind the three windows and the two doors, time became boredom, boredom became hatred, hatred became destruction, and there was that terrible choice on the ground, in the very spot where, on the first night, you’d flung the mattress: madness or a plane.

  I think about the way you walk, upright, on the wet rocks — for a long time I believed every word. From far away I remember everything and even more, of what — beneath things said, done, and seen — would give to my soul a body and to my heart, a heart.

  These weren’t a few months of my life: they were a few months of my death. Now, on every Quebec morning, I have trouble believing that it was me — that broken thing on a floor without furniture, that object laid down there by lightning, totally burned, scarcely able to repeat to itself in a low voice: don’t worry, it will all work out, and then: but go away, what are you waiting for, go tomorrow, tonight, disappear as fast as you can.That thing driven back day by day into waiting passionately for the sound of your car and the palm of your hand, sleeping an infant’s sleep in your hair: it was me.

  I was that thing. It can take years, to heal someone from lightning.

  I’ve also seen fatigue draw new, indelible wrinkles on your face, I’ve seen you suddenly tired, tired of everything, and in a very short time, I’ve seen your forehead move farther back in your hair, seen more grey in your hair and, one night when I asked you if it was because of me that you were aging like that, I heard you answer: Yes, smiling, yes, I think it’s you who is making me age so much.

  The worst thing is fatigue. Fatigue comes from burns that you don’t go near, to which you fail to say: hello, glad to meet you, here you are. Fatigue comes from the hole an airplane carves in the blue of the sky, between the houses of my city. Maybe you never existed: fatigue comes from doubt about your existence. Maybe I dreamed
you. Fatigue comes from the wreckage of a dream.

  It comes from the pointlessness of everything that isn’t you.

  I met you in a shudder and that’s how I come back to myself, with teeth chattering without being cold, with sangfroid, without a hint of fear. No one sees the floating debris that I can feel bumping into me on all sides. Someday, perhaps, to remember only happiness and to think with gratitude about the movement of your hand across the eyelid of my life. And then, quietly, to move my own hand over my warm eyelid and find myself safe from vertigo.

  There are other planes for other countries.There are the voices, the hands, of other men, there are other men. But there is you, and your ashes under everything.There is your lost voice, your lost hands, there is you, lost.There is me who has flown away, enraged, exhausted.

  Here.

  Certain exuberant flowers. One of them, settled comfortably inside its pinky-orange, maybe even yellow, vibrant in its indecisive garment, pure poem to watch being picked, it will start out at eight o’clock on its way to the cemetery where Marco’s father lies, dead from cancer, from alcohol, from a bitterness never resolved by his family, his grave tirelessly adorned with flowers by the mother who, when he was alive, couldn’t stand his presence.

  The flowers may explain why, so early in human history, this land was chosen for making children. Perhaps the flowers are themselves those children — who became adults, and then corpses stored in Etruscan chambers covered with earth, transformed into mountains that archaeologists now disassemble with tweezers and government grants.

  In this region, the oldest graves are shaped like an inverted uterus. A narrow corridor leads to it, widening towards the inside. Preparation of the burial chamber, dug with a pick, goes on for a good part of the life of the person it’s intended for.When the time comes, the deceased is laid out on a bed, along with some precious objects. The gravediggers then leave, sealing it shut. Memory is condemned. They hide the door by reconstructing the mountain in front of it. One does not visit the dead.They are allowed to go to their better life, they’re entrusted to the care of the earth, heads turned towards the most beautiful horizon. Once sealed, death is invisible, irretrievable, it is dead. Over the millennia and unbeknownst to them, people will picnic in front of those gates to the beyond.

  Marco’s mother puts flowers on her husband’s scrupulously Catholic grave.The stone bears his name and the dates of the two ends of his life. He too they put in a hole, but without losing track of him. You go to the cemetery, you lay flowers on his grave, perhaps with some tears and, more rarely, some words.With a certain fatigue about the nothingness of life. His possessions are distributed to his friends and immediate family, which inevitably leads to disputes: they aren’t enough to complete unfinished sentences, to alleviate doubts, and to say aloud what was essential.A tobacco pouch: practically nothing.You’d have had to snatch the time for love from ordinary time.You’d have had to do it during life so that life would be filled with itself, and death would take nothing important, practically nothing, a soul that has already passed into the hoop of love.

  My father told me about a Breton farmer who one night assembled his whole family, including the children. He said simply that he was going to die, and then he died, simply, at the end of his simple life, he died a death called natural and in that way similar to all other deaths, even those of insects.

  One night Marianne and Marco arrive so late that the mother has opted not to fix a meal.They decide to go to the restaurant. It’s cold and the moon can’t quite move up from the horizon of the fields.The road is long. Straight. Marco drives fast. All at once the vague shape of an animal looms before them. Marco switches lanes to avoid it. Then brakes and backs up. In the headlights the shape reappears: it’s a dog, he’s lying there on his side, motionless. “Dio,” Marco mutters (no one will ever know if he swore or if he saw the divine move across the broken body). “I think he’s dead,” says Marianne. Marco doesn’t respond. He leaves the car in the middle of the road, headlights levelled at the poor heap. He walks towards it and, sensing his approach, the dog opens his eyes bright with fever, raises his head, incredulous, as if to say, “No, it’s impossible, did you stop because of me?”

  Marco crouches down. “Where does it hurt, poveretto?” he asks, feeling the dog. “Oh! You’re all broken inside, we’ll take you to the side of the road, come on now, come on.” Delicately, as if he were handling pick-up sticks, he tries to lift the dog. The animal moans and quivers, you can see his terror-stricken heart throbbing under his skin. “Wait.” Marco runs to the car for a newspaper, slips it under the dog, squeezes its muzzle in his hand. “When a dog is in pain it may bite without meaning to.” While he’s dragging it to the side of the road, the dog looks at Marianne with heartbreaking, fiery eyes, the eyes of the dying.

  He lays it down in the wet grass. “His spine is broken, we ought to finish him off, but I can’t do it.” He takes a rope from the car and fastens it to a fence-post, “in case he gets up and crosses the road,” thinking this might give the dog a hope, a very slim hope, of being free to walk and to be tied up because he’s free.Yet after stroking and petting him for a long time, he tells him the truth. He says to the dog: “You have to die tonight, it’s too bad but that’s the way it is.”

  At the restaurant, during half the meal Marco tries to contact a veterinarian who’ll agree to come to the road and euthanize the dog. One says yes, for an exorbitant fee. Marco comes back to the table, furious and discouraged, picks at a little wild boar. His beautiful eyebrows are frowning, you can see the wrinkles that are there when he looks his age.

  “Why,” he asks suddenly, “why were we the ones to meet that dog? Why do things like that happen to me? Listen, that upsets me, a lot.”

  “You’re the only one who stopped.The dog had resigned himself, you could see. A dozen other cars must have gone by before us.”

  “They all thought, ‘Too bad,’ and kept on driving. Even the son-of-a-bitch who hit him.”

  “Maybe that’s why we drove there. It’s far, it’s late. Everything worked out so that you were the one who took the trouble to help that dog.”

  “Mmm.”

  They eat a little, don’t talk.

  “But maybe it’s actually the opposite,” says Marianne after a moment.

  “What?”

  “Maybe it was to help you that we met that dog.”

  “Why me?”

  “So that you could be with a dying dog.”

  “Sure, me, who lost two bitches this year, thanks a lot, that’s enough.”

  “You lost your bitches but you still haven’t accepted the fact that you’ve lost them.”

  “So?”

  “You couldn’t even watch them die.”

  “So what?”

  “So, maybe that dog was a chance for you to be with a dying dog.”

  “Come off it.”

  “Maybe it was to help you accept it.”

  “I don’t want to accept it. Okay, Peggy was old, it’s normal to die, but Ambra — that, you see, I cannot accept.”

  “You have to let them go now. That’s all you can do for them.”

  “You’re telling me I’m possessive.”

  “I’m telling you it’s hard to let them go.”

  Marco pushes away his plate, crosses his arms. Marianne tries to pour him more wine, he puts his hand over the glass. They skip dessert.

  On the way home, along a stream of fields that are all alike, Mario spies the post where the dog is attached and stops. He gets out with his flashlight. The dog was waiting for them, right away his feverish eyes focus on them, you can see that he has just one hope: not to die tonight. Because of his broken spine, his rear has dropped into a cavity in the ground and his torso is horribly twisted. Marco gently puts his paws back in their normal position and pushes him away from the cavity so that he’ll “die the way you’re supposed to die: good and straight.”

  He starts talking to the dog. Marianne is holding the
flashlight. In its circle are the creature’s eye, his neck straining with effort towards the voice, the two of them alone in the big, unjust world. With regret, Marco concludes: “Safe journey.”

  He sighs, stands up, gets in the car, starts it.Then flinches slightly, as if he’s forgotten some detail. He stops the engine. Gets out of the car, undoes the rope, and takes it with him. “He’ll die free, that’s the least we can do for him.”

  Early one morning a scarf of mist was drifting across the lake between the beach and the hill; I held my head on the water’s surface while dawn was undressing the shore. I was doing the breaststroke and every time my head emerged, the scarf was there, receding towards a deeper peace, a more tenacious wound, slowly allowing the appearance of a tree, of two houses perhaps — allowing daytime life to begin. That’s the only definition of the soul that I’ve come up with, long after you asked me the question.

  VIII

  ETERNITY

  The way I feel is strange, strange because you’ll never know it, because you’ll never see the bedroom opened by the sound of your footsteps, or the lightness of the veils that hang there waiting for you, or the blood burned during that waiting, or my bare feet set free from it, and because you’ll never have in your ear the sound of your own voice when it told me words that I didn’t understand yet, that I took to be jewels gone astray on their way to a princess and dropped in front of me with troubling grace. My strange feeling I brought along on my journey, sometimes we stopped at your place, for a while, I don’t remember how many months, we were like beggars outside your house, and though you pretended to recognize us, you ignored us, and even as you were greeting us, you sent us away, I took my feeling with me intact, strange, and I’ve pulled it all the way here, to this page of writing where it is looking for a side where it can finally stretch out.

  I can’t find the missing word. I write relentlessly, perhaps in search of that word, of the kiss that would waken my mad hope and make it legitimate, the word that would have made it right for me to leave, to wait for you and to sink in so deep.