The Perfect Circle Read online

  Contrary to all expectations, his or yours, you will come back.You’ll come back because in the empty house he didn’t sleep. Because you will be anguished by his anguish and by his nakedness projected into the dawn, pink and indecent.

  You leave for France.Your face is undone. A cousin says so right away, before you’ve opened your mouth, “You’re in love, it shows, you don’t know what to do.” You’re invited to the tables of all Brittany and can’t even swallow your spit. He turned you to jelly with such ease. He did very little to seduce you. But that very little, in front of the bouquet prepared in secret and so long before, was worth more than a promise.You see his face on every clump of earth and in every field of artichokes and on the seafront too, at Pointe du Raz.Your thoughts give way before that appalling image, now you can’t gather it into one clear and lucid moment, a moment during which a road might open.You shower three times a day. At night, you listen to music with your eyes wide open. You spend months of salary on the phone with the companion from that other life awaiting you in Quebec. You tell him everything. He answers with words that you thought were reserved for literature. “Go, I love you. It hurts me to say this, but I wish you a bon voyage.”

  You’re alone, terribly alone, in this freedom both of them are offering you — the one by letting you go, the other by not waiting for you. Perhaps you’d never been alone before; from now on, no doubt, you always will be. You’re alone, without good or evil, without fear or shame.You are alone to the degree that you’re terribly free, with a new and shattering freedom, and you don’t know how to formulate your law; you’re perplexed as would be a slave who’s set free overnight.You put off and put off making your decision.At the very last minute, you set off for Italy again.Three weeks.

  The cousin pays for your train ticket. A train that charges into the night, into your night, burrowing into it.You don’t know what this night will consist of. But you want to know the truth, you want your heart to be as clean and clear as the sun in the water.

  That week, floods in northern Italy. The train has to change its route, and at dawn a man opens hysterically the door to your compartment and wakes you up, gesticulating to make you get out, repeating in the language that you don’t yet know, alluvione, his fingers pointing to a map, and because of that, for a long time you think alluvione means river. You run along the platform, repeating the name of a station to all the ticket inspectors and finally you end up, breathless and ticketless, on another train, and then on the station platform where he’s supposed to be waiting for you.

  You call him at home three times, but he’s not there. It’s a day of strong winds and he’s on the lake with his sailboard, while you wait for him on the deserted platform, half understanding — though you won’t admit it to yourself — that you’ll always be waiting for him. Half understanding that suffering while you wait for him will hardly matter compared with your passionate love.You smoke four or five cigarettes in quick succession, stubbing them in the grass beside a fountain. The day is hot, windy. A man with a scarred face approaches, you send him packing. He arrives late, unsmiling, hair wet from the lake. Some distance down the road, he finally murmurs, not looking at you: “I’m glad you came back.” Poppies appear under the big sky.

  That night and all the nights after it: you sleep in his arms. At five o’clock every morning he gets dressed without waking you up and sneaks out of the hotel.The days are long and torrid, you walk in the village alone, and at the hour when people come home from work, you bathe in the blue bathroom, all the windows open, using soap that smells of apricots — of which you keep a piece in anticipation of your old age, when you’ll need a souvenir that hasn’t grown old.

  Every evening: you wait for him outside while, as the daylight is waning, the wind works at breaking the teeth of the flowers and the world is like a big basket of oranges from which you pick a chair.You listen to the voices, varied, bushy, speaking the foreign language, and now and then a word that you recognize leaps like a fish.You know that he’ll come but you don’t know when.The evenings are numbered. One day, you asked him what he’d seen in you. He told you: “So many things.” You said: “Name me just one.” He named serenity. The answer surprised you; you told him so. “It’s a matter of time,” he replied. While you wait for him that serenity is there with you, sitting beside you. It’s sad and strange, and he was the first to see it.

  He arrives late, takes you out for supper, makes you laugh. After supper, he follows you to your room. Because you’re an unexpected visitor at the peak of the tourist season, you’ve had to switch rooms several times.Your beds are no one’s beds, they are borrowed, creaking, uncomfortable. You put the mattress on the floor so you won’t make any noise. Lying against you, he speaks more slowly. The room, the window, his face, the mattress flow together in the dim light. All you can see is the lunar brightness of his teeth that bite you, smiling, while sweat runs back up the course of his skin.Your hands are his hands are your hands. Everything is done in silence on the floors of these rooms. He works at breaking your life by making it possible — one day you will be there where here should be.

  The days: you spend them alone, a silhouette that moves expectantly through the sounds of cars and the furtive voice of the lake. At the washhouse, the women chat while they slap their husbands clothes against the stone. Deep in the clear rinse water, soap deposits stand out against pieces of shadow that tremble in the sun. In the water, the garments stretch, as if emerging slowly from a deep sleep. Behind the castle, the women hang their washing on a very long line, so long that it has to be supported in the middle with a branch shaped like a slingshot.The installation looks terribly precarious and yet, when the garments offer their soft cheeks to the approaching wind, the slingshot sways with perfect ease, like a pendulum that operates counter to the pull of gravity. You offer your own cheek and remember certain warm events, such as the old man who says, though he doesn’t know you: “You must live every day as if it were the last and then you must sleep well every night.”

  In your bag you have an Italian grammar which you work hard at deciphering. On the shore of the lake every morning, you choose the ugliest spot because it’s in the shade and no one else is there. Leaning against a cement wall, you open your grammar, recognize in it some words from the night before and you learn other words that you’ll recognize in people’s mouths that very evening.The language allows itself to be penetrated, puts up not much more resistance than butter, as if it were submitting to the urgency of being learned.

  When you go out with him he talks with others, while under the table his hand is on your knee. One night he invites you to a party at the castle. Along a narrow street, a table has been set up, with Chinese lanterns of every colour swaying above it.The wine arrives in pitchers, the pasta, the salad, the meat in huge pots. People quarrel, embrace, lean out windows; children race around under the tables, on top of the tables, everywhere. Guided by his hand on your knee, that evening you realize that you understand Italian.

  You do nothing but that — walk, study the language, draw, wait for him, hate him because of the waiting, yet smile at him as soon as he arrives. Because you say nothing, do nothing, except at night, except make love, your senses are abruptly sharpened. Listening to the water, you can erase the boundaries of your skin and move into the great body of the lake.You see with appalling precision the skeleton of a tree that stands out against the six o’clock sky. From a handful of sand you feel each grain leak between your splayed fingers.You notice the cold aroma of fortified wine and, pretty well everywhere, the smell of the detergent his mother uses.You scrutinize the ever-changing light, you see it more and more clearly, in every possible state, even at night when it crawls. Behind your senses that are sharpened to the extreme, stands for the first time the present tense, and it has two arms, like a whale.

  During the years that separated you from childhood, you lived in expectation of the present tense, but it never came. And yet while age walks over it, childhood remai
ns, faithful, close at hand, ready to speak its feverish language as long as you pay attention to it. Because you knew that childhood was very close, you expected time would once again be what it had been then: the present, eternity.You applied yourself to waiting, paying attention to a host of details, but you had only a relative success, similar to the kind obtained from studying books. Because of it, now, which lays down mountains instead of craters, and lakes in the most arid parts of the globe, because of it, abruptly, that childhood talent comes back to you, intact. You know that you’ll go away again. Soon. There are five days left, on the next day, four. There is the paradoxical coincidence of the passing days and the new-found present tense. You are there, in the middle, in the form of a still, distilling time so as to capture its essence.

  He talks to you a lot about his mother, whom he lives with. He never takes you there.

  The tension of this happiness to be lost has you in a continuous crescendo. Secretly you hope he’ll ask you never to leave. But because he is made in such a way that he never says more than is necessary, he’ll never say enough. He considers that life goes on above thoughts, and that while it’s going on it becomes what a life should be. For the last days, you are moved to a vast, deserted dormitory in a wing of the hotel that’s set aside for one-week stays by mental patients. It’s dark there, footsteps reverberate, and voices move from one floor to the next, distorted by the echo. Crazy among the crazies, you sense your thought process skidding beneath itself, every second forming incongruous plans such as staying for another month, such as leaving as soon as you can, such as dying or making a baby.Wakings are breathtakingly painful. They take you by surprise in that hollow which, when sleeping, forgets to defend itself, forgets to close its fist. It’s the hollow he conquered, an infinitely fragile place. It is there that he lets you decide about everything.You watch your own madness develop, watch it feed largely on itself and hardly at all on him. He always does the same little bit, but you take that little bit and transform it effortlessly into a poem, a Greek tragedy, a cosmological myth. You see that and you go on, because your own madness fascinates you — as much as his body, as much as his country.

  He’s asleep, of course, on the last night when you finally make up your mind. You pack your bags while listening to the footsteps of a madman walking down the corridor. The plane leaves from Paris.The suitcase is still just as heavy.You’ll have to take a train from Florence, get to Florence from the closest railroad station, travel to that station on the bus that leaves the village every morning before sunrise.At four a.m. you wake him up. He sees the suitcase. He speaks to you in Italian, then repeats it in French.

  “Don’t forget,” he says.

  You promise. It’s a superfluous promise. Everything is engraved as if in wood, in copper, in marble: chestnut blossoms, the wind in the crypt, the languor of the garments in the washhouse basin. His own face, which the light revealed all at once in its sudden nakedness, and the promised serenity: yours, your own possible serenity.

  You board the bus, the first train, the second train. Between Florence and Paris the night is dreadful. Hot. The vinyl couchette sticks to your legs whenever the sheet slides off. Sheets always slide off vinyl. In your half-sleep the nightmare sound of other passengers who converse and guffaw in the overheated alcohol vapours. A Roman priest speaks slowly, thinks slowly, an Englishman listens to himself say nothing between his flabby mouth and his harelip, three Americans jump from one subject to another, always on the surface of things, while you do battle with the devil, and the kilometres shriek along the rails.You get up and step outside the compartment. You wish you were eighty-three so you could avoid the inevitable and prepare yourself, calmly, in your rocking chair, to sleep for a very long time.There’s no space for crying. Near the toilets, the doors open behind your back; in the corridor, someone jostles you.You rest your head on the glass through which the legendary countryside streams by with a metallic crashing, until the train enters France, your father’s country, which he left thirty years earlier, for love.You are leaving now to conclude what your life used to be.You don’t know anything else.You can’t say whether by taking the train again, you’ve lost love or preserved it. As she leaves the toilet, a Dutch woman’s gaze locks with your red eyes and she gives you a knowing sorry smile, the only presence of that entire night.

  In Paris, you board the plane. In Montreal, you take in your arms the other, who is crying, and together you undress your house, cut it into two scrupulously equal parts which each of you moves by yourself, elsewhere. You keep the Scrabble set and the Moroccan cookbook, the other takes the Bescherelle and Madame Benoît.

  The first weeks, you spend inside, among the unopened boxes, waiting for the moment when you’ll have the courage to select a book and lose yourself in it. It goes on all summer. At summer’s end you realize that you haven’t had enough money for a long time now.You take any old job — sales, telephone survey, whatever.You write to him every week, he never replies. For yourself, you also write: The distance between beings who are thinking about one another, who don’t know where the other is or what he’s doing, who trust and who lose confidence, is something extraordinary. I absolutely have to stop smoking.

  And so September passes; in October, you stop smoking. Everything strikes you as totally dull, without interest. At the beginning of November, you stop being faithful to him. At the end of November, he calls you. On the phone, in a second at most, his country enters your kitchen and excavates once more the lost dimension.You become yesterday again, in the basket of oranges, on a muddy road where a storm has broken. His voice carries flowers in these early days of winter. He asks you to come back, you say no, you hang up hastily.Twenty-four hours later you borrow the money your brother’s been saving to pay his taxes and you buy a plane ticket.You start counting the days again.

  You spend December in a three-storey apartment that he rents for you in the centre of the village and where he leaves you alone all day and sometimes even all night. It’s cold, damp, grey. You hardly ever see him and you don’t understand his absence. Neither of you can find a way to put together the pieces of the previous summer, swallowed up by the silence of autumn, dissolved in anger and infidelity. Yet your fascination with him sinks in like a nail, you are at once happy and broken, unable to make sense of yourself, you go round and round in circles inside the three storeys of the cold house, in the rainy village, every day feeling chillier in both body and soul, every day more confused.You think he’s magnificent. From saying them over and over to yourself, you wear out in your head the few words he’s set down for you between the dark sheets, you strip them off like petals, one by one, you measure them to determine whether or not they’ll compensate for his absence.They never do.

  One night, anger wakes you with a start.You dress in the dark and go to the harbour where violent winds threaten to uproot the seaweed.You howl. Carried away by the powerful sound of the water, your voice founders, inaudible.You go to his place.You don’t know the address but you recognize the dark roses he’s told you about, and his dogs greet you with a tumultuous joy that is absolutely unwarranted.A light comes on. He steps outside in slippers and briefs.With the harshest words you know in his language, which you learned from him as it happens, you turn him into a pillar of salt and dump him there, standing between his mother’s rosebushes, in the icy murmur of the lake.You’re crazy about this man.With the kind of craziness that absence has sharpened to a razor’s edge, you’d like to make him bleed to death. He doesn’t reply, there’s the usual delay between thinking something and expressing it, while you turn around and stomp back to your damp house. He’s been demolished. He’ll tell you so, much later.

  It snows in the village for the first time in forty years, on that very night. The snow sticks to the rough stones of the medieval walls like mushrooms on the trunks of trees. It comes up to the eyes of windows, opened now and then by someone who sticks out a hand to check that it’s really true. You have the frivolous impression that
the snow is falling just for you so you can start writing your story again on a blank page.You have the impression that the sky is trying to make your two countries resemble one another. The snow brings out a smile as familiar as a school bell. He comes for you around noon, stammering. You agree to follow him to the house of a friend where the pipes are frozen.

  Familiarity with snow restores human activities to their proper proportions. The villagers don’t possess that habit. The women stay inside, arms folded, brows knit, fearing unknown dangers for their men. The men go outside bareheaded, blasphemy streams from between their frozen ears. They insist on driving their cars, skid on the road, get lost in snowdrifts. Laughing nervously, they step on the gas, then give up, slamming the car door, and walk back home where just this once, the mothers themselves get out the bottle of grappa. Only children and dogs seem to understand what snow is really made of. Snow is made of water transformed into a school holiday, a village-wide amusement park, it’s a bee that melts on their tongues, it’s the sudden presence of both parents at the same time. The children run with the dogs, crying out, they roll on the ground, and get their boots full of it.

  People count on the sun to get rid of the snow. Heating systems and pipes are frozen, the power lines give up.You go with him through the village on a lengthy round of emergency repairs. He spends the day explaining that you have to keep a trickle of water running, and lecturing to clients who’ve refused to invest in a better system. By giving him a chance to help out others, the storm also allows him to make a promotional tour. He doesn’t let anyone pay because he knows when he goes to Giuseppe’s that he is guaranteeing himself easy acquisition of the next hunting permit, and that by going to Massimo’s, he’ll get free seeds for his mother’s garden. You observe all that and you understand that he moves in a limited space where every person is connected to all the others by a kind of economic intermarriage, by the reassuring burden of mutual survival, by an archaic debt that lies dormant behind every window in the village, behind every face.