Fences in Breathing (10 page)

BOOK: Fences in Breathing

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The smell of ink lingers in the landscape. I am trying to understand. Inside/outside. What is inside me? What is outside and why should this matter if it is not in me? Having a body is something we rarely think about because it is normal to be in one’s body and to follow it like an instinct that precedes our thoughts. Having a body comes
from the verb
to be born
, and the word
mother
is never far behind. The body of she who gives birth varies very little from one language to another. Later on, we see if there is tenderness in her gestures, if the tenderness is repeated.

When the sentences in my head became shorter, tighter, I understood that I could at any moment fall into a disturbance of the senses, get violently carried away in mid-sentence or lose all sense of time in that same spot. It’s one of the reasons I cling to the landscape like a surreal little girl in the centre of a drawing of a beautiful blue sky with a shimmering horizon.

Around the château, it’s like there’s nothing left but the lovely smell of roses and cedar hedge. Al, the gardener, still works here. He comes twice a week to rake, weed, water, harvest. With him I can talk about the war. Nobody around us wants to discuss it. It’s a taboo subject, just like what happened in Montréal in December 1989. He is very familiar with the geography of both countries. He knows all about the trees and plants from the very tip of Key West to the shores of Baffin Island and even farther north. Hibiscus or potentilla, palmaceae or betulaceae, he knows. I can tell him how I went from Montréal to Gaspésie, then on to Halifax, where there were still boats that met up with ships in international waters. One day he simply said, ‘Water, I pushed their heads under water. It could go on for hours. You couldn’t make a mistake and
keep the head under too long. It was horrible. There was always a risk of breaking their necks, we had to work in twos and be gentle with our big hands. That took good judgment. The palms of my hands can still feel the slippery scalps, the wet hair getting tangled between our fingers. Their heads thrashed about vigorously. The faster they moved their heads, the more noisily they suffocated. It took patience. We always played music
made in U.S.A
.’ I now believe there is something unreal in this man. I can no longer look at his hands. He said he wanted to leave for Thailand soon.

More and more I love darkness for itself, it soothes me, makes me feel good, though I don’t quite understand why. I also love it because I am trying to imagine language without light, as though I wanted to understand how things were before language, when, deep in the throat, syllables and vowels were not yet organized and it was necessary to tilt one’s head back to allow sounds to fly through the open air, terrifying, guttural or strident. In the beginning, I thought the other language would enlighten me, clarify the mysteries of my inner life. I wanted to learn to read inside myself. Reading inside oneself may not be important.

Somehow, by setting the original
me
and a fictional
me
in a foreign language, I thought I might succeed in covering every angle of the idea that the body renews itself. I
rarely write in the ‘desperately tomorrow’ mode, yet it does happen, such as right now, when the voice, in fragmenting meaning, becomes concerned, oh and how!, with seeing itself go thus with its hand outstretched toward infinity, in life and in death. I then grasp that if this irresistible arousal requires words, it’s because their great reserve of the absolute revives the meaning of life time and again. Meanwhile there will be, there were, hollows, games, depositions. What is there to understand other than simple sentences like those I read sitting in the garden in the afternoon, craving images? What else is there to read but my intention to not disappear?

At the time I was writing the book in the foreign language, I had come to believe that the effort required would be so great that it would force me to refine the meaning of what I nonchalantly called my ‘desire for immensity.’ I knew the foreign language had the reputation of containing a large number of words used to measure and interpret the physical world. Words abounded to talk about the cosmos, black holes, dark matter and constellations. What’s more, this other tongue allowed me to shift from
I
to third-person singular and vice versa without justification, without crossing the bridge of identities and differences. It was useful to me from dawn till dusk and always gave me the impression of standing in the truth of things and of sensations. With this language, I was
simultaneously intimate and public. I was afraid of nothing. I claimed to be afraid of nothing, for I could also lie whenever it struck my fancy. To enter and exit at will the landscape of my loves and of my anxieties.

Inside/outside rolls the language of passions. Part of me is visible, the other sunk into the invisible. Every hour imperceptibly shifts the visible part of what I am into another dimension. The invisible part whirls around the garden above the lake, I know it sometimes goes back to the darkness of before language. This I know. It’s the invisible part that gives life to the life in me and around me. I would like to know what it is made of and how it travels through the body without ever quite rendering it nostalgic.

A few moments ago, we saw an aurora borealis, a phenomenon quite rare if not impossible at this latitude. Yet there it was, flaunting its curves, its breathing, its all-powerful choreography of arabesques. Tatiana leaned over to me: ‘You can see, can’t you, that time is visible. Just look at those watches in the armoire. The time you spend watching time makes it visible. Surely you’re aware that time is a great curved horizon that barely separates us from our origins.’ It was at that moment that the first curves of the aurora borealis appeared. Kim and June joined us with piping-hot tea, which we sipped slowly. The sound of the cups being put down onto saucers, the movement of the little spoons tapping against the edge of the china, nicked the silence. It was still possible for our dazzled eyes to embrace the blackness of northern-hemisphere nights.

Every day now, in my mind, I am sitting in the garden imagining the present. As though it were my true nature,
I am starting to want to touch the invisible part of myself. I am tenacious in the landscape. I would love to be able to give darkness a new name.

The war is still raging over the Northwest Passage.
I am everywhere I am. I don’t dare write: I am frozen, fossilized in combat position.

NOTES

The epigraphs are from the following publications:

Page 7: Alessandro Baricco, translated by Alastair McEwen,
Ocean Sea
(New York: Knopf, 1999).

Page 11: Joë Bousquet,
Le meneur de lune
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1946/1998). Quote translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood.

Page 51: François-René de Châteaubriand,
Mémoires d’outretombe
(Paris: Penaud Frères éditeurs, 1849). Quote translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood.

Page 73: Louky Bersianik,
Axes et eau, poèmes de « la Bonne Chanson »
(Montréal:
VLB
éditeur, 1984). Quote translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood.

Page 103: Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell, ‘The Eighth Elegy,’
The Duino Elegies
in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Vintage, 1982).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Nicole Brossard thanks the Foundation Ledig-Rowohlt for the three weeks spent writing in Le Château de Lavigny.

Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood warmly thanks the Canada Council for the Arts for making this adventure possible through their financial support. Also, big big thanks to Alana Wilcox for her unfailing editorial presence and brilliant attention to detail. And of course, to Nicole Brossard for trusting me, once again, with what matters.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicole Brossard was born in Montreal in 1943. Since 1965, she has published more than thirty books, including
Museum of Bone and Water, The Aerial Letter
and
Mauve Desert
. Her contribution and influence to Quebec and francophone poetry is major. Brossard has twice been awarded the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, first in 1974 and again ten years later. In 1965, she co-founded the literary periodical
La barre du jour
and, in 1976, the feminist journal
Les têtes de pioche
. That same year, she co-directed the movie
Some American Feminists
. She was also awarded the Prix Athanase-David, Quebec’s highest literary distinction. In 2006, she won the Canada Council’s prestigious Molson Prize for lifetime achievement. Most of her books have been translated into English and Spanish and many others in different languages. Her collection
Notebook of Roses and Civilization
was shortlisted for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her most recent book is an anthology of her work edited by Louise Forsyth,
Mobility of Light
. Nicole Brossard lives in Montreal.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood lives in Montréal, her home-town. She is the auther of
Re-belle et infidèle: la traduction comme pratique de ré-écriture au féminin / The Body Bilingual : translation as a rewriting in the feminine
(Remue-ménage/Women’s Press, 1991), and of many texts about her practice of both literary and art text translation. As a translator she has co-authered numerous works of theory and fiction, into English and into French, and was shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Award in 2005. Her practice has led to parallel art experiences, such as years of ‘’performative lecturing’ in North America and Europe, and an exhibition of her art text
translation artefacts
(Galerie La Centrale/Powerhouse, Montréal, 2001). After teaching for two decades, she is now figuring out what being retired means. This is her fourth Nicole Brossard book.

Typeset in Jenson

Printed and bound at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane, 2009

Translated by Lotbinière-Harwood

Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox