Fences in Breathing (6 page)
I often tell myself I’ve understood it all not at all but what is it I’ve understood so well I can pretend so well that it’s necessary to understand everything I don’t exist for
nothing my sketchbook is proof of this and I never cry except evenings when I absolutely have to sleep in a park so I don’t disturb anyone and because it helps me concentrate on the laughter bursting from all over town women laugh in such ways that we can’t see the fences in their breathing and thus I can often touch their fur before going to sleep this morning when I woke up I was myself again I don’t understand why I am myself without warning as though since I have been sleeping at the château living in the foreign language has crushed my identity this morning when I got up this morning I truly felt I had reintegrated my movements my breathing my worries authentic and ancient autumn is coming that’s how it is coming for sure I am going to be cold and mix up my characters between the lines the number of sketches the naughty pleasures fear and the people I often call
us
I will have to learn to remain in suspense over my sketches to shut my eyes before diving into the blackness when black occurs great big marker of night among the planets I can plainly see that night constantly changes the shade of its jet black and that this is conducive to fear and to the swirling around of words in my mouth when someone talks to me with sincerity in the first person I have trouble breathing as if there were a fine dust of silence and cosmos pouring into me a cannibal force capable of swallowing my own dreams my fictional eyes that so often ache will tell me if
it’s good or ridiculous to get so carried away into the universe with one’s sorrows and one’s armoires somebody has spread the rumour that my armoires are antiques I don’t want them taken away from me all my envelopes are stuck into the slits glued together with the bark’s saliva Kim cannot understand all she thinks about is the north and its ice that reddens lips and cheeks each one of my envelopes has wind in its sails even shut into the back of an armoire I would need mirrors like those in hotel rooms to watch everything that moves for example the silence coming and going from one wall to the other above my head before diving toward me so as to soften my eyes yes I would need other mirrors to face my characters the foreign language deletes my landmarks I am no longer able to describe the village to name the lake and the city deep inside me the horizon is receding we say this about the lines of the hand too yes it’s as if my whole body disappears when I read the headlines on the newspapers lying on the shop counter the world inside me becomes more complicated the further I get into editing images yes indeed I lose my bearings it’s difficult because of sunsets fading and of Kim leaving soon for sure my shop will be empty and I will be worried due to my good intentions all of this soils my head and damages my sight I so often imagine us heading toward the night.
The world is a huge horse leaning on his shadow with letters all around helping him stand up in the garden or in
a child’s room the horse carries the child north of the silhouette of the Far North where nobody can see us and where everyone will wait for us in vain once just once in my life I pulled out my sketchbook to see if the horse could gallop between the village and the lake I drew close-ups of his eyes before felling an oak tree in the forest behind June’s shop and I made holes and made holes until all shadows had been exhausted then the horse appeared I hugged him close sweat running down my back on my eyelids nobody was afraid of me nor of the horse anymore nobody was really afraid of anything because for once I had made proper holes in the wood without building an armoire.
Talking to oneself doesn’t hurt a soul and many people in hotels do it quite naturally talking to oneself is not pretending to talk to someone who is on one’s mind or to whom one must repeat insults and sweet nothings like in childhood and the seasons it takes a lot of freedom to talk to oneself about the world we live in freedom is buried I cannot distinguish it under the thousands of pages of law that have come into being since the steel of guns has been firing here and there at the frontiers of the real no one law can be changed without another law authorizing it I enjoy talking alone in front of large mirrors in hotel rooms it helps me juggle the various facets of my body and the objects that decorate the room I am someone who readily
acts out of fear that’s how it is when I walk three times by the same window that shows close-ups of people’s real lives it’s as if I were talking out loud to the invisible part of myself so as to not be afraid and so that it gives me joy I rearranged my armoires differently now I can count them there are ten I count only those from after those from before are in the forest scattered among the ferns the slugs and the logs of dead wood the others have little bars similar to crab-fishing cages they are smaller and each one has a white envelope in its centre inside which I do not leave a message this scares me too much like when Kim used to fill spoons with little white mounds and put flour in her nostrils so that her eyes took on these rare reflections that I then had to cross out with strokes in my sketchbook like this ||||||||||||||||||| taking care not to pierce the paper now for sure I’m worried about staying alive next to my sketches it’s out of the question to sell my armoires so that strangers can deposit their money and the turquoise blue of their dreamed lives in them.
Stay alive says the voice also applies to all girls whoever you are stay alive because of the smooth wind through the roses and through your raptures stay alive show yourself with your syllables and your images don’t be afraid to touch your melancholy stay alive despite the flies and the burns the little decorations everyone’s closed armoires stay alive arms open like pages of a dictionary breathe high and
loud between the signs the mirrors the little sketches don’t forget your grisgris and Latin grammar stay alive despite your mother in her bathtub terrorists and liars stay alive in the moon’s axis and touch go ahead touch your mirrors in the right places before watching yourself leave stay alive like somebody who is not you.
What is it in my head that makes me think I am someone else who cannot truly resemble me or maybe the opposite it is frightening this carpet of words the scroll of images and nothing to explain if we are here if we are pretending to be here if we are with someone inside ourselves whom we love or who splits our head in two so that our thoughts scatter deep into the cosmos and that at last we may cry fully emptied of our breathing.
Sometimes I question my mother mere mortal though somehow she shouldn’t be using words allowed in the foreign language and not at all necessary in mine where does this taste for immortality come from which always becomes more complicated once one’s mother is dead once one has scrubbed and scrubbed her closely with sweet oils and voluptuous silences that always open onto the same landscape with a lake in the middle whose depth is so inconceivable that we need to keep repeating this is no dream to keep reminding ourselves we truly are of woman born and will need to take our time to comprehend all of this and no longer think about fences in breathing.
I always carry with me the clipping from an Oslo newspaper that I have kept since a long-ago March twelve black plastic bags lying side by side on the cement each one containing a human shape stuck to each bag is a rectangular piece of white paper and looking at the limp plastic one sort of gets the idea of garbage needing to be moved if we turn the photograph slightly the twelve black body bags become twelve women wearing niqabs I never talk about death I only know that in life there are fears that simplify meaning and prolong heavy silence.
Today the lizards came out because of the heat their tails glitter like the sharp dazzle of stones soon Kim will be at the seventy-eighth parallel in the land of extreme darkness and of radical whiteness that make the present too vague too vast.
The letters we have traced with the shadows of our arms in order to love somebody need always to be reread I reread I would so like to tell somebody to come visit me even though it’s cold in my workshop or in the hotel room where I sometimes go and where there are sofas and large mirrors like those I saw in the château of Tatiana the Russian she who publishes stories of love of wanderlust and of guns I so long for somebody to touch my mouth and my fur in my heart I can now say how one enters someone’s thoughts there is love there is no love we settle into it it’s that simple we ignite the conversation or not we
take a look around we observe a little now I am pretending to turn my head toward the white bridge to see if somebody is coming Laure goes by wearing a black suit and carrying an enormous briefcase she is walking toward boulevard Long it’s easy to describe maybe her mother is dead I say this because of her clothing I timidly nod she doesn’t see me I don’t feel like following her any farther someone is already following her I will never get used to time’s fluidity in the foreign language it’s as if I were in an eternal present filled with cross-strokes and big fat letters in colours that are almost images there is little free time for oneself in a foreign language I always feel confined even though I am well aware that it is as vast as the imagination of someone who is afraid of sudden death it is however a language where one need not be concerned about who is truly speaking only about the verbs the generic nouns nothing specific for example to talk about trees and seasons but hundreds of words to get closer to the stars and so everybody goes travelling at any time of the year or they wish to stay in a hotel like the one where Laure and Charles stay as consolation for living in a village and probably other things like fences in breathing that I do not wish to discuss presently one life comes another life goes it’s that simple there up north I will have room to put my hands everywhere in the landscape shove them right into the daily gestures of everyone’s life I will speak the language of
dogs of polar bears of reindeer and maybe even that strange code spoken by the ugly hairless fox that roams the streets of Longyearbyen I will get close to people they will explain to me how not to fear emptiness while staring into the deep water so clear so cold they will explain how not to die I will have the feeling of being nothing of being infinitely the solitude of infinite silence several roads lead from one village to another one life comes another life goes it is hot in the middle of the sunflower fields under the still-scorching sun of early autumn once in a while a warplane flies over the fields in the next moment we say that each plane is a wound in the azure skies a lion dashing at full speed a pebble thrown with fury.
A great horse with his shadow reappears every time I go to the post office the other day I asked June if she would film my animal and give him life with her digital camera I said she needed to film in fast-forward around the horse while I pulled it in the opposite direction with a thick rope thus we would get a sense of movement the horse would certainly fall but at least we would sense that it was alive June would have to get a close-up of the eyes when I said this my hand was trembling June did not notice but a woman did notice and I felt dizzy with a pain in my chest I did not have the courage to meet the woman’s gaze while June was filming my horse I stared at the ground the lizards had not yet left us.
The matters of the other language and of non-sense swirl through the air though I strive to put certain words in parallel I’m unable to make them touch in the right place sometimes a vagueness a slight gap sweeps the sentence away all at once and everything needs doing all over again I’m afraid to run out of words the same way one fears shortages of water gas or food I don’t know how to make use of myself in the foreign language I struggle with this and the contour of mountains the pain is more mysterious than ever when I gaze at fields of sunflowers and reeds.
In the lake my mother holds me with arms outstretched like an offering to the gods I am three years old I can allow myself to be brushed by the soft wind or prepare to fly away by caressing her cheeks and stretching my arms out in front of me like laser beams if I keep doing this a while longer I will swallow a little water and from underneath contemplate a hedge of roses and my mother’s face when water penetrates her mouth and nostrils and her breathing seeps away with some red for I dig my fingers too deeply into her waist to hold her close so this is the question who becomes aware of what when we talk about everything and nothing like when I go to the post office or when I hear a fighter plane flying over the village or when I hold an innocuous pebble in my hand I am sad too many shapes are repeated in the unexplained matter that resists me with its shadow its fleeting energy
real and illegible I embrace the horse’s shadow and this is not good for me I cry only when I embrace the horse’s shadow and nobody can see me the sketchbook weighs more and more heavily in my hunting pouch words have begun to make it sink Kim sold two of my armoires and the envelopes inside them then she bought a suitcase I was unable to speak to her to add a word anger is everywhere in my eyes in my hands it is frightening I must buy some nails there is fire in my arms she sold the Armoire of Little Woes and the Armoire of Catastrophes that I had placed behind the black sofa in order to spy between their boards the words of the two madwomen who sit there when I invite them to take tea in my sad workshop.
I had to go to the city centre where the wolves are whom I used to spend time with before knowing June wolves that make holes in their skin their nostrils and their brains the travel agency faces the lake next to the casino I don’t know anyone here I would like to not be here I must buy a ticket to go hunting between the glaciers and stop being afraid I must respond to questions by asking questions without mixing up the answers earlier on in the train Laure Ravin who lives with her mother near the château was sitting by a window with her laptop on her knees the screen was bursting with letters she was reading very attentively she often looked out the window her hand was brushing circles on her pant leg as if she were trying
to clean it or to remove a stain before disembarking she recognized me and smiled there are clouds I don’t like being in town when it’s grey June says I will have to get used to the frightening noise made by icebergs when they lose their balance and topple over on themselves she showed me several nineteenth-century drawings of boats engulfed by seas that chill you with dread this is why I suddenly saw the night of time what indeed is the night of time if I am a thousand times the same person in different centuries somebody who has been folded small in the nature of
Homo sapiens
?