Rising Abruptly (13 page)

Jacques finishes lacing his rock shoes and, with great precision, climbs the perimeter walls of his Bowness bungalow. Maddie follows his progress along the open-plan house, all inner walls knocked down, Jacques having turned his home into one big climbing gym. With fingers and toes, he grips plastic holds of various shapes and sizes that, he explained to her, he had bolted to the studs behind the wood panels.

Very safe. You should try it. I'd belay you.

Maybe she will. Watching his ease sharpens her desire.

He rests on his big toes, looking at her: Think about it. Montréal lies pretty close to sea level. Only Mount Royal gives the city some elevation. Its highest point being at a mighty 233 metres.

How do you know that?

I'm a climber. And, like your Mama, something of a bookworm.

She can see that. Books strewn about the place like so many dirty socks.

Calgary, on the other hand, has an elevation of about 1,000 metres.

He climbs sideways as well as up. Like an ant following a beam, he works his way along the slanting ceiling with the special overhangs. Stops and rests on bones, with arms and legs straight. The higher you climb in the mountains, he continues, the lower the atmospheric pressure, the thinner the air and the lower the boiling point of water. Which means that cooking food in high mountains is a major pain in the butt.

He downclimbs, working sideways and, without touching ground, climbs back up, clinging to walls in the front, then to walls in the back of the house. Back up near the ceiling once more, he stops again, locking knees and elbows, twisting his neck to look at her from high above, and grins: If at sea level you made a relish of onions, Maddie baby, and it had to cook for one hour, at 7,000 metres with the water boiling point being 80°C, your relish would take thirteen hours to come out just right. He holds himself in the static position of the monkey hang to strengthen finger tendons, forearm muscles, legs, improve stamina. And, to pass the time, he reads Maddie one of her mom's postcards, which he fixed to the ceiling just the other day:

Père Marquette, ma chérie, staved off hunger when he explored the south shore of Lake Michigan by eating a wild onion (or was it wild garlic?) the Indians in the region called shikaakwa. And this became chicagou to the French explorers.

He moves again and shouts: Isn't that a hoot? Chicago, the Big Onion. Or is it, the Big Garlic?

Amused by his banter, Maddie watches Jacques's reflection in the north window. Feet apart, knees bent, arms fully extended, grabbing the holds above his head, he straightens his legs, now his hands at shoulder level. As he gets up, he reaches with his right hand to a higher hold, then does the same with the other hand and resumes his climbing. He breathes hard, but otherwise climbs as if walking on the floor. Maddie's onion practice is as good as Jacques's climbing skills. Why does she keep peeling off?

Jacques finally lowers himself to the floor and hugs her from behind, his strong arms warm against her skin. He rubs his body against the full of her back: Come to bed.

As you just discovered, Jacques, I'm a night owl. My nocturnal activity will deprive you of sleep. I should move out.

You just moved in. Stay as long as you want and, as promised, each time I go into the hills, I'll bring you a couple of litres of glacier water.

She hugs him for his kindness: Jacko, I know how sleep deprivation can lead to spatial distortion. And in your job as a roofer and then your climbing, spatial distortion can be fatal.

I can sleep anywhere, my onion lady.

Several more hours of winter darkness will certainly keep Maddie awake. She will count onions, smell them, watch them tumble down on the dark panes of the western and southern windows until the rising sun opens a vista in the east window. Summer nights have the grace of shortness. She longs for them.

If my noise and the light don't disturb you, the onion smell will.

I'll get used to your night cookery.

Will he though?

Onion smell. Then, at the kitchen counter, two-year-old Maddie pressed so hard she pinned Mom's arm down, so that Mom had to wave her other elbow, as a bird with a broken wing might use the good wing to save herself. With her free arm, Mom pushed her out of harm's way of knives and boiling water.

Mais, maman, je veux voir. I want to smell the onion.

At age two, Maddie spoke clearly. Bilingual clearly.

Elle parle franc, proud Papa told Mom.

Whether in mother tongue or dans la langue paternelle, specialized words such as pungent / piquant did not yet exist for little Maddie. So, at her mother's pinned elbow, the child sniffed the unnamed dispersion. How to transform pungent / piquant through the olfactory factory? Later, she thought the word faulty. She refused to associate onions and their allies with the notion of something harmful that presumed to irritate, to sting, to bite. Pungent. The smell connected not with pain, but with desire. Piquant. The sharpness of desire. Nobody would understand, so, quietly, she went in search of the absolute answer. It began with insomnia.

The last time Maddie slept without oblivion interruptus was on her twenty-first birthday. The next day, insomnia began. She had just moved out of Mom's house into a studio apartment on the edge of downtown where the rents were cheaper and paint chipped freely. The floor near the small kitchen counter was so warped she fancied she lived in the crow's nest of an ancient ship. Each time a truck rumbled by, the entire structure swayed. Rats scurried and scratched in the inner walls. At first, she thought it was the rats' scratching that woke her in the indecent hours before sunrise. Her brain spent several nights scurrying on its own in the noisy darkness before it determined what had really woken her.

She smelled onions. Not her neighbours' cooking, not the diner's frying across the street. What she smelled belonged to the earth, to kitchen gardens in the morning. If she had pressed the juice from freshly snapped leek leaves, the damp sand still clinging to them, the scent could not have been sweeter. She sniffed inside the cabinet under the kitchen sink where she kept her onions in an open shoebox. They were dry as they should be and no rat had pierced the layers of crackly skin to get at the juicy flesh.

Maddie discussed the matter with her mother. A few days later, she received this postcard:

Last Saturday, I checked the library, ma chérie. I found no record that rats eat onions, nor, if in times of famine and infestation, rats ruined onion crops, even in the Middle Ages, the golden age of the rat. What I found is that aphids avoid garlic. If one day you have a garden, plant garlic heads among your herbs and edible flowers. I speculate that if aphids are repelled by the sulphur compounds released as they suck the juice of garlic shoots, rats may have developed the same aversion to
Allium cepa
. Still, beware. Onions have their pests.

Maddie pinned Mom's postcard to the wall with a thumbtack.

The rats kept to themselves inside the walls. Still, every night around three
A.M.
, onion vapours swirling inside her nose roused her. She visualized a yellow mist churning in the nasal cavity, snaking through narrow passages opening into the spongy swamp of her brain until the alliaceous mist hit the olfactory bulb. In full smell mode, she closed her eyes, but insomnia took root.

Dizzy chill in the vertigo of night. A distinct constriction of the spine in the caudal region. Sweat, spasms. Legs jerking. Skin itching. Keeping eyes closed. Tumbling into a shallow hole. Heart jumping, strangling the larynx. Constriction in the tail end and no dawn yet. No dawn.

Only that onion smell. Raw, fried, pickled. Mostly pickled. Garlic, shallot, leek, chive, scallion, onion. Mostly pearl onion. Sweet and sour scent, the three o'clock breath. Tart and sweet lacing around the tongue, inside the nose.

Roaming the small room with the warped floor. Listening to rats inside their secret world. The room in darkness hid its ugly face. A yellow glow came in from street lights. Maddie stood at the curtainless window. Grime on glass diffusing the pale light made a curtain of sorts. The street below so deserted, not even alley cats roamed. Outside, through the pearlescent dirt clinging to the window, Maddie saw onions falling from the sky, a hail of pearls pounding the street.

The perversion of making coffee in the middle of insomnia. Strong, black. At three
A.M.
, the jolt in the mouth. Overdosing on insomnia.

Hypnotized, she drew a taste not yet known. Drawing concentric circles on a peeling wall. The transparent, moist skins between the close coats of onion flesh. Outer layers of parchment paper, crisp. Drawing concentric circles. The universe contained in an onion. Onion rings, the fabrication of time.

Later, Mom sent this postcard:

“Indeed the tears live in an onion that should water this sorrow.” I am deep into Shakespeare, ma chérie. You are not alone with onion eyes. Try to sleep. Did you drink warm milk with honey and anise seeds and a little grating of nutmeg? Or you may chew on cardamom seeds. The Indonesians recommend cardamom for stomach disturbances which, as you know, can upset the sleep of the most placid person. At the very least, since, as your papa used to say, les oignons font pleurer, you may cry yourself to sleep. Sweet dreams, Daughter.

What about the Lady of Shalott? Did she have dragon breath? Did she cry herself to sleep? Did the sulphurous emanations of her flesh drive her to social distraction? But her beauty was also the mother-of-pearl of the earth in subtle shades of white, yellow and red, mauve, grey, purple and violet. Something not yet occurred formed in Maddie's mind.

Later, Mom sent this postcard:

That diplomat Prior wrote: “Who would ask for her opinion / Between an oyster and an onion?”

Still drawing concentric circles on walls in the middle of warped insomnia. Leek / poireau. Investigating the root of the matter. Kalonji. The black seed of the wild onion. Kali for black humour? Kalonji, the black seed sprouting out of lidless vigil, forming concentric circles on walls. Getting hypnotized, getting closer.

At four
A.M.
, Maddie made Japanese rice that she seasoned with powdered green tea and rice vinegar. She smelled the rice. Mild, sweet. A pearl onion flitted across her mind, a shadow on her night walls of concentric circles. She formed small sticky balls between oiled palms and stacked them in a pyramid on a glass plate. The rice balls released a faint pickled onion smell and they did resemble cocktail onions. After her nuits blanches, her stomach quivered. Even cardamom seeds wouldn't help. She could only eat the gentle grain, sacred in other parts of the world where people slept. And she catnapped in the corners of certain hours.

For twelve nights, the smell of onion followed her everywhere.

She roamed the streets; the smell accompanied her. She tensed up at noises hiding in shadows; the smell clung to her. On her way back to her room, she passed under the purple neon sign of a martini glass with a swizzle stick of light and an olive at the bottom of the glass. The purple had a defect and the olive shone white. Not a martini then; rather, a Gibson. She saw herself snatch the pearl. Pop it into her mouth.

At five
A.M.
on the twelfth night, out of the irritant of sleep deprivation, she knew she had to create the perfection of a thousand-year-old pearl.

Maddie visited her mother's house.