Catherine Leroux - Madame Victoria

The information is shared and distributed throughout the country, but no one is able to identify her. For Germain, all the fuss and repeated failures do nothing but rub salt into the wound. He wishes they would leave Madame Victoria in peace now. After all, she may have wanted to die unobtrusively. Maybe she’d sought anonymity and solitude on purpose. And surely the whole circus over her bones must rankle her spirit longing for just a little silence so it can detach itself from this mountain pierced by such a heavy cross.

Then, as Germain looks out at the canopy of trees and the roofs that speckle Mount Royal, he thinks again. What she wants is for someone to speak her name.

OUTDOORS IS A MESS. Chaotic winds shake the air, snow is blowing in every direction, ice and thaw fight it out for control of the ground, clouds swirl overhead, the window is frozen shut. She presses her hand against the pane, waits for the water to spread out between her palm and the glass, and places her eye in front of the gap to look at the mayhem outside. She draws her bathrobe tighter around her ribcage as if to warm the landscape, to find comfort in the feeling of being sheltered from everything. Outside is outside. Inside is a nest, a knot, the earth’s axis. A solid heat holds them, her and the little guy. She hears him wriggling. She steps toward him with a smile. On the windowpane, the frost fills in the gap by weaving stars that slowly merge.

She believes she’s not asleep anymore. She doesn’t think she slept last night or the night before or the one before that. Nor did she sleep during the day, though she has no recollection at all of what she did while the little guy was napping. Yet she’s sure she dreamed three days ago – her baby had sharp teeth and webbed fingers – but God knows how long it takes for the brain to produce a dream, maybe just a few seconds.

Earlier, she lay down knowing he always naps for two or three hours after nursing at noon, the time when the will gives up and the scarce February light brushes against the living room wallpaper. She wanted to let herself go, but the child makes such weird sounds in his sleep, squeals and whistles that give the impression he’s choking, despite the nurse’s assurances that this is normal. These noises seek her out in the place where her tiredness strives to win out; they jostle her body as though numerous little wires were attached to her skin. Now she’s nothing but a big puppet that can easily be set trembling, brought to her feet at feeding time, made to sway back and forth to soothe the infant’s colic pains.

She would so much like to go out for a breath of air, but the winter won’t let her. It has snowed constantly ever since the delivery. At first she was too weak to even think of setting foot outside. When she closed her eyes she could swear an artillery shell had punched a hole through her belly. But that was weeks ago and she still can’t bring herself to bundle up the baby, pull on her boots, cut a path through to the poorly cleared street, and then walk over to the convenience store, with its meagre, stale-looking goods. The outside world has nothing to offer her anymore.

All that matters from now on can be found in this tiny apartment that smells of wet diapers and Zincofax. The only adult she’s talked to since she got back is the grocery deliveryman, who comes to her door with red splotches on his face, as if the winter has slapped him. She tells him her name is Victoria, since it makes no difference now what her name is. Her mother, her sister—they don’t call. Her friends? She never gave them her new address. She chats with her baby as an excuse to talk to herself, for launching into long monologues meant to confirm in her own mind that she made the right choice. She cries every day.

Running away to Quebec City or Montreal held no attraction for her. Unlike so many of her friends, she never hated the place where she grew up. She never said, “Sault-au-Mouton—what a dump!” or yearned for the noisy grid of the big city streets. To her, Montreal, which she’d visited only once, was where people ended up after ditching the idea that the world could be a beautiful place. The one thing that let the city breathe was the mountain. Even the river was dirty, its shores obliterated, as if the waterway were a shameful wrinkle that needed to be concealed. Nothing like what the river becomes on the North Shore. At Sault-au-Mouton the Saint Lawrence is pure prowess, a tour de force. The continent’s rippling banner.

She could not imagine living far from all that. Which is why, when it became clear that her decision meant she no longer existed for her family, she crossed over. Going from the North Shore to the Lower Saint Lawrence, only the switched position of sunrise and sunset on the water seems strange. She has no memory of ferrying across; she simply strode over the river in her seven-league boots, weighed down by a seven-month belly and a bagful of old clothes.

She’s a good mother, she knows this, though it does come as a bit of a surprise. She’d been told so often that at sixteen she’d be incapable of caring for a child, she ended up believing it. But from a sort of mental lookout produced by her fatigue, she can see herself in action. She is patient. Steady. Not given to discouragement. She sings, she washes, she watches, she feeds. She does what needs to be done, certain that she’ll go on doing so, even if her fat melts away, sloughed off with all this milk that spills out of her. She’ll become another kind of creature, a bird or possibly a dragonfly, something light that eats almost nothing, that buzzes over the surface of the world and rests even in mid-flight. The universe is shrinking by the minute.

Her baby has grown. He, too, has a name she never uses; she calls him my sweetie, my darling, my treasure. My heaven, my pot of gold, my little starburst. He smiles, gums his fist, grabs his foot and shakes it bewilderedly, as if the limb did not belong to him. She presses her mouth against his stomach and blows; his colour-shifting eyes open wide. She glides the tip of her finger along the meanders of his minuscule ear, and he turns his head, smiling as if he’d just been told a secret. He sucks, he nibbles, he drools. He babbles and she unlearns how to speak. The delivery man keeps on bringing her groceries; he is less flushed but just as flustered on her doorstep, perhaps because she has stopped using known words. Maybe she’s learned the language of elves, their prattle full of small miracles.

She continues to bleed. The nurse says this isn’t normal, that she is exhausted and must eat red meat, go out and breathe in the approach of spring and of the fishing that will soon start up again a few blocks from her house. She thinks of Victor, of his arms hauling in the nets and tossing fish as firm as muscles. His hands grasping the heavy ropes, his body directing the boats, the tides, and the miraculous catches. Right now he must be standing on a deck beside his father, repairing cracks and cleaning rusted portholes, breathing in the hope of the coming season, the nearing of the great shoals. She still dreams of lying down with him and drinking every inch of his skin.

He said, “You do as you like, I’ll give you what you need. Don’t ask anything else of me. Here’s some money—do what you want with it. The rest, I’ve got no time for.”

Soon after, she realized he’d chosen another, whose belly hadn’t swelled up, that he would never admit to his father he’d gotten the girl from Sault-au-Mouton pregnant, and that it wouldn’t be so easy for him to become a man. She left without telling him where she was going. Sure, she still loves him, loves whatever she recognizes of him in her son’s face. She never wants to speak to him again.