Catherine Leroux - Madame Victoria

They live facing the wind, and each day they celebrate their reunion. They lie down on the oblong beaches, cover themselves with dead leaves, and Victoria regains the kind of sleep she likes: blunt and overpowering. In the morning, the little one snuggles inside her hood and they set out in search of food. She chews grass and serves it to him on her thumbnail. A hundred times a day she strokes her son’s cheeks and kisses his innumerable fingers. He’s in the water she drinks and in the leather of her soles. He is everywhere.

They have just crossed the river when she’s arrested. The officers explain that she can’t sleep outside, this isn’t Montreal, and there are laws, and places for people like her. They take her, along with her baby, to one such place. The bed stinks, the window is tiny, and the water in the toilets is foul and won’t swirl when you flush. Fortunately, the little guy has no trouble slipping under the doors and goes out to play in the fresh air whenever he likes. Victoria continues to caress him in her belly, where the salutary tugs persist. She refuses to eat and doesn’t answer the questions that are put to her.

Grumpy women come to examine every inch of her. They squeeze, grope, ask her to cough, to spread her legs, they take her blood and her urine, and one of them even dares to press down on her belly as though, under the shirt and skin, she had seen a little angel capering about in his mother’s pink waters. She is shut in for weeks. The little one grows impatient and Victoria, weaker. To thrive, they need the vastness of the countryside and the cool of the night. A thousand times she thinks of escaping. Her fatigue bars the way.

On the morning when two square-shouldered, clean-shaven men come for her, her wound suddenly reopens. She screams and protests. The little one hasn’t come back yet. “We have no choice, Madame. Montreal is the place for you. Your cancer is too complicated for the local hospital.” She has no idea what they’re talking about and wraps her hands over her belly as they drag her to an enormous vehicle. She cries the whole way, a seven-hour drive; she doesn’t want to go to Montreal, they’re driving too fast, the little guy will never be able to catch up. As they pass hideous, reeking factories, she sobs even louder. Her only consolation is to feel him lodged in her belly. Over and over she says, “Never apart again. Never apart again.”

They take her to a building perched on a mountain. It looks like an ancient castle surrounded by woods and she finds some comfort in this. She waits in a room overlooking the woods, until a lady finally comes to speak to her. She says she is Dr. Eon, that Victoria is under her care, that it’s complicated because she has no papers but they’ll make do without because her life is at risk. She announces they will open her belly to remove a lump of tissue that is trying to kill her. Victoria is frightened, she hesitates; can she share her secret with this woman? The doctor has eyes of different colours, and this reassures her. She explains that she’s willing to have the operation, but they must be very careful with the baby in her belly because she loves him so much and doesn’t want to lose him.

“It’s not a baby, Madame. It’s a tumour. It’s quite possible you feel a tingle that may seem like something moving, but it’s absolutely impossible that you’re pregnant. Given your age.” So Victoria starts to scream, refuses to let them cut her open, flings anything within reach at Dr. Eon. More women arrive, grab her wrists and ankles, strap her down, Victoria howls, calls them murderers. They give her an injection.

She wakes up feeling that forty years have just elapsed. The restraints are gone and her abdomen is bound up with a straggly bandage. She is not in pain. But the moment she touches her stomach, she understands. They’ve taken her baby from her. She can’t even manage to cry, and from her parched tongue she knows for sure they’ve drugged her. Outside, the light is long, full as a bottle on the sea; the summer chants a cheeky nursery rhyme. She tries to get dressed, to slip a foot out of the bed but the bandage pins her down. She’s been sliced, paralyzed. She pisses on the sheet.

The nurse who washes her and changes her dressings tries to find out if someone will be waiting for her when she’s discharged. “My son.” She asks where Victoria plans to go. “Out.” The nurse doesn’t contradict her and brings back leaflets about shelters that look like all the places where Victoria had stayed in Quebec City. She guesses that, once again, they have no intention of letting her choose. As soon as she’s back on her feet they’ll force her to go to some other place where her son won’t be able to find her. She can’t let that happen.

At night she gets up noiselessly to exercise. She has done enough walking in her lifetime to understand which muscles must stay strong, which nerves must be kept limber. She trains. She wants to get back into shape. Because the only thing she knows for sure is that if he’s not inside anymore, he’s outside. During the day she makes a show of being weak and in pain, and asks to be given tranquilizers, which she then spits into her pillowcase along with the other drugs she’s been ordered to swallow. She pretends to be drowsy, shaky, miserable, and no one is onto her.

A lid of clouds sits over the ground as if to keep the night quiet. She decides this is the right moment. Her legs are firm, her belly is entirely free of pain; her belly may be dead but she is very much alive. She slips out of her nightgown and into a uniform pilfered the previous night. In the faded mirror, she looks at herself for the first time in ages. She’s a wreck, yet ecstatic to know her treasure is waiting for her somewhere. Her head spins and her heart races.

Wearing slippers, she treads silently down the corridor. She finds her way, the door opens and presents her with the outside as others surrender whole countries. It all belongs to her. After a few hesitant steps on the asphalt she hurries toward the trees. They’re thin and scattered, but they’ll do. If she can get across Montreal going from tree to tree without ever touching concrete, she’ll be saved. But she’s prepared to crawl under the pavement, in the sewers full of rats as bloated as billionaires, to be reunited with her son.

The slope is steep and the breeze is warm. Victoria is reminded she has long hair when she feels it brushing her back, and she smiles. Never has she felt this free. She climbs to the top of the knoll. From this vantage point she can see Montreal’s complicated roofs, its cracked avenues, its resolute inhabitants, and she tells herself she may have been wrong about this place. The city hums with tenderness. The branches around her start to dance and something commands her to stay put. This exactly where she ought to be.

His laughter is what she hears first. Laughter so exultant that it bursts out like a cough, fitful and uncontrollable. The laughter of a baby discovering for the first time the organ that gives voice to joy. Victoria lifts her head. She can see nothing now, as a million colours explode before her eyes. His smell reaches her, as tender as butter and sugar surrendering to each other, a blend of eiderdown and saliva, and she succumbs to the giddiness brought on by this extraordinary scent. At last, he arrives and leaps into her arms with such force that she topples over backward. She hugs him and murmurs, “You’ve come back, you’ve come back” with endless admiration for this brave boy who was able to find her on an island of labyrinths.

In the dead leaves, she holds the small, bare head tightly near her heart; two round feet climb up on her hip; he nuzzles up against his mother. Victoria feels light and large, larger and larger. She grows bigger and taller and expands like warm air, like the aroma of good bread. Her son is a little ball nestled against her breast, as Victoria swells and towers over the knoll, the hospital, the mountain, as she spreads through the sky and the streets, through the houses, and to the stars. She is inside, she is outside. She is everywhere.