Catherine Leroux - The Party Wall

While keeping a firm grip on his paddle, Ariel’s hands tremble; he averts his gaze from Marie’s temple, and from the window where the light still falls on two bodies entwined.

“Ariel, I love you. You belong to me.”

Someone in the house turns off a lamp; everything goes completely dark, except for Marie’s increasingly naked skin, which is clad in a luminescent whiteness. Then she vanishes, concealed beneath a body that has swooped down on her — Ariel, at last relieved, damned for all time.

After Ariel’s resignation the universe went quiet around them, and they believed it was over. For a few days they lived in a sort of sensory void where the hours flashed by filled with nothing at all. Suspended moments. Then daily life started up again. Ariel was called back to the capital to help with the transfer of dossiers, and Marie went on a trip. Saying goodbye, they chastely kissed each other on the forehead, their hearts balanced on an invisible rope.

The drive south cannot be made non-stop, Marie was told, but she ignored the advice. For more than twenty hours she travelled down the hurricane-ravaged coast, through cities once bustling with summer vacationers and fishermen but now abandoned by inhabitants worn down by the struggle against an ever more merciless climate. Only the aged and the insane stayed behind; only the seabirds thrived there.

At dawn, her heart pounding, she ventured down a road full of potholes. Trees on either side were bent down like beaten men. On a scrap of paper stuck between her hand and the steering wheel an address written in ink was staining the palm of her hand. The last known address of Eva Volant. When she pulled up in front of the house — a cracked, dilapidated building — she burst out sobbing, unable to do what she had come to do: step out of the car, walk up to the door, ring and wait for someone to answer, speak the words: I’m looking for my mother.

With her head buried in her hands, she did not see that someone was coming toward her. The knocking on the car window made her jump.

“Can I help you?” said a quavering voice.

Marie looked up, rolled down the window and contemplated the old man standing before her. Everything about him seemed washed out. His brown eyes, his flannel clothes, his skin that must have been naturally swarthy but was now as dull as poorly steeped tea. She got out of the car, her legs still rubbery from the long road. The air was dusty and lacked cicadas.

“It’s very quiet here,” she noted.

“Oh, not all that much. There are the airplanes. At all hours, day and night. Going to the war, you see.”

She nodded. The old man stared at her.

“You’ve got my address on your face.”

This brought Marie up short. She looked at herself in the side mirror. From paper to hand, from hand to face, the directions for finding her mother’s house had ended up smack in the centre of her left cheek. Rubbing her skin, she turned back to the old man.

“I’m looking for a woman, Mrs. Volant. Does she live here?”

“No, there’s just me here, dear lady.”

“Does it ring a bell, even vaguely? Eva Volant?”

“Doesn’t sound familiar. I’ve known Julias, Christinas, Franciscas, but no Evas.”

Because the information about her mother was not quite up to date, his answer was unsurprising and did not have the demoralizing effect she had feared. Searching her heart, Marie found nothing but relief. What would she have done with a mother, now that her whole life was falling apart because of this woman? The slimmer the chance of finding her became, the more Marie realized that what she was pursuing since she had set out on this journey was a place rather than a person.

“May I go in? I’d like to take a look inside.”

The old man stiffened.

“I tell you I’m alone here — have been for at least ten years. You don’t believe me?”

“I do believe you. But I’d like to go inside just the same. I was born in this house. I’d like to visit. Five minutes, that’s all, and then I’m gone.”

“You were born here? You should have said so right away! This is your home.”

He bowed and left the way open for Marie; she stopped at the doorway as if to say a silent prayer. The interior smelled of tobacco and mildew.

“Please don’t mind the mess. You see, I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

The house was not large but it let in the light so as to create an impression of open space, of continuity with the world outside. One could easily imagine its first inhabitants being happy here, just as it was obvious that those who had followed had known all manner of misery. The old man showed Marie the kitchen, with its clutter of frozen dinner wrappings and its warped linoleum floor. He took her to the tiny bathroom, peppered with brown patches, and then the living room, which contained an unmade bed.

“I put my bed here. I prefer to sleep by the TV, you see.”

“And the bedroom?”

“That’s for my souvenirs.”

Marie stepped into a room that was darker and tidier than the rest of the house. Everywhere, the man had hung photographs of what looked like the streets of Mexico at the turn of the century. There were boxes stacked against a wall, and an old rocking chair had pride of place in a corner. Marie took a deep breath and felt as though a tree was trying to grow inside her chest. She moved to the centre of the room. It was here, under this sloped roof, that Ariel and she had come into the world a few minutes apart. She began to weep. Here is where they had taken their first breaths and together let out their first cries. They had been washed, swaddled, and no doubt laid down side by side a few hours before Marie was taken away, thereby pulling on an invisible string, an elastic waiting only for the right moment to stretch tight and hurl the twins toward one another in a movement as inevitable as the orbiting of the planets. For the first time Marie realized that their reunion, however fateful, constituted an immense consolation for that primordial sundering. The fact of having known the bliss of childhood for just a few wretched moments before being abandoned was made bearable only by the thought of having found Ariel again, no matter the circumstances and the consequences. A sort of return to the zero point of her existence, an obliteration of all those years of isolation and sadness.

Behind her she heard the noise of the television. It was time to leave. Had it been possible, she would have cut out the little bedroom and taken it with her so she might find refuge in it once Ariel went away, once the reporters began to swarm around her again, once another Jackson Pollock picture came to attack her. She fiercely clenched her fists, trying to engrave inside her every angle of the room and to imprint her own silhouette on the place that had witnessed the first hours of her existence.

“Have you found your memories among mine?”

“You might say that,” she answered, drying her eyes.

The old man walked her back to the car. At the last moment, she sensed that he would have liked for her to prolong her stay, that he had already grown accustomed to another person’s presence in his home, undoing in a few minutes years of training in solitude.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Roberto. My friends call me Roberto.”

“Thank you, Roberto.”

Her car churned up a cloud of dust and as she drove off a strident roar could be heard overhead. A warplane sliced through the sky, crossing Marie’s trajectory so as to form an X with it. Never-ending wars. So many things to fight against, and Marie was so very tired.

Far away from the major cities, the noise of the news reaches them somewhat blurred; the distance lends an unreal sheen to events. Politics has taken on the shape of a masquerade for them, and human-interest items seem like sordid tales drawn from mythology. They are not shocked by the Alaskan man accused of killing and eating his four sons, because he does not really exist. The Newfoundland cult that tried to crossbreed dogs and humans is just a joke. Nor are they even surprised when the woman receiving handsome payments in exchange for getting struck by lightning turns out to be a robot. As far as the planet’s decline is concerned, they have let go. They are ordinary spectators of a world grown so warped as to beggar belief.