Catherine Leroux: The Party Wall

“And you? What’s your name?”

“Édouard.”

“Édouard — that’s a lovely name.”

“It’s because I was conceived on Prince Edward Island, l’Île-du-Prince-Édouard.”

“No kidding?”

“That’s what I was told. Yun — what kind of name is that?”

“Korean. It means ‘melody.’”

“You’re a musician?”

“Hardly. I’m a chemist.”

They spend the night in a room with one bed. Yun doesn’t like to French kiss; she says it’s cannibalistic. But, supple as a bow, she enjoys running her lips along the spine, brushing the floating ribs, meandering over the inner thighs. They don’t get much sleep before sunrise, then they drowse until the cleaning lady raps on the door. At eleven o’clock sharp they are sitting in the Monte Carlo once again.

The road turns dreary. The extravagance of the South, its incongruous vegetation, the madness of the religious billboards give way to the monotony of Yankee farmland. Édouard steps on the gas. There’s no time to lose; the pain is gaining ground and he must get to Montreal post-haste. When he can’t bear it any more, Yun takes the wheel. She strokes Édouard’s forehead while steering the Monte Carlo with a lack of precision that, even so, doesn’t frighten Édouard. They reach downtown Montreal at nightfall.

“I can’t remember the last time I saw a skyscraper,” Édouard remarks.

On a piece of hamburger wrapping, he scribbles an address and a few directions; then he hands Yun the car keys.

“You should arrive by midday tomorrow if you don’t stop too often.”

“You look weak. Are you sure you don’t want me to stay with you?”

“Quite sure. I’ll be in good hands. A friend of mine is driving down in a few days. I’ll catch up with you as soon as I’m done here.”

She gives him a tongueless kiss, which nevertheless thrills him to the marrow; then she strides away, her hair beating time on her perfect shoulders, and Édouard could swear there is a brass band marching somewhere among the glass towers.

Again, the telephone rings when Madeleine is in bed. This time it’s for real: a girl with an indeterminate accent announces she’ll be arriving the next day. This makes Madeleine smile. Such manners are a rarity among the guests, who, generally without warning, just show up as willowy silhouettes at the far end of the road. For years Madeleine has been putting up passing strangers, travellers, and drifters from all over the continent. When her son went looking for adventure at the age of seventeen, he began to give his mother’s address to the people he met on the road. Some dream of exploring the Maritimes, others, of learning French. A few simply need a tranquil place to rest, regain their health, find some peace, sometimes their souls.

Reticent at first to open her door to strangers, Madeleine soon grew accustomed to their company, which in the end she came to genuinely appreciate. No one in Grande-Anse, her hometown, can surprise her anymore. Not one of its seven hundred and thirty-nine inhabitants has ever slept under the stars, stolen out of hunger, or hopped a freight train heading who-knows-where. None have awoken in an unidentified city. None have found true love on a godforsaken road only to lose it again a few hours later with nothing but a guitar tune, a hawk feather, and a hickey to remember it by.

So she fixed up a room for these unexpected guests and laid down some rules. Alcohol and drugs are not allowed in her house. Visitors must choose a task to be carried out during their stay, but the task need not be confined to the domestic sphere. Accordingly, a young man decided to carve a bas-relief on the trunk of the old elm tree behind the house. A girl gave a classical song recital in the village. A couple spent their whole time there hauling seawater to the garden as part of a (failed) saltwater pond experiment. The last rule — the most important one for Madeleine — is that every guest must write home before leaving.

The system works quite well, even though two or three objects disappeared from the house after some visitors had come and gone, and she had to accompany one of her lodgers to the psychiatric hospital after a disturbing episode involving a racoon and a blowtorch. But aside from those few complications, the presence of these travellers does her good. Through them she feels she has connected with Édouard. What’s more, her guests’ stories and eccentricities distracted her from grieving in the aftermath of Micha’s death, which is when Édouard’s wanderings began.

There was the thirty-year-old man with a quasi-aristocratic bearing and studied manners. His name was Frank but he insisted on being called François. He spoke French flawlessly and was helpful, courteous, and jovial. The only thing peculiar about him was this: a few days after arriving he announced to Madeleine that on this day of June 6, 1944 he was celebrating the great victory of the Normandy landings. Fifty years after the fact, François lived through the ensuing weeks as if they were the last days of the Second World War; he kept Madeleine abreast of the slightest retreat of Axis troops, every Allied manoeuvre, and described for her the wild parties he claimed to go to at night in the basements of Saint-Germain-des-Près. Fearing at first that she might have to make another trip to the psychiatric ward, Madeleine soon put her mind at rest. Frank was neither unbalanced nor delirious. He had simply decided to recreate that year, so crucial for the history of the West, and to experience each moment with the same intensity that Europeans must have felt at the time. When the Third Reich finally collapsed, Frank dropped his Parisian accent, returned to the 1990s and picked up his backpack, telling Madeleine, “Thank you so much, Madame Sicotte, for welcoming me to Grande-Anse. I’m a new man.” Then he turned around and she never heard from him again.

Madeleine was also visited by a woman with long grey hair — which always seemed to snare dead leaves or bits of wood — who said she was completely amnesiac. As a result, her stay at Madeleine’s house was a total reconstruction, a project in which Madeleine immersed herself body and soul, trying by every possible means to help the woman find clues about her identity, making phone calls left and right, even hiring a hypnotherapist from Gaspésie in the hope of dislodging a few fragments of her history. The woman asked to be called Missy and favoured a different approach, whereby she reconstructed her past through suppositions. “My fingers are long and slender, so I’ll bet I was a concert pianist,” she proposed. Or: “I have the feeling I was surrounded by men my whole life, which no doubt means I was a prostitute or a madam in a brothel.” After a few weeks Madeleine gave up the idea of discovering even a smidgen of information about the woman, who, in any case, preferred to speculate. Then Madeleine received a phone call from Édouard. She filled him in on the situation and asked him if he remembered Missy and how he’d met her. “A crone with witch’s hair? Yes, her name is Cynthia,” he answered. “I don’t know if she’s amnesiac but when I met her she remembered very clearly how her husband had left her for a Hooters waitress. She ended up on the streets because he refused to give her so much as a penny.” Following that conversation, Madeleine approached Missy ever so gingerly and told her she’d found out that her real name was Cynthia and that she hailed from Colorado. Missy’s eyes went blank. “Yes, my dear, it’s true. I was trying to forget it,” she answered before packing her suitcase.

Madeleine came to understand that these passing travellers are all to some extent liars, runaways, and crazy, and that her house matters for them in ways that are beyond her. So she welcomes them without judging or questioning; she receives these characters as if they were living postcards sent by her son, who never writes.