Archibald Samuel - Arvida

In any case, the phonograph no longer worked, like many things in this vast dwelling. They had moved there when her father died, to perpetuate the line and take care of her mother. The family had not prospered as a result: her mother had died the following year, and their household remained childless. Gemma belonged to one of the founding families of the town, of which no trace would soon remain other than this great decrepit house, perched at the top of a cliff that overlooked the town to the west and the lake to the north. She was not ashamed of embodying decadence and extinction, she accepted it philosophically. Everywhere, beyond the sawmill, the paper mill, and the site of the aluminum smelter, the air was alive with modernity, emitting a kind of background noise that was as yet unidentifiable; would it prove to be the grating of metal or a Dixieland melody? The townspeople waited impatiently for the answer, but not her. In either case, it was a music the family would never play.

Michel was away. Michel was a man of the theatre. Gemma’s father had welcomed him into the family with reluctance, as one resigns oneself to a fatal illness, knowing that it was certainly not this man who was going to set the family back on the rails, or usher it at last into the twentieth century. But his daughter loved him, and above all Michel loved his daughter, despite her condition. He found her beautiful with her angular features, her paraffin complexion, and her tubercular mien. He liked to see her wandering through the house like the hush between the lines of a romantic poet. So much the better for him.

Michel had promised to return. He’d transferred Gemma’s parents’ annuity into his own name, and had left to try his luck in Montreal. He’d written several plays which Gemma thought very good, he could act, and there would surely be a place for him in the city. He’d promised to write and to send money. He did neither.

Gemma didn’t hold it against him in the least. He had to concentrate on his art. She spent her time dusting and taking care of the garden. The house was enormous and the garden very small, and so she spent more time inside than outside, which was all for the best; when she felt dizzy she sat down in one of the reading room’s upholstered armchairs, and gave herself up to daydreams about Michel’s success and his imminent return. There wasn’t much more to do. The phonograph needle was broken, and she’d read all the books in the house. Sometimes she danced waltzes with herself, her arms crossed, her hands on her shoulders, her head gently tilted to the right, as if offering her neck to be kissed. She could easily imagine the music when she danced, but she tired quickly.

If Michel did not return, it would be a terrible punishment, but a fair one. Michel was not dead set on having children, she knew that, but she also knew from the outset that she could not give him any. She’d lied to him, as she’d hidden the truth from her father. It was a secret she kept to herself, deeply buried: she was not made like other women, she didn’t bleed as they did, every month. She had soiled herself, like everyone, around the age of thirteen, but then she had discovered that the bleeding stopped if she took care of herself and ate properly.

Michel’s coming, I must make myself stunning. She loved alliteration and naïve rhyme, especially the way it made your tongue quiver against the palate. It tickled.

She had to preserve herself. She went down to the village less and less. The people’s faces repelled her, and the walk along the road was long, without horse or car. She cultivated her garden. At first, she had set a few rabbit traps in the nearby woods, but the need to skin them deeply disgusted her, and in truth she hated meat. The vegetable garden produced all she needed, and Gemma put up preserves for the winter. She lived on very little, in any case.

No suitor declared himself during the two years that she waited for Michel, but townsfolk came by occasionally to see how she was. Burly men with shirtsleeves rolled up, along with wives in their Sunday frocks. The men smoked while gazing down at the toes of their boots, and the women asked all sorts of stupid questions, extending invitations that Gemma sometimes had a hard time courteously refusing. Soon she no longer saw anyone, but she awoke from time to time to find pots of food on her doorstep, which she went the same day to empty in the woods before scouring them, her stomach turning, with well water. The intentions were all good, she knew, but it was out of the question for her to eat those fatty soups and those dishes with mud-thick sauces that common people thought fortifying, but that only served to add bulk to a paunch and make women bleed.

You couldn’t see the lake from the house, not even from the second floor. From generation to generation the family members had tired of the view, and had let a wall of trees grow up around the point, which had the merit at least of sheltering the house from the wind. Despite this barrier, Gemma sometimes had the feeling, in the depths of winter, that the gusts might raise the house up and heave it stone by stone into the ravenous waters of the lake.

Early in the morning or just before going to bed, she took the road leading towards the town, to where the trees gave way and brought the lake into view. It was an enormous lake, and when the clouds rolled in and shrouded the other shore, it might well have been an ocean. She stood there for a long time, her arms folded, watching the thunderous waves that were invisible from the house.

One day, when she found herself there at dusk, she felt as if a giant hand were lifting her up in its palm, and she let herself be carried off by the wind. For a long time it twirled her about like a cloth ripped from a clothesline, like a poplar leaf, like a speck of dust, just above the lake. She saw herself mirrored in its surface, and for once she found herself beautiful.

When he arrived back in town, Michel did not receive a very warm welcome. He must have been judged severely for his prolonged absence, and perhaps stories were circulating. He took no offence. Soon he would be with Gemma, and for him that was all that counted. There had been no successes in Montreal. Like many failed artists, he had conceded his defeat in small increments, tirelessly repeating to himself the stirring saga of his own genius, prodigious, but misunderstood. He returned, resigned to his wife and his annuity, to contentedly count out the days, and to await posterity in the great empty house that was divorced from a world that had not known how to take his measure.

He bought an enormous bouquet of flowers, and in his enthusiasm, decided to climb the road to the house on foot. By so doing, he spared himself the knowledge that no one would have agreed to give him a ride.

It was not so much his abandonment of Gemma that determined the villagers’ reaction to Michel, nor even that it was bruited about that he had applied himself rather lethargically to his artistic ambitions and had squandered his money in the company of a woman whom the prudes spoke of as an actress, but whom the malicious called a whore. Had he been more insightful, not only would Michel have been a better playwright, but he would have seen that the people didn’t really hate him, but looked on him rather with an uncommon blend of fear, scorn, and pity.

Madame Nazaire, the butcher’s wife, had gone up a few months earlier to retrieve the clean dishes that Gemma left on the doorstep. She found them untouched. Under the towel draped over the broiling pan, the roast beef was crawling with maggots. She left everything the way it was and headed home, driving her team of horses a bit too fast on the long descent.

Monsieur Nazaire made the return trip the next day, after having closed up his butcher’s shop, and fetched the dishes. To all the questions his wife and two sons asked him on his return, he replied by slamming his fist on the table. He left the kitchen without having touched his plate, and sat himself down in the living room, in his armchair, where he drank enough small glasses of De Kuyper to empty half a bottle. Before going to sleep, he said to his wife: