Madame Victoria Read online

  Biblioasis International Translation Series

  General Editor: Stephen Henighan

  1. I Wrote Stone: The Selected Poetry of Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski (Poland)

  Translated by Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba

  2. Good Morning Comrades

  by Ondjaki (Angola)

  Translated by Stephen Henighan

  3. Kahn & Engelmann

  by Hans Eichner (Austria-Canada)

  Translated by Jean M. Snook

  4. Dance with Snakes

  by Horacio Castellanos Moya

  (El Salvador)

  Translated by Lee Paula Springer

  5. Black Alley

  by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)

  Translated by Dawn M. Cornelio

  6. The Accident

  by Mihail Sebastian (Romania)

  Translated by Stephen Henighan

  7. Love Poems

  by Jaime Sabines (Mexico)

  Translated by Colin Carberry

  8. The End of the Story

  by Liliana Heker (Argentina)

  Translated by Andrea G. Labinger

  9. The Tuner of Silences

  by Mia Couto (Mozambique)

  Translated by David Brookshaw

  10. For as Far as the Eye Can See

  by Robert Melançon (Quebec)

  Translated by Judith Cowan

  11. Eucalyptus

  by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald Winkler

  12. Granma Nineteen

  and the Soviet’s Secret

  by Ondjaki (Angola)

  Translated by Stephen Henighan

  13. Montreal Before Spring

  by Robert Melançon (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald McGrath

  14. Pensativities: Essays

  and Provocations

  by Mia Couto (Mozambique)

  Translated by David Brookshaw

  15. Arvida

  by Samuel Archibald (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald Winkler

  16. The Orange Grove

  by Larry Tremblay (Quebec)

  Translated by Sheila Fischman

  17. The Party Wall

  by Catherine Leroux (Quebec)

  Translated by Lazer Lederhendler

  18. Black Bread

  by Emili Teixidor (Catalonia)

  Translated by Peter Bush

  19. Boundary

  by Andrée A. Michaud (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald Winkler

  20. Red, Yellow, Green

  by Alejandro Saravia (Bolivia-Canada)

  Translated by María José Giménez

  21. Bookshops: A Reader’s History

  by Jorge Carrión (Spain)

  Translated by Peter Bush

  22. Transparent City

  by Ondjaki (Angola)

  Translated by Stephen Henighan

  23. Oscar

  by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald Winkler

  24. Madame Victoria

  by Catherine Leroux (Quebec)

  Translated by Lazer Lederhendler

  MADAME VICTORIA

  CATHERINE LEROUX

  VARIATIONS

  Translated from the French by

  Lazer Lederhendler

  BIBLIOASIS

  WINDSOR, ONTARIO

  Copyright © Catherine Leroux, 2015

  Translation Copyright © Lazer Lederhendler, 2018

  First published in French by Éditions Alto, Quebec City, 2015.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Leroux, Catherine, 1979-

  [Madame Victoria. English]

  Madame Victoria / Catherine Leroux ; translated from the French by Lazer Lederhendler.

  (Biblioasis international translation series ; no. 24)

  Translation of French book with same title.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77196-207-0 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77196-208-7 (ebook)

  I. Lederhendler, Lazer, 1950-, translator II. Title. III. Title: Madame

  Victoria. English. IV. Series: Biblioasis international translation series ; no. 24

  PS8623.E685M3213 2018 C843’.6 C2018-901732-5

  C2018-901733-3

  Edited by Stephen Henighan

  Copy-edited by Cat London

  Cover designed by Natalie Olsen

  Typeset by Chris Andrechek

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation. Biblioasis also acknowledges the financial support of the ­Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013–2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.

  For LFDMV

  There ain’t no grave

  Can hold my body down

  —Johnny Cash

  Germain Léon is not fond of the dead. Even though, in comparison with the living, the dead are not much trouble, especially those whose days are numbered, who teeter on the edge of the steep slope that will send them back to the inert matter from which they had emerged. On their deathbeds humans are big babies, incapable of the most basic actions, forced to turn to others—sometimes the love of their life, sometimes a stranger—for their essential needs. These ones Germain is able to love and to care for: wash their withered bodies in lukewarm water, soothe their lips with a sponge, change their bandages and diapers, adjust their pillows, inject with the drug that will make their pain tolerable, then imperceptible. When he does these things Germain is happy; he receives their sighs of relief like little puffs of humanity that make him the person he likes to be, the father he wants to go on being for his daughter.

  And yet, while nothing else disgusts him, neither blood nor gangrene nor shit nor vomit, Germain can hardly bear the sight of a corpse. The moment a body has breathed its last, he can’t help recoiling to fight back the nausea. After that, like any nurse, he does what needs to be done, but with shivers of revulsion that he must quell on the way home, where his Clara is sitting at the table with her arithmetic exercise books.

  Hence his astonishment at the skull. For two full minutes Germain stays frozen, hypnotized by the object that has ended up, God knows how, propped against a curbstone a few metres from his car in the parking lot. He contemplates the sutures that form meandering rivers between the bony plates, thinks of the most famous line in Western theatre, and he marvels at not feeling any fear, aversion, or impulse to bolt in face of this corpse—worse, t
his fragment of a corpse. For Germain, this represents a surprising new variation among the manifold feelings and impressions collected by people who work in close contact with life, death, and disease. Only the recently deceased disturb him; the ones so long dead that nothing remains but a skeleton leave him unaffected. “So I could go visit Pompeii,” he muses before rousing from his reverie.

  The police set up a security perimeter around the wooded knoll overlooking the parking lot. Germain tries to see what is going on among the trees, powerless to move away from the skull lying there in the middle of the commotion. He would like to seize the poor dirt-smudged head, to press it to his chest and speak to it softly. He can’t explain why, but this bone is the saddest thing he has ever encountered in his twenty-year career. It’s almost the solstice, the daylight lingers, and Germain’s ears are full of the city’s noise, horns and sirens, construction machinery, festivals clamouring away: the grinding works of Montreal. Ordinarily, such sounds are muffled at the Royal Victoria, the hospital so snugly nestled in the fabric of the mountain. But tonight they are amplified, as if the whole city wants to signal the permanent state of emergency in which it lives, the rages, the races, the victories, all that keeps it from sleeping.

  Two police come back down the knoll yelling something Germain can’t quite make out. They’re immediately surrounded by a dozen officers, who are soon joined by the onlookers thronged around the perimeter. Germain hangs back, anxious for no special reason. A female colleague steps out of the crowd and approaches him. “They’ve found the rest of the body. It has hospital clothes on.”

  Along with the general public, Germain learns everything else from the newspapers. The skeleton discovered in the woods was two years old. No one has come forward to claim the remains. According to the hospital management, every member of the staff has been accounted for. For weeks, this is all people talk about. During their breaks, orderlies recall former patients who left their beds without telling anyone, and secretaries search through the files to verify their colleagues’ theories. Even the anaesthetists deign to put in their two cents worth.

  As for Germain, despite being questioned four times a day, he is as clueless as the rest. But he is haunted by his memory of the skull, curses himself for having been so quick to alert the police, like a mother who let her child leave home without taking the time to hug her and whisper the loving words you need to go out into the world. The one they’ve dubbed Madame Victoria died alone, without the compassionate hands of someone like Germain to accompany her to the final threshold, with no one to mourn her passing. This was the immeasurable sadness he felt on discovering the skull. The weight of that absolute solitude.

  The investigation has stalled. The case has been assigned to a forensic anthropologist and crime novel celebrity, who runs new tests on the skeleton and finds that Madame Victoria was a Caucasian women of about fifty suffering from osteoporosis and arthritis-ridden joints but showing no signs of a violent death. Although the conclusions don’t rule out murder by poisoning or strangulation, Germain is somewhat reassured. Maybe it was a peaceful death, after all. In the photos, he notices the body’s position when it was found, an arm hooked onto a branch, as if to break a fall. The picture, suggesting the woman’s final struggle, wrenches at his heart.

  But what upsets him most is Madame Victoria’s face. Based on the available data, experts were able to produce a rough portrait. Curly brown hair, high cheekbones, faded features, she seems to stare at him in disappointment, and Germain believes he recognizes her. Was she a patient resigned to never getting well again and whom he’d neglected? Was it his fault she’d gone out to die on the knoll? Had he inadvertently administered the wrong drug? At other times she reminds him of his mother growing old so far away; he doesn’t visit her often enough. After months of hoping, like the investigators, that someone would recognize her face, Germain forces himself to banish his gnawing guilt. He has turned Madame Victoria into the repository of all his regrets, all the times he wasn’t equal to the task. A heavy burden to unload on a dead woman that didn’t know him.

  The years go by. Germain changes work units, his daughter enters high school and he does his best to help her across the muddy terrain of puberty. Madame Victoria has gradually faded from the collective memory and joined the army of ghosts occupying the hospital: elderly amnesiacs, drowned schizophrenics, mothers who died in childbirth. Germain alone still thinks of her every day, each time he goes back to his car at the end of a shift, but he is not sad. Now a guardian angel looks out from the little hill, gazes benevolently on the city that gave her a few green sticks of wood to protect her final moments. As for the skeleton lying in a cardboard coffin in the basement of a police station, it would have willingly accepted this box as its final resting place, but for a research team from the University of Ottawa.

  More than ten years after Madame Victoria’s death, her hair is what interests the researchers this time around. Using new technologies, they manage to extract a slew of fresh information from the robust filaments that have remained intact. Once analyzed, each of the forty-three centimetres of fibre brings to light one month of the anonymous dead woman’s last years. What emerges is that Madame Victoria had moved seven times in the space of three years, going southward from the north of the province. In addition, she suffered from a mineral deficiency possibly symptomatic of a serious disease.

  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.

  Victoria Outside

  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 del
ivery. 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.