The Party Wall Read online

  It’s hard to complain in the presence of someone whose every wrinkle suggests the pain she has had to confront, undergo, and overcome to lead a life like hers. Madeleine wags her head hesitantly; she’s unable to fish out a clear answer from the troubled waters of her situation.

  “Your son is sick. But his chances of recovering are excellent. Why is the atmosphere so heavy in your house?” Joanna asks.

  To lie to a woman like her is impossible. Madeleine sighs and lets the truth rise to her lips.

  “It’s me. When the test results came back, my blood didn’t say what it was supposed to. It wasn’t just a matter of being incompatible for an organ donation; the doctors don’t believe that Édouard is my son.”

  “And you, are you certain that he is? It’s a rarity, but sadly, you know, mistakes have been known to happen in nurseries. Could you inquire at the hospital where you gave birth?”

  “I was with a midwife. I was her only patient that day.”

  “Hmmm. In that case, it is very strange.”

  She gets up and leans over a cooking pot to check on her stew.

  “Well, I’m sure it will be cleared up very soon and the explanation will be far less terrifying that what you imagine. I can assure you,” she insists, given Madeleine’s sombre mood.

  On the other side of the open window, Shabby pops up as though summoned by the Dutch woman’s prediction. Its fur is haunted by nettles, thorns, and other small, almost living things. It gazes at the two women with pleading eyes, and Joanna compassionately slips it a piece of Gruyère, which it bolts down immediately.

  As a little girl Madeleine would have given anything for someone to inform her she was not her parents’ daughter. She dreamed that one day a man in a suit would show up at their house and announce an unfortunate error had been made years ago and she had been interchanged with a neighbour’s child or, better yet, that she was the daughter of foreign travellers, who would come to retrieve her with tears of joy and take her back to Bavaria or Castile or another place full of castles and ghosts of headless horsemen.

  Given her parents’ lack of caution, such a blunder might not have been so preposterous were it not for the striking resemblance between them and their offspring. Of course, Madeleine did not see the resemblance. Among members of the same family the common traits are often lost in the sea of differences one tries so hard to underscore, especially when the idea of being the parents’ “spitting image” falls under the heading of an insult or a curse.

  The genetic lab’s brochure specifies a waiting period of five business days for the results to be delivered. Five days that Madeleine spends without food or sleep, reeling between the museum and the lighthouse, where she leans her back against the wall at day’s end. One night, she dozes off there and is found after closing hours by the watchman, who insists on seeing her home. She has told him nothing about her worries, but they are old acquaintances and each of them can easily sense the other’s frame of mind.

  He takes her back to her garden teeming with mosquitoes, and, lost in her questions, she neglects to thank him. Does her son resemble her? She always saw much more of Micha than of herself in both his physique and demeanour. Hasn’t Édouard inherited his father’s need for space, freedom, and travel? “Except that Micha never travelled, he expatriated himself,” she inwardly replies. But he is detached and withdrawn, just like his father. “His mother is hardly any different,” the inner voice responds again.

  “It’s not the same thing,” she retorts crossly, startling Yun—Madeleine had not seen her perched on a tree branch.

  “Sorry,” she says to the young woman, who continues to climb toward the top of the beech tree as if hoping to discover coconuts up there.

  “That’s okay. I completely agree. Things are never the same.”

  When someone is on the road for months at a time it doesn’t take much for him to feel at home. During his years of roving Édouard found shelter in abandoned buses, hollows below train tracks, deserted sheds where three people took turns sleeping on a dilapidated mattress, and he learned to cherish these places with the kind of affection others reserve for the houses where they were born. But nothing could ever match Nora’s cabin.

  It was built out of a hodgepodge of plywood sheets and corrugated tin and might have brought to mind a shantytown hovel were it not for its weirdly artistic aspect. In spite of its less-than-modest dimensions, the shack had a dozen windows located at different heights, which overlaid the floor with geometric figures that changed according to the time of day. Nora kept the place clean, and whoever crossed the threshold had to respect the nearly fanatical order that she imposed on her environment.

  Markedly older than most of the people who passed through her house, Nora was not altogether old. The criterion on which Édouard—he was twenty-two at the time—based himself in arriving at this conclusion was that he still found her desirable. She never explained where she was from or what had prompted her to build such a remote a dwelling, tucked away a kilometre inside a tract of government land in Oregon. It appears she had gone through a period of wandering before landing there, because she knew the US railroad network by heart as well as the way to cross the Canadian border into Alberta. She always had some advice for her visitors, whom she treated with a blend of kindness and sullen paternalism, but she never dwelled on her own travels. People arrived at her house in the company of one of her regular guests and loaded down with supplies; she would seize the provisions, which she transformed into phenomenal meals seasoned with nameless spices that she identified by their aromas. Sometimes without asking for permission she would confiscate an article of clothing or an object that might help to improve her cabin, and no one dared object to this arbitrary taxation. Life was good at Nora’s place and whatever payment she deemed appropriate was the accepted price.

  Édouard spent an entire month at her house. He let his travelling companions continue on without him, as he preferred to be of service to Nora, who needed help to prepare for winter. There were holes in the roof that needed patching, and enough wood had to be gathered for the little rusted stove to maintain a semblance of heat when the frost came scratching at the door. Aware of his amorous feelings, which Édouard was certain he had kept well hidden, Nora consented to share her bed with him and allowed him to nuzzle up against her but without letting the contact go any further. While Édouard detailed the deepest secrets of his young life, Nora listened but never disclosed the least bit of information about herself.

  On the first cold day, she filled a bag with edibles and handed him a voucher for a Greyhound bus ticket.

  “Go see your mother.”

  It hurt Édouard to be turned out of a place where he would have liked to stay forever, but he did his best to hide his disappointment.

  “Why? You think she’s worried?”

  “You miss her. And you won’t find her here.”

  The following summer, Édouard tried to go back to see her. Although he stayed in the area nearly two months, every hour of which would remain etched in his mind, he never managed to find Nora’s cabin again, not even the ruins, not even her footprint on the ground.

  The mailman came by almost two hours ago, and Madeleine has been on the verge of opening the letter a dozen times. She inserts the pewter letter opener in the corner of the flap, and just when she is about to slash the envelope open, she freezes. As if she needed a much sharper instrument, a saw or an axe or maybe crab pincers instead of fingers.

  Finally, at dusk, she decides on a new strategy. She boils some water and patiently holds the envelope over the jet of steam. It reminds her of Yellowstone Park, where the ground fumes, spews boiling water and sulphurous vapours whose mysteries the tourists come to ponder. That is what Madeleine would need far more than a form containing the numerical sequence of her DNA: a seer whom she could ask to enlighten her. The letters of her name warp on the envelope, which finally
opens.

  Twenty-three out of forty-six, the sheet announces. In her haste, Madeleine ignores the more discursive explanations; all she manages to read is the little box disclosing the identity of twenty-three out of the forty-six chromosomes that make up Édouard’s DNA. A perfect correspondence. Only a minute later does she decipher the sober but glorious conclusion of the lab technicians who examined the strand of her hair: “You are the child’s biological mother.”

  “Édouard!!!”

  Madeleine bursts out of the house, body aflame, hand still clutching the letter, calling her son at the top of her lungs. But he is nowhere to be found. She continues running toward the sea and onto the deserted beach, where she strips naked and throws herself into the waves to lose herself in the seaweeds, the iodine, and the fish eggs.

  She arrives at Paul’s house at twilight. Frail yet imposing on the crooked veranda, he opens the door holding a table napkin.

  “You were eating?”

  “Are you hungry?”

  Madeleine removes her clothes heavy with seawater and for the second time today stands naked in the open air. Unsurprised, Paul wraps his arms around her, softly lays her down on the worn wooden porch and embraces her, licks the salt, and kneads her skin with his large, scalding hands. His caresses burn right through his lover’s body. Swept up by an uncommonly powerful swell, Madeleine distends, splits in two, divides and multiplies.

  When they come ashore, night has fallen. Paul brings a blanket so they can enjoy the spectacle of his vast lands made purple by the star-studded sky. In the distance, animals run without harming themselves, the horses send out their neighs, and some owls flutter their wings in unseen nests. Paul gently strokes Madeleine’s tousled hair.

  “Things are looking up for your son?”

  “Yes. Sort of. But they still haven’t found a donor. And you? Your bees?”

  “Can’t find them anywhere. Luckily I still have the horses.”

  He lights a cigarette, not so much for him as for Madeleine, who likes to snatch a few puffs from him.

  “I’ve heard you’ve been taking naps at the foot of the lighthouse these days.”

  “Occasionally,” Madeleine answers, irked by how swiftly rumours travel on the peninsula.

  “You know, if you’re having trouble sleeping, you should spend the night here. I can rub your back.”

  In response to this recurring offer, Madeleine bites her lip. Groping about in the dark, she finds her clothes and gets dressed.

  “Not tonight. I have to see my son.”

  Paul hugs her without a hint of resentment. The reasons she comes back to his house are the same as those that keep her from staying. She walks to her car in the beam of his flashlight and drives away without turning on her headlamps.

  On arriving home, she finds the household asleep. From the corridor she can distinguish Édouard’s hurried breathing alternating with Yun’s, which is slower. Joanna’s dry snoring on the ground floor adds to these sounds, to all this disparate humanity woven together by breath.

  Carrying the letter from the laboratory, Madeleine tiptoes into the room and kneels down by her son’s bed. She is reminded of Micha, an atheist through and through, but who persisted in bowing down at the foot of the bed each night, lowering his head, pressing his hands together, and silently formulating requests he shared with no one. Madeleine liked to believe that in doing so he was wrapping a sort of magical armour around his little family. After he died she realized he had excluded himself from his petitions.

  In the half-light, the two bodies turn around in perfect symmetry. Madeleine leans toward Édouard and murmurs a few barely audible words into his ear. Then she places the letter on the nightstand and cautiously straightens up. She has already gone out by the time Édouard’s fingers stir and flit toward the sheet of paper left next to him. He heaves a sigh that releases what looks like blue smoke into the room. But no one can see it.

  The toaster ejects the browned slices of bread. On either side of the table, Madeleine and Édouard sip the contents of a seemingly bottomless teapot. Now that the turmoil whipped up by the DNA question has passed, they are once again mother and son sharing breakfast with their noses buried in newspapers, moving silently through the morning, living without looking at each other. Yet Madeleine feels something ought to be said now, and she searches through the inept articles and ads of the dailies to find words that may help her to speak about pain, tiredness, kidneys, and death. But such things are not to be found in Section B of the weekend edition. She rises, picks up her son’s empty plate, and, in passing, gently strokes the endless braid floating down along a spindle of his chair. He starts and pulls his braid onto his chest:

  “Stop that, Ma.”

  Madeleine hurries over to the sink. She tries to set the dishes down softly but the cutlery drops with a clatter. Why is something supposedly easy so complicated with Édouard? He stands up waving the newspaper as if he wanted to change the subject even though nothing has been said.

  “The inauguration of the Confederation Bridge takes place in a few days. I can’t believe I’m going to miss it. I promised myself I’d be the first to walk across.”

  “I don’t think they’ll allow pedestrians across. And this is a bad time to wear yourself out.”

  “It makes me sick.”

  Madeleine squirts some detergent into the rising water of the sink. She dips her hand in to fish out a spoon. The water is too hot.

  “Yes, I know. Me too.”

  A quarter of an hour later, the newspaper pages are still turning lazily when Yun bursts breathlessly into the room, her body peppered with white paint. Her gaze shifts from mother to son and her face becomes a mask of perplexity.

  “What’s the matter? You both look paralyzed!”

  Édouard gets up and ushers his lover into the living room, leaving Madeleine alone with her fingers soaking in soapy water. From the next room, Yun’s voice chimes out as if it were passing through Édouard’s hand.

  “You are so weird, the two of you!”

  Some conspiracy theorists had crammed his head full of stories about extraterrestrials, so he decided to follow a small group of unemployed circus performers to Nevada. After setting his tent up on a makeshift campsite alongside some twenty other people, he spent the week a few kilometres from Area 51, scanning the sky in search of confirmation. But the power of desert legends resides in their never being proved. They hover at ground level to throttle the ankles of hikers, who lose their appetites and their sleep until they go insane.

  One night a purple-haired girl pulled out of her gear an enormous bag of mushrooms that she had personally gathered in the Rockies. Édouard swallowed three disgusting, still-moist boletuses. After a few hours of seeing stars dance and his friends’ limbs get twisted out of shape, he made up his mind to go strolling by himself in the surrounding moonscape. Wonderment soon turned into terror. Every glimmer, every rustle became a monster skulking in the Mojave night, ready to abduct him, to dissect him, to probe the stillness of his human body and of his brain harnessed to desperately futile goals.

  Curled up against a porous rock in the foetal position, for many hours he begged to be spared and left in peace on his stunted planet. But the terror persisted. So he resolved to make his way back to the campsite, where he hoped to find solace in the arms of a girl with, or without, purple hair. For a long time he walked in concentric circles, unable to get back to his starting point. It was then he spotted, right there in the middle of nowhere, a phone booth that appeared to be waiting for him alone. Instinctively and with underwater slowness, he dialled the one number he knew by heart: his mother’s. She was the only one who could comfort him at that instant, the only one whom he could tell that he was more than ever lost and ask how to find his way again.

  The telephone rang for a long time, and Édouard sank into the recurrent dream he had had since leaving
home, in which he would call there but was unable to open his mouth, so that when he heard his mother saying “Hello? Hello?” he couldn’t manage even the slightest response. This time, though, the opposite happened. Someone picked up the receiver but did not speak. From the calm breathing at the other end Édouard guessed it was Madeleine. He began to recount his night, the bonfire, the mushrooms, his walk and his going astray, until he eventually broke into tears, overwhelmed by memories—his father’s face, the garden when he was a child, the air along the Acadian Shore, and the time when it was so easy to be someone’s son.

  When he had finished his monologue he waited for an answer that never came. But just before hanging up, he thought he heard the faint vibrations of a foghorn. When he stepped out of the booth dawn was breaking with lavish gestures, stretching its pink, blue, and orangey fingers over the desert. In the distance he could make out the campsite. Madeleine never mentioned that call. A few years later, the Mojave phone booth would be disconnected for good.

  Nothing has been neglected. Her hair and blood, again, but also cells from her mouth and skin, not to mention biopsies of her uterus and thyroid gland. She even noticed that one of the three doctors studying her case was gazing covetously at her teeth. With her jaws resolutely shut, she let them take whatever was necessary to solve the enigma of her body. Madeleine leaves the hospital feeling like a fruit that has been pressed dry.

  The trip back is unusually quick. It’s the kind of day when the clouds blot out the light an hour earlier than the normal twilight time. She parks in front of the house, and it seems to her that space has been hemmed in and the sky has shrunk. Everything is closer, everything is within reach. Once inside the entrance hall she finds Yun waiting for her in the rigid pose of a pointer.

  “Édouard took a spill. He felt faint riding his bicycle.”

  “What do you mean, on his bicycle? Where is he?”

  “They took him to Caraquet. They said not to worry—just a few cuts and bruises.”

  “Let’s go.”