The Party Wall Page 14

  “You know, I have no trouble believing there are two women inside you. You’re as fickle as the wind, Madeleine Sicotte.”

  “I have no trouble believing it either, you know. The problem is that I think I’ve always listened to the same one. The other has been muzzled.”

  “What did she want?”

  Madeleine shrugs. “Beer,” she is thinking. “A cigarette.”

  “Something darker, I guess. Or grander.”

  A fly starts tapping stubbornly on the window, and Paul abruptly swings around, hoping to discover a bee. Disappointed, he turns back to Madeleine.

  “Why don’t you come live with me here?” he blurts out.

  Madeleine twists the sheet around her forefinger. The cloth is riddled with holes from hot cigarette ashes.

  “Because you fuck anything that walks,” she tells him.

  “What? That’s not true.”

  “Yes, it is true. You even fuck my neighbours. I saw Violette Godin’s locket on your night table a few weeks ago.”

  “Who can blame him?” she adds in her mind. Paul is the village’s only decent bachelor. He is a good lover and a good cook. Madeleine has always put up with her lover’s unfaithfulness without saying a word. But today she can’t understand what has kept her from being forthright for so long.

  “We all know it; none of us has any illusions about you. That’s why no one wants to be your wife, Paul. You’ll never have one if you try to have them all.”

  Lying there naked, Paul is unable to meet her gaze, and he keeps stroking the rabbit’s foot that goes with him everywhere. Madeleine finds him handsome and is sorry to have shamed him yet at the same time she feels a huge weight has been lifted from her shoulders.

  “You smell nice,” she whispers as she kisses his ear.

  “You know,” he says as he draws away, “if you came to live with me, there wouldn’t be any others. From then on, you’d be the only one. You’re the one who belongs here. Anyway, you can’t go on forever alone in that big house taking in one traveller after another. Especially once your son sails away on that boat.”

  Stepping toward her pile of clothes, Madeleine stops short.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I think I heard someone say that he and his girlfriend plan to leave on a boat after his operation. That would be the right time for you to move here and settle in.”

  Madeleine dresses quickly.

  “I will not settle in with you—that’s out of the question! I don’t want to settle anywhere.”

  “It’s because of Micha? It’s been years, Madeleine!”

  “Be quiet! You don’t know a thing about it!”

  A few minutes later she is tearing along the dirt road toward the highway. Paul is still standing in his bedroom in his underwear with a stony look on his face. Madeleine hits the brakes to let a hare go by. Then starts away again.

  “What’s this business about a cruise?!”

  She is shouting at the top of her lungs. A scream that she held in when she found the house full of her son’s childhood friends and while she waited for them to leave, for Joanna to go out to do some shopping, for Yun to take a shower, and finally for Édouard to be alone in a room with no way out. Like someone who has just been struck in the stomach by a cannonball, he recoils.

  “Uh, well, me and Yun have hunted up a cheap boat. We’ll have to patch it up a little after I get my kidney… We’d like to see if it’s possible to follow the route of Marquette and Jolliet: sail up the Saint Lawrence and then…”

  “Are you insane?” Madeleine cuts in. “After the operation, you’ll need to recuperate and wait several weeks in case your body rejects the transplant.”

  “I know, but after my convalescence I’ll be on my way again. That’s what I’ve always done.”

  “Well, enough is enough! I’ve had it!”

  Édouard holds himself stiffly with his fists clenched behind his back.

  “You almost die, you land up here and then as soon as you’re able to take a few steps you shove off? Is that how it’s always going to work? You come back to sleep and eat and then you bolt?”

  “What more do you want? I’m an adult. I don’t live here anymore.”

  “What I want? I want a son who comes to visit his mother, that’s what I want. Not another vagrant who stops here just long enough to get his strength back so he can disappear the very next day.”

  “But that’s what I do. I come to see you—what else?”

  “Bullshit! We’ve barely had a real conversation since you arrived. And that was only because you’re ill and they thought I wasn’t your mother. As a rule, we say a word or two about the weather and that’s all. But here you are waiting for a transplant and here I am with two people inside me, and it’s as if nothing has changed! You spend your days glued to your girlfriend—don’t get me wrong, I adore her—but you use her like a shield. Then afterwards you work things out so you can take off at the first opportunity, even though you’ll still be in poor health and courting death at any moment in the middle of the Mississippi or Lake Ontario, without any help, without me.”

  “I don’t need you!”

  “Oh, I do realize that. And, you know, I don’t need you either. But that doesn’t mean we need to avoid having a relationship.”

  She punctuates this last statement with a hard punch against the wall. Madeleine is surprised by both her gesture and the flimsiness of the wall. Without thinking, she goes on pounding the wall with all her might, with her hands and feet, with the strength of the righteous and the stubbornness of the tender-hearted, with a sort of love that passes through her muscles. Slowly, the partition gives way, the panelling crumbles under the blows, and the familiar angles of the corridor become visible.

  “You’ve completely lost your mind.”

  Her eyes are fixed on the gap; Madeleine is no longer looking at her son.

  “I was hoping that at least all this shit—the illness, the DNA business—I was hoping it would bring us closer together. That you would learn to speak to me.”

  “And where would I have learned that? You never tell me anything. Nothing about your family, about your life with dad. I lost my father at seventeen and you never talk to me about him. It’s as if he never existed. And you! People in town say you have a lover, that you take pictures on the seashore. I know nothing about any of it.”

  “You never asked me anything!”

  “Neither did you.”

  On the other side of the hole, Yun’s tear-streaked face appears.

  “Anyway,” Édouard mutters, “there may not be an ‘after the transplant.’”

  Right then, the beeper lying on his nightstand starts to vibrate. It’s the hospital. They’re expecting Édouard.

  Sitting in the grey waiting room, grey like all the waiting rooms in the world, Madeleine thinks about Micha and his cancer, her sister and her psychotic episodes, her father and his cirrhosis. It seems that every ten years the flesh of someone close is demanded of her, as if a Minotaur were pacing along the maze of hospital corridors, lurking behind the respirators and MRI devices. “It’s time for him to leave me something. It’s time for me to leave here together with my loved ones,” she decides while her son is subjected to a battery of tests.

  Because, to be entitled to a kidney, he must pass a raft of examinations. The long road to Halifax was not the last stop. Nor will the transplant—assuming it actually happens—be the finishing line. Sixty days will be needed to be sure the body has not rejected it. Before the great event, it is imperative to verify that the recipient is perfectly healthy and completely free of viruses. With her fingers clutching her key ring, Madeleine makes one wish after another, laying claim to all the wishes that, for lack of inspiration, she did not make on her birthdays, and all the shooting stars she passed up on. In the space of a few hours she
has turned into a superstitious freak.

  After several hours of testing, Édouard is set free. He is tired; the clock struck twelve long ago. The operation has been scheduled for the next morning. While he is getting settled in a room that looks more like an alcove Madeleine can easily see that her son will not be sleeping.

  “Would you like me to ask for a tranquillizer?”

  Édouard’s gesture means no. He seems to have forgotten their quarrel; his brow is dark but shows no sign of anger. On the other side of the curtain a man groans between nightmares. He is dreaming of a giant cigarette, Madeleine guesses from the whistling sound of his breathing; he is dreaming that he is wallowing in smoke. She can almost smell the aroma of tobacco drifting above his bed. She can recognize a true smoker with her eyes closed, the ones who wake during the night for a few puffs, the ones who are doomed. Micha slept just like that toward the end.

  The noises in the corridor die down, but Édouard can’t sleep. His eyelids grow heavy and suddenly start to flutter but then they pop open again. Madeleine places her fingers on her son’s arm. Under the skin, his nerves are restless.

  “Édouard, I’m convinced it will be just fine. You’ve got everything on your side: you’re young, you’re strong. And there’s something about you that not many have. You accept everyone. I’ve never seen you judge someone or reject the company of another person.”

  Édouard’s face is tense and he frowns. Madeleine elaborates:

  “How could your body reject a kidney? If you’d known the donor you would surely have liked him. You would have bought him a beer and talked about Johnny Cash, Kerouac, baseball—right? It’s written in your cells. Every fibre in you knows it.”

  The water wells up in Édouard’s eyes. For many minutes he keeps silent. Then he gives Madeleine a look so desperate that she is obliged to lean closer.

  “All that doesn’t make the slightest difference. I’m going to die, Ma.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “No, I’m sure of it. This disease, it didn’t just happen. It’s punishment.”

  Madeleine straightens up and gazes at her son in bewilderment. He averts his eyes, and what he exudes is in fact shame, scuttling out of his pores like rats fleeing a ship. The palms of Madeleine’s hands grow damp.

  “Punishment for what?”

  “For choosing to save my skin instead of saving a life. Two lives.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “A few months ago, in Savannah, I witnessed a horrible accident. Two little girls hit by a train. They tried to get away, but they weren’t able. There was blood everywhere. I saw them. But instead of going to help them, I… I hopped on the train.

  “You didn’t alert the authorities?”

  “I couldn’t. I couldn’t.”

  He pauses to push some air through the sobs that are choking him. Madeleine breathlessly kneads his arm.

  “I’m a piece of shit. I let two children die. And now it’s my turn to die.”

  Madeleine says nothing more. She can’t find the words to tell him that is not how life works, to explain to her still very young son that the world is not a vast pair of scales where bad actions offset each other, where misdeeds are consistently sanctioned. The world is an unjust place where the good go bad from never being rewarded, where the truly wicked are very rarely punished and where most folk zigzag between the two extremes, neither saints nor demons, tacking between heartache and joy, their fingers crossed, knocking on wood. Every person split in two, each with a fault around which good and evil spin.

  When the pale morning light comes through the curtain separating them from the sick smoker, she finally manages to utter a few burning words.

  “You won’t die. It’s impossible. Because I love you.”

  She very gingerly gets up and gives up her seat. Yun is standing in the doorway wearing a purple dress that seems to herald a celebration, a healing, but in which Édouard will see the colour of grieving. In fifteen minutes, the anaesthetics will carry him off to the murky lands of his consciousness and a stranger’s kidney will come to nestle in his back like a hazardous treasure.

  “I wonder what the person was like,” Yun says pensively.

  “The donor?”

  “Yes. We don’t know anything about him—or her: age, sex, if he loved his kids or believed in God.”

  Madeleine nods. Already over the past two hours she has formed a very clear idea of the person she pictures as having left Édouard a kidney, so that she has a detailed image of the man in her mind. A father in his forties, a long-haul truck driver who died of a heart attack after discovering his wife was having an affair with their neighbour. His name is George, he likes bowling, barbecues, and Simon & Garfunkel. To make amends, his widow agreed to donate all the dead man’s serviceable organs: the lungs, pancreas, kidneys, and eyes. She convinced herself that half a dozen lives saved would make up for a cuckold’s death in the eyes of God.

  “You know,” Yun continues sheepishly, “if you don’t approve of the sailing trip we’ve planned, we could always change our plans.”

  “It’s not my place to approve. There’s nothing wrong with the plan as such. Actually, it’s a lovely idea. You’re free, the two of you. Completely free.”

  “Yes. But Édouard’s health comes first. His health and his family.”

  “We’ll see. We’ll see in sixty days.”

  Using her fingernail to whittle down the rim of a disposable cup, Yun adds in a low voice:

  “He loves you more than you think.”

  Styrofoam particles pile up like a little snow bank at their feet. A muffled warmth stirs in Madeleine’s belly and spreads to each of her limbs. She is filled with peace. Her son is safe and sound—now she is sure of it.

  An hour later, the woman who performed the operation comes out to meet them and to confirm that the transplant was successful. Édouard is taken to the recovery room, and Madeleine and Yun spring up in unison, a modest honour guard for a patient they cherish with equal strength, from source to estuary.

  The man in the photo appears to be some thirty years younger than Joanna. His teeth are so white one might suspect they glow in the dark. He smiles warmly on the arm of the bride. Both are dressed in white and surrounded by musicians with instruments as close to agriculture as they are to music, such is their resemblance to dried fruits and hollowed out vegetables.

  “He is very handsome,” Madeleine says.

  “At his age, all men are handsome,” Joanna adds.

  Madeleine gives her an amused look. The evening settles in lazily; the scent of the sea is everywhere. Édouard is asleep. This is the first time since he was discharged that the household can catch its breath. His ten days in the hospital were exhausting for Madeleine and Yun, who took turns at his bedside. On returning from Halifax they had to rearrange the house, set up a bedroom on the ground floor, learn to manage the medication, accompany Édouard when he moved about, and clean the wound shaped like a half-moon. Joanna’s help in carrying out these tasks proved invaluable. Given her high spirits and Yun’s gentleness, Madeleine senses that the healing will go quickly. The kidney is holding up, and in the surgeon’s opinion it’s working as if it had always been a member of the family. Only the cat is showing signs of flagging, as it spends the greater part of its days sleeping under the armchairs.

  Sitting on the front porch steps, the two women drink beer while Joanna recounts her adventures. Married to a young Cameroonian for the past five years, she displays such cheerful clear-sightedness that it is impossible for Madeleine to make the slightest judgment about this bizarre union. The couple spends scarcely a few weeks together once a year, after which they are “free as the air.”

  “Of course I’m aware of what people think: that in his eyes I’m just a wallet or a visa for Europe. What would a handsome young man be doing with a woman in her s
ixties? But he’s a good man, and marrying him has made me happy.”

  Madeleine puts back the photograph while Joanna grabs one of Micha and her on their wedding day, a picture she agreed to take out of an album that she never opens anymore. She steals a glance at their earnest expressions, their hands locked together. That they were so madly in love early on seems odd to her today, as when you discover an old dress, now too small, and can’t believe your body could ever have slipped into it. Joanna pores over the portrait trying to extract from it some vital element, to understand the couple and the times portrayed.

  “Your husband had a hard life,” she declares.

  In the sky’s fading light Madeleine makes out the pointed movement of a kite, probably a kilometre from her house but high enough to remain visible. Then, for the first time, she dares to share with someone what she held close to her chest for so many years, the secrets that Micha had confided to her on the eve of their wedding, saying, “Now you know everything; you’re free to change your mind.” The rape of his mother and sister before his eyes, the murder of his brothers, his own rebellion at the age of sixteen, when he left the tomb of his people and took up arms to kill and rape in his turn, to spit back at war what war had forced him to swallow. Madeleine had listened to the man pouring out his story, coldly, disappointedly, sadly, but unrepentantly, and she had chosen to disregard those revelations.

  “I still don’t know how I was able to go on loving him so, given everything he had done.”

  With the round hard edge of her fingernail, Joanna strokes the photographed faces of the young newlyweds, first one and then the other.

  “You behaved like half the inhabitants of the planet. Not everyone has the luxury of growing up in peacetime. The conscience of most people who have lived through war is like your husband’s. It’s…”

  The Dutch woman fumbles for words, sifting through her French to pinpoint a synonym that isn’t there.

  “It’s a terrible conscience. Victims and executioners often coexist in the same person. Those who forgive them are the ones who enable the world to heal.”