Madame Victoria Read online

  She’s a good mother, she knows this, though it does come as a bit of a surprise. She’d been told so often that at sixteen she’d be incapable of caring for a child, she ended up believing it. But from a sort of mental lookout produced by her fatigue, she can see herself in action. She is patient. Steady. Not given to discouragement. She sings, she washes, she watches, she feeds. She does what needs to be done, certain that she’ll go on doing so, even if her fat melts away, sloughed off with all this milk that spills out of her. She’ll become another kind of creature, a bird or possibly a dragonfly, something light that eats almost nothing, that buzzes over the surface of the world and rests even in mid-flight. The universe is shrinking by the minute.

  Her baby has grown. He, too, has a name she never uses; she calls him my sweetie, my darling, my treasure. My heaven, my pot of gold, my little starburst. He smiles, gums his fist, grabs his foot and shakes it bewilderedly, as if the limb did not belong to him. She presses her mouth against his stomach and blows; his colour-shifting eyes open wide. She glides the tip of her finger along the meanders of his minuscule ear, and he turns his head, smiling as if he’d just been told a secret. He sucks, he nibbles, he drools. He babbles and she unlearns how to speak. The delivery man keeps on bringing her groceries; he is less flushed but just as flustered on her doorstep, perhaps because she has stopped using known words. Maybe she’s learned the language of elves, their prattle full of small miracles.

  She continues to bleed. The nurse says this isn’t normal, that she is exhausted and must eat red meat, go out and breathe in the approach of spring and of the fishing that will soon start up again a few blocks from her house. She thinks of Victor, of his arms hauling in the nets and tossing fish as firm as muscles. His hands grasping the heavy ropes, his body directing the boats, the tides, and the miraculous catches. Right now he must be standing on a deck beside his father, repairing cracks and cleaning rusted portholes, breathing in the hope of the coming season, the nearing of the great shoals. She still dreams of lying down with him and drinking every inch of his skin.

  He said, “You do as you like, I’ll give you what you need. Don’t ask anything else of me. Here’s some money—do what you want with it. The rest, I’ve got no time for.”

  Soon after, she realized he’d chosen another, whose belly hadn’t swelled up, that he would never admit to his father he’d gotten the girl from Sault-au-Mouton pregnant, and that it wouldn’t be so easy for him to become a man. She left without telling him where she was going. Sure, she still loves him, loves whatever she recognizes of him in her son’s face. She never wants to speak to him again.

  Her mother had said, “If you become a mother now you’ll never be a woman. You’ll always be lagging behind, depending on everyone else. Having a child means coming to a stop. You can’t stop before you’ve finished doing what you have to do. What you have to do to be an adult.” It’s true. She still doesn’t have her driver’s licence. She can’t cook. She hasn’t finished school, and she wouldn’t be able to fill out a tax return. But contrary to her mother’s prediction, she doesn’t depend on anyone. That’s the condition she set for herself to have this child. Everyone was against it, so she did it alone.

  At night, the little one sleeps for a longer time. Three, sometimes four hours in a row. She still wakes up every two hours, like an animal trained to stand guard, heavy-eyed, dense heat throbbing under her skin. She rises, tries to tidy up a little. The objects in her apartment are as light as goose down, so adrift that they settle somewhere else as soon as she’s put them back where they belong. In the middle of the night she fixes herself some bread and jam, which she eats standing by the window. She thinks she can hear the crash of the spring breakup as the ice batters the shoreline, the grind of twisted metal deep below the surface, when the shipwrecks grind their teeth. Spring is on its best behaviour but she’s knows it’s too soon to celebrate. There’s always a relapse when everybody is sure it’s over.

  The only one who hadn’t condemned her decision was her father. That’s how he was, irresponsible and muddled, brimming with feelings of love that would well up chaotically without always reaching the people who were counting on him. He had many flaws but he could never greet the arrival of a new life with anything but joy. He would have kissed her on the forehead, he would have said “my big girl,” adding something about the ton of happiness that was about burst into their lives. He would have uncorked a bottle, insisting she make an exception and share a toast with him, taken her to Forestville and spent his pay on little yellow, blue, and green pyjamas.

  Too bad he missed this. If he weren’t crammed inside an urn he would have given her a reason to stay. She would have moved in with him, and the others eventually would have come to terms with it. Her mother would have realized how well she cares for her baby. Her friends would have paused their cycle of quarrels and faded love affairs to gush about her newborn’s beautiful agate-coloured eyes. Her sister would have agreed, for once, to tear herself away from her beloved campus to spend her vacations in the village and help her remember those wonderful lullabies that melt in your mouth and float above the crib. Victor would have left his new lover on seeing how kind, strong, and brave his son’s mother was. She smiles as she imagines her triumph, although she knows things would never have turned out that way.

  Love is exponential and she anticipates the moment when her heart will explode. When she harks back to what she felt for her baby just after he was born, it seems to pale in comparison with how complex, how intense her feelings have since become. Whenever she thinks she’s reached a plateau, to her astonishment she finds her adoration rising even higher; each time her child accomplishes some new feat her motherly love soars, and on and on it goes. When she hugs him, her cheeks glow red, like a sweetheart. Sometimes it seems she can still feel him kicking inside her. He’s both inside and outside. He is everywhere.

  The neighbours are getting curious, stopping on her landing as they go downstairs, ears on the alert when they come back up. The creaking of the building sends out messages, questions, suppositions that stay poised on their lips. They’re old and grey or young and plump, they whisper in their bathtubs, the murmur crawls along the plumbing, shuts itself inside the kitchen cabinets. Victoria accepts the idea they are talking about her, knows she’ll have to come out one day, greet them, introduce her baby to them, let them pinch his cheek. But not right away. She’s still bleeding and winter isn’t over yet.

  In fact, it has started snowing again. There’s over a foot of it on the ground as she plunges her hands into the greasy water to wash things that all seem unnecessary to her. The infant is fidgeting in his playpen while he waits for his meal. By the time she sits down to nurse a new layer of snow has covered the pavements that were shovelled just an hour ago. Victoria shrugs as she cuddles her baby against her stomach. It’s nice and warm in here. She pats his back, wipes his chin, sings a soothing tune, and kisses him on his eyelids by way of saying good night. Then she nestles into her armchair to watch the storm. The snowflakes fall so thickly, as if someone were shaking the fluff out of a piece of clothes in front of the window. Numbness comes over her, a huge, irresistible fatigue such as she hasn’t felt for months. She curls up and goes to sleep.

  She sleeps for six hours. Seven hours. Ten hours. The morning finds her aching from a whole night spent in that uncomfortable position. She stretches and watches the daylight creeping in and she doesn’t understand. It snowed. She slept. Slept far too long.

  The child is still lying on his back, his blanket barely creased. His hands are closed as though hiding precious gems, and his arms are perfectly still. Perfectly still. She lays her hand on his round stomach. Perfectly still.

  She knows such things happens sometimes, but you must keep them at a distance, at the far end of a pole, an idea pinned up in a corner of your head that you never visit. You mustn’t think of it even if you’re always thinking of it. The greater your love,
the greater your fear, the more you must be convinced that nothing can harm you.

  He doesn’t move. His chest doesn’t rise. Her finger under his little nose doesn’t find the damp warmth she expects. His foot inside the woollen sock is cold. After a very long time, she takes hold of his body, and right then, at that moment, there can be no doubt anymore. Her baby is as light and limp as a doll, like a lifeless treasure.

  She lies down on the floor, places him next to her and says, “Come on, my dove, my puppy, you can do it. Say something to mommy, anything. Squeeze mommy’s finger. Open your eyes, my love. Look at mommy. See how I much I love you, how much we love each other. We have to stay together always, always.” But he stays as light and cold as winter coming back when everyone thought it was over. Her whole body is ripped apart. Everything drains out of her.

  She must have screamed because the neighbours came knocking. The scream must have worried them, because they called the fire department. She fights for the longest time to keep them from taking her baby. “We have to examine him, miss.” A man holds her in his arms with a painful sort of tenderness to restrain her. A first responder palpates her baby’s limbs for a few minutes, and it seems to her that he has revived, but it’s an illusion. They let her take back her child, rock him, tell him again all the secrets that mothers weave for their children. The nurse arrives, gives her an injection, then nothing. When Victoria comes to, her little one has vanished, and she is empty.

  She sets out on foot. What else can she do? She puts on her seven-league boots and goes out of the house that she hasn’t left for three months. The village looks strange to her, different from how it was when she arrived. As though the streets had been twisted, the houses shrunk. Even the sky is disfigured, and she wonders how the geese will manage their crossing, this year.

  The ferry isn’t running yet, so she keeps on walking. She goes without eating or sleeping, wasting away en route to Trois-Pistoles and La Pocatière, until she sees the sky clearing over Île d’Orléans and Quebec City. She marches across the bridge, continues on toward Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré without saying a prayer, passes La Malbaie and Tadoussac, until she finally climbs the hill at Sault-au-Mouton.

  Her mother doesn’t smile when she sees her. She utters her name, arches her eyebrows in disbelief, knits her brow; Victoria says her name is Victoria now. Her mother wants to bathe her, feed her, wrap something warm around her, but Victoria refuses. She says, “I’m fine, the little one is fine, I just wanted to see you, I wanted to tell you how great I’m getting along,” then she bursts into sobs. Her mother guides her to a bed redolent of laundry and a roller coaster childhood, and Victoria sleeps for four days. When she awakens, her mother tells her she’s learned “of the child’s passing,” referring in those ceremonious terms to the death of the most important person in her daughter’s life. Victoria hurls a glass at her face. He’s not dead.

  She looks for Victor in the harbour, to no avail. The bad weather keeps the sailors well away from the shore. She goes to his house, to the poolroom, and finds him at last on his ATV at the sand quarry among a dozen boys ready to crack their spines just to hear the roar of their engines and send the flea-ridden sand flying. She watches them for an hour until they start to head home. A cigarette pinched between his lips, boots kicking up gravel with every step, Victor is about to walk past without seeing her. She plants herself in the middle of the road, and the small group looks up at her. Her eyes meet his but Victor remains impassive. He doesn’t recognize her. She has wasted away to the point where her features have gotten lost. No one knows her anymore.

  Nights on the road are rough; the floodwaters have filled the ditches, the only place she can find shelter and rest. Otherwise she would be visible from the road and vulnerable to harassment. She doesn’t want to be harassed. She wants to stretch out on her back and wish the geese safe journey, and pray that the grasses grow tall and fragrant, and for her baby to be brought back to her. Despite the dampness she stays as dry and brittle as a wisp of straw. Her wound is gone, the bleeding has stopped, there is nothing left of her little one. She would so much like to still be in pain, to feel in her bones the huge tear of his birth. All that remains now is her tiredness, a state she carefully maintains, like those who nurture their drunkenness or emaciation. It has stopped raining on the North Shore. The forests are hatching an army of insects to pepper the summer with tiny stingers.

  The days are long by the time she reaches Quebec City. She tells herself that all this light will help her find her baby. Intent on building up her strength, Victoria starts to forage behind restaurants and bakeries, feeding on stale bread. She huddles next to walls to eat, focused and methodical, sometimes falling asleep in spite of herself and waking up covered with trash and droppings, as if men and birds had taken her for a discarded bag.

  At the university, she begins to search for her sister. The few people she comes across look at her askance. For a few days she camps out on the deserted grounds but fails to find the main gate, the drawbridge. Finally, a gardener provides the key to the puzzle: “summer vacations.” The campus has been abandoned, and her sister is probably trekking across the Andes or the Sahel desert, looking for someone to save. Yet there is so much to be done right here, hard by the oldest French-language higher learning establishment in the Americas.

  From then on Victoria goes into free fall. She sleeps anywhere she can, preferably on the Plains of Abraham or in a park if no one comes to evict her; otherwise, it’s under an overpass or in an alley full of spoiled cats and regal whores. The hookers always give Victoria a friendly greeting and their graciousness cleanses her somewhat. During the day, she combs through the city, certain that her little one can’t be very far. She sharpens her sense of hearing, on the alert for the slightest squeal, the piping voice that she would hear even in a hurricane.

  When spoken to she talks about nothing else but the lost baby that she has to rescue from the chaos of the world. He must be hungry, she explains, and she needs to find him before he falls into the wrong hands. Some turn their backs on her, others try to reason with her. A very small and precious minority express their sympathy and sometimes offer to help. “If I see a baby with grey-agate eyes I’ll let you know right away, I promise.” Their words warm her heart; it’s good to know there’s a small army of allies on the lookout in the great City of Quebec.

  With the arrival of winter come new pains, gnawing at her extremities, feet, fingers, ears. Her allies clothe her, reassure her: her baby is snug as a bug, not to worry, he’s warm and waiting for her in a comfortable little bed somewhere, protected from the blowing snow. Victoria nods, thrusts her hands into the fetid old mittens that keep her alive. Sometimes she’s brought to shelters, crowded dormitories where she’s instructed to eat at mealtime, wash at shower time, sleep at bedtime, and keep out of the icy winds that, they tell her, cast people like her out of the world of the living. She runs away as soon as she can, unable to remain cut off from the open spaces full of the sounds and threads that connect mothers and children. She goes to hang around church squares and the aromatic entrances of cafés. She’s no longer afraid or sad.

  The searching takes her from winter to spring, from summer to autumn, to another spring, another winter; she lets the wheel spin without keeping count. Her hair turns brittle, her fingernails split, her lips become raw, and her skin sags, but she is still just as young. Her body crumbles but stays whole, becomes gnarled but stays smooth. Sometimes she senses Victor watching her from afar, and she strikes a pose to show him her bum, her smiling breasts, her lively mouth like a fish that’s just been thrown back into the water. She is thin. It was inevitable—she’s become an arrow and her whole being points north.

  It happens in the frozen depths of winter. Her pure and weary body brings her the answer the city could not give her. She is huddled under a warm air vent outside a bar sending out all the joys of the world. This is when she feels the first tingle. In her
belly, in the uterus she had kept empty and prepared for everything. A bubble bursts, a butterfly wing grazes the surface of the universe. She places her purplish hands on her abdomen and raises her eyes toward the dazzling precision of the stars. “Stay calm, Victoria. Wait till you’re sure.”

  When spring arrives there’s no room for doubt. Her belly has swelled with an unmistakable little bump whose movements can’t be ignored any longer. Already the salutary pains tug at her and the breath that rises from the life stirring there confirms what she should have guessed: she should have searched for her little one not in the streets of a city trodden by her own history but right inside her, where he had taken shelter and waited for the right moment to signal his presence, to let his mother know he had never left.

  Buoyed by this good news, Victoria sets out again. She heads north, where the cold is direct and the light is slant. She carries her baby to the places of his earliest days, knowing she is strong enough this time to take him around, to show him the pliant landscape, the fields and strands that belong to him, to walk with him for years.

  He is born at night in a stand of firs as tight as a tunnel, and she holds him closely without seeing him. He isn’t sticky like the first time, or as noisy or hungry, and she felt no pain. As soon as he’s out, he breaks free of her grasp like a young partridge eager to take wing. He twirls around her while she catches her breath. She curls up and touches her belly, which she notices is still hard and full. She’s at once empty and full. The baby nuzzles up against her, and his caresses come from within her and from out there all at the same time. He’s both inside and outside.

  They live facing the wind, and each day they celebrate their reunion. They lie down on the oblong beaches, cover themselves with dead leaves, and Victoria regains the kind of sleep she likes: blunt and overpowering. In the morning, the little one snuggles inside her hood and they set out in search of food. She chews grass and serves it to him on her thumbnail. A hundred times a day she strokes her son’s cheeks and kisses his innumerable fingers. He’s in the water she drinks and in the leather of her soles. He is everywhere.