Madame Victoria Page 5

  When we turned sixteen, the Borduas decided it was acceptable for me to sleep over, in the same room as their son. If this permission had never been given, things might have gone in a different direction. Our adolescent angst eventually would have subsided. But as is often the case for the sick and the reckless, the night changed everything. Now we could talk for hours on end about the reasons why we thought the human race was doomed, a horrible accident in the history of the world. Under the heavy quilt of his bed, we learned to articulate, dissect, and magnify our despair so that it grew into a creature more solid than ourselves.

  We began our last year in high school constantly sleep-deprived, which made us as brittle as dry bread. It was time to make decisions, choose a career, plan our lives—the sort of process that seemed to unfold in a foreign language, according to an indecipherable code. We refused to fill out the forms, to take the tests that were supposed to guide us toward the fields that suited us best, and soon our boycott extended to schoolwork in general. We had no wish to do anything anymore except to be together in his bed, welded into an unintelligible ball, rejecting whatever was not our love.

  What happened next should come as no surprise to anyone. That sort of pact was already unexceptional at the time. To realize now how ordinary our situation really was is almost worse than having nurtured such suffering, than surviving the death of the person I loved. To realize that the feelings we thought we were the first to discover were in fact shared by thousands of other teenagers who were too fond of Kurt Cobain or Émile Nelligan or knives.

  Some cities have a bridge or a railroad where the trains shoot past. In our town there was the mine. An open pit so massive it took your breath away, long abandoned by the company that had dug it and guarded by derelict fences full of gaps made by curious locals, explorers, or just plain fools looking for a place to get high. As for us, we hung out there to get better acquainted with the void. We would sit down at the edge of the precipice with our stomachs in knots, and our dizziness would get mixed up with the pounding of our hearts. It was the ideal spot to kill yourself.

  Unaffected by clichés about November, we chose that month the way budding poets choose to write about the sky and the flowers. We dressed in black. We spent a peaceful night breathing side by side, feeling our pulses, listening to the sound of the life between our two bodies extended like javelins before the final throw. That morning we refused to eat breakfast and Daniel hugged his parents before leaving. He didn’t leave them a note. We slipped through the rusted fence and walked to the edge of the pit. There was a lowering sky, the wind was lurking somewhere, the air was still, it was Wednesday and our absence from school must already have been noted. My stomach ached.

  Thirty metres below there were rocks piled up like extracted teeth. We held each other’s hands very tightly, my left in his right, and I recall being amazed at not feeling any sweat on our skins. He spoke in a solemn voice: “I’m crazy about you. You’re the only person I’ve ever loved, and that will stay true forever.” Finding it hard to breathe, I mumbled something similar. Daniel counted to three. The countdown unfolded the way fateful moments always do, stretching out to let our thoughts run free. I heard one-two-three and I felt like laughing—to use that inane signal for such a serious act. I thought, one-two-three, jump in the water, I remembered my first attempts in the pool where I learned to swim, the turquoise world that greeted me, the way it stopped the voices, the song of the robins, and the threats, the strange angles at which the sun entered the water. I saw myself, so small and nervous, frolicking under the surface, untouchable and drifting, one-two-three you’re the queen, one-two-three you’re a mermaid, one-two-three this instant, the last of your existence, is no different from the ones before. It’s a moment just like all the others, no more necessary and no less, no truer and no less. One, two, three. You don’t die.

  I watched him take an incredible leap above the abyss. I don’t think I had ever seen him put as much energy into a single action. He seemed to hover weightlessly and for a split second I believed he would take flight, that he’d won, that he’d made an all-or-nothing bet and was now reaping the gift that human beings had coveted since Icarus. Then he fell. There was a thud so soft it astonished me. No crunching bones, no spewing blood. Just a kind of “poof,” like a pile of clothes landing at the foot of the bed. I stood stock-still for a minute. I guess my head was trying to take in what had just occurred. Finally, I shouted his name. He didn’t answer. I told myself, “Come on. It’s time. Go ahead. Now. You big wimp.” Then I thought he might still be alive. I stepped toward the edge. Then an enormous weight came down on me.

  “Don’t move. Don’t move. You’re not going anywhere.” The man pinned me under his full weight, repeating those words as if to make sure I wouldn’t escape. I broke into tears. I cried until the ambulance arrived. The man got up, but I continued to feel his weight on me. The paramedics wrapped me in an aluminum blanket as though I was in danger of hypothermia. They went down to the bottom of the mine and the one who came to announce Daniel’s death said, “He’s really dead,” as if he’d never seen anyone so dead. I began to bleed from the nose. It was the least I could do.

  I was sent to finish high school in a reception centre, where I was to live until I was legally of age. They protected the residents from themselves by covering everything with plastic: furniture, cutlery, food, dreams. I had to endure long sessions with a hyper-emotional social worker that I refused to speak to because I was afraid she would burst into tears. One look was enough for me to guess she was the type of woman who sobs with her bosom heaving, and I had no wish to see her heavy breasts bounce while she listened to my tale of woe. Besides, it would have been indecent to make someone else cry while I had been dry-eyed ever since I’d slipped off my thermal blanket. This wasn’t intentional and it certainly was not because I didn’t feel sad. But something simply had fallen away from me at the same time as Daniel, and the emptiness that we’d theorized at length together had materialized. A mass of lukewarm air had spread everywhere inside me as though there was nothing left to stop it. Maybe I’d never really wanted to die before the day of our suicide. Maybe it was a bogus idea prompted by our bouts of pessimism, or a game, a kind of posture that made me feel closer to him. But this much is certain: the desire to disappear never let go of me afterward.

  I had severed all ties with my foster family and had never developed any relationships other than the one that had crashed at the bottom of the mine, so I had nowhere to go during my weekend leaves. Probably out of habit, as well as guilt, I ended up at the Borduas’. I hadn’t seen Daniel’s parents since the funeral. That day, they had taken turns collapsing; first his mother had gone to pieces in his father’s arms and then she held him when he crumpled like a broken wing. As I knocked on the red door—the key was still lodged in the lining of my jacket—I half hoped the Borduas had converted Daniel’s room into a torture chamber where they would make me pay for all those years when they had welcomed me into their home like a poisoned fruit.

  Mrs. Borduas opened and her lower lip immediately started to quiver, an insect caught in a net. She screeched, “Jocelyn!” opening her arms almost brutally to press me against her chest. “We were so worried! We thought they’d locked you up!” Mr. Borduas arrived and he, too, embraced me. I followed them inside. They sat me down in front of a steaming plate and I ate heartily for the first time in weeks. Mrs. Borduas stroked my hair while I blew on each forkful. I had never noticed how much Daniel looked like his mother. The same hesitant eyes, the same undulating head of hair. I lowered my head.

  They didn’t ask anything or utter a word of reproach, even though they could very well have blamed me for their son’s suicide. They were just as kind as they had ever been, even more so in a way. Now there was something piercing in their eyes when they looked at me, as if they were trying to discern in my vague gestures some trace of their son that had survived in me. From then on, I knew I cou
ld not die.

  I went back to see them every week. They took me in after I left the centre and convinced me to continue my education. This didn’t interest me at all, but I remembered how they had dreamed of seeing their son earn a “nice diploma.” That’s how they referred to everything beyond high school. I enrolled in a CEGEP and eventually graduated as a qualified paramedic. I moved to the city, near the bridge—the Borduas were averse to navigating the clogged arteries of the metropolis—and found work in a hospital. My job involved sterilizing small, razor-sharp instruments and keeping an eye on the equipment and the employees so they wouldn’t deploy their army of germs into the rooms where patients were cut open. My tasks were simple and specific, and demanded total concentration. I accepted any overtime that was offered me, day or night, alongside the surliest nurses and the crabbiest doctors. Their barking filled the stale atmosphere of my mind. I would come home from work exhausted and eat slumped in front of the TV. I lived in perennial stasis.

  My Sundays were reserved for the Borduas. Sometimes they came for a visit, especially when the sink wouldn’t drain or a lamp was on the blink. Mr. Borduas repaired whatever needed repair, keeping up a running commentary on every stage of the operation, and was happy to see me nod whenever he glanced up. Mrs. Borduas brought me little containers of frozen food with the dates and ingredients marked on the lid. Still, despite the long bus ride, I preferred to visit them. They had never sold the house where their son had grown up. Like them, I suppose, I had learned to stop seeing the rooms as boxes full of Daniel’s shadows. The place had become a warm, peaceful haven.

  Over the years their grief had taken a variety of forms. At first it was raw and prickly, but eventually it mellowed into a kind of smooth sphere that they caressed nostalgically, a healthy but painful habit. The way Daniel’s disappearance shaped their daily lives was both horrible and reassuring. And the importance of my presence in maintaining this conflicted balance wasn’t lost on me. I had not taken their son’s place; I was the instrument that would help them carve out their existence without him, help them skirt around the biggest stumbling blocks while not ignoring them. I believe my face gradually underwent the same process as our bereavement: it grew rounder, its features less distinct. As our grief levelled out, my own attributes fell away and I, too, turned into a bland, reliable, tolerable ball.

  I have no hesitation in saying that I love the Borduas, but it was a flat, stagnant sort of love. Like water slumbering at the bottom of a well, but without which you would dry up. I’m certain they loved me with all their heart. I never accomplished anything of note, but they were proud of me. My career was unexceptional, there was no man in my life, motherhood was out of the question, I had no friends. Yet not once did the Borduas remark on my isolation; it seemed that for them just my staying alive was enough of an exploit to nurture their admiration. The wish to die persisted in every breath I took and through each day as it reiterated the day before. I marked time, and my immobility was an impregnable bulwark against suicide.

  At the hospital, people I’d worked beside for decades still asked me to repeat my name. Doctors to whom I’d handed hundreds of scalpels acted as though they were seeing me for the first time. Patients whose room I had disinfected in the morning wanted to know in the evening if I was “new here.” I’d become imperceptible.

  The Borduas slowly grew older. Their skin sagged like the branches of an especially tough plant, their bones became misshapen, yet the smiles that their wrinkles perched on stayed genuine. Watching them, I sometimes caught myself pretending these old folks were Daniel and me, that we’d gotten through our period of reckless sorrows, that I’d made a clean break with the demons of my childhood, and that he had stuffed himself with antidepressants, which I now knew might have done him good. This apparently cozy, unruffled life, this gentle slide toward the last act might have been ours. Even after all that time, I still couldn’t decide whether or not I’d have wanted such a life. It was impossible for me to imagine Daniel stable and medicated.

  Mr. Borduas was the first to die. A painless embolism in the middle of the night. Mrs. Borduas told me he’d sat up in bed and uttered a few words. Half-awake, she assumed he was talking in his sleep and paid no attention. She had no memory of what he might have said except one word, “Daniel.” We buried him in September, and the sun was shining. The sky had never seemed so bright to me.

  Mrs. Borduas stayed the same, resilient through her widowhood, her rheumatism, and her prolapse. Two or three times a week, I would cross the bridge and the tired fields of the South Shore to visit her. As I handed her the little frozen dishes that it was my turn now to prepare for her, I marvelled at every detail of the house, which the Borduas had never renovated or modernized. One day, without giving it any thought, I asked her, “You never felt like redecorating? Modern furniture, new curtains? If you like, I could come with you to the store.” She gave me a warm-hearted look but shook her head unambiguously. It wasn’t necessary for her to spell out what I should have understood long ago. The walls weren’t lined with pictures of Daniel. She had discarded his books and notebooks and donated his clothes. She had not transformed her home into a mausoleum, at least, not in an obvious way. It was in the decor, in the permanence of the things among which he had lived, that she paid tribute to him. “Every time you come to see me it’s like a breath of fresh air, dear Victoria. I don’t need a decorator for that.” I felt a wave of melancholy wash over me at the thought that this kind woman would soon be gone.

  Less than a year later, Mrs. Borduas was laid low. A stroke forced her to wave a final goodbye to her beloved home, which I promised to take good care of. I went all out to get her admitted to my hospital so I could look after her. I went to see her whenever I had a break and at the end of my shift, and I would sit at her bedside to read to her, help her eat, or simply watch over her while she slept. She liked to fall asleep holding my hand, like a child hoping to fend off the nightmares. She wasn’t quite all there, and she often spoke about Daniel as if he were still alive, still the little boy begging for a morsel of biscuit dough or refusing to wash. I didn’t contradict her but chose to let her slip freely into those states of confusion, where I supposed she found a kind of peace.

  A few days before she died I found her fully awake and alert. The wind was sweeping across the mountain as if to carry off its memories, and I was surprised to find myself wanting to stroll along those poorly marked paths that all led to the same spot. Mrs. Borduas offered me pieces of saltwater taffy that a rare visitor had brought her, fixing her gaze on me more intensely than ever. “Victoria, there’s something I’d like to know. Why did our Daniel commit suicide?” She always said “our Daniel,” automatically including me in the exclusive club of the people he had belonged to. He was now just a small, very hard point in my mind. But here she was asking the question that had dogged me like Ariadne’s thread for all those years. There was still no way to respond. “I don’t know, Mrs. Borduas.” She wiped away a tear, one of the few I’d seen her shed, and tapped me on the wrist. “And you survived.”

  I paused momentarily, wavering between the urge to leave unsaid what could never make sense and the feeling that, for once in her life, this woman deserved a truly sincere answer from me. My throat seemed to open on its own. “Yes, I survived. Because I let go of his hand.” At this, Mrs. Borduas coughed, something I interpreted as a failure to understand. My body was rigid. “We were supposed to jump together. But I let go of his hand,” I repeated. Again, she tapped me on the arm and then closed her eyes. I shuddered from head to foot. I don’t know if she learned anything from my confession. Maybe she had guessed long ago that we had been bound by a pact, Daniel and I. Maybe she had suspected it was cowardice that had turned me into a survivor. Maybe my words just dissolved inside her splintered mind.

  After a couple of days she began to sink deeper and deeper into a coma. I took a leave of absence; I’m sure my supervisor was surprised to
see this stranger apologize for having to take time off. I stayed at Daniel’s mother’s bedside day and night, wetting her lips, arranging her pillows, wiping her nose and the corners of her eyes, emptying her bedpan without recoiling from the body of the person for whom I’d lived such a useless life. She died a short while ago, silent and calm in the face of the Grim Reaper, quietly waiting for the nurses and residents to leave the room before she expired.

  Like the beating wing of a butterfly, her last breath slipped through her lips to seed a storm, a hurricane in the offing. I kissed her on the forehead and went out without letting anyone know. Making my way down the corridors, I passed several colleagues who did not recognize me, even though my hair is combed the same way as always, even though I wear my uniform because I’ve got nothing else to put on. Even though I’m exactly the same person I was since I slipped my hand out of the grip of the boy I loved.

  I step outside and the air is cool. Labrador has reached out with its great squalls, and the gusts lift me from one stair to the next, from asphalt to soft ground. I easily climb a small wooded hill and I feel that the wind will break my bones, open my head and drive out the marshy air, smash me in a headlong plunge onto a pile of granite. But I don’t fall; I go up. When I reach the top, the storm is so deafening it covers the ambulance sirens and muffles the horns of drivers hurtling toward a wall or a deer. For once, in the midst of the tumult, the thundering havoc, I’m all right. I lean my back against a tree and have no need for a run up or a rope or a blade. I’ve waited thirty years, and the end will come naturally, a sudden, spontaneous death.