Madame Victoria Read online

  One, two, three.

  “Do you recognize this woman?”

  The tired features, the jaws like a steel frame, the regal hair. Of course, they say. From Quebec City to James Bay, from Gaspé to Nicolet, from Kapuskasing to La Patrie, from Prince Rupert to Niagara, from Miramichi to Slave Lake, from Yellowknife to Rigaud, hundreds have responded to the notice. Of course we know her. She is our grandmother, our sister. She is our neighbour, the mother of our children. She is the woman who taught us how to sew on a button. The one who stuffed us full of bread pudding, who tormented us with all those ghastly cigarette burns. She is the pensioner who slept all the time, who smoked too much, the traveller who came through our village every spring, the parishioner who didn’t pay her tithe from 1972 to 1987. She was the first Québécoise I ever kissed. She is the lady I didn’t help across the street, and you can see what that led to. She is the woman I had forgotten, that left too soon, that we hoped never to run into again. The one we’ve been searching for for years. It’s for her that we always keep the porch light on now, and no longer turn off our phones, our headlights, our heads. That’s her, that’s Madame Victoria.

  Céleste is a member of the police team tasked with compiling all the calls. She listens to the voicemail messages and notes down names, numbers, and the sometimes scant, sometimes overabundant details provided. First she contacts the ones dubbed “marshmallow cases,” the people whose messages suggest they are not in full possession of their mental faculties. Before dismissing their accounts outright she must call everyone back and ask the routine questions. These conversations often take up half her day. It is not easy to cut off someone who is vulnerable, especially if, like Céleste, you wear your heart on your sleeve. If asked for statistics, she would say that forty per cent of marshmallow cases come under the heading of conspiracy theories; they are the most garrulous callers. They can spend two hours trying to convince whoever is listening that Madame Victoria was the victim of some machination of a) the government b) the Church c) a secret society—Freemasons are very popular culprits—or d) alien agents. Though it goes against the grain, Céleste is often obliged to put an abrupt end to such conversations.

  Another twenty-five per cent of marshmallow cases are made up of people who, when called back, don’t remember having contacted the information line, nor do they have any idea who Madame Victoria might be. Then there are those who give very elaborate accounts that would be credible if they did not end up contradicting themselves, thereby betraying a type of mythomania. These represent fifteen per cent of marshmallow cases and can be quite difficult to unmask. Some ten per cent start berating Céleste as soon as they hear her voice, five per cent cry, and two per cent make lewd propositions. The rest remain a mystery. When she dials the numbers of this enigmatic three per cent, the line has been disconnected or she is told that no one with that name has ever lived there. Such occurrences are too numerous for Céleste to write them off as errors; for her, they are ghosts, witnesses as fugitive as Madame Victoria’s identity.

  The second half of her day is devoted to the serious calls. These conversations are generally shorter. Céleste registers the places, dates, and all the particulars the caller is able to supply. In the vast majority of cases, the inconsistencies become apparent after only a few questions. Sometimes the time period fits but not the missing woman’s age. Sometimes the physical description is promising but not the location. Sometimes people end up admitting it’s a child, a man, or a young Haitian girl that they are looking for, but not an older white woman. When Céleste tells them, regretfully, that she must disregard their lead, they insist. Almost all of them, even the ones who obviously have no connection with Madame Victoria, stubbornly put forward far-fetched theories, loudly claiming to have some sort of proprietary right to the nameless woman. Patiently and as gently as possible, Céleste refutes their contentions. No, Victoria did not have a gold tooth. She was not club-footed. She may have had a tattoo with the image of a lynx, but there is no way of knowing. But that wasn’t her. It wasn’t her.

  Initially, Céleste was convinced that uncovering Madame Victoria’s life story would be child’s play. Yet despite a sound investigation and the countrywide missing person alert, there has been no progress in the case. Céleste is starting to lose hope, and it shows in her exchanges with the callers. They have turned personal. Then, as if by a miracle, an answer arrives. Her name is Léa.

  On the telephone, her manner is brusque, as though she had been reluctant to come forward. But the places and dates coincide. She is the right age to be Madame Victoria’s daughter. She sends Céleste photos of her mother. Same tired features, same athletic bone structure, same shock of hair as Madame Victoria’s. Ever since Léa was a little girl, her mother’s life was made up of lean times and wandering. Then, a few months before Madame Victoria’s death, she disappeared. Céleste is fired up. She summons Léa to Montreal to run some tests. A hair of the dead woman, a hair of the living woman. Then they wait. During their meetings, the young woman is self-possessed, like someone whose life has just reached an angle of repose after years of turmoil.

  In Léa’s presence Céleste tries to rein in her excitement, but she can’t keep from asking questions; she wants to know everything about the woman who may well be the one everyone is looking for. Léa informs her, though not in so many words, that her mother was bipolar, that she led a nomadic life punctuated by intervals in the psychiatric hospital. Because Léa was placed with a foster family when she was very young, she never lived with her mother and sometimes went for years without seeing her. Céleste would like so much to find a name, a family, a location for Madame Victoria, a resolution that would release her from the silence she is trapped in. Now, however, she also wants to bring some closure to Léa’s quest.

  The results arrive, and it falls on Céleste to convey them to Léa. The young woman receives the news dispassionately. Taken aback, Céleste reiterates: “I’m sorry, Léa. You’re not related to Madame Victoria.”

  Léa has an obstinate expression as she stares at the wall behind Céleste.

  “No,” she retorts.

  Heavy-hearted, Céleste sets about explaining to her how the DNA tests are carried out, the markers that are examined, the margin of error, the meaning of the results. She repeats that Madame Victoria cannot possibly be her mother or even a distant aunt.

  The young woman lifts a flame to the tip of her cigarette. The air catches fire. She blows the smoke skyward, invoking the spirits.

  “I don’t care. She’s still my mother.”

  Since then, Céleste has stopped distinguishing between the marshmallow cases and the others, the way you stop differentiating, when you reach a certain age, between good and evil, night and day. All these people are asking essentially the same question. How can someone vanish into thin air? How can an arrow never come down again? Victoria belongs to them now. After all, this could be anyone.

  Victoria on the Horizon

  She came into the world in an area with a density of seven inhabitants per square kilometre. By the time she reached the legal age, that number had climbed to eight and threatened to continue its appalling ascent. Soon the population of the town on the banks of the Ottawa River would be as dense as woollens washed in hot water. And the proximity of others, whether agglomerated in tight cells or spread out in small solitudes, did not hold the slightest appeal for Victoria or, rather, for her skin. Nearness caused unbearable itching, blotches and blisters, and, in certain extreme cases, a distressing loss of hair. The more people there were around her, the more she scratched.

  The affliction struck her on her first day at school. During recess, her skin began to crawl, to rise like an angry sea, producing humours so virulent she felt as if her skin was uttering a thousand cries of pain through its panicked pores. Nearby, the children laughed, sent balls rolling, and drew whole worlds with chalk. Victoria turned her eyes away from her rash, and for an
instant a pulse not her own coursed through her body. Then a small group running at full tilt brushed against her and her left side began to burn. She retreated to a deserted corner of the yard and, in a moment of precocious insight, understood that this first fleeting sense of fellowship would be the last. What she had not yet dared to approach she would now be forced to shun.

  For three years her mother scrubbed her body with all manner of ointments and witches’ salves that irritated Victoria like holy water splashed on demons. In a classroom of forty square metres, the density reached the barbaric ratio of six hundred ninety-four thousand four hundred forty-four people per square kilometre. For Victoria, the significance of the basic demographic unit, the number of people per square kilometre, never diminished; with her gift for mathematics, she assessed each situation in the light of that reassuring measurement. One thing was certain: six hundred ninety-four thousand four hundred forty-four children per square kilometre were far too many for her. When her mother found dried blood on Victoria’s sheets and blouses, she resigned herself to homeschooling her daughter.

  The years passed and Victoria grew into an uncommonly large young woman, in both height and breadth. Yet she looked hollow, like a mainsail that nothing could fill out. When the time came for her to leave home (forty-five people per square kilometre), Victoria wanted just one thing: to go to the ends of the earth. The joints of her hand were chapped from leafing through atlases and almanacs, her bony fingers caressing the images of the most desolate places in Quebec. She eventually determined that, given its sparse population and majestic landscapes, the tip of the Gaspé Peninsula would make an idyllic spot to settle in. She reasoned that along the coast human density would necessarily feel less burdensome because the expanse of water, which statistics did not factor in, was completely uninhabited.

  Thus, she bravely dived into a crammed bus, where she nearly clawed her skin off yet refrained from calculating the number responsible for her suffering. Her neighbour seemed to take mischievous pleasure in jabbing her ribs with his elbow each time he turned the page of his newspaper. When she alighted, she discovered two huge purple blisters at the point of contact. Turning her gaze to the vastness of the sky and sea, she forgot her wounds and heaved a sigh of relief. She was finally far away from everything.

  The geese left, taking the summer in tow, the cold came to slow down daily life, the frost varnished the land, and everything stopped. In her small, spare house, Victoria watched in fascination as her skin grew healthy and recovered a creamy purity and smoothness it had not possessed since the cradle. The only human presence was the occasional automobile that entered her field of vision bouncing over the snowy roads too swiftly to send out the wave that corroded every facet and surface of Victoria’s body. Standing at the window, she stroked her arms, quietly musing that the only thing life offered her by way of happiness was relief.

  To earn a living she did accounting jobs that were delivered by mail. At times, when she took hold of the sheets covered with numbers, her fingers prickled, perturbed by all the agitation, ambitions, and anxieties swarming under the figures she was expected to compile. Then she would let the documents sit for a few hours in the radiance of the wood stove before taking them up again. When she had finished her work she was stiff with a distant fatigue, deliciously different from the exhaustion brought on by her erstwhile ailments. She would wait until the middle of the night to go out and slip the envelopes into the mailbox, certain that at that hour she would encounter nothing but big winds.

  Convinced she was saved, Victoria was unsuspecting when the snow began to disappear, the ice jams shrank, the boats once more set out to sea, and the townspeople took possession of the village again. Their distant, hazy presence, their restrained gestures, and their continual migration to the cities prevented them from destabilizing her new-found health. Nor did she fret when the road traffic increased, speckling the landscape with gleaming colours. It was her skin that sounded the alarm in the dead of night during the Saint-Jean holiday. She thought her sheets had caught fire.

  There they were, all around her, on the waterfront, in the woods, atop the cliffs and near the rushing stream, drunk and famished, tangled up in their sleeping bags, their mouths brimming with bawdy songs and shrimp, full of the benighted enthusiasm so typical of tourists the world over. At dawn, armed with binoculars, Victoria managed to catch sight of the banners signalling the festivities that would last until autumn. Looking down, she gazed at the festering sores that in a matter of hours had broken out on her chest. Even her nails bristled with scales.

  She tried rubbing herself with the old ointments, to no avail; they evaporated upon contact with her skin. Immersed in her bath, she spent a few hours attempting to regain her composure, hoping this unprecedented bout was just a relapse due to a prolonged hiatus. But to her great dismay the water began to seethe and then turn a distressing ochre colour. She leaped out of the bathtub, flayed alive, her vision clouded over by something she sensed was not a product of the ambient air but her own retinas. Twenty-four hours after the vacationers had arrived, Victoria feared for her life.

  In no time, her bags were packed. She crossed the sleeping village under cover of early dawn, enraged at being dispossessed of the ground she had gained at such great cost. After a boat ride almost as taxing as the bus ride that had preceded it, Victoria dashed to a quiet, isolated spot to study her map. This time there were no calculations. She knew precisely where she had to go. It was a place that, ironically, was made almost uninhabitable by the swarms of mosquitoes, deer flies, and biting midges, which was why Victoria had previously dismissed it. But realizing now that human proximity was more harmful to her than these insects, she immediately set out in that direction with no second thoughts. She was an arrow, and she was flying toward northern Quebec.

  Walking at a brisk pace she could cover twenty-five kilometres a day. In other words, two weeks as the crow flies. But considering the detours needed to avoid the occasional dwellings along the way, she could hardly hope to reach her destination in less than twenty days. She left behind the coastal hamlets and entered what the locals called the “unorganized territory,” a wild and marvellously unpopulated expanse stretching from the river to the pole. The only creatures she came across were sufficiently afraid of her to keep their distance. In any case, Victoria had always been more comfortable with the closeness of animals than that of human beings. She therefore allowed herself to break her stride to admire the hefty grace of a moose or the rhythm of a hare in full flight.

  Her stigmas faded together with the impression of consuming the air around her. Her skin remained dry and slack, as though her body was a smaller version of an even bulkier physique. But Victoria had never concerned herself with her appearance, which was far less a matter of image than of sensation, and now that she was shooting toward the horizon like a stray bullet, it no longer mattered at all.

  She came across scattered objects, gutted machines and stillborn tools, strewn along a deserted road. When she began to notice flowers sprouting in the middle of the pavement she realized she had reached what she was looking for. A density of 0.1 inhabitants per square kilometre. That perfectly smooth zero, burnished by tranquility and seclusion, was her salvation. The vestiges of human activity kept showing up like fallen satellites until Victoria spotted a sign: Site de l’ancienne ville de Gagnon, the site of the former city of Gagnon. She had arrived.

  Nothing was left of the municipality except the washed-out pattern of the streets. The houses, the school, the church, the stores—everything had been flattened when the company pulled out. On the outskirts of the city, sitting in a pool of toxic water at the bottom of a massive hole, were the machines the managers of the mine had not seen fit to take with them. Metallic fossils, scorified whale skeletons. Witnessing this scene of dereliction, Victoria discovered what all undertakers come to terms with through their acquaintance with corpses: the grey, unalterable peace of death. She
moved through a kind of silvery desert coldly glimmering with deposits of a heavy, bluish powder. They had extracted from the belly of the earth whatever was needed to turn this part of the country into a moonscape. The wind came up and the smell of the tundra brushed against her bare skin. Nature, so beautiful, so volatile.

  She spent several days sleeping outdoors, with the bats weaving protective trails overhead. In the absence of other humans, her solitude took on a new texture. Whereas before she had to fight to build an invisible bubble around her, in Gagnon such efforts were no longer necessary. The struggle was quite simply to survive. She had brought only a thick sleeping bag and dehydrated food that she ate sparingly. In the creeks and the immense arms of the Manicouagan reservoir she caught fish that kept on battling until the moment of death, and coming into contact with their vitality made her tremble. She was unaccustomed to it. She prepared and cooked her prey with reverence.

  In August the weather took an uncertain turn and shelter became a pressing need. Victoria took up residence in a place bordered by magnificent aspens, where, she assumed, a very cozy house had once stood. To find the necessary materials she had to move away from the centre of town, which had been stripped decades ago. Sometimes she walked up to twenty kilometres a day to locate a few planks, branches suitable for supporting a structure, some sheet metal. She erected a cabin with what she found and insulated it with leaves and moss. It felt good to build her nest where people had lived, loved, lied, wept, where men had bled and women had swaddled babies. The days grew shorter and she began to gather firewood. She stole sheets and canned goods as heavy as bear bellies from the seldom-used hunting lodges of Lac Barbel.