Madame Victoria Read online

  These preparations plunged her into a kind of frenzy. She started talking to herself and to the fallen leaves, the squirrels, the last moths. She told herself legends inspired by the strange topography of this city reclaimed by nature, and confided in its inhabitants, whose souls had not entirely gone away. Submerged since her early childhood, the desire for human contact resurfaced, compounded by the looming season of hardships. From the traces of warmth and friendship that surrounded her, she invented the warmth and friendship she lacked. Then the first snows settled on her new kingdom and she fell silent.

  Those who have experienced real pain, the kind of torment that claws at the outer limits of what a person can endure, understand what a blessing immobility can be. After years of suffering, Victoria bore with equanimity the need to stay huddled in a shelter so narrow that she was forced to sleep curled up, to eat in a squatting position, to let her thoughts go round in circles. During the blizzards, she sat perfectly still inside her shell of stiff cloth, feeling that winter had stuffed her in its pocket like an old glove. Even though the fire produced enough heat to keep her alive, the big freezes numbed her extremities and a perilous sleep tormented her on more than one night, as the wolves awakened around her.

  Yet the danger of freezing and the wild beasts might have been kept at bay if hunger had not gained ground, slithering through the snow like an endless snake. Because when it becomes permanent, hunger eventually is forgotten, and therein lies the danger. The supply of canned food and dry cereals that had appeared substantial in the fall depleted very quickly, and the frugal rations that Victoria afforded herself were dispersed inside her as soon as they were swallowed. With her skin immaculate as never before, she counted the days until the thaw, making delirious calculations in which her exhaustion served as the numerator and winter, the denominator. By the time spring came gliding across the incalculable planet of the north, Victoria had been devoured by the winds and the solitude of the Manicouagan. Like the city where she had taken up residence, she was now just a phantom.

  She was aware that on the first day of warm weather she crawled out of her lair, lapped up meltwater, and caught sight of some geese, which she wished she could roast. She later would recall raising her head to receive the boreal forest and its shower of luminous needles, the greedy mouth of spring. She blacked out somewhere between her triumph over the season of death and the failure of her calculations. Under the expanding sun her skin grew iridescent. The sound of footsteps ruffled the silence.

  From the depths of her coma she felt her malady returning. It started with a prickly sensation, followed by outright itching, which, given her paralysis, she could not relieve. The torture lasted several hours, during which she inferred from the jolts and jerks that she was being transported elsewhere. A specific point between her breasts began to burn with unusual intensity, and Victoria grasped through some feverish intuition that she had arrived at the place she had never dared to go. Through her pain she was overtaken by a weird joy, a savage jubilation born of transgression, the abandonment of all her efforts. She found herself thrown against others, packed, moulded into the crowd. She was saved. She was damned.

  When she awoke there was a syringe in her arm and a nurse slathering her body with a petroleum-based cream. “Don’t bother,” Victoria managed to mutter as she eyed the huge blisters that covered her skin. The nurse jumped. Doctors hurried to her room to take samples of her skin while Victoria swallowed pills that did nothing to dull her pain. Only a step away from downtown Montreal, the population density exceeded three thousand per square kilometre. Within the walls of the Royal Victoria Hospital that number increased tenfold. Analgesics were powerless to deal with this degree of human concentration.

  While she was being fed, intravenously at first and then with small meals as pale as the rain, she learned that six days earlier a hunter had found her in the woods exhausted and severely undernourished. He had immediately driven her to this hospital without explaining why he hadn’t left her in Baie-Comeau, La Malbaie, or Quebec City. Dizzy with pain, Victoria barely managed to follow the nurse aides’ account. For hours at a time she crunched ice cubes and looked out the window at the men and women jostling each other on the overcrowded sidewalks, delighted and horrified by this unthinkable proximity.

  When she was able to walk and eat unaided, she got out of her bed. Her skin was covered with sores, even her feet floated on a layer of gigantic blisters; the staff was against her going out. Victoria shook her head, touched by the kindness of all these people with their drawn faces, their prominent cheekbones, their almond eyes, their laughing mouths, their protruding ears. She never grew tired of seeing this multitude of faces. She promised to come back every day for the treatment that was supposed to cure her and left.

  She could walk no more than ten metres without halting, staggered by a pain so acute it blinded her. But she did not have far to go. From her room she had noticed a small, isolated wood overlooking the parking lot. It would do. This knoll would allow her to establish a buffer zone within a radius of thirty metres around her. Considering the density to which she had become accustomed over the past weeks, this perimeter would afford her some respite. Besides, she could not walk any farther.

  She fashioned a small nest of leaves and, rocked by the sirens and the music of the evening, she spent a tolerable first night. She had not been mistaken. The moderate isolation eased her suffering. In the morning she hobbled back to the hospital to receive her medication and undergo tests. The medical staff seemed to have run out of solutions but they persisted in believing something on the fringe of their science could help their flayed patient. This perseverance made them even more endearing.

  On Victoria’s fifth day in the wood, a chubby nurse no taller than a rosebush led her into an office and shut the door. “I know you’re sleeping in the parking lot. I could help you find a place to stay, you know,” she said, riveting her eyes of different colours on those of her patient. Victoria shrugged: “I don’t sleep in the parking lot, I sleep in the wood. Please don’t be offended, but the time I spend there does me far more good than the medicines you give me.” She described to the lady the things she had done over the past few years to fight her strange allergy. “Then why don’t you go back to the countryside?” Victoria smiled and felt the crusts on her face go taut. “I don’t know,” she answered, unable to explain that she could no longer detach herself from the crowd that made her ill.

  That evening, the woman insisted on accompanying Victoria to the top of the knoll. She placed a blanket and a package of food near the makeshift bed. “Sleep well. See you tomorrow.” In a sudden surge of affection, Victoria took a step forward and wrapped her arms around the nurse, who compassionately returned the embrace and even bestowed a few exquisite taps on Victoria’s shoulder. As the nurse made her way back down to the hospital, Victoria, shaken by the hug, began to tremble.

  In the middle of her breastbone, the point of tension that had been radiating heat since her arrival in Montreal expanded. A searing pain invaded her chest, her trunk, her neck, and finally her head. Her skin simmered like water about to evaporate. She wanted to scream but all she could manage was a hoarse wheeze. Her body was burning. In a panic she threw herself down and rolled on the ground. The carpet of dead leaves ignited.

  On Mount Royal, the dogs sniffed the air. A smell of incense, wintergreen, and scorched spruce floated through the trees. A tender-hearted Great Dane began to howl; a flock of birds scattered in the plume of smoke rising from the slope of the mountain. Without knowing why, people strolling along there suddenly felt like crying.

  Victoria Worn Out

  Somewhere between the eleventh and the twelfth she’d had enough. It had already set in with the eighth, the fraught, irreparable tiredness, when nights brought her dreams where her arms came loose and dropped to the ground with a soft thud. Then she became pregnant with her ninth, and her sleep turned back into the thick sub
stance that engulfed everything and made her snore. But when the third wife announced with tears of joy in her heifer eyes that she was expecting twins, Victoria decided it was time to get out.

  The first wife gave up after her fourth child and never leaves her bed now despite the prayers, despite the songs sung for her by the matrons of the community. Victoria was entrusted with her offspring, so that from one day to the next her brood doubled in size. She ate incessantly in those days, seeking in the meat pies and crusty breads the energy that drained out of her each time she nursed, each time she awoke in the night. After that, she resigned herself to being thin. Nothing can satiate her, neither food nor faith.

  The small white bodies that surround her are interchangeable, just like the names of these sons and daughters all demanding to be washed, warmed, fed, consoled, taught to walk and speak, tucked into bed, and cared for when they come down with the runny noses, chesty coughs, and stomach viruses that befall the household like disasters. The husband doesn’t consider it incumbent on him to help out, and the third wife has always believed she does her fair share by singing lullabies and making necklaces out of macaroni.

  So Vanda is mixed up with Nephi, who becomes Justicia or Laerte when it’s time for homework or Noah during a snowstorm. At bath time, all these little slippery-skinned creatures follow each other through the bathwater, which gradually turns brown, while Victoria, getting damper and damper, feels her hands shrivel up and eventually steps out of the bathroom dripping wet. She ought to find the children’s laughter and words endearing, but they’re smothered by the screen of her exhaustion before reaching her ears. She gives them each a kiss and aligns their small bodies in overcrowded beds, pulls up the quilts, and turns off the light the way one hastily shuts a door to keep out the cold.

  The kids’ uncertain sleep signals the beginning of new tasks where their shadows continue to haunt the house. The bits of food glued under the table. The evaporated drops of pee around the toilet bowl. The clothes discarded in the corners of the rooms. The thousands of toys pulled as if by magnets underneath the sofas. The nose pickings stuck to the back cover of the Book of Mormon. The dying animals hidden in the basement in the hope of saving their lives and which, if not found in time, will fill the house with a stench of putrefaction. Then, after the housecleaning, the laundry, the sewing, and the next day’s sandwiches, there are the prayers. To give thanks for the boon that a large family represents.

  She lives in the southwestern part of the continent; she sets course for the northeast. With its catastrophic climate and its reputation as a Sodom, Montreal is the last place they’ll look for her. Victoria packs in secret, one article at a time, more when the husband spends the night with the third wife, but such occasions have grown scarcer as number three’s belly grows larger. Victoria crams an assortment of essential items into her suitcase, doing her utmost to assemble whatever clothing and material is needed to prepare for what awaits her in that city of snow and promiscuity. Whenever a child coughs or farts in the next room she quickly shuts the suitcase, her heart racing. They sleep restlessly, unable to stop fidgeting, to stop making their tenacious little presence felt.

  The main problem is money. When the husband is away, she is the one who holds the purse strings. But a theft would very soon be noticed, easily sniffed out in this household so mindful of its budget, so devoted to scrimping and saving. And it’s out of the question for Victoria to spend years building up a nest egg by skimming small change from the kitty on the sly. She needs a more radical method to finance her getaway. She considers raiding the temple’s cashbox but is too afraid of the consequences. The community does not take that sort of offence lightly.

  The solution comes to her one feverish night as she surveys the assembly to whom she has just served the sacred stew. Casting her eyes on the eldest son, a blond-haired lad prophetically named Croesus, she realizes he has been delivering papers for quite a while. Come to think of it, she can’t remember a time when Croesus didn’t spend his mornings seated astride his dilapidated bicycle distributing vapid publications rolled up like scrolls. Searching her memory, she recalls that on several occasions the boy voiced the desire to donate to the Church’s African missions. First thing the next day, she snatches her son’s piggybank. Just as she hoped, the delicate porcelain piglet contains enough money for her to cross the continent and subsist for two or three weeks. Victoria seizes the loot with no second thoughts. The infidels of Africa can wait. Her own impiety is a matter of urgency.

  The larceny sets things in motion. Checking the bus schedules, the routes, the times when the coast would be clear. Thrusting her hand under the bed in the middle of the night to be reassured by the touch of the suitcase handle. Shouldering the husband’s body away when he rolls toward her. Above all, avoiding pregnancy. Especially now. On every surface, disorder is on the rise, and the children have begun to swear under their breaths, as if the house sensed the imminent chaos. In her head she is already far. She is an arrow that nothing can divert from its flight north.

  She chooses to leave the day after the Sabbath. Sleep is more impenetrable on those nights and the early morning heavier. Cousins have come to the house to celebrate, and the floors are littered with bodies slumbering on camping mattresses, dressed in blue, pink, and a dirty white now beyond washing. She can’t distinguish her sons and daughters among the pug-nosed faces. They all look alike. The children of her family have become one child, a single little person uttering an inarticulate request, an impossible prayer, with one voice. One pair of legs cavorting back and forth along the corridor, one head of hair beset by chewing gum.

  Victoria threads her way through the sleepers, careful not to brush them with her long skirt. The door creaks when she opens it, and a little girl with a tousled mane lifts her head, scratches her behind, wipes her nose with the sleeve of her nightgown. Victoria raises a finger to her lips to hush the child. Then she steps through the doorway with a sigh that carries her to the far end of the deserted street, to the station full of birds and prayer sheets. Others have gone adrift here before her.

  During the endless bus ride, Victoria recalls the horror stories brought back by the young missionaries returning from Montreal. The bars where women dance and hike up their skirts like Jezebels, vagrants who bite people going by, alcoholics who drink themselves to death, temples converted into condominiums. Not that she’s unable to credit these accounts, but they don’t shock her anymore. The time when she believed that those who left the trenches of the Church fell into an abyss is long past. Now she is one of the so-called “sons of perdition,” and she doesn’t care. The last circle of the Mormon hell is better than that community and its stifling rules. No dancing. No lottery tickets. No hot beverages. No refusing the husband’s body. The first thing she’ll do after getting off in Montreal will be to drink a cup of coffee hotter than the sun and scratch a lottery ticket while doing a few tango steps.

  The weather is fine when she arrives in Montreal. It’s milder than she expected, but Victoria insists on wearing a heavy parka. She takes a seedy room next to the bus station, puts down her luggage, chucks the Bible that was asleep in the night table, and finally lies down. It seems to her, on this bed with lumpy blankets, that this is the first time she has ever stretched out. Except for her deliveries, she has never spent this much time both awake and horizontal. Nor has the silence around her ever been so perfect. The noise of the engines and the horns rising from the street is nothing compared to the fleshy thrum that set the tempo of her former life and nurtured the feeling that at any moment someone might show up, tug at her arm and demand of her a thousand things meant to remedy the inexorable fact that whatever you fill will eventually be empty again, whatever you heal will end up hurting again, whatever you satisfy will sooner or later be unappeased. She falls asleep.

  After forty-eight hours of dizzying stillness Victoria resolves to confront the outside world. The roads are grey and grimy, and wet in
spite of the dry weather; the people are old and tetchy and refuse to look at her. She could not have wished for anything better. She goes to watch the river and the ships, passes in front of dozens of churches without paying attention, and hikes up the mountain. Everything is constantly moving and, oddly enough, this movement, with which she has no connection, calms her. Montreal is precarious and full of gaps; fitting in will be easy. Everything will be easier, from now on.

  She devotes the following week to job hunting, making the rounds of the shops, supermarkets, and fast-food restaurants, offering her services as a cashier. After all those years managing the family budget, her mental arithmetic skills are unrivalled, and the prospect of establishing a border of numbers and banknotes between her and her peers appeals to her. Wherever she applies, she is appraised with a stern look, sometimes her telephone number is noted down, but she senses from the vague gestures with which she is received that the moment she turns around her particulars will wind up at the bottom of a wastebasket. She has no résumé, no references, not even a fixed address. No one wants to hire a ghost.

  One afternoon she finds herself in front of a pizzeria. To save money, she has been making do until now by nibbling on white bread and a few thin slices of ham. But after the long days spent marching from one neighbourhood to the next in search of work, she hungers for something hot, fat, and heavy. Liberated at last from the greed of gluttonous children, she wants to chomp on her favourite foods and hear the smack of her selfishness between two mouthfuls. She enters the eatery, ready to sacrifice a portion of her savings, which life in the big city has depleted faster than she’d expected.

  At the counter, a waitress with hair as frizzy as a lamb is serving customers in three broken languages. Behind her, an oil-soaked sign announces that the restaurant is hiring. She glances at the greenish walls and squeaky stools, and pictures herself carrying plates of Caesar salad and garlic bread. Victoria intercepts the waitress as she walks by, introduces herself and enquires about the job offer. Showing no interest in Victoria’s waitressing skills, the woman asks if she speaks French.