Free Fences in Breathing by Nicole Brossard Page A

law was keen, as fine as a blade capable of slicing the pain away from muscles, eyes and faces. The law, in principle, erased fear and kept mothers at bay.
    At about six o’clock, Laure Ravin went down to the hotel bar. She picked up a
Herald Tribune
that was lying on a chair and headed for a table in front of the large window looking over the Jardin anglais. The weather had changed, rain was imminent. She liked this Bar du Miroir where, when she was in town, she would come by for cocktails and listen to a Chechen pianist. Each wall was decorated with a huge mirror recalling an Orthodox cross. Seven squares high by seven squares wide. The armchairs and sofas were black or grey leather. The carpet, red. All around, businessmen discussed contracts and good fortune. All had grey hair, as if money protected from baldness.
    She was about to sit down when I recognized her. It was the same woman I had glimpsed one day behind the cedar hedge of a nice house in the village. She gave the impression of wanting to talk to me. I was glad to see her. I invited her to sit at my table. She ordered a glass of white wine, noticed I was drinking a martini, like she herself did when in New York. Then she inquired about my life at the château, about Tatiana, whom her mother had known well years ago. I talked about the reasons that had brought me to the château, about my ‘relationship to history,’ about my sense of estrangement in this village. As though it were very important, she described the vineyards surrounding the château, the tasting rooms where wine always made heads spin and tongues loosen. She spent more time describing a wooden bench behind the church from which one could look at the countryside, see the lake and, on some days, the snow atop the very high mountain. She said she was fascinated by the cohabitation of an ancient world and of cutting-edge technology in each village home.
    The sun was setting. The lake was becoming a monochrome presence while its great jet of water, shot through with rainbow colours, switched on like a neon sign. Laure often used the word
lacerated
: lacerated sheets of paper, lacerated painting, lacerated woman, lacerated democracy, lacerated freedom. This epithet no doubt translated adeliberate gesture that suddenly and violently damaged an integrity. I listened to her very closely. I could not quite determine whether I should attribute my close attention to how interesting her ideas were or to what she could represent to me. Out of the blue, Laure Ravin started enthusing about Spinoza, saying she could never refrain from talking about this man whose work she found so contemporary. In the same breath, and at length, she inter-wove opinion, knowledge and belief. ‘Spinoza cut telescope lenses for a living. He was a joyful individual who feared neither exile nor excommunication.’ It was obvious Laure wanted to draw me onto political terrain, but every five sentences a word or expression would bring her back to her mother. To hear her talk, one would think I knew her mother.
    ‘My work is composed mostly of reading and interpretation, like in Ismail Kadare’s
The Palace of Dreams.
’ She was listening to me. She did not know this book. She confessed her ignorance with such fervour that her voice troubled me. The granite table felt smoother and warmer under my palm, the martini transformed familiar sensations into a mini-dose of anxiety and reverie. Outdoors, it was getting gloomy. Could it be that what I was feeling in one language was untranslatable, incomprehensible, in another?
Suddenly everything is so frail from afar from up close to the end of the street we kids loved to play in and with the pastand memory demolishing potatoes tasting of ashes and molluscs we loved jumping from up high falling into ravines with words that threw open an abyss in the eyes every time we loved abysses and in their depths what had broken and scattered and needed to be put back into its original shape with one