Free Fences in Breathing by Nicole Brossard Page B

predatory glance in order to keep breathing. As for myself I enjoyed underlining words it was my way to keep repeating in someone’s ear if I loved them hated them if I wished them well whenever I underlined I stopped the wind and something would begin that I called grave, deep night.
    Outdoors the weather was changing. Laure Ravin suddenly seemed to want to conclude: ‘I must drop by the post office. And make a phone call. Would you join me for dinner? On the other shore?’
    They were two sentences at the door of the Hôtel Metropole with a bridge and a touch of dusk penetrating mouths and thoughts. The two sentences touched in a single spot, resulting in a single syllable. Night. In the middle of the bridge spanning the shores, it was a known fact: they were two sentences made to prevent the night from sinking into night. Two sentences sweeping the dark like emergency lights, bright gashes flaring into a fan above the lake.
    Laure had bought two large envelopes and some stamps showing the white mass of a bear amid the blue vastness of Arctic glaciers. We crossed the bridge in the opposite direction, lingering because of the beneficial scent of kelp and silt. A slow darkness was descending, slowly sweeping the sky, creating the impression of a field of mist and ruins. At eight-thirty in the evening we made our entrance at the Hôtel d’Angleterre. In the dining room, Laure talked about a frightening world. About the powerful life force that makes us hungrily consume reality and recreate it in imaginary form, dreadfully fascinating and, in a sense, irreproachable. I said I loved people only when they are coiled inside the intelligence of the living. For the lawyer in her, meaning was alive only when brutal and all-consuming. She deemed that reality was but a kind of laundering that made it possible to properly dispose of violence and despair, and that it was necessary to always hold it in the utmost respect, regardless of the emotions running through us. I replied that, on the contrary, it was imperative to dive into the heart of reality in order to thwart lies and the filthy imprints they’ve left on time like a horizon of culture. We were the only ones speaking French in the room. All around us, German, Japanese, Arabic and English words raised the dust of the present, punctuating diners’ laughter and good manners. Between Laure and myself, a life chapter was opening, a discourseof honour gliding word by word into old ideas of freedom and the infinite desire for life.
    I decided to walk Laure back to the Metropole. On the way, the perspective shifted. The bridge seemed larger, wider. Behind us the Hôtel d’Angleterre had become just another hotel among the other grand hotels along the quay. The vibrations that were so strong on the bridge during afternoon had ceased. The asphalt glistened under the rain. Car headlights left long red traces. Or white ones, depending on their direction. The city seemed suspended in the playful twinkling of its shores. Ever so smoothly, I had slid into the metaphor of sadness of Jean-Michel Othoniel’s illuminated boat. By turning it over to the night, where it belonged, this metaphor seemed even more gorgeous, as precious as the mute tenderness that follows a moment of abandon.
    They were two sentences with an idea of time and night. Sentences permeable to death and oblivion. One could readily have believed in a story between them. Each sentence poured its meaning into a great vivarium of torments and questions with words ever easier to caress. Yet each one sought to understand the laws of her own gravity. Whenever the two sentences crossed paths too quickly or too often without apparent explanation, inner reality dealt the universe a sharp, glorious kick. There remained a wound in the middle of the universe. One needed to behold it, then to have no fear of burrowing into it until the universe became the universe again. This is how the sentences moved forward into the night, carrying