Following the Summer Read online

  Lise Bissonnette

  Translated from the French

  by Sheila Fischman

  Following the

  Summer

  A NOVEL

  Anansi

  Copyright © Les Éditions du Boréal, Montréal, Canada 1992

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  This edition published in 2013 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801, Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

  Fax 416-363-1017

  www.houseofanansi.com

  First published in French as Marie Suivait l’été in 1992

  by Les Éditions du Boréal

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Bissonnette, Lise

  [Marie suivait l’été. English]

  Following the summer

  Translation of: Marie suivait l’été.

  eISBN 978-1-77089-133-3

  I. Title. II. title: Marie suivait l’été. English.

  PS8553.I88M313 1993 C843’.54 C93-093590-X

  PQ3919.2.B59M313 1993

  Cover design: Brant Cowie/ ArtPlus Limited

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  for Godefroy-M. Cardinal

  A jet black dog, part basset, drags its round and tired

  body to the edge of the park. A thirsty day. Surge of men

  under scrawny trees. During another such July sulphur

  and wind paced out the area around the lake where a

  town would rise. With the first convoys that followed in

  the wake of gold or fraud. No man’s land. Around the

  borders a scorching yellow sun. Now the only hunters are

  singed dogs and children from the same brood. Above the

  anthills, invisible mists of Sunday.

  One

  MARIE IS TWENTY YEARS OLD AND SHE is knitting, white yarn against a green bench. Click of needles, rustle of birds. Of birds she never hears, in this park that is suspended in dust. Birds pass in the distance, on the other side of the lake, as if they were tracing the exhalation of the mine. Breathing that reverberates close by, three streets in back of her, where a veil settles over the trees, invisible, but she sees it as grey. It’s peaceful here, the leaves motionless, for the wind veers off at the first path, at the first dwarf trees, arrested in mid-growth as though someone has pruned them.

  Behind the low wall the rumbling cars are silent now. It must be four o’clock because a shadow has stirred on the wide pool of moss, what is left of the spring. Green. She imagines herself as a young woman knitting and watching over a child in a park, in France, where urban roses bloom around rented chairs. Knowledge borrowed from books. As usual, it is the scent she cannot quite grasp, the sweetness to go with the ashes of this place.

  At five she will go home, take back inside herself this nowhere city, this sultry day. A bag for her knitting, a leash for the dog, the hideous dog. Who for the moment has disappeared. Somewhere beyond the paved path, towards the trails, earth and bush, where curiosity used to draw her in the days when it still existed.

  To the north, one branch of the path has been erased. As if no one wanders any more to the fences that protect the guest houses, the mine’s castle-houses, now uninhabited for the most part. Though with their German casements and their French roofs they look as if they should be filled with servants: Their lawns slope down gently and stop at foliage that hides a glaucous beach lapped by the bile green of freshwater weeds. Poison.

  The other path still follows the shore, gritty with sand and bald stone. This place was witness to her adolescent rage. Amidst the drought of trampled grass, the grime of furrowed earth, the acid ochre of rocks seared by the chemistry of the mine. Bright red beside the water, dusky rose between stunted blueberries sterile at the root, and littered cellophane, cigarette butts, torn pages of yellowed newspaper.

  On another scorching afternoon a magic ceremony was held. Marie’s glasses were used, with a sliver of sun, to set fire to the grass; she had entered the water beside the flat stone to immerse Isis, a cloth goddess. (Her terror, legs caught in the solid, acrid lake. “And if I fall?” — “Then you will decompose. — Rust.” — “Shall I be reunited with gold?”) It had taken an hour before Isis was dry, before she burned. “May those who stop us from leaving here be drowned or consumed,” said Rita, her black hair the proper colour for casting spells.

  Blurred ceremonies, and now only the colours remain. With nothing to do during this lull, Marie goes to look for her dog. She is near-beautiful and annoyed by a trickle of sweat on her face, by the sand that sneaks into her brand-new sandals.

  She gropes for a place to step, her mind is blank, she is only impatient at being here, under this harsh sun, calling an animal. A clank of bicycles not far away, behind a knoll, punctuates the children’s shouts. Husky voices, already coarse. The path disappears into higher grass near the top. She is exasperated.

  A thin streak of half-dry clay, a square of shadow. Marie falls but it’s nothing, only the sharp edge of a stone that makes blood flow at the ankle’s hinge. A soiled dress, and now irritation because she must wait for the oozing to stop, beside water too dirty to use. No pain. Just a sense of absurdity, a spark of rage.

  No, summers in this natural garbage dump brought neither rituals nor sorcery, neither revelations nor evil spells. Only the summer, as dull as this one, divided between cycling and forbidden dancing, between brief rainfalls and drought, between weekday boredom and Saturdays when you counted the weddings. In the distance she hears the latest one, the blaring horns of rented Cadillacs, to be returned as soon as the wedding party has alighted at the hotel.

  The dog has come back, has stopped moving. The animal has legs of unequal length, its eyes are reminiscent of ancestors we would like to disown, in photos where workers are dressed up like members of the bourgeoisie. Into dark suits and taffeta dresses with ruching are tucked the hardworking leanness of one, the fat of the other. Their hands give them away, as do the fixed stares of the children in their one pair of white stockings, eyes bulging at an everyday magic. The dog is panting like one of them, like the grandfather who every morning carted logs from his house to the workshop where he sharpened other people’s saws and knives.

  She is there to absorb it, along “with the day’s humidity, the dog’s gaze. Nothing happens here, only scratches. A prison-land that drags its rocks like a ball-and-chain. Meagre shoots that lap up blood through the dust.

  Go home now. The sun still harsh and high. Bicycles have delivered the children’s cries to the rim of the park, to the little thicket of aspens, noon-hour stopping place during excursions, where they bite into thin bread, into ham grey with butter and light. Marie makes a final attempt to stem the oozing, now a paler pink. Behind her flits a brief shadow, scarcely more than a rustle on the sand-polished stone. Something like mockery in the voice. “Hurt yourself?”

  Against the sun the lengthy silhouette becomes stocky, divided between the black slacks and the orange blouse. She’s built like the grocer’s wife, Marie thinks, straightening up. Her
cheek brushes the slight curve of the other woman’s hip. An ordinary woman, with sheep’s eyes (like her own) and hair burnt by a cheap black dye-job.

  A salesgirl, or rather a waitress in the beer parlour. When the town was finally populated there were twenty-nine taverns and ten hotels that children weren’t even allowed to go near. The obverse of night, lights that turn the snow on sidewalks green, and ventilating fans that send out rancid odours, and in summer the sugary smell of beer. Whenever they walked under the awning of the Union Hotel (Verres stérélisés, Bienvenue) they laughed at the misspelled word. It was their way of showing contempt for the drunken midafternoon laughter that came through the swinging door. Laughter of people like this woman. You envisage them with sheets always rumpled, with unmade beds flanked by grubby night tables, with companions noisy and malodorous.

  Her face is clean, her eyelashes thick. What is she doing here, on the other side of the lake? Does she not know the difference? Firmly, she grasps Marie’s arm and shifts her to a higher position, leaning against a still-scorching rock. “You should be careful, it’s dirty here.” Takes a blue handkerchief from Marie (the kind you put in hope chests, that bring laughter from girls like her). “Could be dangerous, better clean it up right away.”

  A worn-out voice, one that’s been hung up in many places. They have to be like that at night, mercenary, tolerant of alcohol and of jokes repeated a thousand times. Marie believes she can recognize them. Last year, on a day like this, she had tried to help to her feet a woman moaning softly in an alley, whom the police had taken to the station instead of the hospital. “Nothing wrong with her, she’s dead drunk, she’s always falling down, and when she starts chasing other customers away, the owner of the Royal kicks her out.” As Marie signed the deposition, the human wreck stirred slightly, a howl of pain. The youngest officer had picked up the pale body covered with scrapes and tossed it into the station’s only cell. Obscenities poured out in waves, as if the woman wanted their contempt. There was something enjoyable about being carried away by pity, about sniffing out the drama that had brought her here — desertion, or incest. No one could choose such abjection. Such dereliction, said the priest, who liked verbal precision. Marie was unmoved by dereliction, was only curious about the hoarse voice, so suited to curses.

  The voice of this woman bending over her wound resembles the other, save for its oily slowness. She talks about rusty scissors, about scars that close over invisible infections, about abscesses and accidents that happen to children. Before Marie can even think about making her getaway, the woman spits gently into the handkerchief, turning it mauve, and wipes the wound, probing deep inside. Firmly, as if using a grater, she exposes the pink, she presses once again, and blood wells up, clean. Again. Marie’s disgust is idiotic now, she knows that. Under the handkerchief tied as a tourniquet, the stickiness soaks into the cloth.

  Go home now, quickly. Thank her.

  The orange top exposes a plump elbow, rounder than her own. Like the arm that tucks you in on nights when you have a fever, tenderly, absently, already busy putting clothes away or turning off unnecessary lamps. “Thank you,” says Marie, the routine words turning ridiculous. The dog shakes himself, stirs up the silence a little, but the woman does not move away. She walks with Marie to the edge of the park, supports her on the irregular stones (“I’m fine now, really, it’s nothing”), and lavishes advice — Mercurochrome and cold water.

  On the moss a man with tattooed arms has just stretched out. He pulls himself up on his elbows just long enough for the shadow of the two women to pass across his pale shirt. An orange blouse against a beige dress, dowdy now with its sober flowers, its (genuine) patent leather belt which matches the sandals exactly. Marie is a catalogue image with her carefully waved hair, her discreet earrings. Her gait becomes awkward. The other woman does not even see the man feigning sleep.

  A crease of jealousy. Marie sees again Eleni, daughter of the Greek restaurant-owner who had the same confident sway when she brushed against the troops of boys in the narrow aisles at the arena. “Love me tender,” Elvis crooned, amidst the fine hail thrown up by their skates. Even in the depths of winter, when coats deform you and sweaters stiffen your silhouette, she still excited them. She had married the only West Indian in town and showed him off every night, dragging him down the main street, and there was no mistake. No possibility of mistake. She degraded every form of affection. And now a man stretched out in the park was using the same standard to judge Marie. Who didn’t protest. Even regretted her innocent appearance under his shamelessly greedy gaze, regretted not wearing some violent colour that would drive up the bidding. A colour meant to be followed, to be summoned, as far as the rows of houses up there, that will protect you from consenting, from appearing to consent.

  Neither the hour nor any shadow offers deliverance from the heat, the radiance. “I’m Corrine,” says the other woman, her manner familiar. They slow down. Marie falls in with her heavy pace, the better to be filled with her odour of musk and sweat, which she should find repugnant. And which should enable her to keep her distance, exasperated, detached. Above all, not to be seen.

  But none of this shows on the surface. The woman is thirty, at the very least. Her skin is dull. From the side, only her plump arms are visible, but her neck, observed just then, was somewhat crepey, her cheek chapped by the sun. Corrine is blind to Marie’s disgust. She hears herself talking about three willow trees, the only ones in this town, with every passing season their bare roots more eaten away by the acids in the lake, trees that should be cut down. She talks about rot, about danger. Says on that score she knows what she’s talking about, and laughs. An urgent generosity in her voice.

  Marie sits on the grass that will crease her dress again. From her subservience it is obvious that she is pleading with the other woman to stay.

  Two

  ERVANT IS WORKING NIGHTS NOW, HE’LL punch in at nine p.m. This is the most difficult shift for surveillance of the blast furnaces, when everything operates in slow motion, when you’re aware of the night inside the perpetual night of the blind building. He will need an hour or two of that numbness to stop feeling guilty for Marie’s vexation.

  There is no place for him in the drawn-out after-dinner hours. They passed him the bread, salt, fruit, then silence settled in behind the trivialities that engross Marie and her mother, two like voices that keep him at a distance while the father reads or dozes in the living room. It’s about Ervant that they’re talking, however, about the ceremony in which he will be the bridegroom, the other figure in the photographs whose settings they’ll decide on tonight. From the radio come news items to which he pretends to listen, the coffee is too sweet. Marie could have done it deliberately, he’s still the stranger here. The fiancé with no family, who must constantly be taken from the solitude of his rented room. He must learn how to say no.

  He has ample time to read the hostility on the mother’s thin, bare, faded lips after the meal. A quick dour look to question him, the same one she wore on the first day, the first night. She had gone to the basement, carrying glasses down, bringing others up; the party nearly over, the music dying away, conversations flagging, the girls already thinking of how they’d talk about it the next day. A lack of reserve in the gaze, a hand on the forearm, and she had guessed at her daughter’s choice, Marie’s choice: she would choose this tense and silent swarthy man who would not grow awkward with age as did the men from here. Curly hair like a child’s, and dark. Laughing eyes, though, whose warmth, when it came, would make her daughter give way. A straightforward body.

  There was nothing to use against him, except a measure of distance perhaps. He would never enter the house without knocking, his phone calls would be quick, a stranger’s, coffee would be served him in a cup and saucer, he would never venture upstairs. His laughter was for some other place. In Marie’s house there would be one last frontier, against the town which no longer resented these strangers who had in a few years become the law and cu
stom of the streets. Yesterday in the mine, like Ervant, then business today, college tomorrow. Their homelands had prepared them for here, they were white and hard in the cold, they were lighthearted in pleasure when the summer nights grew long. Slavs from Central Europe, not even Gypsies.

  The girls’ mothers didn’t really hate them. They only lamented the fact that their own sons went into exile, retracing the roads their fathers had taken, in the opposite direction, and that they were returning too late, after Marie, or Julie, had lost her initial fear, the provocative sharpness of unripe fruit, the brown slenderness of bogus Indians. And they married them, because the time was right for it, these immigrants whose sisters they will never know, with faces their own children will resemble one day.

  An exact copy, only more incisive, of the history of these women who also followed immigrants from the interior, thirty years ago now. Thinking they were only passing through, they stayed, and Marie’s mother is one of those who has regrets. Regret at having built a house, at having given her daughter a history that is so brief, so easy to repeat.

  She no longer even tried to catch Marie and Ervant exchanging looks. Marie had long ago lost her reserve, and her mother was not one of those who spy at the front door when goodnights are said, who read diaries or sniff out the lies in accounts of last night, when her child becomes too talkative about new friends, when names are tumbled together the better to hide a single one. She didn’t want even to guess where they might meet, in the little country house whose key Marie would sometimes ask for or, like so many others, near Powell’s Hill for quick embraces inside a chilly automobile.

  She knew her daughter inside out, especially in the shadowy zones. That Marie enjoys his body she has no doubt. But she understands her better at times like this, her keen, elusive bitterness. Which won’t stop Marie from going out, from setting out with Ervant for a slow half-hour walk through town or the park, up to the fence around the mine, from taking pleasure again, becoming a little insistent, even, when they set the schedule for tomorrow.