Wonder

  Lili Lady’s apartment is cluttered with all kinds of objects – small china figurines of shepherdesses or pipers, jardinières in which spider plants with yellow leaves are withering, throws covering the arms and backs of easy chairs, decorative plates hanging on the kitchen wall next to old black-and-white photos of unsmiling people looking straight at the lens. There are several examples of everything: cheap rugs scattered on the beige carpet; three TV sets lined up in order of size in the imitation oak cabinet in the living room; down to the rolls of paper towels that she glimpses in the kitchen when Lili Lady, who insists on making tea, looks for the kettle. The air smells faintly of roses, dust, and wet wool. Damocles and Lili are stretched out full-length between kitchen and living room, the curly little white dog between the enormous paws of the mastodon.

  One day while Lili Lady makes tea, she gets up to look at the books that form an odd collection around the TV sets. Most are in English, a few – knitting instructions and a dictionary – in French, and a dozen others in a language so strange she can’t even recognize the characters. She thinks they are novels but she couldn’t say why; the covers have no illustrations. She opens one, leafs through it: it is printed from right to left, from top to bottom. Suddenly a cuckoo can be heard, sounding the half-hour.

  “Do you take sugar, Anna dear?” asks Lili Lady from the kitchen, over the gurgling of the kettle.

  “Yes, please,” she replies, immediately returning the book to the shelf.

  Then she spots, face-down, a book with a gilt-edged leather cover, its title in solid square letters: PHILOSOPHY OF EARTHQUAKES.

  “What did you find there?” asks the old lady, who arrives bearing a tray on which a china teapot with small yellow flowers clinks against matching cups, saucers, and milk jug.

  She shows Lili Lady the book, who looks at it closely, turning it over and over in her trembling fingers as if seeing it for the first time. Meanwhile, she pours tea into the old lady’s cup and her own, to which she adds a small spoonful of sugar.

  Lili Lady holds out the book: “Take it, Anna, you’ll make better use of it than I will.” She protests but the old lady won’t hear a word, so she slips the book into the pocket of her coat, drying on the radiator. Lili Lady seems delighted, inquires about people the girl has never heard of and whom the old lady seems to have lost track of ages ago. She chirps like a bird, moves jerkily to tuck a lock of hair away from her forehead or to pick up her saucer, and repeats several times: “Anna, I haven’t seen you in such a long time, I’m so happy.” She dares not correct her.

  She sips some tea, immediately wants to spit it out but restrains herself and manages to swallow, even smile politely. The sugar bowl has been filled with salt.

  The next day, sitting at the foot of the beech tree, they take turns piling the stones, as if building a house of cards that collapses regularly, lashed by the dogs’ tails or when Damocles gallops too close, his steps making the rock quake.

  He takes a sandwich from his bag, gulps it down in three bites. Inside the backpack she can make out a new pile of books, some with titles half-visible: Reflections on Volcanic Mountains, De Vesuviano incendio nuntius.

  “So, you only read books about volcanoes?”

  “No.”

  “What else?”

  “Umm – earthquakes …”

  She ponders for a moment, starts to say something, stops. Sighs, then asks:

  “All right, tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “Anything. Tell me what you read this morning.”

  “No luck. This morning I looked through a gardening book with instructions for transplanting a holly. I can share what I learned with you if you want: first you must choose a spot that’s not too sunny, where the soil retains its moisture …”

  “I’m serious, tell me something that would make me like volcanoes.”

  “Make you like them?”

  The idea seemed to astonish him. He stuffs his hand into his backpack again and takes out an orange, peels it, and softly calls Damocles, who approaches, intrigued. He holds out a section of fruit and the dog shakes his head as if he’s just been sprayed, then looks at him with an expression at once disappointed and insulted.

  “Okay then,” she goes on, “something that would help me understand them. Actually, dogs can’t stand citrus. Bring a biscuit next time.”

  “Mmm.”

  He seems to be weighing the advice. He shyly offers her a piece of orange, which she accepts while watching him out of the corner of her eye. His skin is golden from spending his days outside, his hands red and covered with calluses and scratches. He bites his nails. Maybe he caught her examining him; he curls his fingers and announces:

  “All right. The worst, the most lethal volcanic eruptions – the ones that produce little or no lava flow but whose craters literally explode with clouds of toxic gases – are named for Pliny,” he begins, stretching as though he needs to warm up before dealing with the subject.

  She is at once happy and surprised to recognize the name. Maybe it won’t be just about magma and tectonic plates.

  “A Roman, right? A philosopher?”

  “Two, even. There’s Pliny the Elder, author of a natural history in no fewer than thirty-seven volumes. Then there’s his nephew, Pliny the Younger.”

  “And which one is volcanic?”

  “The Elder.”

  “I assume he was the first to observe one of those eruptions?”

  “Possibly. But that’s not where the name comes from. During the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79, Pliny went to see friends who lived in Stabies, some distance from the volcano. If we can believe the account his nephew wrote in a letter to Tacitus about his illustrious uncle’s final hours, they dined copiously and went to bed with full bellies. They would never again see the sun rise.”

  “What happened?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Vesuvius turned out to be closer than they imagined?”

  “That’s right. The wind turned and the volcano’s fumes asphyxiated the city. Pliny and his friends attempted to escape by sea, but they died on the shore. When his body was found at the end of the 19th century, he was still holding a bundle of documents.”

  “But how do they know it was his body they found, nearly twenty centuries later? What was in those documents?”

  “I’ve no idea. Still, it was in his honour that the Plinian volcanoes got their names.”

  “It makes no sense to name a volcano after someone who believed in it so little that he went to die in the middle of a poisoned cloud when he could have stayed peacefully at home. Are you sure there’s no other explanation?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “And it doesn’t bother you that some things are named for people they killed?”

  She realizes how her question could be an accusation and adds in a milder tone:

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  He has the strange impression that she is forgiving him, and that he’s just passed some kind of test.

  From her own bag she takes the book Lili Lady gave her.

  “Here, I found this for you,” she says, handing him the old copy of The Philosophy of Earthquakes.

  He takes it carefully, gently turns the friable pages that smell faintly of mildew and iodine, looks for the publication date, careful not to damage the binding. While he is leafing through the book, something falls out of it. Curious, she bends down to pick up a rectangle of yellowed paper. Faded colours show horses hitched to curving sleighs dashing through fir trees and a few tall birches in a snowy landscape. She thinks at first that she can recognize from the stiff and formal gait of the horses – which look like circus animals, each with one leg raised very high and bent at a ninety-degree angle, manes neatly combed – the tiny, bundled-up figures in the sleighs and, particularly, the feeling of cold it gives off, a Krieghoff painting. Once she deciphers the title, however, she realizes that it’s an old postcard with hand-painted blues, yello
ws, and browns that give it an aura of unreality rather than add to its verisimilitude. SLEIGH RIDE ON MOUNT ROYAL, FEBRUARY 1910 is printed under the picture. On the back, a woman’s hand has written in violet ink:

  October 4, 1943. First snow and Arthur left today for the war.

  A.

  “Tell me,” she says after thinking it over for a moment and studying the landscape around them, “is Mount Royal an extinct volcano?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Why isn’t it a volcano? Isn’t it up to you to tell me?”

  “I was wondering why you thought it was an extinct volcano. I imagine that even if you walk all over it every day you’ve never personally witnessed an eruption, right? A small lava flow maybe, a little cloud of smoke?”

  “Very funny. I don’t know where I got that. It’s the kind of thing everyone knows without knowing where it came from.”

  “So it’s the kind of thing to be avoided like the plague.”

  “And you’re personally familiar with the plague? You’ve experienced it maybe? Rats? Buboes?”

  Offended, he replies:

  “It’s not the same thing at all. We know the plague existed, we know what caused it, how it was transmitted, we know the symptoms, we can calculate the number of deaths it caused.”

  “Maybe you know. As for me, I choose to believe you. The way I choose to believe that Mount Royal was once a volcano and that today we walk around the periphery of an old crater that long ago spat fire and rocks.” With her fingers she mimes a spectacular explosion in miniature. “Besides, when you look at the mountain from Dunlop Avenue, or de Vimy, don’t you think that it looks like a kind of big sleeping dragon?”

  He stares at her, perplexed.

  “Do you also think that Mount Royal is an extinct dragon?”

  “Not extinct. Sleeping.”

  THE CITY GREW UP AROUND THE MOUNTAIN that has stood in the middle of the island since the beginning of time. Or at least since the Mesozoic Era, when igneous rocks stole their way into the adjacent sedimentary layer, then were isolated by erosion at the end of the Cretaceous Era to create the Monteregian Hills, the “royal mountains,” sole remaining witnesses to that far-off time. Amerindians grew squash and corn there and gathered mayapples, prized for their invigorating qualities; they carved into the bark of trees mysterious signs that some old people still declare they saw as children, on the ancient elms whose shadows bathed their houses. A thousand years after the birth and execution of Jesus Christ, the Iroquois were already burying their dead there. It was on one of its summits that, in 1643, Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, planted a wooden cross to give thanks to God for having spared the newly founded Ville-Marie from the floods that had wreaked havoc all around. Some three hundred years later a new cross, metal this time, was erected to recall the first, in memory of the memory. It is still lit up at nightfall, tracing in the city’s sky a kind of crucifix at once spindly and squat, recalling those that until very recently hung, along with sacred images and palm fronds, on the walls of every house in town. Mount Royal is at once a park – laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed Central Park in the heart of the island of Manhattan – and a forest. Its slopes give shelter to: three hospitals; two universities; a former philosophy seminary that will soon give way to condominiums; costly private schools with pupils in green and blue uniforms; countless opulent residences whose stone and bricks are covered with hundred-year-old ivy; culs-de-sac lined with small houses that, with their sloping roofs and broad verandas, could have been transplanted from the English countryside. It boasts an artificial lake that has never seen the shadow of a beaver but is populated, winter and summer, by noisy mallard ducks; it was dug on land that once belonged to the Toboggan and Ski Club, where metal posts that once held up the cables of the mechanical lift that took skiers to the summit still stand, supporting pulleys that look like rusty coconuts. Also a restaurant that is all angles, a memory of the 1950s, orange, silver, and yellow; a vast number of big, fat grey squirrels, speedy chipmunks, some foxes, skunks, field mice, raccoons in the hundreds; radio and cell-phone antennae stuck into cement bases that look like bomb shelters; a winding road that opens onto two lookouts; a third road cut into the rock, once used by a streetcar and now closed to traffic several times a year when its shoulders are lined with bales of hay for bicycle or toboggan races; wooded areas deep in poison ivy, others where thousands of white trilliums grow, turning pink, then crimson as the season progresses. At its base every Sunday a multi-hued crowd gathers sings dance, and smoke thin, fragrant cigarettes to the rhythm of tomtoms and djembes. A few years ago, a second party started up, and oddly dressed young people in leather or rubber armour, carrying big cardboard swords that they wielded peacefully in the undergrowth, flocked from the four corners of the city to wage epic battles between Good and Evil. Mounted on their good-natured Percherons, the police stare at both spectacles with the same incomprehension. The mountain still shelters the greystone house of Hosea B. Smith, who bequeathed his land for a park. It seemed ridiculous: its sides are unassailable, objected the disgruntled, which drove one Colonel Stevenson to scale it, twice, in 1862 and again in 1863. He dragged a cannon with him and fired a series of salvoes from the summit that proved beyond a doubt that it not only was possible to scale the mountain, it could be done surreptitiously, even if the climber was carrying pieces of artillery. This of course worried the city authorities, who were determined to keep the mountain from being transformed into a Trojan horse, as it were. There is also, at a bend in the road, a slate-roofed pavilion with multiple gables, resembling a small house from a fairy tale and dating from the same period as the now-vanished funicular which led to one of the lookouts; and at the summit, a vast Art Deco structure called, apparently without irony, the mountain “chalet.” Its interior is totally empty aside from a snack bar that smells of burnt grease and the sweet odour of sausages sitting in tepid water, and offers the startling sight of a high ceiling supported by caryatids in the form of enormous squirrels. Hidden in the mountain’s heart is a reservoir of nearly one thousand cubic metre capacity, its presence announced on the surface only by some narrow pipes that rise out of the ground like periscopes. In every season there are discreet bird-watchers, joggers in head-to-toe Lycra, lovers sharing furtive embraces. Entire immigrant families picnic there in summer, from the wrinkled granny in a shawl and a chignon to the chirping grandchildren around the barbecue where cumin-scented lamb kebabs are grilling. In winter, the slopes are taken over by hordes of little figures in scarves and mittens of every colour, flat on their stomachs on plastic toboggans or old-fashioned wooden sleighs, holding their breath as they race to the bottom of the hill.

  We talk about her – for it’s obvious that by her very nature she is female – in the singular, but like some mythological dragon she has three heads, each standing on guard in turn. She also has labyrinths of paths, stairways, and steep ravines, like a gigantic game of snakes and ladders.

  Her very nicest terrain, where the slopes are gentlest and offer the eye the most pleasing landscapes, is occupied by four cemeteries, peaceful cities of the dead in the heart of the metropolis of the living.

  It’s in the oldest and most densely wooded of these that he works.

  Some of the stones are so old that the name of the person in whose memory they were erected is illegible, as are the moment of their birth or the hour of their death. Lying in the grass, their once-smooth surfaces now covered with delicate blackish lichen, they resemble flagstones that trace a winding way into the shadow of hundred-year-old elms, a garden inhabited by trees and souls.

  When she spots him in the distance among the stelae, the crosses, and the angels with folded wings, he is the only living being, save for the birds and squirrels that are the true inhabitants of the place. At this precise moment, at the sight of his long silhouette standing out against the blue of the sky, she has the impression that he is life itself, that he keeps the garden from foundering into a sleep lik
e the one to which Sleeping Beauty succumbed for a hundred years – or was it a thousand? – that if by misfortune he felt an urge to lie down among the dead, then the Earth would stop turning, the stars would veer off course, the Sun and the Moon would collide.

  He watches her arrive, one hand shading his eyes against the blinding light. His cheek and forehead are smeared with brown earth, like war paint. At his feet, spindletrees await planting, roots wrapped in damp burlap. The brass bell of Saint Germain church rings twelve times.

  “See what I found this morning when I was digging,” he says, taking from his pocket a flat grey stone that she accepts though she doesn’t understand. Then, turning it over, she discovers, miraculously, a fish from the depths of time, from the belly of a sea dry now for millions of years, but upon which one can still see each of the fine bones and even the memory of its round eye.

  “I’ll call him Bubulle,” she announces, tracing the jagged outline of a fin.

  Sitting at the foot of the beech tree, each of them is eating half of the sandwich she has brought. The dogs hang around with innocent looks, then leap, jaws clicking, when a bit of bread is tossed to them.

  “I have a heart murmur,” she announces, not looking at him.

  “And?”

  “And apparently I have to avoid violent exercise and strong emotions.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you can live like that?”

  “As you see.”

  “But what is it anyway, a heart murmur? Something like an air current that runs through it?”

  “Not exactly. They say it’s congenital. Something about a valve and an atrium. Blood goes in somewhere when it ought to be coming out, or the opposite, anyway something that circulates against the tide.”