Read Online Fences in Breathing by Nicole Brossard - Free Book Online

inner tense and I wanted to settle into it to get a sense of its colour. I had also noticed that, though they had the same number of syllables, one of them took longer to utter. Three syllables did not always equal three syllables. Therein lay a clue that, in each language, time could be stretched or it could contract to make it easier to decipher the cumbersome monotony of dailiness and the tenacious enigma of passions.
    I didn’t know it yet, but both sentences concerned my most intimate self. ‘There must be a reverse side to what I am.’ The two sentences spoke about water and about downtown on a sunny day with frisky cumulus clouds.
    I borrowed the château’s blue Volvo and drove along the serpentine road through Aubonne, then plunged into the forest, taking each curve in such a way as to make my heart race, wild in my chest. Light threaded through the violently green foliage, tropical-summer green. Tatiana had said, ‘Go and spend a few days in town, go.’ I hadlistened to her. The road glistened in the sun like young skin. The château, the village, already seemed far off, lost somewhere in the consciousness of an ancient character. I craved the city, craved skirting the shores of the lake and scrutinizing its dark water, happy there was water all around me. Noise, light, everything would do me good. Being by oneself all the time is difficult and perhaps not necessary. We need to be with other people at least half of the time so that life can intrigue, leap and roar. Some days, others are
err and there
strewn inside a story, at other times they are stuck still in the sentences. It’s difficult to imagine what comes next. You have to lift your head, breathe.
    In my language, I am able to reason properly, to weigh the pros and cons of a hypothesis, to understand my own hesitations, while in the other language, my reasoning is skewed, the slightest ambiguity upsets me and I have no control over the sequence of words. Zones of knowledge have no limits. Reality takes on a vague look. The images I’ve begun to consider mine become incomprehensible or get stuck here and there in space like disturbing objects, cut off from their symbolic value. Anything can happen, like the other day, when I collided with the matter of evil. A topic I’ve never stopped to ponder. Everything was unfolding as if this shapeless and powerful thing called evil were accessible to me only in the foreign language, for
me in that language is not me
. Although I am fully aware of how thebrain can, in all languages, ennoble evil, restore the senses like one says about a wall about to collapse, set each word like a sharp weapon capable of fixing everything, I can’t bring myself to believe that language can so easily deploy inside us not the idea of evil but a theatre of evil. Is there a level of language conducive to expressing evil? Language level, water level. There is always something I don’t understand whenever I venture into the history of a city at cocktail hour.
    When the two sentences of light and water crossed paths in my thoughts, I felt free without noticing they had interrupted the rapture that had filled me ever since I arrived in the village. I now had a better understanding of what happened following Charles’s arrest the very day his sister left for the Svalbard archipelago. The next day’s newspapers made a point of specifying that he had been detained only for questioning. Charles returned to the village. He would still stand in front of his workshop, look worried, perseverant, observing the planes coming and going among the clouds, drawing sentences that, without warning, swept both skies and thoughts clean. Neither of the two sentences belonged to Charles. He could hear them. He could see them, but they were not his. He could not put them in an envelope.
    It was still sunny when I reached downtown. I parked the car by the train station and headed for the lake. A few clouds were darkening the harbour. Until now, the lake