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

had been but a faraway space, presumably soothing and beneficial. I wanted to be at lake level so as to breathe that mixture of city and powerful water that renews vital energy. I sat near the carousel at the port des Mouettes. Inside her kiosk, an old lady is selling tickets. The facade reads Wetzel Family 1878. With its elephants, swans, horses and little cars depicting the twentieth century’s first automobiles, the carousel is picturesque. Three children are at play, preoccupied with driving their vehicles properly in an unknown world where time has no hold. Barely visible in the day’s light, dozens of little glimmering lightbulbs girdle the top part of the carousel. I can see Jean-Michel Othoniel’s
Boat of Tears
, a work made of wood stripped by salt and the repeated power of imaginary waves upon its sides. The tears, large glass bulbs of blue, pink and yellow, recall the magical glory of light as it might be imagined sparkling in festive garlands above the icy waters of the Atlantic. A night like the Far North and ice floes settles in, majestic and timeless in the afternoon. In the distance, the formidable water jet sprays droplets in the wind, a shower of fine particles of grit with, in the background, the port and its hundreds of white masts and little hulls pitching and rolling in the shimmery light.Behind me, the Hôtel d’Angleterre calls out as though it has a voice that is grappling with destiny, a voice set to conquer luminous sentences and their swaying above emptiness and death. How to predict where danger is coming from when one is absorbed in a book? Danger revives silences and impulses. How many Hôtels d’Angleterre are scattered here and there throughout nineteenth-century history and colonialist geography? Now a man in a top hat and bouffant pants is staring at me. Behind his barrel organ, he makes the light dance a waltz with the warm weather, then, with bursts of sounds and little rock slides at the bottom of a ravine, he stops everything. Only then does he hold out a bowl. The sun blinds him. Sweat streams down my back. I want a pistachio ice cream because of that tender green reminder of a past life I never mention.
    Sentences return, subterranean, sombre, transparent or luminous, as if to make me doubt what it is I see, hear, even desire. Sentences that draw me back to the château and in which I converse with Tatiana, aware of the secretary’s footsteps in the hallway, of the dry sound of the piano cover being lifted, then of the first notes of ‘Mood Indigo.’ All through my head, people are moving forward in time. People are time itself. So is there no true time to master but the one I carry within me?
    I ended up heading for the bridge, alert among the crowd of pedestrians and cyclists. The strength of thevibrations created by passing cars surprises me. A woman leans over the parapet. A little farther on, a man smokes and stares at a small grey building called La cité du temps. The man is thickset. I am unable to make out his features. The word
pal
comes to my mind, let’s say Al
as in
Alexander, Albert or Allen like the gardener at the château. The water level. From the château, it sometimes seems that the water level is rising dangerously, and when it goes down, depending on the fog, depending on the light at dusk, a new kind of concern sets in. In the morning, the mountain is what first attracts the eye. We know at a glance if the snowy peak is visible. Whenever it is, the fascination of doubt returns: does it really exist, that peak now visible, now imperceptible? The woman has disappeared behind a bus. In the foreign language there are cries I cannot get used to. Cries issuing from as far away as history, slow, funereal, that leave dark traces even inside the mouth of whoever in the distance hears them. Then there are the others: cries that are faster and fiercer, that pounce like ravenous beasts, their energy doubling every time the echo of their own cries encircles them.