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  DOMINIQUE FORTIER

  and translated by Sheila Fischman

  On the Proper Use of Stars

  Copyright © Dominique Fortier 2010

  English translation copyright © Sheila Fischman 2014

  Originally published as Les larmes de saint Laurent in Quebec in 2010

  by Éditions Alto

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopyig or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Fortier, Dominique, 1972-

  [Larmes de saint Laurent. English]

  Wonder / by Dominique Fortier; translated by Sheila Fischman.

  Translation of: Les larmes de saint Laurent.

  ISBN 978-0-7710-4769-5

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-7710-4773-2

  I. Fischman, Sheila II. Title. III. Title: Larmes de saint Laurent. English

  PS8611.O7733L3713 2013 C843′.6 C2012-907767-4

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  One Toronto Street, Suite 300

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5C 2V6

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Monsters and Marvels

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Harmony of the Spheres

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Love Waves

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Acknowledgements

  We have the impression that deep down men don’t know exactly what they are doing. They build with stones and they do not see that every move they make to set the stone in the mortar is accompanied by a shadow of a move that sets a shadow of a stone in a shadow of a mortar.

  And it is the shadow building that matters.

  JEAN GIONO

  Joy of Man’s Desiring

  —

  ceiiinosssttuv

  ROBERT HOOKE

  De Potentia Restitutiva

  IT WAS SNOWING CONFETTI ON SAINT-PIERRE. Paper flakes flung by the handful from windows and balconies on rue Victor-Hugo settled in the palm fronds, on cobblestones, carriages, even in the nostrils of horses that shook their heads to get rid of them. Carried on the sea breeze they swirled for a moment before turning the shoulders of men dressed in skirts and bodices white. Powerful chocolate arms emerged from the ruffles and lace, and dropped veils over the hair of their lady friends, who were strolling along, waddling a little in pants held up loosely by suspenders of every colour. Every year, from the beginning of January till the end of February, Carnival came and turned everything upside down. Merchants, longshoremen, fruit sellers, fishermen, and women of easy virtue took to the streets on Shrove Sunday, staying there for the last three days of dancing, parading, and drinking. After a slow crescendo, the festivities culminated in an apotheosis that both crowned and ended the carnival at dawn on Ash Wednesday.

  The rich and the powerful participated reluctantly in merrymaking they saw as a necessary evil, turning over the ballrooms of their mansions to their servants. But the poor took advantage of it to live for those few days a caricature of the existence they dreamed of all year long, and which their masters calculated – because they were allowed to borrow it, so to speak, for a few hours – they would continue to tolerate being deprived of the rest of the time.

  “I am ridiculous,” whispered Gaspard de La Chevrotière, stopping to gaze disdainfully at his reflection in the full-length mirror just outside the dining room, as if he were discovering some troublemaker who had, through trickery, gained entry to his house, and whom he had no idea how to get rid of.

  “Which is the point of the exercise, my dear, if I’m not mistaken,” replied his wife, who was prettily dressed as a chambermaid, and whose black skirt, white apron, and lace cap suited her remarkably well.

  Baptiste (who at the time preferred the name Gabriel) was following the exchange from the table, lip-reading the reflections he could see in the big mirror.

  “I can’t button the trousers,” grumbled the gentleman, pulling in his sizeable belly and lifting his jacket to reveal a waistband on which button and buttonhole were indeed separated by a significant gap. “Yet they are the ones I borrowed from George last year. It’s utterly baffling. They must have shrunk. There is no other explanation.”

  “Quite so, my dear.”

  Before he was hired as a gardener’s helper for the La Chevrotière household, Baptiste had held various positions that had brought him different sorts of dissatisfactions and vexations, mostly temporary, because he never stayed in one place very long. The previous year, he had even started to change his name, as one changes uniforms, when he took on a new trade, in the hope of some day finding one that would suit him perfectly. And so he had been successively a fisherman (with the name Lucien); assistant cook at the Hôtel Excelsior (where he was known as Jacquot); shellfish vendor; coachman (declaring his name to be Ludger); fruit-picker; and electrician’s helper, that is, one of the volunteers responsible for carrying the tools of the engineers the city had hired to install the streetlamps that now lit the main roads in Saint-Pierre after sunset, leading some old folks to say that at this rate, it would soon be impossible to tell day from night. Under the name Auguste, he had occupied briefly the position of messenger boy for the newspaper Les Colonies and worked as a stevedore loading and unloading the ships that anchored in the port.

  Of the humiliations he had suffered under his different identities, none could compare with the one he experienced that night, when he was served by Madame de La Chevrotière, her husband, and their lump of a son, all clad in uniforms borrowed from their servants, while he and the rest of the staff, decked out in worn silks and velvets loaned for the occasion, were fidgeting self-consciously on chairs in the dining room where the grand chandelier with its dangling prisms had been lit. The two valets, three chambermaids, the cook, and the gardener obviously shared his discomfort, even though they had lived through a similar farce in the preceding years and so knew better than he did what to expect.

  Only Edgar the butler seemed totally at ease at this mockery of a meal, with the guests nervously examining their silverware as if the forks, spoons, and knives were liable to jump into their faces if they didn’t pick them up in the right order or happened to cut their fish with a dessert knife, while those playing the role of servants balked at the thought of burning their finge
rs or being soiled by food destined to be eaten by others. The latter, like the former, tugged at their unaccustomed clothes, the maids going so far as to pity for an instant their mistress, who had to put on every day those pointed little court pumps that squashed their toes.

  “The house where I was before, they gave us our day off at carnival time,” murmured Ninon, who was seated next to Baptiste, fiddling with a cameo on a black ribbon that was leaving a red mark around her neck. In her voice there was regret mixed with pride that could just as well mean that she would rather have been free to go down to the port with the crowd or that she was delighted to be part of festivities worthy of a lady. Baptiste, unable to decide which, nodded in reply.

  Madame de La Chevrotière, followed by her son, Gontran, arrived with the soup, while Monsieur opened a bottle of Beaujolais with nonchalant elegance and served everyone, dripping purple drops onto the tablecloth that Marguerite, who served as laundress twice a week, regarded anxiously. “Many thanks, Madame, this is exquisite,” remarked Lucien, the footman, politely dabbing his lips after tasting the vegetable broth. Madame nodded graciously while the cook coughed discreetly into her hand. The three masters remained standing behind the table; all that could be heard was the clink of spoons on china and the sound made by Marcel, the gardener, as he slurped his soup. Finally, Ninon elbowed him in the ribs. The old man stopped eating and, looking unhappy, pushed away his half-full bowl.

  At that moment, Monsieur plunked down in front of his servants a platter of fish that he then exhausted himself serving with a fork and spoon, just as he’d seen his maître d’hôtel do a thousand times, never hesitating to blame the man for his awkwardness if by chance he discovered on his plate some grey scales or a long, pointed bone. After several minutes of battling the bream amid the muffled laughter of the guests, now jubilant from the wine, he gave up and decided to slice the creature into sections, which he placed with scant ceremony on everyone’s plate. Baptiste, served last, was given the silvery head whose round eyes and open mouth seemed to express some unnamed surprise. After the fish, in swift succession arrived a dish of boiled vegetables and a puny chicken that Gontran, son and pride of the household, who had spent the first part of the meal surreptitiously guzzling a second bottle, served with all the offhandedness and reluctance possible, dropping as much bone and cartilage as meat onto the plates, and sending the peas rolling under the table.

  The costumed servants were now laughing too loudly, showing their self-satisfaction and a lack of concern about being overheard by their masters, who were beginning to tire, unaccustomed as they were to standing for so long. Ninon and the other two chambermaids, dressed as grand bourgeoises, bit their lips to make the blood flow, turning them the vivid red so flattering to their complexions, and constantly leaned over to display charms set off by their low-cut necklines.

  “Did you see her with that tureen?” sniffed the cook. “She looked like she was carrying a chamber pot.”

  From the street came the shouts and laughter of the crowd heading en masse to the port where they were preparing to throw King Vaval into the water. Each year, Vaval represented the greatest peril to have struck the island of Martinique and its inhabitants over the previous twelve months, or the greatest that threatened to occur during the following year, be it corrupt politician, bloodthirsty murderer, epidemic of fever or flu. The effigy was flung into the sea after a noisy procession punctuated by rattles and tambourines, all to the great displeasure of Father Blanchot who, ever since his arrival, had been fiercely opposed to these festivities, so reminiscent of the excesses of pagan bacchanalia.

  Finally the meal was ending and the chocolate cake, crowning the feast, was brought in. Sated, fired up by alcohol but even more by the images in the mirrors of their flushed faces above lace collars, the guests spoke loudly, proposing toasts and, forgetting the silverware that had just a while ago caused them such anxiety, they grabbed handfuls of bread and fruit from their baskets. Edgar the butler – who, Baptiste observed, was the only one not in costume, maybe because, assuming that his status placed him somewhere between masters and servants, he had merely reversed one half of his person for another – gazed unruffled at the scene, while Madame de La Chevrotière busied herself cutting the cake, not without a certain dexterity.

  “Here, my good man,” she murmured, offering the first slice to Jacques, her first valet for more than twenty years now, as she would have offered a banknote to a beggar on the street. He took it with an awkward gesture and the plate, dropping from Madame’s pudgy hands, shattered on the mahogany floor.

  The comfortably seated guests now realized why their masters refused to get up or even to bend over whenever they happened to let fall an implement or their napkin. For their part, Monsieur and Madame had obviously no intention of getting down on hands and knees to pick up a mixture of sticky crumbs and sharp shards. As for Edgar, it would never have crossed his mind to lift a finger, each of his two halves transferring onto the other the responsibility to intervene; he became, if it were possible, even more stiff than before, approaching in fixedness the bronze Louis XVIII scornfully watching the table from a corner. The seated and the standing stared at each other in a silence where floated famines, suggestions of let-them-eat-cake, the threat of guillotines.

  Baptiste pushed back his chair noisily and, saying “Madame” at once to both Madame de La Chevrotière, motionless amid the broken china, and the chambermaid at whose feet the plate had smashed, began to clean it up with his bare hands, as if he were gathering oyster shells on the beach. The next day at dawn he left the house without asking for his wages but taking with him two silver candlesticks.

  When he shut the door behind him, the streets were still covered with confetti, while empty bottles testified to the merrymaking of the night before; on the waves floated the remains of the sacrificed effigy, which that year had been made to look like an American businessman who had stripped several of the Saint-Pierre widows of their fortunes before disappearing mysteriously. It would not have occurred to anyone to have constructed a King Vaval that depicted the very mountain in whose shadow the festivities were taking place for the last time.

  SHORTLY AFTER THE END OF CARNIVAL, WHEN everyone had resumed his place and the streamers had lost the last of their colours in the gutters, Mount Pelée began to sputter, releasing some feeble clouds, grey or white, sometimes accompanied by brief tremors. No one on the island seemed disturbed by this, for people were accustomed to such benign events. Settled now in the village of Le Prêcheur where, calling himself Mathias, he’d become a coffee-picker, Baptiste had got in the habit of looking up several times a day at puffs of smoke that looked as if they’d escaped from the bowl of a giant pipe. It was only after three weeks of indistinct rumbling that, curious more than genuinely worried, he undertook to climb the mountain to see what was brewing in the mist around the peak.

  When he was a child, he used to observe the peaceful contentment of families who went to the mountain for their Sunday stroll. He had often played with boys his age, climbing the slopes of Pelée all the way to Lac des Palmistes, a round basin that provided tepid water to cool down in after the ascent. A metal cross stuck into the rim of the pool was reflected on the blue surface, casting a protective shadow that their splashing would briefly trouble. Other children canoed there or floated wooden boats that Baptiste looked at speechless, not even thinking about envying them. The sight of these family gatherings filled him with something like sorrow, and he soon discovered that he preferred the Étang Sec, a shrivelled crater several hundred metres below that had no water at any time and for that reason did not attract picnickers. He would stretch out on his back in the middle of the lunar circle, close his eyes, and it would seem to him that he was the last human on earth – or the first.

  On the mountain’s flanks, amid the jungle of palms, banana trees, and flowers, some of them with large petals swinging high above his head, the rock was pierced with vents from which escaped now and then putrid
fumes that smelled of eggs left out in the sun. Those stinking holes were lined with the prettiest lace: festoons of red or ochre, concretions similar to those that grow secretly in the silence of grottoes, drop by drop, but here, in the sun of Martinique, they appeared overnight; purple or scarlet interlacing recalling the forests of coral hidden away in the depths of the sea, the crenellation so delicate it looked as if it would crumble at the slightest breath but that when touched proved to be as hard as rock; guipure lace of dazzling gold as bright as the scales of the plentiful yellowtail snapper that fisherman roasted over charcoal on the beach.

  One day Baptiste had wanted to take one of the mineral flowers out of the rock from which it had blossomed. Reaching out delicately to grasp a petal between thumb and forefinger as if it were a butterfly he was afraid of frightening, he had discovered that the stone was blazing hot and hastily pulled away his hand. For a number of days he had on the pad of his thumb a nasty blister oozing a liquid as clear as water; eventually it was replaced by a pale scar with an irregular outline that recalled in miniature the stone rose he’d wanted to take away, its image now graven into his flesh like a punishment, a reward, or an omen.

  In this month of March 1902, Mount Pelée was deserted and, as he was climbing, Baptiste felt the earth tremble under his feet, run through with long shivers. Arriving at the Cross he discovered, stupefied, that from the Étang Sec were rising not the wisps of vapour he was used to but abundant sulphur clouds that rose directly into the air, like jets of water bursting from the blowholes of whales. The acrid, burning mist stung his eyes, forcing him nearly to grope his way along. The phenomenon seemed to him spectacular enough to warrant his tracing onto the bare cliff in large indistinct letters the following words, using a piece of quartz that left an uneven line on the stone:

  Today, March 23, the Étang Sec crater is erupting.

  He reread slowly the white message on the grey surface and realized that he’d neglected to write the year. He wanted to add that piece of information, but stopped as if prompted by a kind of superstition. In truth, he would have felt he was writing his own epitaph.