Silences, or a Woman's Life. Marie Chaix

to be bought, a perpetual knitting spree. One hand lifeless, its only use to hold down one tame needle under its weight of flesh; the other hand going like crazy, pulling the yarn, pushing the other needle back and forth, making loops and knots, working away till it cramps. Let’s not waste time: knit and keep knitting. Scarves, coverlets, and lots of little patchwork squares, that’s easier, you just follow a straight line, no decrease or increase. And bootees—lots of baby’s bootees. Can’t do anything else, so might as well keep knitting till your brain is snarled. Poor old brain anyway, it can’t think anymore, it can’t keep up. So keep knitting. It’s your only hope. Ten years of it. It had to end sometime, didn’t it? There. My dears, I’ve knitted you ten years of old age, and that’s enough. This is my will and testament, these are my last woolen wishes. I can’t write or speak anymore, so I bequeath you these few little patches to wrap your winter thoughts in. Good-bye.)

      The cat has torn the ball of yarn to tatters. I cut the thread that connects it to the knitting and set it on the table.

      “There’s something else I should have told you,” says Juliette with a cunning look. “Last night she had a nightmare. She heard a humming all around her, and when she turned on the light the walls were swarming with black flies. That’s a bad sign, for sure. And another thing I forgot—she kept vomiting. She couldn’t stop. Come and see.”

      Everything is getting clearer. No more time for pictures. I go to her room. She is lying on her back; she’s breathing; her hair is strewn over the pillow. She’s breathing: for the time being. Occasionally a mild spasm shakes her, but the vomiting has stopped. Her breathing is steady, the skin of her arm silky and warm. Under her nightgown her breast gently rises and falls to the beat of a heart that remains loyal to its husk and does its work gallantly; does whatever is necessary for life to be present, for blood to run through veins and give color to the skin—that silky, warm skin. Nothing, for the time being, has changed. All is calm.

      “Everything’s going fine, really. She’s just asleep.”

      And I tiptoe out of the room. Juliette shrugs her shoulders and lifts her eyes to the ceiling. (The chandelier is truly hideous. Why is she so attached to that chandelier, with its teardrops and its dust-catching pendants? What melancholy hides behind these prongs of twisted metal fashioned into coarse ivy leaves and hanging all askew?)

      “Whatever you say. Let’s wait and see. But if you expect her to wake up fresh and pink tomorrow morning—”

      That’s it—we’ll wait and see. Wait for what? Let’s wait for the sake of waiting. Let’s wait, all three of us, for day to break.

      So now here I am sitting in your chair, amid your walls and relics. You’re through with watching over a distant past that was crumbling in your memory, through with assembling scraps of life like ill-matching pieces in a puzzle where you would never recover your own likeness. You’re tired of waiting; you’ve gone off without a word, leaving me to renew your patience. You’ve fallen asleep without warning, without complaining, but leaving no message. It’s up to me to decipher your sleep and hear the sentences your silence speaks. Are you planning to desert this hostile body that you’re sick of? Will you start moving in darkness back through all the nights of dreaming, waiting, and loneliness that have punctuated your life?

      As you walked in your sleep, how many rooftops, peaks, and cliffs did you pass? From how many dreams were you woken up by sudden voids opening beneath your hesitant steps, by streams that all at once gushed forth and undermined your precarious path, by abrupt halts at the threshold of shattered bridges, leaving you to stare at an inaccessible shore whose riches turned to sand between your outstretched fingers?

      As you teetered in your sleep along the ridge of your life, could you count the shocks that had hurt you? If only you could go your own free way at last, far from this broken body! If only you could take wing without hindrance, without being summoned back to the ways of the world, without waking up to days of which none were improvements!

      I wish that this night that you’ve chosen for your excursion would stretch into infinity and that you could go on wandering peacefully among the hills of sleep. I don’t want to give you up yet; I want to imagine your itinerary and follow you down the winding path of oblivion you have taken. If I must lose track of you, don’t let it happen too fast. Give me time to bid your silhouette farewell as it falters on the rim of the horizon.

      I’m waiting, and I have time to wait. Something in the color of this darkness, in the best of your pulse, something in the rhythm of your peaceful breathing and the stubborn convexity of your closed lids tells me not to expect you back. This time your sleep masks a real departure. But I’m not frightened. I’m keeping watch.

      Soon, in the new morning, you will be already far away. I long to fall asleep at your side; but I have to get moving. I’m still one of the living, and we aren’t allowed to go to sleep in the daytime and converse with a shadow. And the sad fact is that I’ll have to call them to your bedside. They’ll come on the run.

      They won’t realize it, but I’ll be leading parallel lives: a visible life, in which I’ll follow your body wherever they decide to take it; and a second, nocturnal life, the legacy of shimmers and shadows, of fugitive moments, of scenes half-lived half-dreamed: the life of a woman who is now taking her leave.

      Alice was born to be a queen; then fate made a mistake. Her luminous eyes, her angelic smile would have given heart to a whole downcast nation. Her soft broad shoulders, straight and proud, were made to display, heedless of their weight, ermine, velvet, and millennial gems, and the smoothness of her brow to be caressed by strands of dangling, milky pearls.

      In accounts of her childhood and dreary youth, everything recalled the sad beginnings of tales whose raggedy heroine ends up a princess. Year after year, I waited for this miracle that never happened. Why had no fairy alleviated her ordeals and set a crown on her head instead of gray hairs? I used to think there was no limit to her patience. How could she preserve such a smile and such confidence?

      In a desk drawer she kept a box of which she was particularly fond. It contained an assortment of snapshots, letters, old postcards, sky-blue pendants of the Virgin Mary, mother-of-pearl buttons, foreign coins. The gilt box was octagonal, with a surface that felt uneven to the touch, overlaid as it was with a fine lacy relief of dull gold. At the center of the lid was an oval medallion that reproduced in pastel colors the delicate smiling face of Queen Astrid. The sight of this portrait left me spellbound—the two women were so alike, it might have been her own.

      Astrid of Belgium was young, beautiful, and much loved. She would, more or less, be your age. A small, finely chased diadem brightened the undulations of her hair; her white neck emerged from an impeccable fur collar. Her death was a “tragic” one, wept over by every newspaper in Europe: a car accident that orphaned two children and left a king in despair. In the depths of the box, clipped from a magazine article, were photographs of the royal family and, next to them, the shattered car.

      Alice used to tell the melancholy tale of Astrid, whom she loved like a sister and who, she said, deserved a kinder fate. As I listened to her I could sense how she identified herself with the dead queen, whose memory was laden with her own regrets and all the sorrows still ahead of her. It was as if the only thing that could resemble her was an image of suffering; as if, to her life, only a life steeped in doom could be declared a parallel.

      Es war einmal . . . Once upon a time, though, when she was seventeen, everything had been like a fairy tale.

      She was a well-behaved, timid adolescent who lived with her sister, three years her elder, and their widowed mother. In Mulhouse, the twenties for them weren’t exactly roaring. The vagaries of Paris fashion had grown fairly tame before reaching their part of the country, where, under the stern eyes of mother and grandmothers who would have felt jeopardized in the eyes of God and men if they revealed one inch of ankle, youth was anything but daring. Girls were pointed at and called sluts when they started hemming their skirts at the knee to make dancing the Charleston easier, or chopped off their turn-ofthe-century braids for the sake of a trimmer, boyish look.

      In Mulhouse (Haut-Rhin Department), distractions were few. The two sisters were devotees