Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader. Nicole Brossard

could have made the bullet ricochet or wound me slightly.

       – No. It was you or him. For if this man had only wounded you, you would have turned on him with such fury that you’re the one who would have put him to death. One way or another, your life would have been ruined. Self-defence or not. That man, don’t forget, had a fine reputation.

       – You dare to tell me that in order to protect me from that man, that madman, you chose to get rid of me.

       – I didn’t kill you. That man killed you.

       – But that man doesn’t exist. You were under no obligation to make that man exist.

       – That man exists. He could be compared to the invisible wire that sections reality from fiction. In getting closer to Mélanie you wanted to cross the threshold.

       – I hold you responsible for his actions. For my death.

       – I’m not responsible for reality.

      – Reality is what we invent.

       – Don’t be cruel to me. You who are familiar with solitude, ecstasies, and torments. You and I have never thought of protecting ourselves. In this we have come a long way but sooner or later reality catches up.

      – I can reproach you for what is in your book.

      – By what right?

      – Reading you gives me every right.

      – But as a translator you have none. You’ve chosen the difficult task of reading backwards in your language what in mine flows from source.

      – But when I read you, I read you in your language.

      – How can you understand me if you read me in one language and simultaneously transpose into another what cannot adequately find its place in it? How am I to believe for a single moment that the landscapes in you won’t erase those in me?

      – Because true landscapes loosen the tongue in us, flow over the edge of our thought-frame. They settle into us.

      – I remember one day buying a geology book in which I found a letter. It was a love letter written by a woman and addressed to another woman. I used the letter as a bookmark. I would read it before reading and after reading. For me that letter was a landscape, an enigma entered with each reading. I would have liked to know this woman, I imagined the face of the woman for whom it was meant. It was during that time that I started writing the book you want to translate. Yes, you’re right, there are true landscapes that pry us from the edge and force us onto the scene.

      – I think there is always a first time, ‘a first time when it must be acknowledged that words can reduce reality to its smallest unit: matter of fact.’ Do you remember those words?

      – No, but I think that whoever said that was right. I’m weary. Is there anything else you wish to know?

      – I mostly wanted to hear you talk about death. But no matter what happens, we’re alone, aren’t we?

      – Keep to beauty, have no fear. Muffle civilization’s noises in you. Learn to bear the unbearable: the raw of all things.

       Le Désert mauve

      1987, tr. 1990

       HOTEL RAFALE

      from Baroque at Dawn

      tr. Patricia Claxton

      First the dawn. Then the woman came.

      In Room 43 at the Hotel Rafale, in the heart of a North American city armed to the teeth, in the heart of a civilization of gangs, artists, dreams, and computers, in darkness so complete it swallowed all countries, Cybil Noland lay between the legs of a woman she had met just a few hours before. For a time which seemed a coon’s age and very nocturnal, the woman had repeated, ‘Devastate me, eat me up.’ Cybil Noland had plied her tongue with redoubled ardour and finally heard, ‘Day, vastate me, heat me up.’ The woman’s thighs trembled slightly and then her body orbited the planet as if the pleasure in her had transformed to a stupendous aerial life reflex.

      Cybil Noland had felt the sea enter her thoughts like a rhyme, a kind of sonnet which briefly brought her close to Louise Labé, then drew away to pound elsewhere, wave sounds in present tense. The sea had penetrated her while whispering livable phrases in her ear, drawn-out laments, a lifelong habit with its thousand double exposures of light. Later, thoughts of the sea cast her against a boundless wall of questions.

      In the room, the air conditioner is making an infernal noise. Dawn has given signs of life. Cybil can now make out the furniture shapes and see, reflected in the mirror on the half-open bathroom door, a chair on which are draped a blue T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a black leather jacket. On the rug, a pair of sandals one beside the other.

      The woman puts a hand on Cybil Noland’s hair, the other touching a shoulder. The stranger at rest is terribly alive, anonymous with her thousand identities in repose. Cybil Noland turns so as to rest her cheek comfortably in the curve of the other’s crotch. Neither thinks to move, much less to talk. Each is from somewhere else, each is elsewhere in her life of elsewhere, as if living some life from the past.

      Cybil Noland had travelled a lot, to cities with light-filled curves shimmering with headlights and neon signs. She loved suspense, the kind of risk that might now take as simple a guise as strolling about among the buildings of big cities. She had always declined to stay in the mountains or the country or beside a lake, even for a few days. Her past life had unfolded at a city pace, in the presence of many accents, traffic sounds, and speed, all of which sharpen the senses. Over the years she had come to love sunsets reddened by carbon dioxide. It had been so long since she had seen the stars that the names of the constellations had long ago vanished into her memory’s recesses. Cybil Noland lived at information’s pace. Information was her firmament, her inner sea, her Everest, her cosmos. She loved the electric sensation she felt at the speed of passing images. Each image was easy. It was easy for her to forget what it was that had excited her a moment before. Sometimes she thought she ought to resist this frenetic consumption of words, catastrophes, speed, rumours, fears, and screens, but too late, her intoxication seemed irreversible. Between fifteen and thirty years of age she had studied history, literature, and the curious laws that govern life’s instinct for continuation. Thus she had learned to navigate among beliefs and dreams dispersed over generations and centuries. But today all that seemed far away, ill-suited to the speed with which reality was spinning out her anxiety with its sequences of happiness and violence, its fiction grafted like a science to the heart of instinct. As a child she had learned several languages, enabling her today to consume twice the information, commentary, tragedy, minor mishaps, and prognostications. Thus she had unwittingly acquired a taste for glib words and fleeting images. All she had learned in her youth finally came to seem merely muddleheaded, anachronistic, and obsolete.

      On this July night that was drawing to a close in a small hotel in a city armed to the teeth, Cybil Noland had felt the sea rise up and swallow her. Something had spilled over, creating a vivid horizontal effect, but simultaneously a barrier of questions. The sky, the stars, and the sea had synthesized an entire civilization of cities in her when the woman came.

      There between the stranger’s legs, questions arose, insistent, intrusive questions, snooping questions, basic questions seeking alternately to confirm and deny the world and its raison d’être. Borne on this current of questions, Cybil Noland vowed to renounce glib pronouncements without however willingly forgoing the dangerous euphoria elicited by the fast, frenzied images of her century.