Wonder (23 page)

The cardinals are back. She couldn’t say where they come from or when they returned, maybe they spent the winter in the shade of a bird feeder, but it was this morning that she first heard their shrill cheeping, then saw two tomato-red shapes circling each other against the blue of the sky. It is obvious from their scarlet plumage that they are two
males, but they don’t seem to be chasing one another, rather they appear to be surveying this realm that is theirs, to reconnoitre it and to expand its borders.

She spies the first robins of the season in the middle of the clearing, bellies as round as oranges. Slender buds, their twisted stems like long flames of white and rose can be seen on the cherry tree now. Among the young blades of grass are dozens of blue flowers. All at once she realizes that spring has arrived, that the earth has thawed, and yet there is no sign of the dreaded development whose construction has been suspended for months.

“Why was the work stopped, do you know?” she asks him at noon that day when she spots him at the summit of the mountain, standing near the beech tree.

He gives her an oblique look.

“Didn’t I tell you? It was broken off in the light of new information.”

“What kind of information?”

To reply he assumes a voice that could not be more official, as if he were presenting the matter to a committee.

“As it happens, this path is home to an endangered bird species, the cerulean warbler, and connecting it with the rest of the network on Mount Royal would have brought more visitors liable to disturb the bird’s well-being, not to mention that the work itself would have risked doing considerable harm to its nesting …”

She whistles softly. Both sit down, looking straight ahead at the sky that has come to meet the mountains, whose outline can just be made out on the horizon. Not far away, Damocles, intrigued, is face-to-face with a bristling squirrel, tail straight up in the air, pupils blazing, hoisting himself to his full height.

“The cerulean warbler, is that all? And who told the authorities that this ultra-rare species exists?”

He shrugs to declare his ignorance.

“A good Samaritan, of course.”

“Of course.”

Having apparently decided that the squirrel is an acceptable playmate, Damocles extends his front paws, drops his shoulders so that his chin is almost on the ground, then gives a high-pitched bark. The squirrel responds with an incensed yelping and furiously flicks its tail.

She questions him again:

“Have you ever seen a cerulean warbler?”

“No, but I’m sure I’ve heard his song, haven’t you? Wait … Sshh.”

He brings his finger to his lips, pretends to prick up his ear. All that can be heard is the wind in the leaves, Juliette delicately peeling a branch, and the spluttering squirrel. Damocles finally turns away, defeated, while the triumphant squirrel wags his tail as one might wave the
flag of victory. The dog gives it one last look, then comes and sits at their feet.

“No, I can’t hear it,” she confesses.

“So maybe we made a mistake,” he says, throwing up his hands.

The following day, the posts and the bit of fence have disappeared, leaving in the ground three small shallow holes that Doormat is quick to fill in.

The chestnut tree has started to unfold its big leaves in a kind of backward, slowed-down origami. Half unfurled now, they resemble soft green lilies with oblong petals around a gently swollen tapering core. That stage of false flowering, between bud and leaf, lasts just a few hours. Seeing it very early that morning, as a cloud of mist is coming from the dogs’ mouths, she thinks about one of those films that shows in fast motion the germination and growth of a seed lifting its head hesitantly towards the sun.

In the distance, one can see the silhouette of the white big top the circus sets up on the edge of the city every year. It resembles one of the vast tents that Bedouins reserve for their chief in the desert. Spotting the familiar outline, she looks away at once, her heart pounding.

It is said that the heart of a man is one and a half times the size of his fist. The bigger that muscle, the more slowly it beats. According to one theory everything that lives and has a heart is granted the same number of beats before it dies – so many for the mouse, so many for the elephant – and once the supply is exhausted, the creature dies. Meaning, perhaps, that the lives of frogs, of hummingbirds and ants aren’t really shorter than the life of a man or a whale, but that they unfold at a different rhythm, specific to each species. The length of a life will always be a lifetime; there are planets for example where daylight lasts for months and others where the sun rises and sets every few hours, just as certain ephemeral creatures squeeze into one day what others will take a century to live.

No one knows where or how music was born, or where language originated. It is easy to imagine though that the very first expressions of it (rhythmical clapping of hands or stamping of feet, a piece of wood struck on a stone, then on the taut skin of a drum) were simply repetitions of the beating of our hearts in our chests. If we don’t know any animal musicians, ones who make sounds that way to reassure or entertain themselves, or just for the beauty of it, perhaps that’s because, unlike humans, they do not feel a need to count out the time that separates them from death.

Music, which can be so precise when expressing sound in its infinite varieties, possesses remarkably few tools when it comes time to take account of silence, which is not its opposite but rather its inverse. The rest sign, a solid rectangular box, a square hat clinging to the fourth line of the staff, corresponds to the whole note and like it, lasts for four beats; the half-rest, equivalent to a half-note, is represented by the same box, this time set on top of the third line where, relieved of half the silence it contained, it could be said to have broken away as it flipped upwards, no longer toppling under its own weight. The quarter-rest, its depiction resembling the profile of a theatre mask with a pointed nose, lasts for one beat, like a quarter-note. The main thing is, it goes no further: each shorter rest is designated by a fraction of the last (half-rest, quarter-rest, and so on) and noted with an oblique line crowned with a kind of slanting comma, which becomes double, then triple and quadruple as needed, the multiplication indicating the shortening of the silence until the stem resembles a spike of goldenrod bending in the wind. With its five small heads the one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth rest is equivalent to the quasi-hemidemisemiquaver. What is there beyond it? Nothing.

Scarcely a breath, the moment that comes briefly before a heartbeat, the rustling of a wing, the fraction of a second between the instant we press the switch and the instant the light goes out, the precise moment when a
drop of water suspended from the tip of a leaf breaks away and falls to the ground.

It was years ago now, centuries one might as well say, when every night she would go through the movements with a strange sense of moving under water. It would seem to her that she was disappearing, liquefying, leaving room for another woman who knew the motions and whom she watched pirouetting, a spectator of the self who was giving in to the dizziness, then to the brilliance of the leap, fall before flight, and who only made way for her again when it was time to grasp Pierrot’s white hand.

Perched on a silver crescent they waited, suspended in mid-air, half-hidden by the darkness that shadowed the summit of the big top, while act followed act in the ring below. Under Pierrot’s black hat, his ears, on which he’d forgotten to spread the white chalk, looked like two pink flowers. Columbine briskly caught the trapeze that dropped from the canvas roof. Pierrot followed her slowly, each time leaving the moon reluctantly. This last part of the act, after they’d spent several minutes perched motionless high in the big top, invisible to the spectators, was the most perilous.

—

On the final night, as on all the others, Columbine painted on a round mouth, red as a cherry, long lashes like stars around her eyes. She spied Harlequin behind her in the light-framed mirror. He stopped for a moment at her side; he brushed her cheek with the lace escaping from his velvet sleeve and offered her a cigarette. Dreamily, she took a drag, and smoke floated for a moment above their heads, then dispersed.

The moon, which had been damaged in transport, had been mended, reinforced, sanded, and repainted, but at the junction of the old structure and the aluminium used to repair it there were some rough metal edges that scratched the skin and tore the delicate silk costumes. The whole thing, heated by the floodlights, gave off a smell of paint. Columbine was waiting impatiently to descend to the ring and join Harlequin, whose coloured jacket blazed in the spotlight that followed his every move.

When she realizes that Pierrot won’t be able to catch her, it’s too late. Did she arrive too soon at the end of the arc traced by her trapeze, or was he just a tiny bit too slow? How to know? The music plays, tinny brasses and ethereal violins, no one can have noticed that their trajectories, which are supposed to cross, will instead brush against one another, then move away again without connecting. She hasn’t let go of the bar yet but the movement
that will make her do it, already begun, cannot be undone.

The audience, row upon row in their seats, are outlined in silhouette, and look as if they’ve been cut out of cardboard. Their faces can’t be distinguished. As it is every night, the big top is jam-packed and the ushers guide spectators to their seats until a couple of seconds before the show begins. After that they switch off their flashlights; the narrow beams might distract the performers. Latecomers have to wait for the intermission, standing near the entrances, before they can take their places.

Her fingers release the thin, rubber-coated metal tube and, briefly, she continues her ascent, carried by the movement of the trapeze that she’s just left.

She sees Pierrot without seeing him. He also knows. He can do nothing for her.

In the ring, Harlequin, Pantaloon, and the villagers from whom Columbine and Pierrot have escaped pretend to be searching frantically for them. Armed with spades and pitchforks, they’ve emptied a hayloft out of which burst a host of birds – gracefully skipping contortionists – and, watching their takeoff, the searchers discover overhead the two runaways.

Columbine hears the laughter of hundreds of children whose faces she cannot see. For a moment that is an eternity, she floats in a kind of weightlessness. At regular intervals, behind the stands the emergency exits pulse a
vivid red. In the ring, all the characters run around with their heads upturned, they’re screaming comically, waving scythes and brooms. The milkmaid’s apron is not the colour it usually is; it must have been torn or soiled during yesterday’s performance. Golden dust floats in the beam of the spotlights. In the pit the musicians’ skulls can be seen, lined up in a semicircle in front of the conductor, a tiny light shining on his rostrum. Four are bald.

Across from her, Pierrot, very close but already insurmountably distant, holds out his arms, stretches his legs, tightens his muscles, his face first distorted by effort and helplessness, then resolute. With a strange near-calm, he lets go, in a final attempt to catch her, because nothing else matters, and if he does manage to grab her he’ll find some safe way to land with her in his arms. They both fall like birds cut down in full flight amid the horrified cries of the villagers in the ring. Thinking it’s a particularly dramatic finale, the spectators in the stands get to their feet and bring the house down.

Pierrot lands violently in the safety net, has time to feel a spark of pain pass through him from neck to lower back, then faints. Columbine, held back by a harness, is pulled back brutally in mid-fall and stays suspended above him. He can no longer see her. At some point, no one knows when, the music stops.

F
OR SEVERAL DAYS NOW
D
AMOCLES HAS BEEN
dragging his paw. He has to be coaxed into or out of the car, hesitates at the bottom of the stairs and at the base of the mountain before he begins climbing with a heavy tread, and if he allows himself to lag behind, it’s not always because he’s chosen to bring up the rear but sometimes because he has trouble keeping up.