Wonder (25 page)

Not until he is in front of the imposing brick edifice does he realize that he has no idea what her name is. Strangely enough he’s never needed it for thinking about her. Suddenly he is aware that until this morning, he has never
spoken to anyone about her, making her all the more precious in his eyes.

But here he is in the entrance to an enormous building where dozens of people are going back and forth, some looking busy, others exhausted: nurses in white or pale green; visitors with unruly children; attendants responsible for this or that, dressed in one-piece uniforms; a few doctors in blue, paper masks around their necks, racing outside for a cigarette or for a coffee at the corner. The lobby reverberates with the clamour of big spaces where people are only passing through: waiting rooms in stations or airports, shopping malls. He sweeps into the first corridor he discovers on his right and tries to remember the elementary principles for exiting a labyrinth. He can’t unwind a spool of thread behind him, but turning right whenever he can should let him systematically cover all the floors. And there are probably some departments he doesn’t need to go through with a fine-tooth comb: geriatrics, the neonatal unit … The thought of it makes him dizzy.

He slowly paces a corridor with a long row of doors on either side, mostly ajar. On the left, pale sunshine leaks out of windows and doorways and stretches across the floor covered with linoleum that’s known better days. Overcoming his reluctance and discomfort, he sticks his head in each of the doorways just long enough to distinguish forms stretched out in bed or hunched over in
armchairs, near-ghosts that study him for a second, barely surprised, before they go back to their suffering. He doesn’t know if he has the will to go on much longer, but he knows that he doesn’t have what he would need to leave without seeing her.

She is asleep when he finally locates her room, fourth on the left in the seventh corridor of the west wing on the second floor. Seeing her pale face against the white sheets makes him think of the sunlight on the snow that covered the mountain the day they met. Next to her bed stands a plastic and metal instrument with a black screen where a thin green line traces peaks and valleys, evenly spaced. They remind him of drawings of the periods before earthquakes occur, when the seismograph needle all at once records a number of nearly imperceptible oscillations corresponding to the wavelets, the barely noticeable palpitations and the minuscule eddies that announce the agitation about to shake the heart of the earth.

A tall, thin, sad-faced man is leaving as he arrives. The visitor looks young but he has the eyes of an old man; he leans on a cane as he walks and puts a finger to his mouth, enjoining him not to make any noise.

Silently, he sits in the vinyl chair beside the bed. A feeble light comes in the window and spills, honey-coloured, onto the walls and floor. Sounds from the
corridor come to him muffled; the room is strangely calm, as if it has managed mysteriously to detach itself from the hospital and sail upon a slack sea. From his bag he takes a book and his notepad and resumes his reading, turning the pages as gently as he can to avoid disturbing her sleep. She is breathing regularly, like a wave that advances and withdraws under the effect of the backwash. Before long he too dozes off in the warmth of the room.

When she opens her eyes she finds him fast asleep, his mouth wide open. His book has slipped onto his knees and a page has escaped from his notepad. She reaches out for it, unfolds it cautiously. He has noted, in an urgent script:

She slips the paper very carefully under her pillow.

Feeling her eyes on him, he wakens almost at once. Jumps up, bends over the white bed. Probes her hazel eyes; in one pupil is embedded a green speck that shines with all the brilliance of the sea on a fine spring day. He would like to place his hand on her forehead but doesn’t dare.

“I’m glad you came,” she says.

“Me too,” he replies, in a tight little voice. He looks tense, runs his hand nervously through his hair to lift a blond lock that has fallen over one eye. His thumbnail is bitten to the quick.

He remains at her bedside all evening and all night, as if he must at all cost prevent sleep from stealing her. He tries to distract her by reading from some gossip magazines he unearthed in a nearby waiting room, then from his ever-present treatise on geodynamics, telling her every story he can think of, asking her the craziest questions, seeking a better way to get to know her than by interrogating her about her past or her sickness:

“If you could only eat one fruit in your lifetime, what would it be?”

“What colour can’t you stand?”

“Do you have a favourite star?”

“Do you think it’s true that dogs can predict earthquakes?”

After doing her best to answer as honestly as possible (an orange, purple,
Stella Maris
), she looks at him, astounded.

“I should be asking you that, shouldn’t I? There must be something about it in one of your books.”

“The truth is, scientists have no idea. What’s certain is that dogs detect the first vibrations before we do, as if they have a kind of particularly precise seismograph …”

“How do they do that?”

“No one knows exactly. It’s assumed that they are more sensitive to variations in magnetic fields, so they’re more acutely aware of the movement of the magma under the earth’s crust. Some believe that perhaps they can pick up very high frequency sounds coming from inside the earth.”

“What if they are simply more attentive?”

“Maybe.” But he doesn’t seem convinced.

“My turn now,” she says, raising herself up on her pillows. Her cheeks are tinged with pink, her eyes shining. In the corridors, nurses in rubber shoes go past like ghosts, and pretend not to know that visiting hours have been over for a long time.

“The vegetable you hate?”

“Salsify.”

“Favourite animal?”

“Salamander.”

“They’re supposed to have nine lives, right?”

“No, isn’t that cats?”

“You’re right. But then how many lives does a salamander have?”

“I have no exact information on that question but I would suggest, without too much fear of being mistaken: just one.”

“But aren’t they supposed to be legendary animals that are reborn from their ashes?”

“That’s the phoenix.”

“What about the phoenix?”

“It’s the phoenix that is reborn from its ashes. It was said of the fire salamander,
Salamandra salamandra
, that it lived in flames. In
The Travels of Marco Polo
, we read that the shroud of Jesus Christ was preserved in cloth made of salamander.”

“How horrible.”

“He meant asbestos.”

“Why didn’t you say so before? Though now that I think about it, that’s no more reassuring.”

“It’s said that salamanders produce a kind of animal asbestos, or maybe asbestos is a sort of plant salamander. The point is that a particularly shrewd scientific mind one day took it into his head to throw a dozen salamanders into the fire to see if they would be magically transformed into some substance dear to the alchemist, if they would produce a fire-retardant thread, or if they would acquire some supernatural power.”

“And?”

“They were roasted to death.”

“Sic transit gloria mundi.”

“They say the same thing was done with witches way back in history. If they were able to avoid being burned at the stake it was proof that they had allied themselves with the Devil. If they burned without a fuss, that proved
their innocence and the kingdom of Heaven was theirs.”

“And how do you know all that?”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

She looks doubtful, then pensive for a moment. The lights of the city sparkle in the window pane, blurred by the rain that has started to fall and to trace long trembling paths on the glass. She suddenly remembers a report she’d seen on
TV
after a deadly earthquake in China.

“A few days earlier, thousands of frogs had come down from the mountains and overrun the streets. People had to close doors and windows to avoid being infested. The authorities talked about a particularly large migration, about a more abundant population that year, I don’t know what other idiotic explanation to reassure the citizens, but of course the frogs were right …”

“Appropriately, the first instrument that made it possible to identify the origin of an earthquake was perfected by the Chinese.”

“Was it a frog?”

He laughs.

“No … Well, actually, yes. More precisely, it was a number of frogs. We had one of those things, very old, at home when I was little; I never knew exactly where it came from or what happened to it … Whatever the case, it was a device made up of a kind of big, bronze amphora; all around its sides were eight dragons, heads down, each
one with a metal ball in its mouth or, actually, each dragon was supposed to have a ball but it was incomplete and there were only seven. Beneath each dragon was positioned a frog, mouth wide open, ready to receive a ball.”

“And the dragons dropped the balls when there was an earthquake?”

“Yes.”

“But why eight? Wouldn’t one dragon have done the trick?”

“No: the beauty of it is that not all the dragons opened their mouths at the slightest vibration: inside the amphora there was a kind of inverse pendulum that reacted to seismic waves by striking the dragon exactly opposite the direction in which the earthquake was happening.”

“So it was one ball that fell …”

“Yes and no … When the pendulum came back it would also hit the ball directly across from the first one—”

“But tell me, unless there’s someone posted permanently in front of it, how could you know if the quake’s epicentre was, say, due north or directly south?”

“They didn’t know, so the emperor would send riders out on reconnaissance in the two opposite directions, at the same time.”

“So the one who found the origin turned back to warn the emperor, that’s all right, but how did the other one know that he had to come back?”

“Who said that he came back?”

“You mean he kept galloping non-stop, always moving away from what he was looking for?”

“More or less, yes.”

The sun has come up for real, nurses and doctors have started their morning rounds, the shadows of the night have dispersed; he is finally able to believe that she is out of danger.

When he leaves the hospital, without realizing it he takes the road to Saint Joseph’s Oratory though he has never gone there before. Once he gets to the enormous grey structure that perches nearly on the summit of Mount Royal, he begins slowly to climb the steps to the crypt. There, he pushes the door to enter a long room, its walls lined with votive lights flickering in their red, green, and yellow glasses, rows of them in tiers like spectators at the circus. The thousands of tiny, guttering candles give off an unpleasant warmth and the smell of wax. Here and there someone slides a coin into a wooden box and the clinking echoes through the room. On the walls between the platforms where the candles are burning hang dozens of wooden crutches and canes, no doubt left by lame pilgrims cured by the Frère André’s salutary attentions or the restorative action of Saint Joseph, to whom the sanctuary is consecrated. He shivers at the
sight of this collection, unable to stop himself from imagining the mountains of eye-glasses and shoes that inevitably evoke Auschwitz. He reminds himself that this church was built earlier, in a completely different world, where similar mounds were synonymous with miracles rather than the Holocaust. At the base of one of the walls of crutches that have acquired a time-worn sheen, a worker has left behind a pair of work gloves that lie, empty, on the floor.

At the exit from this room there is a door, above which can be read
Information/Benedictions
. Glancing inside, he sees a peculiar silver object, half-cooking pot and half-samovar, crowned by a panel declaring
Holy Water
. Next to it is a box filled with miniature plastic bottles like those allowed on airplanes.

He wanders aimlessly through the maze of corridors and stairs that lead from one room to another, and soon finds himself in a hallway where, tucked deep in an alcove cut into a wall and protected by a grille, a brownish object that might have been a stone is exhibited in a small glass reliquary. On the heavy metal doors can be read:

At the foot of the marble pedestal holding the glass box are a few scraps of paper with prayers or thanks scribbled on them and some coins, as if thrown by someone making a wish at a fountain. Not far away water is flowing. Letting the sound guide him, he comes to a long, concealed corridor that seems to have been dug out of the mountain and sees that he is standing opposite a rock wall covered here and there with green moss. Droplets fall from the rock face as if from an immense stone cheek, one by one with a sound like rain.

A series of escalators similar to those in shopping malls leads to the basilica, which he eventually reaches though he doesn’t know it, for want of reference points. He hasn’t seen a window to the outside for a long time and he feels as if every footstep is taking him deeper into the heart of the mountain. Finally he pulls open some heavy doors to enter a room so vast that for a moment it takes his breath away. There is no natural light here either, aside from some scarlet rays darting in through stained-glass windows that seem to have been shattered and stuck back together in a hurry. He advances towards the choir, his footsteps ringing out on the floor. Here and there he can make out a stooped figure seated on a long wooden bench. The entire nave, seemingly made of cement, is reminiscent of the architecture of early twentieth-century dams whose double purpose was to subjugate nature and to declare loud and clear
man’s superiority over everything around him. No doubt here it is meant to exalt the greatness of God, but the effect is the same. He recalls that Brother André was a small man, five feet tall at most, a humble porter.