Behind her she heard the noise of the television. It was time to leave. Had it been possible, she would have cut out the little bedroom and taken it with her so she might find refuge in it once Ariel went away, once the reporters began to swarm around her again, once another Jackson Pollock picture came to attack her. She fiercely clenched her fists, trying to engrave inside her every angle of the room and to imprint her own silhouette on the place that had witnessed the first hours of her existence.
“Have you found your memories among mine?”
“You might say that,” she answered, drying her eyes.
The old man walked her back to the car. At the last moment, she sensed that he would have liked for her to prolong her stay, that he had already grown accustomed to another person’s presence in his home, undoing in a few minutes years of training in solitude.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Roberto. My friends call me Roberto.”
“Thank you, Roberto.”
Her car churned up a cloud of dust and as she drove off a strident roar could be heard overhead. A warplane sliced through the sky, crossing Marie’s trajectory so as to form an X with it. Never-ending wars. So many things to fight against, and Marie was so very tired.
Far away from the major cities, the noise of the news reaches them somewhat blurred; the distance lends an unreal sheen to events. Politics has taken on the shape of a masquerade for them, and human-interest items seem like sordid tales drawn from mythology. They are not shocked by the Alaskan man accused of killing and eating his four sons, because he does not really exist. The Newfoundland cult that tried to crossbreed dogs and humans is just a joke. Nor are they even surprised when the woman receiving handsome payments in exchange for getting struck by lightning turns out to be a robot. As far as the planet’s decline is concerned, they have let go. They are ordinary spectators of a world grown so warped as to beggar belief.
As for word from their families, it is as rare as sprouts in the ground here. Marc is the only remaining link between them and their former existence, allowing Marie and Ariel to send their close relations the occasional letter, the content of which is always so insubstantial that even the cleverest spies could not determine its point of origin. The information travelling in the opposite direction is hardly more specific. Ariel’s parents, having also yielded to the appeal of exile, have entered into old age on what is left of the Yucatan Peninsula and confine their messages to the weather and sometimes their health. Meanwhile, morality has gained the upper hand at the Leclercs’, who have refused to communicate with their daughter ever since it became clear she had no plans to leave Ariel. Marie has registered this loss without dramatizing it, like one more thing gone down in the ocean of all she has had to give up. Only Rachel, equanimous with regard to her sister’s choices, continues to correspond with her. As for the information passed on by Marc — the tribulations of the cops, the rebuilding of the Party — Ariel does his best to ignore it, just as he refrains from broaching with Marc the subject of his divorce from Emmanuelle. The less he knows about it, the better. An island with too many bridges is no longer an island.
In any case, it is not hard to turn a deaf ear on the plain, where silence is stronger than all else. Ariel and Marie give themselves up to this landscape, with its smooth horizons, its regular surfaces devoid of hills or fjords or the rectangular woods of the cities. Their self-sufficiency is more than ever necessary. They are friends, family, lovers; they share all the loves that go into a life, and all the solitude this entails.
When Marie returned to Montreal ready to describe to Ariel her journey in search of Eva Volant, she found him on the street, red-faced and stupidly rooted in a puddle of melted snow. The fire seemed to float weightlessly like a will-o’-the-wisp, a paper airplane ignited through spontaneous combustion. It took Marie a few seconds to grasp that it was their house.
No criminal investigation was needed for them to understand that the blaze was the work of an arsonist. During his stay in the capital, Ariel had been informed that a slew of letters had flooded his office in recent weeks. He had opened a few of them at random. One of them depicted its author as a sexual libertarian and offered Marie and Ariel a “haven of peace and tolerance where they could live their forbidden love and share it with a community of like-minded people.” Most of the others saw themselves as agents of divine wrath and condemnation to the fires of hell. It was hard to guess which of the fallen prime minister’s thousand foes might have burned down his house.
The day after the fire, Ariel and Marie treaded around the smoking ruins of their home trying to recognize its wrecked forms, to identify the living room, the staircase, the kitchen wall, the remains of what had been no more than a temporary structure, an ephemeral order they had believed in for so long. A few blackened objects peeked out here and there like little corpses rising to the surface of dark waters after being submerged in the depths: a toothbrush, a juicer, a Montblanc pen, a flashlight. The cat’s body could not be found. Unseen since the scandal had erupted, the animal had no doubt been dematerialized just like the rest of their world.
They had been circling around their former life for what seemed like hours when Marc arrived out of breath.
“Thank God you’re safe and sound!”
He paused beside them to contemplate the black pit where a fine snow was doing its best to settle.
“Witch,” he hissed between his teeth.
Ariel and Marie looked up at the former military man.
“Emmanuelle. It’s all her fault,” Marc explained.
Just as the house was going up in flames, Marc — by tugging on the many lines he had cast — learned that the person responsible for the leak was his own wife. Emmanuelle, rooting through her husband’s affairs, had found out. She was the one who had sent the journalists the anonymous message, which Marc’s men eventually traced back to her.
“She left even before I could confront her. I can’t believe she did this to us.”
The snowflakes covered their coats and their hair turned frizzy by a night without hope, but expired in contact with the seething rubble of the house. Nothing of this broken life could ever be washed clean again. Marie turned to Marc with a glazed look in her eyes.
“We want to disappear. Together. Can you help us?”
In Marie’s class a few children stand out, colourful faces in a room too often black-and-white. Little Marco with his second generation Italian accent, who curls the few French words he learned with an altogether Latin theatricality. His mother comes to fetch him every night and sometimes presents Marie with arancinis, murmuring, “For my boy’s favourite teacher.” Then there’s Sophia, with ponytails that defy gravity, law, and order, who keeps her hand permanently raised, even when she does not know the answer or has nothing to say. And, finally, Angel, whose classmates are all at least a head taller than her; her gaze is piercing and her French pronunciation perfect. Every Friday Angel tearfully presses Marie’s hand before running off to the weather-beaten yellow bus.