NAUTILUS

The shell tricks you into thinking that what you hear is the ocean, not the blood beating into your ears.

PARIS, YOU KNOW, is farther north than Newfoundland, Mother remarks coolly in a letter. There is no discussion of my returning home. They have found my behaviour disgraceful. When the nuns wrote to them of my latest expulsion, detailing my fractious behaviour and outlining their concerns for my future, I begged my parents to let me enrol in the art academy in Paris.

Father is exceedingly practical. He went into textiles and then there was a war. They needed uniforms, years of them. He became enormously wealthy. He thinks studying art is idiotic. It is only for the poor or homosexual, he said, believing both to be essentially the same crime. Mother, who knew the new money appeared crass, had an exacting brain. She hot-housed me in the areas she thought refined. She sent me books about Goya, Delacroix, and Turner’s night paintings without referencing them. Ivory. Do not forget the hairbrush I sent. Please use it at least twice a day. Sincerely, Mother. She made it impossible to engage with her. She kept her distance, and seemed oblivious to what was inside me. The books were confusing. It made me think she understood something fundamental in me.

They sent me away but nothing changed. At convent school the longing for my brothers, for the woods, was so pronounced it felt theatrical. When I’d left, my brother Arthur gave me a cigarette tin filled with pencils lined up like soldiers. Drawing, I’d learned, was one thing I was better at than my brothers. Mother had an art tutor come to the house every Wednesday afternoon. He said the reason famous artists have so many self-portraits is that it is a useful exercise to draw something you think you know. It is also the only view you have that is permanent. I look into the mirror. I have no idea how to transcribe this high-boned face full of angles. But he remarks, Very good, when he puts on his overcoat. More hatching here, he says, pointing to my cheekbone, and here at the hollow of the neck. If you use dark shading at the corners, it makes a mouth more alive. Draw, even if it is only for a quarter of an hour each day, and you will find yourself much improved. I began to carry a sketchbook with me, continually drawing my brothers’ knightly faces, half blurred, in constant motion.

When I flip the lid to the tin at convent school it is like a detonator, sending a sharp longing through me, though drawing is the only way I feel better. The page glitters fresh each time. I draw portraits in the margins of my notebooks, which both comforts me and makes me more separate. I am expected to have no emotions. Do as I’m told. And though I understand this would be the easier course, I cannot help but do the opposite. It is a life of indoors full of silence, full of blame. Not unlike the precise attention of my parents, constantly obsessed with correcting my behaviour, my posture, my manners. I love being outside. What I miss is air. Cut off from sounds of my childhood, I feel untethered and dull. When I arrive, the nuns’ first words are, Rule number one.

The girls instantly hate me the way a fox hates a dog. And like most girls, they make a vocation out of exclusion. My grandmother Queenie once read to me that the first rule a geisha is taught, at age nine, is to be charming to other women. This is not my experience. My accent is wrong, my hair is wrong, and girls can be their most wicked when you don’t look right. I am so unused to these mothered girls. Unfamiliar with their habits, their secret customs. They suck on pens, they roll the waistbands of their skirts. There is a moment of horror when I see emptiness in their eyes. Nothing is reflected back at all. Just empty, shining circles. They look like a small squadron in their pleated kilts and starched white blouses. The dorms like barracks, with rows of metal beds and one small side table each. I am unpopular because I am new, and not good at anything. I can’t play field hockey. I am not good at religion. Drawing doesn’t count. Though I am so deeply lonely, I don’t make any effort to befriend them. I would rather be on my own than with people I don’t like. When we file into the dining hall for meals, a group of girls gets up and moves their table far from wherever I sit down. She munches her food like a tomboy, they say. Just before we go to lunch, I see that someone has stolen my sketchbook and torn pages from it and taped them to the walls in the corridor. They’ve drawn over my brothers’ faces. I blink, swallowing back tears. I cannot cry. No one here cries. It would show that they have broken you. Instead, I am shoved into the dining hall where there is silence, as we are not permitted to speak during meals. I sit straight-backed, listening to hundreds of girls chew their meat, swallow their soup. The tink tink tink of metal spoons against the bowls in unison becomes a dependable sound that feels like safety.

I start drawing maps of escape in black ink on small white sheets. The high stone walls surrounding the grounds, the gardens, the dormitories, the alley to the outside world, and a legend with numbers and routes below. The nuns write to my parents. This child does not collaborate with work or play.

Children are conformists. They sense my apartness a mile away. Even when I change schools, each time it is the same. There are almost no letters from home. And I wonder what it would be like, just once, to be met with something other than Mother’s cool detachment when she sees what she regards as my needy, untamed eyes. I once saw a woman swing a small boy in wide arcs in the air to his shrieks of delight, a vast look of love in her eyes. The kind that galvanizes.

At the last school, I’d begun to have a recurring dream. It is always an island. A circular, spiralling shell. It is exotic and familiar. It is only when I land to attend the art academy, walking through the whorl of arrondissements, that I realize what my dreams have been about. They have been about Paris.

I grow my hair until it touches my waist, and wear it braided, pinning it up around my head. I decide to wear only white. My body is nervous, alert to everything. To chimes and clicks. The smell of chicory and Pernod, and the pervasive stale cigarette smoke from tabacs. The streets are unlike the unimaginative geometry I’ve known. There are no straight lines. I walk with purpose on the uneven cobblestones, along Boulevard Saint-Germain, the light spilling onto the stones, twisting away from the fragrant chestnut trees that line the street. I will never forget this light. Against the dove-grey rooftops it is a miracle.

Inside the gold-tipped fence of the Jardin du Luxembourg, gravel chews at my hard shoes. The park is populated with women—a stone angel with large sweeping wings, beautiful and precise, twenty French queens, the first statue of liberty. People sit in metal chairs and watch the octagon of water turn pink as the sun dips low. Autumn isn’t about everything leaving. Here it is called la rentrée. The return. Through the park, on the other side of the cemetery, is Rue Froidevaux, the wide street with meticulously clipped trees where I have found a flat that will double as a studio. It was once a maid’s room, and now sits above the atelier of Mme. Tissaud, a rélieure who makes, rebinds, and hand-sews books. Through the large front windows I can see a sewing loom, finishing presses, and wood-handled tools. When I walk through her door, Mme. Tissaud exclaims, Ivory!, embracing me so intensely I feel my lower vertebrae crack.

I am sorry, I offer. I am early.

She smiles slyly. Don’t apologize. I don’t like the word sorry. Besides, we count up the faults only of those who keep us waiting. I trust people who are early, she says, speaking in the direction of her bookcase. She marks a book with her eyes then takes a brown leather edition off the shelf. She is calm, deliberate. She wears a rough linen apron and has a face that is kind and wide, sackcloth hair. Kafka, she says, kept his watch an hour and a half fast.

I am thinking about how exactly that would work while I open the book, rich and coded, intrigued by a protagonist who has only a letter for a name. How nice K. looks on a page.

She draws the white thread through the eye of the needle and sits at the window sewing while we talk. She speaks in proverbs. I have five grown children, she says, holding up a hand with veins roped from age. They are my fingers. I cannot live without any one. When she looks at me, I feel naked. She seems sharply aware of how solitary I am. Fierce but unsure. All the things that match nothing in her. I see her tilt her head. As though she remembers something. Later she will look at me and tell me how hard it is to cope with youth, its moods, its intensities, everything we wish we could have access to later in life but never can. The great disparity, how there is so little of youth and so much of the other.

I was looking at a flat in the nineteenth. It was inexpensive, but it felt so far away.

I was born in the nineteenth arrondissement at the foot of Parc des Buttes Chaumont, she says.

Where I will later meet Lev, nocturnal wanderings through gypsum, fences of carved cement branches that I run my hand along to prove I am not in a dream.

After two months in Paris, I receive an invitation to dinner from the Hungarian-born architect Istvan Szalasi and his wife, Tacita, a friend I’ve met at school. Ours is a sistership I have never known. Our friendship, predicated on some oddly gratifying chocolate offered to me, our easels touching. Most women have problems with food, they are always trying to disappear, but like me, she thinks hunger is a mistake.

I see her three separate times the first day we meet. In three different arrondissements. In a city of three million people, this feels profound. Something passes between us, like an echo, a vibration. Whichever is deeper, harder to ignore.

When one of the instructors at the academy trips theatrically in mid-lecture in the first week, we both start laughing hysterically. I convulse, tears streaming.

Mademoiselle Frame, if you are unable to control your emotions, kindly leave the room.

Tacita and I are like magnets, the satisfying pull to the click. She notices that I use only one sheet of paper for notes, erasing the same page each time when it gets full. I know that I will like her when she doesn’t ask why. Residue from the silent pacts I would set myself in childhood. If I can jump across the sidewalk without touching the crack, that will do it. If I can bounce the rubber ball one hundred times without dropping it, that will do it. Though I never stopped to ask—Do what?

Before she came to Paris, in Hungary, she spoke French for a living. She has a fine-tuned ability to interpret facial expressions of people whose languages she speaks, as though she has been born into their languages. She tells me that, like most things, it is a practice that relies on strategies. It is all in the tongue. You must be conscious of how the tongue moves in the mouths of the people whose language you wish to speak. She leans back and takes a sip of coffee. There is a lyric poet, she says, who calls translation a salutary gymnastics of the mind. When I look at her across the table, I realize that it has been years since I have actually spoken to someone I loved.

Where did your French come from? she asks.

Mother spoke it. She had a difficult time trying to find a French tutor for us. We had the same stern man teach us Latin, science, and mathematics. She eventually dredged up a plump ginger-haired teacher, named Mme. Plouffe, whose conjugation of irregular verbs sounded more like tragicomedy coming from her small pursed lips. Bouche en cul-de-poule. I had to will myself to attend to her shrill but oddly droning voice. Asseoir. Courir. Devoir. Falloir. Mourir. One of the first things she did was teach us Alouette, the children’s song. Alouette, gentille alouette. / Alouette, je te plumerai. It sounded so jaunty until I realized that not only are they admiring the lovely skylark, but plucking its dead body of feathers systematically from its head to its feet. Whenever I hear that song I think of murder and Mme. Plouffe’s puckered little mouth.

Tacita is ethereal and intense. Elfin. Someone who never spends money on haircuts. She cuts it herself, close to her scalp where it forms in thick dark waves. She tells me she first cut off all her hair as an experiment. It was coal-black, long enough to sit on.

I’ve always thought it an odd signifier of women’s sexual powers, she says, given that it is actually dead. It is simply armour women wrap themselves in.

She is a bricoleur. She roams the junk shops looking for what most would consider rubbish. Her finds she then categorizes in her studio drawers. She collects everything. Flight maps, a doll’s forearm, tiny glass jars, old photographs, watch springs, glass transparencies of the phases of the moon, stones the colour of midnight, loose red sand, children’s blocks, plastic rose petals, butterfly wings sewn from linen, blue filaments, cutouts of birds and other creatures, satin stars stuffed thick with cotton, fragments of mirrors.

We drink café crème in one of the dim wood-and-mirror cafés beside the art academy. From childhood, she says, all I wanted was to be able to keep every object lined up on my shelves. I cannot collect fast enough to save them from ending up bloated on the river floor, decaying in back alleys, or buried deep below the ground. I love history that lives in the dirt and cracks and stains of things. With objects, perfection does not interest me, she says.

You explore by remaining open to everything.

And—she smiles into her thick white mug, she seems more here than anyone I’ve known—what about you? she presses. Where did the name come from?

Mother silently laboured for an hour and three-quarters, to the tick of a roman-numeralled grandfather clock outside the door, I tell her. She endured the delivery without a cry, her teeth clenched. I was almost blue, head jammed against pelvis so that there was a red mark on my forehead when I came out. My four older brothers filed in, their green eyes glinting, glancing at the baby wrapped in soft blankets. Albert, the oldest, three-quarters legs, said, She’s as white as cigarette paper. Ivory suits her.

Mother shot him a silencing look.

Of course, once humans got involved, I say to Tacita, mythic qualities took a decidedly unbecoming turn. I think of the tragedy, harvested from elephants—assassinated and left to rot in the savannah, swarmed by flies—to make piano keys and billiard balls. I don’t tell her that I was tormented because of it.

Where were you before you came here?

England. Convent school. I was expelled, I say, exhaling smoke. More than once.

Well done, she says, placing the cigarette back into the notch of the ashtray and resting her chin in her hand.

Well, I am not a blueblood like you, Tacita says teasingly. I am from a long line of black-haired women who come from drowsy farms. They lugged buckets of water through muddy villages. I didn’t get to know my mother long enough. She was a diviner. She had the ability to find four-leaf clovers from anywhere. She once told me that to see them was like a bride looking through a veil. You don’t look for them, you just soften your eyes to the shape. I turned to look at my mother, stunned, and said, I know about the veil. That was our closest moment. She died in childbirth. I was the oldest, so when I was twelve, I became the mother. And when I left to work in Paris, the next sister in line became the mother. We are like matryoshka, she says, Russian dolls. She drops her pack of cigarettes in her bag and says, We all have the same face. It is too expressive ever to be considered beautiful.

No, I counter. Like all charismatic women, you are beautiful. By conviction.

I look at Tacita, looking at me, emitting a certain steady warm intensity.

Paris is filled with fascinating objects in an infinite number of unlikely places, she explains to me. You’d be amazed at what I find in the trash, Ivory, her black eyes gleaming. She spends most of her time collecting. The ideas of art come later.

You know, I say carefully, the sadness is good. For your work.

She squints her eyes.

Happy people don’t look down.

She takes me to some of her discoveries. A shop she’s found by Canal Saint-Martin that sells doll eyeballs—rows of glass eyes in constant wobble, laid out on a wooden track, clicking as they touch like the silver boules tossed on the sand by grown men all over France. Tiny refracted Tacitas stare back at me.

We end up at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, where we sit for hours drawing the bones of animals assembled into perfect skeletons, and then smoke cigarettes in the adjacent garden that is also the Paris zoo. After being cut off from animals for so long, the sounds beat blood back into my ears. Velvet ruffling feathers and silences punctuated by thwacks, metallic chirps, grunts, and screeches, crisply defined against a faint wind—the incantatory rhythms of a live, twitching fugue. We discuss the effect of the Muséum and its contents, with its art nouveau metal flower railings, the dark winding staircases, the abandonment of bones. We discover, tucked in a dusty corner, a tiny skeleton of a two-month-old human fetus that has been propped up. A fetus is always seen half-curved and floating, a sickle moon. Upright it becomes utterly grotesque with its large skull, giant round eye sockets, stunted bird legs, and miniature ribs. It is displayed alongside the monkey ear in a jar of formaldehyde and the monstre double, the malformed twinned bat fetuses, in an odd democracy. We stare at it apprehensively, as though somehow we understand at the same moment that a baby will, for both of us, remain simply a collection of bones inappropriately assembled. I see my own reflection stare back.

Tacita leaves to roam the brocantes while I sit in the zoo where I spend hours observing the monkeys, gazelles, and hyenas. I often don’t draw them there. I listen to them. I seek out the grassblades, the copse of trees, anything that will lead to a confluence of intimacy between the human and animal world. I practise for great swaths of time, always undisturbed. As in the cafés here, where everyone drinks and drinks and pays hours later.

I begin to keep a notebook of sounds.

Is it a diary? Tacita asks.

Diaries are just emotional weather reports, I tell her, writing and not looking up. They don’t interest me.

I write in the notebook. Nightingale: narcotic effect, lunar dust. Hyena: points of stars, cackle. I add the word dialects with a question mark. Tacita writes in the margin: Funny.

I had hoped that I could paint my way into a pact I’d made in the woods years ago, a pact of saving. I haven’t yet told Tacita about the animals. All the time in the forest, how I would hear their voices, shot like arrows through the silent trees. I heard their secrets and kept them to myself, huddled low in the mud, listening to the sounds issued from insects, animals, and birds at the roots and tops of trees. I took in all the silences as well as the sounds. The sounds around me and the ones inside of me. My inner life took shape around them. For the first time I was happy—was it happiness I felt? People always think that it’s animals who are observed, but they observe us too. My brother Edgar liked to tease me. Anyway, what’s wrong with people? I remember looking at him concentratedly. People are noisy, I finally said.

This feels unrelated, I confide to Tacita. Capturing a living creature and then making it inanimate, deliberate brushstrokes, swirls of oil, seems so, inadequate. You can overwork it and it becomes stuffy and dull. You focus so much on the detail that you overlook the important things. All the little inaccuracies that make up the truth. A solemn and divine truth somewhere in their indifferent eyes that twists into you.

She doesn’t ask about the pact. Instead she says, An unordinary life leads away from the past. Maybe it is something else. Maybe the creatures you seek to interpret are like starlight, or the moons of other planets. Maybe they need to be discovered.

Outside the Muséum, a roasted scent like fennel flowers saturates the air with its perfume, something that grows in one of the geometrical flowerbeds in Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes that Tacita and I have become obsessed with. We pass perfumed women in silk stockings wrapped in furs with gold belts around their waists clicking along the streets, arms full of parcels. Despite looming threats, everything seems to be slowly growing more luxurious, more exaggerated. Eventually it will be complicated floorlength dresses, a retreat to safety, to something that is known. We comb the markets and bring everything back to Tacita’s apartment. We decide the kitchen is a place of power. Alchemical. And though her art and that of the group mocks social conventions, still she finds herself wringing out Istvan’s socks and hanging them out to dry over the balcony. We walk back to the kitchen.

I had never assumed they were married. But they were, eleven years, since Tacita was seventeen. They never met in Hungary, but she had stood inside a soaring building he designed in Budapest. She thought it an impossible feat, to make something that moved someone to the point where they felt a burning in their chest. She liked when he told her that he’d stayed awake on the site for twenty-four hours before making any sketches. He wanted to see the progression of light.

She says they have been with other people, like most of the artists in the group. But it has never interested them as much as each other. She says it so casually, with her big warm smile. I should feel self-conscious around her, having only just emerged from the high, thin world of girls. She seems so fully fledged, with her own kitchen, where she cooks and draws, and a studio filled with objects and photographs pinned to the walls. Her soft, low voice. Her bare feet. The exotic silk robe she wears with a thin tie around her waist. The way she runs her fingers through her short dark hair, the stacks of silver bracelets clattering on her wrist. I find I feel more like myself around her. She makes that part of me, with the secret shame of being so banished, into an artifact. But then I wonder, Am I right? Have I read her gestures correctly? More and more, we talk about what we want to make. We conspire together, our eyes electric.

When I watch couples resigned to their marriages, Tacita continues, the thing I cannot bear is the slackness underscored by bitterness. All the indignities they inflict upon each other, the little dropped remarks. How sometimes with married people you wonder whether what you’re looking at is love or hate. Their lives drift so far from themselves that they spend them on nothing; they engage in banal domestic conversations like “It’s time for a new sofa, don’t you think?” She says she and Istvan live without routine in part because that is what clouds people’s ability to see what they once loved about the person they are with.

I remember watching a famous Hungarian cellist play an Elgar concerto, Tacita says, hands turning red from the cold sink water. For his encore he did something that caught everyone off guard. He played a line on the cello and then stopped. The hall was silent. Then he sang it back. Played a line and then sang it back. His voice and the voice of his cello overlapping until I had no idea what I was listening to. Which was more exceptional, his command over an instrument or a human voice becoming an instrument? I shut my eyes, Tacita says, and as an ordinary mortal accepted his superiority without question. Yet, while his genius filled every sliver of the recital hall, I thought, This person still needs to make toast. He still needs to feed his cat. He still requires his socks to be washed. She laughs. I’ll never understand it.

Understand what?

Being human.

I find it hard to consider myself part of a category, I say. I know what it is to be myself but I’m not so sure what we are as a whole. We are a species, I suppose, like any other animal, just trying to find our place on the earth, except that we seem to need to discover the truth about the space we occupy.

I think that’s why there is no such thing as wisdom. I don’t believe in it. No one can tell you how to become who you are. You just have to live it to know it, she says.

Have you ever heard that recording of an English cellist who was broadcast playing Dvořák’s Songs My Mother Taught Me in her garden? I ask.

She shakes her head.

The sounds of nightingales in the garden made it onto the recording. Singing the same four notes and then eventually adding a flourish, a fifth note. The broadcast was a sensation. They said it contained an element of ecstasy. But you know what I always thought? The birds stole the show. The cellist must have been annoyed at this. Humans always want to win.

Their flat is charmed with the smell of citron from the scented log she put on the fire. A cuckoo clock marks each hour as Tacita moves about her kitchen, small and pale yellow. She tells me that the gastronomy of the group of artists tends toward elaborate and somewhat grotesque cuts of meat. The last meal involved a naked woodcock flambé in strong alcohol served in its own excrements, as is the custom in fine Parisian restaurants. There are lambs’ brains, calf livers, eel pâté, pigs’ feet, and anything with a shell. They prefer what is clear and intelligible in form, she explains. The shapelessness of vegetables is something they have no interest in. Shellfish are prized. They like the battle, jaws ripping at armour.

I think it is because they are mostly men, she says, unpacking the rest of the vegetables. Everything is a dare.

Doesn’t it bother you?

What?

That kind of bravado?

She places beets on the table. The thing that bothers me, she says, is people whose imagination stops too low.

She walks out and comes back with a little wooden box. The frame is amber wood with dark black holes where the nails once were. The ground is wood, painted a thick chalky white with deep cracks running vertically. There is blue around the edges, and a thin piece of wood jagged at both ends painted the same blue. Shards of blue glass, along with a piece of white coral that seems almost the shape of a human heart. A speckled ball in one corner. White nails hang upside down from the top.

I love this, I tell her. These everyday things that together form a dream. Where did you find the coral?

Pigalle, she says. One of the streets with a woman in dirty underlinen and varnished fingers leaning out each doorway, like a play. You know, she says, placing the box on the table, people think artists live in garrets and drink cocktails. She smiles. Instead here I am in the gutters collecting dirty things and trying to arrange them to evoke some sort of wonder. Something that we know, but altered by time or circumstance. Tacita takes an opened wine bottle from the counter, pours it into two glasses, and hands one to me. Like pink glass, she says, frosted by sea change.

It’s the notion of just truly being awake to everything, I say, taking a sip. Never sleepwalking and always seeing.

She says she is happy I’ve arrived. Before she felt that women in the group were relegated to lovers of male artists. A lot of the men looking for some form of muse, and then going home to wives who will service them anytime they want, but mostly are too tired.

I’ve never understood why everyone doesn’t know that women are the ones who convey things in the most interesting ways, I say. We have always observed. We have been used to no audience and that has given us room to really see. I often think that’s why women were put in tight corsets, so that is what their minds would focus on. Men are secretly threatened, I say, touching the back of my hand to my cheek, hot with wine. Besides, they are more compelled by action. To the sequence of events.

Maybe this is why in my work there is such a recurrence of birds in cages, Tacita laughs. I like that your interest lies in animals too.

I take another sip and put down my glass. Not the petted things.

I notice that she has an astonishing ability to give herself completely to people, without distraction. A perfect and rare transparency. I learn from her that the way a friend acts toward you is a clue, it is a window into the way they would like to be treated. It is also what undoubtedly makes her an accomplished translator. She confessed to me that she’d only once taken liberties, and that naturally, it had cost her the job. It was worth it, she says. It was when she met Istvan. He was designing a theatre interior by the Canal Saint-Martin and she was hired to translate the meetings between him and the maire from the tenth arrondissement.

The maire, a big man with a long face that joined a wrinkled forehead, large sloping eyes, and an enormous nose, and who overall gave the impression of a somewhat intelligent bloodhound, said, I think we should have the building permits by April.

What Tacita said to Istvan in Hungarian was, Last night I saw that Venus was out. It sparkled above the treetops. I am in love with this bright planet.

Istvan, already alive in the presence of the translator with a scar above her lip, a silver vertical line that made her even more striking, tried desperately to comprehend how it was possible that the balding, nasal-voiced maire before him was speaking about the beauty of elusive planets. Once he understood it was Tacita, he began thinking of how he might ask her to dinner. A week later, the bloodhound himself married them in the atrium of the Mairie du dixième.

What sort of wedding did you have? I say, turning the thin-stemmed glass in my fingers.

I wore blue. We invited no one.