DOLPHIN

Ceta cea. 21" length of symphysis . . .
5'3" of ramus . . . 16'6" end of muzzle to
palatal notch . . . 13'10" to preorbital notch . . .
85 teeth incurved, fang compressed . . .
Habitat, unknown. Creates rings out of blow hole
or creates water vortex ring and blows air in.

AFTER SWITCHING OFF CHOPIN, I take my woollen shawl and wrap it around my shoulders. Two jumpers layered over pyjamas. I slide my feet into my sandals, my ungainly limbs labouring up the courtyard gravel to the car parked on higher ground by the wild blackberries shot through the tall grasses. My bones feel too large, too heavy for my body, though when I catch a reflection of myself I am so slight I am barely here. After Paris, I refused to look at myself in a mirror. For years, only catching flickers in windows, the glint of a knife, fingermarked lenses. Afraid to look and find that grief had altered my face.

There is the absence of sound and visible objects in these tracts of land. All the evenings, across these violet-lapped fields from setting suns, I watch from the front door. Cool to the heat of them, emotions dulled by the simple act of time passing. The darkness unrolls, the white-tufted moths fluttering in confined circles around the light. So much of making something out of life comes from the physical world, from really looking at everything. The smell after rain, trees illuminated in a storm, the sound of a screen door, the first star, all the things that compose your existence moment to moment. It forces you to live in the present, which is the only thing I’ve ever known to stop the sinking fear of death.

The American found me this car. I’m not sure the era. From some friend of hers who summered here from California. This is his dead wife’s car. I wedge the cuttingboard behind the driver’s seat and feel it jutting into the small of my back. Did his wife do this? I wonder. She was a young woman. It makes me feel ashamed at once, to still be here.

When I reach the village I realize that I don’t remember the drive. I’ve unintentionally driven to Chinon, twenty minutes to the seven of Fontevraud. My mind elsewhere, and time moving still. The shops and flats are quiet, shuttered in. No sign of the tourists with their canvas hats, hauling around their ridiculous packs, and maps, and cameras, and plastic water bottles, as though they were going on safari and not to a French town with perfectly potable water.

I park along the river at the foot of a plane tree and slowly walk to the river’s edge to the payphone, with its clouded plastic scratched with graffiti, and begin pressing the small grubby metal squares. My hand judders. A calling card, strings of passwords. I let it ring. Six, seven, eight. I am rehearsing what to say. Then nothing. No one answers. There is an answering machine detailing various extensions, gallery hours.

I find a park bench illuminated and slowly walk there. My legs ache. I conduct what I might say on the telephone, the stillness creeping. Though the village is quiet, there is the odd low rumble of a truck, a distant voice. I sit in silence for long enough that I drift off. I wake to a young woman in a white nightgown and complicated sandals, with straps around the ankle like a slave girl’s. Mostly they seem to wear cheap, ill-fitting garments with exposed midsections. For all its practical improvements, feminism has not yet freed women from a sense that their value resides in how they are seen by men. The woman has a tattoo above her ankle that I can’t make out, most likely something banal. It used to be just sailors and criminals. Not much interests me about fashion. During the war it froze for six years. Now there is clothing manufactured to look like what was once worn by the bone-poor, and somewhere somebody profits from this. I picture how many times I mended my one pair of stockings in Paris. How unshined shoes were tantamount to the end of civilization. The modern expression of rebellion seems sadly commodified. When out with the artists, I always felt a nervous sort of energy. As though anything could happen. Because the revolt came from within, and how can anyone ever predict what might come from the mind? Change life, Rimbaud said. There were naked bodies, objects on fire, magnetic fields, clouds eaten by the moon.

The young woman and I are like churchgoers, an extended polite silence between us. But soon her sobs punctuate the night air with a violence that almost gives me a coronary.

Mademoiselle? Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?

She turns her pale oval face and looks at me suspiciously with blue-socketed eyes, as though she has just now been alerted to the fact that she is not alone. She must think me mad, this old woman in striped pyjamas piled with sweaters on the other end of the bench in the middle of the night.

She tells me that she can’t sleep. That she’s so exhausted she cannot even sleep. A small baby. No husband. The baby sleeps twenty metres away but inside it is a dark and shrunken world, one she feels she’ll never get out of. She needs air. She needs to feel part of something bigger than her apartment, with its hushed tones and sour-milk smell. She says no one ever told her about the loneliness. I am the first adult she has spoken with all day. The days are without end. Nights are the worst. They are as deep as black water. It is only me, up with the drug addicts, the mentally ill, and the old people— She stops, embarrassed.

Ça va, I say. It is the first time I’ve heard my own voice in days. Old people actually aren’t usually up at this hour.

She lets out a small laugh. She wipes back the wetness with her hand. She says that when she pushed out the baby, a whole new magical life came with it. People stared, saying a baby this new still has angels around it. She felt enchanted, altered. Her own sister didn’t even recognize her voice on the telephone. But then you don’t sleep for months and you are stuck in this gruelling toil and everything slides to a brink. It makes this bunched, plain life it came crashing down into all the more desolate. If the baby is screaming and I am half-starved, do I still make a sandwich for myself while he cries? While he sleeps inside, is it illegal for me to be sitting here, on this bench? I feel unhinged, she says. Like I am capable of doing something crazy.

I think all women carry something of a rebellion inside them that often goes unexpressed. Because we think we are not in the race—or game, or whatever the sporting analogy is—we have a sense of anarchy that I think is an advantage. In times like these it threatens to erupt. It is not such a bad thing.

I can’t shake the darkness that rips through me, she says. It’s so strong I could harm myself, or the baby. She pauses. I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately, she says, blowing her nose.

Well all the thinking you do, I doubt you’ll figure out much.

I’m so tired, she says. Sleep like a baby, she mimics. Why does no one talk about the fact that babies are insomniacs? I’m so exhausted but I’m just sitting around doing nothing. I sit inside all day. Laundry piles up, the refrigerator empties. Nothing is ever finished. I never realized how hard it is to do nothing. To do nothing and be okay with it. To not become impatient doing nothing. I can’t rely on anything. Each day I think I learn something about him, about my situation, but then it changes. She slumps against the back of the bench and mutters what sounds like, He seems somewhere between human and animal, though more animal than human. And what does that make me? Someone told me to keep a journal because you forget everything. And you know that in ten weeks, I’ve only written one thing. One word. She laughs. Milk. I feel like a farm animal. Like the goats on my aunt’s farm that I helped milk when I was little. We would get them on the milking stand with the lure of grain, then we would keep them in by their necks with a long piece of wood that had a hook and eye at the top. I always liked the sound that streams of milk made hitting the pail. It sounded so rustic, so comforting. Now I don’t feel that way at all.

Mammals are so dependent on milk, I think but don’t say. It’s why we will never be as free as the birds. Because I have nothing subjective to contribute, I tell her about sleep. Dolphins don’t sleep for a month after giving birth, I say. It’s how their offspring avoid being prey.

C’est moi. Exactement, she laughs, wiping her eyes.

Well there are better stories.

How do you know that?

There just are.

No, I mean, how do you know about dolphins?

Oh. I study animals.

What do you study about them?

I work a few kilometres from Fontevraud in the white caves near the house there. I am transcribing animal languages that have been recorded.

I didn’t know there was such a thing.

It’s been over a hundred years. The first recordings were birds on an Edison phonograph. But those birds were captured. Which isn’t the same.

Oh.

The first wild bird recordings in North America were made in 1929 on a movie soundtrack because no one had invented a tape recorder yet.

She looks at me with the look that people get when they are determining how old you really are, patronizingly, as if I am a small child. And what I want to say to her is, Don’t do that.

Maybe you can tell me, she says. I think I saw a jackal by the river late at night.

Egyptians used to read the Book of the Dead on how to navigate the underworld. The god of the dead had a jackal’s head. He determined who could enter by weighing the heart. If it was lighter than an ostrich feather, the soul would be allowed to ascend into heaven.

She shifts on the bench.

Jackals are opportunists. They often steal what others kill. I think what you might have seen was a wolf.

You know a lot about animals.

I’ve observed them my whole life. We are quiet for a while, both staring ahead.

Is the work lonely? she finally asks. I think of sitting for hours silently on the ground.

It’s like being in love, I say, feeling oddly candid at this hour with this stranger. Your interest in everything else is lost.

I wouldn’t know, she says, the baby’s father left. We aren’t—close.

I am relieved she doesn’t use one of those tinselled words like soulmate. People should leave each other’s souls alone. Untapped parts of a person used to be called charisma. Now they are cause for therapy. What’s inside you is a precious, essential thing that must be left inviolate otherwise you risk ruining it. The radiance at the centre of your very own life. The thing that makes it worth living. Without it, no one is truly independent.

To be understood is the worst disaster, I finally say out loud.

What?

Valéry.

Who?

I tell her that I am writing a dictionary of animal languages, of species on the brink of extinction. By listening to wildlife, we gain understanding of animal communication, and the health of wildlife populations. I am looking at the patterns that have emerged from the sounds. They allow us to see what we normally could not. There are innumerable little extinctions occurring all the time. We are living in an age of slaughter. But modern society seems to operate with no sense of the past and even less regard for the future. I have no idea why extinction isn’t more a source of horror, I say. I once ended a lecture this way, and surprisingly a student’s hand shot up. And do you know what he said? He said, Stalin said one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. I was so angered by a rhetorical question being answered with a fascist’s justification of mass murder that I was actually shaking. After I calmed down, I thought about it a lot, and realized that I had to admit he had a point.

And what brings you here, she inquires politely, at this hour?

I’ve come to speak to the person from the gallery. The one who sent the letter in my pocket, knife-sharp. I thought I was coming here to confront Valentina about the complete silence around my work. S’affronter. Already it sounds like a dustup. But it is the letter that occupies me.

Work, I finally tell her, and quickly feel ridiculous.

You know, I say, switching the subject. You will open up into motherhood, you just must remember to do it without losing yourself. Let the laundry accumulate. There is more danger in getting too good at being practical. Women who do this are never fulfilled. My tone is of a calm parent, though this is not my intention.

You must have children.

A grandchild, I say. The word hangs in the air like a bird testing its voice.

She looks at me oddly. Both of us are calculating how this is possible, or maybe only I am. She is distracted, looking at her hands.

I am trying to not think of the letter. As though it has not precipitated a new and exquisite pain. Why is there no mention of a child? What kind of terrific odds could produce such a preposterous outcome? My entire life I have been persecuted for living, in essence, like a man. And now this absurd claim like a thousand forces doing their best to pluck things from me, designating my own inadequacy, my own insignificance. Only for a moment did I let thoughts of motherhood take shape, but even then, especially then, it was set to fail. The choice was made. And once a choice is made, it cannot be unmade. I tried to not think of it. Looking too closely at things changes what you feel. And now it doesn’t matter how much or little I thought of it. Why repeat sad things?

Ask for help, I tell her. Sleep. You will find that you will get through it. The night is difficult, but the night can also bring solutions. She looks up. You need to sleep long enough to dream.

She slides over and collapses in my lap holding on to my waist, and then starts shaking with tears.

I’ve not been held like this for years. It is uncomfortable, verging on painful, but I do not move.

I wish I could help.

You already did, she says, wiping her eyes with the tips of her fingers. Though everything she says sounds open-ended.

She gets up, holding her small body with grace, and then glints white through the cool grass and across the park. A pale shape moving, through the navy blue light. I think because of my age and opinion, she mistakes me for wise and maternal. The truth is I’m neither of these things.