Violette du Silence

  There is a prism corner bound, the glint of something diamond inside her head. There is no idea of retention.  Just a loud, brave laugh as the immense confinement of her head comes upon her.  The vague brown room exists somewhere outside, and she slowly breaks up the things in it until they settle back into the same colour as her.  And so her evening begins.  She will stab into it, V-shaped, and make of it her very own kaleidoscope.  But for now she is there in the corner, laughing at the size and shape of her head.

  She didn’t quite know where to put this traverse across town.  She had been there a moment ago.   And now, here.   For remedy – the reason.  And the remedy, because she is human.  And so the walk across town for the remedy.  The knock.  The painful initiation.  The drag (of other people) and then the relief.  Violette is soothed. 

 Of course, before she had gone out, she had felt into the gaps in her room.  She had had the familiar feeling that she would find something lovely between the other useless things, but came up only with the recompense of a gentle persuasion that it was all within the reach of the day. 

*

   “What are you drinking?”

   She looks first at her glass, to remember.  And then up to where the voice came from.  She hadn’t seen him before, not even tonight, at the bar.  She realises she must have been staring intently at the table for a long time, or the lines of her knuckles, her eyes only going as far as that.  But she does look up at him because she remembers how to be polite.  Oh, and because her small leather pouch – so light, unburdened – is flopped over the edge of the peeling veneer table, like a dead bird... She knew it! He is beautiful.  Volcanic eyes giving away his age along with the grey hair that hangs like an adolescent’s about his face.  It is like this, ever since she started coming to the bars in this fashion. Without pre-thought.  With only the desire for a drink.  She wears a dress, one of the bunch she buys for a pound or two, scouring second-hand rails.  She loves her body, its essentiality - there is nothing left over now that she fuels herself on drink and little presents, alone - and does not hide it in folds or frills.    It is thirsty, she lets it drink.  She walks into bars and knows it was always going to be like this.  She was always going to be like this.

  She waits for a voice.  It is her own.

  “I’m perfectly alright on my own.”

  Trying.

  He smiles, “I know.  I can see.” There is a pause. “A drink?”

 “Guinness.”

  She looks at the froth at the bottom of the glass, slipped down the sides, the trail of a drink had.  It is in her belly now, causing this pleasure. She is a part of the world.  There is blood in her.  Blood in the guts of every person in this bar.  The braise of his eye have disappeared. 

 The last drip of froth.  A smile, a scrape.

Out on the streets, she is her father’s daughter.  Under the moon, refracting colours.  Her mother had met him at various twilight gatherings, like that.  But her family had made sure to chase this foreign creature back to his original habitat, and even though they had made of Violette the memory of a colour, a scent, she couldn’t help being what she was.  The name he had given her (so it goes) after a passage in a book he loved.   He had taken to the road years before his daughter was born so she couldn’t really set about finding him.  But she knew his family had a business that stayed put somewhere in a city hidden in the Massif Central.  A shop, a city, and tilting rope ladder streets.  A city of cobbles afloat on the sea of surrounding mountains.  That is how she imagines it.  And the business: a Quincaillerie.  She had thrilled at the name.  The word.     Quincaillerie, the word had jingled and the hardware shop came crisply to her, like the bell ringing on an opening door.  She often went adventuring along the corridors, into the adjacent rooms, tip-toeing under the stock.  So highly, tightly packed; correct and attainable with the aid of lovely old wooden ladders.  She became familiar with the Quincaillerie and at a certain age took to wearing bolts threaded onto utility string about her neck, rubber tap washers circling her fingers.  She became her own jingle jangle Quincaillerie at the sweet age of sixteen, seventeen; so that people may come to her, open the door, and be glad to find what they needed right there before them.  She would be of service to mundane wishes.

  “Fancy a drink?”

  He is young this time, unkempt, wonderfully not at ease.

  She is herself perfectly and they know what that is.  At least, they are learning.

  “Red wine, please.”  (Secretly, inside: shimmering, red.)

 Time to move on, to redden the lips.  She is without cash.  There is blood in her guts.  She must quicken the tempo if she is to reach her haven tonight.

   He gathers their drinks from the bar, and they sit and talk.  Especially alone.   She loves to give this pleasure; a saintly mirage for the thirsty and crumpled…this time he is armed with a larger glass than the previous...handing out soul saving tools…

  She wonders what he would look like back in her room.  Here, rather pink.  But there, in her dwelling place, beige.  She had nothing in her cupboard, in the shared kitchen. He would go hungry in the morning and she would have to make excuses, her belly rumbling like his after a night of antics.  But she doesn`t, and never has, made love to beige.  She doesn`t take men to her room, however sweet, however pliant they make her.  She thanks them for the wine and cigarettes.  And then goes home to make love to her own wine stung lips.  How they gloat in the mirror!  What jewels in the dark frame of the room. 

 She is glad that no-one is there to see the next game of the night (or by now it is early morning) when she slides into gaps, finds things, when her fingers alight it is a little celebration.  Presents to herself.  And where she gets them from, the day could tell you.  But Violette, she forgets, and fumbles for them at night and is always delighted to find and unwrap.  And now she can finish the night, leave behind all the faces that helped her along its way, and place herself in the corner, the victim of her odd-shaped head and her need for this moment of utter delineation.  The white lines deviate into colour and, in this moment, she does not ask where from or where to.

*

  Violette never went to the mountains.  Her mother turned her English.  Turned her father into a farce.  Had she slid her hands against him and with her steel eyes stay any thought of his entering?  Did he, then, a full grown man, disappear into the grey, foreign city, without hope or friends?  What did they do to him that he never came back to look for me?   Violette remembers the muffles downstairs, the tap on the door, and then again, low voices, the door.  Unlike her other memories this one did not become honed.  Rather more vivid than all the rest, she let it lead its own life, and the healing was natural.  But it left a scar.  She became quite accustomed to its size and shape (ever so slightly changing as Violette grew and the years laid shadow and light over it).  She never had the notion to step onto a train bound for a country that could have been her home if it weren’t for a man disappearing into the fog, unaccustomed to pulling his collar up around him (the cold, or the memory of lovely fingers that had lost all their love?).  Perhaps on peeling back the landscape, the blood would seep out of her like a full grown woman, and she would have to take count at long last of her wounds.  She chose instead to stay and live with herself, an English Violet, and with a little scar. 

 

  She is waking up in the corner of the brown room at the top of the stairs. It is still half-light, half-dark dream station outside.  She knows she will probably fall back to sleep.  And the house will be emitting sounds of roused bodies below her when she opens her eyes for the second time.

  In this half-light she lies crooked, and cold.  The skylight is open.  A tiny bird alone in an unkempt nest.  A perfect picture of abandonment.  She should be a lot larger by now, but her rib bones press at her skin and her sweet call for mercy (at least some relief) borders on silent and goes unnoticed.

  She manages to stay awake through the half-light.  She doesn`t usually feel like smoking so early but the first thing she does once on her feet is to head to the right-hand drawer of the chest and fumble for an old packet.   She remembers being given ready rolled ones the whole night through, and after she had left the bar with the pink boy in it, she had bumped into Larry.  He had seen her alright, invited her for a smoke.  She had declined but she is already planning that maybe today she will search him out.

  She finds what she was scrabbling for.  Unsealed, it is old and dry.  Pushing her hand farther back she hopes to come across something more savoury.  What her fingers alight on is a surprise.    She pulls it out of the drawer and barely recognises it.   It had suited her well, she remembers.  Now it is a sorry sight next to how she remembers it crested on her grandfather’s perfectly groomed head.  She had taken it from the house at which she arrived too late.  Everybody else – the cousins, the uncle and his wife, and the rest of the strangers in her mother`s family – had put their colour coded spots on things earlier the same day.  She arrived just as the last quibbling over things marked with two different coloured spots was dying down.  Stained, as Violette as she ever could be.  The stain she carried from being Violette but not being allowed even that.  She wore all this magnificently as she spilt into the terse house, a dye seeping, mocking the boundaries that form give lie to, she had them pressing up against furniture, doorframes to avoid being tainted.  She performed a rapid flight about the contours, and then embarked with the hat.  Unspotted, she would have liked to think.

  She walks on with the hat tucked neatly in the grip between her torso and her upper arm.  She likes it being there, trapped.  And her, free.  She is going home with the hat he wore, the gentleman whose etiquette demeaned those around him.  Simmering beneath the smiles and the strong handshake, the generous eyes, was something that had nothing to do with gentillesse.  She knows that his booming voice gave credence to her average-sized mother’s hands as they slid from the clench of their own fists against the body of someone who was once dear and put a stop to things in Violette’s life.

II                

The hat leaves a little tumble of things behind it as it comes out of the drawer into the room.  Violette is beneath the skylight with the hat in her hands.  By the light she sees clearly the water marks on it, handles its sagging deformity with care.  A while back she had left it in a friend’s car, had left the window open, had let the rain in.  It could no longer retain its original shape. But it is beautiful as it is, as she had made it, soft and ever so slightly stained.  She tucks her fingers in at the curve and pulls down the edges to see if it still remembers.  Do you remember what you used to be?  No, I remember the night of the rain, when it poured down and I sat defenceless and the water came in.  It’s true, the shape does not come easily, and it has no intention of staying.  Breathing in the early morning, small city air moistens the taste of the night before in her mouth … And she hasn’t a penny! And tonight, the same – the fatigue of starting anew when she had reached pretty much where she wanted to be the night before. And every night the descent.  The climb down to the floor, as it were.  Or else it comes up to meet her.  The drink encourages her to bump into things, make sore her existence, and confirm it. And then her little presents rescue her from the soiling, and take her up and away and the hurting ceases to hurt, the present takes charge and casts its glorious spell and she is free.  Free as a bird, flying away. A bird, staining the sky in its wake.

 

  She is going to go and see Larry, see what`s about, on this habitual day-after. She has dressed carefully, and has the hat in her hand.  She had touched each and every hanger that held her clothes.  Fondly, slowly, knowing all the stories. She chooses the dress that she bought for one pound from a jumble sale down south with Gwen, where the women of the village all had their stall on the green.  Gwen did the rounds and had two plastic bags full of ill-fitting (it turned out) jumpers, and one battered pair of espadrilles.  Violette had stalked more randomly, following the flutter of some colour she liked, or the emptiness of the stall.  And then she had noticed a pair of steel grey eyes.  A lady with a stall that looked as though it had arrived late, awkwardly perched amongst the others.  She reminded her of someone.  And then her eyes recoiled and soothed themselves on the soft clothes, the old style, that this woman wore.  The lady had started to talk to her, trying to empty her stall.  Shy and bent now over the clothes, Violette punishes herself with a few more minutes contact with this woman who she will never know, who she longs for, whose eyes told the truth without any intention of doing so.

  She picks a bundle of a dress from the table and hands it to the lady.  It is colourful, old-fashioned but feminine.  The exchange takes place, and Violette departs high.

  Every hanger has hanging from it such stories.  Her collection of clothes is not vast, but selected.  And when she tires of a story she gives the thing away. 

    The dress is folding about her.  Too light really for the still day outside but she hopes for a spot of sun to warm her. 

*

  It’s not the first time she’s tried it, but she was always sick before.    All the day long she had felt herself wilting.  It had turned out lovely.  The sun showing off, the city imitating it below - the sunglasses, the windows rolled down, the jaunt and benevolence of warm bodies and Violette’s mind encircling an idea with the stuttering black lines of a pattern.

  And after this, after this little present, her plan will seem even more worthy and this time she isn’t sick.  Larry watches her as her wings begin to lift, and the choice is evident:  far behind now the nest and the decision to fly away.

  Okay, okay.  She hears someone breathe.  And for this, this freedom – she is willing to pay.  But I’ve got nothing on me and I’m damned if I’m going to put on shoes and go out as if I was normal, and not stained.  Not Violette.  Not bruised.

  And after this, she is bruised – a small mark on her arm, a memory of stinging. And, after it all, she is stained.  It had happened naturally.  He had smiled and helped her out of the one-pound dress.  Had grabbed at her shoeless soles as she lay beneath him and moaned with relief.  And it was tempting for him, her noise, this effort.  He was willing to do this again.  And it was she who smiled, then.  Recuperated the bundle of her frock from the floor, and with it the memory of steel, grey eyes, and left.   Still stinging, still soothed.

And she walks home through the centre where things have begun to close, and night owls are preparing for the feast ahead of them.  Past that and down the hill to where the buzz of the city peters out and the possibilities blanket down. Violette climbs up the stairs to the landing, closes the door steadfastly behind her and then climbs the staircase into her room.  Twelve steps, narrow and steep, leading up to her own mind meanders.   Violette has a penchant for this, for creating and adorning and making shapes to end up with nothing at all.  The corner is calling for her,   Viens là.  Here.  Là, and the stuttering lines began to take form in Violette’s thoughts.  She will put to use her inheritance of the lost quincaillerie - her ancestors beaming at her from behind the counter, and the legacy of the other unremitting family – an unbending steel that she will wield with care.  And she will become Violette.  Quite silent.  A present all wrapped up.

. 

III

Il ouvrit la fenêtre, se pencha au-dessus du vide et respire l’odeur du violette du silence…

  Thursday.  In the city centre, albeit one of the quieter streets, people pass by, sporadically.  This is what the girl loves; she can’t put her finger on it.  Can’t name it, only make shapes from it, and it pleases her, pleases her.  There is a girl, on the curb of a shop that sells nothing now.  She had tried putting shoes on but they just kept having her walk out on job after job.  It was a show of unfaithfulness and the world had let her go.  Some of them pause for thought, but mainly they steer clear of the curb.  Cross-legged, she arranges her things.  Her bag, a book in it.  (She always has it on her, sometimes pretending it really was a present from him).  Right there in plain view.  Nuts and bolts. And her latest find, shapeless from its night with the storm, is pliant in her fingers.  A fold in the curve, the edges lap over.  A hat.  Mainly, an offering.  But an acceptance, too. She sits, her neck bending.  She will more than likely ache at the end of it.  Just like at the end of all the other things she could do.  This is her choice.  And the hat, beside her, is lovely, sagging.  It will perform as best it can, as prettily as it can, just to be full.  To fill up with the only thing now the world can give her.

  She is part of the scene, and can’t quite believe it when the first tinkle of coins dropping stabilise her hat, lighten her heart.  She is in heaven, for her courage.  Her hair unkempt, her skin uncared for.  A cheap dress.  Nothing to prove, they offer themselves freely, Violette and her grandfather’s once-trim hat.

 Somewhere above the street, in a different town, a different country, a window opens and a man leans out.  Perfectly.  For the story that he loves he makes a story of himself.  A perfect moment after the awkwardness of his rising, so still he had been.  He breathes in the cold silence.  So thick it is, it is as heavy as purple.

 There is no girl present in the street below him.  Very few people passing beneath.  He lives in the centre of the town but on one of the quieter streets.  The first moment when he leans out, when he wishes to remember what is outside his rooms, is always cold for him.  Because there is a space in him that no warmth enters into.  Because his annals are devoid of a girl and her growth.  Because his life lacks a daughter he steeled himself against a long, long time ago. Surrendering his right to give to her, he had kept everything for himself.   Roughly stitched up at the beginning but at least not gaping, and now just the stain of a scar where she had been removed.

 La Fin

(Written after a passage from 'La mort dans l'ame', Jean-Paul Sartre [Gallimard, 1949], p.177)