Fences in Breathing Read Free Page A

himself, overwhelmed by an invisible burden. The woman seemed rather joyful and, as I watched her talking with the man, I thought for a moment that she could not see him. That he was a shadow, a tautological presence. My eyes met the woman’s. The wind was blowing hard. My eyes watered like in winter.
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    Images come up, one after another, like slides in a carousel or like in a graphic novel without the words. Just faces looming up from urban landscapes or science-fiction. June sees them coming, spreads them out, reorganizes them in an endless flow of profiles and close-ups that act as sites of memory and of future. Since her childhood, everything in her has played out like in the movies. Her family is a film crew, the house a film set with moments of sober silence, or of eating and drinking and laughter, notebooks scattered all over the table. June owns the Videoreal shop. For the last three years, she has been renting out old movies and some recent releases. She refuses to stock soft or hard porn. What this costs her in terms of business she makes up for with the younger clientele who love to engage in discussion and leave the store with
Citizen Kane
,
The Deer Hunter
,
Death in Venice
,
Matrix
or
Star Trek
. An entire generation thus navigates between past and future without sidestepping the all-powerful present. June is a fanatic for the present, which, in her view, tempers the pain of living, protects from ghosts and counters mirages. To her, everything is a pretext for the pleasure of now: lighting a cigarette, watching a movie, stretching out in the sun, reading or not really reading, kissing on the lips. June claims to be happy because she does not hesitate to transform her pain into a character capable of playing many roles. ‘Pain, come over here. Pain, go over there,’ she tells herself, whenevershe feels the urge to stage what she refers to as the most exhilarating moments of her existence.
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    Half past midnight, the house is silent. On the kitchen table, Laure Ravin has spread magazines, newspapers, two photo albums, all dated September 2001. She slowly turns the pages, hypnotized by everything she sees and does not really see. Here, an enormous fireball in a blue sky gorged with immensity. Here again, debris like so many tiny white paper airplanes floating in the foreground of a tall tower. Already ruins, already autumn and steel, shredded. Everywhere, a fire gnaws at the building and devours the things of life: photographs of children, coffee cup, pen, an Anatolian carpet, a pleasing painting. Everywhere, books, operating manuals, bills, contracts, printers, cellphones and BlackBerrys, ID cards, twenty-dollar bills, painkillers, all of this suddenly becomes nothing. Some say this is hell, some say this is war. Human forms halfway between bodies and chimeras gesticulating in front of windows. Torso, shoulder, white shirt, here a man, arms glued to his side, one leg bent at a 45-degree angle, freefalls headfirst to his death. The sun has disappeared. A woman wearing a pearl necklace is covered in ashes from head to toe. Everywhere, ghosts in business suits walk through the darkness of the great fog of civilization.
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    Sometimes I catch Tatiana looking at her collection of watches. A hundred or so timepieces, antique and modern, with their white gold, their bright silver, assembled over the years since the purchase of the château: bassine-cased watches with astronomical indicators or enamelled covers, watches with tactile hour indicators, pendant watches, hunting-cased watches, dress watches, aviators’ wristwatches, ladies’ bracelet watches, gentlemen’s watches. She touches them, rewinds the ones whose mechanisms she is familiar with, marvels, tries to imagine the why of so much research, of such refinement and beauty. All these wheels, all these bridges, these screws, these pins, these hands, these springs, assembled to tempt us into a fascination with time. Once a year, Tatiana goes