Fences in Breathing Read Free Page B

into town to see the mother of all complication watches, the Calibre 89, which, in addition to showing mean sidereal time and incorporating the Gregorian calendar, is adorned with a celestial chart representing the Milky Way and making it possible to distinguish 2,800 northern-hemisphere stars. And further complications still, about which she cannot stop dreaming.
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    The workshop is cluttered, dark like a sentence between two wounds. Here and there, tools, hammers, pliers, nails and picks, all the colour of rust or the grey of time passing by. Dust of dust and dust of scrap metal, sawdust, blond and brown wood chips that stick to your soles when you enter. Charles is sitting on his cracked leather sofa the colour of an old asphalt road. The tobacco smell of three generations of great drinkers and talkers has permeated the sofa. Charles has known them all, because the writers who once regularly visited the château liked him. Some bought his wood carvings, light enough to be carried all around the world; to others he gave those little boxes that look like drawers that he has never stopped reproducing, hoping someday, in a ritual gesture, to sow them at the bottom of the lake. With the men, he drank and talked about what made blood rush to his head. Few women visited him, but those who did enjoyed sitting on the sofa, smoking. When they asked too many questions about his work, Charles got a worried look on his face. When the woman did not grasp quickly enough that he was in pain, his eyes darkened. He enjoyed that moment when he could sense himself being misunderstood and rejected. He would then get up, find his sketchbook, doodle a few lines, pretending to draw the woman, then go back to his room to fetch a list of writers with whom he dreamed of working, he said. He made sure to add the name of the visiting woman writerto the list. Knowing they were on ‘a list’ scared the women. So each one declined his offer. In time, fewer and fewer writers visited the château. Charles continued to produce sketches while thinking about his sister and about June. Today his page is blank. Charles’s hand trembles or does not. That’s how it is.
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    In the garden, Laure rediscovers a kind of peacefulness. People in the area say roses grow so well here that everyone knows a poem in their honour. In the old days, her mother used to grow them with love, like in the best English films, where the rose has forever been noble. The gardener has mowed the lawn. The smell of fresh grass lodges itself in memory, in that place where the pleasure of living cancels out the throbbing of anguish. The gardener claims he can make grass as silky as a young girl’s skin, but he also knows how to multiply the thorns on rosebushes so they can remain forever graceful and entrancing. Behind the cedar hedge, a car is parked: inside, a man waits. He stares at who knows what, but makes note of any gaps in language, any suspension of common sense. Tomorrow a nurse will come to care for her mother for a few days. Laure has spent several nights analyzing the Patriot Act. No verbal sleight has escaped her. She understands the dangerthis document represents. She hesitates to start writing her report, unsure what tone it should have. The garden is a kingdom. On bright days, one can see clearly the little boats on the lake that, to the villagers, plays the part of a real-life character. Most of the time it is said to be comforting, but on days when nothing is moving, when heat draws the contours of the mountains like in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, movement comes from inside it. Whoever looks at the lake on those days feels threatened to the core.
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    Kim is spending more and more time in front of her computer. One click and Svalbard appears, its amoeba-shaped archipelago; another click and the city of Longyearbyen comes up with its two rows of brightly coloured houses wedged between mountains that are sometimes white, sometimes a soul-wrenching