This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poignant excerpt from the latest novel by Québécois author Maude Nepveu-Villeneuve, translated into English by Kate Lofthouse. In plangent, methodically-detailed vignettes, Nepveu-Villeneuve’s narrator describes her return to Moreau, the village of her childhood. In the wake of a recent tragedy, her perception of the world around her comes unmoored; she feels as if she has never left Moreau, as if her years away were only a nightmare, yet Moreau also seems unreal, “a figment of my imagination.” Struggling to engage with the world as a thing separate from herself, the narrator spirals into her past, moving from distant memories of childhood vacations abroad towards the cause of her present alienation.
I’ll just . . . go home to my sad life and be miserable forever.
—Maddy Thorson, Celeste
Summer is darker than winter on my parents’ street, once green leaves fill the branches of Moreau’s trees and their ancient foliage has cast its shadow over the houses. My parents escape in search of sunshine every year, to Spain, Morocco, Belize, anywhere the July heat is more oppressive than it is on their little shaded street in a small village lost up in the north, a little town I never name when people ask me where I come from, because it doesn’t mean anything to anyone, so I always go back to the closest big city saying around there, and people nod and shrug, because even that city is a minor one, insignificant, one never mentioned in weather reports and which people struggle to picture.
They took me with them when I was little. The three of us went, a close-knit and indestructible family unit with the same sturdy blonde heads and indistinguishable laughter, we fled the shade cast by the old trees over the bungalows and the lawns, and we walked along the shores of Caribbean islands or through the streets of Cairo or Terceira. I would have preferred the cool air of our little street, riding my bike around the block for hours, napping in the hammock in the backyard, drawing on the pavement with Laure, my neighbour from across the way, my best friend. But my parents had other ideas, we left at the end of the school year and came back at the beginning of August, in time to buy supplies and new clothes.
This summer, as I park my car in the driveway, they are in a jungle somewhere in the southern hemisphere. The lawn and flowerbeds look untamed as usual. The neighbours had gotten used to it and left my parents to what they call their “English garden” which is, in fact, just a tangled mess of plants growing one on top of the other, eating into the dandelion jewelled grass that rises several centimeters over the cracked sidewalk. I didn’t even own the car I was parking, it was a rental, the same as the one we hired with Simon for our trip last summer, the one that felt like it could drive all on its own. I got my license at sixteen like everyone else in Moreau, but I have never had my own car and I stopped driving when I moved to the city—except for when I visit my parents, and for that summer, when Simon and I went on a trip to the sea a long way from Moreau.
So, my parents are somewhere in the jungle when I arrive at their house, and a neighbour waves at me from her window as I walk along the weed-infested path to the front door of the little brown bungalow. I take out my key, pick up the mail, and put my suitcase in the hall before going back out to the trunk for the shopping I bought on the way, so I wouldn’t have to go back out again as soon as I arrived. I put the groceries away in the kitchen, the perishables in the refrigerator and the cans in the cupboard and, once I have unpacked the last bag, I sit on the couch in the lounge and cry.
*
My bedroom is just off the kitchen. My parents left it as it was when I went away to study at Cégep, but I made little changes every time I went home, taking down old posters of bands I didn’t listen to anymore or films I’d forgotten the ending of, and I put up fresh curtains one Christmas, bought a new duvet the summer after. I came home for the holidays for so long that I don’t know when exactly I stopped living here. Perhaps I never did. Perhaps this bedroom has been my real home all this time and it has just been waiting for me, patiently, to came back today. Perhaps the intervening years have just been a long, painful, and slightly incoherent dream and now I am finally waking up to start my life. If only it were that simple.
I packed my suitcase too quickly. I wasn’t thinking straight, I threw in anything I saw, as if a kind of mist had descended, narrowing my vision—they call it tunnel vision, don’t they?—and I stuffed everything in without rolling it up like my dad taught me years ago, before one of our summer vacations. It’s a trick you can use to get more in your suitcase: you take a sweater, and you roll it up as tight as you can until it looks like a snake so you can take more with you. It came in handy when my parents decided we wouldn’t check baggage anymore and, instead, would only take a knapsack small enough to fit into the compartments above our seats on planes, trains, buses. When I was thirteen, restricting myself to a little pack for six weeks was a total nightmare, so I learned to roll my clothes very, very tight. But when I was filling my suitcase, this suitcase, rolling my clothes was the last thing on my mind, I just wanted to leave as quickly as I could, get out, save myself and no longer see the fragments of my life which seemed to have been disintegrating pixel by pixel for years.
Opening it now, I wish I’d thought about it a bit more, been a bit more composed, or strong enough to do a better job.
I hadn’t packed any underwear.
*
I took an optional mythology class in grade 11. I think I chose it because I didn’t want to hear about real life, I wanted to lose myself in made-up stories from distant times. I studied The Iliad and The Odyssey, and I loved the story of Persephone, and of Penelope, who spent her nights undoing the tapestry she had woven throughout the day so she could delay the moment she would have to choose a new husband. We had to analyze the three different versions of Antigone and I read and re-read them a hundred times, and I learned the names of the Greek gods and goddesses by heart, as well as their Roman equivalents. My favorite was Artemis, Diana to the Romans. She was the goddess of hunting, fertility, and birth and she was free and fierce and could kill a rapist with a single arrow or turn an enemy into a deer. Artemis and her doe, Artemis the defender of young women and children. My parents decided to take us to the south of France the summer I finished high school, and I practically dragged them to the salle des Cariatides in the Louvre where, in the middle of the room, there is a 2nd century marble statue of Diana with a Doe. I’d insisted we go via Paris. There were so many things I wanted to see there, a pilgrimage to works of art and artists’ tombs and famous cafés, and we finished the trip by spending two days in the Louvre because just one day wasn’t enough.
I’ve thought about Artemis a lot over the last few years. Simon drew a picture of her, and I’d taken to putting it in my pocket and carrying it around with me like a talisman. All this talk of divinity makes me feel a bit ridiculous, but you need something to cling on to when nothing else makes sense.
Maybe it was really her who had led me here, to Moreau, to be alone in her domain of forests and mountains. She can’t do much for me anymore though, it’s too late now.
*
No one knows that I left. Except Simon, but he won’t follow me here and anyway, he can’t be sure that I am here, precisely. Maybe he suspects it, but I could just as easily have gone to a friend’s house two metro stops away, or the west coast, or the other side of the ocean, it wouldn’t make any difference to him. He won’t come looking for me.
Night fell just a few hours after I arrived. I’d hoped I would be able to sleep, but I wasn’t used to the silence. I know the sounds of the house so well that I no longer hear them, and nothing ever happens outside, not even a car parking—the slam of the doors, its occupants walking or talking or laughing—or even the squall of scrapping cats. No one has a cat in Moreau. I don’t know if their absence dates to time immemorial or if it was just decided one day in a town meeting, or in a tacit agreement between the residents. I only noticed it when I moved to the city, and as many cats as humans passed me as I walked down its allies and along its sidewalks. But it would have been odd to bring it up after all that time, to question it, so I made nothing of it like everyone else and accepted the situation for what it was: there are no cats in Moreau.
I draw the curtains, the ones I’d chosen before coming back for Christmas one year, and I look at the house across the street. Laure’s house. It was repainted a few years ago, I can’t recall when exactly. Red became blue, the cedar paneling was taken down, yellow shutters were hung, and the popup trailer was no longer parked in the driveway. Laure and I played in that trailer for years, it was left up in the entrance to her parent’s garage and it was our cabin, our little not-so-secret hiding place. Then we grew up and started hanging out on an empty lot with the other kids, and then we left to study out of town and the fabric of the pop-up trailer was folded away, until one day my mom called to tell me that Laure’s parents had sold the house. They were the third family to sell up on our street that year.
It was bought by a young single father, a guy from the nearest town who felt he didn’t live far enough from civilization and dreamed of a large plot of land and forests to get lost in. Or maybe he just didn’t have much money and hadn’t been able to find anything better. I had passed him and his daughter a few times on the street, but neither of them said much. There weren’t many children in Moreau. My mom talks about them sometimes, her neighbours from across the way, but I only ever half listen, like when she talks to me about the people living in the house behind ours, or the convenience store that is no longer selling her favorite chips, or when she tells me the lake has frozen over earlier or later than usual that year. It isn’t that I’m not interested. It’s just that Moreau doesn’t seem real when I’m not there, like the village is waiting for me to arrive before it comes back to life, or as if it were just a figment of my imagination, which made everything that my mom said about her life there seem like fairy tale. But since I arrived, the village has started to wake up: there is a light on in the house opposite and the curtain isn’t thick enough to mask the shadow moving behind it. The shape gets bigger, shrinks, moves from right to left and left to right. Someone is pacing back and forth. Like me, they cannot sleep.
*
She was the third, but she was the only one who had a face. The first two came and went like waves, we hardly had time to know they existed, to reach out a hand to touch them, before they were gone. She was different. We thought she was going to stay. We saw the way she danced, and we thought she had made a nest for herself, the way little things do, the ones who grow enough, the ones who live and learn to breathe. Perhaps it was just that the nest was badly built, the nest that hadn’t managed to carry any of them longer than a finite number of weeks. Several months at most, never enough.
She passed like the boats we saw floating in the distance at night, from the balcony of our house by the sea, close enough to think that she was moving towards us, but too far away for us to be able to make out her features before she disappeared for good. It was night all the time, after she left, and Simon couldn’t cope with the darkness anymore. He went outside looking for the brightest sunshine he could find, while I stayed indoors with my eyes screwed tight shut trying to remember her face. I was so afraid I would forget it.
That is how the gulf opened between us. We both looked for comfort in the things that soothed us and forgot to turn to each other. We had our backs to each other for too long.
*
As the sun started to set in the summer sky I eventually accepted that I’d have to eat something, despite feeling like I had a sack of coal in my stomach.
The ingredients I’d bought on the way are depressing to the extreme. I’ve never been the cook, that was Simon, and it’s true that without him I don’t know how to make anything anymore, I can barely cook an egg or spaghetti, and even then the sauce would be bland or ready-made. But it doesn’t really matter anyway because everything tastes like dirt, travelling down my oesophagus like a stone.
I eat at the end of the table, on the seat facing into the kitchen. That’s always been my seat, with my mom at the other end, her back to the kitchen, and my dad sits where I’ve put my laptop, facing the window looking out onto Laure’s house, with me to his left, opposite my mom. My dad always said that he sat between his women. We didn’t even change seats when we had guests, we sat people around our foundation, and I can’t imagine eating anywhere else even with my parents away.
The shop bought bolognaise is disappointing, and I hadn’t even thought of buying parmesan. I slide my fork around my plate, cutting through my food like I’m checking boxes in a to-do list, and I drink a mouthful of the red wine I’d brought with me—I should have added some to the sauce—when I feel like I hear a noise down by my feet, like a kind of scratching, or scraping. I look at the floor, but nothing’s moving. It scrapes again, sccrrr, sccrrr, crrrrsh, crrrrsh, I can’t tell where the sound’s coming from, maybe it’s in the walls, or under the island, or even behind the still closed basement door. It’s probably a rodent, we get them a lot in Moreau, a lost vole or squirrel, or a mouse that’s decided to build a cozy little nest between the walls. I wasn’t used to sharing my home with clawed houseguests anymore, and I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of hunting down the intruder.
The scraping starts up again, a little louder this time and, I’m almost certain of it, it’s coming from behind the basement door. I freeze.
Whatever it is, I’m not opening the door to check. There are too many things down there that I don’t want to, that I cannot, see—the ballet bar where I practiced my whole life up until my accident, but more than that, all her things, the things we’d bought for the life she would never have, that my parents had brought here while we decided what to do with them.
In case, perhaps, we tried to have another child.
*
I tossed and turned in bed trying to ignore the scratching coming from the basement, until I finally fell asleep without realizing it. Three hours have passed when I open my eyes again and I am drenched in sweat and tangled up in the duvet, just like every time I dream of the moment I woke in my blood.
It was three years ago, the first time I was pregnant. The sheets between my legs were hot and at first I thought I had wet the bed, but I had such terrible stomach pains, like I was being scalded, that I shook Simon awake and shouted for him to get the light. When I lifted the blankets, it was like I was in a horror movie. I thought for a second I was dreaming, because this could not be real, we had reached the magic number of weeks, got out the other side. Or so we thought.
We got to the hospital at two in the morning, it was my first visit to the emergency room since my accident and I was sure I was bleeding out, I was shivering and Simon kept repeating again and again that everything was going to be ok, but I swore through my tears that “It isn’t going to be ok, Simon! I’m losing our baby and all my blood”. It seemed to take an eternity for me to be seen, an eternity equivalent to three sanitary towels and the same number of trips to the washroom through a packed waiting area. I was crying, my jeans were red with blood and people were looking at me as if, after hours spent staring into the distance, the entertainment they had been longing for had finally arrived. I felt another piece of myself crumble away every time I had to meet their eyes.
When they finally called me to the desk, I naïvely thought that the nightmare would be over: they would give me some medicine, it would calm the pain in my stomach that was bringing me to my knees at more and more frequent intervals, and they would find me a bed where I could lie down while I waited for a doctor to come and make sure I wasn’t going to die of blood loss, and who would, maybe, tell me that this was nothing but a false alarm and they could save my baby. But no; the nurse handed me a few sanitary towels, then she saw my jeans. “Go back to the waiting area and sit on this,” she said. She was holding out a bed pad.
I was so stunned that I went and sat back down again without questioning it. Two hours later, two hours of cramps so strong that I could hardly sit up, that I forgot the watchful eyes of the crowded waiting area, I felt it. Getting up to go to the washroom for the thousandth time, I felt my baby leave my body in a crashing wave of fluids. I was standing, frozen, in the middle of the crowded emergency room, while a tsunami of blood flowed out of me and onto the floor. Simon jumped out of his little blue plastic chair and dragged me into one of the washrooms and, when I took down my jeans, there he was, tiny, with his arms and his legs and his extraterrestrial head. Our little chick, hatching too early. Our first child. I picked him up, I stroked him with the tip of one finger while Simon pulled the emergency cord, once, twice, three times. The nurse from the desk arrived and Simon looked at her, pleading with her to do something. She told us not to move and we waited, suspended in the moment, until she came back with a bowl and forceps. She used the tips of the forceps to pick up our child, she put him in the bowl, and then she left. I collapsed onto the toilet seat and Simon stared wide-eyed at the blood on the floor. I thought he was going to throw up.
The rest of the night is a blur. Pain has a way of stretching and squeezing time to the point that you can no longer remember how events fit together. I know that Simon left the washroom and came back with a nurse who led me to a gurney and left me lying there for hours with a little white bath towel wrapped around my waist, and another rolled up between my legs. I know that the next morning, someone pushed me into a corridor near the ultrasound rooms, five meters away from couples who looked like us, except the women were absentmindedly stroking their round stomachs under their hospital gowns. I know I wanted to scratch their eyes out.
I also know that I eventually found myself in a room, on a table, with cold gel on my skin, and a machine was sending images of my empty stomach to a screen, and the obstetrician was telling me that he couldn’t see anything there. I replied through the mist gathering in my brain, I told him the one thing I could be sure of, the one thing that was absolutely imperative I tell him so he could correct the terrible mistake that had occurred.
“The nurse took my baby.”
The doctor looked confused, his eyebrows narrowed, and Simon tried to explain, the cramps, the blood, the forceps, the bowl. The doctor put his hand on my arm.
“I’m sorry, madam. You’re going to have to go home now.”
I don’t know the precise moment my anger was conceived that night. Maybe when the nurse took my child away in a bowl, maybe when I looked into the eyes of the pregnant women in the waiting area. But at that moment, when the obstetrician sent me home with my empty stomach and my stiff, bloodied jeans, I knew the rage would live.
Simon played hockey two days later. I went to the match, even though that meant I had to make my face presentable enough for the bleachers of Montreal Arena. Anyway, I couldn’t imagine staying home alone for a whole evening, better to be surrounded by people, or at least that’s what I’d thought.
The keeper came to speak to me after the game.
“Congratulations!” “For…?”
“Well, for the baby!”
“Oh, that! Thank you, but I lost it the day before yesterday.”
His face. A mixture of shock, embarrassment, and the remains of a smile that he didn’t know
what to do with. “Oh. Uh . . . Sorry?”
I laughed.
“It’s no big deal, it happens to one in five pregnancies.”
My laugh was like a death knell.
Translated from the French by Kate Lofthouse
Maude Nepveu-Villeneuve is an author and editor at the Quebecois publishing house Les Editions de Ta Mère and a professor of literature in Montreal. She has published three novels, a novella, several short stories, and one work of children’s fiction, Simone sous les ronces, which won the Prix des libraires du Québec in 2020. After Celeste is her third novel and was shortlisted for the Prix libraires du Québec in 2022.
Kate Lofthouse is a literary and creative translator working from French to English. She has attended the Bristol Translates Summer School, where she was mentored by Daniel Hahn, and is about to complete a Masters in Translation at Bristol University. She translates fiction, creative non-fiction, and wine writing.