The Certainties Read online

  ALSO BY AISLINN HUNTER

  Fiction

  The World Before Us

  Stay

  What’s Left Us, and Other Stories

  Poetry

  Linger, Still

  The Possible Past

  Into the Early Hours

  Essays

  A Peepshow with Views of the Interior

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2020 Aislinn Hunter

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2020 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Title: The certainties / Aislinn Hunter.

  Names: Hunter, Aislinn, 1969- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190152737 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190152745 | ISBN 9780735276871 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735276888 (HTML)

  Classification: LCC PS8565.U5766 C47 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Text design: Kelly Hill

  Cover design: Kelly Hill

  Image credits: (waves) © CPD-Lab / iStock / Getty Images; (fox) © smartboy10 / DigitalVision Vectors / Getty Images; (binoculars) © Kreatiw / iStock / Getty Images; (glasses) © stdemi / DigitalVision Vectors / Getty Images

  a_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  for Glenn, always

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Aislinn Hunter

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Narcissus.

  My sorrow.

  And the likeness of my sorrow.

  —FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA

  Go now.

  Beside the uncertainties

  in black veils

  stand the certainties.

  —DERMOT HEALY

  stand on my hotel balcony and look to the sea and to the sky’s unbridled light. On the beach below, the gulls thrash and squawk; a vagrant scrounges for cigarette stubs. As I watch him, the same thought circles: when we are dead we will not know our nations.

  The vagrant crouches in his baggy trousers, sweeps the pebbles with the side of his hand and pockets what he finds there. His hair is thin and patchy and he scratches at it frequently. For an hour I’ve watched him tread, barefoot, back and forth across the short stretch of beach. His feet have given me ample pause, as I’ve been up since dawn trying to decide if I’d prefer to die with my shoes on or off.

  Sometime around seven the hotelkeeper dropped a breakfast tray outside my door. I can imagine the ants I saw on the ground floor of the hotel tipping their antennae toward the heel of bread and drizzle of oil. The old woman is long past apologizing for the weak tea or the size of the rations. Her sort is one we keep encountering: weary of us, of what trouble we might bring, even as she stuffs the crumpled pesetas we give her into a tin.

  The breeze coming in off the sea is warm and fresh. Already, in the morning light, a man and a woman with skin still sun-kissed from summer wade out into the bay. She’s wearing a bright yellow swimming costume, her dark hair tied in a plait. Beyond them a sailboat lolls gently in the harbour as if the world were not in tatters, as if this were simply another September day. Further out again, past the twin points of the headland, a merchant ship steams south, heading toward Barcelona, or perhaps as far as Tangiers. My death in front of me as I stand here: as palpable as that boat cutting through the water.

  * * *

  YESTERDAY AFTERNOON, before my companions and I were placed under detention, I walked along the Passeig de la Sardana to a restaurant called Paradou. There’s a wine I’m fond of, a hearty red by a Bordeaux vintner, and I was, if I’m being truthful, looking for something close enough to transport me back to better days in Paris. This wine was one I would drink with my friends from the philosophy department when we met at the café in Saint-Germain—the five of us under the café’s striped awning arguing causality or perception as if we were closing in on problems that could be solved.

  It was a quarter to one when I set out from the hotel, turning right onto the passeig. The street and the beach were quiet. A man in a clerk’s uniform passed me without meeting my eye, and then a couple overtook me heading toward the pier. The old men occupying the shaded benches that faced the sea kept their eyes on the boats that had been pulled up above the tide line and did not turn to watch me. The buildings I passed under were weatherworn and pitted by bullets or gouged by bombs; there was a hole in the street which a woman casually walked around. Coming off the mountain the previous evening we’d passed by worse damage near the train station: the face of a church reduced to rubble; the remains of a house slumped between crumbling apartments.

  Compared to the three Spanish restaurants I passed on my way to the Paradou—places with washed canopies and clean tablecloths, a few customers on their terraces—the Paradou was desolate. At La Dorada the tables lined up under the platane trees each had a vase of bright red peonies in their centre. How absurd, I thought: that people were still growing flowers; that flowers still willed themselves to bloom. Unlike La Dorada, the Paradou’s courtyard was gloomy and sour smelling. There were rivulets of water running down the cobblestones as if someone had sloshed a bucket at the source of the stench and then given up. There was no one outside, so I had my choice of the ten tables enclosed within its thin railing and chose the one closest to the beach so that the mineral lilt of the sea was before me.

  While I waited for the server I watched a terrier pacing along the water. He was the kind of dog my sister had come to favour in her married life, and which, for no reason I could identify, I despised. Ritter was Meira’s last dog, a chaser, bred for ratting, made into a pet, and killed in an accident beneath the wheel of a butcher’s cart. I have always believed that if one wants to engage with an animal one must do so on the animal’s terms, not demean him through an excess of coddling. Meira was the opposite, even had a special cushion for the dog, which she placed under the pearwood table in the drawing room. How her guests laughed at that the summer I stayed with Meira in Durbach.

  Those dogs who seem closest to wolves are the ones who interest me the most. What breed was Salomé’s pet? A wolfhound? Always slinking around the studio, and once baring her teeth at André when he blustered in drunkenly. I had been sitting on the chaise by the window and remember thinking, a bit too admiringly, that she’d tear André’s throat right out of his neck if he weren’t careful.

  The table I chose had croissant flakes on it and a spot of jam. When the waiter did not arrive with a cloth I wiped the crumbs away with my hand and turned the table slightly to move the daub of jam to the side. It was nearing one o’clock and more people were moving along the passeig: a grape picker in his wide-brimmed hat, two men I took to be civil servants, a man in a railway worker’s uniform who was likely heading home for his midday meal. None of them glanced at me though I sensed they were
all well aware of my presence.

  After a lull, a smartly dressed man in a black suit and homburg came along. Another marvel: that the market economy still flowed, that the man’s suit showed little sign of wear even though production of goods was faltering and decent clothing had ceased to be affordable. This man gazed over at me—he had thick brows, a prominent nose and a soft chin that made him appear sympathetic. He nodded the slightest bit as he passed my table, and then proceeded up a stony pathway toward the hem of the mountain where three houses stood along a terraced ridge. The house closest to the passeig, the one the man entered, was yellow, and though it was dilapidated like so many of the other houses in the village, it had a kind of regal façade and what I imagined would be a magnificent view of the sea from its upper windows. To the side of the house, behind a low wall, a woman was pegging clothes onto a laundry line. In an attempt to quell my impatience over the absent waiter, I studied her efficiency and the graceful reach of her arms. As I watched her, the row of men’s shirts and women’s blouses grew.

  Just when I was thinking I should get up and leave, a trio of hens appeared a little ways up the mount, clucking and squawking loudly and darting around a gate. These three hens were soon joined by two more who seemed to have escaped along a similar route. A flustered woman in a plain black dress followed soon after, reaching down to grab first one hen, then the other, with no success. She kept at them, though—rushing here and there trying to pluck them up or bustle them back into the yard. Such clucking frustration on the hens’ part! Just when they’d discovered the larger world of Portbou.

  One notices the strangest things in these years. How the woman chasing her hens—a middle-aged woman with a blue scarf tied around her neck—would, once, have been laughing. Laughter that would draw someone else, perhaps a neighbour or the absent waiter I was trying not to be preoccupied with, to help: I imagined the waiter swishing his apron to move the hens along. The woman and the waiter would know each other, at any rate; there would likely be a measure of trust between them. But now, the woman looked frightened. Seeing her worried expression I entertained the idea of getting up to help her myself—but that would’ve been a joke. I’m fifty years old and my left leg is so stiff in the morning I have to set my jaw to the task of moving with any haste. This is not, as my travelling companions believe, the result of the strain of the journey—it’s a simple hobbling: age and exhaustion, a weak heart. My infirmity was the inspiration behind the insult delivered by my sister six months ago in my apartment in Paris when, frustrated by the futility of her attempt to coax me into going into exile, she’d shouted, ‘You’ve already used up ninety percent of the energy normally afforded a life!’ Meira had then stormed out of the room to keep me from seeing her tears.

  At last, one by one, the hens submitted to the woman and cooperated; they were ushered, clucking, back into her courtyard, the curtain of her skirt pulled out behind them. In the midst of this quaint spectacle, the waiter, in the form of a shadow cast over the cobblestones, finally appeared. I shifted in my seat to better see him—his moustache thick and untrimmed; his eyes ringed black as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. He asked in French what I might like. No menu—as if I came here daily.

  ‘Un verre de vin rouge, Bordeaux de préférence s’il vous plait.’

  He nodded. A fly landed on his arm and he ignored it but I shifted my attention there, thinking of how flies are drawn to corpses, thinking that this man might already be, like me, so hollowed out by war as to seem dead to any living thing around him. ‘Rien d’autre?’ he asked, brushing the fly away and tugging at the cuffs of his shirt—a shirt, like mine, that had not been washed in days.

  ‘Avez-vous de la salade niçoise au menu?’

  The waiter bowed slightly and took a step back before turning toward the restaurant door. I smoothed my own moustache with a nonchalance I knew wasn’t convincing. Even then, in those hours before Suzanne, Bernard and I presented ourselves at the station, I felt as if I were taking part in a play. The waiter and I were two grown men engaging in transactions as if nothing were happening: as if I were not a stateless man about to submit myself to the authorities, as if he didn’t hold my well-being, my safety in his hands even then, capable of sending the dish boy to the policía if he were so inclined, to convey news of a foreigner.

  Two days before we crossed the Pyrenees, we were told by Suzanne’s contact on the French side that the Spanish authorities were allowing refugees to transit across the country. We were also told that the Abwehr, or some version of German intelligence, would be here in Portbou as well, both in uniform and out of it: at the train station and the port, and working with local informers to find refugees on German extradition lists. Suzanne’s contact—a minor official in the mayor’s office—had a copy of an extradition list from late August and our names weren’t on it, but he cautioned us that émigrés were sometimes questioned and papers inspected closely enough that outdated documents or suspected forgeries were flagged. For these reasons it was best to appear to have arrived on a French train, which would mean that our papers would have been inspected in France. Our meeting with this man, in the back of a tabac near the station in Banyuls, lasted no more than ten minutes: he gave us the name of a local official and a hotel that he believed would be safe to stay in. He’d sourced three hats like those worn by the local grape pickers and said we should wear them coming down off the mountain and walk into town at dusk among the workers. ‘No bags,’ he’d said, eyeing my briefcase. No one was at the back of the shop with us save for an employee who looked like the contact’s brother, yet the contact still nudged the sack of hats under the table toward Suzanne’s feet instead of handing it to her directly. And so, as instructed, after our long climb over the col we waited at the upper ridge above one of the vineyards until the grape pickers started down into the village at dusk, and Suzanne, Bernard and I walked in behind them, exhausted beyond belief; my briefcase heavy under the wing of my coat.

  * * *

  —

  Going to the Paradou yesterday afternoon was a risk. If Suzanne had known I’d left the hotel she would have been furious. But I was tired of constraints and wanted to believe that now that we were in Spain travel would be a question of formalities—of doing as Suzanne’s contact had suggested and presenting ourselves at the station with the other refugees coming in on the four o’clock train from Perpignan. We’d queue, get a stamp, and then take a later train south. I told myself that if the waiter alerted someone to my presence—the police or the civil guard—I would still appear to have the right papers. But no one exited the restaurant or came down the passeig for me—only the waiter returned with the wine in a cloudy glass, nodding as he set it down, full, almost to the top. By the way his tired eyes met mine I understood that this excess was a gift from him to me and I nodded up at him in thanks.

  As I brought the glass of wine to my mouth my hand shook, but then, when I had my first sip the visible world slipped away. First, there was simply the taste: of earth and sun and ripe fruit and easier, more carefree days…and then I remembered Hélène, my favourite waitress at the café in Saint-Germain, how she had the affectation of touching her earlobe when she spoke to us; the gap between her front teeth slight and charming even though it made her self-conscious. I felt as if I could remember everything about that life, that no detail had escaped me: the pigeons pacing the cobblestones with their cooing noises, pecking at the crumbs the breeze sifted from our tables, André cleaning his spectacles and frowning at Maurice’s grand philosophies, Salomé’s bell of a laugh, a paper napkin lifting up and then catching in a shrub across the street, Gaston stubbing out his cigarette and walking over to retrieve it and then waving that small white flag over his head as he came back to us.

  It was only wine, merely wine as André would say, but in that glass I remembered that I had once felt full of the world, that my hunger was satiated by it daily.

  After I finished my meal, the w
oman who had been pegging laundry on the house on the hill appeared again, opening her gate and coming down the path to the passeig. She was wearing a pleated dress that fell just below her knees and a straw hat over her boyish hair. Holding on to her gloved hand was a little girl in a mauve dress with a band of lace along the hem, and shiny black shoes bowed with ribbons. She looked to be about four or five years old. Like her mother, her dark hair was short. Neither of them shared the features of the locals, but in every other way—clothing and disposition—they seemed to belong.

  Distracted by the absence of some item in her purse, the mother stopped just before the Paradou to rummage through her bag. The girl, loosened from her mother’s grip, turned and walked toward me. It was maybe twenty paces to the Paradou’s tables, not more, and then she was in front of me, her huge brown eyes staring inquisitively at what I cannot say—the empty plate and wineglass in front of me, or my face: my hair wilder than usual, my moustache in need of trimming, the skin below my eyes puffy and marked the slightest bit by the purple dye from my spectacles which became wet during the climb.

  It occurred to me to say hello, to entertain her in some way, but that would have diminished what was passing between us in that moment: her world opening up, up, up and unfolding, and her taking me into that opening even as my own world was closing. A child saying, with the slightest lift of a smile, that it is all right, that the world will go on with purpose, that it may diminish but it will not end.

  ‘Lo siento,’ the mother said—and I blinked up at her fine, open face; noted her nervous smile. She had a small change purse in her hand now, presumably the lost object. I nodded as if to say that her daughter was not bothering me, and the woman, switching to English, said, ‘She’s a very busy child.’