Silence In October , livre ebook

Canongate Books - Christian Grondahl Jens

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135 pages

English

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Description

After 18 years of marriage Astrid, the wife of the novel's narrator, has left home. Her departure leaves her art-historian husband feeling loss and loneliness that force him to reassess his life: not only his relationship with Astrid, but with their children, friends, his previous lovers, his work and perhaps most significantly himself. Moment by moment, in the silence of their Copenhagen apartment, the puzzle of his life takes shape. Gr,ndahl explores with great subtlety the secret, unpredictable connections between men and women.

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Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	19 mars 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781847677471
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0520€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Contents
Title Page Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine About the Author Praise Copyright
1
A strid stands at the rail with her back to the town. The breeze lifts her hair in a chestnut-brown, ragged flag. She’s wearing sunglasses, she’s smiling. There is perfect harmony between her white teeth and the white city. The photo is seven years old, I took it in late afternoon on one of the small ferries that cross the Tagus to Cacilhas. Only from a distance do you understand why Lisbon is called ‘the white city’, when the colours lose their lustre and the glazed tiles of the façades melt together in the sun’s afterglow. The low light falls horizontally on the distant houses rising behind each other over the Praça do Comércio up to the ridges of Bairro Alto and Alfama on the other side of the river. It is a month since she left. I haven’t heard from her. The only trace of her is the bank statement showing the activity of our joint account. She hired a car in Paris and used her Mastercard on the route via Bordeaux, San Sebastian, Santiago de Compostela, Porto and Coimbra to Lisbon. The same route we took that autumn. She cashed a large sum in Lisbon on the 17th October. She has not used the card since then. I don’t know where she is. I cannot know. I am forty-four and I know less than ever. The older I get the less I know. When I was younger I thought my knowledge would increase with the years, that it was steadily enlarging like the universe. A constantly widening area of certainty that correspondingly displaced and diminished the extent of uncertainty. I was really very optimistic. With the passage of time I must admit that I know roughly the same amount, perhaps even slightly less, and not at all with the same certainty as then. My so-called experiences are not at all the same as knowledge. It is more like, what shall I call it, a kind of echo chamber in which the little I know resounds hollow and inadequate. A growing void around my scant knowledge that rattles foolishly like the dried-up kernel in a walnut. My experiences are experiences of ignorance, its boundlessness, and I will never discover how much I still do not know, and how much is just something I believed in.
One morning at the beginning of October Astrid said she wanted to go away. She was standing in the bathroom at the basin with her face leaning towards her reflection, painting her lips. Already dressed, she was elegant as ever, in dark blue as usual. There is something reticent, discreet in her elegance, dark blue, black and white are her preferred colours, and she never wears high heels. That is not necessary. When she had said it she met my eyes in the mirror as if to see what would happen. She is still beautiful, and she is most beautiful when I realise yet again that I am unable to guess her thoughts. I have always been fascinated by the symmetry in her face. Symmetry in a face is not something one can take for granted. Most faces are slightly irregular, either the nose is, or there is a birthmark, a scar or the divergent curve of a line which makes one side different from the other. In Astrid’s face the sides reflect each other alongside her straight nose, which in profile forms a faint, perfectly rounded bow. There is something luxurious, arrogant about her nose. Her eyes are green and narrow, and there is more space between them than in most people. She has broad cheekbones and her jaw is angular and slightly prominent. Her lips are full and almost the same colour as her skin, and when she smiles they curl a bit in a subtle, conspiratorial way, and the incipient wrinkles gather in small fan-shaped rays around the corners of her mouth and eyes. She smiles a lot, even when there is apparently nothing to smile at. When Astrid smiles it is impossible to distinguish between her intelligence and the spontaneity whereby she registers the environment on her skin, the temperature of the air, the warmth of light and coolness of shadows, as if she has never wanted to be anywhere else than precisely where she is. The years have discreetly begun to mark her body, but she is still slim and erect even though it is eighteen years since she had her second child, and she still moves with the same effortless, lithe ease as when we met each other.
I would have put out a search for her long ago if I had not had the statement listing her banking activities, but she didn’t want to be found, I understood that much. I am not to look for her. I asked her where she was planning to go. She didn’t know yet. She stayed there in front of the mirror for a while, as if waiting for a reaction. When I said nothing, she went. I could hear her voice in the living room as she was phoning, but couldn’t hear what she said. There is something lazy, laid-back, about her voice, and now and then it cracks, as if she is always slightly hoarse. Shortly afterwards I heard the door slam. While I was taking my shower I saw a plane catch the early sun in a shining sign, passing overhead between the opposite wall and the roof of the back premises. I had to keep wiping the mirror each time it misted up so as not to disappear in the steam as I covered my face with shaving foam. It is always the same distrustful gaze that meets me in the mirror, as if he wants to tell me he is not the one I think he is, the man in there with white foam all over his face. He looked like a melancholy, weary Santa Claus, framed by the Portuguese tiles that made a frieze of glazed blue plant stems around the mirror. She found them in a foggy village near Sintra, we had driven through the mountain roads’ winding tunnels of green, I swore because I got mud on my shoes, while fastidiously and capriciously she inspected the ornamentation on the blue tiles as if they differed radically, and the corners of my mouth trembled when I had a drink of the rough wine that a peasant with his jacket full of straw offered me from a barrel on the back of a donkey cart. At night we made love in a blue hotel, and the shining blue petals and sailing ships and birds on the walls gave her restrained moans an enigmatic tone which made her remote and close at the same time. When I went out of the bathroom she had gone. It was quiet in the flat. Rosa had more or less moved in with her new sweetheart, and Simon was riding around on his motorbike somewhere in Sardinia. It wouldn’t be long before we were really on our own, Astrid and I. We hadn’t talked so much about it, maybe because neither of us could quite imagine what it would be like. It was a new silence and we moved about in it with a new carefulness. Earlier we had enjoyed the freedom when for some reason the children were not at home. Now the rooms opened out like a distance we either put behind or allowed to grow between us.
A whole world of sounds fell silent. The sounds that the others produced and those I contributed myself and which had surrounded me for years with their continuous themes, subsidiary themes and variations of footsteps and voices, laughter, weeping and shouting. A kind of unending music, that was never wholly unvaried and yet remained the same through the years because it was the music I heard and remembered, not the instruments, the sound of our life together and not the individual words and movements of which it consisted. Our life, which repeated itself, day after day, while it changed, year by year. A life of broken nights and noisome nappies, tricycles, bedtime stories and visits to Casualty, children’s birthdays and charter trips, Christmas trees and wet swimsuits, love letters, football matches, rejoicing and boredom, squabbles and reconciliation. During the early years it had gone on growing, this busy, chaotic and polyphonic world, until it filled everything. It spread out among us with all its arrangements and all its planning and all its routines. We stood each on our own side of our new world, and for long periods we could only wave and make signs to each other through the noise and the bustle. In the evening, when all the duties were fulfilled, we sank down together shattered in front of the television news and guessing games and old films, and although neither of us ever dared say it aloud, I was sure that she too sometimes asked herself whether all the details and precautions, all the wearying commonplace everyday business, had not cast a shadow over what was supposed to be the meaning of it all. Only long afterwards did it cross my mind that the meaning was perhaps not to be found in the selected moments I had photographed and pasted into the fat family history book; the meaning of it all was rather linked to the sum of repeated trivialities, the repetition itself, the patterns of repetition. While it was all going on I had only noticed it, the meaning, as a sudden and passing ease that could spread within me when, stumbling with exhaustion, I stopped midway between the kitchen table and the dishwasher with yet another dirty plate in my hand, hearing the children’s laughter somewhere in the flat. Chance and isolated seconds, when it crossed my mind that precisely there, in transit through the repeated words and movements of the days and the evenings, did I find myself in the midst of what had become my life, and that I should never get any closer to this centre.
It was in the silence that I realised it, in the void in which Simon and Rosa were by degrees to leave us. The sounds in the flat were no longer a music whose instruments flowed together in a shifting resonance. They made their appearances alone at the edge of the silence like hesitant signals; when I was in the bathroom with the hot water gurgling down the drain, while I shaved and heard her answer me from the kitchen with the barking of the juicer, the whistle of the kettle or the long sighs of the coffee machine. Now that we could at last make ourselves heard,