Breakneck Read online

  BREAKNECK

  OTHER BOOKS BY NELLY ARCAN

  Whore (novel)

  Exit (novel)

  Hysteric (novel)

  Burqa of Skin (belles lettres)

  BREAKNECK

  a novel

  by

  Nelly Arcan

  TRANSLATED by Jacob Homel

  ANVIL PRESS / CANADA

  Copyright © 2007 by Nelly Arcan

  Translation Copyright © 2015 by Jacob Homel

  Originally published in French under the title À ciel ouvert (Seuil, 2007)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages in reviews. Any request for photocopying or other reprographic copying of any part of this book must be directed in writing to access: The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, One Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.

  Anvil Press Publishers Inc.

  P.O. Box 3008, Main Post Office

  Vancouver, B.C. V6B 3X5 CANADA

  www.anvilpress.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Arcan, Nelly, 1973–2009

  [À ciel ouvert. English]

  Breakneck / Nelly Arcan ; translated by Jacob Homel.

  Translation of: À ciel ouvert.

  ISBN 978-1-77214-055-2 (mobi)

  I. Homel, Jacob, 1987–, translator II. Title. III. Title: À ciel ouvert. English.

  PS8551.R298A6213 2015 C843’.6 C2015-901432-8

  Cover design by Rayola Graphic Design

  Interior by HeimatHouse

  Represented in Canada by the Publishers Group Canada

  Distributed by Raincoast Books

  The author would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for its support in the writing of this novel.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing for our translation activities.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canada Book Fund, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  * * *

  Rose Dubois and Julie O’Brien find themselves on the roof of a Montreal apartment building on a scorching summer’s day, and from that moment on their fates are intertwined. Worldwide climate change and dramatic shifts in weather patterns foreshadow their predestined suffering.

  As is soon revealed, the two women share a submissive love for the same man, Charles. Their mutual desire creates an arms race of artificial beauty and debasement; they have a common obsession for plastic surgery and strive to be avatars of the perfect female.

  As they compete for the love and attention of Charles, both women come to realize that to accept being nothing more than an object, to kneel and grovel before your persecutor, you ultimately become his executioner. In the end, Charles’ own obsessions and desires—which he loathes—are ultimately his undoing and downfall.

  Their hands touched like twins, two delicate hands,

  of the same kiln . . .

  I

  * * *

  THE SKY AT HIGH TIDE

  THIS STORY BEGAN under a summer sun, a year ago, on the roof of Julie O’Brien’s building, where she was lying like an abrasion, a term she used to describe her relation to her skin, russet and fair, that came from Ireland if you followed it down from the third generation on her father’s side, and that wasn’t equipped, she told herself that day, to fight the burning sun that poured down and stung the nations of this world with its rays.

  The roof of the building where she lived brought her closer to the sun and its needles. She imagined that day that this closeness was a match made to fail, that russet and blonde were lethal genes that couldn’t survive the growing desertification of the world. She had another thought as well: that this world was a house and you had to be free to leave it if you wanted to stay.

  The eight-storey building was full of people who didn’t want anything to do with any of this, not because they lacked the heart, but because of what she’d thought about on the roof. The world was an oven opening onto hell, it was the assembly of billions of lives one on top of the other like a planetary neighbourhood, a harassment of opinions and demands, differences and denunciations, with its news reports and accounting of the dead, its pressure you had to avoid and its bedlam you had to flee, its incessant manifestations you had to repel if you wanted to live.

  Julie had turned thirty-three that year, Christ’s age as she liked to say, but that age was the only thing she’d shared with Christ. She had few friends who were growing ever more distant. There was that couple who just had a child, a little girl whose name she could never remember, a couple who used to be so hip and deliberately left downtown to build a life in the suburbs, choosing to send another soul to the stake, cast onto the global pyre. Her friend Josée left to live in New York for the opportunities it provided her career as an unemployed fashion model, and there she joined her New Yorker, a real Yankee who would give her American citizenship when they married—Josée whom she hadn’t seen in years and certainly couldn’t imagine having a child in New York, a roiling city of greenhouse gases, a city threatened by terrorism.

  Julie was at the age when life pushed friends in different directions and children separated those who tried to stay close. This wasn’t a problem for her, it wasn’t even a shame, it was just the way things were and nothing more, she thought without irony when she thought about it at all.

  It was noon and Julie had been tanning for an hour, burying herself deeper in her thoughts to endure the burn that, she hoped, would make her beautiful. In these days when success is the be-all and end-all, she told herself, slathering on a second helping of cream on her already burning skin, in these days when success shouts from every rooftop and age indicates the proper amount of success at every level, it’s important to get your age out there. She never missed a chance to share her age: I’m thirty-two going on thirty-three, the age of Christ, I’m thirty-three going on thirty-four, she admitted with some chagrin, not wanting to let go of Christ. Julie gave out her age the way some people hand out their business card, it was the best way to solicit pity or stir envy, in her world where age was everything and nothing, a blessing or a death sentence, it was the most important thing of all.

  She was of the age, she thought, when lacerations left by love had to be left in the past and when you had to think about children, to determine once and for all whether, yes or no, you could be a mother, and if, yes or no, the child would have a father. No, Julie wasn’t a mother, and if by some misfortune—she told herself to instill both fear and reassurance—if one day she were to have a child, if one day her uterus found a way not to have its due ripped away in an abortion clinic, there would have to be a father to take care of it.

  Thirty-three years old and she’d already written a number of documentaries, a few of which had been produced, and one of which had known a measure of success due in part to the title she’d given it: Children for Adults Only. The script featured the common yet undetected pedophilia of ordinary parents who can’t let go of their children, who inspect them like a possession that can be turned inside out like a glove, children like handbags, with parents who make them live in a bell jar away from the world, to stave off bacteria and vexation, all for their own good, unable to leave them even for a moment. Julie trained the camera on parents who had become perverse through fear and precaution. They accused doctors, teachers, even the surveillance conducted by their cherished technologies of negligence, abuse, and violation of their children’s right to remain intact through the vagarie
s of life. The documentary had a measure of success but didn’t change social realities. Despite the convergence of the media when the movie was released, the documentary hadn’t calmed the paranoia of pedophile parents and Julie didn’t want a child just to put her principles into practice. When she considered that around the unstable nucleus of the world was an indefectible, unmovable aura, when she thought that beyond human mutation there was the homogeneity of cosmic law, inalienable, she was reassured, and she slept in peace. The world was hard-headed despite its upheavals; it never completely split apart, even if it went in every direction at once.

  In any case, changing the world was not a concern of hers anymore at that point in her life, it hadn’t interested her for some time, ever since she had lost her heart, or her soul if you prefer. She cared even less for the fate of her world that was bursting into flames all across the planet ever since she had killed the man who had wanted to give her a second chance and whom she believed she loved. That was Charles whom she would steal from Rose as a game at first, out of a desire to amuse herself, Charles whom she pushed into madness without much intention, Charles whom she killed without any motive—or hardly at all—almost an accident, through a plan unexpectedly fulfilled, and Julie almost guilty, with Rose as accessory.

  This is what Julie retained from the event once it was over, since interpretations would differ. The rooftop was a starting point but there were others: for Rose Dubois, the starting point was found well before, and as for Charles Nadeau, he would never have the chance to tell the story of his own death. There are as many starting points in a story as characters in it, but the plurality of beginnings means nothing when the end result is the same. What counts, in truth, is the foundering, the location of its defeat, the moment when chance can no longer play a role, so strong are the movements that gave the story meaning that they hold it in thrall, pushing it toward its predestined end.

  This beginning coincides with Rose entering Julie’s life, or better still, her desire, she being the great helmsman of their fates, whom everyone had underestimated. Rose with her big ideas, who’d never been comfortable speaking, intelligence without language, without the means for language, beautiful beyond compare but never in her own eyes. Rose the fashion stylist who dressed her models with her own hands and needles in her mouth, who sometimes called the models bitches behind their backs on her off days because she could not actually slap them.

  NEVER HAD THE sun seemed so close to the earth as on that day. The sun was frightening to behold, it looked as if it were kneeling and prostrating itself before Montreal’s corpse like a moronic giant who doesn’t know his own strength.

  For the past few years, Julie had been tormented by the climate and temperatures that were no longer just conversation, but daily experience, worrisome over the long term because behind them hid a surge and a charge toward destruction.

  One day she’d write a screenplay about what people had to say when nature stopped following the horizontal, solidly anchored mechanics of its slow evolution, when going against its own history, it unhooked itself from its heights and moved downward, broke away from its lofty distance and—you could never tell—one day it might dominate the lives of men and become the centre of all their concerns, like clemency or shipwreck, taking back the divine character it once knew and that men had stolen from it. It was important to say it out loud, Julie believed. Sitting among men and crushing them, nature would become God once again. Men would be forced to admit that their heavenly Father was not a father but an all-powerful child whose bawling blotted out the music of the world, keeping men from whiling away their lives in the idle comfort of their homes.

  Her fair and russet skin, discreetly dappled, should be able to tan just like darker skin. But for that to work, she would have to accept that tanning wasn’t an opportunity to bask in summer’s touch, but a struggle, a duel between her and the world, a moment during which she had to concentrate and make freshness appear through her imagination, a number of minutes she’d have to suffer through, a time slot to let the burning spread without too much damage. The programmed desecration of russet skin, committed through strength of spirit, a fakir consumed by nails. In the heat of the day she had a thought for her microwave, then for her last lover Steve Grondin, the greatest pain of her life, the fatal one.

  The smallest detail of that day, however insignificant, took on the proportions of a momentous event in her heart. Julie was on the roof, struggling to tan, when a song rose up around her, encircling the building with its incantations. It was a prayer of men calling upon Allah, Allah, Allah, a discordant word in her universe that knew only how to cultivate the body. These believers in Allah had in their voice their god whom they marched into the street, in a procession that threw them into a trance, and the song did not just go on its way, it didn’t finish, it dragged on, as close as the sun. It was a beautiful song but that morning beauty exhausted Julie since it could not be present without the heat that coated everything, making it a burden. Today, at this very moment, she said to herself in burning revelation, beauty is a miscalculation.

  From the roof Julie couldn’t see the singing men because she insisted on searching for them among her neighbours, in the streets next to hers, neighbours whom she couldn’t see either. To not identify the singers added another burden to her day, to the hobnailed sun that lowered upon her and began to correspond to God himself, nowhere, injurious, an ambush set at the edge of every horizon. None of her neighbours were visible, not even at the windows that, for the most part, showed only drawn curtains. The chanting continued to circulate without her or anyone else being involved, music with no other contribution than the voices themselves that at that moment seemed to be trying to be heard over eternity, an eternal sentence created by the obstinate belief of men in God, even in the Western world, where it existed the least, where we pretended to believe in nothing, only ourselves and the close reflection projected by the mirror of the present.

  Just as Julie was about to give up and return to her place on the third floor of the building, she finally identified the place from which the chanting was coming, and who the men behind the song were. It was coming from the west, from Saint Lawrence Boulevard where she often walked, and it wasn’t a Muslim chant at all, but the disciples of Krishna. From her roof she could see the boulevard as well as all the other Montreal landmarks: the Mountain bearing its cross, the Olympic Stadium, the Jacques Cartier and Champlain bridges, the major skyscrapers, not to mention the endless sea of roofs that constituted the real Montreal since they hid the daily life of its people, and its hidden heart ready to go out and beat in the streets, and make noise.

  That the procession of singers were followers of Krishna and not Muslims reassured her, she didn’t want the images of war seen on TV to take root in her indolent reality. The ridiculous nature of the Hare Krishnas made them innocent, their masquerade reduced their strength as a cult, they weren’t about fervour but facetiae, not gravitas but indulgence. Hare Krishnas didn’t march to carry on outstretched arms the coffins of their children who had been blown to pieces, but out of respect for the insects that might, who knows, be transporting the soul of their ancestors or be the future vehicle of themselves. People might gaze upon the Hare Krishnas but they didn’t have to issue an opinion or make a judgement, they could laugh using the wide spectrum of laughter, from thigh-slapping guffaws to laughter that offended and destroyed.

  JULIE WAS WATCHING the procession when Rose arrived. Like Julie she was wearing a bikini and carrying a pair of high-heeled shoes in one hand. Instead of lying down on a recliner, she came up to Julie, her free hand extended.

  “My name is Rose. I moved into the building last week. Right across from your place.”

  Rose’s story had begun months ago, unbeknownst to Julie. Rose had noticed Julie as her neighbour, Julie was someone for Rose, a threat, a blond-haired, light-skinned danger by her front door. The hand she offered Julie was slender, manicured, adorned with a ring, and the colou
r of her nail polish matched her bikini. Julie looked at Rose carefully because she was impressive. The woman was a true beauty, but in a commercial, industrial way, she noted that without judgment since she herself was part of that group of images and advertisements. Though she was only a few years past thirty, Rose, like Julie, had had plastic surgery a number of times, and she recognized the signs, even the smallest ones, that indicated that something had disappeared, the impurities of old age had been erased from the surface of her body: an unmoving forehead, the flat contours of her eyes, without a single line even under the pressure of sunlight, the bridge of the nose bearing the nearly imperceptible mark of having been broken and remade straight and sharp, her lips swollen, rounded, half-open, like fruit on display. Her breasts were far more noticeable since they were a part of Rose that hadn’t been erased, but filled instead, not oversized but with a firm roundness, implanted high on her body, giving the impression that they were an erect cock.

  Seeing Rose was like pressing a finger against something inside her, the scar of her missing heart. Physically they looked like each other, but the likeness revealed another hidden woman, the way their lives were devoted to giving themselves what nature had refused. Rose and Julie were beautiful with a beauty that comes from privation, they assumed the right through contortions, their bodies sculpted by the gym, the sauna, the violence of surgery, an often irreversible roll of the dice, their nature torn asunder by medical technique and its ability to recast. They possessed the beauty that comes from the savage desire for the constructed self.

  Then, Rose finally said, “I live with Charles Nadeau. I think you know him.”