Liberté

a ghost story for Christmas

1

Paris, 1947

For a love lost, she gained a novella. Typewritten, on ninety-six once-rationed pages, turned out in ten long days at her desk in the cold apartment they had so recently shared together. In the afternoons, she took coffee at the Café de Flore, whiskey if they had it, and recalled the low-lit evenings she had spent there during the occupation, when men in dirty trenchcoats had put out their hands, offering a first name only. What became of them? The ashen-faced boys, the girls with no make-up?

Now, everywhere she went: Patricia has left for Spain.

The details, gossipy as they might have been accurate, found her ears as tributaries found their rivers. Two days ago, yesterday, tomorrow. It didn’t matter. Whether she was walking on the rue de Richelieu or half at sea, for Margaux the affair was over. A ghost of a thing, cannibalised in print, a lover turned to ink.

2

Paris, 1942

Margaux straightened her legs and felt the bicycle slow naturally beneath her. The stones were cobbles, dirty grey, the window shutters scrubbed in faded paint, pink and blue. There was no concierge at Édith’s building, which made the coming and going less conspicuous than in other parts of the city.

The city.

The city.

A woman turned to stone.

In the smoky half-light of the apartment, Margaux and her friends discussed the fate of the woman, their woman, who hunched her shoulders against the scourge, desperate to survive. Many were Communists or Existentialists, others spiritual without religion, atheists or liberals.

At the end of each night, Margaux left the 5th arrondissement and cycled home to her apartment, lit a candle to the Virgin Mary and offered a quiet prayer for all her friends, who were not traitors to freedom, nor ever would be.

3

New York, 1963

She met her wife in the Village (at a place with a Small g), two Europeans cut adrift of home, in what the colonists called the New World. Margaux knew better than all that. The world, in its splendour and disgrace, was nothing if not old. Go south of the oceans, go west of the sun, what made the difference was its people.

Gisela knew her third novel best, the one she’d written for another woman. Perhaps that was why. If it had been her first, published in ’43 under the nom-de-guerre ‘Araucaria’, the girl in the white shirt, whose eyes she’d paint for fifty years to come and fail to capture, might never have conjured the zeal it took to find her at the bar, ask for a cigarette, ask her out for coffee in the morning. Still, twenty years made a difference - Margaux now forty, Gisela only twenty-three – and so if it was not destined by a stray prayer to Our Lady, then it must’ve happened quite by chance.

“I’m here to study philosophy,” the girl said, her tongue loosened by the wine. “They tell me you know Sartre.”

“Would you like to meet him?” Margaux asked, enraptured by her latent accent.

Gisela’s flat cheeks reddened, a trait she’d conquer in the coming years, when the sense of being an impostor was fully vanquished.

They talked a long time at the bar that night, the hours swimming like brushed ink until they pooled outside a yellow cab at midnight. They went home together, to Margaux’s friends’ place in the city.

The city, Margaux thought, smoking a cigarette in bed as an ancient light pushed through the dawn clouds. What a beautiful thing is a city.

4

Victoria, Vancouver Island, 2022

“By the time we met in ’63,” Gisela told the girl, over drinks in a saloon-themed bar downtown, “Margaux had all but stopped writing politically. Her last two books were historical fiction, romantic even, in their way, and she came in for a rough time with the critics.”

The girl, who tended their garden every three months, supped nervously at her beer. She reminded Margaux of her wife, as she had been that night in the Village, when a sense of awe and desire had collided so fiercely as to conjure a future from the present.

“The truth was, while she may have stopped writing politically, she had never stopped being political. She’d just switched forms.”

Margaux’s bones groaned despite the early afternoon gin, and the thought of using the walker to find a washroom repelled her. Sometimes now she felt as if she were in two or three places at once, forced only to commit corporeally when it was necessary.

“What are you telling me?” asked the girl, her shoulders broad and high.

“Not far from here--” Gisela started, resuming her rehearsed tale, “-- just across the street, is a studio. Inside, is a collection of every sketch and painting Margaux made between 1955 and 2001. Not a soul in the world has seen them, or even knows that they exist, but they’re there. A living, by-the-moment record of the twentieth century’s most profound moments, by one of its most singular female artists. And on the eve of Margaux’s 100th birthday, we’re going to destroy them.”

“Destroy them?” repeated the girl, a punchline misunderstood.

“All of them,” said Margaux, coming back to herself. “Every last one.”

5

Locarno, 1968

She’d been in Prague two months before and sensed the low, miserable doublespeak in the bars, the cafes, the bookstores. At the university, she had read poetry with Vratislav, not knowing that the ghost – whose spirit she had come to pray for – might soon be exorcised again.

In August, when the tanks rolled in, she took a blade and painted hell.

Here is a City, she named it.

And underneath: oil on canvas.

6

Paris, 1967

“We were never freer than during the German occupation,” Gisela said, accusing Sartre, who lit a cigarette with a shaky hand. “That’s what you wrote.”

“I wrote it because it’s true.”

Margaux, disguising alcohol as weariness, swayed in her seat. The room was busy and oppressive, so long and far from the barren rooms she’d known two decades previously.

“Since the Nazi venom was poisoning our very own thinking, every free thought was a victory.”

“Despite the terror? The atrocity?”

“As I said: the circumstances, often atrocious, of our fight allowed us to live openly this torn and unbearable situation one calls the Human Condition.”

Gisela paused for thought, and Margaux pined for home.

7

Manchester, 1999

Gisela had brought her there to see the desk at which Marx and Engels studied together, in the Reading Room at Chetham’s Library.

Margaux (never a Communist herself, albeit once sympathetic to their cause) sat silently in the grand old alcove, imagining the plain glass were stained, and how in the mid-19th century it might have obscured the grey Mancunian rain, which was beating presently at the window.

She felt a kinship for Manchester, for Salford and the Pennines. In another life, she might have chosen England for a home. Eight hours behind, her adoptive home on the west coast of Canada was doubtless sleeping, as if time and the city were hardly linked at all.

When they left, she took her wife’s arm in her own and listened to the raindrops on their umbrella.

Try as they might, she thought. This city is not for turning.

8

North Vancouver, 2022

“I have never been one for nostalgia,” she told the girl, on the stoop of her home in North Vancouver.

The girl - a gardener, a painter, an immigrant – had agreed to take a series of Margaux’s paintings and reimagine them for the 21st Century. Afterwards, the originals would be returned to the earth.

“No?”

“One day you will be nostalgic for now and never know how you got there,” Margaux replied. “I tend to agree with our ancestors, who treated it as a disorder.”

“Everything feels so uncertain,” said the girl. “Like it will break.”

Margaux closed her eyes and listened to the crickets. In the heady dusk, they sounded like electric lightbulbs.

“Same as it ever was,” she said.

9

Barcelona, 2023

Margaux, three months shy of a century, watched El Raval awaken from her hotel balcony. The opening, at the Picasso Museum, was set for 2pm. She could sense from the gallery director that they thought she might not make it even that long. It was a dreaded flight for a nonagenarian North American.

Despite the trip, she felt in good health. She had nurtured the jetlag with gin and reading before falling asleep to the sound of European rain.

It had been so long since she’d been here, to this city, which had once been home to Miro, Picasso, Gaudi.

All the beauty and the bloodshed.

Gisela brought coffee and pastries from a café closeby.

It was just after dawn.

10

For a life lost, she would gain a legacy.

It had been a long time since she’d cared for such a thing and yet, here it came again, like rain after snow, to remind her what she cared for most was freedom.

These last few years she’d seen it threatened, attacked, repealed.

At the opening of the exhibition, in the presence of the girl’s new paintings, she told those gathered:

“When we approached Alexa to take these works of mine and reimagine them, it was with a single caveat: that she make her art with hope. This is because so many of them had been forged in pain. It strikes me now that while there is a place for that, I am not sure I want my legacy – however small – to be so consumed by fear. True, it is fear which has driven my work most, both in literature and art. Fear of oppression, fear of tyrants. But as I draw closer to the inevitable ending every one of us will face, I feel happy – no, content – that my final act was to look forward instead of back.”

Later, at the window of her hotel room, she watched the city move below her in the rain and thought of her old friend, Éluard, whose poems she had clung to as a girl. How beautifully he had written of liberty and his commitment to it.

On absence without desire

On naked solitude

On the steps of death

I write your name

Margaux, thinking only of this, offered a silent prayer to the Madonna, turned out her light and slept.