Between the Stillness and the Grove - Tapa blanda

Prologue

There is the sea. Dzovig is staring at it. She does this often in the early hours of the morning, makes her way to the wall at the edge of the beach, determined, like an addict seeking out her drug. And the sea is never very far in this country: Portugal, a thin strip of land stretching along the Atlantic, on the edge of the Continent. The people here also stare at the sea; they stare at it so often that reflections of light bouncing off the water pass across their eyes even after they have gone home, at night, even as they sleep. They carry the smell of the sea with them in the wool of their coats, in the breath they exhale, after bread and wine. But they don’t think of the sea, as Dzovig does. They dismiss it as husbands and wives of decades dismiss each other, or as peoples of the mountains dismiss geography, though it has shaped all that they are. But Dzovig is from another country, and therefore different. She stores up the sea like a beggar at a feast.

In her favourite painting of Pessoa, his shape is also standing at the edge of the water, a thin black line before a huge expanse of grey, in this country where the sea is rarely grey, or white.

In every painting of him that she has seen, he always wears a hat, a black fedora which sits on his head like an extension of his body. Even a picture of his room that depicts little else but squares of sunlight on the floor and half a chest of drawers contains his hat, left on a chair. She likes this about him, a carapace. She likes the hat, the round glasses, the cropped moustache and bow tie. Such a prim dresser, for a modernist. She likes the empty bronze chair that stands beside him, part of that sculpture in front of the Brasileira café, as if in wait for someone. She had gladly occupied that chair. She could think of him now as an old lover, as real as any man whose body she has ever slept beside, though she won’t. Pessoa has been dead for more than fifty years.

Best of all she likes his name: Pessoa, meaning, literally, person. Anyone, or everyone.

The sea is particularly blue today, or perhaps only seems so because of the intensity with which Dzovig is watching, wondering if she will ever come back here, to this stone wall, to this adopted country. She had thought for a time that she would never leave Portugal, like Pessoa. That any other place would be a poor substitute for the black and white mosaics of pavements, all leading to the water. But tomorrow she will cross the Atlantic in a plane full of Portuguese who, given steaming towelettes, will wipe the surface of their dinner trays rather than their own hands. She will land in Toronto, a city without sea, where, her friend tells her, there are flowers like blue planets. Where, Vecihe tells her, everything is new. Come and visit, her friend says. But Dzovig knows that there are no visits. She knows now, deep in her stomach, that each arrival is a return.

Chapter One

TOMAS

The steady grinding of wheels comes to a stop. She is still sleeping; not even the shuffle of bodies leaving the train wakes her. It is the man sitting across the aisle who pulls at her arm, saying “Menina. Lisboa.” On the platform dozens of people are walking in semi-darkness, a network of black beams high overhead, under a glass roof that has grown opaque. Daylight seeps through it as if through layers of green water.

Dzovig’s hair is cropped short and falls haphazardly into place when she shakes it out. She is wearing a shapeless sweater and a green skirt, a skirt she has held onto since Armenia. In a bag she carries the rest of her clothes, a hair comb, a few pens.

It is early morning in the streets of Lisbon. Outside the station, by the doors, two women are selling flowers, each with her own buckets of roses set out at her feet. The women are dressed in black wool. They could belong anywhere, Dzovig thinks: the widows of Europe. They throw words at each other across the passing people, oblivious, apparently, to the loss their clothes are commemorating. Maybe this is all it takes to get through it, she thinks, to dress in black wool and sell flowers.

She hasn’t eaten for hours and she is very hungry, her last meal a sandwich with the French student, Jean, who had offered to follow her across Europe, thinking, perhaps, that she was one of those students with giant backpacks that gathered outside the train stations of European cities. “Non merci,” Dzovig had said. She might have slept with him if she’d thought that he had any money, but she knew by then that only older men would pay. She had enough, in any case, to last her for a while.

She approaches one of the widows, and asks in French for a place to buy food. The woman consults her companion. She speaks only Portuguese but points with thick fingers in one direction. “A Menina quer a baixa,” she says.

“Menina, baixa?” Dzovig repeats. She doesn’t understand.

The women laugh and confer again. They point to Dzovig. “Menina,” they say. Finally they add, almost in unison, “Centre, centre.”

She walks down a long, wide avenue, past squares where the fountains are running, past a statue of a man on horseback in a sea of pigeons. She has grown accustomed to it now, the beauty of non-Soviet cities. In the beginning it had struck her with a kind of perverse pleasure, like vengeance. Look at us, Tomas used to say, packaged into neat little Soviet boxes.... He liked to say that Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, wasn’t an Armenian city at all.

Erika de Vasconcelos was born in Montreal in 1965, and knew from the age of seven that one day she would be a writer. Her mother “would have been a writer if she’d been born twenty years later.” Her grandmother and aunt were both book lovers who collected old editions of French poetry. She grew up reading in three languages: English, French and Portuguese. Today, Erika and her mother still send books to each other.

De Vasconcelos was over thirty by the time she launched her writing career, deciding it was time to start writing seriously after she attended a high school reunion and everyone asked her what she had written. She published her first novel in 1997, and its success was astounding, receiving the highest praise. Now her work is also published in Germany, Holland and Portugal. A finalist in the CBC/Saturday Night short story contest, she has also published fiction in Toronto Life and This Magazine, and teaches creative writing at Humber College. She is married to the novelist Nino Ricci, and lives in Toronto with her three children. Though she misses the bilingual culture and the beauty of Montreal, she loves the writing community in Toronto, the “literary heart of eastern Canada.”

The novel My Darling Dead Ones is a story of three generations of intelligent, strong, passionate women; it follows the connections between a European past and North American present and the emotional legacies we inherit. The women’s stories are told through Fiona, a second-generation Portuguese-Canadian in a collapsing marriage, torn between the last vestiges of affection for her husband and her desire to take a lover. Trying to assuage her own present pain through an excursion into the past, she turns to the experiences of her mother, grandmother and great-aunt for guidance, learning about them through letters and photographs – and finds she is only the latest in her family for whom marriage has not always brought happiness. The novel explores the healing powers of life and sexuality and, against a rich backdrop of Portuguese culture, the difficulties of being an immigrant.

While writing that book, de Vasconcelos made a life-changing discovery, which she decided she wanted to write about: the possibilities of a mother/daughter connection between two people not biologically related. “I was interested in this idea that, at certain times in your life... someone can mother you in a very profound way.” The theme of human warmth being the only source of comfort for the wounds of the past, begun in the first book, is more fully explored in the second; just as Dzovig appears briefly in the first book, and Fiona in the second.

Whereas My Darling Dead Ones was about embracing the past, Between the Stillness and the Grove explores how people cope with “a past that’s so devastating that you don’t want to face it at all.” De Vasconcelos does not have an Armenian background, though she had taken a course on Armenian architecture in university. She found it a challenge to write about something she knew so little about at the outset, as well as something so sad and emotionally draining. But the story allowed her to explore what moves her as a writer. “I’m really interested in those big human questions. Questions about history, about death, about silence, the price you pay for the choices you make.” She is interested in what keeps people going after tragedy, and how great human suffering is carried forward from generation to generation.

She found the best way to explore these themes with subtlety was to move through different times and places. “I don’t like the linear-type story. It all has to do with how much you want to reveal at what stage. As you read the novel you start to make more and more connections.... I’m very conscious of how much information I’m giving out and when, and how I want it to build up.” This technique lends the novel an emotional tension which, along with the vibrant language, vivid characterization and deeply affecting history, make Between the Stillness and the Grove a book that’s impossible to put down.

“A book always starts with characters.... For me, writing this novel was the process of getting to know Dzovig and Vecihe, bit by bit, solving the puzzle of who they really were. It’s a journey that took me deep into Armenian history, and finally, to Armenia itself. When I got to Armenia, I was finally able to see the churches I had studied and imagined, hear Armenian voices, feel the weight of the mountains.... One night, I sat at a table with three Armenian artists, drinking wine and eating pears.... They toasted the birth of Dzovig and Vecihe, and I felt then as if the novel had been blessed.”