Archive 501
Vivian Galván García
Alive and Undecided
By Lillian DaviesApril 2024
When the night nurse pulls the cardiogram stickers from Joan’s chest, changes the sack of fluid on the hanging trolley, and injects a dose of antibiotic in the catheter stuck in the back of her hand, Joan’s lids close to the blink of the blood pressure meter, and her vision falls into a velvet oblivion. Charged with violet, a sort of striated glow erupts from her left, where the newborn lies. He is wrapped tight in a pale yellow hospital-issued sheet, he lies inside a clear plexiglass crib rolled up close to the metal bars that surround Joan’s narrow cot.
“Repose-toi,” the nurse whispers as she lowers the metal blinds, switches off the lights. “Il va dormir.”
Joan hears a door click shut, feels the weight of the city’s exceptional silence outside her window. The week before, the night had screamed with sirens, and her contractions became more frequent. Only at dawn had she switched on the radio and heard news of the attacks.
Like plush curtains, lowering in an empty theatre, a thick darkness surrounds her, pressing through her eyelids and onto the stage of her dreams. As if her mind had been swept clean. A scene closed, the next, as yet, unimagined. The baby sleeps.
In that rich obscurity, a near silence is sliced with footsteps and the sharp scent of disinfectant. Like the shadow of someone she knows, inside her dream, a blue hand parts the textured depth, and enters her pitch black room through the bathroom door. Much larger than her own, as if a fragment of Aztec sculpture, Mictlantecuhtl, goddess of death, the hand continues along the short hallway, growing in size as it turns to approach her bed.
Detached from any arm or body or face, the hand floats silently. It does not bleed, as Joan had, just hours before, though cleanly severed. Deep indigo veins bulge through its turquoise skin. As if shaped in unctuous strokes of oil paint, the hand glistens in a midnight palette.
In a single, terrifyingly gentle move, the hand takes Joan’s and lifts it from the pressed cotton sheets, tugging it towards the sleeping baby. His head still smells like the inside of Joan’s body.
The day nurse is holding the remote for the electric blinds in her right hand, manipulating the buttons with her left, when Joan opens her eyes. It is the sound of this mechanical opening and the sharp rays of sunlight cutting across her body, nearly naked, that awaken her in cold fear.
“Regarde Madame! Il dort encore!”
———-
The week between the attacks at the Bataclan and the birth of her son had felt like a sort of limbo. Monday morning, after Pierre left for work, Joan switched off the kitchen radio. The search for the remaining shooters was still ongoing in the suburbs of Paris, Brussels. Heavily pregnant and scared, she hadn’t left the apartment all weekend. The US Embassy had sent an email advising citizens to “shelter in place.” But she needed the fresh air. She needed to move. She picked up the keys to her studio and went out.
Heeding her doctor’s advice, she left her bicycle locked up in the building’s cave. The baby needed to make it to term. As it had been when she was a child, her bike was her dream machine, wings she could spread towards freedom. On good days in the studio, her canvases could expand like that too.
On foot, Joan stayed in the sunshine as long as she could, crossing the street to stay under its warm rays and away from the municipal workers already at work bagging dried leaves from the plain trees that lined Boulevard Raspail. Electric blowers at full blast swept heaps of them, mixed with trash, in noisy gusts.
Joan’s studio is on the top floor of a modest building on rue Saint Placide. There is a cobblestoned courtyard at its heart, with an iron tap and mossy terracotta pots of succulents, hydrangeas, ferns. It’s a space hugged tight through the winter by thick stone walls.
The building’s guardian, her hours neatly posted on a lace curtain lined window, cares for the urban garden. At work distributing the mail or mopping the ceramic tiles of the entry hall, she smiles at Joan when she arrives in the mornings. Joan felt, when she first visited that building, following a lead from Yoshiko, that the place was cared for, that it was a place where she could care for her work.
As she progressed in her pregnancy, the climb up the worn wooden stairwell to the 6th floor was harder, but opening the door to her chambre de bonne, its burnt orange tommette floor, and the single window facing North still brought her joy. Light. A space all her own. On the wall, she’d posted a copy of Sister Corita’s rules for the Art Department at Immaculate Heart: “Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.”
She’d also washi-taped a print of Jordan Casteels’s Mom Hand and a worn postcard from the last Frida Kahlo exhibition she saw: Souvenir, Le Coeur, 1937.
On a wide wooden table she’d asked Pierre to help her drag up from the sidewalk (the treasures Parisians leave out on the street as garbage!), Joan had started working on her matchboxes, carefully painting the small objects, then gathering her poems, her drawings, a collage of collected material, to fold and place inside. These sculpture paintings she stuffed (like the mind) with memories and dreams, to bursting, nearly like her own stretching womb, with stories, with life. Each painted container of drawings and poems told a story or pieces of it. Like an archive. Her Lygia Clark box was the first. It was the Brazilian artist who’d arrived at the object in the 1960s, painting those tiny matchboxes in brilliant washes of red, blue and gold. Playing with the way the form could reveal, and then hide, an interior space.
Joan had studied painting with the best of them at Yale, but she’d rebelled against the large scale canvases her male professors had supported at the time. Preferring to make work you could hold in your hand. The bigger canvases return though after her son is born. It is he she can hold in her hands, to her breast, and it is space she craves, her own, and so she buys the widest swathes of linen she can find, savoring its robust texture and flinging her arms wide in her address with paint, oil—always oil—alive and undecided.
That week after the attacks, and before Joseph arrived, Joan kept her radio off. Instead of France Culture, it was Emahoy’s Lonely Wanderer she played on loop. The sound of her hands on the piano like magic, like stars reflected on water.