The Four Seasons by Mavis Gallant
“Her real life was beginning now, and she never doubted its meaning. Among the powerful and strange she would be mute and watchful. She would swim like a little fish, and learn to breathe underwater”
“Carmela had never been anywhere except her own village and this house, but Mrs. Unwin had no way of knowing that. She pressed a cracked black change purse in Carmela’s hand and sent her down the hill to the local market to fetch carrots and not over a pound of the cheapest stewing beef. Carmela saw walled villas, and a clinic with a windbreak of cypress trees and ocher walls and black licorice balconies. Near the short, work had stopped on some new houses. One could look through them, where windows were still holes in the walls, and catch a glimpse of the sea. She heard someone comment in an Italian more precious than her own, “Hideous. I hope they fall down on top of the builder. Unwin put money in it, too, but he’s bankrupt.” The woman who made these remarks was sitting under the pale blue awning of a café so splendid that Carmela felt bound to look the other way. She caught, like her flash of the sea, small round tables and colored ices in silver dishes. All at once she recognized a chauffeur in uniform leaning with his back to a speckless motorcar. He was from Castel Vittorio. He gave no sign that he knew Carmela. Her real life was beginning now, and she never doubted its meaning. Among the powerful and strange she would be mute and watchful. She would swim like a little fish, and learn to breathe underwater.”
—from “The Four Seasons” by Mavis Gallant in The Collected Stories.
Pair with this audio documentary with Mavis Gallant from CBC. A true delight. Like colored ices, that do indeed come back around.
Three Stories
“Another admirer. How their ranks swelled. They could erect a monument to her in the town square. An extremely fucking likeable woman — that’s what the plaque could say.”
Madame Bovary, 2012 by Peter Wüthrich
“I’ve told them the stories of their births many times, but at some point something shifted; they began to insist on making me the hero of these tales, rather than them. Now what they want to hear is how hard I needed to work to push them out, how I refused any pain medication because I wanted to be able to stand and walk and writhe however necessary to help them through the birth passage. They want to hear, again, how great the pain was that I had prevailed over—can I describe it? To what can it be compared? What they like, it seems to me, is to hear what an act of terrible strength it took to push them into the world, and that I, their mother, was capable of it. Or maybe what they want is to celebrate, again, the old and fading order of things, where they are not called on to protect, but are themselves watched over and protected.”
—Nicole Krauss, “To Be a Man” in The Atlantic
“Another admirer. How their ranks swelled. They could erect a monument to her in the town square. An extremely fucking likeable woman — that’s what the plaque could say.”
—Erin Somers, “Ten Year Affair” in Joyland
“No sign of him. This is not living, she thought. Waiting for a solution that never comes is not living. I know he’s getting tired of me. Why doesn’t he come? It doesn’t even matter if he doesn’t love me. As long as he’s here.”
—Pauline Melville, “Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary Discuss Their Suicides” in Electric Lit