In the City of Pigs by André Forget

Author:André Forget [Forget, André]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / Literary
ISBN: 9781459749108
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Published: 2022-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

VII

Perhaps I would understand. Two days later, the words still bothered me, sitting silently in my Pullman seat as the train cut its way north. Had I understood anything I had seen or heard in my short time in that city? What, indeed, might it mean for me to have understood? I flipped through the pages of my notebook, and thought about what I would tell Zimmermann. I knew what kind of story he wanted me to bring back. But that was not the story I had found. Rebekah Schumacher was the real story, silence was the real story — silence, and the great envelope of money that made it possible. There was something heroically monstrous in Schumacher’s dream, her single-minded desire to build an instrument that no one would ever hear. And she must have known with certainty that her dream would come true, that long after we were gone those great pipes would remain, a monument, a cenotaph.

Outside my window, the forest was endless. From time to time the darkness was punctuated by the baleful gleam of water slipping over river stones in moonlight. But this Tartarean landscape was only an illusion of light and shadow. The only mystery lay in perception.

When I had met Schumacher on the docks on the morning of our dive, she’d said nothing of our conversation the previous day. In her silence I read no discomfort, only the certainty of a person who speaks only when she wants to speak. We boarded the boat. She introduced me to the pilot, a small man named McLaughlin who opened his mouth only to spit over the gunnel. Schumacher gestured for me to change into the diving suit she had brought. I had been trained to do this back in Toronto (an expense Zimmermann agreed to only because the story demanded it), but I was clumsy with the apparatus, and Schumacher made little clicking noises with her tongue while she helped me attach the regulator valve. When the boat reached the harbour mouth, where the water was cleaner, she tapped me on the shoulder. She slipped off the side of the boat, and I followed her into the ocean. It was a sunny day and the light reached deep into the water. Below us, the seabed sloped into darkness.

We swam for a long time. Schumacher seemed always to know where we were. At certain points, she would point out things of particular interest — wrecked fishing boats, an old mine. And then we rounded an outcrop and I could see, glinting in the distance, a series of massive pipes rising from a rocky ledge.

As we drew closer, I became aware of the mind-beggaring scale on which the complex had been built, for complex is the only word that can describe the massed ranks of pipes, the flights stretching out like great silver wings on either side of the oblong stone pediment in front of the keyboard. The ledge on which this vast palace of metal had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.