Mont Blanc
by Andrew Hook
‘Bicyclists understand: the beauty, the simplicity, the feeling of almost flying. Surely, few of man’s inventions have been responsible for as much human happiness as the bicycle.’
from The Bicycle in Art: A Universal Symbol of Progress, Angie Schmitt
I am a car driven between two bicycles
The Citroën B14 G is winched backwards: a scene in reverse. A bloated box leaking river water. The taut rope a tightrope between the living and the dead. The material hums in crepuscular light. A sated mosquito desired by none. The metal framework shields a polished wooden interior, black leather seats, yet fails to conceal my body or his. The bridge was broken before I took that path. A deliberate act of defiance.
Once drained, we no longer float. The Frenchman slopes away.
On the bank, the Austrian, his hands clasped like writhing lovers.
These two.
These two who formed me from clay like a statue. Who breathed life into an empty vessel.
Ha!
Those two who placed me on a pedestal for the charm of stumbling.
There is much to be written about playthings.
Yet when a car moves forwards, it pushes the air in front of it, creating a vacuum in the space that it occupied a second before. The air from behind rushes to fill that absence. This is the wind that blows past the bicyclist, that causes them to falter.
They would have me on two wheels rather than four. Yet I am not the bicycle, shared by an entire town – an entire patriarchy – who came along for the ride. They are the Alcyon, the Louvet: romanticising halcyon days of love. I am the female: shedding imprints as I do river water as I am pulled from nymph to corpse.
I am the dominant force.
The river is dragged in my wake.
The free radical
I enter the picture fully formed. A capricious entity. My behaviour subject to astonishment as spontaneity causes the Frenchman and the Austrian to follow suit, without any reaction at all. Yet if I am the swollen river, a hydraulic force removing an erodible bed, they are the flotsam, the jetsam, the twin particles of unblinking acceptance.
They swallow my independence like Evian water. Then seek to bottle it.
The compartment in which I am squeezed is designed by men. It is Baudelaire who said that a woman is natural, that is to say, abominable: the greatest idiocy combined with the greatest depravity. The Austrian and Frenchman make this debate in my presence. I light a cigarette, the smoke from the Gitane curling around my smile. These two consider themselves free thinkers, yet my thoughts spiral in my head without their knowledge. Together they impose stereotypes onto unconventional lifestyles. They pour glasses of wine.
These men – with their shielded homoerotic tendencies, with their belief in a ménage à trois on the condition that there are only two in a bed– these free radicals who are no more than horrors, monsters, assassins of the arts, little fools, little sluts – these men.
Even a river is contained by a channel until she expands and spreads.
I butter some bread, eat the corners. The conversation carries on regardless. I seek to inject Simone de Beauvoir, that man is defined as a human being and woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male. Instead I sit and watch, allow them their battle. They are so fey they will never fight over me, never duel. They seek modernity, want to push at the skein of the acceptable, whilst desiring to make me acceptable. I pluck at a ladder in my tights. The material has stretched to breaking point.
The free radical theory of the aging process is based on the hypothesis that with increasing age, mutations of mitochondrial DNA will accumulate and will at least lead to a loss of function with subsequent acceleration of cell death.
They seek to cast me in this role. An object created in their image. The triumph of their will.
I stand. À bientôt!
The shocked expressions! On another day they will play dominoes and forget my existence, but here they are rushed to action, falling over themselves to accommodate me.
It is so tiresome performing in this mask.
The third man
Fiction is as valid as reality, only better.
I draw a pencil moustache, don a chequered cap, light a cigar. I seek to claim for myself the reckless male freedoms that women have been traditionally denied; yet I cannot do so in a dress and bouffant. I hide in baggy men’s clothing.
We run the length of Paris. Our feet vibrating the iron bridge at Passerelle de Valmy. Given time, this aspect will be hidden beneath grey warehouses, cars and concrete, but in the moment I count un deux trois whilst already running, leaving the effete behind. There is a certain inevitability in bedding one of them, but I will win this race. I seek to embrace more than flesh: womanhood on my own terms.
Society sketches me. Despite being the product of a woman and a man, I am considered as product to a man.
I extrapolate the day. We hurtle passed la Tour Eiffel, Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Opera Garnier, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Élysées, the Musée d’Orsay, the Cinémathèque Française. Our shadows contain temporary concealment of the sun, our reflections duplicate our threesome. Somewhere in this melange is the way to live: I must choose between the light or the dark.
I am stronger: or as strong.
I seek to remove my cap, find an establishment to wet my upper lip with a frothy café crème then wipe off my moustache with the back of my hand. I want to chug my cigar, pontificate on philosophy. I strive to demand an alternate me.
Yet I am writ large as a butterfly. I flit between topics, my mind unable to focus on anything serious for long. I flirt with the Austrian with my hand on the Frenchman’s leg. The American’s have a saying that their ideal woman can keep a man if she is a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom. A triumvirate. I am only seen through the eyes of others. A projection on a tatty cinema screen.
I buy sulfuric acid not only for the eyes of men who tell lies, but for those who collaborate in them.
Perhaps the Frenchman and the Austrian would prefer me dressed as this third man. We walk back along the Seine, hand in hand in hand. If only we might live spontaneously, outside of society’s gaze. What new shapes might we bend ourselves into?
In Seine
So, they tell me, at a photographic slide show they had become entranced with the bust of a Greek goddess and her serene smile, such that they travelled to view the ancient statue on an island in the Adriatic Sea.
Dressed similarly, as if they were one person, they had fallen in love with this simulacrum. They pledged an understanding that should she be made flesh they would compete for her affections; that whilst this unmoving face gazed upon both of them equally, individually they might alternate between loser and victor, based upon self-imposed parameters of love, thus limiting – from the very first moment – the extent of their desire.
The hand I placed to my mouth was feigned shock but served the purpose of hiding my smile.
We sit inwards on an upturned barrel. Wine long gone. Each of our knees touching to create a six-sided shape: a hexagon. A polygon. The Frenchman and the Austrian lean inwards, conspiratorially. They have found this Greek goddess in me.
What am I to do with this?
They have relegated me not only to a woman, but a representation of a woman. I am little more than my sex. Come to life!
Their love is an affection: little more than a construct.
I seek to play them.
Their manners exasperate.
I consider myself an outsider. I separate from my body and observe their actions. There is a presumption that because two men pursue a woman that she must be in love with both of them.
They contain an easy camaraderie. Are no more dangerous than the perpetuation of a stereotype. The Austrian has an open face, a gentle demeanour. His confidence is low yet there is an expectation that one day a woman will fold to him. The Frenchman is equally genteel yet in a more direct fashion: his moustache expresses masculinity. He has had more affairs of the heart and whilst promises might be made he has the habit of breaking them. Both are writers: one fact, one fiction. They seek to make me a painter. I cannot simply be myself to them.
I move a finger from one to the other: Am, stram, gram / pic et pic et colégram / bour et bour et ratatam / am, stram, gram; pic!
The Austrian – the one I have found first – the one who found me first – becomes my premier dalliance.
I meet him with a coquettish smile.
Look how he bows!
I am much more than brusque. I want a child. The irreparable drive of womanhood.
With my future selves I can change the world.
Night has fallen with the monochrome hush of a silent film. I want to relax in this life: luxuriate. Yet their chattering goes on: political shenanigans, theoretical concepts, perceptions of art. I admired the heroine’s freedom in the play by Strindberg, which both men disliked. They are constrained by vocabulary. The shifting waters of the Seine play against the underside of bridges, casting moonlight where it otherwise does not shine. There is a fluidity to life unconstrained by convention and structure. I run ahead of these bores, my heels clattering against cobblestones like a runaway mare. With one leap I drop vertical into the water. A cold rush ameliorates my senses. So sharp that it cuts me to the core.
Voices inveigle underwater: bubbles in time.
It’s either raining or I’m dreaming.
I've always loved the nape of your neck. The only part of you I could look at unnoticed.
When I surface the air is as cold as the water.
They are bent at the sides, arms outstretched, as I swim towards them. The Austrian’s head remains down even as we straighten. I have broken something within him, and whilst he will become my lover, my husband, the father of my child, this experience will serve to underline deception. Yet it is the Frenchman, who previously would have deferred, whose love now blossoms immense – a Mont Blanc – and who can no longer be bothered by what might lurk in the valleys.
Je ne suis pas un chiffre
When I birth the girl, I see too late that she also seeks to define me.
We move to the country. The Austrian goes to war. The Frenchman a nemesis. Whilst the death toll is significant on both sides, I pick wildflowers and place them in my hair.
I enjoy dalliances with those too old for the call up. The girl extends within her frame as her arms and legs push out through her clothing. In trenches, men die for something other than love. I receive their letters. It is their greatest fear that should they meet in battle, that one will become instrumental in the demise of the other. I can only hold my breath whilst I wish it.
Motherhood is matter-of-fact. Not the fairytale some placate me with. I throw the girl in the air and catch her. I throw her again. When I am petulant, I make to miss but don’t.
There are giggles to be caught at the brink of fear.
The canopy of madness doesn’t extend as far as the countryside.
Although there are one thousand five hundred and sixty-seven days of a war in which men fight men and women wait.
When the Austrian returns, he takes me in his arms. He tousles the hair of the girl. He is safe. We are safe. He plays it safe.
It is a fallacy that we are only changed by others.
We head straight to the green, grassy, cow-filled alps, picnic basket in hand. The girl defaults to the Austrian now that the man is here. I am a salmon swimming upstream. I spread the slightly spicy, cheesy liptauer on some small squares of plain white sandwich bread. The Austrian has boiled my eggs. The girl cracks one on his back. Another joins us and there is an uneasy truce. What? I couldn’t be a nun whilst he was gone.
I am not just a number, I am a free woman.
When the Frenchman arrives it is a case of the great switcheroo. The Austrian understands he has to do something to remain in my orbit. Unlike in the war, when Austria depended entirely on Germany for support and had no other reliable ally, he cedes to the Frenchman and capitulates to the loss of love.
What might be perceived as capriciousness on my part is only a matter of practicality. I will not be their goddess.
Should I read their minds as a book I would note I am the cornerstone of their relationship: the interlocutor. The invader. In modern times I would be cast as the manic dream pixie girl. That stock character – usually depicted as a young woman with eccentric personality quirks – who serves as the romantic interest for a male protagonist. A one-dimensional construct of the male mind, existing only to provide emotional support or to teach important life lessons, while receiving nothing in return.
I seek an imbalance. I couple with the Frenchman so that he might fail to give me the child that I would otherwise have had.
Le Tourbillon – a whirlwind romance
There is a pleasurable evening where I sing solo, accompanied by a man I have had a liaison with, as both the Frenchman and the Austrian look on. I am sure they consider me liberated, yet I am sought not to stray too far. The leash they have fashioned is not of metal and leather, but the double-helix of expectation and restraint. My voice carries authentically light, harnessed to the parameters of cinema vérité with a flirtation of the nouvelle vague. Yet it is a new vagary that I seek, an unexpected and inexplicable change in someone’s behaviour.
I imagine the song recorded, played on a loop, in perpetuity, so that the purely whimsical lyric of a love that comes and goes so quickly might take on the mantra of a darker context. I see my lovers driven mad by my vocal, their bodies bruised chrome-yellow in altercations with padded rooms. Their eyes wild, their hair unbrushed, clotted with blood. I see fingernails bitten quick: fingerprints removed. An identity crisis. I urge the whirlwind to take physical root at the point of their feet, to twist them upwards in a corkscrew – as they become the corkscrew – whilst ascending to the heavens which they covert.
When I taught Shakespeare there was the belief that hell hath no fury like a woman scornedwas a line from one of his plays, from which I would inform these students that the line was appropriated from William Congreve’s play, The Mourning Bride, and in full was Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned. Even then – before meeting my attentive fops – I knew better and understood that real rage came from being loved, but not loved properly. It was not better to have loved and lost rather than never being loved at all. It wasn’t enough to be a conduit for passion: you had to be passion itself.
Should I make my own notes I will be written out of this dialogue.
So, I repeat: I had liaisons other than these two.
There is a spectacular alpine cycling route circling the massif of Mont Blanc — the roof of the Old Continent — and crossing the borders of Italy, France and Switzerland. Once considered a horrific place, inhabited by demons and dragons, it instead is an incredible display of alpine beauty where sheer granite walls rise between impending glaciers, long gravelly moraines, meadows and enchanted valleys.
It is there that you will find me. One pleasurable evening.
Oh, to be a free bird in a patriarchal society
I don’t want to be understood.
I collect the Frenchman in the Citroën and in waving goodbye to the Austrian I say goodbye to them both.
The twist of the wheel is deliberate. It is all I can do to change the narrative.
When we enter the water we involuntarily hold our breath, causing our pulse rate and blood pressure to rise just as they do for the Austrian, watching from the bank. After being submerged thirty seconds, rising levels of carbon dioxide cause a receptor in our brain to fire off an irresistible compulsion to breathe. It is a terrible moment: against our will we inhale, and water hits the larynx at the back of our throat.
Think what it is like to have a drop of water go down the wrong way. Here, water rushes into the lungs, causing us to slip unconscious. At this stage, our heart is still beating, racing to overcome the lack of oxygen, up to about two hundred beats a minute, until it slows because the oxygen is exhausted, and eventually it stops.
As it does for the Austrian.
As it does for the audience.
At our funeral service they throw words as confetti:
tragic deplorable
awful fatal
heartbreaking pitiful
sad harrowing
pathetic
If only they might accept one of my own.
Andrew Hook has had almost two hundred short stories published, with several novels, novellas and collections also in print. Stories have appeared in magazines ranging from Ambit to Interzone. His themed collection of Hollywood celebrity death short stories, Candescent Blooms, was published by Salt in 2022. Forthcoming books include an SF novel, Body and Soul (Elsewhen Press), and a non-fiction book on the film, Union City (Electric Dreamhouse).
