The First Garden by Anne Hébert

the foreign countries where she was an actress, sometimes at night on her way back to the hotel after the performance, or in a restaurant in the middle of a meal, around the table with the cast after a few bottles, when a last toast was being drunk in honour of someone who had no name, when they suddenly ran short of imagination and could think of no one in whose honour to clink glasses. Flora Fontanges would raise her glass. Salut, she would say, Côte à Coton, des Grisons, Stanislas or Sainte-Ursule, and no one knew what she was talking about.
    â€œThe most wonderful thing,” said Raphaël, “is that if you turn around after you’ve been climbing, you can see the mountain in the distance, and the open sky above the valley.”
    A thousand days had passed, and a thousand nights, and there was forest, another thousand days and thousand nights, and there was still the forest, great sweeps of pine and oak hurtling down the headland to the river, and the mountain was behind, low and squat, one of the oldest on the globe, and it was covered with trees as well. There was an unending accumulation of days and nights in the wildness of the earth.
    â€œOnly pay attention,” said Raphaël, “and you can feel on your neck, on your shoulders, the extraordinary coolness of countless trees, while a roar, loud yet muffled, rises from the forest deep as the sea. The earth is soft and sandy under our feet, covered with moss and dead leaves.”
    Is it so difficult then to make a garden in the middle of the forest, and to surround it with a palisade like a treasure-trove? The first man was called Louis Hébert, the first woman Marie Rollet. They sowed the first garden with seeds that came from France. They laid out the garden according to the notion of a garden, the memory of a garden, that they carried in their heads, and it was almost indistinguishable from a garden in France, flung into a forest in the New World. Carrots, lettuces, leeks, cabbages, all in a straight line, in serried ranks along a taut cord, amid the wild earth all around. When the apple tree brought here from Acadia by Monsieur de Mons and transplanted finally yielded its fruit, it became the first of all the gardens in the world, with Adam and Eve standing before the Tree. The whole history of the world was starting afresh because of a man and a woman planted in this new earth.
    One night, unable to sleep because of the mosquitoes, they went outside together. They looked at the night and at the shadow of Cape Diamond which is blacker than night. They realize they are not looking at the same sky. Even the sky is different here, with a new arrangement of the stars and the familiar signs. Where are the Big Dipper and Canis Major and Canis Minor, Betelgeuse, and Capella? The sky above their heads has been transformed like the earth beneath their feet. Above, below, the world is no longer the same because of the distance that exists between this world and the other, the one that was once theirs and never will be theirs again. Life will never again be the same. Here in this night is their new life, with its rough breathing, its sharp air never before inhaled. They are with that life, they are caught in it like little fish in black water.
    The children and grandchildren in their turn remade the gardens in the image of the first one, using seeds that the new earth had yielded. Little by little, as generations passed, the mother image has been erased from their memories. They have arranged the gardens to match their own ideas and to match the idea of the country they come more and more to resemble. They have done the same with churches, and with houses in town and in the country. The secret of the churches and houses has been lost along the way. They began floundering as they built houses of God and their own dwellings. The English came, and the Scots, and the Irish. They had their own ideas and images for houses, stores, streets, and public