Changing Light - Couverture rigide

Gallagher, Nora

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0375424512 ISBN 13 : 9780375424519

Editeur : Pantheon Books, 2007

Synopsis

Fleeing a crumbling marriage in New York for rural New Mexico, Eleanor falls in love with the disoriented, ill man she rescues, unaware that he is Leo Kavan, a troubled scientist who has gone AWOL from the Los Alamos atomic bomb project.

A propos du livre

Extrait

0375424512|excerpt

Gallagher: CHANGING LIGHT

one

Eleanor stood up in the garden from tilling a plot for early lettuce, shook off her hands, and stuffed them into the sleeves of her brown wool sweater. The wind was up; it blew dirt from the adobe wall into the newly hoed ground, dry pods from the chamisa bushes rattled like bones. She walked toward the house, sniffing the air like the dog beside her, climbed the steps to the door, opened it, walked past the stove, her hands still nestled in the sleeves—like one of those Chinamen, she thought to herself—and turned into the bedroom, where she’d put him last night.

All night long he’d listed between sleep and a rushing wakefulness, muttering in what she thought was German but couldn’t be sure. “Lotte,” he cried. “Raus aus dem Feuer!” And then, a word she thought might be English but didn’t know. “Implosion,” he said. She had placed rags on his head soaked in water and chamisa to break his fever, get him to sweat. He looked to her like men she’d met in New York: dark, Jewish, probably; curly black hair. Last night, when she’d found him lying in the bosque beside the river, his face was turned toward the sky. The dog circled him. She bent over him, her heart beating in her throat. His lips were cracked, his eyes shut. His wet khaki pants clung to his legs like vines. He grasped a pair of boots by their laces and a heavy belt in his right hand. Her eyes moved from the boots to the river and the mesa that rose up on the other side.

She bent down. “Hello?” she said. “Hello.” His head moved, the eyelids lifted. His eyes were a pale, startling blue. “Lotte?” he said.

“No,” she replied. His accent on the name was thick, and in her memory she heard someone’s voice speaking with these inflections, like an echo off a high stone wall. “Are you ill?” “Ill,” he repeated, and ran his tongue over his lips. She walked back through thick sand to the Ford, took her canteen out of the glove box, returned. He drank in small gulps, like a bird; she could see the water traveling down his throat. Water spilled out of his mouth and onto his chest, and he shivered. She jerked the canteen away.

“Can you walk?”

She wrapped his head in her father’s old sweater, the sleeves crossed over his eyes. She stood between his legs, grasped his ankles, and pulled. When she got him to the Ford, she squatted down, put her arms under his shoulders, and heaved him up to sitting against the front tire, then pulled him forward, whispering to him as she would to a horse, “Easy, now, easy, don’t fall.”

She had planned to drive him straight to the hospital, but as she started the engine he whispered to her, “No doctors.” She looked over at him and saw in his face a barely controlled desperation. And so she took him home. She shouldered him into the house as she had her brother when he came home drunk from a debutante’s party, and tipped him into bed.

She stood over him in the room plastered white with thick adobe walls that she and Estaban built last May before the sudden rain came in July and washed all the plaster off the outer walls and the dirt out of her garden, leaving only gravel, and she had to dig her carrots up with a pick.
He whispered in his sleep, half wakeful. His eyes opened and he saw her arm pass over his body like the shadow of a bird.

“What happened to you?” she asked. Leo turned his head to the wall, licking his lips.

We tickled the dragon’s tail, Leo thought. One of us was burned.

Slotin was moving the two half-moons together with screwdrivers. The counter ticked and the red signal lamps were blinking. The lamps blinked faster as Slotin moved the half spheres closer, like a drummer or a Japanese man with his chopsticks.

Then there was the sound of a screwdriver hitting the floor. The meter stopped. Leo heard the silence first. He yelled to Slotin, “Raus aus dem Feuer!”
The moon had pulled him across the deserted streets, between the trees, to the hole in the fence that the teenagers made to outfox the guards. His legs felt like sacks filled with sand. He got down on his hands and knees and bowed his head, feeling along the sharp ends of the linked fence with his hands first before he pushed himself through. He sat on the other side, his breath hot in his lungs, and then started to weep, his whole body shuddering. To be free of the place. He pulled the knapsack stuffed with a blanket and bread and cheese through the fence after him, adjusted the heavy belt stuffed with money that he carried with him through all border crossings, stood up, and began to find his way. In the dark were animal shapes moving through the trees: a deer, then a wild turkey, its wings folded neatly against its round breast. After a while he noticed the small swift bats flying past his nose, sonar alerting them to his head. He felt a sudden calm to be among them, the life of the world; as a boy he had always loved the dark.
Leo could not stay awake. He felt he should; he did not even know where he was or who this woman was who bent over him, asking questions. But he was too full of dreams or memories, he was not sure which. Slotin’s hands. The Chicago beehive assembly. His sister, Lotte, standing in the Woodrow Wilson train station in Prague.
Eleanor washed red and white beans in a colander at the sink. She poured water from a large earthenware pitcher through the beans and watched their colors darken as the liquid ran over and through them. She caught a cup of water from under the colander and poured it on the pink geraniums in the Folgers can on the windowsill. Outside the light changed to pink; streaks of purple lit up the Jemez. Her garden looked red for an instant. Tomorrow, the doctor, she thought, and almost said it out loud. Tomorrow she would drive into town. Even the unconventional gringa can’t allow a strange man to stay in her house, even if he’s ill.

She checked on him but he was deep in sleep, so she lit her kerosene reading lamp, but didn’t sit down. She was reading Willa Cather, a sweet, sad story about a family of Bohemians in Nebraska. She turned on the radio to hear a little jazz and felt lonely for the first time in months, when, for the first time in months, there was someone else in the house.
Her living room had a little fireplace placed in the wall at waist level that Griefa and Estaban built one afternoon.

“Ande yo caliente ya riase la gente,” Estaban said when he was finished, and when Eleanor asked him “En Inglés?” he shrugged his shoulders. Griefa said, “As long as I am warm, let the people laugh.” Griefa had plastered the walls wearing a dress—her bra showing under the arms—and a hat with plastic flowers. The floors were dirt mixed with cow’s blood, made by the dancers at San Ildefonso Pueblo. It had aged to a shiny deep red. Beside the bed was a wool rug in gray and black from the Ortega family in Chimayo. Against the wall were several canvases, and Eleanor’s paints were neatly lined up. The ceiling was made of heavy vigas with latias woven between them, thin aspen saplings that Estaban had cut in the forest above the boy’s school at Los Alamos.

This was what she had wanted, this room, imagining it while lying in the apartment in New York, sick with a headache, unable to go outside and face the crowded streets for fear of the paralyzing din in her head. She had built this house room by room in her mind ever since she had first seen New Mexico and known she would have to come back. When she and Griefa and Estaban were done, the three of them had breathed in the smell of damp plaster and then sat on the portal outside and drunk Coors beer and eaten some green chile stew Griefa had made and looked out at the blue Jemez Mountains.
Leo opened his eyes and looked up at the ceiling. How many days? One? Two? Whose room is this?

The light entered the room at quarter past six; his Timex was still ticking. He turned in the bed to watch the door, to wait until she was awake. He had not fully seen her, just her looming face over his, her hands near his mouth, her arm over his head. The sleeve of her white shirt. As she came through the door, he blinked as if to take a photograph. Woman walking through a doorway. White shirt, black skirt. A pensive face, fair skin, shadows under her eyes. Not a trace of rouge. Her hair was dark and straight, cut in a bob; she pushed it back with her left hand. White hands, thin wrists. She obscured and absorbed light as she entered. Leo thought of how neutrons slowing in the body’s watery cells scattered damage.

She leaned over him.

“Is this your house?” Leo asked.

She jumped back; her feet made the floor speak. He smiled.

She stayed where she was, watchful. He tried to broaden his smile, to appear innocent. Who was she?

“It is.”

“It’s very nice.” Then, “I’m hungry. I’m sorry to trouble you.”

She turned and left the room, returning with a bowl of chicken broth and a hard-boiled egg. She spooned the broth into his mouth. She tapped the egg against the wall above his shoulder and peeled the shell into pieces, which fell onto a blue damask napkin she had laid on the bed. She split the egg expertly with her thumbs and popped half into his mouth. He licked the dry, powdery yolk and the smooth white and swallowed. Then closed his eyes. She wiped her hands on her skirt, took the bowl from the side of the bed, and stood up. For a second she lost her balance and pressed her palm against the wall.
Memories called on Leo, plucked at his sleeve. The past was everywhere. A chain of laboratories, from the old world to the new, his life of...

Revue de presse

“The moral power of Nora Gallagher’s voice, so evident in her essays, resounds through her first novel. This is a book that deals wisely with many things–love, work, creativity, even physics. But it’s about simplicity in complex situations–i.e., about the lives that all of us lead in the modern age.”
—Bill McKibben

“Changing Light is a love story about desperate people with brains, told quietly and passionately, and stuffed with clear New Mexico light; specifically, the terrible, majestic lights and shadows of Los Alamos in ’45, when The Bomb was born. It unfolds in a remote place that was very near the heart of the 20th century, it is as truthful as an old ballad, and nearly as elegant as Einstein’s physics.”
—Peter Behrens

“Once again, Nora Gallagher has written, with compassion and grace, about the things that matter. Changing Light is a thoroughly imagined, spiritually courageous glimpse into a moment in time when good and evil might have been one and the same. By turns thriller, love story, and historical mystery, Gallagher turns out to be every bit as talented a novelist as she is a writer of gorgeous non-fiction.”
—Sue Halpern

“An incredibly beautiful story with echoes of Ondaatje and McEwan. Haunting and unforgettable, this is a smashing fiction debut from one of our most thoughtful writers.”
—Martha Sherrill

“Changing Light is a remarkable love story, told against the backdrop of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and the final innocent days of the world before the atom bomb. Nora Gallagher has effortlessly moved into the world of fiction, bringing her understanding of the spiritual life to her characters, and revealing the importance of faith, not just in religion, but between people, and among the inner workings of science and art.”
—Hannah Tinti, Author of Animal Crackers

“This is a spare, beautifully crafted story about people trying to sort right from wrong under unforgiving circumstances. When good and evil partake of each other, when knowledge alone cannot separate the two, and when time has run out, then moral certainty becomes impossible. Yet the characters of this story, like all of us at one time or another, must somehow choose and live with the consequences. Nora Gallagher is no stranger to these themes; in her non-fiction work, she has already led us beyond the seen and the known to where feeling guides us. Here she does it in fiction, and she has given us a jewel of a novel.”
—Mark Salzman

“Changing Light is a lyrical and passionate novel that takes on some of the largest matters of our day with no loss to its intimacy.  Conviction that writing matters the way life matters is Gallagher's hallmark, and this reader is her grateful beneficiary."
—Thomas McGuane

“An elegiac and tenderly-written love story between a stranger and an artist on a high New Mexico mesa under the looming cloud of an atomic bomb, secret pasts, and hidden passions.”
—Gretel Ehrlich

“At last, a novel about something. Nora Gallagher captures with dazzling beauty the lives of a woman and a man caught in the grip of history and our country’s shadowed past. I held my breath reading it.”
—Annie Dillard

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Pantheon Books
• Date d'édition: 2007
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0375424512
• ISBN 13: 9780375424519
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 240
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible