The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  – 5 –

  He passed through Emergency on his way out, hoping to catch another glimpse of Stephen and Ariel, but they had gone. All afternoon he had been carrying the image in his head of Ariel clutched to Stephen’s chest like a frightened chimp, though no doubt Ariel had been fully reassumed into the mother-son covenant by now.

  He could still feel the whoosh of Dr. Klein’s door closing behind him. Fucking careerist. Go on and take your plum Toronto job, he thought. Take your filthy lucre. Yet beneath his spite he already felt a spreading relief, a thrill of the sort he got at the end of bad relationships. He had escaped. He was free.

  The sun had mellowed to a late-afternoon shimmer. Along Pine, the exhaust-embattled trees had all sprung into leaf. In a matter of days the world had been made over—all up the slope of the mountain the green stretched, impossible, but there. What little chromosome in the mind made it sing at that, what made it hope? He could feel the memory urging itself on him of the permanent spring smell of the air in Sweden, of the blue of the Öresund. They would go there together, to the coast. Per had told him of his visit to the Tycho Brahe museum on Ven—Tikuh Brawh, he pronounced it. He liked planets and stars; he liked dinosaurs; he liked machines. Reassuringly ordinary things, as if there was still a chance for him, as if he was a boy like any other. Alex saw, suddenly, that there was probably no special puzzle in the boy, only the usual ones. It felt as if some screen between them had dropped. The screen of Dr. Klein, perhaps. He need never mention Per to him now, had managed to save him for himself.

  I suppose, Peter, it was a bit like Calvin with God. Not wanting the priests in between all the time.

  You don’t have to tell me about it, sir, I’ve got kids of my own. And while you’re at it, you might as well get Mother Mary off to a nunnery.

  He veered off onto McGregor from Pine rather than continuing toward Trudeau’s house. After months of skulking past the place under the watchful eye of the Cubans he had finally caught sight of the man, when he had practically knocked Alex over bounding up the steps that rose from Redpath.

  “Pardon, monsieur!” he had said with a grin.

  It wasn’t until this apparition had headed up the walk of the former prime minister’s house as if he owned the place that Alex realized it was The Man Himself. He was so odd-looking and small, wizened and gnomish like a character from the Brothers Grimm. This was the man who had faced down the bottle throwers at City Hall, who had made the nation’s women weak at the knees, who had brought the Constitution home. Yet here he was gamboling along the streets like a schoolboy hurrying home for lunch. The encounter left Alex with the queerest sensation, as if he had had a brush with a supernatural being but had somehow failed to make proper use of it, to take away some special power or insight.

  All that had been before Alex had made the mistake of getting into a discussion about Mr. Trudeau with one of Félix’s friends that had left a particularly bad taste in his mouth, all the more lingering and sharp because he had actually defended the man. Now he had to pass his house, day after day, and each time be reminded of failures he couldn’t quite name, as if he had somehow fallen short of the mark in a contest he hadn’t even known he’d signed up for.

  From the curve that opened out to Parc Merde de Chien from McGregor he noticed that the bust of Simón Bolívar had disappeared from its pedestal. Anti-Fidelistas, no doubt, or maybe anti-Trudeauites. At least the placards weren’t here, not in this bastion of Anglo-Scots privilege. In Félix’s neighborhood, one hung from nearly every balcony and porch: NE TOUCHEZ PAS À LA LOI 101. The infamous language law. In the beginning the slogan hadn’t seemed much of a rallying cry for rebellion, but then a protest at City Hall had brought people out by the tens of thousands and everything that had felt dead, consigned to the wastes by the pragmatists and the technocrats, had come alive again, all the old Péquistes crawling out of their post-referendum cocoons to spray-paint English signs and smash things in the streets. Outside his building one morning Alex had passed a car with Ontario plates on whose dusty hood someone had inscribed, apparently without irony, “Anglo go home.”

  None of these things made Alex feel especially broad-minded. Rather they made him feel like a redneck, a bigot, the sort of person who looked at a couple of workers whose bum cracks were showing and who stank of cigarettes and thought, Fucking Quebecois. At bottom he had Citizen Trudeau to thank for the whole farrago, with his precious Constitution. Alex himself didn’t much care whether the city’s signs were in English or French or Swahili—they were just fucking signs, after all, not Proust. But now the Constitution had come into play and principles were at stake, guillotines being sharpened in the wings while the language police tracked down each misplaced apostrophe. Big-Endians and Little-Endians. Alex wondered which side Fidel, if he were in charge, would have rounded up for the jails.

  “I’m of two minds,” Félix had said, in his usual Gaulish pose of fair-mindedness. “Of course, if we were separate we would protect our minorities like any state, but this way it’s different. This way we’re the minority.”

  There was no placard at Félix’s place, at least, that wasn’t his style, but nonetheless Alex had felt a sort of suasion beginning to set in there, Félix’s speech peppered now with telling catchphrases that all seemed joined in some long, unacknowledged assault against an unnamed enemy. Phrases like, Of course, and It’s different, and If we were separate. Alex had never quite forgotten Félix’s argument with Louie: there was always that part of him that kept waiting for Félix to slip up, for the true fascist to show himself beneath the cultured façade.

  Félix and Louie had actually met again, in the gay ghetto, of all places, one night when Alex and Michael had run into Louie prowling the streets of the East End and had dragged him to the California. The California was strictly gay lite, the refuge of straight women who didn’t want to get hit on and straight men like Alex who liked to think of themselves as enlightened. It turned out Louie knew the place.

  “I’m going to sleep only with white men,” he said. “And only on top.”

  Heads turned as soon as Louie walked in. He stood surveying the room like an African prince, drinking the attention in.

  He nodded toward the bar.

  “Alex, look. It’s your friend.”

  Sure enough, Félix was there, in the trademark cashmere pullover he wore in his after-hours incarnations, chatting up a young man at the bar who looked decidedly fresh-faced and sheepish and Alex-like. Alex thought he caught Félix about to turn away and pretend he hadn’t noticed them, but Louie hadn’t taken his eyes from him.

  “Alex!” He was coming over to them, his face lit in a smile that came so naturally it seemed real. “What a surprise! And your friend, I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.”

  Louie held out a big hand as if all was forgiven.

  “But I remember yours, my friend, I remember yours!”

  The group of them settled at a table and Louie and Félix, bizarrely, talked for half an hour or more in rapid French, while Michael worked the crowd and Alex was left to make halting conversation with Félix’s young companion, a boy from Rimouski who couldn’t have been more than twenty. Alex couldn’t figure what game Louie and Félix were at: they were acting as if they were old comrades-in-arms remembering their days battling the regime back in Port-au-Prince. Félix’s hand came out again and again to touch Louie’s shoulder.

  “So I guess you guys made up,” Alex said, after Félix had picked up the tab and gone off with his Rimouskan.

  “The man is a dead man,” Louie said grimly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s got it. The virus. The bug. You can smell it.”

  Alex didn’t have the stomach to stay on very long after that.

  “Did you get that?” he asked Michael. “That he’s sick?”

  “It’s not like people wear a star. Maybe he’s just old.”

  At their next lesson, Félix acted as if the evening had never happe
ned. That corner of his life, picking young men up in bars and such, seemed set apart. Something had shifted between them, though, as if there was an understanding now, a sort of convoluted agreement to know and not know. He’s a dead man. Alex couldn’t get the stone certainty of Louie’s voice out of his head. Félix continued to go to work, he drank his wine, he traipsed off on his holidays, yet there was a change, perhaps, he was more wan or more thin, more tired. Or perhaps the same.

  Alex made an effort to stop smoking around him.

  “But you must,” Félix insisted. “It’s the one vice I don’t have. I can enjoy it from you.”

  And afterward Félix always had a pack of cigarettes around, Alex’s brand, which he’d lay out on a side table before their lesson.

  Their relationship had begun to seem a kind of theater by then. Surely their lessons were beside the point—Félix already spoke better English than Alex did, and in any event he wasn’t going to have much use for it if he was dying. Alex didn’t know what the average life expectancy was these days, but he knew that gay men were dropping like flies: one month they looked healthy, the next they were skin and bone. Félix ought to be getting his affairs in order, not swanning around the gay bars or wasting his time with the likes of Alex.

  The invitations for drinks had stopped by then, after Alex had begged off a few times, but now Félix invited him to dinner.

  “It’s just a few close friends, nothing very formal,” he said. “No one to be afraid of.”

  Alex hadn’t dared refuse, wondering at Félix’s intentions but telling himself that he had probably merely needed a fourth, or a sixth, or an eighth, and Alex would do. In the liquor store he agonized over what wine would be up to Félix’s standards and settled finally on a thirty-dollar Barolo, then regretted the excess of it as soon as it was paid for. When he arrived at Félix’s door he realized he hadn’t even so much as wrapped the bottle and was ready to turn around and head back home.

  “Alex! So you’ve come! Come in, come in, I’m just finishing up in the kitchen.”

  The house was filled with cooking smells. The dining room, a cavernous place with oak paneling and exposed beams that sat closed off and dark during Alex’s visits, was completely changed now, decked out with tableware and flowers and billowing napkins folded into the shape of some kind of bird. From the living room came a loud hum of conversation, but Alex followed Félix into the kitchen, clutching his little offering.

  The stovetop was covered in pots and pans, the counter a heap of onion skins and wrappers and greens. Alex had never seen the place in such disarray.

  “So.” Félix took Alex’s bottle and looked it over appreciatively. “Very good, very good. You know your wines.”

  Someone had come soundlessly into the kitchen through a side doorway, a slightly hunch backed man whose head was ringed with a perfect circle of baldness like a tonsure, mesmerizing in its symmetry. Below that mysterious clearing a luxuriant crop of hair that looked as if it had been under cultivation since the sixties fell away in shimmering waves down the man’s shoulders.

  He looked over the wine Félix was holding, then over Alex.

  “Alors, mon ami. I didn’t know your tastes ran to the Italians now.”

  Félix let the comment pass.

  “Alex, my good friend André. From my radical days.”

  “So you’re the famous instructor. Félix has talked about you.”

  He set about fussing around Félix while he cooked, tidying things as if reclaiming territory.

  “What part of Italy, then?”

  “From the south. I mean, my family is. From Molise.”

  “Molise, I know it.” This was so uncommon that Alex’s first thought was that he was lying. “Campobasso, isn’t that the town there? The Low Field. A curious name for a place in the mountains. And then of course all the Samnite ruins.”

  “André is a journalist,” Félix said. “You must excuse him.”

  “Don’t insult me, I’m not a journalist. I’m a terrorist.”

  The living room, which Alex had been dreading, was starting to look less formidable than the kitchen. He had the feeling of being stuck at the wrong end of a long evening.

  A rattling pot distracted Félix while he was chopping parsley and he cut his finger.

  “Merde!”

  At the sight of the blood Alex instinctively started. It puddled on the cutting board before Félix managed to stanch it with a dish towel.

  André had caught Alex’s reaction.

  “C’est rien,” he said at once to Félix. “Attends, je prends un Band-Aid.”

  He took his time dressing the wound. Félix, an eye on his pots, was getting impatient.

  “Vite, là, ça brûle!”

  André, as soon as Félix’s back was turned, gave Alex a brutal look.

  “À table, messieurs et mesdames!” he called out. “C’est prêt!”

  Félix’s notion of informal, Alex saw, stretched to name cards at every setting and an array of cutlery that looked like the armaments of a medieval battalion. A great deal of talk was given over to the cutlery as people took their places.

  “Oui, oui, de France,” Félix said. “Du dix-huitième siècle.”

  Matters careened toward disaster for Alex right from the start. Félix, busy with serving, left André with the job of introducing him.

  “C’est notre jeune professeur d’anglais,” he said, as if he were a character in a Molière play.

  “Mais il parle français?”

  “Oui, il parle fritalien, français à l’italien. C’est très drôle, apparemment.”

  With a few deft strokes André had managed to sabotage any hope Alex might have had of finding his stride. It was true—how had André known this?—that his French was peppered with Italianisms. He ought to have made light of the matter but was put off by the thought of everyone waiting to hear his funny accent. A few polite questions were put to him but he fumbled his French so badly that the overtures soon dwindled away.

  “Voilà.” Félix had been busy in the kitchen. “La soupe.”

  By the main course, Alex had long ago lost the thread of the conversation. The woman next to him, a stiff-backed professor from UQAM, had taken pity on him at one point and spoken to him in English, but the two of them had seemed such an island then amidst the bons mots flying across the table that their conversation had quickly grown stilted and forced. He was reduced now to staring into his food, all his appetite gone, or to smiling grimly as he pretended to follow what was being said, the room having taken on the menacing warp of a Dali painting. Félix had more or less abandoned him, caught up in his serving like an old queen, though all Alex could see was that Band-Aid on his finger.

  “Messieurs et mesdames, le plat principal. Filet de porc normande avec des pruneaux et des tomates farcies.”

  André had been holding court the whole meal. He had got the table onto dirty jokes, apparently a specialty of his, telling a string of them in a broad joual that had people guffawing and shrieking with feigned offense.

  “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a de la part de notre jeune anglophone?” André said, at last turning to Alex again, the moment Alex had been dreading. “What do they say, over there in Westmount? Pas beaucoup d’affiches là, je parie. If you don’t like 101, take the 401.”

  It was an old line, but it still got a few titters.

  “Laisse-lui, André, voyons donc,” Félix said.

  “No, I’m curious. Voilà un anglophone in flesh and blood, c’est une occasion. Maybe you can explain to us, Alex, what’s the anglophones’ view on 101?”

  A few more titters.

  “André—”

  “Non, non, laisse-lui répondre.”

  The room seemed poised now, waiting for the punchline that could send it safely back into laughter.

  “I haven’t really asked them,” Alex said warily.

  “Parfait,” Félix said. “Exactement.”

  But André had him on his hook now, and wouldn’t
release him.

  “What about you, then? What’s your view?”

  He should just have shrugged the question off as he’d done the previous one. But for the first time that evening, he had people’s attention.

  “I think we should follow the Constitution,” he said, though his heart was pounding.

  “Which Constitution is that, exactly? Mr. Trudeau’s?”

  André had dropped any pretense that this was just some friendly airing of views. Alex felt the sort of panic he used to get after he’d thrown the first punch in a fight.

  “He has a point,” Félix said to André. This came so unexpectedly that Alex felt a deep sense of gratitude go through him. “It’s a perfectly normal Constitution, even if we didn’t sign it.”

  He got a few laughs at that, and the tension seemed to ease a bit. But André wouldn’t let the matter go.

  “He’s such a saint to you anglophones, your Mr. Trudeau. But in Quebec we didn’t need Mr. Trudeau to come along to tell us who we were. You should ask him where he was in the war, with his human rights, marching down St. Laurent with a swastika on his arm like the rest.”

  There was a silence.

  “Ça suffit, André,” Félix said.

  A gravity had come over the room, as if André had betrayed a family secret.

  “Bon,” Félix said. “Ça c’est la fin pour la politique. Alors on passe à la religion.”

  If anything the exchange tipped sympathies in Alex’s favor. Félix brought out his Barolo, to many appreciative murmurs, and the woman beside Alex made another attempt with him, until they finally managed to find some common ground on the subject of migrant farm workers. But he was marked now, he could feel it, like a foreign element that had to be contained.

  “I really should go,” he said to Félix, as soon as propriety allowed. “I have a lecture tomorrow.”

  “Yes, of course.” He stared down at his hands. Alex saw that he had changed his bandage. “You mustn’t mind André. That’s just his way.”

  “No, no. It was interesting.”

  Félix saw him to the door.

  “I’m away next week,” he said. “For our lesson, that is.”