Appropriate Place

by Lise Bissonnette

  She didn’t die in strawberry season. She died one October afternoon at the Hotel-Dieu, skeletal and absent, hydrated through her veins, under the scarcely bereft eyes of her children, her parents, Fernand and Gabrielle, who had torn herself away from the orientation meeting of the party in which the young sociologist was establishing a reputation for being a most useful analyst. It hadn’t taken much to make her nearly pretty — contact lenses, a light permanent to give some life to her ultrafine hair, the pleasure of having published a few articles in one of the papers, a few emotionally painful lovers, though there’d been none that autumn. The death was serene. Nearly nothing — a gasp, then hands squeezed, vague gratitude to the doctor who’d had to step up the dose of morphine. They all had cars, they would meet at the funeral when the date and time had been set.

  A week before, Gabrielle had had half an hour alone with Guylaine early one night. The dying were allowed unlimited visitors, and that time was as good as any other for a friend whose days were so full, in fact she was sure she was helping to relieve the anguish which must be terrible in the hospital dark. She helped Guylaine to drink through a straw, in a covered glass like the ones now sold for babies. She’d had to bring her ear close to her friend’s white lips to take in, through her disgusting breath, her whisper. Stanzas as slow as a heat wave, piercing as a blizzard. “I detest you. You ruined my youth. You ignored my children. You sneered at my husband. You seduced my father.”

  He had revealed it to her, weeping, in the early days of this cancer, begging her to forgive him for having caressed her friend who had undressed in front of him years ago, while he was reading Bernanos and paying no attention to the languorous melody she was tinkling on the piano. If Gabrielle had said nothing, betrayed nothing, it was, so he said, because she had wanted it all, beneath her intellectual manner she was a whore, she was always exposing a thigh, a breast, when she came to the house. One day, he could swear, she wasn’t wearing panties under her miniskirt, he was the only one to have noticed, if he had mentioned it to his daughter and his wife they’d have thought he was crazy. He had in fact remained crazy about Gabrielle whom he’d dreamed so much of entering. If only she had given him the chance, this story would have ended, he’d have been a father to his daughter, a grandfather to his grandchildren, a husband to his wife. Perhaps Guylaine’s bones would have stayed healthy, it wasn’t normal, this punishment imprinted on a young woman. His daughter. It was his own diverted sperm that was muddled up.

  He was ugly and trembling, he had asked her for secrecy because it was too late and he didn’t want any drama during his child’s last days. But she, the dying woman, knew very well that he was still trying to keep up the old desire that continued to swell, that she was dealing with two obscenities, one of whom wouldn’t come to see her five times before the end. And then, because she was Guylaine, she had given in, again. She would talk when no one could hear her, when Gabrielle could simply shrug and close a white door on a shadow that peed in its adult diaper, under a sheet as dry as her bones.

  She had one final hiss, at the moment when she knew that Gabrielle had had enough. “There’s one thing you won’t have. The one you want.”

  What do I want? Gabrielle wondered, as she finished off the memory of the pharmacist who may have been right to think she was offering herself. She hadn’t worn a bra that day, it had been pleasant to feel her nipples becoming erect and her belly pressing against that hard thing which she didn’t yet know how to name, and to grow old exciting him from afar, though she doesn’t remember going to his place without panties, except during the period of long Moroccan robes, and he wouldn’t have been able to see anything.

  What was it I wanted? she thinks that evening, crammed with the play of a man who is still adolescent. Before her, the Rivière des Prairies, which are no longer prairies but fields of bungalows and towers that are also crammed with seniors in small apartments, the pink streak of the sun dying drowsily over Montreal, the horizon barred all the way to the United States. The strata of a country about which some wrote poems at the time when she did or did not wear panties under a miniskirt or a long robe that had come from Africa, like the words of Frantz Fanon.

  Three

  AN ORDINARY HANDSAW could have cut up what remained of the two caraganas planted at the beginning of June and dead in August. But the contractor arrived with a small excavator, chainsaws and two workers, through some misunderstanding that’s still unsolved, if Gabrielle is to judge by the chorus of curses rising from the lawn.

  With the powerful voice of a skinny man, the owner of the garden-level apartment declares that they must also remove the hedge of honeysuckle, it grows like a weed and blocks the view of the river, its roots are so tenacious that drastic measures are called for. The owners’ meeting, he claims, had agreed on the principle of putting in low plants so that people on the garden level (even though, as he doesn’t add, they’ve paid less for their three rooms and kitchen) can enjoy the building’s interesting location as much as the people on the upper floors. As proof, he brings up the caraganas with their twisted trunks, whose thin, drooping branches should have grown low and broad if the acid soil hadn’t killed them so quickly.

  From the fourth floor Gabrielle hears only the rumbling of the debate — including the indignant barbs of Fatima, who hasn’t been ordered to make the honeysuckle disappear and who dares to confront the mule-headed man. Pierre is familiar with the quarrel because he’s heard it more clearly from his place. He tells Gabrielle when he arrives that she should watch out for that Monsieur Poupart. “His wife has one cheek purple from a burn, she’d spilled a bottle of oil and to punish her he set fire to it and she won’t lodge a complaint.” In his opinion, it’s the husband who killed the caraganas by pretending to water them during the summer drought, who knows what mixture he was using? Honeysuckle can take anything, it’s common.

  Long after the workers have gone, leaving the hedge intact, angry hissing rises up from the terrace of apartment 101, where the brute tells his wife at length about what he plans to do. Like a saw, he in turn disturbs the morning air, which had been washed by a cooler night, at last.

  In the yard, the cutting has been done cleanly, the remains of the trunks blend with the mulch, the tired grass appears to have been tonsured for some autumnal ceremony, Gabrielle tells Pierre, who doesn’t understand the image. “What’s a tonsure?” She laughs at this child who has never known priests. He’s better off that way. Besides, the last one she’d known had brought bad luck.

  “It’s a sign of chastity,” she said. Though she knows nothing about it. She assumes that the ridiculous shaving of the top of the head was intended to lessen desire for women. Surely it’s hard to caress a man whose brain has been denuded by some old bishop dressed like a vestal virgin. His kisses must reek of the void.

  Pierre inquires about that last priest she’d known.

  She wouldn’t swear that Damien Perreault had been an abbé, despite the premature baldness that suggested it, as well as what he gave her to understand about a stay at the monastery of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, in Brittany, where he had apparently been introduced to the teachings of the monk Abélard. Saint-Gildas was a small seaside resort with a handful of inns that were more inviting than its austere abbey, and Gabrielle had trouble picturing Damien as a reader in the refectory. Rather, she saw him devouring a book on medieval philosophy at the beach, coated with luxurious suntan oil, between two naps in the sun. He did seem to know all there was to know about Abélard, having thoroughly penetrated that vanity so brilliant it had become theological, that faith in oneself that really does tu
rn certain men into images of the God they’ve created to invite comparison. That would have been Damien’s style, had he persevered. But he also talked about cliffs, sea spray, jellyfish with as much precision as the teachings of Abélard, with whom the encounter finally seemed more like a vacation affair than a mystical experience before an altar. Moreover he’d said nothing about Héloïse, whose spirit seemed to Gabrielle, from the little she’d read about her, more riveting than that of her illustrious seducer.

  “Damien always lied,” she says. And at that moment she senses, as if it were in her windpipe, the slight bitterness he exuded when he was talking to her, that flowed only in her, it had taken her months to understand why.

  She sends Pierre back to his work, the rest he wouldn’t understand at all.

  Damien and Gabrielle had been colleagues at the university, vague adversaries at the beginning of the school year, having quarrelled over the only course on class structure offered in Quebec. The period of strikes was over, but there was still plenty of fraternization between the few supervised hours of teaching. It had all started in the office of the dean, who was very tall, very handsome, very silent. They were drinking manhattans. Present were Damien, pink-faced after one sip, skinny Alexandre, whose wife would wait for him, and Serge, trying to discipline them into a six p.m. meeting with plans for another the next morning. Gabrielle had worn a blue wool dress, the blue of the dean’s eyes, with a full-length zipper nearly to her boots, which girls wore all day and from which they never managed to scrape off all the salt from the streets. Alexandre was talking about women’s underwear as a gauge of the changing times, he claimed he often cheated on his wife. Gabrielle played scatterbrained because of that blue which was suddenly unbearable, ice turned to silk to be torn between her and the tall silent boy. Never would she be virginal enough for him. Something evil was alighting, radiant, at the end of her twentieth year.

  Damien had seized the moment before they did, he had filled the glasses, spattered some paper by suddenly raising his, challenged Gabrielle to take off her clothes to test Alexandre’s thesis. With a sharp tug of her zipper she’d done so. A few seconds and a few centimetres of the bra-slip she was so fond of, that pushed up her small breasts in a double layer of lace which she washed by hand with expensive soap flakes in the hope of preserving it for a long time. It was only when half-naked that she was somewhat beautiful. And now there was at least that between them, this perfect waste.

  The blue did not break, it even became the first laugh in the love of a lifetime, one she would never recount.

  But Damien wouldn’t rest during the months and years when he would be their mutual friend, until he tried to have a go at this miracle, marvelling at having been the first witness while pretending to be its guardian.

  He was also a visitor to the home of the married lover, reporting to Gabrielle the colours of the house and of the children’s curls, their mealtimes, all those bits of answers to the questions that she didn’t ask. Little by little, in front of the Alexandres and Serges, he had even played at being Gabrielle’s lover, they all got drawn into that trompe l’oeil, as a favour to the lovers. One night, at the faculty Christmas party, Damien had groped her in front of her colleagues until she’d thought that he really was interested and tried to console him afterwards, in the car where they were sobering up while they waited for some heat. He had kissed the tips of her fingers as one might do to some inconsequential trollop. From his blank expression during the drive home, she realized that she was just the proxy for his own love of the same boy.

  That was the only chilly episode between them. Afterwards, she let him kiss the other man’s juices on her neck, seek in her the trace of stolen bliss and breathe in the unhappiness of absence. The hours, at least, were filled.

  It was Damien who had signed her up for the sovereigntist party he’d been associated with since its beginning. The adopted son of quiet bourgeois, he was, he said, the natural son of a former Nazi who’d found refuge in Canada, who had tracked down his son who was also the son of a whore and left him a fortune of dubious origin, which Damien chose to spend discreetly and had put at the service of the democrats in our liberation movement, after associating for a while with terrorists, the first ones to have finally drawn some lessons from our history. Those who favoured violence were all poor and neurotic, he said, and you had to be healthy and rich to have a normal relationship with freedom. And so he’d left them, after his sojourn for reflection at Saint-Gildas, and he had given some energy in the form of cash to the petits bourgeois hungry for a normal state, the kind that are respected by the newsmagazines and are the only ones that matter.

  Why had she believed that nonsense? Because he spouted it without the usual hesitation of our local thinkers? Because he read Der Spiegel in the original and summarized brilliantly all the French and American periodicals piled up on the backseat of his comfortable Citroën? In any case, she had developed a liking for the topicality of things. And had got it into her head that palingenesis couldn’t come about without the commitment of people like her, who understood the source and the term. Or so we believe at the dawn of our thirties, in a country where bombs no longer go off and where intellectuals socially on the rise nonetheless owe something to the neurotics who are in jail. She had acquired a membership card, paid more than her dues, and started to attend meetings.

  Damien wanted to stay in the shadows but to make Gabrielle, who had a way with people, into a figure. That was how he put it. While she was spending her evenings on a detailed dissection, in the original, of Rosa Luxemburg’s relationship with nationalism, persuading herself against all evidence that it hadn’t been a total repudiation, Damien extricated from hundreds of newspapers and magazines signs of a rebirth of patriotism, and it was from them that she finally drew her arguments, around party tables where there was no time to waste on debates about the particular circumstances of the Spartacus League in the early years of the century.

  Little by little, Gabrielle had shed the jargon of her discipline, preserving only her admiration for that little bit of a woman whose speeches had galvanized men and who hadn’t feared the police. One day she would go to Berlin and sit on the edge of the canal where murderers had thrown Rosa’s corpse.

  Gabrielle’s students now found her more fiery, they were glad to see dispelled the dissertationlike atmosphere that she’d previously felt required to keep up. The same was true in the party, where some were beginning to think she had the makings of a pasionaria. Not the kind of which leaders are made, a woman was out of the question, but the kind that strikes the proper vein among party members.

  There was a small triumph one Sunday morning at a National Council meeting, one that would bolster the development of her political career. A confrontation with the Maoists had been brewing for weeks, there were still a few — people of speeches and spirit who wanted to make the party into a ferment of proletarian revolution in North America, a place where the future would be not only French, but fair. She led a workshop organized with the help of Damien’s notes. “You think,” she told them in some introductory remarks, “that there’s a country dedicated to revenge and justice, a country that will not lay down its arms, that will not lay down its spirit until there is a global confrontation. You think that three hundred years of European energy are being wiped out, that the Chinese era is beginning. Mao reminds you of the power of emperors, but he is actually a carapace covered with rust, like those army leaders you see at funeral processions or abandoned in the sorghum fields where the Chinese people toil. Mao is nothing but a solitary shadow, watching and hoping for the twilight
of a world. Proletariats will join capitalist states as has happened in Russia and the United States. Mao is old, he’s watching the revolution slip away while he shields his eyes from the sun. With him, you would take a great leap into the void.”

  It was clear to see that she read, that such literary considerations weren’t spontaneous. But in a party that cared about an image of culture she really did stand out as someone who knew how to write, who could carry on a conversation with the few political tourists from France who were coming more and more often to look into the effervescence of their picturesque American cousins. Without altogether retreating, the Maoists had changed halls. The Great Helmsman would die a few months later, in a climate of revolutionary rust that she certainly hadn’t been alone in pointing out, but the party recognized her instinct as being reliable enough that she was entrusted with other missions on the ideas front.

  On the day after Mao’s funeral, the university’s internal mail brought her an anonymous missive: “Young Woman, I too have read page 561 in André Malraux’s Antimémoires, Folio paperback number 23, Gallimard, 1972. Fear not, I wish only good things for you and for Quebec’s independence, I shall respect the secret of your brilliant inspiration.”

  Gabrielle had not read Malraux. She immediately obtained a copy and on page 561 found, nearly word for word, the text that Damien had written for her. There was fog between the lines, and lessons that would serve her well, later on, in the company of other liars. She didn’t waste time hating Damien before she confronted him in his sun-bathed office where he was reading an article on Kissinger’s strategy in Foreign Policy. Barely did his plump priestly cheeks turn pink, as they did during their alcohol-fuelled chatter. He took so many notes on so many subjects, he said, that he could easily have copied out passages from Antimémoires two or three years ago and inadvertently incorporated them into something he’d written himself. She could use the same excuse if anyone complained, it happened to so many professors, apparently Malraux himself liked nothing better than to heighten facts by seasoning them with lies. She shouldn’t be so puritanical, as people learned in abbeys.