What did he know about Malraux? He didn’t read many books. She realized that when he copied, it was cheating. From that day on she separated what she wrote from what Damien did and put herself in a condition of infidelity.
She now saw him only in the elegant restaurants to which he was fond of inviting her, where he behaved like a regular, where he drank too much of wines that were too fine. She went along as if she were going to a show, for the wild stories about his life to which he managed to give some verisimilitude.
Over noisettes of venison at Postel, he had claimed to be the owner of hunting grounds in the Camargue to which he went incognito, because local descendants of the partisans would slit the throat of this son of a Nazi who had taken advantage of a miserly old woman to appropriate the property legally.
Over champagne in an elegant Vermont inn, where it had pleased him to drive her some hundred and fifty kilometres in the snow, he had given himself a brother in the States, a rather famous ophthalmologist, whose wife had become Damien’s lover in room thirteen of this charming retreat; of it had been born a daughter as beautiful as the daylight but deaf and blind, the mother had been shattered by grief, she would die soon.
Over tea in the Ritz garden he had told her he’d recently become engaged to a Toronto actress, daughter of a ruined Greek ship owner who had made a new fortune in Canada by selling copies of Hellenic sculptures to the nouveaux riches with swimming pools, with whom the Queen City abounded.
He was always coming back from amazing trips, from hotels that no guidebook had spotted, routes that no one else had followed, encounters that no one else could imagine and that gave him information on how foreigners viewed Quebec sovereignty — with hostility, in general. The worst was yet to come, he repeated again and again, Gabrielle should be on her guard.
She listened as if she believed him, she knew how to make those eyes. Just as she knew that Damien was as afraid of planes as of women, which demolished all his lies at the outset. But he was a contrast with the pale creatures she met in the department, shadows of their borrowed ideas, brains hesitant under the greasy hair that soiled the pillows of their unsatisfied girlfriends. He carried her along too, most often away from the party militants who adopted the missionary position both in bed and in their political sermons, unversed in either the subtleties of the flesh or the perversions of the powerful. The shadows Damien talked about were false, but they were more real than the hopes that rang out in the fleur-de-lys flags those political enthusiasts waved.
One late-summer evening, at one of the new terraces on Saint-Denis Street whose vulgarity Damien deplored, Gabrielle told him that she’d requested an unpaid leave from the university and that she was going to run in a north-end Montreal riding. She had spent her childhood there, still had some useful ties, liked places on the river. The party thought it had a chance there, though they were all aware of the limits to popular support for the idea of sovereignty. She herself wasn’t even sure that she altogether believed in it, she told Damien, but increasingly she preferred meeting with adults more than with students barely out of adolescence. Their hopeless ignorance had come after their insolent ignorance, she was a good enough pedagogue but preferred to exercise her talents on people less impudent and more cheerful, who would address her respectfully. What’s more, like everyone else, Quebec’s sheep-like history turned her stomach. In the universities, it was forgotten. But on the streets of her childhood, how many people still thought that the genuine God, if he spoke to humans, would have done so in English, and that it was incumbent on them to put up with it?
Damien’s expression became intractable before she had finished her third sentence. “You’re crazy. Not only will you lose the election — as will the party — you’ll wreck your own life too. Rumours will spread about your married lover — or lovers. You won’t be able to withstand them. You don’t have the nerves for debate. You can’t write a good speech that’s clear and succinct. Besides, I know the party activists, they won’t even support your nomination.” There was a threat in his voice. On his chubby face small wrinkles were appearing, signs of near old age, unattractive. In a moment, she had grasped everything. That he thought he could hold on to her. That she was merely a cog in the machinery for transmitting his stories to the other man, to the person he wanted to continue interesting through her. That he could see her getting away, leaving the triangle, occupying the stage by herself. She realized that he was the author of the anonymous letter, that he’d wanted to be the bird of ill omen at the beginning of her public life, while playing the role of her lover. One day, at a moment of victory, he would tell all, he would betray her.
And so, with no outside teaching, she absorbed the first rule of her new life: to get the perverts on her side. Instead of appearing wounded, she asked him for advice. At the second cognac, he thought he still had her. His colour came back. And until he became the wreck whose colleagues took over his courses when he was in detox, she treated him as a scout.
Which happened every now and then, when he was in the capital. He came for her in luxurious limousines of a kind the government no longer allowed cabinet ministers, they would go to Serge Bruyère, where nouvelle cuisine offered civet de lapin with a blueberry coulis, they would wash down Damien’s latest fantasies with the finest Pouilly, they’d be seated near tables of Americans, to shield their conversations.
One night of black ice on the maze of highways that run out of the overly old city, he told her that he was going to New York for treatment of a mysterious sickness in his blood. She could only see the red blotches settling into a face that was barely puffy, she pretended to believe him, as usual. He disappeared for six months though and only resurfaced for a brief call to her place at dawn. He was after a job in a French university, he was going to set himself up overseas to reconnect with his origins, a letter of recommendation from a minister of cultural affairs would enhance his file, everyone knows how sensitive the French are to the proper connections. Gabrielle was annoyed. She had learned to be sparing with her signature for fear of abuse by sycophants and most of all, she didn’t want circulating in France, one of the rare countries to befriend her government, proof of her relationship with an individual as disturbed as Damien. And what if there were some basis to his story about a Nazi father? She gained some time by asking for a copy of his c.v. so she could put useful comments into her recommendation. He hung up with promises to send it. She knew that such a document had never existed, Damien’s curriculum vitae existed only in the current of his dreams.
The following week, on a day of thaw and mud all the way to the Parliament, she learned through Marguerite, a mutual friend, that Damien had been found in front of the fireplace in a chalet he’d rented in Sainte-Adèle. He hadn’t paid the rent since December, he was in debt beyond all measure, he had defied his cirrhosis to the point of confusing codeine and cognac, sleep and death. It would be called suicide.
He had left nothing for Gabrielle, neither a message nor anything in his will, because there wasn’t one, the copy of Malraux’s Antimémoires having like everything else taken the road to a secondhand book store. Any sign would have been a gesture of the kind that are invented for novels. But Damien couldn’t have done that, he’d been exhausted.
At the burial — they were maybe a dozen at the Cimetière de l’Est, near the oil refineries, in the shadow of depressing apartment buildings — she saw an old woman who was crying and who looked like Damien. His mother, the only one. She saw a young woman who was crying and who looked like a photo. The Toronto actress, or the American girl, or a new secretary in the sociology department to
whom he had often given flowers. Just one friend, anyway, which Gabrielle no longer was. She had made him incidental to her love and to her work. In the end, she had been more skilled at betrayal than he was.
These were things that she thought about for the first time in the shadow of the so strange presence of Pierre. She touched the railing from which the warmth of the day was withdrawing but which still held the memory of the sun. Since that time the only place in Quebec that upset her was the square of crabgrass where Damien was rotting, where there wasn’t even a tombstone. She’d gone back there often.
Four
IN MOST MONTREAL neighbourhoods they still ring the angelus even though no one hears it. The angel of the Lord does not however descend onto rue des Bouleaux, in Laval, because the apartment buildings there were built on meadows where only yesterday the clinking of cowbells could be heard, far from the villages and their churches. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to put up a house of worship in the vicinity, not even the sects that are beginning to prosper further north, in the folds of the Laurentians. Here, everything is neat and tidy, even inside the residents’ heads; for a long time they’ve been spending Sundays cooking or cleaning, they hope for an easing of Sunday store hours so they can do their shopping before taking in a movie at the mall, it would be more convenient.
Gabrielle knows that it’s noon though when the door of a pearl grey Cadillac that belongs to the sister of a lady on the third floor slams in the visitors’ parking lot. Whenever it’s sunny the two women lunch together on the balcony. Gabrielle’s view of them is from above and too close. They are tanned like the Floridians they become in winter, with backcombed hair of greenish blond, heavy shoulders bare under tank tops meant for teenagers, bodies preserved in a certain age. Look-alikes, maybe twins, though their voices clash. The visitor speaks coarsely, the other woman softly, so what makes its way up to Gabrielle is an odd monologue, one-half of a conversation, like telephone scenes on TV soaps. Most of the time in fact they seem to be chatting about programs they watched the day before, their delivery is not disturbing, it’s the smooth rhythm of a spool, barely broken by the clinking of cutlery.
What’s most remarkable to Gabrielle is the roundness of the scene. They have never cast a curious glance at her own balcony, at the little scandal, within reach of their understanding, that is the presence of Pierre. He doesn’t touch her except in late afternoon, moments of tender and silent fornication that already are starting to feel like the rendezvous of old lovers. But still, he seems settled in and a little too bare, decent ladies could whisper when they see him. But they are absorbed in one another, exchange polite small talk, serve one another juice and water, salads and cakes that are always topped with mounds of ice cream. They don’t laugh, they chat on and on, they’re fond of each other. Around two p.m. the car door slams again, the neighbour doesn’t reappear on the balcony, maybe she uses the afternoon to put together food for the morrow, no detail is superfluous for one who cares about harmony.
“I knew a senator,” says Gabrielle, “who had the very same car.” It was the last of the Cadillacs with any style or presence, the rear end bulging like the cushion of a marchioness, the leather buffed to stir a woman’s sex, the dashboard cut from mahogany like an ocean liner’s, the nose of the hood like a diadem, contemptuous of the ordinary people on the road, those with small engines. The senator of course was tiny, he seemed just rich enough to be appalled by all the rumours and to pray that God would preserve him from louts. One of whom Gabrielle would have been had she not been a woman before being a separatist, a race that he thought he abhorred.
She had met him and seduced him, but chastely, during the first televised debate of the election campaign. Her victory was a foregone conclusion; she was slender and fresh, filled with the grace of the words of the future, dignity being the most powerful, a subtle reminder of the humiliations that were still too frequent and of the immense pleasure to be gained from making Canada stick to its false promises when the time came. Time wasn’t urgent, she said in a voice of velvet, we’ll take what we need to bow out graciously, and while we wait we will better confirm our modernity. Was she not the very image of youth and of the skills hence-forth asserting themselves in French to the four corners of the territory?
The host from the public network favoured her side and the little man, who had become a senator through business, not politics, who was discovering the new situation of women under the spotlights, stammered banalities about the good will of Canadians. Still, he lost the match with elegance and invited her to lunch at the Mas des Oliviers. Out of the dimness, where jurists of all tendencies still drank martinis before their bavette à l’échalote, rose a distinct sound, the sound of the west end of the city, of money duly counted. Men entered in twos and threes, coatless despite the September chill, they would nod in the direction of a table, stop at another, murmur greetings laden with complicity. One could gauge their status from the time it took them to get to their seats and on how long the route was, a geography far more complex than what’s discussed in sociology texts where status is however a seminal notion, one that is measured with the greatest obsessiveness and with instruments that are constantly being refined. There were lawyers who advised investors, lawyers who created numbered companies into which they poured investors’ money, lawyers who served as intermediaries between investors, lawyers who merged investors’ assets and lawyers who’d become investors themselves, by dint of having been there when the bill appeared, the high point of their day. Across from Gabrielle was a man who had used the various categories of lawyers and who was therefore greeted by nearly all of them, except for those newly minted who would have appreciated an introduction. Among these young people a few women formed as did she a bright, nearly damp spot, one of those moist breezes that on the shores of the St. Lawrence announce so certainly the end of summer.
No one in these circles knew her, the program wouldn’t be aired until the following day. They must have thought that the senator, long unattached, was trying to get back in shape. It was the impression he gave in fact, he was attentive, gallant, already tamed. Gabrielle drank white wine, which placed her on the borderline between virginal and brazen, and she was enjoying a filet de doré meunière, a fish that does not fear butter, thus allying sobriety and seduction. She was clearly displaying a sound instinct, including that for pleasing her contradictor by asking him to tell her about the people and the place. He was not as banal as he’d been in the studio, he even sparkled behind his round glasses. To hear him talk, the diners were nearly all cuckolds, and the most fortunate in business were the two tall grey-haired ones at the back, whose recent merger was so perfect that their wives were already sleeping together and were even sharing a well-known actress. Gabrielle discovered that, as well as being a direct route for advancing one’s ideas, politics was the most fascinating of kaleidoscopes.
The senator became one of her amused companions in the other camp, of whom she learned to have many, with no ulterior motive, for the fun of it. It was harmless to spend time with them, to laugh with them, to get in their cars along the Ottawa–Montreal–Quebec City corridor and to inquire about their families or their love lives. After all, the future of Quebec was not a matter of life and death. No one was the enemy and one had to wish for others what they were reluctant to wish for themselves, what they’d be happy to have when the time came. They were getting old, she thought, and they were afraid of the wind. She had the energy to cleave it for them.
Heady weeks that brought her party to victory, contrary to all expectations, by accident. Not once while she cr
isscrossed her future riding, overcoming her jitters before making some speech or other at some meeting or other, even a friendly one, was she really prepared for the wild notion of winning a seat in the National Assembly and for a government that would be hers. For the thought of handing over her course outlines to a replacement, along with the keys to her office, of renting a furnished apartment on rue Sainte-Ursule, of memorizing train and plane schedules along with the names of her new colleagues, all of them as stunned as she was on the night of the victory. The bottom of her heart, that blue place where she formed an island with her lover, felt solemn and emotional. They only needed to work well and the country would be within reach.
She knew Quebec City from reading Adrienne Choquette’s novel Laure Clouet and she remembered the first chapter as clearly as if she herself had been the woman whose youth was in suspense, who on an early September day like this, from a stone house with a fenced-in garden across from the provincial museum “went out, wearing kidskin gloves and a gabardine suit.” It was dove-coloured alpaca, the suit that she wore for the swearing-in, the skirt too tame, her hair too well-coiffed, she was surprised to hear herself say aloud, “So help me God,” when she intended to erase the last sign of God, preventer of all women, from cultural affairs, the ministry entrusted to her.
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