The ministry building, tall and grey on the Grande Allée, overlooked what had been the world of Laure Clouet, and during the few weeks when she was still anonymous, Gabrielle liked to walk there, filled with the old silence that seeped from the homes. Deserted by the good burghers and transformed into restaurants with atmosphere, in the morning they possessed the haughty blindness that made Quebec the most Pharisaic of cities with class, slower than any other in America to uncorset its daughters and to demand fewer lies of its sons. Gabrielle, who was preparing to bring together the best minds of the province to write the most audacious and the most complete proposals for cultural policy, inhaled the last residues of the constraints that she would disperse, smiled at still-unknown bureaucrats, had few doubts and, unlike Laure Clouet, didn’t wear gloves.
At least not until the December winds, they were vicious and laden with all the revenge of the ancestors. The mood turned grey then, even in the trains that week after week took her back to Montreal. The Saturday arts sections, while more tolerant of her than of her predecessors, were already finding plenty to fault in her policy outlines, mocking their ambitiousness for such a small people. The writers thought their chatter was harmless enough, but it weighed heavily in the government’s faint understanding of anything cultural.
It took less than six months for the area in front of 225 de la Grande Allée Est and the side entrance to the Parliament to erase Quebec City’s charm. She no longer saw the beauty of the stones, she travelled past the fortifications in a limousine, liked only the bridges across the St. Lawrence. She enjoyed some success, particularly at the beginning. She had an instinct for maintaining equidistance between heritage preservation and support for the avant-garde, though she had little time to read, or to understand where she was heading.
On the eve of a federal-provincial conference she was happy to meet up with the senator in Ottawa. In his discreet pied-à-terre on the tenth floor of a tower on Metcalfe Street, he was as anonymous as the Quebec minister of cultural affairs, who was surprised to find agreeable and teasing the notion of a transgression on federalist turf. Time would weigh less heavily up there. Champagne, smoked salmon, Russian bread, even caviar obtained from who knows what embassy: he had prepared well for the pause.
His name was Champfleur, a ridiculous one for a man reputed to be grim, though he did have a silky way of shaking hands. He settled her — deliberately, it seemed to her — in the voltaire chair with too many studs that sat next to his enormous library, the kind that seems to have been purchased by the metre by parvenus. But she was wrong to think that. While he was attending to his platters, she saw that what he had assembled there was a sizeable collection of the world’s poetry, meticulously bound, ordered, filed in our two original or translated languages. Nothing else.
She asked the most idiotic of questions.
“Have you read them all?”
There was irritation in his smile. “I tell ladies, or young ladies, that I have no more need to read all these books than they need to wear all their jewels.”
But he soon took pity. “Anyway, I see that you wear very few.” It would have taken more kindly remarks to mitigate Gabrielle’s feelings of inadequacy, she who had come to cultural affairs without knowing personally a single poet, much less an entire opus, except for bits that had been made into songs. As for the troubadours of the land who celebrated its powerful panoramas and assigned its animal might to its men, she kept them to one side. Sociology makes one invulnerable to collective illusions, to anthropomorphic drift, even if it’s carried along by the most beautiful music. If she believed in the rebirth of Quebec it was through other forms of progress than those that accompany grand sentiments.
While he was pouring inexhaustible champagne and teaching her how cream and black bread together had been setting off sturgeon eggs since the time when French singers were at once rending and refining Russian hearts, Étienne Champfleur talked to her about the importance of poetry, of which he read very little.
“My walls are cushioned with words. I have close at hand when I need it all the ways, brilliant or naive, to express all the states of mind and body of a lifetime, and several lifetimes wouldn’t be enough. They are there, I’m sure of it, they have existed and sometimes still exist, in other places. I like owning them, the way others amass great wines that they don’t drink. Besides, we couldn’t taste them. We have had the misfortune, you and I, to be born into a world immunized against tragedy. Here, all of us can consummate our loves before we lose them, which makes the loss less painful, and we die from accident or disease, at a normal age most of the time. Horrors are rare, we experience them by proxy. I will even tell you that you’re right to steer clear of our poets, their greatest tragedy is not to have one, and to use words like forceps to bring them into being. They lack agitation, cruelty, they have nothing to do with them. I’ve classified them separately, with their calculated sadness. I’ll change my mind, I’ll follow you when just one of them is overjoyed with our mediocrity, with being the Job of our own dung heap.”
He fell silent. She didn’t really understand. The champagne blunted her attention, and while she thought she’d understood a warning against strong emotions, she was suddenly very unhappy, or allowed herself to become so at this time of night, so far from everything she thought she hoped for. She was not yet forty years old, her body was a minor parenthesis in her lover’s life, poetry was a wall in a strange house, in a stubborn city. Power was beginning to please her and she knew that that was bad. Tomorrow, others would compose for her statements as hollow as those of her adolescence, and she would enjoy the press conference game. How could she hate herself more than that? By knowing, like our poets, that you don’t kill yourself over such a thing. That there would never be enough pain in the entire lifetime of a bus driver’s daughter, now a cabinet minister, for her to die of it.
She drank far too much and cried just as much, in the dim light of a little man who didn’t even hold her hand. He was content to become the bespectacled senator again, who, to help Gabrielle regain her composure around midnight, the hour when she should go back to the Château Laurier if she wanted to arrive at the conference centre a little fresh, inquired about her new life in the other capital, amused at the similarities between the vanities of the two parliaments, told her that a few days earlier he’d overheard a conversation over Sauternes and foie gras at Café Burger in Hull, between the Montreal president of a major bank and the federal finance minister; they’d been assessing the effect on separatist feelings of a threat to move the head office of the institution that had been established in Quebec at the turn of the twentieth century. “Their minds may be twisted,” the senator agreed, “but they have a better hand than you do.” While she waited for an Ottawa taxi, a rarity at night in this well-behaved little town, Gabrielle caught herself debating with some brio.
The federal–provincial conference had as usual left no perceptible public trace except some awkwardness between Gabrielle Perron and Étienne Champfleur. They saw one another now and then, on the neutral ground of restaurants, and they stuck to parliamentary gossip. The senator was useful to Gabrielle all the same, with what he gleaned from remarks in the federal capital, which had been throbbing with nerves since the separatists had come to power. Some said they were in the service of a foreign power, it was known through the Canadian mistresses of French diplomats, others claimed to be taking part in highly intelligent meetings to prepare for infiltrating enemy ranks in the very heart of the Quebec capital. Rue d’Auteuil would soon be bristling with microphones, the senator said, amused. She repeated little
of this nonsense to her colleagues, who wouldn’t have appreciated her relationship with a man who belonged to money and Canada.
Their last meeting took place in Quebec City in the fall, at the Closerie des Lilas, which was to the Upper Town what the Mas des Oliviers was to the centre of Montreal, with the addition of some senior government officials. Thin, emaciated almost, Champfleur alluded to the doctor he’d come to consult, one of the leading Canadian specialists in prostate disorders. It was no longer fitting to smile at it, to imagine that in another life, before the Cadillac, the little man could have been a charming, lanky lover, one of those who can hold back their pleasure for hours, probe a girl so thoroughly and gently that she is only a sex, afterwards taking his in her mouth, grateful. He was the father of three sons, all in business and scattered to other provinces, he rarely had anything to say about them, or about their mother who early on had flown off to New York with someone richer and less intelligent than he was.
At the Closerie he drank only water, and that had limited confidences. She asked Jean-Charles to drive him to the airport, she was in a hurry, she’d go back to the ministry by taxi, to prepare for the public hearings that had finally been called to study her cultural policy. The worst of the winds made her take her leave very quickly, she had on thin shoes and the sidewalk was icy.
Two months later she heard of his death on the radio and though she was in Montreal on the day of the funeral, she didn’t put in an appearance at the Saint-Jean-Baptiste church, the false cathedral of Plateau-Mont-Royal, where he had been born, son of a storekeeper. From the death notice in Le Devoir she learned that he’d also had a daughter, Gabrielle, a teacher and poet, dead at thirty. But she hadn’t had time to go and greet an entourage now indifferent, the man had been such a loner. The party caucus was shut away for two days in a downtown hotel, a kind of meditation before the upcoming battle of the referendum on sovereignty; it was unthinkable for the minister of cultural affairs, who was being counted on to rally the artistic community and to find words for the most memorable slogans, to turn up, out of place, at a gathering, even an obscure one, of opponents.
She didn’t even know in which cemetery he had been buried. She thought that now she had plenty of time to make inquires, to place a rose on his grave or even, if it wasn’t too late in the summer, to plant a perennial. After all, the match between them was a tie — nothing they had debated had reached a conclusion, twisted minds on all sides had manipulated the fearful, who held the fate of the world in their dried-up brains and constantly postponed deciding what it was until the morrow. It was indeed impossible for the poets to extricate any images from this limbo, the only truly lasting inheritance of the catechism. They were no more inspiring than the junkyards that the country was full of, which were beginning to be recycled into flea markets.
What had become of his library? He’d had the intelligence, or the pity, to bequeath it to someone other than Gabrielle, or to the National Library of Canada, which prided itself on assembling a world-class compilation but whose poetry collection, save for the required legal deposit in our two languages, was until then very limited. Few would note it because few had complained.
Five
A FIRE IS AN EVENT far less spectacular today than it was during Gabrielle’s childhood, when there were regular conflagrations, winter and summer, with the tremendous noise of blazes swallowing up the possessions of large families and sometimes one of the children, who would be found under his little iron bed, burned to death. The entire school would then file past the gilt-handled ivory coffin that would take the dead child to paradise. Long after the firemen had left, the bowels of the kitchen could still be made out, with walls where hung, miraculously, a holy picture or a calendar. And over the following days, the victims had time to force their way cautiously to the cellar, where they would recover the useless objects relegated there. If it was January, the month most conducive to overheating, the place would be devastated until spring, and the dead child’s soul would remain frozen in the vicinity — an object lesson for young smokers of the cigarettes to which many of these disasters were attributed, to the unrelenting shame of their parents who often had to resign themselves to fleeing to other neighbourhoods.
There was nothing like that in the new suburbs. If the fire had been caused by smoking, as might have been the case in a neighbouring house that night, it was easily contained thanks to the fire-retardant materials used nowadays for sofas and mattresses; it was very rare now for a bed to become a child’s tomb. And in the event of more serious negligence — cooking fat catching fire or the improper use of some electrical appliance — the flames rarely went beyond the inside walls, stopped by the increasingly effec-tive firewalls required by law. Television still showed the occasional sequence of a carnage that had decimated a family, but they nearly always took place in the country, to people who were not only impoverished and poorly housed, but also careless. In Laval, in a neighbourhood such as rue des Bouleaux, people had at most been wakened by sirens around three a.m. Only two homes had been briefly evacuated and in less than a week the traces of soot were gone from around the ground-floor windows. All that remained of the tragedy — for it was one, it was learned that it had been a deliberate act of vengeance by a teenager forbidden to see her boyfriend — was the ongoing traffic of service vehicles: cleaners, carpenters, carpet layers, electricians. The young girl, whom Gabrielle couldn’t recall having met on the street where people got around mainly by car, would disappear after having existed for a moment, the responsibility now of social services, as it happens the realm of an excellent minister.
Still, the weather was waxen all around, despite the sun that had been very active on the roofs of Montreal since dawn. It was as if it was unable to cross the river, bluish like old veins and dozing now before it had even taken notice of the day. A fine dust had settled onto the balcony furniture, Gabrielle had had to close all the windows to protect herself from it, and she’d had to eat breakfast in her kitchen. When Pierre burst in around ten o’clock, despite the air conditioning it was as if one were breathing inside an enclosure and Gabrielle had no desire for him or his work or anything else.
He’d gone prowling around the area of the fire, as she’d have done too at his age, no doubt. He brought back the first bits of news.
“Apparently she’s pregnant and the guy wanted to marry her.”
“So what was the problem?”
“He’s Pakistani or Jamaican, nobody knows which, and the girl’s parents didn’t want to know, apparently they even forced her to have an abortion.”
“Nice people.”
Pierre poured the coffee. He was starting to take root.
“I know where they’re coming from. My mother was always telling me she should have got rid of me because I was the result of some Italian passing through and she’d loved him, which wasn’t a good recipe for making a kid. Now it’s killing her and I don’t want to go back there.”
Gabrielle held back her clichés. It was the longest meaningful sentence about his background that he’d uttered in the few weeks he had been coming to her place, something welled up from it that was like a threat to what she’d thought was his tranquility, there was a difference between initiating a young male and getting to know his demons.
She sent him away on the pretext that he couldn’t go on painting with the windows closed, she had errands to do and would perhaps even go to a nursery in the Laurentians that specialized in ivy, where she might find a way to plant her balcony. But after he left she didn’t move. She suddenly cared about the moment of which she had just robbed him. There was
a story that would live only in her, on this morning of ashes. The fire at 10,009 rue des Bouleaux was opportune, it was time for it to happen, for life to start resembling what she had hoped for when she settled into this apartment, under lock and key.
She turned on her computer, went through the disorganized files on her hard disk, found the letters that she’d never sent to her lover because he would have burned them, not out of malice but because he had no safe place to keep them. In fact they weren’t love letters, because at the time, she could love him with real words, when they lay down in the middle of the day and “I love you” meant absolutely that: that they were in love with one another. To write it was superfluous, though she had now and then, in short, breathless, disposable notes.
She found the one from the highway, the last one. She had written it back in Quebec City, after one of those afternoons stolen from the university by him, from the government by her, they happened then only once a month or so and sometimes the interval was as long as six or seven weeks, making her wonder if they were still lovers.
Especially as they weren’t always, he couldn’t bear the thought of sleazy motels where the lingering odours of other anxious couples, most of them smokers, assailed him. They would talk in the car, then, sitting close but barely touching, a caress on the neck could last an hour, awakening a commotion in her belly, it had been genuine desire, and it always comes, how amazing.
They’d had lunch in Saint-Sauveur, in what thought of itself as a bistro because of wine and blanquettes. They had not set foot inside the art gallery; now that she was the minister responsible for that sort of place, she could no longer visit them without attracting sycophants or whiners, without people tracking her reactions or counting up their acquisitions, it was the same in bookstores where she no longer even dared to buy the English women novelists that were such a fine distraction from dreary late evenings in Quebec City.
Appropriate Place Page 5