We took the highway home, it was getting late, you weren’t saying much and my role was to chatter about this and that, I was charged with telling those tales that reasonable men want to hear and there’s nothing more reasonable than men like you, who were no longer twenty years old when everything toppled in the land of Quebec. The day was winding down and I was too, I’d had enough of what awaited me. I was on my way to meet Jean-Charles and the limousine, a common Chevrolet full of insipid newspapers and woeful files, and he would drop me off two hours later at a hotel in Victoriaville with mauve and pink carpets where at some meeting or other I would unveil some elements of the future cultural education policy that was still gestating. At the end of the meal I would hear spoons clinking in coffee cups, the sound of the infinite lack of attention that greets our speeches and stands apart from them before they’re delivered, even though these people would have taken umbrage had I refused them my presence. When at length they applaud not my words but the fact that it’s time for a drink or bed, I am still thinking only of you. I call you in my head. The line crackles and burns between us who are never there.
Never weary, like this afternoon in your car — canary yellow for a daytime delinquent. It was my role to tell stories and I concocted them easily. Along highway 440, at the level of what had been Fabreville, stands a series of pink brick buildings with brown roofs, each of which holds around twenty apartments. I pointed out that you never see anyone on the balconies, even when the day is declining and the sky is turning gold, which will surprise only the simpleminded. When you settle here, into what was recently the middle of nowhere, with hay, cows and horses, the sociologist tells you that it’s not so as to gawk at the horizon that’s been stolen from our good farmers, or to hear the lighthearted songs of their swallows, which are well and truly gone. The place has been tamed, the doors merely open onto screens. It’s inside that it is pleasant, in the unvarying light of kitchens and corridors, sheltered from nature’s dirty tricks that make every species prey for another, particularly among the loveliest shadows and the softest sounds.
My presentation had conviction. I was imagining the serenity in every one of those fine and private places along the highway, because no doubt people live there who have suffered pain, whose children have betrayed them, whose villages have been destroyed by bombs in hills that are nonetheless enchanted, who have been stripped of love and even of coitus by something ugly, who have perfected arts that no one wanted. When the television murmurs and the clean sink goes pale under the fluorescent lights, they are untouchable. They achieve peace, whereas I, with my hand on your knee and knowing that I arouse you, my pleasure is too acute, filled with dread. I am already preparing to forbid myself, as always, to have the grief of you.
Then I told you the shocking story of the girl who would move there after a love affair gone sour, who would be still too young. As in Pasolini’s film, she would set fire to all these tidy existences. Before long she would seduce the oldest man, fumble around in his tin trunk, that of a Balkan refugee, only to discover that he was not victim but executioner. She would open up about it to the plump sad woman, abandoned by her descendants, and be surprised to find that she too was on the side of the killers, for she was the wicked stepmother, now forgotten, the one who crammed her twins with rotten food and whose dogs were fawned upon, there had been stories in the newspapers years ago. Then she would attempt to be proven right by an ugly normal woman, one who goes shopping with coupons and cleans her length of corridor herself, to hear her say that children are poison, that she was once a schoolteacher and that the only way to survive is by constantly overcoming the temptation to torture the handsomest of the little men, those future lovers of dolls. And she would buy from the failed artist one of his youthful pieces; with hope revived, he’d go back to his dying.
What would become of this haunted house in the final sequence?
You laughed, it was obvious to you that I was seeing myself as the Pasolinian girl and that this whole hodgepodge was only the desire, a vain and stupid one, to reach some semblance of Italy instead of Victoriaville on a night that was turning to rain. You upbraided me a little for my way of going under protest to see useful people, public service is in your blood and you’d like me to be the same. What you love in me though is the very opposite of the good behaviour you’ve been able to teach me. It’s a talent I have. When you come on my greyhound back you defy and you dance, I’m tenderly well placed to know, it leaves marks on my corolla as they say in erotic novels from the nineteenth century, I could have been a character in one, I have their same lightness.
And so we went, crusaders, on this day when we had nonetheless barely touched. Perverse abstinence. As for those pink brick houses where people go to sleep before the sun, where they construct a kind of peace with sharp angles, where pent-up love can become tolerable, it was on that day that I began to desire them.
Sunlight slanted in, divided the parquet into yellow and grey. The computer lisped its background noise, the day would be watertight. That day, Gabrielle wrote the final instalment, it was what she was there for.
The morning I went to the Morgentaler Clinic, Madeleine came with me. We took a taxi. The fetus wasn’t yours, or so we thought, but that was not the reason for your absence. You loathe hospitals, not so much because of the colour and smell as the shamelessness with which viscera, blood, excrement are treated. You are such a reserved creature.
An abortion clinic has nothing to do with that however, or very little. The curtains are brightly coloured, the reception desk is like one at an inn, the nurses wear the engaging smiles of massage therapists who presently will strip you, unembarrassed.
They took me before they opened, a small act of cowardice that had been recommended by the management secretary, to spare me the curiosity of others. Yet there was nothing scandalous, the procedure hadn’t been illegal for a long time now, thanks notably to some women as well known as me who had signed petitions, declared that they’d all been there. The yellowest press couldn’t have pointed to my presence at Morgentaler’s without creating an immediate mobilization that would have been a rampart for me, and no one would have dared to ask a free, mature and independent woman who the father was. Still, I was grateful for the privilege of such discretion, telling myself in fact that these were things women had fought for.
The officiating physician was young and handsome, I mention that because I noticed, yes, I am frivolous. I remember an instrument at work, grey, metal, cold between my legs, it was hidden by a sky blue sheet but I could see it through the eye that we all have in our vaginas. He explained the vacuum machine to occupy my mind while he was working, and I could indeed hear the tube sucking out the waste matter he was extirpating from me and which he of course didn’t show me. It wasn’t too painful but he did say something very bad: “The mass is significant. You may have been pregnant longer than we estimated.”
If he was right, the child was yours.
It was the accident I’d tried for months to bring on. I’d given up the iud, I’d even bought a soft jersey dress, brick red, a designer model, which I wore too often, for the pleasure of letting my stomach become familiar with its fullness. At the slightest nausea at my desk in the National Assembly, where I often felt that way for various reasons, I would track a bubble rising from my entrails to my head, it bore your son — I never doubted that it would have been a boy, complicated like you but with dark brown eyes like mine because, according to Mendelian law, the gene for brown eyes is dominant. But the tests delivered from pharmacy to pharmacy to Madeleine, who was in on it, were always negative. My red dr
ess, which in fact you didn’t like, was sterile.
Why did I have sex with a stranger after the brief official trip to Italy that I’d extended by three days on the Adriatic for myself ? I was able to tell Madeleine that the weeks had been long without you, that I was exasperated, or desperate, that finally, away from home, I had worked up the courage to anger you by taking the stupidest risk, to sneer at your intelligence, your wisdom and its laws. No, that’s not true, you had nothing to do with it. The man was there for the taking, he was smooth, easy, hot, he made me laugh for forty-eight hours, took me dancing on the sand, humming his song. I have a nomadic body, I always have, you knew that too before you took me, and when I drink I can have the mind of a shop girl who sees herself whirling on the beach with a handsome dark-haired man in the setting sun.
That was why, when a nurse sat me in a deep armchair, wrapped in a warm sheet, and suggested that I rest as she stroked my hand for a moment, I whirled again. I had plenty of sobs, the kind that she, a nice girl with beautiful teeth and golden hair, would soothe again and again, all day long. Mine welled up from nowhere or from my shoulders, a little higher than my heart in any case. I saw myself as the very image of infinite desolation because a thread of blood would be soaked up by the white gauze that parted my legs, what a pity. Madeleine brought me back to the house. My absence was shorter than for a case of bronchitis, the whole thing was uncomplicated.
You came by day after day, for a few minutes or an hour. I’d rarely seen you so often. We engaged in idle chitchat, you kept asking if I needed anything, as if chocolate or tea or a newspaper could make the late afternoons pass. The evening when you decided to rock me, with all the lights out, to murmur that I must get over the black spider dwelling in me, I thought you were about to take me back and that life would be more beautiful, because more solemn than before, like in the song about the lovers, those whose bodies are exultant yet who know that they’re together in a bedroom without a cradle.
The time had come to be more beautiful than before, and under your fingers I was, you left very late, for once. And never came back.
But I am certainly more beautiful than before. There’s light in my little head that has chosen to come here to be illuminated, as if it were a clinic where they kindly extirpate waste matter from you before it builds up.
What I know is that you didn’t leave because of the boy on the shore of the Adriatic. At the moment when I was dancing with him, you were starting to look at other women less innocently and to acquire from me some lightness that may have led you afterwards to the bed of some laughing woman or other. Nor did you leave because of the child, that ball of shadow that disappeared at an age when it’s still possible to have two fathers. You left because I’d lied to you about my desires and the reasons for the red dress, and because I made love to you with ulterior motives, with thoughts that betrayed our luminous noons and that betrayed you.
Is lying exhaustible, like grief? For two years now I’ve been walking in the long labyrinth of my black spider that I’ll finally arrive at, my sister, my friend, who will tell me why I was born dark and deceitful. When I hold her in the palm of my hand — she is here, I saw her yesterday, before the night — you will come back and you’ll take my key. As we will be old, we’ll sleep together all through the night.
While I wait I am alive and I know that you are in the city.
Thus wrote Gabrielle, in vain.
Six
PIERRE COULDN’T HAVE cared less about Gabrielle’s sudden aloofness. The beginning of August is rich with storms, Laval’s malls are made for taking shelter, for stopping the wind, the rain and later on the snow, all those climates he’d hoped to escape for good when he left the North. Surprised that he’d taken months to discover their endless corridors, he never tired of walking on the cold tiles, of breathing the smell of rags that rose from the fast-food restaurants, of hearing children sniffle and fake fountains wheeze. He paid particular attention to the icy store-window dummies that didn’t all resemble one another, regardless of what people think. Though window-dressing fashion dictated headless women, you could distinguish between the sylphlike and the union types from the size of their busts, the angle of the neck, the thickness of the waist, though they all lacked buttocks as did the male dummies in the neighbouring stores, which were insignificant in comparison.
Pierre turned up around noon, wolfed down some chemically fresh doughnuts from the day before washed down with a spruce beer, didn’t touch the soiled and crumpled newspapers on the tables whose screaming headlines would give you a bead on this country. Lightning had killed a golfer, a former cabinet minister had drowned in his pool, the Hells Angels had acquired a historic manor house, an epidemic of caterpillars was ruining the lives of campers in the Laurentians, the explosion of the Chernobyl power station would leave thousands dead there and could contaminate the skies of Canada. But fortunately there were no skies here, where the air was purified by passing through vast wind tunnels whose rumbling could be heard behind the washrooms. Late that afternoon, after the final coffee break for young salesgirls more or less clad in rayon and polyester, whose sour speech he liked listening to, he would hang around the arcade till late at night if he happened to be at the Carrefour Laval.
The blistering hot levers on the machines created mauve and silver movements for the season’s most hopeless young males. With his belly pressed against some electronic tomb where sparks made love to mermaids, to Ferraris, to gold ingots or vanishing horizons, Pierre thought more clearly about Gabrielle, about the cloying whiteness of her walls, her hips, her breasts. She was a store dummy with a head, burdened with eyes that diminished him. That wanted to take something from him. Free game. His cock at rest, he reddened his palms against glass and metal and discovered that he was happier.
One Wednesday around six o’clock there was a power failure. In the darkness pierced by the glimmer of exit signs, the young men tossed off curses that sounded, after so much noise, like silence. After lashing out at the flanks of some dead machines, they began to scatter. A tall man with very curly grey hair, whom Pierre hadn’t noticed but who was perhaps the arcade manager, went out with them, offered cigarettes to those who were lingering around one of the entrances to the mall. An unfamiliar sun was showing through the final curtain of rain at the very back of the parking lot. The grey-haired man invited three or four of the young men to board his luxury van, a black Yukon with two rows of seats, they would go to St. Catherine Street West, power failures usually spare the downtown area and besides going to the arcades, they could spend some time in the dens of the triple-X dancers upstairs. Pierre followed him. In the spreading rosy dusk he thought the man’s features were a little delicate for a connoisseur of dancers. But there was beer in the trunk, which might help him overcome his reserve and drop a few bits of sentences here and there into the string of expletives that served as the young men’s reaction to the unexpected as they travelled towards adventure. On the other side of the Viau bridge, the north end of Montreal was as deserted as Laval, they spattered only the void, though there were lights on behind the blinds and fences. Even so, they shuddered a little in their damp T-shirts, as they went directly inside the Cabaret du Sexe.
They all duly went for a piss, then the grey-haired man, insisting that they call him Jérôme, flopped down next to Pierre on a sofa recently covered in leatherette. The dancers were taking a break, except one little brunette with round thighs, uncomfortable in an overly tight G-string. Facing the back of the stage she swayed her hips, spreading the cheeks of her ass with her hands, as if it were an obscene gesture. To believe that
, she’d have to be a student of literature. Jérôme took a notebook from one of the big pockets of his safari shirt and began to draw. Pierre thought it was the outline of the girl but he saw that it was the profile of the brothel red lamp that only lit the arm of the sofa. Jérôme finally turned towards him.
“Your hair’s a weird colour.”
“Yes.”
“Is it dyed?”
“No, natural.”
“So your parents aren’t from around here.”
“Around here, somewhere else, what difference does it make to you?”
“I study men, it’s what I do.”
He fell silent. Three long-haired dancers, clearly well aware of the ways of masculine concupiscence, were offering themselves in full frontal view, breasts swaying to a blues number, eyes smiling at the young men’s flies and then, without actually doing anything, miming some lesbian foreplay. To really warm the place up though they’d have needed more customers. After twenty minutes, the scene ended with the propriety of an old video and the little brunette substitute came back on duty. Pierre was sure that now Jérôme was going to touch his arm or his thigh, unless instead he slipped a hand into his fawn-coloured hair, the way his mother’s logger clients used to do in the last camps of the North, wrecks who would have fucked a muskrat if they could, who jerked off while they groped at the underpants of a child. Jérôme’s face was blank like theirs just then, but he gave Pierre a shove and got up. “I’m hungry. Want to come to Ben’s?” They left behind the others who had shed their embarrassment among themselves and now were chuckling about cunts.
Over a smoked-meat sandwich oozing orange mustard, in the most brightly lit restaurant in town, Jérôme asked his permission to take some notes on the origin of his fawn-coloured hair — a cross between the acerbic blonde of a Corrine of the miners’ taverns and the mahogany mane of an Italian moaning for the sun he’d left behind. Jérôme recorded the bits that the boy dropped parsimoniously. Pierre didn’t know if the ashes of his father, a suicide, had gone back to Sicily or to whom they would have been sent. He didn’t know where Corrine was since she’d recycled herself as a cook in hunting and fishing camps for Americans. Surely she didn’t sleep around any more but who could say? She was in her fifties now at most and would no longer be the object of such close attention from men getting drunk in the new-style lodges with their pathetic clientele of nouveaux riches. Pierre recalled Marie as being merely a temporary guardian. “She comes from up north, she’s a friend of my mother’s, she left her husband there, an immigrant with no ambition. She’s a teacher here. And she’s in mourning for her lover, a well-known man who wrote books about art.” Jérôme tried briefly to learn more, but in vain. The alcohol of Laval and the cabaret had dispersed, the ceiling lights at Ben’s were becoming stage lights, the coffee had cooled down at the first sip.
Appropriate Place Page 6