In the Yukon that brought Pierre back to rue des Bouleaux, Jérôme explained his vehicle and his grey notebooks through his profession — he was a retired anthropologist, now itinerant. He claimed he was collecting data on unsuccessful crosses between the peoples who meet here, in this land of immigration, whereas most of his colleagues, those who published, were more interested in demonstrating the new vitality that comes from interbreeding. Their research was better regarded and above all, better funded. A great part of the truth, and of their errors, could be seen by observing nude dancers, the most easily observable human beings, which was why Jérôme came to watch them regularly. “Remember the little brunette, the chubby one who was so self-conscious in her G-string? Just looking at her I know that her mother must be Huron or Iroquois and her father of old French stock, from a bad lineage, all of them poor half-wits. That gives you an intellect stuffed with confused connections, with some fine savage instincts but an even stronger atavistic predisposition to submissiveness. It also produces a very tough physical type, with solid flesh and short limbs. Natural survivors, yes, but confused inside their heads, with a gift for perpetual hesitation, for non-existence. It seems to me that most of our interbreeding leads to individuals like that, I call them subtractions. Other researchers, the ones who speak, see them as additions. It might be different in another country where desires may trigger passions, forge characters with those mixtures, I don’t really know.”
They were approaching the island of Laval. “You,” Jérôme added, “you could have been a wild animal.” But in profile under the suburban street lamps, Pierre resembled at most a stubborn fox, a sly little animal for whom even rabies isn’t fatal in these regions. Then the man began to laugh, barely audibly. From a distance, from more than forty years, suddenly came to his ears the first notes of Peter and the Wolf, the Prokofiev record that had been played so often in the luxurious house of his childhood. He no longer recalled the end of the story but all at once he understood that the words of the tale, quietly recounted to the horror music, had resulted in the destruction of terror in some pampered children. From the dark forests where the wolf gorges on blood should have risen the smell of crime, the sweat and excrement of torture victims, the gas from decaying carcasses. And from that stinking mist, after the dumb death rattle of the slain, the true sound of death — that of the killer licking his chops — should have ascended. The Russian steppes still know something about that, about those dawns when the tyrant goes to bed sated while his clones aim at the cities, in their offices that stand in for watchtowers.
But what was he afraid of, this boy falling silent at his side, settled into the costly cushions, taken into streets purged of all vermin? At most, the rutting of another male, or even his mere insistence on conversing, as if prying out a few words were a form of rape. His night, which in that respect resembled the nights in all the apartment buildings lined up in their inconsequential sleep, was not weighted with any other threat, no dogs were out. Yet fear was on the prowl in the cabin.
Jérôme fed a cassette of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater into the tape deck, the truck was filled with the luminous voices, and Pierre had only to get out quietly, cooled down, at the door to the big pink brick cage where he was spending the summer. At least he was walking upright, his shoulders square. Jérôme had a fairly accurate idea of the mother, a bare-armed woman who surely didn’t bend beneath men, the kind who would have screwed them in broad daylight. The father was a bigger puzzle. After all, he had begotten this duplicitous youth who, like so many who hung around the arcades, was lazy only when it came to thinking. The fraudulent youth could also be the wolf who’s waiting for his moment. This Peter, Pierre, is the wolf. Jérôme promised himself that he’d track down the Prokofiev record, no doubt its stupefying version had been reissued a thousand times, and went off to his ranch in Saint-Lazare to transcribe his notes into the database that he would never submit for publication. In any event, if he were to do that he’d have had to pursue his investigation a little further.
It was midnight, that is to say very late inside the pink brick cage, when Pierre stepped inside Marie’s apartment, still excited from the choral singing. The lights were all still on in the apartment, which was laid out exactly like Gabrielle’s but far less carefully designed. A few pieces of antique furniture, a French-inspired armoire, a near-refectory table, two brass standing lamps with jigsawed brass bases, had been flung among square armchairs, plain carpets and a few paintings. The only works of art, prints by Francine Simonin with broad streaks, soaring or fixed in mauve and yellow, still waited to be hung. There were a few plates on the serving hatch to the kitchen, that was unusual, and the TV set was spitting out a black-and-white film that from a distance sounded like a war movie, which was not at all like Marie.
The door to her bedroom was open, in fact she never closed it. He heard her moving around. He stood in the doorway, surprised. She was filling two big suitcases that he’d never seen. One, already packed, seemed to overflow with lightweight clothing. In the other, a jumble of papers and books was piling up.
She greeted him with a preoccupied smile. “I decided to make some headway with my preparations while I waited for you. I’m leaving on Saturday for a few months.” She was going overseas to teach and he could stay in the apartment, in fact she preferred to entrust it to him.
She talked to him a little about her next place, Ethiopia, as if it were the next town, while she went on bustling about. He watched her moving to the sound of gunfire from the living room. Her fine hair pulled back roughly into a ponytail, held by a blue elastic. Her fingers, almost too thin, the polish on the nails with golden accents. A red dress that fell straight, with no waist, over hips not as slim as the ass. The bare feet that maintained the arch of the high-heeled sandals she inflicted on herself all summer. The beauty spot, hairy perhaps, that marked her left cheek and held the night on her face, the face of a woman with light brown hair he had never dared to discover from up close and who would escape him.
It never crossed his mind to touch her or to push her down as he had Gabrielle. He found her strange now, suddenly distinct from the vaguely concerned and smiling figure she’d always been to him. According to his mother, who scowled as she recounted these events, Marie had wanted to abduct him when he was a child. She had coveted him, quenched his thirst with the finest milks and soothed his fever, and Corrine had had to go away to disengage Pierre from such unwholesome suffocation. According to Corrine at any rate, and it didn’t make much sense because in her wandering, she seemed always burdened with her son and was prompt to chuck him for hours to anyone who would take him. When he had reconnected with Marie, she’d shown no sign of coveting him, but it was true that she tended to want him better fed, to slake his thirst incessantly, to protect him from the sun. “You burn enough as it is,” she would say, a remark he didn’t try to understand. So the reason she’d let him wander since the beginning of summer was that she was preparing to abandon him, he guessed, and he was surprised at the capacity for lying in a woman who’d seemed unlike the others.
It was really late; she ordered him to go to sleep, in the schoolmistress-y voice that she sometimes used and that he’d be glad to get away from.
The next two days were idiotic. She had to arrange with the bank to issue drafts for the mortgage payments in her absence, get the long list of over-the-counter drugs and sunscreens she assumed she wouldn’t find in Ethiopia, fill out medical insurance forms in the event of accident or repatriation, meet the nervous beginner who would replace her in a class of the emotionally challenged in the fall, and make su
re that Pierre was registered in a nearby college where she’d managed to have him admitted despite his borderline grades. There was also Fatima to be mollified, who had, in her other language but quite clearly, cursed the news that this trouble-free occupant was going away and that a teenager who she sensed was filled with glowing embers would be camping in her stead.
Pierre had at least instinctively grasped the way to co-operate. With Virginia, he established the peace of orphans. He took her to the corner store for ice cream while the women talked, and he spoke American to her, repeating the syllables of the summer’s hit parade. He understood practically nothing of the words in these songs about excited bodies, about swelling sex, and Virginia was too young to go there. Besides, without music Pierre had the wrong accent and knew even less what he was saying. It was Thursday. The next day, Virginia was still clinging to his legs when he helped Fatima bring in the garbage cans, as Marie had suggested, and near the fence at the water’s edge he gave her a silent botany lesson. On a few square centimetres of lawn he showed her ten kinds of weeds and even more, the pleasure to be had from pulling them, digging to the root with a fingernail, through the damp-crusted dusty surface where the grass clung, from which it drew its yellow-green by sucking up the black. The little girl’s laugh was shrill and long as she scraped at the soil with fingers already darkened.
Strange that Fatima should leave her with this boy who could have abused her, there was abundant talk about such things in the cities, about the threats against little girls who were regularly found deflowered, their throats slit, always in the vicinity of water, because Montreal is an island, with countless creeks in its suburbs for committing evil.
On Saturday, Marie’s departure was set for 7:40 p.m., like most transatlantic flights. She would stop over in Frankfurt, then leave at dawn for Addis Ababa, there wasn’t even one full day of transit between rue des Bouleaux and the Hilton where all foreigners who were interested in their safety stayed.
Pierre was surprised that Marie wanted him at the airport, true, he was the person closest to her, of her women friends he only knew a few and they were married, abstracted, casual. It was also true that her suitcases were heavy. He felt very sure of himself as he drove the Ford Capri, an old fake sports model that she was fond of and was leaving with him for its last few usable months. He liked the corridors at Mirabel, packed with people, yet deserted. He found a thousand shades of grey there, crossed by the yellow plastic counters that took away any urge to cry. The restaurants, constantly being remodelled, sputtered with the sounds of work and gave off no odour. Yet beneath the high ceilings there was something like pure air that could go to your head. Freedom without the skies, it can exist.
For the first time in three days, Marie talked about her destination. She was going to train teachers who would go on to train others in that vast country with its hundreds of ethnic groups, its fifty million humans, to which it had taken war to bring a handful of roads but where schools were plentiful, more so than anywhere else in Africa. Since the dawn of time they had been a people of books, but there were concerns that only the culture inherited from parchment was being handed down, now they must add English and the training of masters with an aptitude for teaching it. Her knowledge of English was good, coming as she did from a border region where you couldn’t survive without first hearing, then speaking it. She had even now and then escaped entirely into that language, where dreams were without depth or danger.
And then, Ethiopia was Abyssinia. She had always assured her lover, the François who had died and whom she wanted to convince of her ability to live without him, that it was her own, Marie’s, desire to make her way to Abyssinia. He mocked her, did François, he didn’t believe her, he’d come across so many poets whose impotence festered on the routes that Rimbaud had taken, he warned her about all the pilgrimage clichés. But Rimbaud had nothing to do with this journey, which had started thirty years before with a children’s book she had later lost. It was about King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, shown in an illustration lying under a tree whose name seemed familiar to her.
“From Abitibi to Abyssinia,” she concluded as she swallowed the last sip of bad cappuccino. The scenario was stupid but according to her, the absurd was an interesting bulwark against the temptations of misfortune, which for some time had been brushing against her.
He thought he understood and so became mature. Framed by sleigh bells, the voice of Noël-Christmas announcing departures had just summoned the Air Canada passengers en route to Frankfurt. Near the frosted wall that concealed the security control, they were supposed to kiss. They embraced. He was a head taller and could press her whole body against his, from shoulder blade to thighs. He had a violent erection against Marie’s belly. He stirred her, she caught fire, he’d done it. On his own he pulled away, her back was already turned. He was free now, and angry.
Seven
THE BLOND LABRADOR that belongs to the Canadian ambassador to Ethiopia, the Sudan and Somalia, is panting, flopped beside the indoor fountain that gives the fortified residence an unexpected grace. Between Oscar’s paws rolls a grey bone, normally forbidden on the straw carpet that matches so well the light that has finally come back to the late-September sky after a more than usually vicious monsoon. But Oscar’s mistress and the children are on holiday with her family in Jonquière — statutory advantage in a posting classified as difficult. In front of the tablecloth that would be immaculate were it not for the trace of blueberry coulis on angel food cake he’s just been served, the diplomat lights a cigarette, it’s allowed in the garden.
He thinks he can recall the still-young woman who will occupy his entire afternoon at the chancery. Her personal effects have to be sorted, by his secretary as much as possible, it’s more discreet to have another woman deal with what might be intimate objects. Communicate with Ottawa about repatriating the body and most important, find out how to get in touch with her family. Who knows if the satellite phone will be working today? And more, who knows if she even has a family? Because if she was the aid worker in a red dress that fell straight over her hips but was slit fairly high on her left thigh — he has served under a dozen sunny latitudes and flatters himself that he can spot the thousand ways of baring flesh — a woman he met at the home of his American counterpart at the beginning of the month, this will be a difficult case.
He who so loved the country, to the point of staying behind when his family fled to Quebec during the summer rainy season, had exaggerated its baleful effects, to warn her. Of course he understood her boredom with Addis Ababa, a city that was dead day and night by order of the tyrant whose sinister image dominated public places, guarded by henchmen in Mao-collared grey jackets. She’d had enough of the Hilton’s discos where the international famine workers took turns having a short break from the shorn land in the north, from the hospitals where they saw children about to die, unable even to swallow, from the tents where they saw others being born, deformed for life, from the adult eyes burned by humiliation that no water could wash away, and from the rumbling of war, booming, sated, through this decay. Evenings, they savoured fresh pasta at the Italian restaurant downtown, going there in procession for fear of more or less recognized cutthroats, or made do with the hotel’s American meals before getting together with the gorgeous prostitutes tolerated by the regime, the most beautiful Semites on earth. For foreign currency, these women were prepared to embrace any of the awkward bighearted leftists recruited on other continents by their churches, most of them Protestant and prudish.
It wouldn’t be the first time, he’d told the woman with the insolent eyes, that yo
ung men would lose their innocence during a journey of sanctification, he’d known many of his own generation who had left their virginity behind at Jeunesse étudiante catholique summer camps. But she showed no interest in observing such an ordinary phenomenon and she was weary of her vain searches in Addis for some cultural signs of the ancient land for which she’d prepared herself. The tyrant had purged the city, muzzled historians and musicians, even banished embroidered cottons from the markets where local crafts had been replaced by plastic utensils imported from China. She was not a famine worker, she was part of a pilot teacher-training project set up by CARE USA, tolerated for reasons of currency and the need, even in a communist country, to master international English, the kind that was heard around the oh-so-prosperous hotel pool and tennis court. Some new form of extortion or some whim on the part of the men in grey had postponed the start of the CARE program till the beginning of October, and she wanted to get out of Addis, something the ambassador had strongly advised against, even if what she had in mind was mainly the Abyssinian plateaus, which war and famine had spared. The entire territory was nevertheless crisscrossed by foreigners in the pay of the tyrant’s allies, or spies in the service of his enemies in nearby Eritrea, he had told her, and everywhere, the poverty was so sordid that the safety of tourists could not be guaranteed, not even among a people recognized for their integrity and gentleness. In the rare villages petty gangsters were now beginning to lay down the law.
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