Appropriate Place

by Lise Bissonnette

  There was no question then of exile, never did I sense in them the slightest nostalgia for the people and things of which the bards then beginning to crisscross Quebec were declaring the sublime neo-French beauty. Cap Diamant, the Île d’Orléans, the giants who had slept there and who apparently were waking now to prepare for independence — the entire past strand of a present that was becoming glorious seemed to have left them indifferent. And even less was it a question of a sin having led to banishment. They and their friends along the St. Lawrence had inscribed on their brows the serenity of the innocent. They were careful not to sound off too much against sinners, my mother so feared carnal knowledge that even a reference to it for the purpose of condemnation struck her as perilous. With every fibre of my being, which derives from theirs for better and even more for worse, I’m certain that they hadn’t tripped up before marriage.

  Anyway, the forbidden fruit didn’t tempt me. We ate apples very rarely, they came from Ontario by train, there were brown spots on their skin, anyone who likes that fruit is foreign to me, they make me want to vomit. Consequently, the metaphor of the apple eaten by the couple — invented to symbolize the cunnilingus and fellatio Adam and Eve discovered with delight — could have launched me on the trail of an ordeal of metaphysical dimensions, the deprivation of orgasm because of an urge to puke springs from prohibitions all religions have invented. But I wasn’t really philosophical, at home we didn’t have even a hint of a conversation that might have forged a link between the taste of the fruit and the meaning of life.

  I have a clearer memory of garter snakes, descendants of the Serpent. They were all over, zigzagging through the patches of wild blueberries. They’re short, garter snakes, and so small that you can’t even see their venomless sting. They are their ancestors’ lovely bastards, able to wrap themselves around an oak, they have adapted, they live in groves of aspen born from the ruins of burned spruce forests. They are exactly the colour of the peacocks in Mexico, but that’s not well known because they are reluctant to let themselves be seen in the sun. If I wasn’t with my sister, who would cry out at the sight of one, I was sometimes able to observe them. I spied one that was writhing on some moss, in pleasure or agony. How I envied it! I have retained of it at most some suggestion in my belly that came back to me, like the glimmer of a lightbulb, at the point when I was becoming interested in the earthly paradise that it took me a long time however to locate.

  Through I know not what penchant for contradiction, something a number of those educated by the nuns are familiar with, I preferred Cain to his brother, Abel, though the pages of the Old Testament attribute to him, with no extenuating circumstances, all the miseries of the world through the ages. Today, thanks to the bits and pieces of psychology I’ve studied, it’s easier for me to grasp the mechanisms of my adolescent reasoning. Then, I was only recently pubescent but I was one of those who were bleak, small, shy, with the creases of my childish folds inadequately smoothed. In class I rubbed shoulders with a few girls who were rich and beautiful, tall and cheerful, whose appearance matched, feature by feature, the heroines in the sagas in the Veillées des chaumières, those magazines for silly girls of which some French publisher dumped his surplus in the log cabins of Canada. It was obvious, clear, unquestionable that had an Abel existed, he would have been reserved for those girls, because he’d have had every virtue and a boy who has every virtue doesn’t need to go fishing among the bleak to find love. He only has to choose the nicest one from the sirens placed at his disposal by their wealthy and pleasing parents. And some of them are nice, despite the reputation they’ve acquired for being idiots.

  Unattainable, impossible — the Abels become abhorrent to girls with no assets. Cain, on the other hand, might well exist in their lives. Not only has he too been tested by envy, but also his murderer’s destiny is more interesting than that of the handsome murder victim, and a girl who’s in the mood to complicate her life can find reasons to slip away with him. The virtuous, for example, will want to accompany him along the road to repentance, while the depraved couldn’t imagine a better accomplice in perdition. At the start of my menses I certainly didn’t go that far in my calculations of destiny, but Cain was a brother to me, I attributed to him brown eyes and dark clothes whereas the other one, with his blind grace forever petrified in the flannel of his shroud, seemed instead to be a brother to the terribly tiresome Maria Goretti.

  If these impressions, which should have been fleeting, have stuck in my memory, it’s because I choked back several questions having to do with Cain during religion classes that were not yet catechesis so that it was impossible to discuss anything. I found it hard to understand why fratricide suffered an irreversible, eternal curse, when we were taught that every sin could be forgiven. But such questions flew away as we removed ourselves more and more from the confessionals — which in my case happened fairly early.

  It was much later that the character of Cain came back to me. I was about eighteen, I’d stopped growing, I found little to do, little to think about, textbooks were still censored. Spring had been dry, inflammable, hard to live through. The town talked with stupor about a Ukrainian couple who’d taken their own lives in a shack below Normétal. They had been found in one another’s arms beneath the black cross of the temperance movement, though they had only polluted water to drink and nothing at all to eat. My father knew them, he knew all the destitute people who tried to cultivate the Abitibi soil, he loved animals and stood in for the veterinarian with them; it was his form of proselytism, he sometimes saved the lives of calves and, to his great joy, a few horses. He’d gone to see the Ukrainians a few months earlier, but their hens had died anyway. He was not surprised by the tragedy. He came out with a few words of anger, quickly suppressed by the good Catholic he was, at the politicians and priests who deluded the workers in the cities about the fertility of the Abitibi soil. “One of the worst of the pieces of land God gave to Cain,” he said about that of the Kowalchuks.

  He meant by that soil that was rocky. We knew about those plots of land shaved out of areas that already were producing stunted trees. Neither machine nor man could smooth it, for the clay soil, once turned over, yielded only stones. We drove past their unfenced fields, they would have served no purpose, the animals couldn’t survive on the sparse grass, dotted here and there with brown clumps of earth that towards the end of summer took on a mineral hue. As most of this land had been quickly abandoned, at best it roused amazement at the malevolence of whoever had even suggested it could be cultivated — and pity for those who’d believed it.

  At an age when we want to make names for ourselves I had acquired some affection for these places. I thought they were poetic in the moonlight. The stones, turning to marble, evoked beneath our skies the sepulchral blue so prized by the Romantic poets, at least in the excerpts we were offered at the convent which was, by definition, a friend of graveyards. I savoured their silvery glints. As it had not provided food, the cultivation of mineral soil did give rise to progress in housing. Many were the small tarpaper shacks that little by little were faced with round rocks, patiently cemented. It took time, sometimes years — not for lack of material, but because once the process was started, it had to go on, using stones that were all same size, which became more laborious to collect once the surroundings had been skimmed. Long snubbed by the bourgeois whose taste extended only to cut stone, these structures are now greatly appreciated by lovers of folk art, they see them as an ingenious, aesthetic and functional
way to make the most of a hostile environment. I was still far from able to formulate such judgements, but those houses seemed to me filled with joy, erected to amuse the always large numbers of children around them. The fathers of these youngsters had to have been good to have embarked on such an adventure. These houses were also the first to be graced with a few boxes of flowers, the growing of which was a luxury if not a scandal in our land that was unsuited even to vegetable gardens.

  I also liked rocks for themselves. You could find them here and there in the clearings, vast and warm, where I’d go during my walks on the outskirts of town. From those shapes hollowed out by the millennia, I made for myself beds where I could close my eyes in the sun and feel my lids become iridescent, or read, silly things generally, but so what. Without shelter, skin roughened, gaze bleached, I too was a stone. I recognized myself in the area around the mines, I thought I could make out their subsoil with its veins that resembled my own, I liked hearing about the fires that would denude our landscapes even more.

  When people cursed these landscapes, calling them “the land God gave to Cain,” I was offended. It was entirely possible that the Ukrainian couple had committed suicide for some other reason than poverty and hunger, they could have succumbed to a longing for their native land, to a problem of sterility, to an incurable disease that would separate them and their love couldn’t bear the prospect. I was still rather marked by the literary excesses of the previous century that would live on in isolated corners of French Quebec, so late to produce its own novels.

  All the same, the image stuck in my mind and I found myself thinking, for the first time in a somewhat orderly manner, about Cain. I had some recollection of his crime, cutting the throat of his brother Abel to take his property, or out of jealousy over Adam and Eve’s obvious preference for their eldest, an odd thing because in Quebec the youngest child is usually the best loved. The punishment though I couldn’t recall, only the part about the eye that pursued him even to the grave, an allegory thoroughly exploited in our classrooms to keep us quiet when the teacher left for a few moments, entrusting us to a Cyclopean and vengeful God.

  There was no question of Cain’s being sentenced to prison, prisons didn’t exist when there was only one family of four on earth, he too must have been banished, like his parents. An interesting notion, releasing the guilty to the four winds, returning them to wild countryside that they must tame in order to survive, instead of shutting them up and turning them into imbeciles by subjugating them. Had it not been for the unforgiving Eye, Cain would one day have become a free man. Some of his descendants think it did happen, that he divested himself of the burden of evil by cultivating his solitude, where there is no room for jealousy. In that case, in the twilight of his life the Eye would have been merely a sun that was setting and then had set. Justice and hope are better served by this thesis but when my father, who owed his education to tradition, evoked the land God gave to Cain, it seemed murderous and merciless. Not a bird passed there, not even to fly over.

  And so the land where I was born, and the rock that gave me some idea of happiness by transforming me into stone, were the reproduction of cursed places. Ugly until the end of the world in the eyes of the deity and of man. Instead of being disconsolate, I surprised myself by marvelling at it. In fact it was difficult at age eighteen to hold on suddenly to a better dissidence to be explored. Cain would be my hero. I would put myself on his trail.

  ?

  Here the text breaks off and a very large question mark, redrawn again and again until it cuts through the paper, seems to have been an attempt to disavow the preceding pages, as the following suggests:

  But who am I so vain as to think I am, all of a sudden? A Maryam on whom an annunciation falls? No more than Burtukan, who may become her village schoolteacher, was I able to imagine any connection between the origin of the world and the land where I had grown. The story of Cain barely takes shape in my aging head, where books have talked about other books. I am scribbling on the terrace of a hotel in Lalibela that’s at once new and decrepit, because my journey has been halted by the rain that closed the roads and I have nothing else to do. Constructing it gives shape to a life that had none, that tumbled down the way life does here, between people with small desires whom fate has caused to be born in spaces too big for them.

  I was unaware in fact that I was on the side of Cain.

  No matter what was written about it by all those men seeking to endow their Quebec with the genes of giants, even as they were settling in the most impossible places, our line has always originated in unadventurous bodies. They had certainly been hard at work, they’d opened clay roads and cleared jungles of ice, but at the end of their days, they had never stopped telling one another thin stories wherein victories were so many stakes to block their horizons: the arrival of a caisse populaire or a movie theatre, the passage of a surveyor, the replacement of wooden sidewalks, the building of a hospital. When they had triumphed over the elements enough to tame them, to set limits to their living and their dying, they were content — much more so than those who ventured to the poles, whose desires had no end.

  I was born long after the limits were established, they had multiplied, now you need a bus to get from one to the other. And under those conditions, what was most certain was not revolt — that was something we’d have had to draw from our ancestry which was devoid of it — but boredom. It doesn’t always lead to fantasies. There’s an unwitting shadow over days that are nonetheless full. I don’t remember having wallowed in it but I see myself coming and going in the town, checking new arrivals at two or three boutiques, making dresses and buying a coat, teaching, cashing my paycheque, phoning one woman or another about a Saturday outing, but there were six other nights in the weeks and where was I? In front of the television and sometimes in books whose titles I can’t recall, past the age for novels about romance. Yet I read a lot, till late at night. And so the days, though boring from end to end, seemed short to me.

  The first Cain to block my path was Ervant. I was right to leave him shortly after I’d married him because he ended up driving in even more stakes than my parents; but I rediscover, still intact, the hunger that came to me from that skittish body, that knew how to get in tune with mine so I felt constantly naked, and wet, and ready to fling myself into him again and again. I had no self-control. Today it’s easy to give him the face of the outsider, the alien who disturbed villages, who seduced virgins and reduced their parents to not very much. It corresponds to the idea that we form of spasms in quiet places, they’re always due to a young man who has come from somewhere else, with stiff prick and mystery in his eyes. But Ervant didn’t come from some Sodom, not at all, sulphur was not his country. He had fled the smell of it, which still lingered in Eastern Europe, he made love with knowledge gained in the old, self-confident cities he’d passed through without really seeing, eager to get to the New World and finding himself now and then having to assuage himself with liberated women who demanded caresses in the right places. Along the way, he had become a handsome beast.

  With my appetite aroused I cared little about the futures he described to me in broken French. He would have liked to have found grace with my mother, who cold-shouldered him because he was an immigrant; dusk made him talk about big warm houses for bringing up children, he saved his money, and while he deplored them, at my insistence he recounted a few stories of women and girls on the shores of a Danube forgotten by him. I never tired of his evocations of Fatima, the l
ittle girl who’d masturbated him in a church and already knew how to demand money, it was a long way from my childhood with its odour of purity and its clean cotton undershirt.

  On rue des Bouleaux the concierge is also called Fatima, she’s the right age to have aroused Ervant in Vienna, and seems to me also to have the sheep’s eyes that still made him blink from embarrassment and guilt when he talked about her. She would be completely square, that Fatima, without the fat deposits swelling bust and buttocks, but in her voice, in her Spanish throat, I hear the swelling that comes to little girls at the same time as the swelling of their breasts, the sound of the first fondling. If I go back there I’ll try to find out if she once lived in Vienna, with a father who ran a café.

  There was nothing of Cain about Ervant but his wandering, and that was coming to an end. I realized that during the year of our marriage when I befriended a woman who was more of a wanderer than him, she was hotheaded, she loved sex, she took away any desire I might have had for a child by giving birth to an acid and awkward boy, most of all she taught me the need to go away, she did so constantly. Anyway, the town was about to close in around its ultimate limits. Then came college, university, libraries, theatre, all institutions that lead us to think we are appeased. I got away from him just in time, without realizing it, mainly I had the impression that I was leaving my husband.

  To become alienated as I am now, it’s necessary to have been free. I had a gift for that, I think. The years before François I see as smooth and full and round, though to others they might seem a form of Lent. I had bought a small house near the school where I was teaching English to girls who were biding their time till they turned sixteen and could escape. Behind their peroxide bangs, the cheap lipstick smeared on their pouts, their smokers’ voices, I nonetheless saw gazes I’d never met before, a sense of defiance that I approached but without fraternizing. I wouldn’t have had the words to console them about incestuous brothers, violent boyfriends, drunken mothers. But I knew instinctively how to talk to them about other things, about the pleasure of being a brunette or their dreams of becoming nurses. It was as strange to them as Alberta or Catalonia, but they were grateful that I gave them some air; one girl became an optician and let her hair go back to being chestnut, by chance I found myself at her shop on Mont-Royal a few months ago, she remembered me as taller, she said. It’s a sign that I was feeling good at the time.