Appropriate Place

by Lise Bissonnette

  The school kept me company, it was alive with the electricity of the now unbuttoned Quebec, teaching English was a very simple way to take note of it, I was doing it in a void and I didn’t care. I was on my own, my pleasure was boundless. I would buy a newspaper that helped me understand the few bombs and the many demonstrations, I participated from afar by reading Vallières and acquiring political prints in galleries where I knew none of the long-haired leaders. In fact I went unnoticed though all in all I’d been a charming teacher. I had no regrets because I particularly liked to get on the road to the United States in spring, summer, fall, to go and while away the hours in Maine and Vermont, in antique stores or boutiques where people sold homemade jam. They were perfect conversationalists, anonymous too, and thanks to them I could get by without any others during the week.

  In the winter I went at least once in search of something similar in Florida, there are plenty of interesting things to be found there off the paths beaten by bad taste. It was there that I heard Orpheus for the first time, in an Italian theatre reproduced in Sarasota, and it was there that I met François.

  Since his death I can’t tolerate music.

  Who is worth the trouble of loving that way? Surely not the François Dubeau who is becoming blurred nowadays in itemized publications: professor of art history; teacher of a generation of artists; progenitor of his devotees through homosexual sex, which was what had actually brought him to power; among the first to die on the field of horror that the gay plague was for a time; and henceforth ennobled if not altogether tamed. As well — and this is something the articles and anthologies will never say — adulterer to all those aesthetic and amoral commitments that had won him the respect of his circle, for he had secret sex with a woman, in her brick house with fireplace, elegant suppers, Sauternes and chocolates savoured between the sheets, moonlight glinting off a white orchid, which he caressed. As if it were me, Marie.

  No one can imagine. I found jubilation, as it says in the Magnificat, in that awkward body made spirit that brought to me, inside me, all the servile flesh that flowed into him, all the rage choked back in artists’ studios, all the stammerings of those who would give voice to this still-mute country, all the slackening of muscles barely exercised yet already weakened by who knows what sadness about their art, when it becomes a mere meeting of those who make it, who are by definition ordinary. François’s torment gave meaning and voluptuousness to things. I found the echo of it all day long, in the acidity of black coffee, in the eyes of a teenage girl in crisis, in the stripes of streets, in the stunned Muzak of supermarkets, in the uneven gold from my lamps, in the toneless voices on the radio, in the door to be locked against danger. But never again did I find in him whose words were laughter, the light hair, the fingers nimble for writing that could have created tales and canticles. I knew though what he refused to talk about in the ferocity of the world, I read it in his thin nape with the slightly twisted sinews, in his fear of orgasm, which passed through him as if despite himself. I felt I was on my knees when faced with such remorse. I sometimes thought I was pregnant by him, though I was unaware for as long as he was that the dried sperm on my skin was steeped in death.

  I loved a condemned man, I loved a man who was damned, I know that because I’m no longer a free woman and I don’t give a damn. I didn’t see him die, he was in the arms of others who made a grave for him, and if he wrote me a letter as he’d promised, no one ever gave it to me.

  It doesn’t matter, I had a choice between two ways of lying down, that is of spending even longer at his side. It would be in Laval or in Abyssinia.

  I thought for a while that I could be both of us, be François and me, and live in the unlikely place he’d once suggested, on a whim. He’d got the idea one night when we were returning from the Laurentians, sated on the cirque of lakes and mountains, silent now as we were on the verge of resuming our parallel lives, we were driving past the new apartment blocks springing up now along the highway access roads. They were all alike, unreal, with their deserted balconies, their flickering lights, and we couldn’t tell if they reflected the setting sun or some lamp switched on at the beginning of a solitary evening. They were a long way from everything. “We’ll live halfway between Laval’s two shopping centres,” said François. “We’ll only go out for food and wine, we’ll be a ball of rosy pink in a square bed and our neighbours will be our world, they’ll suffice.” We’d turned it into a game, we had invented dozens of possible neighbours, from the worldly assassin to the bestial nonagenarian, from the incontinent diva to the piggish nun. We would have prowled around their secrets by night, for no reason, just for something to do, with no repercussions. Or to marvel at the fantastic human resistance to virtue, up to this very century that had designed these perfect cavities, intended to confine excess in all its forms.

  I sold the house, moved to rue des Bouleaux and met there only ordinary people, an aloof concierge, a quarrelsome old couple, singles with forced smiles and — the one surprise — a former cabinet minister, still young, who seemed to have shut herself away to write her memoirs, as if anyone in Quebec could still be interested in the why’s of our failures. I didn’t see much of her, my balcony faced the Laurentians, hers faced the river, but there was a shared recognition between us, no doubt because we’d wandered one day into similar dead ends. She had been minister of cultural affairs and of course it was she who, for a time, awarded the grants that those in François’s circles lived on. A tenuous bond, now abandoned.

  But to whom do I intend to lie in this notebook that no one will read? Why have I been silent, or almost, up till now about the real Cain who is practically my son?

  I was never really alone with François. In my house there was also that boy who has been clinging to me, has been underfoot, since his birth, the son of my friend of that summer following my marriage, a corrosive and passionate child who took away any desire for motherhood but whom I had to adopt despite myself. She, Corrine, remained a free woman, time and again she expelled him and turned him over to me, we were a made-up family, he and I, and as foreign to François as his virus-bearing lovers were to me. I cared for Pierre’s fevers when he was a newborn, I took him in when he was a teenager, a russet shadow in my house where he stayed because he knew nothing else, no one else. I allowed him to roam the city, he never came in very late, he grew up slender, caustic, taciturn, skilled at doing odd jobs, and had no other goal. If I became his mother to some degree, it was because I was the right age, my friend had disappeared into one of the northlands she was fond of.

  But most important, the silence between Pierre and me has the depth of the small Oedipal tragedies so common in our houses. He knows nothing about Phaedra, he’s a product of our schools where this kind of tragedy is unknown and untaught on account of its great age, but that’s how he sees me. I look brunette and passionate, my widow’s weeds are red, it’s possible that he is disturbed.

  Pierre followed me to rue des Bouleaux, where else could he have gone? I don’t know who it was that more or less deflowered him — man or woman, night or day — but he began prowling around me, sweet smelling and pubescent. Towards the end of the hottest days of summer, I kept my distance from that smouldering fire, I decided to abandon him the way one decides on an abortion, I imagine, knowing that you’ll be left with a lump in your belly and that it could become like the eye of God, unless you find a way to puncture it.

  The other way to keep François alive then was Abyssinia. So he’d know th
at he was free to exclude me from his worlds, I had told him that one day I would go to Ethiopia, a country that was the very contradiction of mine and that was intended for me. Certain books said that the first man had appeared there in the first rift in the earth, the oldest skeletons in history were exhumed there; where I come from too there were regularly born, along the last fault in the new world, bodies that might have considered themselves immortal, conquerors of the final frontier. The sun of Abyssinia flowed with milk and honey; the moon of Abitibi hardened gold and copper. I must go towards that contradiction. There I would lie down in a field of stones, their greys and blues similar to mine, to complete the circle, to recover the first moment in my life as a girl, a warm rock that streaks the skin of a child and makes her smile. In the distance, a brief storm. When I get there, the season of heavy rains would also be drawing to an end.

  François did not believe in my Abyssinia, which was borrowed from a collection of illuminated manuscripts published by UNESCO, any more than he believed in the apartment in Laval. He went along with the game, the land of Rimbaud can count on a favourable bias on the part of artists or art historians who like to think themselves unkempt and suicidal, a state they confuse with the melancholy they have learned. His pet name for me was Vitalie, the name of the poet’s mother and his sister. I was certainly less well prepared for a trip to Ethiopia than for a move to Laval, but I acted quickly in the middle of the summer, volunteer aid workers aren’t so numerous during this period of famine when the corrupt regime appreciates English teachers all the more, because the language is that of international outlays. I have an iron constitution, I had no problems with the vaccinations and I didn’t have to discuss my decision with anyone. Because I am alone, no matter what Pierre, to whom I’ve left the place, thinks.

  At the airport, embracing me as is customary, he tried to brand me like a mare, his cock pressed hot against my hip, there is nothing more vulgar. In the plane though, dispelling the slight turmoil he’d provoked, I really did see the image of Cain taking shape — wandering, damned, hunted down. I more or less wondered, before I dozed off while waiting for the stopover at Frankfurt, why I so often found myself on the damaged side of individuals. And if it was even possible that I’d been born of a land God gave to Cain.

  One thing is certain, and I am writing this journal to etch its reality indelibly, to imprint it: this morning, I saw the earthly paradise. For twenty or thirty minutes, I don’t know which, along the road to Lalibela. We had set out early because the road might be hard to negotiate, it had rained until late the day before. But at eight o’clock, when the truck turned onto the first rocky outcropping that seemed from the beginning to block the road, the air was as dry as the stones. We were driving slowly but still stirred up a fine ash that the landscape, which had been flayed grey, absorbed as its due. I thought about the horrible picture of eternity that was given to us at school. It would last, so we were taught, the length of time it would take to wear down a mountain if the wing of a bird brushed against it once every hundred years. They have no idea how terrifying that is to children, who fear more than anything being unable to move. In the mineral flow that carried me off this morning, there was worse. The mere thought of a bird was impossible and the infinite expanse of stones was feeding on dust and becoming a mountain. Eternity was getting longer.

  After a sharp pull of the wheel at the foot of a cliff, suddenly there was the valley. A great lake of thick grass where nothing was lacking from what would create our happiness on the morrow of the mists of time: rolls of wild honey on the high branches of the eucalyptus; ridged paths where white-robed children run; herds of cows sniffing the teff and the ponds; a few goats walking in step with a few masters, who lean on golden walking sticks; huts clinging to the low ribs of escarpments; branches that would produce smoke to caress lithe-bodied women; bouquets of shrubs; patches of coolness on the horizon that dance well back but refuse to recede. I describe the scene as François would have described a painted composition, in strata, we are perverted by our way of looking at pictures, which are odourless.

  But it happened that I asked Salomon to stop, that he went off for a cigarette, and that I acquired fraudulently that hint of the earthly paradise. It is surely indescribable.

  And so, tonight, I am content, though it’s all stupid. I know that the huts are made of cow dung, the cattle are diseased, the goats feverish, the children starving, the women, servants and the men, porters. That they are able to eat not by putting their herds out to graze and by growing teff, but by lugging to the villages in the high plateaus the stones from which the tyrant’s henchmen build their houses and businesses, hotels like this one where the pipes leak, the pool is cracked, and the flowers in the dining room are plastic. Beer is served there, and fake coffee ceremonies to the few Greek tourists who come to experience the Coptic Easter at Lalibela. Salomon, who knows people everywhere, says that many priests are considered to be thieves; they are entrusted with treasures, some of which God himself gave to their ministry a dozen centuries ago, nowadays their ornate gold stirs the greed of an unscrupulous government. The crosses and crowns are gradually disappearing from temples policed by men with Kalashnikovs, but evidently they can be bought; it’s impossible to be armed and honest in Ethiopia, I quickly became aware of that in Addis.

  Nevertheless I fall asleep slowly, the window open on the stridency of a handful of crickets, coiled in the idea of beauty. I touched it today and now it’s as if it is not in my eyes but at my fingertips. One touches love, I can do it, in the same way.

  Tomorrow, I get back on the long road to Addis Ababa. What’s left for me to look at? It’s time to make myself useful.

  The ambassador closes the notebook, torn between finding this Marie interesting, in writing at least, and deploring the way that she’s steeped in those remnants of a Christian education that nowadays sends so many young people to remote countries in search of impossible revelations. Nothing is less certain than the appearance of the first hominids in the Lalibela Valley, though one must acknowledge that the contrast between the scree that holds up the plateau and the greenness of the valley combines all the elements of a setting for Adam and Eve and later on, for Cain and Abel, especially since fratricidal wars have regularly marked the region. As for her love affair with the man called François, it seems to have been just, if not beautiful, which makes her death a form of privilege. Would she have gone on to betray him? An Abel could have taken the edge off her, Marie being still fresh and rather seductive. He sees her suddenly, precise down to the first wrinkles clawing at eyes at once so brown and so bright. A woman in red. An impromptu.

  He pulls himself together, realizes she didn’t write a word about her stay in Addis, or about meeting him in the salons of the American embassy. She though had seemed worthy of memory. Perhaps, in spite of his interesting postings and his fairly erudite knowledge of the terrain, he has become someone bland, covered like the stones up there with an ash of words, the diplomatic tone having finally dulled his wit.

  Thus passes his desire to stay in the residence. To listen to the fountain and to think in his turn about the colours of the origin of the world. Ethiopia is no longer Abyssinia, there’s a famine to be dealt with, and in a while he will have to inquire about where to send this notebook that belongs to her estate. The question really answers itself, it’s obvious that he must send it to rue des Bouleaux in Laval, and that young Pierre will have to endure the disagreeable reading of it. The Canadian ambassador to Ethiop
ia, Sudan and Somalia will also suppress the urge to start looking for a Burtukan in the area around Lalibela. The evocation of that child, a type so common in Ethiopia, was nothing but the epigraph of a schoolmistress — a profession that is not safe from mawkishness.

  Nine

  BUILT AT THE HEIGHT of the Canadian government’s inferiority complex, the Lester B. Pearson building unfurls its shades of grey and its batrachian gaze down onto the Ottawa River and across to the Quebec shore, with a close-up of the federal parks and a long shot of the anthracite suburbs, a pleasant place to live within biking distance of the Gatineau Valley. On this autumn morning the eye can still rest on the rust and blonde and probably warm moss of this neutral zone, though it’s hard to judge the weather from inside an air-conditioned office. Perched up there, Marcia Nelson, who still lives with her parents, experiences the first doubts inherent in her first job after graduation, here in the Department of Foreign Affairs. Yet she felt destined for this life, so well nourished was she at the University of Ottawa on the understated nostalgia for that same Pearson, who seems to have been at once a good man and a visionary, the way officers in the Canadian foreign service are required to be, or to become. In charge of diplomatic travel documents while she waits for her first posting abroad, she is musing over a dispatch from Addis Ababa, where the Canadian ambassador, who ought to be offering judicious advice that can be forwarded to the United Nations on ways to relieve the famine or bring about a truce in Eritrea, is getting worked up over the repatriation of the body of a road accident victim. For two days now Marcia, though highly bilingual, has been trying in vain to find any trace of a family for this woman named Marie, whom CARE seems to have recruited from another planet. Her file contains nothing but an address in Laval, to which phone calls go unanswered. At this very moment police are carrying on investigations in the vicinity, but the ambassador is getting impatient. The morgue in Addis is not a model of its kind, there are no daily flights via Europe, and before deciding on the route he has to know where the dead woman is supposed to end up.