Appropriate Place

by Lise Bissonnette

  Marcia upbraids herself for treating like a parcel the first dead person of her young career. The task should inspire her, but instead it’s upsetting. The sun ought to go into hiding instead of being so softly beautiful over the valley of the Gatineau. Unlike her parents, Marcia is of the generation that sometimes dares to take the air of Quebec, amazed that it’s breathable. But now it’s giving off the smell of viscera. In this department people are prepared for death in foreign countries, it goes without saying because the planet is disturbed everywhere, but the decay that she’s about to confront is of another order. It is that of a kind of unknown rival who was able to make her life a tragedy such as she, Marcia, will never experience. That’s obvious when you go home to Nepean every night, and when Dad and Mom, civil servants too, are so lovable or loved, always.

  When she comes back from lunch in the cafeteria, where everyone was scandalized over the assignment of a prestigious European embassy to an over-the-hill politician, the information finally arrives. This Marie was originally from Abitibi but has been an orphan for some years, she was briefly married but long since divorced, with no trace remaining of an individual named Tateossian, an immigrant who left on his own, the way he had arrived. She has only some very distant relatives, no doubt indifferent to her life or death, somewhere in Massachusetts. The Laval apartment, which she owns, is inhabited by an unemployed youth whom she seems to have supported for obscure reasons, they’re unknown in any case to the concierge who supplied the few pieces of information that were later confirmed by the Office of the Registrar General. The police were unable to interview anyone else, the boy was away, the corridors deserted, the whole place is a desert.

  Marcia advises the ambassador where the parcel is to be sent and by what route: Ethiopian Airlines to Frankfurt, then Air Canada to Montreal. While all that is being done they’ll locate a morgue in Laval to receive the body and a funeral parlour to see to the formalities for the unclaimed dead, a problem to which such an operation surely holds all the keys.

  The vague migraine that was threatening Marcia dissipates; someone places on her desk the always excessive bundle of her superior’s African travels, which she must process with her eyes closed to the images of the starving villages to which he drags around his big belly and his outmoded opinions, feasting his eyes on the barely pubescent girls. What he doesn’t dare to claim as an expense is their services, which he will in fact avoid paying for. He has sometimes had to hurry home because of gonorrhea, it’s well known.

  Around four p.m. the phone rings and a husky voice, barely that of a man, asks: “Are you Marcia Nelson?”

  His name is Pierre. He explains with difficulty that he is the boy in Laval and that he wants to know if it’s true that Marie died over there, as stated in a message the police had left with the concierge. There’s been a mistake, he thinks, Marie is working in Addis Ababa, she never said anything to him about travelling outside that city. How could she have ended up in a Jeep hurtling into a canyon?

  Marcia wonders who could have transferred this call to her, she’s responsible for travel documents, not for special services of all kinds. It’s some male who has taken off this Friday afternoon and the receptionist is directing everyday matters to officers who can be relied on to do the job. Anyway, it’s true that she is in a position to confirm whatever information the government of Canada possesses about this death.

  She doesn’t want to hang up first, the boy’s state of mind worries her: he refuses to believe her and demands to see the body as soon as it arrives. But as what? While she tries in vain to extract a shred of identity — is he a son, a nephew? — she sees smoke, even flames rise up at the end of the Alexandria Bridge. Another of those matchstick houses in old Hull is burning, late in the season; generally it’s midsummer storms that clear the region little by little of its shabby past. Now the strange voice becomes scorching too, as if it had caused the fire. Marcia leaves behind, against the rules, a little of her skin. She promises to call him back, she has to review the situation, she becomes insistent and motherly though she’s barely twenty-five and has had no experience of solicitude until now.

  There is a stain turning red above old Hull. A cremation must be violent. The body arrives on Sunday at midday, Marcia Nelson volunteers to take receipt of it at customs, it’s not her responsibility but it suits her superior who is short of officers on the eve of the long Labour Day weekend. He takes note of her zeal, thinks she must be hoping for a promotion and it would be a good thing, she’s the kind who sooner or later would take offence at the number of his trips to Africa, which everyone however has to admit are indispensable to maintaining Canada’s impeccable reputation in humanitarian matters.

  Because she wants to prowl around rue des Bouleaux, Marcia Nelson leaves Nepean on Sunday at dawn and instinctively turns onto the Quebec shore of the Ottawa River. Gatineau, Montebello, Papineauville are asleep in their history-book gravity, villages crammed with the names of the most renowned of the French-Canadian bourgeoisie. Their illusions have so successfully postponed their country’s death throes, for the time it takes to abdicate responsibility, that now they’re considered to have possessed superior wisdom, whereas they were merely indecisive and tormented — like Pearson himself, from whose myth Marcia is reluctantly breaking free. She, who has inherited all his dreams, who is young and masters both languages, eager to serve the public good, having read and absorbed Anne Hébert and Margaret Atwood, certain from the outset that the two peoples can be reconciled, is nonetheless experiencing this journey along the other shore as vaguely menacing. The menace becomes clearer in the long series of blighted villages leading to Laval — villages that are awake. Suddenly, Marcia is driving her Honda clumsily and is now constantly being passed by vans, she asks so timidly in French for a muffin and coffee that a good girl will naturally serve her in English at the Dunkin’ Donuts in a mall whose parking lot is already full, at ten a.m. on Sunday. It takes her a while to find rue des Bouleaux, in a neighbourhood under development that no one’s familiar with, not even at the service stations.

  She parks near a bed of begonias where there’s not a soul in sight, and sits in the car for long minutes, stunned by the pink brick apartment blocks, all identical, all silent, all decked out with a circumflex hat above their wide and ostentatious doors, all no doubt signed up with the same chemical maintenance service for the lawns, whose green is withering uniformly; no autumn leaf will linger there because the trees, if there are any, are planted at the back of these bunkers that are the colour of poor-quality Renaissance prints. Marcia is stunned because rue des Bouleaux is a precise replica of Pine or Birch or Oak Street in the neighbourhood that was grafted onto Nepean’s side five years ago and was soon filled with a new generation of civil servants, most of them from the other provinces. As if the plans not only for the houses but also for the places themselves came from one catalogue, inspired by settlement camps in the occupied territories, which smother their anxiety by means of tidy lines: camps for refugees from the quiet middle class.

  She doesn’t dare to stroll through this entrenchment where all the windows are covered with the same blinds. Here people can observe you through half-closed slats without one eyelash moving in the building. A cold volley of shots that she, who has no reason to be on rue des Bouleaux, should shy away from, her department hasn’t asked her to investigate, only take care of the formalities at Mirabel. But Marcia Nelson feels that her life of adventure is finally beginning, her life as an external affairs of
ficer prepared to go further than required by duty. She enters 10,005 and rings the concierge’s bell to the right of the front door, laughter bursts out, inappropriate here in such a gloomy place, and a faint aroma of peppers fried in oil. It makes her hungry, which is also inappropriate. It’s obvious that she’s going to disturb this woman at the beginning or in the middle of the Sunday meal. Her name suggests that she’s Catholic, so interrupting her is something that should not be done without some powerful reason, which is nonexistent here. For Marcia though, the moment is intoxicating, unique, she must seize it because it’s unlikely to come back — on Canadian soil anyway — and she prepares to find the words to apologize, to invent an emergency.

  Fatima greets her however as if she’d been expecting her. It’s aperitif time and she’s drinking it in the company of a man her age, forty or so, whose deep-set, laughing eyes contrast with his stringy complexion, the type whose looks are described as “Mediterranean.” Marcia’s arrival is well timed, she and Felipe have been talking about the events, word of which has spread to the upper floors, a visit by the police attracts attention in a peaceful spot like this.

  Fatima is voluble, abetted perhaps by alcohol. What is this business they want to involve her in? She’s been asked to identify the body because she, the concierge, is apparently the only source of credible information. She’ll do it because she’s obliged to, she has no choice, but she’s getting fed up with 10,005 rue des Bouleaux, which has the evil eye. In fact she’ll be leaving next month, with Felipe, who owns a bar and bistro near the Plateau Mont-Royal, she’ll move in upstairs with him. That will be fine. She’ll be a waitress, wash dishes if necessary. She knows something about that kind of business, her father ran a drinking place in Vienna where he had finally settled down after a series of immigrations. If she thinks about it carefully, the clientele of the forlorn who went there, some of them so deprived of women that they had their eyes on her as a child, were much better people than the underhanded gang who live in this building, all of them turned in on their own probably sordid secrets. And stingy on top of it.

  “I’ll just send the kid back to the States and I’m out of here.” Marcia learns of the existence of Virginia, takes pity on her loneliness in this place where only adults live. She has found an easy way to make Fatima gossip more informatively about the inhabitants of the building and in particular about Pierre, whose influence on the child has the concierge worried. She’d known boys like him in the past, who pretended to take her out walking and ended up asking her to touch them. Pierre gave Virginia a little quartz watch, a cheap trinket that excites the little girl. Now she waits for him every evening. He doesn’t always come home, he hangs out in the arcades with queers, maybe he’s a hustler himself. Felipe saw him once leaning against a car near the vacant lot over there, he was with a fat guy covered with tattoos, the kind who likes being beaten with chains, apparently blood turns them on. What would he do to her, to the little girl? You never know.

  Fatima talks more discreetly about the woman on the fourth floor, who used to be in politics and has decorated her apartment so nicely. Pierre did the painting, but she finally kicked him out. He didn’t seem to work very hard, you’d often spot his lanky silhouette on the balcony in the sun. She’d seen so many like him in her father’s café, men who were soft except for their pricks, who fantasized about their talent for seducing older women. But that distinguished woman wasn’t taken in, she fired him and a good thing too. As for the dead woman, what Fatima thinks is that he tried the same thing with her but she took off instead of kicking him out, nobody knows why.

  Or maybe he’s her son, though the concierge doesn’t think so. She saw them side by side in a corner store at the beginning of summer, his hand was on her hip, as if she was his girlfriend. With those low-cut red dresses she wore maybe she brought problems on herself.

  In any event, Fatima mutters more softly, as if to herself, he drives the people around him crazy, trouble piles up, it’s unbearable. One of the owners tried to murder his wife with fire, the way those barbarians in India do. And there’s been a lot of petty thievery, which isn’t normal, only a few deliverymen come to 10,005, the concierge keeps a close eye on them, the robberies must have been an inside job. The owners’ meetings are becoming stormy, people are starting to criticize Fatima. So before they drive her away, before the boy rapes the little girl, she’s leaving, with her friend Felipe. She certainly wouldn’t want to be around if he caused another death. It’s the fault of that Pierre, finally, if the woman died from moving away from him and into a dangerous country.

  Marcia’s not sure she has understood everything, she was brought up in a climate devoid of superstition, she can’t imagine having a conversation about the evil eye. Anyway, it’s only good manners to leave Fatima and Felipe to their meal.

  Far from being haunted, the corridor is ripe with the scent of peonies mixed with disinfectant, one of the new concoctions the maintenance company employees like, you can see why. Marcia doesn’t experience the thrill she was hoping for from her incursion into such foreign territory. The air is perfectly conditioned, a big mirror by the elevator sends back the image of a twentyish Anglo in a flowered skirt drifting above flat heels, a beige blouse over a slender bosom, straight shoulder-length hair, a permanent, faintly pink smile. She thinks she looks ordinary, whereas salesladies find her definitely pretty, she looks good in whatever she tries on, it gives them a rest from all the inelegance they see parade by. In her own opinion though she looks more like someone visiting a hospital.

  Marcia decides to check out the building the way the heroine of an action movie would do, to make something happen. She’ll go to Marie’s in fact just to fix in her mind’s eye the image of a threshold the dead woman would have crossed. Suddenly she realizes that she’s never seen a corpse. Families no longer expose their dead, urns are replacing coffins more and more, from their finest photos the departed bid farewell with beautiful smiles and in excellent health. It’s morbid and unseemly to be curious about the condition of a body, waxy and disfigured, but she can’t help herself.

  Two or three times she paces the fourth floor, nothing is moving there. It’s a garret like any other, more antiseptic than the hallway in a convent, where the air always carries some trace of the sweat that flows abundantly in individuals who are overly chaste. She takes the elevator down, disappointed but relieved to be back in the sunlight. She opens the door of the Honda, briefly lets out the torrid air that was scorching the leatherette, observes 10,005 rue des Bouleaux for the last time. Suddenly Pierre looms up, as if he had passed through the wall stage left. It’s him, thin, musky, poured into bleached jeans, with a swelling at the crotch from an erection or a knife. As if they were on a date he gives her a little bow. A handsome specimen, desirable but, alas, the type that’s never interested in her. She escapes.

  So ends her adventure. At Mirabel, the customs officials don’t even ask her to accompany the box to the morgue, because the police are taking care of the follow-up and the identification. She won’t see Marie. Once repatriated, a dead person is no longer under Foreign Affairs jurisdiction. Marcia drives home along the Ontario side of the Ottawa River, a view for her mind’s eye only, because the waterway is invisible from the highway.

  For your world to be exciting, your name has to be Fatima.

  Ten

  THE ORGANIZERS of the benefit for AIDS research had hesitated for a long time before deciding on a maison de la culture in Laval. In spite of the good-sized
lobby, the well-equipped stage, the efficient ticket office, it seemed shrunken because the auditorium could seat only a hundred and fifty. The idea of holding this first public rally around the tragedy of a disease that was about to become epidemic had come to them in July, from images of Live Aid, the rock concert broadcast worldwide that had placed the Ethiopian famine, until then tolerated, at the forefront of reasons for global indignation. The flow of emergency funds, sustained by millions of guilty viewers, had multiplied a hundredfold.

  In the kitchen of the Montreal clinic where the plan had first taken shape, there had been just one volunteer at first, a fat little woman nobody listened to though they left it to her to assist the dying; she had pointed out that there was no equivalence between the pictures of Ethiopian babies dying at the breasts of their emaciated mothers — sublime modern version of the massacre of the innocents — and the rare photos of those dying of AIDS, with their sores suppurating from an excess of accursed sperm, a disturbing modern version of the punishment of Sodom. They told her that Montreal, along with San Francisco, was one of the rare sites of gay liberation in North America and that women’s ability to empathize with homosexuals was higher there, for reasons having to do with the kind of matriarchy long since in effect among old-stock Quebeckers. A good many mothers preferred to imagine their sons quickly coupling and uncoupling at the baths rather than clinging for long nights to the curves of another woman and worse, combining love with ejaculation. It was possible and even probable that they could count on these middle-aged women — who formed public opinion by monopolizing the radio phone-in shows — to create a climate of forgiveness, another Québécois specialty, in this case stemming from the ancestral masochism of a colonized people. And the climate of forgiveness was the necessary ingredient, the key to a reversal of the situation, that is access to the public funds controlled by those gentlemen whose own sexual orientation was, in appearance at least, the furthest thing from deviant.