Appropriate Place

by Lise Bissonnette

  Having put the fat little woman in her place, a young doctor sure of his psychosociological facts had approached television stations about broadcasting the show, but he’d had to choke back his arrogance almost at the outset. The biggest public station, the federal one, had turned him down politely with references to administrative policies that had no room for medical research among the good works it agreed to support. The danger of creating a precedent was too great, they’d be overwhelmed with requests from associations that support victims of breast cancer or heart disease or childhood disorders far more unbearable than this AIDS business which, after all, affects only a minute segment of their audience. As for the biggest private station, the one that seemed to print so easily millions of dollars for various telethons, its brass had sent a very dynamic and understanding spokesperson who had assured him of the warmest welcome at a future appointment if in the meantime he could come up with a few solid sponsors. He was well aware without having to consult the fat little woman that he wouldn’t even get through the door of the PR department of a financial institution or even a pharmaceutical company. They’d be happy enough to take the money for research, but would refuse to display any sympathy for the plague victims, as their science ought to go instead to making them disappear.

  He’d had to fall back on the limited circles of friends. The only openly gay member of the legislature and two or three of his more discreet but obliging colleagues had been able eventually to reach an agreement with Radio-Québec, whose educational mandate had always been interpreted flexibly. The program managers, while reacting favourably to the plan after a week of resistance inside the institution, had however insisted on a delayed broadcast, ostensibly because the fall schedule was full, but in fact so they could maintain the possibility of censorship. The performers who had agreed to appear for the benefit of AIDS research were minor stars, and the risk of going live, even with scripts approved in advance, was too high. Families would be watching.

  And so they had to resign themselves to Radio-Québec, which was after all better than nothing. Next came the rounds of the big auditoriums whose vast size was a handicap in such a situation. Without the excitement created by a major broadcaster, and with just a handful of so-so performers, they couldn’t expect to sell thousands of tickets. The doctor came back sheepishly to the clinic kitchen and the fat little woman, who was as modest as she was magnanimous, suggested they choose one of the maisons de la culture. They’re popular with the penniless and have the right values, and they’d provide a positive audience that would get the struggle off to a good start. Of course the admission would barely cover expenses, practically nothing would be left for research, but would it be better to cancel?

  Silence around the table, where the fat little woman had set down a bowl of the season’s magnificent black cherries, none of the six dared to touch: to touch something that was round, red, garnet, flesh — breasts, nipples, lips to be swallowed mindlessly, lying down with another, for an hour or for life. From now on that would be their ordeal. Between them and the taste of things was a constantly thickening skin, a viscous cataract that kept them from gazing deeply into the eyes of their patients, patients who were submissive, resigned, humiliated by their sores.

  As if she were attached to that silent wire, a nurse began a monologue. “Still, a lot of them defy the people around them.” There was one who during his lifetime had organized a farewell ceremony to which he’d invited all the relatives and friends he could think of, greeting them from a wheelchair as they paraded in, his withered limbs nearly naked under a loincloth. Only two teenage girls, braving their families’ terrified looks, had dared to kiss him. He’d stood up for a minute, leaning against the buffet where the gathering comforted themselves with cold cuts and wine, and announced that he was leaving them for Hell. His voice was reedy, no one had protested. They believed him. Another had orchestrated an impressive funeral for himself in an Outremont church attended by Quebec’s rich and powerful. A number of them seemed to be fixated on giving in to death while spitting in the faces of others.

  Rather than put on a show, the literary type among them had ventured to say, what they should do is write an old-fashioned mystery play that would deal with present-day passions.

  The curtain would go up. A child would open a large illustrated book in a red cover with gold lettering, like the sacred histories of our youth, and try to study the lives that end well and those that end badly. The grace of a clean, white death, barely morphined so there could be one last smile, would be depicted there as one that is usually reserved for those who have lived lives of renunciation. It would evoke the lives of young parents with one or two children, who drove used sedans, cooked green vegetables, worked their fingers to the bone to pay for daycare, took in the free concerts at the jazz festival, gave to Centraide, committed adultery occasionally and responsibly, their consciences not at rest but without excess; it would be a celebration of the just of our time, when saintliness is no longer what it used to be. But — and this would be the magnificent lesson presented by the tableau — the disgrace of a disgusting, contaminated death, of truncated bodies from which the soul is driven long before the end, would not be reserved for the wicked. On the right-hand page, between the illuminations, the child would read aloud the musical bubbles, the comic book of existences scattered and light as pistils, that settle on their neighbour and touch him and touch him again, sometimes to the point of fiery black orgasm, the kind that brings death amid pus and horror. And that, as an androgynous choir would tell the assembled crowd, was the life of other just men of the present day. As they hadn’t known pleasure, those who chose a white death take their leave surrounded by regret, while those condemned to a sullied death experience none of it.

  The child would proceed from page to page without choosing, the choir would recite a metallic Kyrie, then he would turn to the crowd and ask them to list their fears. In the hall the long-haired, the cool, the open-minded, the sexu- ally liberated could boo, mock, walk out, convinced that they belong to the circle of the brave, that they’ve finished with celestial punishments and drivel about the apocalypse. But most wouldn’t dare to make love that night and maybe in nights to come. Not all orgasms are worth dying from.

  Obviously that was unacceptable, the notion of a grand tragic script and a stripped-down production. The cause that the clinic wanted to serve threatened to end the festival of a generation and of its laid-back progeny, instead they should lighten the atmosphere. Suggest lots of songs, both harmonious and angry, on the model of Live Aid, invite a few poets who can always be counted on to break down cynicism, and banish speeches except for one by a great actor who had agreed to serve as spokesperson and who would read, at the end, a few stanzas by an unknown.

  Around the table people breathed more easily. Hands reached out to the bowl of black cherries. Someone mentioned a sensitization device that was spreading across the United States. During demonstrations of solidarity, a big quilt was spread out, each section bearing the name of someone who had died of AIDS — often a pseudonym, because a number of families didn’t want the publicity. The effect was gripping but reassuring too, the quilt being a symbol of the prodigal child’s return to the lap of the grandmother who rocks her memories of the child and frees him from the shadows. Who but the Americans could invent something so ridiculous, said a French trainee who had read Lacan and who refused outright to mask the depths of human despair. They could do better, and he suggested as a background anonymou
s photos of some of the dead. Others would be able to identify them or not, but at least they’d be looking death in the face. Which was accepted.

  So it was that Simon, the out politician, agreed to the scenario and suggested putting Gabrielle Perron on the committee of honour for the evening. Having left politics after fine service in the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, her name could now be one of those that give nonprofit organizations credibility because their connections are wide-ranging and they can’t be suspected of serving personal ambition. What’s more, she was a woman and her sex was underrepresented in the circles concerned about the advance of AIDS, which was wreaking havoc among males.

  Among her former colleagues, Simon was one of the few Gabrielle wanted to see again. Homosexuals freed from clandestinity are, at least in adulthood, rather exquisite creatures. Simon had a talent for the frivolous, he could read, understand and interpret all the constitutional theses but avoid the tiresome people who draw them up, a distance those same tiresome people were glad to respect in return, so insecure was their own sexuality and so fearful were they of debates with an unpredictable speaker whose superior civility would emphasize their stuffy awkwardness. Simon also had a genius for friendship, he bestowed it far and wide and had some left over for absorbing confidences, from both the suffering and the superficial. You had only to embrace him and already you’d feel relieved of some turmoil or doubt, for in his company, lightness was a duty. Yet neither Gabrielle nor the rest of her delegation had ever solved the mystery surrounding his companion, an American who raised Arabian horses near Trois-Rivières, who didn’t appear in public and of whom Simon revealed nothing, not even during the most alcoholic tête-à-têtes with his closest women friends. Some said he was crippled and violent, but that was simply ignorant speculation to comfort those who were jealous of so much beauty. Because Simon was also the handsomest boy in the National Assembly, tall, slim, radiant and dark, the kind that sensual women like. “You’re a loss to humanity,” Gabrielle often joked, though she appreciated the absence of desire between them. They spoke frankly to one another. In fact Simon had often told her that he disagreed with her leaving politics, something he couldn’t — or wouldn’t — understand.

  They’d got together then, for old times’ sake, at the Continental where Gabrielle Perron’s return to Quebec City, even for just a few hours, had turned a few heads and started some rumours. Over glasses of Brouilly, how could she resist the straightforward but provocative request by her favourite? She got busy as in the good old days, drawing up a list of people to approach, suggesting the course of events, estimating sources of funds or exchanges of services. She also played sociologist. The disease, she said, was emerging just as homosexuals seemed to be settling down, starting to demand the right to marriage and even to have children, dreaming of normality. It would be interesting to see how this new behaviour would be reconciled with the sordid life on the fringes to which AIDS was consigning them. The political calculations by the various groups may have explained why it was hard to plan their evening, when powerful images were liable to confirm the confusion between homosexuality and depravity. Still, she missed the motivating forces that could be sensed in depravity. “How do you feel now, as a member of the gay community? As if you were living in the cocoon of a religious order, following a rule and performing your rituals to tunes by the Singing Nun?” Simon said she was more or less right, but in his opinion an obsession with community was the price to pay for making the system bend. He reminded her of the assembly debates on including sexual orientation among the grounds for nondiscrimination to be inscribed in the charter of human rights. She sighed again at the depressing prospect of chipping away that was always imposed by any search for the common good. She’d been right to move away from it.

  “Anyway,” said Simon, “let me reassure you. I don’t want to get married or adopt a little orphan. Now less than ever.”

  He’d stated it as a joke but by the end of the bottle of Brouilly, Gabrielle knew there was no mistake. She had just been given the most moving confidence possible by Simon, whose laughing mouth had grimaced slightly. Things must have been going badly in Trois-Rivières. But asking would have endangered their friendship. She merely repeated that Simon could use her name and her former title, that she’d help organize the evening if he wanted. A speech was out of the question though, no matter how brief.

  She took a walk in Old Quebec, to sober up before getting back in her car. The blast of tourists still masked the charm of the place; she saw one spit onto the wheel of a calèche and heard another making fatuous remarks in front of some wonders of Inuit art on exhibition at the Brousseaus, who were impervious to the commercial trivialization of the genre. She’d be better off going into Simons and poking around in the new fall accessories, the hats whose secrets are known to the store’s buyers, the gloves that in the interior light of Quebec City give you the hands of Laure Clouet. She bought gloves and hat in rusty brown, though she knew that back in Laval, she’d never wear them.

  Without really admitting it to herself, Gabrielle was going to enjoy being involved in a good deed. Particularly because AIDS was now a little like what sovereignty had been in the days of the pioneers. The cause would make it possible to separate the fearful from the brave. Her old acquaintances, those who had given up on changing the world and were now tending to their gardens or their investments, declared their sympathy — their hearts and their reading were still in the right place — but claimed to be terribly busy. The children were entering their teens and going through identity crises, the start of the university year was a gridlock of meetings, their old parents were sick and dependent, they themselves worked hard on behalf of theatres or orchestras that, despite their reputation, were experiencing severe financial problems — something a former culture minister in a government that had initiated the era of cutbacks ought to know. A brilliant way to make her step back, to force her to appeal to those generous souls who, dreaming of a sunny Quebec, could not be insensitive to these young men who were living on borrowed time and cruelly deprived of the chance of living until the great day. They gave sums, small and sometimes large, promised to be present. They confirmed the existence of decency, that greatest of mysteries.

  Strong arms were needed for building the sets and Gabrielle had the idea of dispatching Pierre. At the end of the summer she had closed her door to him; there’d been no scandal, it was like turning a page, and she’d talked with him only briefly when they met in the lobby, about Marie’s departure and her death. A stupid accident. What would become of him? He wasn’t related to the woman, the estate would kick him out of the apartment once some official had determined where her belongings would go, to the State or some distant relations. He’d go back up north, he said. Gabrielle didn’t believe it, he was now part of the city’s fringe, but she wouldn’t question him further. In fact she hoped to see him disappear; he’d been a vulgar passing sexual fancy for which she now reproached herself. He had a way of looking at her now that placed her among those old ladies who haven’t lost their looks. She regained the advantage by treating him as a handyman and a pal, as well as teaching him a couple of things about preventing a disease that could threaten him some day, in his roaming.

  Pierre turned out to be an excellent assistant to the video editor, a volunteer from Radio-Canada, carrier of the virus and released from his everyday activities by colleagues openly compassionate but secretly terrified of his mere presence. Some disinfected any equipment he had used, producers gav
e their instructions by telephone, most of the time he ate alone. In contrast, Pierre as a pupil was attentive and intense, overcharged with interest because of some hunger for danger. The plan was to slowly bring up on a large upstage screen the features, confused at first, then clear and sharp, of some AIDS victims of the past two years. Some were known, others weren’t. The editor had run into some of them at the clinic, the only one where the doctors told the whole truth.

  Denis, a grizzled thirtysomething with dusty blue eyes behind thick glasses, his neck venous and seemingly twisted, had been one of the first to die. He was a painter, he inscribed on his canvas, in shades of grey and flesh, the walls that he came up against in life. A silent soul under sentence of death.