Marc, bald, dry, his gaze like knots on a parched vine, ended up blackened as if from third-degree burns. He was a journalist, of average talent but highly cultivated, assigned to rewrite reporters with bylines who ignored him.
Michel, with the kindly mug of a busker, a child who never tired of teaching other children at the university. He was a biologist and didn’t forgive his science for missing out on his disease. He was furious, for once, when he died.
Yves, his face half-hidden by his long, tragic, manicured hands, in the hazy pose of the dying, already snatched up by the ether. He was a writer, read less and less, for him the virus had been a suicide of rare elegance.
And François, of whom there were no close-up photos but who was very recognizable, with his stooped height, sharp profile softened by flyaway hair, talking to an invisible audience. He was the best-known art critic in Quebec, prone to having sex with his disciples, most of whom were now infected but still under his spell.
“I know him,” said Pierre. The editor laughed. How could he? The world of François Dubeau had nothing to do with that of a dropout from up north now a resident of Laval, a suburb rather impervious to intellectuals unless they’d settled there early and raised small families on their small salaries. François was anything but that.
Bristling, Pierre asked a lot of questions about the man. He had recognized him beyond any doubt, he’d been Marie’s lover, the tall cheerful guy who marked off the garden’s seasons with her in the little house where Pierre’s mother had dumped him, the man who talked with her about Abyssinia and whose presence he’d eventually grown accustomed to, though they never really got used to each other.
It was just a double life, the editor would have said had he believed it. Suddenly Pierre understood its refined seams, the nights spent this way or that, the spaces reserved for one and for the others, the sentences slipped on like clothing, according to the climate, according to the clients. Having sperm in common, all the same. Marie had no doubt consented to the game, she never seemed bothered by her lover’s absences, she made no plans. Her lie added to his made a mountain of waste between yesterday’s child and his memories. For the adult he was now becoming, reminiscences in the form of excreta.
The smell of sweat was in fact filling the little office that adjoined the auditorium. Two members of the organizing committee had just come in, engaged in a virulent debate on how to use the small profits expected from the show. The editor went on impassively lining up photos and dreaming of the effect he wanted to create, similar to that of Thierry Kuntzel’s fantastic video on the death of the Swiss writer Robert Walser, a piece that had given new life to the art of the dissolve.
Eleven
THE POLITICAL EVENT of the autumn made its first appearance in the arts sections of some English-language newspapers and magazines. A young anglophone Montrealer — that rare creature of direct British descent — brought out a magnificent book on the Canadian psyche, entitled French Bastard. Stunningly intelligent and subjective, it defied the conciliatory syrup that had been flowing from the leading anglophone nonfiction writers ever since the 1945 publication of Two Solitudes. In it, Susan Finney made mincemeat of the theory underlying MacLennan’s novel and even more, those of his followers. In their opinion it was the distance between social classes that had poisoned any attempt at a loving fusion between the respective offspring of Canada’s two founding peoples and consequently, kept the political divide between conquerors and conquered from being filled; whence the idea, highly conventional but even after half a century not yet hackneyed, that the enrichment of francophones and their progress towards some kind of economic equality would lead to growing interpenetration between descendants of these offspring. Which sooner or later would snuff out the collective desire for separation.
Aside from a few details, such as the still mostly anglophone ownership of houses on Summit Circle or country mansions on Brome Lake, the new writer reminded her readers, we had however achieved financial equality. Any interpenetration was still limited though, and generally ended in the most poisonous divorces, as any specialist in family law, with whom Susan Finney had spent a lot of time, could testify. In her opinion, the lasting error of the political scientists was to sublimate their own anemic sexual appetites while they wallowed in subsidized Canadian conferences, which had kept them from coming to grips with the notion of desire. Its absence, so striking in heterosexual relationships between francophones and anglophones, had thus escaped them. Aside from some passing superficial oddities, analogous to vacation flings, interpenetration hadn’t happened. If one compared the customs of linguistically mixed and linguistically homogeneous suburban couples, one would note that the English-French connection was the one that would fade most rapidly and most surely. And blandness, she declared, the smell of poorly aired closets that’s given off by genitals at rest, was well on its way to becoming the existential definition of Canada.
She for her part saw no problem, therefore offered no solutions. She simply set out a masterful description of the peculiar blockage of the fibres or nerve endings in the pelvic area. It had been noted by observers of brief news items that crimes of passion between francophones and anglophones were practically nonexistent, even when squabbles over money reached a paroxysm. Which also explained the damp squib that terrorism in Quebec had been, lacking any genuine will to destroy.
Susan Finney’s book took a totally exceptional turn in the chapter devoted to her own attempt to verify degrees of intercultural desire. She told how she had forced herself to become a sovereigntist, by joining the party but mainly by offering herself as a transit between the “two solitudes,” the MacLennan cliché being common currency in all political circles. She’d become an adviser and had set her heart on a cabinet minister who rumour had it was a big-time stud who’d fooled around with her in the back of a government plane one evening after a pointless trip to the Baie des Chaleurs. He’d tried to seduce the old-stock anglophones and in the end had to be content with getting it off with Susan Finney. The description of their carryings-on attained pornographic exuberance, as free flowing and high performance as you could wish for during traditional interpenetration, but toned down while fooling around with sodomy. Even between two famished temperaments in still young bodies that were exploring one another for the first time, she had noted, desire could not transcend a threshold that was invisible but genuine, and abnormally low. Susan Finney had pursued the experiment to the point of conceiving a child, the French bastard of her title. The book would reveal the child’s existence to its progenitor, whose anonymity she otherwise protected. “My child,” she concluded, “is in radiant good health. But no one stops me in the street to tell me how gorgeous a baby it is. I push the carriage of a creature who is imperceptible, as if volatile. It is my future and yours. It won’t kill us.”
Gabrielle had a clear memory of Susan Finney, who was once connected with a ministry close to her own. She was amazed at what she read — a few magazine excerpts and ecstatic reviews. The impassioned style, the gritty way of hijacking the political debate, the exhibitionism that was the antithesis of Canadian tradition, should have been the acts of a beautiful sex kitten. But as the public could now observe on its screens, there was nothing of a Mata Hari about Susan Finney. She was more like an apple. Timid sea green eyes, plump cheeks, a cherub’s colouring, dirty-blonde hair that fell straight onto a cotton blouse, full flowered skirts in summer, pleated ones in winter, sensible shoes at all times. The
body seemed clumsy but, as men will confide, girls who are ordinary and chubby are often wilder and more unrestrained in bed than those who emulate scrawny fashion models. Still, if she’d had to predict a literary career for Susan Finney back then, it would have been as a writer of cookbooks or gardening manuals. And here she was, invited on all the talk shows, facing psychoanalysts, psychosociologists, constitutionalists and journalistic analysts of all sorts, chattering exceptionally well in both languages, buttoning lips and shutting traps, and once her debating partner had been cornered, bringing him to a full stop with sexological references that were apparently irrefutable and foreign to them all.
In Quebec, which revelled in its tolerance of politicians’ morals, where the press ignored gossip about their extramarital flings or even about their family happiness, a kind of erotic fever was suddenly running through even the news sections, with insinuations as to the identity of the minister, who was immediately recognized, or phrases referring to the thesis of French Bastard. Gabrielle wouldn’t allow herself to buy the book but Madeleine, for once taking an interest in politics because it sounded like a sex scandal, had gone through it zealously. On the phone, she burbled with enthusiasm. She drew some strange lessons from the thesis about Canadian blandness.
“That Susan Finney’s right, you know, and the sovereignists should have thought about it before. They have to show the world that reconciliation and the growing integration into Canada is going to create the most colourless people on earth. A nightmare, a new form of the revenge of the cradle!”
But Madeleine was wrong. As Susan Finney had noted, because of the absence of desire, Gabrielle explained patiently, there would be very few of those attractive and colourless children. Aside from the literary episode, she had no interest in this thesis, in fact she wondered if Finney’s undeniable talent wasn’t being secretly used by opposing forces still intent on destabilizing the party. The government’s mandate would soon be up, the troops were worn out from the demands of power, the option was languishing in the polls and now the slight amount of intellectual energy still liable to be harnessed was being exhausted on a banal sex story that claimed to be a powerful symbolic discovery! But Madeleine stuck by her guns. “All I know is, you haven’t kept up the healthy tradition of fornication in Nouvelle-France. Just when some real urges are being talked about . . .”
Which allowed the conversation to turn to Madeleine’s own most recent urges and let harmony prevail, as usual, when they hung up.
With the blinds all open onto mid-September, the apartment was drinking in a greenish early evening, a foam of low sky. Gabrielle stepped onto the balcony but came right back in, shivering. She realized for the first time that summer would always be shorter here on rue des Bouleaux, looking down on the river. Then she recalled the chill that comes over small children, even during heat waves, when they’re at the top of a Ferris wheel, swaying in midair. It took her back to that height, to the verge of a faint nausea. There was no place to get off and no one to start the wheel moving again.
In the library she switched on the lamps whose power she had studied so as to reproduce the warmth of winter lighting, especially on stormy nights with wuthering winds.
What books to plunge into? The grotesque debate that was upsetting her former associates, over a book in fact, managed to blight the magic of the place. Turning her into a nostalgic old woman, the kind she loathed. Her lost and better bygone days were there before her, on the shelves reserved for books on palingenesis, that magnificent scholarly word she had dared to get close to though she’d never studied Greek or, in the narrow schools she’d attended, elegant French. She found there, intact and as mellow as the memory of a perfume, the route that had allowed her, a bus driver’s daughter, to propose for what Quebec would become an interpretation that had won her the unanimous congratulations of the French jury before whom she’d defended her thesis.
It had all started at the time of her first contact lenses and her long hair tied back in a big bow, at the end of her college days. A literature teacher, an intemperate Balzac enthusiast, was constantly boring his students with the notion that the crossroads of all modern science, no less, could be found in the preface to La Comédie humaine. The students didn’t understand a word of this pretentious-sounding gobbledegook wherein Balzac declared that he was describing variations on the human species the way others described those of animals. The teacher had nonetheless ordered them to pick one of the scientific references the novelist had amassed, a veritable name-dropping for nineteenth century Paris salons, and write an essay on it. Chance had sent Gabrielle to one Charles Bonnet (1720–1793), a Swiss naturalist and philosopher whom Balzac considered to be a genius for having formulated a theory of the world as “an interlocking of similar components,” where “animal vegetates as does plant.” Which made of Bonnet a brilliant disciple of Leibniz, improving upon his thesis on continuity in the universe, a systematic mind perfectly suited to the great novelist seeking coherence for the thousands of characters in his boundless work.
Gabrielle, who didn’t think she had a scientific mind, had taken an interest in Bonnet as she would have in a game. Aside from his birth and death dates, she found nothing on the man’s life in Quebec’s meagre libraries. She had been content to imagine him as dismal and destitute until years later, long after she’d defended her thesis, which did not contain these frivolous notions, in the public university library in Geneva, where she was able to consult the originals of his works and two amazing paintings. One was a portrait in oil signed by one Jens Juel, revealing Bonnet as a handsome man with a high forehead and an arrogant pout, obviously acquainted with the finest hair curlers, tailors and manicurists, the open book under his hand appearing less central to the composition than his emerald silk lapels and the frothing lace of his shirt at the wrist. The other, dated 1780 and signed by Simon Malgo, was a rather insipid and green “Vue des environs du lac Léman du côté du Midi prise de la demeure de M. C. Bonnet à Genthod, à une lieue au Nord de Genève,” whose very existence attested to the bourgeois comfort that philosophers, it’s true, rarely spurn and often seek.
But in the days when she was obeying her literature professor, Gabrielle had available only a few titles and some resumés of the work of Charles Bonnet, whose treatise entitled Palingénésie philosophique, ou idées sur l’état passé et sur l’état futur des êtres vivants, published in Geneva in 1770, presented a cosmogonic doctrine uniting geology, embryology, eschatology, psychology and metaphysics to illustrate the continual rebirth of living beings, while at the same time considering in that endless repetition, their capacity for evolution. British dictionaries attribute to Bonnet the authorship of the term, while French dictionaries assign it rather — and quite shamelessly, given the truth of the dates — to the Lyon philosopher Pierre-Simon Ballanche, whose Essais de palingénésie sociale, published between 1827 and 1829, are today considered to be pale copies of Bonnet’s thinking, distorted what’s more by blasts of religious mysticism and the digressions of a dilettante more concerned with impressing his friend Madame de Récamier than with contributing to scientific progress. Balzac, though his contemporary, had been right to prefer his predecessor in palingenesis.
The dissertation was supposed to be limited to five pages, but Gabrielle was able to make such good use of the few scraps of knowledge on her subject that the Balzac scholar gave her an exceedingly high mark. And from then on, the fine word “palingenesis” was a secret asset, proof that she could perhaps bec
ome an intellectual — to her, the most amazing destiny but one which she didn’t think she could dream of because, as a rule, she’d have had to descend from other intellectuals to get there or, failing that, to be a boy who’d come to the attention of teachers in a classical college reserved for boys. At the time, no woman in Quebec had published a serious work of nonfiction or taught at the graduate level in the departments that manufactured intellectuals.
She had become a sociologist anyway, agreeing to study social statistics, which at the time passed for the major doctrine in a discipline that claimed to be scientific. It was not until she arrived in France, during an early conversation with her thesis director, that, to impress him, she had dared to utter the word “palingenesis” to describe her reading of the cultural renaissance Quebec seemed to be experiencing. The master had been delighted and had continued to be during the following two years, helping her to put that old notion in contact with contemporary sociological thinking, at the same time encouraging her to restore the reputation of Ballanche, some of whose spiritual, if not religious, investigations could be found in Madaule and possibly in Poulantzas.
In short, she had landed her doctorate with rather disconcerting ease, given her background and the earlier limits to her aspirations. And she’d come home to the shores of the St. Lawrence, to her country whose turmoil she would contribute to that much more because she had now mastered a scientific explanation for a sovereignist movement whose inconsistencies and chaos the fearful curmudgeonly analysts who still reigned supreme at the reins of newspapers denounced.
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