Appropriate Place

by Lise Bissonnette

  The very French weight of her intellectual trappings had however quickly lightened. In the new university, professor and students were the same age and the liveliness of their discussions was no less striking than the lightness of their morals. The sexual revolution often moved faster than the revolt against Canadian shackles or capitalist exploitation, her years of teaching were less studious than her years of thesis writing had been. Palingenesis was gradually reduced to a vague memory before it became, in politics, a useless object. Because first and foremost it was necessary to speak in a way that people understood.

  In a waiting room a few weeks earlier, she’d been leafing through one of those magazines that specialize in treating females as brainless, which offered a long list of therapies for sicknesses of the soul. There it was, under the letter P : “PALINGENESIS: a method of breathing that allows you to achieve greater self-awareness and express repressed emotions. See also Rebirth.”

  There had been a renaissance, an evolution too, and they had generated fools. So Gabrielle Perron was tempted to think, fascinated as she was by the dust motes dancing in her library in the lamplight, despite that morning’s dusting.

  She pulled herself together, reminding herself that she hadn’t settled in parallel with the world in order to detest it. She turned on her computer, created a file called GL under “Correspondence,” and started a letter to the man who had been her first intellectual model and, all things considered, the only one.

  Georges,

  During a recent trip to Paris, I was tempted to see you again. To tell the truth it was a rash idea that struck me when I was crossing the Île de la Cité in a drizzle. I opened my umbrella just in front of your door, at 1 rue des Deux Ponts, and it took me a moment to realize that I was actually on the threshold of the building where I’d gone so often, with so many friends, part of the traffic that so exasperated your neighbours on every floor. The concierge who gave us a motherly greeting had flown away, were we not also half-plucked fledglings, far from our native lands, begging for the beakful of words from the assured talker that you are? Number 1 rue des Deux Ponts is now a blind door, soundly bolted, where the concierge is an electronic keypad displaying the apartment numbers. Caution or fear is so extreme that no name appears next to the numbers and I suppose that the entry code is changed every month, one must be prepared for the baseness of tradesmen.

  That is so unlike you that I thought you’d retired to some North African land, surrounded still and again by those slender coffee-coloured lads you used to pretend to educate along with us, knowing we weren’t taken in. As for me, I was quite fond of them, they added to my feeling of liberation, to the stirring sense that I’d finally reached a shore where everything was possible. I went into the bistro across the street, consulted a Paris directory and found you at the same address, immutable. I dialled the number once, twice, in vain. It was around six p.m., I decided to wait for you for a while, sitting at a table like a character in a Paris film, but over the course of an hour the only person I saw go inside was a little old lady who I’d have sworn, on account of her hard-wearing World War II–vintage raincoat, was the whining widow of the past, the one who shared your landing and murmured the worst racist remarks about your little North African friends. Her or her daughter. There’s nearly a quarter century between me and that image, which I enjoyed rescuing from oblivion. But of Georges, nothing. Not on the following days either, when I dialled the number several times before giving up for good.

  What did I want from you? When I was in Paris, nothing. I’d probably have hidden the fact that I was a cabinet minister, embarrassing in view of the values you’d inculcated in me, which were rather foreign to any exercise of power. Today though, Georges, I would ask you for an accounting of my life. I am now the age that you were, or nearly, when I first knew you. You were a creature of farandoles and words. What did the nature of your love affairs matter, your eyes were sated and bright in the morning and that, it seems to me, gave you even more words for picking away at our theses, for teaching us to recognize and describe “social change” as we said reverently at the time, that end in itself which you maintained had to be provoked before it could be analyzed. To bring about that change, you were offensive. We wanted to be. Your way of sating yourself with your little North African boys may have done more than all your books to give them access to knowledge, in the universities that were springing up in the suburbs. I came home from Europe telling myself that I too was going to have it all, farandoles and words and the social change that would come of it.

  So what am I doing here, before I have one real wrinkle, organizing life as if it should no longer be touched?

  I am still delighted, Georges, by what I, like you, contributed to breaking down. I hate what the world was before we got there, a bundle of fear and suffering dictated to the ignorant. I taught and taught, as a number of us did, and they came in the thousands to listen to us and to hand in their papers, as we’d done with you. But do you not also hear, in your educated and changed city, the sound of a new trivialization? Palingenesis has become “rebirth,” Georges, and it’s as if I were seeing you tonight, absent from 1 rue des Deux Ponts because you are giving adult paying students a course in the management of desire. Who knows, maybe you’re even there, behind your electronic padlock?

  And there’s worse. I know of no one, absolutely no one, who has made a success of his farandole, the one that you promised us, that you said was the guaranteed companion of our knowledge.

  I don’t even know how to have a failed love affair. Yet if I take a good look, I have one. I’m one of those who have met a living being and then been inhabited by him, every second, and who have had the grace one day, in a train or in a car or in a strange bedroom, of hearing him say, “You’ve made a new man of me,” while realizing he was happy at what he had become. And that’s what loving is, and being loved. We didn’t know how so much rapture could have come about. Bodies lived through it, there weren’t enough sighs to steal from one another, enough salt to lick from the sphere of an eye or a small pink genital fold, of palms to press between legs before sleep, not too long, just before starting again, quickly. For the hours weigh double when they are parentheses stolen from other lives. And the love lasted, it still lasts, it is inexhaustible.

  Except that it’s no longer current. That living being no longer wants to say it or to enter my mouth or my belly. There were too many weeks between us, too long a road to travel in a few hours, we wasted the time that we needed to domesticate our worlds before we opened the sheets. We started to make love like others, who don’t wait. We consummated, we consumed it. The weeks became months and now a year. He won’t come back because we don’t know how to be reborn. I ought to be tragic because he inhabits me still, every second. To such a point that it’s he who kissed my neck or massaged my pubes when others clung to me and I smiled at them. I moved here to meet up with it, my failed love, a privilege that stemmed from it. But it makes light of me, breaking away and breaking my heart so thoroughly that I don’t have one left to experience it.

  And I’m angry with you, Georges, because I can look at us, at my love and me, I can observe every chink in our affair and dissect it, and understand it. Instead of inhabiting it, in this place that I wanted to be appropriate. It is you whom I hate tonight, because it was through you that the words came to me, sweeping over me today, driving away the ache. As a child, I used to speak the musical notes that way instead of listening to them. I believed you though
when you explained that the right words were life itself and that what’s more, we would have love. You were a crook. My wish for you, behind your bolted door, is a life of never-ending silence.

  Through some inexplicable feeling of urgency, the letter was sent special delivery. On October 4, it came back to Gabrielle, stamped by the French post office, “Unknown at this address.”

  Twelve

  THE SHOW TO RAISE money for AIDS research took place amid chaos, or so the newspapers reported the next day, while the TV stations kept running footage of the small fire that had forced the evacuation of the maison de la culture around eleven p.m. The damage was limited; for some reason yet unknown one panel of the set had caught fire and, despite the swift arrival of firefighters, some parts of the set had been ruined. More than the fire itself, smoke and water damage would send the bill into the tens of thousands of dollars.

  And so the fire had eclipsed the news stories that the team at the clinic had been so afraid of when a good dozen reporters and cameramen showed up in Laval just as the dignitaries were arriving, and clustered around some well-known faces. Including that of the minister of health, a decent man who had rejected the advice of his political attachés concerned about the disease’s dissolute image. According to those who had skimmed the American press, which had more to say about this still mysterious subject, AIDS was not the terrible threat evoked by activists. It was indeed a devastating mortal ailment of a new kind, but it probably affected only the most debauched homosexuals, who were suddenly looking for pity. And even if they refused to pass moral judgement on the victims, it was still much too early to compromise themselves on the question of research assistance; they would seem to be rushing to meet that particular lobby while other foundations that battled terrible diseases were knocking at the ministry’s door only to see their hopes constantly dashed. But the minister, because of some premonition about a greater disaster, had ignored their grimaces.

  And so, along with Gabrielle and her colleague, Simon, he had been subjected to the questions that reporters borrowed from one another, few having taken the trouble to bone up on the thin file about the appearance of AIDS. Did the minister’s presence indicate that the plague was a genuine epidemic, one that was beginning to spread through Quebec? That the situation was alarming? Were figures about deaths available? The answers were evasive and despite the PR people’s pleas, the cameras ignored the young doc-tor, the sole respondent who could have given accurate information and calm the first signs of hysteria. With his slender adolescent’s manner and his anonymous looks, he was left to the scientific press, absent from the show to which editors had chosen to assign general reporters. The worst had seemed about to happen when the lenses started scanning the small crowd gathered in the main lobby, a majority of long-haired males, a large proportion of whom sported an earring. It seemed as if the evening would be a model of the art of creating stereotypes, when the goal had been to create a breach in the wall of prejudices. An imminent disaster.

  The fire then had been a wrong in exchange for a right because it had modified the structure of the news reports, eliminated idiotic questions about AIDS and even — something no newspaper would talk about — put an end to an embarrassing situation that had suddenly arisen on stage, just before the final speech.

  The organizers had had a terrible time coming up with the lineup of performers. Given their casual ways, their extroverted temperaments, their well-known generosity and the boldness of the event, recruiting volunteers should have been easy. But nearly all the voices at the other end of the line turned vague. As if in the grip of some unspeakable terror. Idiotic excuses were stammered, conversations were abruptly broken off, leaving messages was pointless, everyone was much too busy this season. Except for Pauline Julien, who was always magnificently responsive to the call, the rare brave ones had materialized from the serious musical circles, notably contemporary music. In other words, celebrities no one had ever heard of, though they’d been the pride of Quebec in the international networks of the avant-garde. And so, even by extending her dissonant repertoire to include some Mahler lieder that the average mortal wouldn’t find too unsettling, the sublimely talented soprano wouldn’t make the ticket office blow up. As for the more popular groups or singers, whose melodies would definitely have been closer to the tastes of the young, male, gay audience, the best-known had dodged the invitation and they’d ended up with the B list of new talent that had not yet hit its stride. So that to fill the two hours of showtime, including the intermission, they’d had to resort to some postrural poets, a very productive but very private network, eagerly awaiting the rare opportunities to make their work known. Pauline, who had agreed not only to sing but also to host the evening, had promised to introduce them so warmly that the audience, even if it included a few backward individuals still loyal to formalist aesthetics, would willingly applaud poetry that was impossible to read and consequently to chant. The poets would be asked to offer nothing that would exceed the attention span of an average crowd, in other words, three minutes and change.

  But that was without reckoning with Clothaire Lemelin. He it was who had begotten the postrural school of poetry and he fully intended to exercise his primogeniture. He had reserved the closing act for himself.

  Dramatic in a charcoal suit and red tie, reminders of apocalypse, he perched on the edge of the platform, demanded total darkness onstage, save on his person, so as to highlight his mane of hair with its blue-tinged waves and his white, nearly diaphanous hands — the hands of a full-time visionary.

  “What I am about to deliver was written and published in Paris, for close friends, a good many years ago. You’ll see that it’s an occasional poem. But as its style will attest, it is neither by me nor by our friends here present. It was written by a gentleman who passed away last night, at Montreal’s Sacré-Coeur Hospital, of natural causes, that is they had nothing to do with AIDS. That death, however, coming on the eve of your gathering, must be brought to your attention because it sheds light on those deaths that we are recalling here and another death, on the same order, that Quebec is striving towards, its current negligence announcing the death pangs.”

  A murmur of impatience ran through the thin ranks of VIPs. They had been assured of an apolitical show, an order Pauline Julien had scrupulously respected. Was this a trap? The zealot inhaled their concern, looked up to the flies and began to declaim from memory his chosen piece.

  In the dead of night, embittered and alone,

  I set down lines unfit to be read by man.

  I am a pilgrim who has clambered far too high,

  Beyond pleasure for the hand or for the eye.

  My mad shunning of this sordid world

  Augments with age and implacable distaste;

  I can but oppose a passive face

  To monsters brought to life by some fiend’s rage.

  I thrust my icy scalpel into nature’s breast,

  And sound the boundless baseness of the flesh.

  Whoever would prevail against this rot

  Must bow before the connoisseurs of hell,

  A hell that’s of this world and observes no truce.

  Pilgrim of the infinite, votary of the beyond,

  Why seek in other climes what you desire

  When you may sink with ease into this mire?

  “Your stomach turns of course,” continued Clothaire Lemelin, “when you hear that accumulation of dripping alexandrines, detrimental to the memory of Baudelaire who has never been so p
oorly imitated. Pretentious too, thinking he’s an albatross shot down by the rest of us, the carrion universe. There’s worse. I only recited a poem suited to the occasion, one that talks about flesh and death. But that poet had something for every taste, from Claudel to Nelligan, idiotic images, moon-women who were also flaming suns, books that rhymed with crooks, and even inane advice to the lovelorn.

  I withdraw into myself

  And find myself serene

  More enduring than tears in their dotage

  Life is a joyful pilgrimage.

  “Composing such trivia, it would have been better had he died sooner. Yet this versifier, writing a century after the genuine writers of melancholy, was one of the greatest intellectual influences in French Canada, one of the first literary figures to recognize the foundations of the independence movement, as well as being the symbol of our collective apostasy, for he gave up the soutane long before those noisily defrocked priests turned sexologists. He deserved praise, François Hertel, about whom you’ll read hagiographies in the papers tomorrow, whose coffin certain eminent federalists will follow because he taught them how to read, he gave absolution to their first ejaculations — alone or in company — and he had the good sense to choose exile before he began to express his doubts about Canada. Tonight, I am presenting him to you as he was and as we are. Phony tragedians, borrowed fanatics, about to be chilled forever.”

  Then Clothaire Lemelin, who now was pacing the stage under a follow spot, the lighting man thinking he was obliged to use it, launched into a disjointed but not uninteresting soliloquy, talking in particular about the end of innocence.

  During that year, 1985, the irruption of AIDS into public awareness had driven us from the brief paradise of a decade of debauchery that had been a genuine freedom, one that others would envy us for until the end of time. For of that serene, intense copulation had emerged, thanks to the sacred still clinging to us, loving passions of biblical quality, the most genuine since the world began.