Côte-des-Neiges was teeming with students still in the daze that marked the beginning of the school year, you could see them in groups at bookstores, drugstores, hardware stores, stocking up for the next academic year which most would have tired of by February, when the neighbourhood would close in around its frozen mud and its poorly maintained apartment blocks. Few went to Vito’s, the restaurant now attracting mostly professors or retired people from the neighbourhood, for the prices had gone up though the food was still the same, Italo-Québécois for stomachs equally hybridized. The owner counted on nostalgia, which helped him hold on to his past clientele, now sufficiently well-heeled that they no longer drank house wine by the litre. He chose well, Gabrielle and Madeleine had trouble finding a table in the first room, facing the street. The former minister, still recognizable, attracted looks, and she regretted her unthinking choice of restaurant, this was no way to start a new life, being stuck here in the territory of gossip for which she provided an excellent pretext. They were reduced to whispering rather than speaking out loud and Madeleine, who wanted to talk Gabrielle out of her desire for a cat, couldn’t complete her arguments. She would have ridiculed, caricatured her friend, got carried away a little, but she limited herself to pointing out the problems of maintenance — litter, food, smells — and care. “And most of all, don’t count on me!” “I won’t need a cat sitter.” Gabrielle displayed an ethereal smile which displeased her friend intensely and brought their discussion to an end.
Definitely, this was a difficult turning point in a woman’s life, thought Madeleine, who for some time now had been rather concerned about her own capacity for enjoyment. It wasn’t a symptom of menopause, hormones erased them easily, but a lessening of her appetite for fun. She who had never sought brainy partners found herself too often, once her legs were together again, regretting that they had nothing to say. Besides that, she was reading a little more; soon she too would be contemplating a cat.
On rue Jean-Talon they were warmly welcomed at the SPCA, where the July dispersal of pussycats left behind when their masters had moved was not yet over. The choice was quickly made: an animal just a few months old, housebroken and having had all its shots, that displayed even in its golden eyes the self-confidence of the big tabby cat it would become, introverted but likable, and adaptable to a cloistered life. The young woman who dealt with adoption procedures had no idea who Gabrielle Perron was and observed the rule of suspicion to the letter. Gabrielle had to answer questions about the lifestyle in store for the cat as well as about her own abilities, psychological and financial, to devote the necessary time to its happiness and health. Finally, the cat was in a box on the backseat, dignified and silent like the good companion it would be.
“What will you call him?”
“Hertel.”
Madeleine, who got her news from television only and therefore knew nothing about Hertel’s death, wondered if her friend was heading for a breakdown. She promised herself to call her more often. For now though she was in a hurry, she had a tennis lesson before dinner.
She just had time to buy all sorts of cat things at a pet store before it closed and Gabrielle was finally at home. While she was getting to know Hertel, she renewed the determination that had been given a rough ride by her stop at Vito’s. After a shower, she donned a royal blue dressing gown, its velvet like warm silk, and remembered, as she put in the oven a vegetarian lasagne precooked at a steep price, that Pierre was probably going to turn up. He bothered her, that was another of today’s mistakes, fortunately the last one because he was leaving soon. She was about to change again because it was out of the question to greet him dressed like this, when he rang the bell. Too bad, she’d simply cut the meeting short, she certainly wouldn’t invite him to share her dinner.
In fact he was the one who said he couldn’t stay long. She had no reason to worry about how she was dressed, he didn’t look at her. He handed her Marie’s notebook, the one that the federal government had given him once the formalities were complete and they couldn’t track down other family or friends. The notebook confirmed Marie’s relationship with François Dubeau, she had to read it, and there were references to Gabrielle too. They settled in, face to face, in the library. Her first truly solitary evening was in ruins.
The pages had been read and reread, skimming through them she had the impression that the boy was following the progress of her reading. But eventually she forgot that he was there. She absorbed Marie’s words as if the notebook were a testament intended for her; she saw the woman at her side, slender, brunette, dressed in red, delivering her story aloud, line by line. Exorcism would drive away the Cain who was spoiling the moment and the two women would stay behind to share, until late at night and maybe till the next day and after, reproaches to the wicked gods who had caused them to be born in the wrong places. Most important, they would have shared their way of leaving them. Marie urgently, Gabrielle calmly. After all, they were both barren, and free.
She smiled at her interior movie with its triumphal ending and turned towards Pierre. She wished he could leave the notebook with her until he left, there were passages in it to be copied out and kept, in the past she’d have urged publication. “What a pity, that accident,” she said, “she was so right to go away . . .” He folded his arms and straightened his shoulders as if he had become a man. “Do you think so?”
She was too distracted by her vision of Marie to pay attention to the hostile crackle of the question. She was about to speak, to serve up to this boy, who was on the whole rather uncouth, some cliché in praise of flight, when he cut her off, suddenly standing, shouting because he’d never really learned how to talk. “It was me that started the fire yesterday. I’ve been doing that since I was born. I’m unhappy. I don’t understand anything. You always lie. And when you’re tired of telling lies you put on airs, you talk about exile. What’s that supposed to mean, exile? Do you know what it means for me? I started the fire while that crazy poet was talking about it. Marie died in exile. And it’s your fault, you and people like you. You can read in the notebook, a country of the destroyed. She went away. She was mine since the day I was born. And you say she was right . . .”
He grabbed the notebook from her, rested his elbows on her art books, a rather fine collection from the primitive artists of Oceania to the conceptual artists of Europe. At his fingertips, Marie’s pages began to blaze. Where had the lighter come from? In Gabrielle’s eyes there was none.
If the victim had not been till recently the minister of cultural affairs, the crime on rue des Bouleaux would have been in the headlines for a day at most, and even then on an inside page. It was a classic story, barely juicy: a forty-year-old woman stabbed, an awkward attempt to camouflage the murder with a quickly extinguished fire in an apartment building equipped with every alarm and fire-prevention device, the young occupant of a neighbouring apartment being held for questioning and then jailed on convincing evidence, no other witnesses, especially since the building had been without a concierge for several weeks. Emotions were guarded on this street in a new section of Laval where, despite her brief career in politics, the woman was one more unknown among others. All the same, some concerns were expressed about peace and quiet in the neighbourhood. Had it not been for the detail of the cat acquired on the very day of the tragedy and sent back at once to the SPCA, orphaned again, the dose of pathos would have been nil.
In spite of orders to be discreet, the police still had to deal with a certain commotion, and the story ha
d spilled over from the pages devoted to news in brief and seeped into the political coverage, where the right to comment made possible some fanciful exaggerations. One declared that a colleague of Gabrielle Perron’s claimed her seclusion resulted from a depression of amorous origin, another took up the depression theory the next day but attributed it to the blocking of the sovereignist horizon, because she belonged to the idealistic side of the party. Another, more audacious, focussed on the crime itself, suggesting that the official trail of the investigation, attempted robbery, was an indulgent official cover-up for a sex scandal, Gabrielle Perron’s life having long seemed, let us say, unorthodox. Whatever the truth may have been, it was a very sad ending for a talented woman whose retirement had already been seen as political suicide.
The sole female editorial writer at Le Devoir, who was the same age as Gabrielle and had always found it interesting to run into her, contributed a brief but heartfelt piece marked by sympathy for the life of a recluse. “In the space known as Quebec, where for a quarter of a century now our generation has never stopped ceding its overly vivid hopes to the lasting practitioners of the old forms of resignation, interior exile freely chosen is an act of courage.” Nothing about the circumstances of the death, they were of secondary importance, an editorial must try to take the readers’ thoughts a little further.
And that was the tomb of Gabrielle Perron, made of paper henceforth recyclable. As for the apartment she had owned, a buyer was found quickly. A securities broker, recently divorced, assured of the speculative potential of a good location along the river, moved in with a new girlfriend, to an appropriate place.
Also By Lise Bissonnette
Following the Summer
Affairs of Art
Cruelties
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House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”
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