The Dead of Winter

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Went to a demo today. Thousands of people, waving banners. Vive le Québec Libre and Maître chez nous and the fleur-de-lis and all that. I can’t tell whether I really care about the politics or only about the thrill of the crowd.

  I bumped into Pierre Rousseau. I think he cares… About the politics that is. He’s turned very handsome and very revolutionary. All he talks about is the class struggle and the French being the white negroes of the continent and cultural and economic oppression. Forty-four nations have declared their independence since the second world war. Why not Québec? He used to speak proper French. Now he slips into joual. It’s quite seductive. I wanted to prove something to him. I think I did. I really think I did.

  What does she mean? I skim subsequent pages but my name has vanished.

  The book slips from my hand. I am back there. Back with Madeleine in search of an explanation. June 1970, it must have been. I was well into law school, heading our deputation for the march. Maybe I had already joined the Parti Québecois.

  The crowd was huge. Ever since de Gaulle had proclaimed his ‘Vive le Québec Libre’ from the height of the garlanded Town Hall and effectively blessed the movement, the crowds had been huge.

  This occasion was a particularly raucous one. The chanting and cheering of the gathered mass already a celebration of an event that was still a dream.

  At first I paid no attention to the tug on my sleeve. When I did, I turned to see a woman of astonishing beauty. Beneath the fringe and the lazy flutter of hair, I recognized those gold-flecked eyes. Madeleine. She was wearing a scruffy T-shirt and tight jeans. Her thumbs were hitched into their waist and she walked with a kind of coltish sexuality, an animal grace which made me think of Brigitte Bardot. I hugged her. Speech was all but impossible, but I shouted and mouthed above the crowd. ‘If we lose each other, let’s meet up later. About eight. At the pizza parlour on the corner of Côte des Neiges and Lacombe.’

  She squeezed my arm and walked off. Had it been possible to follow, I would have.

  Later I sat amidst my friends in the Pizzeria and sipped bad wine and glanced so often at the door that Guillaume, my closest mate, reprimanded me for not paying attention to the conversation. When Madeleine finally came in, I think he understood. A momentary silence fell round the table. She sauntered towards us, slipped into a chair. I swallowed hard and introduced her, put my arm a little possessively round her shoulders.

  While we ate, she was quiet, attentive in a languid way. At one point, in the midst of our heated emphasis on separatism, she said, ‘But what’s wrong with Canada?’

  ‘What do you mean by Canada?’ I grilled her and when she failed to answer, did so for her. ‘You mean that family romance, that peaceful, loving, cooperative federation made up of two ethnicities, French and English, coexisting happily from sea to glorious sea? But that’s never been there, Madeleine. That’s always and only ever been a fantasy, a myth. What we really have are two separate entities. English and French.’

  I went on and on lecturing passionately, loading her with statistics, evoking justice, the pride of a people who had lived too long with bowed heads. I was trying to impress her. I must have been insufferable. My only excuse is that I was still a mere twenty. Political passion is the province of the young.

  Soon after that I asked her if she’d like to come back to my place for a quieter drink. She surprised me by saying yes.

  Alone together on the streets, I was suddenly gripped by shyness. I could hardly believe that this exquisite woman was my old friend Madeleine.

  Madeleine, however, came into her own. Released from the dreams and quibbles of politics, she started to tell me about her courses at the theatre school - how one of their teachers had them sing ‘God Save the Queen’ in English in order to practice their diction, how another could barely get his lips round Racine, so that the rhymes never rhymed. She mimicked and pranced and by the time we had reached the house on the Rue Fendall we were both laughing so hard, we could barely stand up straight.

  ‘Nice place.’ Madeleine caught her breath as she looked around. She peered up at pictures, tried lamps, touched objects with avid curiosity.

  ‘Not mine. I’m house sitting.’ I uncorked a bottle of Bulls Blood which was about the only wine we drank. ‘And you, where are you living?’

  She didn’t answer. Her silence made me think she must be hitched up with a man. I didn’t want to press her, but I suddenly couldn’t think of another thing to say. I handed her a glass and she curled into the sofa and sipped it with a serious intentness.

  ‘Do you have some music?’ she asked abruptly.

  ‘Sure. What would you like. Mozart, Brahms, Debussy, Jazz, rock, chansonniers, Gilles Vigneault, Jacques Brel? I was sounding like an idiot again and I shut up.’

  ‘Vigneault, why not. Since you’re such a patriot.’

  I met her eyes for a second and I had the impression that any moment now, she would launch into an imitation of me I wouldn’t like.

  ‘Vigneault, it is.’ I put on an LP. I could feel Madeleine’s eyes on my back and I only dared turn round when the guitar was already well into the mournful chords of Mon Pays and that dry, broken voice had begun to dissect our condition.

  Madeleine patted the seat beside her. I sat down and we gazed at each other. There was a crackle in the air, like fire licking at wood. Then suddenly our lips met.

  I don’t really remember anything else. It was the first time loving, sex, passion - whatever it was - had extinguished that watchful inner eye. With Madeleine there was nothing except the music of our limbs, the percussion of desire, the melody of discovery.

  Afterwards, our bodies entwined, I felt I had come home to a home I had never really known, like heaven, or a sea that lapped at one continuously, bracing and embracing, all at once. Madeleine’s luminous eyes told me she felt the same way. Or so I thought.

  I must have slept with inordinate heaviness, for when I woke she was no longer there. Not in the bed. Not anywhere in the house. A chasm opened inside me, as if I had been split in two. And with it a sense of disbelief. Had I dreamed the whole encounter?

  The tell-tale splash of blood on the bed suggested otherwise. But it filled me with a secondary disbelief. I hadn’t noticed, hadn’t imagined, could still not imagine, that it was Madeleine’s first time.

  I lay there, smoking furiously, one cigarette after another, trying to make sense of things and then I lunged for the telephone. She hadn’t left me a number, so I tried inquiries with no success and then the theatre school. I left a message, left a number at the paper where I was doing a summer stint again, left my home number. All day and the next and the next, I waited for her to ring. Nothing.

  Swallowing my discomfort and my pride, I finally contacted Mme Tremblay. She told me Madeleine had just left for Connecticut where she had a small summer stock job. She gave me an address.

  I didn’t write. I wouldn’t have known what to say. I felt too hurt and at the same time, I had the sense that I had failed somewhere, whether through lack of tact or something else, I didn’t know. Women were so incomprehensible.

  I made myself forget. It didn’t take all that long. Work, youthful spirits, the pace of political and other passions - everything then moved with the blurred speed and raucous enthusiasm of a Rolling Stones concert.

  Our group at the university knew the enemy in intimate detail. We had analysed his component parts. We knew the size and scale of his assets, the tentacles of his power. We hated him and the Jews who were his cohorts and the complicit clerics who had kept the province locked in the nineteenth century. We had managed in a few brief years to extricate ourselves from the choking grip of the clergy and to restore some pride in our French identity. A great deal remained to be done.

  All this was fine and well in the abstract. The trouble was few of us had ever met any English face to face, let alone any Jews, those ogres of the catechism we had imbibed with our mother’s milk. For centuries, we had managed to inhabit two sepa
rate and neighbouring solitudes and make monsters of the other.

  I had the bright idea of forming a discussion group with our equivalents at the law faculty of McGill, the English university on the other side of the mountain. Five of us and five of them. The only stipulation was that the language of dicussion had to be French.

  We met on a Wednesday evening in a room at the university. They arrived in a group and for a moment we all stared at each other in embarrassed silence. They didn’t look any different from us. They were young, casually dressed, polite as we shook hands and introduced ourselves. The only difference was that one of them was a woman. Anne Davies. She was tall and self-composed with waving copper hair and a smattering of freckles and her French, unlike the others, was a mirror image of my own.

  I talked through the points of a prepared statement which detailed the kinds of issues we wanted to discuss with them in the coming weeks: economic and political discrimination, the charade of bilingualism, the need for the universal use of French as the official language of Québec, and so on. They threw in a few more. We grew a little heated over our Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau’s policies which we felt reduced the French to just another ethnic minority. But all and all, things progressed with a degree of friendly civility and abutted in my invitation to retire to my place for drinks.

  It was in the informality of my living room that things began to go awry. My friend Guillaume started on one of his anti-semitic riffs blaming the Jews for this that and the other, for their disproportionate share of resources.

  Anne interrupted him sharply. ‘Look, I’m Jewish.’

  One of the men echoed her. ‘Me, too.’

  He stood up to leave, but Anne stayed in her place. Her face was fierce, her posture suddenly that of a street kid, poised to fight. ‘The trouble with you Québecois is that the whole history of the twentieth century seems to have passed you by. Where’ve you been hiding? Do you know where nationalisms based on racial homogeneity have led to? Have you heard of fascism, Nazism? The Second World War?’

  Guillaume cleared his throat and I butted in saying the first thing that came to my mind before he brought further shame on us. ‘My father fought in the Second World War.’

  She met my eyes. Hers were green, the pupils huge. I hadn’t known Jews could look like this.

  The aburdity of the thought, the fact that it had leapt into my mind, the sense that I was trapped in stereotypes, made me burble on. ‘Look, this is obviously something we need to discuss further. Next week, maybe you could, I don’t know, throw it all at us, give us your list of prejudices. We’ll give you ours.’

  Anne laughed. ‘Sounds like fun. Think we’ll come out of it alive?’

  As the others left, I asked her if she could stay behind for a few minutes. I wanted to apologize in some way. I was also interested in her - the way she argued, the things she had to teach me, the mixture of wit and fire. Within a few weeks, we were engaged on an affair, which had as much of mutual curiosity and the pleasure of argument about it, as passion. The affair outlasted the discussion group. It also deflected my thoughts from Madeleine.

  Anne and I are still friends, though she left Québec for New York, where she teaches at Columbia. It was she who helped me keep my intellectual balance through the terrible days of the FLQ crisis which finally shattered the collective dream of a harmonious Canada. The bombs in mailboxes and armouries had begun the process in the early sixties. The kidnapping in October 1970 of James Cross, the British Commercial Attaché and then a week later the kidnapping and murder of Québec Labour Minister, Pierre Laporte by a terrorist cell of the maoiste Front de Libération du Québec, finished it.

  The federal government sent in the army, instituted the emergency War Measures Act. Our civil liberties were suspended. I and many of my colleagues found ourselves marched off to police headquarters for days of interrogation. It was difficult to disentangle our hatred for these abusive measures and our sympathy for the ultimate aims, if not the means, of the terrorists. Anne helped. I may have wanted independence, but not at any cost.

  In the midst of all this, a postcard with a picture of flaming autumn leaves arrived from Madeleine, saying nothing more than ‘Hope you’re well. See you sometime.’

  The sometime stretched into two years. It finally arrived in the form of an invitation which reached me at the newspaper. A single sheet of paper depicting a circus scene and announcing a new production of Lulu by a theatre group I had never heard of. On the back, Madeleine had scrawled, ‘Come to the opening night. There’s a party afterwards.’

  I went. Even another woman or a political meeting couldn’t have kept me away. Though I felt a little like a well-trained dog who would have liked to chew at the leash.

  The theatre was in the old town, a few streets up from the harbour - an area of beautiful grey stone houses which were just beginning to be reclaimed from dereliction. This one still hadn’t quite made it, though a bright banner hung over the doors and the woman at the ticket desk beamed good humour as she gestured us down the stairs into a basement room that had been decked out with ramps on three sides. A spangled light, like a great balloon made out of mosaics swung over what served as a stage.

  A brass band dressed in a madcap array of circus tat and glitter started to strut across the stage and boom out a cacophony of sound. In its wake came three larger than life puppets, bulging caricatures - a humble, leering priest, a bewigged judge, and a cigar smoking politician. The puppets bowed and bobbed and lined up at the back of the stage. Suddenly a grate clattered down in front of them, encaging them. They growled like wild beasts, thrust themselves against the bars of their prison.

  A whip lashed the air. The puppets growled more savagely. From somewhere a pistol rang out and a circus master’s voice welcomed us to the show. The fury of the beasts increased. Then a silver sylph of a dancer appeared. Her face was that of an angel’s, her first steps as sinuous as a serpent’s. With astonishing abandon, she leapt and shimmied and threw herself about the stage. Half goddess, half fiend, her presence bewitched beasts and audience alike.

  It took me a moment to recognize Madeleine. In the next I forgot her. I was as prey to Lulu’s magic as the series of men and women who entered her sway and fell victim to her unleashed sexuality. Her sheer physical vitality captivated and entranced. Like a force of nature or of the unconscious, she lived above and beyond any social or moral conventions.

  I later realised that the troupe had played fast and furious with Wedekind’s original turn-of-the-century plays. Gone were the doctor and artist and newspaper owner to be replaced by more contemporary figures of establishment hypocrisy. The music, too, was wholly of our time, as brash and loud and pulsating as a rock concert, so that it was almost impossible to sit still. Lulu never did.

  As a reviewer said of Madeleine Blais the next day, she embodied that true, savage, beautiful beast who was young Québec. He didn’t bother with the play’s end where Lulu lies prone, her fast and free life ravaged and ended by Jack the Ripper, a modern serial killer before his time.

  With a start I realise where my thoughts have taken me. My hands are clammy, my throat dry. Was Madeleine’s end already written in her flamboyant beginning as Lulu? And if so, in which of her male leads am I inscribed, victims or killer?

  I hurl off my clothes as if they were responsible for the straitjacket of my thoughts and plunge between the sheets. The pillow retains the scent of Madeleine’s hair, a fresh fragrance composed of I don’t know what flowers. I bury my face in it. Three nights. Only three nights have passed.

  In the scent of the pillow, I find her again as she was in that first vibrant performance. I see her perched on that bar in the centre of the stage, swinging her legs, back and forth, randomly to the side, always in motion, a little girl who has woken to the power of her sexuality. Was it then that I said to myself, if I had been the first, I had certainly in those two years that had passed, only been the first of many? When I approached her at the party afterwar
ds, I was intensely aware of the fact.

  She was standing in the midst of a group of admirers. Her eyes were radiant. A simple black triangle of a dress, sleeveless and very short in the style of the time, did nothing to mute her presence. I hovered at the edge of the group, uncertain about how to behave with this new Madeleine.

  But when our eyes met, the sexual magic between us was still there, more potent than ever. Trapped in its taut lines we didn’t move for a moment. Then she took a step towards me and in a blink I was at her side, effusive with congratulations.

  Her tone was sceptical. She drew me towards a quiet corner. ‘You really liked it?’

  ‘Really. Very, very much.’

  She began to anatomize the production and her performance with the seriousness of a practised critic, telling me where she had failed, where she could do better.

  ‘You were wonderful,’ I reiterated.

  ‘That isn’t, I hope, just a comment about my legs.’

  I allowed myself to examine her legs. ‘No,’ I laughed. ‘Though they’re not bad either.’

  Our eyes locked again. I don’t know what she read in mine, but she turned away, was about to be swallowed by an exuberant group. I touched her shoulder, held her back.

  ‘Can we see each other, Madeleine? Perhaps even later tonight? I looked for you, you know. After… after…’

  ‘Maybe.’ Her face took on an enigmatic cast. ‘Let’s see how things go.’

  I waited. I don’t think I could have done otherwise. I watched her raking in the congratulations. I watched the hugs and kisses and instant intimacies which make up theatrical life. I chatted and drank and mingled and never took my eyes off Madeleine. Maybe it was simply the persistence of my attention, maybe she had always intended it, but eventually she did come back home with me. And once she was there, I never wanted her to leave again.

  Oddly, it was as if no time had passed. We didn’t speak about the intervening years. No explanations were given. Perhaps we were still too young for them. The present was enough. It was flushed with desire. It enveloped us in its generous heat.