Sometimes I would give in and retreat into myself and question my desire. I left the abandoned house. I let a forest of thorns grow over you. Only then would you venture out.
Rome is fragrant with flowering laurel, pink, white, and purple, the laurel of crowns. Between the Teatro Marcello and the Piazza Bocca della Verità, great clumps of laurel have taken over the sidewalk. I have to push through them to reach the banks of the Tiber and the bridge to Trastevere.
At the Borghese Gallery, standing before Bernini’s magnificent statue of a girl transformed into a laurel tree to escape the god who would rape her, I wonder which of us was Apollo, and which Daphne?
Julius Caesar accumulated mistresses, Mark Antony’s political manoeuvring dovetailed with his sexual desires, Augustus’s wife regularly brought him young virgins whom he took great pleasure in deflowering. I have known more than one Caesar in my time. Caesar the gladiator for whom girls were mere dolls. Caesar the bard for whom life was a percussion concert in a minefield. Caesar the poet who published under a pseudonym to hide the fact that he was a Narcissus desperately seeking his own reflection. Caesar the philosopher who acted as if he were above it all, but wrapped himself in his mother’s skirts, though she had humiliated him his whole life. How many times was I caught in their web, and had to slowly pull my feet free, fuming because I did not know how to untie the knots or dissolve their sticky juices, not knowing how to carry off a worthy coup d’état because I was no Brutus and I was alone, without a senate behind me?
Rome was built on blood and sperm. During my walks, I come across couples, sometimes on a bridge, other times in a park or standing by a wall in a shadowy street, couples locked in languorous kisses, couples quarrelling bitterly the way you see in the movies, voices raised and arms in the air, the girl stalking off, the boy left behind, then the girl coming back a minute later to add a few more choice words, waiting for a reaction before leaving again, the boy waiting, then running after her before she disappears for good, and a little further on I see them in each other’s arms, leaning against the rail, with the Colosseum or the Vatican in the background.
My friend Constantine often said that passion is a drug. The more you yell, the more you cry, the truer love seems. Adrenaline ramping up, the wild sessions in bed, as if in love tranquility were suspect, but not violence.
Constantine knows what he’s talking about. Wild women in a rage, narcissists with a thirst for power—he’s met a few in his life. According to him, the art world is fertile ground, bursting with girls with borderline personalities. They stream in from everywhere, throw themselves at his feet, tattoo his sheets with evidence of their visit. They want to hang onto him, either by becoming his muse, or showing him the real facts of life. But Constantine is no fool. He came, he saw, and if he didn’t always conquer, he returned with the assurance of gladiators and the stoicism of the ancients. Since then, he has been flying solo.
I tell myself that soon I’ll be doing the same, and opposing your invasion with the radical retreat of my armies. You will not see me anymore, you will not hear me, you won’t know where I am or what I am doing, imagining me will be your only choice.
The gladiators of ancient Rome were not what we picture today. They did not fight duels. One did not die of a fatal blow struck by the other. The loser had to acknowledge his defeat, his adversary’s superior strength, and his own weakness. Standing next to the victor, he lowered his eyes and awaited the emperor’s verdict— would he die or would his life be spared? The crowd took great pleasure in the scene. Such happiness in seeing the waiting man’s face, and the thrill of watching him have his throat cut.
When I visited the Colosseum, I learned that the Roman gladiator was a curious character. He was a star and an object of horror. He embodied the murderer and the victim both. When he died, he would join actors, prostitutes, and people who had taken their own lives out of cowardice. Gladiators could be loved only at a distance, in the arena. It was not good form to associate with them.
But for the Romans, there was a class worse than gladiators, for true danger was not to be found in the arena, but at the theatre where the most vile impulses and the true face of men were displayed for all to see.
You said that Montreal’s grid pattern made you feel you were in Kafka’s Trial, and to keep from getting stuck in the squares, you walked at a lively pace in a diagonal pattern, as if declaring war on space. For you, the land of the wild and the free was not synonymous with freedom, unlike Prague whose layout had to be followed on a map if you wanted to know where you were.
I had never noticed that Montreal was a checkerboard. When I walk, most of the time I don’t see further than a few steps ahead, the people I pass at close range, the shop windows I go by. Then I might lift my head quickly, clothes, shoes, the sun, a pretty face, before I dive back into myself.
You said that in another life, I almost certainly had been an animal that lived close to the ground, whereas you preferred the heights, you must have been a bird.
You attacked my city as if it were my skin. You liked to say that Montreal was a hole, an overgrown village. You said it was an open-air prison inhabited by poor people whose main objective was avoiding suffering at all cost. You said that here people spent their lives waiting, they were not truly involved in existence, a welfare society was not preferable to chaos and anarchy, democracy was just another face of fascism, and a person was more alive when he had to stare down death on a sidewalk in Bombay or a sniper’s bullet in Sarajevo. You thought my country was a hothouse where human beings were plugged into respirators. You said that whatever we needed, we invented, you laughed at your own joke about how we could grow strawberries in Alaska and make cakes without gluten. You said we were fragile, perishable, and afraid of everything, Americans were getting so fat that soon they wouldn’t be able to move and would go the way of the dinosaurs. You raged against our lack of culinary tradition, then accused us of thinking only of food, setting meetings in restaurants as if it were a great event each and every time, instead of living in an open house like gypsies. You said we feed off fear, and I replied ironically that yes, of course, but most importantly, our real fuel was the contempt of Europeans who came here to spit on us from the height of their centuries-old cultures.
Eastern Europe occupied the same spot in my mind as the rest of the world. I was never really interested in it. I found nothing mysterious about the great cathedrals, Sputnik, or the famous Kalashnikov. The only things that made me curious were those nesting dolls with their fine dresses sculpted from linden wood, and which you can now buy in the effigy of Stalin, Gorbachev, and Vladimir Putin. I was happy with the clichés I’d picked up here and there and stored in some dusty corner of my brain, in the same area as Reunion Island and Burkina Faso, countries that for me didn’t exist outside a poster in a travel agency or an advertisement. The East was just another place in the world that could be summed up by the exploitation of athletes, abandoned by their parents and sacrificed to the glory of the nation until they died in total anonymity. My knowledge was woven from proverbs, superstitions, and rituals, a collage of colourful flowery dresses, a glossy surface that reflected nothing more for me than what I knew, forests, fields, and snow, this North American Siberia where I grew up, you said it was worse than the other side because not only was the cold so intense, but the humidity too, and in any case everything was worse here than everywhere else, especially where you came from. You wondered why America existed, and why you had to suffer such a fate as a result of God’s cruelty.
During your time here, you kept a journal online, and took great pleasure in insulting Quebec. One day, I copied and pasted what you had written in your mother tongue into a translation program. I expected sadness or despair, the palimpsest of the pain you experienced long ago and which, so you announced, would return with your journey here. I expected melancholy, which I had anticipated before you came, the hours we would spend in shared solit
ude, less to make love and more to ease the transition between your elsewhere and my here. I pictured the slow passage across a dense river, a Styx you would cross but emerge from, cleansed of the fear and pain that tormented you. Instead, I discovered endless surliness and contempt in your journal, stories that mocked this place, and a portrait of Montreal as a giant garbage bag. Your disgust with Quebec was proportional to your attachment to European countries, the Czech Republic, France, and Germany, which you portrayed as a sacrificial victim. One day, you told me that by murdering the Jews in the gas chambers, Germany had chosen to commit a crime against humanity but someone had to do it, in the grand scheme of things bastards existed because they were needed, someone had to have the guts to assume the evil of others, and bad guys weren’t only bad but also victims of a destiny they could not escape. The executioners always came out on top in your version, and I would listen to you, incredulous, as you spouted that nonsense.
You preached love and compassion, with your long legs folded beneath you twice a day in the asana position, you could endure those contortions for hours without moving, you were channelling a master and claimed to be receiving his light from the other side of the globe, you opened wide the sluice of your hatred and with a clear conscience poured it upon the place where my ancestors set down roots, people from Normandy who immigrated here before the Seven Years’ War and remained along the St. Lawrence River. In time, some had become lawyers, politicians, and doctors, and they themselves had had boys, some of whom were writers, men who like all Québécois were failures, unlike the males of your country, and especially you, the superman, the Übermensch.
You turned Quebec into a monstrosity, and me with it. I took on the features of one of those extraterrestrials whose existence you liked to believe in because they put a face to your fears, the fear of being loved and having to trust someone, as if love were an obstacle to the potency you lusted after, and would deprive you of the power you always wanted to wield because it alone gave you the illusion of an identity, you were to follow the model of the Russian soldiers your mother admired, describing their arrival in Prague as a majestic thing, the way you had of tightening the screws on me until I imploded, until I diffracted, until I erased myself and finally stopped loving you.
I hate you for having defended the greatness of your world by spitting your venom on mine with so few scruples. I hate you for having positioned yourself in a watchtower like the ones you see in prison yards and, from that height, blasting away at us.
You liked to say you were Stalin’s son. Now I understand you were Hitler’s boy too.
On good days, you would ask me to tell you the story of the Patriots’ War. I did as well as I could, that is, not well at all, since my recollection of history class was full of holes. The slogan “Je me souviens”—I remember—didn’t work for me. National identity was not a thing that needed to be defended nor excused. Everyone had their place on this planet, without hierarchy and no matter their history, no country deserved it more than any other on the grounds that its cultural capital was greater, built on ruins, wars, kings, or divinities. But with you, suddenly, this was a subject for debate. You spoke of the cultures you admired, the peoples you respected, setting apart great and small nations, and I protested as if these things somehow concerned me, surprised by the way I defended that nameless, faceless thing that you called, in your careless way, country, roots, or origins.
I moved to Montreal fifteen years ago and since then the city has been part of me, its alleys and gardens, its electrical poles carved into the trunks of trees, its potholes and spiral staircases, its porches that throw a warm welcome around the houses. I like the neighbours who call from balcony to balcony, the snow that cloaks the city, the hysteria of Christmas lights, the garbage bags set like dotted lines along the sidewalk, their smell saturating the summer air. You cared nothing for the sovereignty issue and the battles over language. You said that social movements were idiotic, and I wasted my time trying to convince you of the country’s newness and the giant steps it had made so far, holding tight to its language as English was working to infiltrate from all sides, that few populations had made such advancements in so short a time. People liked to say that Quebec was a relic of the colonial past resisting modernity, and I was like that quaint relic, opposing you. My resistance enraged you, and you would swell up like a frog, you changed your strategy and accused my defence, as if I should have kept quiet while you freely attacked. I never felt so québécoise as when faced with your assault. Coloniale Avenue became the Plains of Abraham.
I should have remained indifferent, but for that to work, I couldn’t have loved you, or loved myself, or this country or any other, not the Czech Republic, Quebec, or Italy. For that to work, love could not have existed at all, I would have had to be a character in a film, the kind of psychopath that makes the lambs whimper. “First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing, ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature?”
I would have had to be an entomologist contemplating the splendour of a butterfly he has gently asphyxiated then pinned to a board, and do but one thing: talk to you about you. That way I would have told you who you were, I would have identified your species, I would have described its appearance, its behaviour in the natural world, its characteristics, and properties. In that way I would have kept you. Nothing would have touched me, neither your violence nor your sweetness, neither your capriciousness nor your terror. I would have been the Commander you admired, that statue against which you measured yourself because it was stronger than you and you would never succeed in dethroning it. You would have been neutralized. But then, would I have still loved you?
I have nothing to say against Quebec. I won’t join the choir of intellectuals and artists who love to reject their culture and puff themselves up because they’re closer to the old country and everyone knows that old is gold, worm-eaten woodwork, grey stone, marble, and mould. Those things seem more solid, old and immutable, the long term always wins over the ephemeral products of the new land, the logic of makeshift lodgings and fake facades, a gust of wind and everything disappears like the tourist hotels in Chennai.
Colonialism is a wound, and I go on the attack when I hear voices persuaded by their privilege, the singsong paternalism of those for whom we will never be anything more than fools, serfs, eternal losers, those who say that nothing can ever be born here, no sustainable development, only throw-away products, the dead end of the pioneers who a hundred times took up the same task, convinced that one day it would amount to something, and meanwhile others are telling us it’s a mirage, we can invent but we will never establish anything that will last for all eternity.
I won’t join the chorus of hypocrites.
I never knew what a family house felt like. My parents moved all the time, and I don’t understand how a person can get attached to walls, whether they’re built of brick, stone, or aluminum. I don’t know the place I was born and I don’t care to know where I’ll be buried. I left the shabby village where I lived as a child and didn’t know what was waiting for me at the end of the highway, and when I went back later to compare my memories to reality, I found nothing of what had occupied my mind for all those years. The place was empty. The playground was paved in cracked concrete. The hut at the entrance to the campground hadn’t been repainted for ages, and the blue of the swimming pool had faded. Nothing had been replaced and the holes weren’t filled the way you said they did in East Berlin, where they turned bombed-out zones into parks for kids. In my village, people built new houses at the end of a row of old wrecks, like a virus reproducing. The place smelled of despair, as if patiently waiting to disappear piece by piece into the junkyard.
I went back there with you to show you what sort of belly I had emerged from. We drove in on the 417. You squinted at the landscape of cornfields and farms adrift in endless space. Time stretched out like the white lines on the asphalt that child
ren stare at until their heads spin. There was no one on the street, not a single living person. The solitude weighed a ton, the spruce was dying of sadness, the church steeple was alone, lost, fading into the thin fog. The village had become a cemetery, washing away the rest of the bitterness I carried within, the final regrets of childhood.
When we talked about our backgrounds, I would remind you of those pictures. To your high culture I offered up the bungalow and the rail line, and my stuttering native tongue. Deep down, I loved my village, the way I loved you when I took you there.
Last night, in my sleep, after the insomnia that has been my companion since you left, I heard you tell your stupid senseless stories again. This time it was about a neighbour woman you hardly knew at all, though you maintained that her outbursts of anger were caused by a stillborn child who had been her ancestor. I raised my eyebrows and you pushed on, you wanted to persuade me that occult forces dictate the relations between people and that we have to trust their shadowy embrace. You started talking to me about souls and the karmic cycle, the price that life makes us pay and the ancestors to whom we owe absolute fidelity. In my dream, you were the misfortune teller you had become in reality who, every day, sets down the law of bad news, the one who, in the absence of God, decides he’s a guru and goes looking for disciples.
The Last Bullet Is for You Page 5