Last Days of Montreal

by John Brooke

  In the market, he brazenly takes an apple and bites into it, making it clear to the vendor that it is she who will pay. And she does. Walking away, she asks, “Does that give you pleasure?”

  “This apple, yes. You, not so much. But it’s right, don’t you think? If you stole love from your husband and gave it to an apple vendor…now, as you give your life to me, I will take it with an apple. There’s a symmetry there, no?”

  What can she say? This neighbour is not the man she thought he was. And she doesn’t dare run or ask for help. Between the bench and the market she has babbled out her life, everything, including her brief affair with Gaston the apple vendor, a fellow French emigré. It happened when they were both lonely. It happened in winter, now that she comes to remember it… After the market, she heads over to Jarry Park. It’s soaked and muddy, but he follows her still. She stops in the middle of the field, breaks the nose off her baguette and chews on it. Mont Royal swells in the southwest distance behind the stadium. Along its farthest edge the art deco shapes of the Université, the huge roundness of the Oratoire’s dome and the jagged adobe-like rise of the millionaires’ condominium complex combine to give a fictional, lost-world effect. Geneviève feels lost with her unreal life in Montreal. While this man waits like an unknown assistant someone has assigned her. “I don’t even know your name. Vic? C’est ça? My husband calls you Picasso.”

  His lip curls with a special scorn that will soon become familiar.

  “Your face. It reminds him of Picasso.”

  “In truth, I am Menocchio.”

  “Menocchio?”

  “B’en, I was born Vittorio…I was Vic to the men who believed they were the bosses of my life after I arrived in Montreal. It was my wife who gave me Menocchio. She said it was because I would always gather things. She said I would tuck them into my pockets and that she would wonder what I did with them — all my found treasures. Menocchio: a gatherer of bric-à-brac, scattered things, lost items, the unclaimed and unwanted, the forgotten and the disavowed…Well, what I did, and do, with all those things is guard them. Menocchio. I brought this name across the ocean and I have carried it to the far side of love. It’s rare my wife calls me anything anymore. It seems to be the way of love that a name fades from the lips much like the kisses. Why is this?”

  Geneviève thinks about it. He has touched on something. “Perhaps the face changes. One no longer sees the thing that brought the name to mind in dreams.”

  “The thing in the dreams is not a face but a place,” replies Menocchio. “Passion needs its rooted place. Carry it too far from home, it can only ever be a ghost.”

  “Oui, comme ça,” she murmurs, “an uncertain thing between the presence that is the two of you.” She has felt this. She has seen it in every face. Making love to strangers…making love to Bruce. Sharing life, but never history; passion receding till it’s only the body, a free agent, forever travelling — but to what, and where? “So easy to lose each other,” she allows.

  He nods. “My wife has lost me. Her Menocchio, her gatherer of lost things — he has slipped behind his face into the eternal meaning of his name. You see what I mean?”

  “Perhaps.” Ripping away another hunk of bread and popping it between her teeth. Yes, he has touched on something close.

  He says, “It means you are a lost thing too, Madame Geneviève. And that I have found you.”

  Geneviève cannot argue. He knows her. There is already a rapport. She repeats it, that name — she repeats it as if he weren’t here in front of her, as if she has suddenly lost him: “Menocchio?”

  For some reason it earns her a smile, wide and magnificent, like a donkey’s. “I love to hear you say it!”

  Thus they enter into a relationship based on her confession. Which is based on her life.

  4. A new routine

  She begins to arrange her life around it. The season changes (as her heart, if not her body, knew it must). He spends his mornings in his garden with his wife. Around noon he’ll appear in the lane and look up at her window. Geneviève puts her work aside, goes through the yard and out her gate. They’ll walk to the bench and he will repeat his demand. She refuses, offering a different excuse each time, depending on her mood. Then they will stroll through the quarter and talk about it. Direct, or oblique, but even through her silence, everything revolves around it. He holds her fate in his crazy hands, and talking…this walking, it may buy her time to see a way past him. To find a weakness. She has read that the terrorist/hostage relationship is subtle, and if approached accordingly, can be shaped. She can’t know if he has guessed her strategy; but walking around aimlessly is his well-known métier and he seems comfortable enough. He tells her, “Walking serves to isolate a person with their thoughts. This is valuable as you contemplate the logic of your life. If you are going to sit on my bench you must come to terms with your isolation.”

  “I am not going to sit on your bench.”

  “Oh, my Geneviève, I believe you will.”

  Vic has become Menocchio; and Menocchio has gone from vous to tu when addressing Geneviève…to my Geneviève, without her really noticing. Each day when they meet and walk away, his wife will be watching from their garden, vague and dusty in the same grey smock. “Doesn’t she question your going off with me like this? I can’t believe how she stands there and watches you go.”

  “No. Why would she? She has no right. I told you: she has lost me.”

  “Poor woman.”

  “Come, come. She is provided for. I dig her garden. I put my wine away when my grandson comes on Sunday. If there is something to be carried, I will do that too. She knows this. There is no need to worry about my wife. And your husband — does he know? Does he quiz you at the table or in the bed? How does your husband see you?”

  “He is not my husband,” declares Geneviève. This was bound to come out at some point. “I won’t be married. It’s too late. There are too many gaps to be married. Too much separate history to be married…far too many small things for me to bear the thought.” She has heard herself saying these words before. But to whom?

  “Secrets,” prompts Menocchio, “the untouched things that are only yours?”

  Just like that, he will bring the issue squarely to her. She might glare and seal her lips, at least for the rest of that particular day. Yet she takes no pains to conceal it from Bruce either. After all, it is not like her adventure with Gaston Le Gac, the apple vendor from Bretagne. Nothing at all like that. Murder is not sex and she refuses any notion that this thing with Vic…Menocchio, might lead to a similar place in her soul. Bruce can know. Bruce is bound to know. But it has nothing to do with him.

  (Neither, really, did the thing with Gaston. Geneviève’s heart knows her soul is not divisible.)

  Sure enough, one Saturday in June, Bruce is in the kitchen reading his paper when she leaves. He’s at the window, watching as they depart. The next Sunday he is in the lane washing his car as she again joins their neighbour and trundles off. Later that same day they are sitting together in the garden with their books. The lilac has blossomed wonderfully. Her adversary is ten paces away with his grandson, mugging and giggling. All looks well and normal. Bruce puts down his book. “Two hours, Gen…almost three, actually. Where do you go?”

  “Walking.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere. Around the quarter.”

  “Not to drink, I hope.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  He sits for several moments; then wonders, “So is it fun — walking around with Picasso?”

  Fun? “It is something I have to do.” She adds, “He is not Picasso. He is Menocchio.”

  All Bruce can say to that is: “Why?”

  “He needs me. I talk to him.”

  “About what?”

  She shakes her head — don’t ask me this.

  “I see.”

  Bruce is well aware of her patch, and of her increasingly erratic cycle, the new foods that are appearing on their
table, the cigarettes she has started smoking again to try to fight her weight, and of the book she is holding in her hand: Le renouveau de la gloire! But he does not “see.” How could he?

  She cancels their usual holiday flight to Marseilles, telling him, “I need a break.”

  Bruce says, “Right,” and doesn’t push it. He will use his holiday to develop his golf. To spend time with his parents and his two children who live with their mother on the far side of the city. To drive to Toronto and visit an old friend. To keep his distance. She admires his forbearance. Or is it fear? Does Bruce have a sense that she could kill on a whim? The fact is, she needs Menocchio. To explain it, to tell her if it could be true. The visceral anger of a stunted spring is gone and Miko’s awful face has all but disappeared. And while Miko’s mama’s business carries on — mais oui! — it appears she has lost a customer. The junkie girlfriend. Geneviève has searched up and down rue St. Denis, where she used to see the woman earning her squalid living, but there’s no sign of her.

  Geneviève is alone with Menocchio and the thing she has done, a thing she can never undo.

  Never: she understands it as the shadow side of a perpetual present tense.

  She is chained to it and the bond is deepening as they walk in circles through his world.

  5. Overlapping sensibility

  There is an overlapping sensibility developing.

  He enjoys it, taking it as it comes. She fears it is the marriage she has always denied.

  They are back in Jarry Park, watching kites dart and drift through the summer sky. Geneviève shifts her tote bag from one hand to the other. It is filled with bread and vegetables from the market. He thinks: She combines the practical side with her meditation. I don’t mind. On the contrary, with each action — choosing melons, critiquing cheese — she adds one more item to the inventory that is herself. Which I now own. She thinks: No, and you never will.

  A kite alights with a bounce on the grass, twenty paces away. Menocchio lets out one of his ghastly donkey noises, pulls out his pocket knife and dashes toward it, a barrel-chested, seventyish man in a motoring cap, running, braying shamelessly. People look. Of course they look. At her too; and she must acknowledge it: Yes, I’m with him. He thinks: I’m always happy to find a kite!

  But the kite — its owner unseen at the far end of a ball of string — jumps away from his grasping hands. Once…twice, just out of reach; and a third time; then it glides back up into the sky.

  She asks, “What is your problem?”

  He tells her, “I would love to have a kite to fly above my French woman while she sits on my bench in my park in the heart of my quarter.”

  “You would have taken it. Just like that.”

  “Yes, I would have taken it.”

  “You are a greedy, greedy man.”

  “Yes, yes,” Menocchio agrees wholeheartedly. “I want whatever I can lay my hands on. But what about you — who will not allow herself to be touched by marriage? Or a child? Or by a rough word or two from the mouth of a lost soul like Miko? Is that not selfishness? Is that not greed?”

  “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “And you were in the right one?”

  Geneviève falls back into silence. Heading home, he stops to examine a pair of abandoned shoes: fascinating, a piece of history, lying there, random, in need of someone’s feet. She waits, watching dully. She knows Menocchio will gladly take them home. Nor can they pass a pile of bundled magazines. This too is treasure: so many things to be learned about the bundler!…She grows impatient, half a block ahead as he dawdles by a carton of discarded wine bottles, finally choosing four to take for his own.

  He thinks: Your patience is terrible, but my bench will fix that. She thinks: You are too pathetic.

  Here’s a child’s ball lying in the gutter and Menocchio grabs it. “This will be perfect for my grandson.” Immediately there comes a rush of small feet down the front steps, a child with his hand out, speaking inarticulate words. He wants his ball. Menocchio gives him a dance instead: hunched up, extending a long and dirty forefinger from his nose; and braying, raising his feet, stomping. One, two, one, two. The child runs back up the steps, squalling for his mother. Menocchio clasps the ball to his breast and walks away.

  The mother rushes out and catches him, tugging on his sleeve.

  He turns on her with another animal moan, and does his dance.

  The woman shrinks back.

  Who wouldn’t? thinks Geneviève. And she knows he’s got her boxed again.

  Oh si, chortling, enjoying her dilemma, thinking: I can walk away unimpeded; my Geneviève will stand there wishing she could explain it all: that she comes from France — this is always first, and then about the man who is not her husband, and that she has no children, and about her bicycle and the bicycle that was stolen. She would love to mention the affair with the apple vendor, and the book she is reading — about a return to glory; and the bread she favours, the cheese…how her mother taught her to taste the quality of a cheese. How her father could fix a car. There are so many things to tell a stranger, and eventually she will come to the madman who is her neighbour. Explain it with a sad, sad smile. Her burden. Geneviève would love to tell that child’s mother everything except her reason.

  An entire block behind him now, Geneviève knows what he is thinking. It is exactly what she almost told that woman!…almost: her whole life, but not the reason. Before that woman let her go. She made her go. Didn’t want to hear it. That woman didn’t want to know about crazy people in the streets.

  When she catches up, Menocchio poses basic questions. “Will that boy learn to take care of his ball? His next ball. And will Geneviève learn to take care of her life?”

  She sulks. She stops to ponder it and lets him go on alone. But she hears him nonetheless:

  Oh, my Geneviève, you can reach a perfect stasis point. You too can have control.

  6. Virgin moments

  Their daily route takes them past Notre Dame du Rosaire church. Like most churches in Montreal, it dwarfs the surroundings, grey and mouldy, immense beside Monsieur Hot Dog, utterly powerful in the face of the dry cleaner’s and the local branch of Geneviève’s bank. There are two spires, on the taller, a golden cross; below, at a modest remove, Our Lady surveys the quarter. On a good day the summer heat is breezy and sublime. On such days it can seem that the warm wind lifts the Virgin from her place atop the steeple and transports Her. Geneviève, trapped in the street with her malignant secret, will gaze up and imagine this blessed woman drifting lightly away, yet never without leaving a trail behind for those in need to follow. Geneviève feels a need.

  Menocchio can see what she is seeing. He asks, “Why would she bother to think of the likes of you?”

  Attempting to hide her impulse, she rejoins, blasé, “Oh, I gave up on that when I left my village.”

  He tells her, “As did I. We were both villagers and this would be the new world where things would be different. Freedom. Did you ever dream you would have ended up in such a situation?”

  She refuses to answer. Or is it that she can’t? On the worst days, her uncertainty as to her life’s true intentions and their logical trajectory extends back to a girl’s peevish sense of being hemmed in, her first avowed intent to leave. On those days the link from then to now…to this, seems plain. Her book has told her, “During this special time many women will rekindle belief, find new meaning.” Genevieve needs new meaning. Then why is she lying? How can she pretend that any impulse toward the church door is long gone from her life, left back there with her girlhood, in her parents’ home, the day she went off to see the world? She thinks, It’s always there, Geneviève, part of your life forever.

  She looks up at the Lady. Unguarded, she thinks: Tell me something; I will do my best to hear.

  He hears. He reminds her, “She is not available.” As if daring her to run inside to tell the curé.

  Would she? Could she at this late date? It’s tuggi
ng at her.

  Menocchio tugs her away from it. “No use fighting fate. If you’d acquiesce and sit on my bench, you would know you have come to exactly the right place despite this thing you have done.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You will.”

  They walk.

  Not available? Where does that fit in the logic of the truth he holds up to her face? Hard to know for sure; this is all new territory. The tighter his grip, the clearer it speaks: a voice quietly interrupting, dreamt in her depths and intervening, prompting, inquiring as she tries to sort it out. Not louder; clearer, deeper, a separate sensibility, romantic yet calm…but compelling as the urge to travel when you’re twenty. One day in late June, stopping at the church steps, she challenges him. “Let’s go inside.” It’s windy, warm, and Geneviève has been gripped by an exuberant energy. “Come on! Into the box. We’ll confess. Get rid of it. We’ll find the curé and tell him everything! We can stop this walking and go back to our lives.”

  “I have nothing to confess,” he says. His smile says: It’s you. You’re the one who did it.

  “Of course you do,” shouts Geneviève, heedless of the line of people waiting for the bus. “She’ll forgive you! Whatever it is you’ve done, she will find it in her heart to forgive.” Menocchio snorts, amused, and walks on. She calls after him, “She wants you to!” Does she realize how stridently she’s pointing into the sky above her? Of course. Part of her is always aware. Too aware.

  Menocchio never even looks around. And Geneviève follows. And the moment, and any chance it may have held, passes. Another Virgin moment, is how she’s come to cast them. It passes into the sky, becomes a shade, the merest nuance of a darker blue, hidden far above Our Lady’s head.

  This impulse: If you’re born with it then obviously it’s always there. But one makes choices.

  This glimmer of hope attached to that urge? This is wishful, unreal, an evasion of responsibility.

  True. He keeps telling her the truth. She has to follow him. But, crossing the park, passing the bench, coming back up the lane where they part without a glance or a word, she dares to look once more. A traveller’s eyes, searching the sky above the corner. For a focus point? For something…