by André Alexis
With his own work, he threw himself in deep water, every time, with the faith he would emerge. But, then, he knew how to begin a painting. At some point, a mark had to be made on canvas and that was all there was to it. As far as sketches for a prison were concerned, though, he had no idea how to go about it and, having no idea how to proceed, he spent months doing little else but looking. For the first time in his life, he read assiduously. He read whatever suggested itself to his imagination: the Odyssey, Xenophon’s Anabasis, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pliny’s Natural History (Books 2, 7, and 8), Nezami’s Seven Princesses, Tirant lo Blanc, Orlando Furioso. He looked at everything. He spent days in the gallery, hours at flea markets. Nothing was too small or insignificant to contain some grain of the thing he was chasing. When such and such a cup or fish knife proved disappointing or unsuggestive, it meant that he had, at least, eliminated some portion of the universe from consideration.
A tiresome process, then, but also inexpressibly absorbing and exhilarating. He was looking for an external manifestation of something that existed inside him. It was tiresome to sort through the things that were useless, but it was exhilarating to discover a clue in, for instance, a large bowl of brilliant aquamarine glass with a decorative design of swirled ribbing and lily pads (found at a flea market), or in passages from ancient, dusty books.
The idea, which was not an idea so much as it was a wager or a hope, was that the various objects, words, and impressions would point to something, would give a coherent picture of that which united them, of the somewhere that lay behind them. He also hoped that he would recognize the “picture” of MacKenzie Bowell when it came, and that it would be singular, original, deep.
And then, while in bed with a man named Giovanni, more precisely, at the sound of the word
– Anche
something in Reinhart opened. He carried on as if he were still present, but Reinhart couldn’t decide which distraction he resented more: Giovanni or the curtain that slowly parted, in his imagination, to reveal…
To reveal (later, long after Giovanni had gone and Reinhart had been alone for hours) a vision that had nothing to do with buildings:
Through a window, in a room he did not know, he saw olive trees. The trees were beneath the window. In the distance, on a hillside, there were the lights of a small town. The sky was cloudless and dark. The moon, off to his left, was full, as bright as the sun, with Mars just beneath it and off to the left. He knew none of the constellations by name, but the stars were so clear, he could have drawn lines between them to make the gallery he wanted: the open book, the falling chair, the stethoscope…
It was not a vision in the usual sense. It was an hallucination. He could feel the room through whose window he looked. There was something Turkish about it. As he had never given much thought to the sky or the moon, it was as if the hallucination belonged to someone else. And, belonging to someone else, he could find no personal significance in it. He could not have said what it was, in the sky he imagined, that was meant for him. The sky he envisioned seemed to have no bearing on his own work, yet at its presence Reinhart let himself go. He began to draw.
It was noon the following day before he looked up from his desk. He looked up because, outside his window, a car horn sounded and would not stop. It was then that he discovered what he had drawn. It was, though not unpleasantly, puzzling. He imagined he’d been creating buildings of startling modernity: light towers, stone walls, a barren courtyard…
But MacKenzie Bowell Federal Penitentiary was not as he might have imagined. It was as if he’d had a fifteenth-century vision, something Masaccio or Piero, even, might have had while in a fever. It was all marble and coloured stone, with a piazza (no other word for it) and octagonal plinths. Not at all what one would have called a prison compound, not what one would have expected to find in the Gatineaus, but still, it was what had been called out of him and, without stopping to eat (urinating, when nature called, in a jar by the desk, a jar that had once held honeyed kumquats), he went on drawing buildings, perspectives on the compound, and views from unusual angles, until seven o’clock in the morning when it finally occurred to him he hadn’t eaten in a while, he was tired, and it was time to go to work. He looked down at the drawings he’d made, pages and pages filled with details that seemed to have come through a narrow gate in Time, slipped to him by one of the artists he’d admired as a boy.
None of it was what he’d expected (it never is) or what he wanted (it is never quite that, either), but he was so exhilarated by what he had gone through that he forgot to eat or bathe before going out. No matter. It was almost summer and the world (or Ottawa), with its blue washed sky and lime green buds breaking out from the tips of grey branches, seemed to be going through an inspiration similar to his own.
{35}
MISÈRE ET CORDES
Daniel was now thirteen. He had lived six years without his mother, six years already, and François Ricard was afraid she had become, for his son, a fading memory. Though he was still thoughtful and inquisitive, Daniel now rarely asked the questions he had asked before:
– C’est quand que tu as rencontré maman?
– Comment est-ce qu’elle était, toute jeune?
– Est-ce qu’elle nous aimait?
– Est-ce que tu l’aimais?
– Est-ce qu’elle m’aimait?
At school, he was unfocused and easily distracted. He could no longer remember, for instance, the simplest poems
Par les soirs bleus d’été, j’irai dans les sentiers…
and he now failed dictées he would have found simple only a year before. In the past, his mother had made a game of memory. They’d competed to see who could recall the most of a poem heard for the first time and Daniel had often won. He had a wonderful memory, but, these days, it seemed to have gone underground.
Something had to be done, but what? François and Daniel had begun to lose the closeness that had come with Michelle’s death. François made efforts to recover it. They went walking through Sandy Hill and Lowertown. He bought Daniel the skates and hockey equipment he wanted. They stayed up late to play chess. They read, before bedtime, whatever Daniel wanted as well as books he thought the boy would love: Le Grand Meaulnes, Le Père Goriot, L’Odyssée. But they could both sense – behind the outings, readings, and chess – a falseness, an intimation that they did these things together because they were the things a father and son who were close would do. The ease had gone from their relationship.
As for Daniel, his mother had died and the vacuum she left was part of everything he did and felt. Her presence was, as Père Laurent said of guardian angels, not a shadow exactly, but a shadow made of light. You might be doing the most innocent things, throwing stones into the river, say, and you would sense their presence, said Père Laurent, the way plants sense the sun. So, one day, he had asked Père Laurent if his mother were a guardian angel, and Père Laurent had answered
– Mais non Daniel. Elle est avec le bon Dieu qui la tient dans sa miséricorde
Père Laurent’s answer, delivered in the mildest tone, had upset him, because he had no idea what miséricorde meant. The word, or was it words, had tormented him.
Misère et cordes?
Miséri corde?
Had God bound his mother? In his darkest thoughts, he imagined his mother suspended above the world, just out of reach. How long would He bind her? Was it just a matter of time before she fell, as souls are said to fall, into the pit? Yet Père Laurent had said the word as if it were a glorious thing. Perhaps, God being God, the cord never broke.
– Papa? Les cordes de Dieu sont plus puissantes que nos cordes à nous, pas vrai?
– Mais quelles cordes Daniel? Dieu n’a pas de cordes.
– Mais, Papa, tu sais, l’aut’ jour…Père Laurent m’a dit que Dieu tenait les âmes dans sa misère et ses cordes. Il n’a pas dit vrai?
�
�� Misère et cordes? Daniel, la miséricorde n’est pas une chose mais une idée. Miséricorde veut dire une sensibilité à la douleur d’autrui. Et puisque Dieu est supposé être plus grand, plus noble, plus je ne sais quoi d’autre que nous, Il est aussi plus sensible à la douleur.
Now, this was an answer that comforted Daniel, and the boy went off to his room, but it did not comfort his father. François understood the boy was asking about his mother and wanted reassurance, but he thought it wrong to make clear a word that was not at all clear. He put Le Devoir up between himself and the world and thought about “mercy.” As he did, other, truer responses to his son’s question occurred to him. He called Daniel back and was about to say
– Daniel, no one knows if God is merciful. It makes no sense to say God is loving, merciful, or good, because none of the living have even so much as seen Him. The only inheritance you have, as a man, is ignorance, and you’re old enough now to take what’s yours: nothing
when he realized what he was doing. He was going to tell a thirteen-year-old that everything men saw, touched, and imagined was built on illusion and nothingness. But when his son stood before him, he could not. Instead, he asked
– Veux-tu jouer aux échecs?
– Je n’peux pas, answered Daniel. J’ai des devoirs.
– Ah oui? Alors allons voir où t’es rendu.
And off they went to check Daniel’s homework.
That moment with his son stayed with him for days.
Would it really have hurt Daniel to hear the truth from his father? It was inevitable that a conscientious human being would, eventually, arrive at the same thought: man is a synonym for ignorance. Partial ignorance, not even absolute ignorance. But it was easier to look on the abyss with your hand in another’s, wasn’t it? He should have looked down on the void with Daniel and said
– There, you see? And yet I’m with you.
When his mother died, Daniel must certainly have looked down on darkness himself. It broke your heart to think of it and, feeling guilty, François wondered if he had not, for six years now, in some measure, abandoned his son. Though he had seen to Daniel’s material needs, sheltered him, allowed himself to be (momentarily) distracted from thoughts of Michelle, it was not until his son asked the meaning of miséricorde that he began to see that he had, since his wife’s death, withdrawn from his son. The thought was unbearably sad. For six years, he had behaved as if mourning were his only life: to mourn the death of his wife, to give life to her memory through mourning. He had neglected his son’s needs and, so, he had neglected life itself.
Was mourning over, then? No. As with people who, in love, feel not as if they’ve begun to love but as if they have, rather, discovered a fount of love within themselves, a fount the beloved brings to notice, so it was for François’ grief. Michelle’s death was not the beginning of grief, but a discovery of a grief within; grief, like love or language, being a source that reveals itself.
Yes, all right, grief has no end, because it has no beginning.
Still, in thinking of his son’s needs, the pain of missing Michelle was not over, but it was adulterated.
On Sundays, François and Daniel visited Michelle’s grave, changed the flowers they had left the week before: irises for lilies, lilies for irises. They had visited the grave together so often it had become part of Daniel’s childhood. Through the repetition of certain details, they had even created for themselves a small ritual:
– park on St. Laurent
– walk to the cemetery, whatever the weather
– stay for fifteen minutes of silence
– then, home for the Parisiennes they made the night before
But what endless variation these few steps produced. No two vigils were alike. There was, first, the weather: clouds, precipitation, blue sky, dark sky, evening light. Then, there was Time itself. Though they rarely stayed for longer than fifteen minutes, it sometimes felt like five and, at others, like five hundred. Then, again, there was the mood in which one set out or the strength of Michelle’s presence. The only thing father and son did not do was speak. In the beginning, when the sight of Michelle’s headstone overwhelmed him, François forbade his son from speaking. And ever after, even when he no longer felt the depths of grief, he maintained silence. So, both were surprised when, one Sunday in autumn, after changing the flowers and standing silently together for a while, François said
– C’est comme si on était içi depuis des heures.
Daniel looked up at his father. They were standing side by side. There was, as there often was, a cluster of mourners not far from them: older, heads bowed before a pink granite headstone.
– N’est-ce pas? said François.
– Oui Papa, said Daniel.
– T’as pas froid?
– Non…un peu.
François smiled and put his arm around his son’s shoulder. Then they stood in silence until their time was up.
After that, François was not joyful, exactly. The memory of his wife was not, suddenly, indifferent to him. Rather, a capacity for happiness, something he’d had since childhood, gradually returned.
It was around this time that Franklin Dupuis called to ask whether they could, for a few minutes, meet officially, though it was a weekend. François agreed and, early on a Sunday afternoon, Franklin knocked at his door. He was dressed in a long black raincoat, its collar turned up.
– I really can’t stay, he said, but…
From beneath his overcoat, he took a cardboard cylinder.
– You remember I asked if you’d do quantity surveying for a new penitentiary?
– Vaguely.
– Well, said Franklin. I’ve got something to show you.
He walked past François, into the living room, looking around before stepping into the dining room. There, he took the plastic cap from the cylinder, eased three scrolls from within, and unfurled them on the table. Both men looked down at the drawings. Franklin admired them, his pleasure obvious, but François had trouble deciphering what he saw.
– Beautiful, isn’t it? asked Franklin.
– Sure, said François. But what is it?
– It’s MacKenzie Bowell Federal Penitentiary.
To François, it looked to be architectural drawings of a town centre somewhere in Europe, or the reconstruction of a lost city: a neighbourhood in Pompeii, for instance.
– It would be a real favour if you did this, said Franklin. Give me a sense of the costs before the construction bids come in. I’d be paying you myself, so there wouldn’t be much money.
– Where are you going to build it?
– In the Gatineaus.
– Hmm. You know, Frank, this calls for a lot of marble. It’s going to be prohibitively expensive, and I haven’t done any surveying since I joined Transport.
And yet, as it happened, François was in just the mood to accept Franklin’s proposition. He had recently been told to actually take a vacation. He would lose the time owed him, otherwise. He found the idea of working as a quantity surveyor appealing. He was ready to take any assignment that might bring diversion. So, after a brief look at the oddly antique plans, and without thinking about it all too deeply, François smiled and said
– Okay, Frank, je l’ferai pour toi.
– Wonderful, answered Franklin. I can’t tell you how much it means to have people you trust working with you on something like this. I’ll call you next week with the details.
– Would you like a drink of something?
– No, I don’t think so, said Franklin.
He rolled the drawings tightly up, inserting each one in turn back into the cylinder.
– These are the only ones I have, he said. I’ll have copies made for you.
He slipped the cylinder inside his raincoat, then moved forward to embrace François with one arm.
&nb
sp; – This is a real project, he said. I’m glad to have you with me.
And as suddenly as he had come, Franklin was gone.
François would come to think of this as an almost hallucinatory visit, as vivid as if he’d dreamed it, though the image that stayed with him was not of Franklin but, rather, of Daniel’s shoes. Moments after Franklin had gone, and as if on cue, his son had come in from the yard.
– Papa, he’d asked, qu’est-ce qu’on a à boire?