Asylum

by André Alexis

  Mary had invited François. He had come with Daniel who, at sixteen, was only four years younger than Gil. Mary was often out with François these days. She had left work at the ministry and her most persistent thoughts were of her new life. What did she want from it? She was at home in her house, but what was she to do with herself, now? Was it time for children? Is that what she wanted for herself?

  She lightly touched Daniel’s shoulder and, to François, she said

  – Il te ressemble.

  – Mais non, said François smiling, il ressemble plutôt à sa mère.

  – Ah, said Mary. I’m sorry I never met her.

  For François, it was peculiar to stand in this backyard, next door to Walter’s house. It was like a shift in perspective. He remembered gazing into this yard and wondering, the way one does, who the owners of the property were. Now, here he was with Mary, part of another world. But how mysteriously worlds came into being. As Mary spoke, he listened to her, but he allowed part of himself to drift: the moon, the evening, the sound of the city, now, unlike the sound of the city in winter, the city in summer a different instrument altogether.

  And then he heard a familiar voice

  – François?

  and turned to see Walter and Louise, who shook hands with him as though it were natural for them all to meet here, beside Walter’s house.

  As he embraced Louise, François remembered an evening very like this one. He and Michelle had walked home and heard…what was it? The sound of a guitar playing a folk song from somewhere else, something like “Perfidia” but not “Perfidia.”

  – Mujer, si puedes tú con Dios hablar…

  Perhaps it had been “Perfidia” after all, a song Michelle had learned from a Spanish student at the university and that she’d sung to Daniel. Strange the things that stay in mind, the past itself like a familiar but intermittently heard melody.

  – Is everything all right? asked Walter.

  – Yes, wonderful, answered François. I was just thinking how often I’ve seen this yard from your side of the fence.

  – It feels different when you stand here, said Walter. Looking over the fence, it almost feels like I’m spying on myself. It’s a little disconcerting.

  – It must be, said François.

  * * *

  —

  My parents and I arrived at nine o’clock and, though I’d intended to leave early, I stayed on past eleven, talking first to Mary and François, then Stanley, whom I had adored since I was a child, then Louise and Walter.

  It was amusing to discover I was to leave Ottawa on the same day as the Stanleys, but it was Walter and Louise who were most interested in my destination.

  – I envy you, said Walter. You’ll be near the most beautiful things: Giotto’s Campanile, Ghiberti’s doors, Masaccio’s chapel. You should avoid the people, though. The Florentines are so sick of tourists, it’s like they scowl for a living.

  – I’ve never been to Florence, said Louise.

  – Where I’m going isn’t exactly Florence, I said, but it’s not far. You two should visit me. By the time you come, I should know my way around.

  – That’s a great idea, said Walter. Let’s keep in touch. You’ll be our eyes on the Old World. Make sure you go to Siena, though. It’s a beautiful city.

  – I’ve heard it’s a little…intimidating, I said.

  – No, it’s not intimidating, answered Walter, not at all. It’s probably better if I don’t tell you what I like. You should see it for yourself, but, if I have to mention something…I love the Piazza del Campo, the feel of it, being there in summer and eating persimmon ice cream. And, well, just walking along the streets, through the different neighbourhoods. The first time I went, I stayed in l’Istrice, near the old church of Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio. I was almost happy there, you know. And that didn’t happen often, when I was young.

  – It happens more now, though, doesn’t it? asked Louise, teasing.

  – Yes, said Walter, I suppose it does.

  As if he were himself surprised.

  * * *

  —

  Stanley, though a little uncomfortable in the clothes he’d bought, was a cheerful and interested host. As Beatrice and Louise talked about the Glebe, Stanley and Walter chatted aimlessly, the two conversations drifting gently in and out of each other.

  – How did you two meet? Stanley asked.

  – I’m not sure any more, said Walter. It seems like we’ve known each other forever.

  – I know what you mean, said Stanley. I can’t remember the first time I met Bea either.

  – Some people are there before you know they are, said Louise.

  – That’s what I think too, said Beatrice.

  She put her arm in her husband’s. To Walter, he said

  – We’ll have to talk some more when we come back.

  – Yes, let’s, said Walter. When you come back.

  He would have asked Stanley more about his and his wife’s itinerary, but Walter did not want to monopolize his hosts. They would meet again. There would be time. He felt it, and there passed between them the fleeting but shared pleasure at acquaintance; and this pleasure was, it seemed, a thing to which words drifted, like snow to the side of a house. They spoke on about little matters, about rissotti and Amarone, until Walter said

  – I think you’ll have a wonderful trip.

  – Thank you, Wally, Stanley answered.

  * * *

  —

  For a few hours, it was as if a new city had sprouted up around them, their own city, one to which they actually belonged. The time would come, Stanley was almost sure of it, when this house would feel like it belonged to them. He’d had an enjoyable conversation with Walter Barnes and, what would you call her, his female companion? Louise. Then, he’d spoken with François. It was always a little unsettling to meet the men Mary brought round. Not that she’d ever brought many. Hadn’t brought anyone in some time, in fact. But he had never learned to stop wishing for his daughter’s happiness, a wish that always made him slightly anxious. Perhaps this one was serious.

  After meeting François and his son, Daniel, Stanley had wandered about his own backyard greeting people, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe this was now his life, until it was midnight and Beatrice brought matters to a close, as there was still packing to be done.

  When everyone had left and Gil had gone out with friends, they stayed up to wash the dishes, tidy the house, and fold their clothes into two large suitcases. They ended by playing Scrabble, a game they played on nights when they were too restless to sleep and, as always when they played Scrabble, they drank Ovaltine because it reminded Beatrice of her parents and because Stanley found it sleep-inducing.

  On this night, however, sleep would not come. They were anxious, and both were unwilling to talk about their anxieties, so they spent the quiet hours on either side of their living-room table staring at their letters

  N A B O N A D

  (say, or)

  C R I D A D S

  until, at four in the morning, thinking it was still night, they retired for a few hours of uninterrupted sleep, which was all they would have for the next two days.

  The excitement of travel, the thrill of flight, the thrill of landing in Fiumicino, the bright morning light in Rome, the impossibly quick rhythms of the new language…all of this and more would keep them awake until, at last, sleep caught up to them again.

  * * *

  —

  When they returned home, at eleven o’clock, Walter picked up the book he was reading (Flesh and Stone by Richard Sennett), grateful that Louise had suggested they use the last of the evening to read. She returned to Middlemarch, but reading was not what Louise had in mind. She sat beside him on the sofa and casually opened the fly of his trousers.

  – You should read,
she said. Or you’ll never finish.

  Daring him to go on reading, if he were able.

  As always, he was surprised to discover they had, in fact, made love for an hour or so. No slower than usual, not much faster. The two of them, losing track of time, had a cycle as consistent as that of the planets.

  Did he lose track of her, as he lost track of time?

  No, not at all.

  It was just the opposite.

  Certainly, in the midst of orgasm, he knew neither himself nor Time nor her, but…as rarely before, the actual presence of Louise Lanthier was an aspect of his own pleasure. He was fascinated by the details of her, both general and specific. The “general” were those things others might have called specific: her waist, her breasts, her hair, all things that might be measured, quantified, put in an archive labelled Louise. They were wonderful, certainly, but there was something contingent about them. Her physical attributes were an aspect of what attracted him, but on the journey towards her, in the years it had taken to admit to himself that he might love her, her attributes began to seem part of what belonged to her “accidentally,” that this or that aspect might be altered without in the least affecting his feelings.

  The “specific” details, on the other hand, were those he could not put into words, those that were both constant and shifting. (What words were there, for instance, for the taste of her?) The “specific” details, the facets that made Louise Louise, were not simply difficult to articulate, they were unnameable. It wasn’t only that “there were no words,” it was that “there could be no words.” For him to love, to return again and again to this woman, it was necessary there be some aspect of her too specific to be named. Which meant that some aspect of Louise was foreign, not in the sense of a world to be colonized but strange and unknown as home is strange and unknown. And, of course, the foreignness of home is itself inarticulable, unnameable. An Odyssey in Ithaca.

  An Odyssey in Ithaca? That sounded familiar.

  Yes. Louise had said it. They were her words. She was now part of his inner life, part of a world he shared with no one but her. How intriguing that he could meet her in the depths of himself. On the edge of sleep, drifting, he didn’t so much remember as hear another handful of words Louise had spoken

  – The world is in the senses.

  The sentence returned to him unaccompanied by its context. Perhaps they’d been speaking of philosophy, of St. Augustine or Hume or, maybe, Descartes. St. Augustine, most likely, he thought. And Louise had intoned her consent: she stood with Augustine on the side of memory and the senses. He had disagreed with her. He was certain of it. He had been reading Kant (hadn’t he?) and Kant mistrusted the senses, because for Kant the world was mind first, last, and inevitably, there being no world that did not pass the gateway of consciousness, no world outside of mind.

  Yes, he must certainly have agreed with Kant.

  And yet, lying here in the living room, on the sofa, the lights in the house still on, though it must be one o’clock (or was it two?) and he would have to get up, wake Louise, gather their clothes, and go with her up the stairs to the bedroom, he reconsidered. On this July night, wondering if he should let himself sleep, he also wondered if Kant were inevitably right. Or was it, instead, that Augustine and Kant, Hume and Descartes were neither right nor wrong, that their ideas were like constellations through which Reason periodically moved, like a sun, and when Reason moved through them it was possible to see Kant differently and to stand with him against Augustine.

  But Augustine’s time would come and Kant’s time would come again. So, the world would live in the senses, and the world would not. So, there would be a time for touch, and sound, and taste…a time for thought, for mind, for consciousness. And Love itself, what about that? It, too, would be (at times) a habit of thought, and (at times) a truth in the body. Which was it now? He could not say. All he could say was that, on this night, with Louise in his arms, he believed he loved.

  He had never been able to say that before.

  The sun, so to speak, had entered his being, and he would have awakened Louise to tell her, but he was asleep long before the right words came to him.

  {52}

  THE PHANTOM CITY

  The farewell party for Stanley and Beatrice was the last gathering I attended. I left Ottawa the following day, on July 11, 1989, and I have not yet returned. Almost certainly, I’ll return some day but, until I do, all I have are letters and rumour. I have heard, for instance, that Hull no longer exists, that the small city across the river is now called Gatineau, a change that puts a caul over my past but, well, why not? For years now, Ottawa has slowly become unreal. It’s as if the city were underwater, changing in mysterious ways as barnacles, polyps, or whatever creatures exist below attach themselves to this or that facet of the city and eradicate it or darken it or cover it from view. Of course, with Ottawa, the element isn’t water, it’s time. Or is the element memory? I suppose it must be both. Time itself changes the city while my back is turned. And memory, as it perishes, takes with it the city I lived in, turning it to a place of imperfectly recollected monuments. Either way, whether the depredations are time’s or memory’s, Ottawa has slowly become, for me, a sort of phantom city occupied by the living, like an imaginary garden in which there are real toads, to steal a phrase.

  Now, considering what leaving has meant to me and how important this breach has become, it’s odd that I remember so little about my departure. I had decided that what I wanted in life was peace, which, as I then understood it, meant release from Mind. I chose Santa Maddalena, a Gregorian monastery, because it was in Italy, somewhere near Florence, and I thought it would bring a new perspective as well as release. So thinking, I said goodbye to my parents, not without some pain, and I left my city with no idea when I would return.

  The moment was traumatic, certainly, but I experienced it as a kind of longing, as if leaving someone with whom I had not yet fallen out of love. I had recovered from such losses in the past. I assumed I would recover from this one. But, as I now see, the emotional pain was only the most obvious one. The loss of my city cut through every aspect of my being. No part of myself was left unhurt, but it would take years to understand the extent of the damage.

  I now think the hardest part of leaving home has been the loss of coherence. I mean, all those I had known, from Stanley Stanley to Franklin Dupuis, had a solidity their stories gave them. One’s friends, acquaintances, and family are held together by their trajectories, by what one knows of their trajectories: a happened, then b, then c, which led to d, etc. But all the moments in a story depend on the place of the story. The moments happen in a specific environment and it’s that environment that gives them their weight and meaning. Once I’d left Ottawa, not only did I lose the subsequent steps in the various stories, but I gradually began to lose the meaning of such steps as I did know. The machinations of bureaucrats, for instance, are most feasible or most easily understood when one lives in a government town or a capital city. Otherwise, they seem inexplicable or bizarre.

  My parents visit me from time to time, so their existence is concrete enough. And I’ve been writing to Walter, among others, on and off, for years. Oddly, Walter and I rarely correspond about him or the city. We write about medieval towers, about shepherds on stilts in Southwestern France, about spiritual concerns or European politics. In Walter’s letters, I will catch only glimpses of the canal, the Rideau Centre, the Parliament Buildings. I will see Louise in an evening dress, waiting for him to finish a letter so they can go off. At some point, I heard that Walter had had his foot amputated, but this was gossip my father related and my father’s gossip is rarely credible. Besides, a missing foot is the kind of thing Walter would surely mention, if only in passing.

  The one I hear from most often is Franklin. Since I left, he has written me five or six times a year, though it is difficult for me to answer quite so often. This seems proof of
loneliness or idleness, as we didn’t know each other that well when I was home. There are only two subjects that really seem to interest him: his prison and the brute ignorance of the Conservative Party. He never speaks of his daily doings, his personal life, or, for that matter, of Edward and the past. Every once in a while, he will send photographs of himself and someone else standing proudly before the gates of MacKenzie Bowell, as if all had gone as he’d intended. And yet, from what I can make out in the photos, the prison is dove-grey and Italianate. Not hideous, but uninspiring: two buildings that, but for their size, would not be out of place in a neighbourhood of faux Roman columns and Grecian birdbaths.

  As for Franklin, he has aged badly over these fifteen years. He is rail thin, his hair is ash-grey, and he has begun to stoop. If the Conservative Cabinet had killed MacKenzie Bowell at its inception, there might still be something for Franklin to strive for. As it is, this prison is nothing but the shadow of a shadow, resembling his Alba the way, in his own words, a smooth pebble resembles a chicken. Nor was anyone likely to repeat the experiment that Bowell penitentiary had been, after the small fiasco that accompanied the release to the public of Reinhart Mauer’s original designs for the prison. (It was all a mistake, the revised drawings were to have been sent to the Citizen for an article on prison architecture. The public was outraged by the extravagance of the original designs, so much so that, even after the mistake was discovered, the public, and members of the Opposition, continued grumbling for months: “They treat prisoners better than the unemployed,” “Conservatism gone wrong,” “…reward instead of punishment.”)

  The sadness I feel looking at photos of Franklin and MacKenzie Bowell comes from the fact that the man is tied, inextricably, to the place, unwilling or unable to let go. His inevitably hopeful smile, as he stands before the prison, in photo after photo through the years, seems to me to be the smile of a man who is himself imprisoned.