by André Alexis
If, as is said, man is an animal trapped outside of its cage, I suppose one should be heartened that Franklin has found the inside of his. It’s a dispiriting sight, though, and progressively moreso as the years go on. At times, I feel unbearably gloomy when I think what is left of Franklin Dupuis.
I have heard that Stanley and Beatrice are healthy and comfortably installed on 3rd, that Gil has moved to Toronto, that Mary is married and a mother of two children. It is also from my parents that I learned about the death of Henry Wing, and the news affected me deeply. He was a man from whom, though I didn’t realize it at the time, I learned a great deal. Not only did he introduce me to the Fortnightly, but there was about him something strikingly gentle. In school, I had learned to think of intellectual endeavour as a kind of will to power, something like scorpions in a jar, but Henry’s forbearance and mildness were, by example, a strong counterpoise, and I wish I had said how much I admired him.
Yet, as the years go on, I think of my acquaintances less and less. These days, such parts of the city I can still hold in memory are what I think about most. They have the more tenacious grip on my imagination.
And what is it I remember most vividly?
A vista, in summer: the canal, at the foot of the National Arts Centre, looking south towards the Laurier Street Bridge, the black railings, the concrete walkway, the sound of the water, the sense that the water is deep, though I know it isn’t, the bland buildings on the other side. There are no people. There is no occasion. The only colour that comes to mind is the green of the grass along the embankment. In other words, I remember nothing of great significance, and yet, if I close my eyes, I am able to re-enter the city, at that point, and feel myself almost at home. I will die, perhaps, in Italy, but my soul will leave the world from there, from Ottawa. In fact, I imagine my soul – always supposing I have one – mercurial, silvery and liquid, the wayward pools of it gathering a final time, upon my death, before it sublimates and I am released.
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Lately, I have taken to comparing my present setting to the one from which I sprang. Tonight, for instance, as I look up in the sky (it is nine o’clock), I am still surprised to find the right stars but the wrong world: the bears and monsters are rightly suspended, but where Hull should sit, there are the dark hills and the lights of Pontassieve, and where Vanier might be there is only the land: Tuscany, south of Florence.
Remarkably, many of the Italians I speak with understand my homesickness as well as I do. For instance, there is a woman here from Puglia. She is a cook and has been at the monastery for twenty years. For fourteen years, we have, from time to time, commiserated with each other or, at least, smiled knowingly in each other’s direction, her smile conveying how little she thinks Tuscany fit for human life, and mine conveying how fervently I wish Tuscany were sufficient. To comfort me, or perhaps simply in friendship, she has, for almost as long as we’ve known each other, managed to secure for me, every Saturday evening, a pomegranate. I am not fond of pomegranate, but it is so hospitable of her, I hate to miss a Saturday-evening meal.
Curiously enough, my compatriot, my fellow Ottawan, the man who is, in some ways, closest to me, does not share my feelings. Paul Dylan, or Fra Paulo as he is known here, insists he has never felt a moment’s nostalgia.
Over the years, Fra Paulo and I have spoken about most everything and I naturally feel a great affection for him. There are a number ideas we do not look on in the same way and we have had our…not disagreements exactly, but differences. No, that makes it sound as if our differences were disagreeable, when, in fact, they have been as fertile as some of my agreements with others, and they are almost always a challenge to my way of thinking.
For instance, one day recently as I was in Florence delivering jars of honey to churches and stalls, I was struck by something Fra Paulo had said. We had been talking about mercy and discovered that we thought of it differently. For Fra Paulo, mercy is essentially synonymous with forgiveness. He believes he’s been forgiven and lives in the light of that forgiveness. Day after day, he thanks God for this, the highest blessing. Despite the unexceptional man he was, God’s mercy, he says, has made him an exception, brought him closer to God.
I understand what he’s saying and, yes, perhaps Fra Paulo has been forgiven. But this is not mercy. Mercy is divine and it is beyond forgiveness. I mean, the way I see it, when one has sinned, one becomes a special case. One is removed from the crowd. One stands marked before God. The sinner knows himself or herself to be apart, and lives with the knowledge that comes from being apart. Long after one has been forgiven, one goes on in knowledge of one’s past transgression. Fra Paulo, for instance, constantly returns to his sins, retells them, if only to assert they have been forgiven. Mercy, though, when it has been granted, will be manifest as a forgetting of transgression, as the sinner returns to the fold. Through God’s mercy, one ceases to be a special case, one becomes anonymous again, no longer a problem for God or for oneself. You see?
– I understand, Fra Paulo said. But aren’t you just arguing about degrees of forgiveness.
– No, it’s more than that, I said. It’s not just semantics.
It seemed to me, as we talked, that mercy, when it came, would be like those moments of transport when all is one and one feels nothing and nowhere and blissfully anonymous, exactly like those moments but prolonged. One struggles to remember them, here on Earth, but in the end, it may be we can only really know His mercy in death.
Fra Paulo smiled.
– I’ve known you for twenty years now, Mark, and I wonder if it isn’t the struggle you prefer, the not knowing. That’s how I used to be too. I turned things over and over, until they meant everything and nothing. But I don’t do that any more.
– You mean you never question God?
– Not often, no.
That, of course, is typical of Fra Paulo. He has said, time after time, that his faith in God is unshakeable and that he lives, with little break, in the presence of our Lord. And, yes, that is something I have struggled to understand. For me, the presence of God is in the very struggle to understand Him, the struggle to come to terms with His existence. I have felt Him most strongly at the moment when I doubted Him most. Doubt is the thing that calls Him to me. It is on the point of untroubled belief that I lose Him.
There’s more to it than that. To be honest, I mistrust the nature of Fra Paolo’s faith. What is the word for a man who, unable to control his life and world, gives up authority to a stronger party, without wondering if “control” is what’s wanted? I mean, a man who has capitulated to a stronger master is not free and, given the extent of his surrender to God, it seems to me Fra Paulo is not free. He is not free, and yet Fra Paulo is at peace with himself and I am not. How did that happen? What should a monastery give if not the way to peace? I thought about these things ceaselessly, for days on end, after our conversation. Why are we here, if not for peace? But if peace comes only after capitulation, what is the point of it?
As I walked beside the Arno, thinking again about Fra Paulo’s words, I considered if I had made a fetish of doubt. If God descended and granted me audience and certainty, what would I do? In my life, I have never met a proof I couldn’t disprove or ignore. I almost believe my being would wither if it were too long with God. When I’ve tried to imagine paradise, I’ve imagined myself in a place filled with diversions, where God makes His appearances infrequently, once every one or two millennia, say, leaving enough time between visits to nourish those who are nourished by doubt, those who feel Him most intensely when they are on the verge of disbelief, but not so much time as to bring unconquerable despair. Doubt and hesitation are not accidental qualities or things I’ve lately learned. They are facets of my self, perhaps even ineradicable.
A year ago, after fourteen years at Santa Maddalena, my home came flooding back to me: Ottawa, a handful of my acquaintances, the circumst
ances that preceded my leaving. All these things came insistently back because, I suppose, after all that time, I had achieved the distance from them I needed. Over the last year, three Hilroy notebooks (blue, red, blue) have become a sanctuary for me. They hold the world that makes sense of Franklin, Walter, Louise, Mary, François…
As I reread these pages, pages filled with yearnings, losses, bereavement, and changes of fortune, it seems to me I have recreated the shuttle and shunt of various lives, and, in so doing, I have inadvertently described my own soul.
I have spent a year proving Fra Paulo right: I am a man of contention and disquiet, however fervently I might long for peace.
Yesterday, I helped filter and bottle the orange-blossom honey. All of this is done by hand, of course, with the honey slightly heated, so that it pours into the bottles more easily. It is one of my favourite things to work in the fienile after the combs have been spun and the rooms smell of oranges. Once the filtering was done, I sat at the wooden table and wrote out the labels by hand, perhaps a thousand of them, contented by the very act of printing Miele di fiori d’arancio.
When I had finished, I worked contentedly in the garden. There are days when I am able to work without thinking of anything in particular. These days are a blessing of sorts, but there are other days, equally blessed, when I am as aware of my surroundings as if I were seeing them for the first time: the stone wall with its wisteria in second bloom, the ordered rows of the garden, the earth beneath me, sun-faded on its surface but dark brown where a weed has been pulled up, my brothers walking about, quietly talking or, perhaps, mumbling to themselves as they carry out their duties, our monastery itself on a hill overlooking other green hills. Then there is the copse beside the chapel. It is here that those who wish it are buried when they die, their graves marked with stones from the quarry near Pontassieve, the panes of granite creating an ever-varying path among the trees. I go there often, not so much for solitude as for the cool beneath the trees and the smell of the rosemary bushes that mark the entrance to the graveyard.
Around sunset, I swept the dining hall, it being my week to clean up after the evening meal. As I was replacing a bench beneath a table, I looked up and saw Fra Paulo leave the hall. His head was bowed and he was lost in thought. I hadn’t recognized him at first glimpse. For an instant, he was simply an older man in robes, his hair greying, his hand touching the side of his chin. As he left the hall, I thought how rare it is to see those we know without all the things we usually bring to seeing, ourselves unarmed, in other words, momentarily taken from who we are.
After a brief conversation with Fra Philippo, who chided me for having missed early Mass that morning, I retired to my room. I washed my hands and face, put on my bedclothes, and sat at my table to finish translating a short poem by Rilke called “Herbsttag.” It’s elegant third verse is one that I have always found evocative:
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.
Translating is something I have come to love. The discipline is, in itself, both bracing and soothing. Then there is the joy that comes from weighing words: their worth, sound, and sense. Inevitably, there is self-revelation, though the object is discretion and all the effort goes into keeping oneself out of it. It always moves me to hear the language of my home through the thoughts of a writer about whom I may know next to nothing.
He who has no house will not build one now.
He who is alone will be alone for some time,
Will be wakeful, will read, will write long letters
And will wander restless along the lanes
When the leaves fall.
I am both everywhere and nowhere in this, Rilke’s landscape. The man who wanders the lanes was, perhaps, Rilke. He is, perhaps, myself, now. It is all like a magician’s trick, at times, this there and not-there-ness, this business of losing yourself and finding yourself in another’s words. But it brings me solace and pleasure, losing and finding being the heart of whatever the journey of this life is.
So, in any case, it seems to me on this night, July 14, 2004, at 10 p.m., looking out my small window at the brilliant stars.
A Note on the Text
In trying to re-create Ottawa, I have occasionally incorporated short phrases or sentences from writers whom I first read when I lived there or who have influenced the writing of this novel. Many of the quotations are from writers whose family names begin with the letter A. (John Ashbery, for instance, whose words are spoken by a diner at Pied de chameau. Or Anna Akhmatova, who first wrote about the past rotting in the future, or Jane Austen, whose words are spoken by the Member from Moosonee.) But there are also verbatim quotes from, among others, Emmanuel Lévinas, Vladimir Nabokov, Marianne Moore, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Catherine Bush, Immanuel Kant, and, of course, Will Shakespeare (massacred, mostly, but with Francis Bacon’s words – cybele, bedizen, estuarie – attributed to Shakespeare, for once).
The translation of the third stanza of Rilke’s “Herbsttag” was done by the author.
The font used for the novel’s epigraph is called Amanar and it was drawn by Pierre di Sciullo (www.quiresiste.com). Its alphabet, called Tifinar, is one of the oldest still in daily use. It is the alphabet of the Tuareg people, who call themselves, among other things, Kel Tamasheq (speakers of Tamasheq) or Imashaghen (those who are free).
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The painting Città Ideale, ca. 1470, details from which appear on the pages introducing Books I and II, and which appears in full on the page introducing Book III, is attributed to Luciano Laurana (ca. 1420–1479). Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino, Italy.
Sari Ginsberg
André Alexis’s internationally acclaimed debut novel, Childhood, won the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for The Giller Prize. His most recent novel is Asylum. Alexis is also the author of a short story collection, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa; the play Lambton Kent; and the young adult novel Ingrid and the Wolf, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. He is the creator and host of Skylarking, a nationally broadcast weekly program on CBC Radio 2.
André Alexis lives in Toronto.