The American Fiancee

by Eric Dupont

  Poor Mama! And so, at the age of twenty, I went back to Königsberg. Adolf Hitler had uprooted me in 1934, only to send me back in 1940. Since Mama was becoming gloomier by the day, since Papa was virtually never at home, and since Terese and Ludwig were no longer in my life, Berlin had lost all meaning for me. I was happy to be going back to Königsberg, where there were no bombs falling from the sky. Mama didn’t even come to see me off at the station.

  But I’m tired now, Kapriel. Shall I tell you the rest tomorrow? Tell you what, I’ll take you to Potsdam, just like I said. I’ll tell you the rest in the S-Bahn and in Potsdam. You’ll love Potsdam. And the end of my story deserves more inspiring surroundings than this apartment. Nothing less than an imperial city for this story of madmen.

  Roman Epistles

  Rome, October 1, 1999

  Go get fucked, Gabriel. Or rather, don’t. There’s a thought that should leave you sleepless for at least a couple of nights. And then, like a moose in rutting season, you’ll be off hunting again in your staid, foggy city in the North. What will you take from your next victim? The 120 Days of Sodom? Or will you make do with her innocence, like you did with poor Stella Thanatopoulos?

  I had to wash my hands I don’t know how many times after reading your letters. I felt so soiled by them I even poured a little bleach into my bathwater. Everything about your letters, from the scandalous content to the awful form, would repel any right-thinking person. I was sorely tempted to burn them and spit on them with the contempt reserved for such sheer wretchedness. Because you are nothing short of wretched. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Gabriel.

  And just so you know, poor Gabriel, Anamaria and I have both lost ten kilos since last winter. As per our contracts. And once the production is over, we fully intend to reacquaint ourselves with the curves we both consider to be perfectly normal. What’s the difference? We’re doing it for art’s sake, while you’re driven by vanity and depravity. That’s the difference.

  I’ve hidden your letters and notebooks until I’m able to dispose of them someplace where no one will ever find them. The last thing I want is for Anamaria to discover them! And what would happen if Bruno-Karl D’Ambrosio ever read them! It would be enough to bring everything tumbling down. The film is dangling by a thread as it is. Things have only gotten this far thanks to Mom’s boundless generosity. And Mom, I should point out, is nothing like the cold and calculating creature you depict in your letters. I hope you deeply regret all those ghastly things you said and that you plan on giving her a sincere, honest, and heartfelt apology. Or perhaps you’ll find a Catholic priest in Berlin willing to listen to your confession? Speaking ill of one’s mother? A clear violation of the fifth commandment, my poor Gabriel. I’m only half joking. You have a distinct lack of indulgence toward a woman who was, after all, born in 1950. She picked up her habits at the convent, and there you go running her down with your smugness and self-importance. You should leave it up to the columnists in the Montreal tabloids to humiliate the Catholic mysteries and hold up science and reason to undermine the sacrament of confession. Leave what is beyond your grasp alone. You will recall, my brother, that confession was the only thing she imposed on us. Not once did she force us to go to mass. She always let us get on with our lives. All she wanted us to know, from the earliest age, was that there is a thing called evil and that, in certain circles, some people like to distinguish it from good. There existed a time when believers felt the need to draw up a list of deeds and acts that corresponded to their notion of evil and to share that list with someone. It’s called pouring one’s heart out. Showing a modicum of respect for traditions that mean so much to her doesn’t seem to be asking a lot. Mom has her age and history as excuses. The contempt in which you hold her values says much more about you than it does about her, my brother. Think of all she’s done for us. We’ve never had to work, Gabriel. We had an extraordinarily protected childhood. We went to the best schools, had the best music lessons. It’s your problem if you turned them down. And confessions with Father Huot were never the drama you make them out to be. Even as a child, I saw them as an opportunity to take stock, to speak to someone neutral who wouldn’t judge. You’ll laugh but it’s thanks to Father Huot that I discovered the Vétiver cologne I wear all the time. As a child, my senses never knew greater happiness than that blend of grass and woody notes in the Rosemont church confessional. For the first few years, I couldn’t put a name on the fragrance. I thought it was the smell of saintliness given off by all the world’s confessionals, until, that is, I realized it was coming from Father Huot. When I was seventeen, the day I first tried to seduce Anamaria, I made my way to the cosmetics counter at the Bay to track down the fragrance. Now I’m never without it; it has become my trademark. Mom disapproved at first, probably for financial reasons—you know how she likes to manage her assets!

  “You’re not planning on smelling like that all the time, I hope!” she said.

  Such a display of vanity was, in her eyes, an unjustifiable expense. Vétiver cologne has become synonymous with me everywhere I go, proof of sorts that I was ever there. That, at least, I owe Father Huot. A man of such fine taste!

  At any rate, if I am to believe half of what you say went on during your time in Toronto, many an hour awaits you in the confessional—assuming, of course, you can fit your outsized ego through the door. Do you know who you remind me of? The peacock in Ravel’s Histoires naturelles, the farmyard fop who keeps telling everyone he’s getting married. Thing is, his fiancée never shows up. But the bird doesn’t lose hope and keeps on with his daily “Leooona” cry, bold as you please. The peacock is not at all displeased with this state of affairs since, as Renard puts it in his delightful poem, he’s “so sure of his good looks, he’s incapable of resentment.” If the Buddhists are right, Gabriel, you might very well come back as a peacock in your next life.

  Last night, Anamaria and I tried to count the number of girls we’d seen you with in Montreal, back when you still lived in Outremont. It was like counting sheep: it put us both to sleep. Poor Gabriel. We had fun coming up with a kingdom you could rule. It was an amusing game that distracted us from our exercises for a few hours.

  You’d wear a plain toga, revealing the virile charms of your muscles as you strut around your city. The women would be held back by guards. They’d come up to you and rip out their eyelashes and eyebrows as a sign of devotion. The ground having been declared too dirty to receive your saliva, you’d spit into the hands of a courtesan. Everything you touched would be set aside and burned once a year in a ritual attended by one thousand naked women. Not a single woman less. You’d be accompanied everywhere you went by forty handpicked wives, since you’d marry a consenting virgin every day. That’s the kingdom Anamaria and I had fun inventing for you. Yes, we had a good laugh at your expense. Because you are grotesque and disgusting. Don’t fool yourself. The proof runs through your letters, starting with the poor women you took advantage of at Lajoie. Please tell me you were joking, that you wrote that only to try and make yourself seem interesting. The episode with our Grade 6 teacher Mrs. Boulay is all the more troubling because, unless I’m mistaken, your visit to her home—I think it’s fair to call it rape—dates back to the saddest time in her life. That either you don’t remember, or you chose to gloss over this point, just goes to show how selfish you are.

  In spite of myself, I read your account of the time you ate her bread pudding. You do realize she could have been in real trouble if you’d told anyone. Your anecdote, as touching and illuminating as it may be with regard to the origins of your life as a libertine, also sheds light on an aspect of your personality that you’d rather keep quiet about, a flaw you’d rather accuse me of than accept as your own. My poor Gabriel, you asked if Mrs. Boulay had a son. Allow me to refresh your selective memory for you. That January, when we were twelve years old and in Mrs. Boulay’s Grade 6 class, her little boy, who was called Patrick, died suddenly. He’d been born with a heart defect and his days were number
ed. He went to our school, but before our time. Mrs. Boulay sometimes brought him to class with her when the other teachers had had enough. That you’ve forgotten all about him when you can remember the color of the stairs leading up to Mrs. Boulay’s apartment in January 1982 says more about you than the pile of letters cluttering up my coffee table in Rome.

  Little Patrick, on top of his heart murmur, also suffered—and I mean suffered—from a serious learning disability and behavioral problems too. He had to repeat a year of elementary school, which meant that he was thirteen and head and shoulders above everyone by the time he got to Grade 6, making him even harder to ignore. Are you quite sure you don’t remember him? Patrick was incredibly sensitive, a real mama’s boy. I can already hear you and that wicked tongue of yours trying to compare his emotional dependence to my profound and completely natural affection for Mom, a woman who, I’d like to point out to you at least once in my life, never shut you out of her heart. She took more of an interest in me; that’s all there is to it. One day you’ll really have to learn there’s no dignity in resentment. But for Patrick it was pathological. The first day his mother dropped him off at school (and only on the school board’s orders—she’d been feeding his pathology by refusing to send him to school for fear of traumatizing him) he threw a fit. He bit one of the other boys so hard he drew blood; and when the caretaker was called to bring him under control, he gave him a black eye. I think the kid ended up realizing he’d have to go to school, but only after Mrs. Boulay had begged the principal to accept him, so he’d at least have the comfort of knowing his mother was in the same building. Before she lived in Outremont, Mrs. Boulay was in Villeray, where her teacher’s salary allowed her to rent a nice big apartment. At first, she’d had to send Patrick to the school closest to home, while continuing to teach in Outremont. When the principal at Lajoie refused to accept Patrick, Mrs. Boulay had moved to Outremont so that she could send her son to the school where she taught. It won’t be lost on you that she lived in the cheapest part of the Outremont neighborhood—not the Jewish part, and certainly not the most expensive part like we did—right above a laundry on Van Horne. In summer, the poor woman could never open her windows with all the noise. Ah, the things normal people are prepared to go through just to share a zip code with people like us! What was her furniture like? Did you sit down in her living room before coming back home? If Mom and Suzuki had known you were hanging about an apartment above a laundry on Van Horne, they’d have made you take your clothes off before you came into the house. They’d have burned them with gasoline, smothered you with lanolin, and scrubbed you head to toe with quick, precise, purifying movements. Admit it, impure soul that you are, you’d have let Suzuki do it twice. You don’t fool me . . .

  At any rate, the little boy eventually won, and Mrs. Boulay let him go to Lajoie until Grade 6, which he spent sitting just in front of her desk. You don’t remember? But wait: it gets better. Patrick would spend every recess with his mother, reunited with her at last, as though he’d thought he’d never see her again. He burst into tears at least once a day. At lunchtime, Mrs. Boulay dressed her abnormal son and took him back to their apartment for something to eat. We’d see them walking hand in hand, and the taller the boy got, the more unhealthy their relationship appeared to be. It was almost impossible, for example, to find yourself alone with Mrs. Boulay. Patrick was always around, practically standing guard. One day, the other boys in Grade 6 decided to play a trick on Patrick, who by that time was thirteen, a year older than they were. They broke into his locker, where they found a pair of women’s underwear that belonged to his mother, of course. The boldest boy of the bunch took off with the matronly rose-print drawers—and flew them from the school’s flagpole, just below the Quebec flag.

  Patrick and his mom were well and truly humiliated. News spread through the grapevine so efficiently that it reached even the normally closed quarters of the kindergarten. Everyone but the principal knew. And there wasn’t a thing Mrs. Boulay could do to the little hoodlums. Remember the fat French guy who used to get his kicks feeling up little girls? It was he, I seem to remember, who hoisted the underwear to the top of the flagpole under cover of darkness.

  And you don’t remember any of it? Or are you just setting it to one side? Well, the fact remains, my dear licentious brother who now seems to be suffering from amnesia, that the year after that sad spectacle, you and I wound up in Mrs. Boulay’s class, along with some of the Underpants Gang, Fat Guillaume included. Patrick had ended up leaving Lajoie and was now at the public high school in Outremont, where he was, by all accounts, deeply unhappy. In January 1982, Patrick died suddenly at school one morning, running after one of his tormentors, who’d stolen his gloves. He knew he wasn’t allowed to run, he knew he wasn’t allowed to get short of breath, but he wouldn’t listen. He died with his classmates looking on. It was a very cold day. The next morning, Mrs. Boulay didn’t come in to teach. That was the day she was absent, the day you brought her the exams she was supposed to mark. When you walked up into her apartment, her son Patrick had been dead for a day. Poor Gabriel, you ate Patrick’s pudding. Mind you, we often end up with someone else’s dessert. That’s just how life is.

  I’ve tried in vain to remember a time when there was still some getting through to you, a time when you weren’t completely obsessed with mirrors. Once again, Suzuki is back in the dock. Because it’s all her fault. It’s her pictures that made you the way you are. It was our birthday in 1981. We’d just moved into the house on Rue Davaar in Outremont. We kept finding stuff in the closets, things left behind by the previous owners, an English-speaking couple who’d moved to Ontario just before the first referendum. Mom had bought the house for a song, and I’d been stupid enough to believe Suzuki wouldn’t be coming with us. Until then, I’d always kind of thought that she just worked for Mom, a tomboyish nanny who helped her open restaurants. Someone Mom would let go when we moved. Imagine my surprise to see her organizing the move, choosing color schemes, telling the workers what to do. And why, oh why, Gabriel, did she insist on speaking in that country bumpkin accent of hers, like she was back in Rivière-du-Loup and it was still 1968? It really grated on the nerves. When she showed up at our parent-teacher meetings, I would rather have been eaten alive by fire ants than admit she was there to pick up my report card with those stubby, hairy fingers of hers. Mom at least made an effort to speak correctly, to be understood by everyone while remaining true to her roots.

  We were twelve at the time. Mom was away in the Laurentians, in that home where overworked people went to convalesce. She gave everything to Mado Group Inc., you know. It’s not her dedication I’m criticizing or calling into question. But every time she went away, either to open a new restaurant in some other godforsaken hole (back then, she was opening branches in New Brunswick) or to recharge her batteries after pushing herself too hard, she would leave us with Suzuki, whose very smell made me feel ill. When I think back on those mannish hands, how her voice would fall back into its working-class ways. Do you remember when she’d say hello to people? You’d have thought it was a plumber speaking. No class at all. She’d organized a little party for our twelfth birthday. A handful of friends from school were there, even Father Huot. I’m quite certain she’d never have given you that photo if Mom had been there. And you didn’t see the expression on Father Huot’s face when you took the picture out of the birthday card. She might have been more discreet, waited for us to be alone. But anyone who knows her knows she likes nothing more than wrecking other people’s dreams. Suzuki’s sly smile told me she’d set the two of us at loggerheads with no more than a photo. She was the one who pushed you away from me. And you know it.

  “Your grandfather gave me the photo. The first time I went to eat at the Lamontagnes’ in November 1960. That’s the archbishop of Rimouski beside him.”

  I can still hear her telling that embarrassing story to our friends in Outremont in that lumberjack accent of hers. Some memories should stay buried. G
od, I can see why Mom never wanted to impose that world on us, a world she extricated herself from through sheer determination. You’ll recall the hint of nostalgia she had in her voice every time she mentioned our grandfather, no doubt a manual laborer, a bit of a simpleton who did his best given the circumstances. At any rate, I think it was that particular day that the picture of our grandfather in a ridiculously tight-fitting leotard cleaved the rock of our fraternity. And you, poor boy, you were absolutely fascinated by the photo; you stared at it for days. How furious Mom was—and rightly so—when she realized Suzuki had betrayed her! I can still hear them screaming at each other in the living room.

  “You just had to go and give him the photo of Papa Louis! You can be so damned thick when you want to be, Solange!”

  “They need to know, Madeleine!”

  “Need to know what, Solange?”

  Mom flew up to her room in a rage, and Suzuki into hers. Two doors slammed. I trembled for both of us. A week later, you disappeared after school. We couldn’t find you anywhere. It took Mom a month to work out why you stopped coming home for supper. You’d started going to that filthy gym. It was crawling with old Greeks and Ukrainians, stinking hairy animals that lifted weights all day. A reassuring fatherly presence. Each to his own IQ . . . Meanwhile I found peace among music teachers. Mom wanted to forbid you from going, but Suzuki stood up for you again.

  “Let him go, Madeleine. It’ll do him good. I spoke to the guys down at the gym. They’re looking after him. They’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt himself. They think it’s hilarious, having a young guy in there with all the old fellas! He’s like their mascot or something. It’s nothing more than a few harmless old men pumping iron.”