I have studied the magic
of happiness, which none eludes
He irritated you, Rimbaud, what you liked in him were his words, and Abyssinia. I thought you resembled his sister and his mother, who were dark and who loathed him even as they hovered over him, and who lost him again and again. They were called Vitalie. And suddenly you were more Vitalie than they were, you took me as if you were famished, then you threw me out of bed, there was snow to look at, and a scarf to buy for the consumptive you suspected I would become, and melting butter to spread on toasted bread. We went out side by side at eight o’clock, I noticed the hammock that you hadn’t put away in the fall, a snowdrift hanging from a bare maple, I lay down in it for a laugh. You caressed me through layers of wool, I came hot and cold, I named you Vitalie howling very softly, I baptized you in the palm of your gloved hand.
We were lost without knowing it. We laughed, do you remember, when we were both mistaken.
From that day I pretended to believe in Abyssinia and you pretended to be preparing to go there. We would not be a little couple who went to the movies, the market, the museum, who picnicked on the mountain. There was your house for loving, such a strange choice, in an inner suburb where the very streetlamps cast their light in another language. We were fifteen kilometres from Mentana Street, in a diffident Great Britain, signed with Canadian flags on a few balconies, imprisoned inside brick cottages the boldest of which tolerated some ivy in the spring. You had chosen the house from a catalogue, not knowing the neighbours, you were only passing through and you wanted to climb stairs to go to sleep. I guessed your obsessive fear of overly bright bungalows, I laughed at it.
It was you, so you said, who had chosen to be my mistress rather than my wife. To make your house an elsewhere unknown to all my friends, the university, the magazine, art. Leaving me Rockland Avenue, my piano, my blue cat whom you would not meet. To agree that at some point life would separate us, that we were certainly in no hurry, but it would happen. And then you would go to Abyssinia.
I know perfectly well that you were lying very gently. That it was as certain, as clear as this March day, that I could love you until you were old and gaunt, and still magnificent in your high turtlenecks. That you would not survive for three weeks in Abyssinia, speaking French to the hyenas and English to the warriors. But you love me, Vitalie. And you allowed me to choose deceit: to change nothing about the texts, the symposia, the boys I no longer had sex with but made a show of accompanying here and there. I didn’t even take down the seven of hearts. And I was even able to run into you without greeting you at a concert of ancient music one night, I was with Jean-Pierre who thought he was still in favour, I was teaching him about the prophetic formalism of the harpsichord, I hadn’t known that you too liked unaccompanied strings — you who used to caress me to the velvet of Pachelbel. One morning I thought I saw your icy Toyota on my street, moving as slowly as jealousy. If it was you, Vitalie, I was alone.
I never meant to hurt you but I am evil, and that is killing me now. We played at being the heroes of fashionably grey novels, free lovers, the only things lacking were the alcohol, the cigarettes, and the weary tirades taken from Robbe-Grillet. I would have taken you to Laval, to a fourth-floor flat, to make a ball of rosy pink and rose in a big square bed that would have been our only chance. But we lost one another between two houses filled with the sounds of art and of a journey to Abyssinia, both of them so beautiful and so false.
All the same, one summer evening I thought of making a child with you. You know, to make it with the greatest care. It was your turn to lie in the hammock, it had become our place, I was caressing your pubis while recalling the baptism of Vitalie and I said that I felt her under my palm, that she would grow very tall very quickly and that we would make her into a dancer. You maintained that it would be a boy and that he’d turn out badly. We changed the subject.
The boy arrived, a month later. I’d come in stage left as usual and there he was, tall, slim, translucid, redheaded, in the kitchen, pouring himself some Abyssinian coffee in my cup. “I’d like you to meet Corinne’s son,” you said from the back of the living room, forgetting to tell me his name. Perhaps he didn’t have one. His eyes were tawny, his skin so white it should have radiated cold, but it blazed around him.
He spoke little, was listening to some horrible metal music.
I would have thought you’d reject this reminder of your troubled summer, what was left of the woman who had abandoned you fifteen years before, who had gone up north, become ordinary again, and had got together, said her son, with an Italian. Corinne had a weakness for Italians, you’d told me. But you had not told me the extent to which you were in a way the mother of the boy she was sending to you now because he and her man often came to blows and she was not a woman to forgo her pleasure.
You thought you had been present at the child’s conception, in a water tower, where the male had been merely a willing stalk, one that Corinne had squeezed inside her before your eyes. The child should have died at birth, he’d been consumed by all kinds of fevers, you had bathed him, unfailingly. And then she had stolen him from you.
You fixed up a bedroom for him upstairs, the walls seemed like glass to me, now I took you up to the Laurentians more often, to make love in small motels, I didn’t have the impression I was jealous. His name was quite simply Pierre, but I called him Cain to give an edge to our strange conversations. For him, everything was mineral, from his music to his fondness for killing, which might come to him if he was holding a knife. You smiled as though he were still a child and not a threat, you were going to enroll him in school in September, Corinne would come for him again one day, but for a time we were three.
I’m not angry with him today, even if he was our evil eye, the flint on which we stumbled, as you had done during that summer. We were no longer two on our island when Bruno Farinacci-Lepore wrote to beg for an invitation, he said he needed to leave Italy, his mother had died and the estate would lie fallow again, he wanted to come to Montreal to pull himself together and what was the wonderful Charlène Lemire up to now? I was at the summit of my small power and I had no choice. He would stay on Rockland Avenue for two or three weeks, then go down to New York for the opening of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, which was grateful to me for having suggested he attend and happy to share expenses with my university.
At Mirabel, I thought he looked thinner. He was lost but gracefully so in a vast overcoat of dark brown alpaca. No white now. Not even a scarf, that would have been unbecoming with his greenish complexion. I observed him as an expert untouched by dilemmas, as an art historian who was left cold by effects.
But is there a better talker than Bruno Farinacci-Lepore? Before we had left the Laval city limits I had regained my appetite for the way he expressed himself. We would soon be required to take an interest in the first generation of artists with no memory, already he had decoded all their signs. Artists who made a profession of their youth, who rendered the signs of terror in shades that were harsh but attractive, there was something of the Nazi in them and we, their elders, instead of confronting them, would pretend to understand them, to see them as apologists for the absurd in its fin-de-siècle version. He named them all for me, from the German obsessed with the Reich who gave us the most sublime charred paintings, to the Puerto Rican who paid for his heroin by making everyone who was anyone in New York come running to the barrage of his graffiti.
I knew all the words but only now did I understand them. There were no innocent Cains, not in life and not in art.
Bruno went to bed very late, and alone, that went without saying. He moved as if he’d been burned, he had given up alcohol but drank coffee after coffee as if it were a transfusion. I felt only gratitude, and a desire to write all the texts the next day, to parade my knowledge and to stir up once again our small circle, who settled into provocation as if it were a bed of fleecy clouds and who return
ed to the fascism of their fathers — the Quebec version of it, which was always foreshortened and fearful. Bruno seemed to find it very interesting.
The next day, Vitalie, I saw the question in your eyes. Had I touched Bruno, had he taken me? No, only with words. You remember, we went with Cain to spend some time in the most saffron autumn of all, I breathed as if all my creatures could be reconciled, nothing in my life was a greater privilege than you, with all your trust. I thought of introducing you to Bruno, you said no, kicking up the leaves with your long tawny boots, you resembled the still warm trees.
After Bruno had gone to bed, later and later, I would call you in the middle of the night, as if I needed to reassure you. Nonetheless I stayed close to him, it seemed to me he needed someone there when he awoke — later and later as well. The last night, around eleven, he wanted wine. I poured him a great deal, I was worried. He sat at my feet, on the grey carpet, with my blue cat on his lap. He told me that he would not come here again, that he soon would die, looking down on the Lago di Bracciano, that was why he was letting his house go to rack and ruin. He spoke of death as of a work of art, his words dry. The appetites that dwindle, the jealousies that fade away, the anxieties that end, the lies before the mirror. “What is strangest, he said, is the skin. It comes away from the bones before one is even at death’s door, it prepares itself to leave its place, it bruises and sometimes it hangs — from the bones in the neck, from the buttocks, the elbows. It changes colour. He showed me a black spot beneath one earlobe and another on his forehead, which his hair no longer concealed. “As if hell were already licking at me,” he sighed.
He took my hand, he insisted, his eyes were the eyes of a child wanting sweets. I won’t tell you that I wanted to participate in his end, Vitalie, or that I found it fascinating and terrible to taste it and so to make of Bruno a unique memory. I’d been drinking, I pitied him, above all I was still hungry for him as I had been in Nice, exactly. He fucked with a rage that gave the lie to his dissertations on death, I was appeased.
I thought he had cancer, was being gnawed at like so many others by the beast that clutches at remorse and at regrets, he certainly shared that destiny. I still did not altogether understand the rumour in the city, in the cities, announcing a plague that afflicted men who love their own sex. I’m sure that he didn’t want to kill me, that I pleased him outside the fishbowl where he had shimmered before so many passing fools.
I told you everything about that night long before I knew. You shuddered, I saw it even though you claimed yet again to understand. Perhaps you stopped loving me for a moment, there is always a moment when it is too bright. The light damages the print a little, it fades but stays clear, you could see my shadow, you wouldn’t forget it now. But one does not necessarily abandon someone, Bruno was going to die, his tragedy was more lavish than ours.
And so you found your Rimbaud, Vitalie. The one with gangrene.
Gangrene. It took us some time to recognize it, coiled as it was inside the most beautiful late autumn in history. Cain-Pierre seemed to have mellowed, you’d been lending him friends since school had started again, they surrounded you in the caféteria at lunchtime, they thought you were lively and laughing, you walked in their light and the most beautiful loves are incestuous, as Barbara sang, the only voice your make-believe son did not shatter with his music from hell. I came to enjoy the almost-island of the three of us — a family that was like no other — as we stood on the threshold of our forties, and you talked less about Abyssinia.
Then came some anxious nights. The first time I was with you, I awoke in a sweat, my throat ablaze, I’d never had a fever, you soothed me, you’d seen so many children on fire like this, for no reason, because it was winter and they were afraid of the cold.
When I was alone my choking was more prolonged, more genuine. I had no idea what it was. I would pace back and forth, shivering, I wondered what remorse was laying siege to me this way, I who believed I’d been spared because you had permitted, even wanted this double life. I sat down with my books, I was trying to put the finishing touches to Bruno’s thesis because as usual he refused to denounce what was fake in the trends he was always the first to detect. I transferred all the lies to others, I finally rid myself of them. I called you at dawn, I could hear my fever dissipate in your voice.
March was the coldest March in history. For a joke, for our anniversary and to put some colour in my cheeks, you wanted to visit Florida again. This time we would take the same plane, in both directions. We chose West Palm Beach because of a short piece in the New York Times Travel section about a production of Norma in the arena of a town whose ultra-rich had not yet treated themselves to a concert hall. You taught me about the high priestess and her impossible love for the enemy, you were sure the voices would be even more treacherous than she, but you always needed some strange pretext for going anywhere.
We rented a red Escort and looked around for a hotel that would serve beautifully for the end of my life.
It was called the Sea Lord, a modest white block between the old-age condos and the parvenus’ resorts. Almost an inn, whose owner spoke a bit of French, suggested books, a café, a rather scaly pool, and a few rooms looking out on the sea, so close it rolled into us day and night. It was cool and nearly cold beneath the tall pines that rose from the sand, for several metres it resembled a cove in a northern sea, our own latitude amid so much that was insignificant. For three days I did not burn, I undressed you constantly, you wore rough new jeans with silk camisoles, I remember every zipper, every fastener, but it kills me no longer to hear your murmur flow between my thighs. I can’t do it, the sound has been switched off and this is how death comes. There are thicknesses on my walls, I am slipping into a room filled with madmen.
It was seven o’clock. Dan Rather began the CBS news with a big medical story, he frowned as he announced the epidemic nature of what was being called “the gay plague,” but to which scientists were giving the name acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. My disease would always be AIDS, always in the English in which I first suspected it, the papers and magazines were filled with it nearly from hour to hour. I read them all, you suspected it too. And without even trying to make love to you for the last time, I lost your body, which was fastened to my soul.
We came home. We shouldn’t have. But we still weren’t altogether certain that there was no hope. You still wanted to give yourself to me because you had no fear of this disease that held only boys in its grip. My passion was gone though, I was so cold for you. It happens now that you’ve been spared, Vitalie, that the disease passed from Bruno to me and stopped before it came to you, you are Marie the virgin of my last sperm inside you, and Vitalie who will live. But you have nothing because I am leaving you nothing, even in your belly everything has evaporated.
I left you stage left, in the season of the peonies by the hammock. I wanted to feel you standing all along me, I wanted you never to see me stretched out in my final fevers, Rimbaud laid low, delirious perhaps, and enraged. And I left for Mexico, whose noxious vapours are forbidden to those with my condition, fumes that trigger the final pneumonia. I shall not be one of those afflicted who struggle, who are beginning to demand researchers and the money with which to conduct their research. That which has been eaten at will not be reborn, I must go, quickly, before my bitterness is exhausted.
I need to leave in anger, with witnesses. I am imprisoning you in this letter and I’m making of you a storm that will threaten their days. Let them be free of disease, I didn’t pass it on to any of them, I was finished long ago with their bodies, they can encounter one another if they wish. But let them know that my caresses and my words were the measure of their weakness. I speak imposture. It is like all the others, I don’t believe that it will make a lot of noise on the day of my funeral, accompanied by a Bordeaux along with the cat, Flaubert, and a piano. It will not emerge from the walls. But I want them to know one another and to know
you, so that henceforth they will exhaust themselves, wondering what in the false is truly false.
You talked to me about a swamp into which you thought you were sinking one day. You are there, Vitalie, I am becoming the clay that unites us. I am another, and I love you. You can believe me, Marie.
Five
M ARIANNE DUBEAU SAT AT THE FOOT of the bed, on the black comforter pulled so taut for three weeks now, ever since François had gone away to the Hotel-Dieu to die, between white sheets and in the hands of fearful nurses. Some would touch him only with gloves. Marianne was never afraid, she knew that she would die alone thirty years hence and that this boy’s life had been a wonderful accident in her own. She has returned him to the desert whence he came.
It was not when he spoke, finally, that she had sensed the danger.
On the morning when he had become truly blind, he had asked for Schumann’s Concerto in A Minor, opus 129, by the cello of Jacqueline du Pré, who had chosen it as the music for her own last moments. Passion, violent sweetness. Marianne had listened without allowing herself to be taken in, only surprised to find her son vulnerable to such a poignant landscape, a Cézanne with no horizon for a stranger who has lost his way.
And he had begun with Cézanne, as it happened. He had briefly mentioned the Côte d’Azur, had told her it was time she knew that the life of her son had not capsized there, when he had met Bruno. Then he’d revealed the existence of Vitalie, a story of happiness that went from Disney World to peonies in the suburbs, a shaded story she had believed without really paying attention to it. She had never been the repository for all of François’s secrets, it was entirely possible that a woman had given him rest from the tedious rounds of those who came to Rockland Avenue to be caressed, for pleasure, or for a few lines in a magazine. Odd name, Vitalie. He’d never talked with her about Rimbaud.
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