AWOL

by Jennifer Barclay

  I called a few days into my trip, out of boredom. “Ah, je suis une amie d’Astrid,” I said with eyes closed over the telephone, hoping he wouldn’t hear me blushing. He told me to meet him the next night, at his apartment in the Latin Quarter. He would take me to dinner. And to the famous nightclub Castel, where he was working as a kind of disco manager.

  I was staying with a high school friend, Danielle, who had been living in Paris since taking a business degree at Fontainebleau, and her prim virginal ways were chewing on my nerves. She had taken up photography, and everywhere we walked, through the Marais, the Place des Vosges, Montmartre, she held a Canon camera protectively against one eye. She took pictures of monuments only, not people.

  Since escaping the ivory tower of university I was looking for more flesh-and-blood action. I had been a nun consecrated to books during all of my undergraduate years. I was now full of sexual yearning. I took to reading a worn copy of André Gide that I had found in an English bookstore—The Fruits of the Earth—and one night actually started to weep because his words made me realize that I was missing out on life somehow, by refusing to savour its sensual riches. I resolved then and there to do something reckless. Like have an adventure. For all that might involve.

  But as my guide to hedonism, Gabriel was more than I had bargained for.

  He answered the door wearing a thigh-high black kimono, his blond mane of curls sliding off the satin at the shoulders. He asked if I wanted a coupe de champagne. I heard it as coup, and thought at first he was offering me a slap. I sipped self-consciously while sitting on a chocolate-brown sofa strewn with animal-print cushions and throws, while he got ready for dinner.

  It was the summer of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I can still remember the thrusting pulse of “Billie Jean” as it blared as we entered the restaurant. It was one of those insider places where the owner behind the bar nods silently at you as at an old friend. I was deeply impressed. It was also the summer of Yannick Noah, the dread-locked, drop-dead gorgeous tennis star. And he was right there at a table, with an entourage of fabulously good-looking people, celebrating his victory at the French Open that day. Gabriel called it the “Roland Garros,” like I and everyone else in the world knew what that meant.

  The more I drank the more fluently I could speak French. Gabriel was clearly bemused by me. He looked at me, his eyes crinkling at the corners, probably thinking, “Astrid owes me a favour.”

  After dinner, we moved on to the celebrated nightclub where he worked, party palace to lubricious European princes and their leggy model girlfriends. But it was early when we arrived, ten o’clock. The dance floor in the bowels of the discotheque was empty. Gabriel slipped off into the darkness, leaving me in the care of a burly Lebanese bodyguard named Fifi. We chatted amiably about his job: limousined thuggery, or so I thought he said. Castel was dark and labyrinthine, with a narrow spiralling staircase and dark wood panelling, and corners where blow jobs were given, coke was snorted, and deals were whispered through thick clouds of burning Gitane cigarettes. It was difficult to hear anything over the pounding music: Duran Duran, Bowie, raspy-voiced Italian pop. After a few more drinks, it started to sound pretty good. I gently excused myself from Fifi.

  The dance floor was now awash in Gucci shoes, Ferragamo neckties, real diamonds, fake tans, and eyeliner. Sometimes I clued in that someone was trying to dance with me. But I didn’t want to connect. I ignored all with the exception of a dark older man whom I met while ordering another drink. He asked, in dignified French, where I was from, and when I said, “Canada,” he leaned in and said he was a good friend of my prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. Talk about an icebreaker. He said he was a minister in the government of Morocco. Had I ever been to Morocco? “Ah then, you must come to Morocco. I will buy you gorgeous clothes. Take you to all the best nightclubs.”

  At dawn, I left with Gabriel instead. He had occasionally come to check on me throughout the night with a “Ça va?” and a good-natured squeeze of the shoulders. He was likeable. At the end of the night, when I felt I had had enough, I found him upstairs in an inner chamber, sipping Scotch and playing cards with Duc de So-and-so and his titled confrères, their ties pulled from their collars in full playboy fashion. I hadn’t planned on being seduced by Gabriel. But when he asked if I wanted another coupe, I thought: You want experience.

  I went upstairs, and with lightning speed, off went my bra and the black silk wide-leg pants that my mother had bought me, hoping I would have a swellegant time in a city she had only ever dreamed about. I was wearing a G-string, which Gabriel also tore off with a swift swipe of the paw. “You like gay?” he asked. “I am gay.” I didn’t know what shocked me more: his first words of English or this startling admission. The person who had given me his number was 100 per cent woman. I was still grappling with the meaning of it all, when Oh! Ouch! Stop! So that is what he meant.

  After my night in the jungle of Saint Germain, I felt lonely. And loneliness in a foreign city can drive you to do things you wouldn’t normally do. It makes you desperate to connect. Which is why the next day I called the Moroccan with the beautifully tailored suit and avuncular manner: I wanted to be adored.

  I wanted security—the kind only someone in the full narcissistic bloom of youth could convince herself comes from an older and rich man wanting to shower her with compliments and gifts. I called him at his Paris hotel, and he was thoroughly delighted and cute on the phone, calling me “chérie” and saying, “je t’embrasse.” Because he was just about to fly back to Morocco, he would leave all the arrangements for my visit in the hands of his female associate, who was staying behind in Paris. It seemed so effortless and easy. I thought: If this is the continental way, I’ll just go with the flow. I relaxed.

  Off I went the next morning to meet his female associate for café au lait on the Champs Élysées. The woman with the large sad eyes called him Doo Doo, but I couldn’t laugh because her manner was solemn. Morocco, she told me, was a land of beaches and late-night parties. My understanding was that Doo Doo was a busy man and likely had a wife, and would be joining up with me only occasionally, when he could. Again, the emphasis was on gorgeous new clothes, and, in addition, there would be a house on the beach; it was in Marrakesh and I would go there after first landing in Casablanca. The woman had first-class airline tickets in her purse, which she stuffed heatedly in my hand.

  But first I was to meet the family. Why, I wondered? To show me off? A custom of some sort? I didn’t question it, however, and followed her meekly like a pup through the busy, winding streets of Paris’s first arrondissement. She led me to an apartment where her Arab sisterhood lay waiting. The shutters were closed, the lights dimmed. In a corner sat the matriarch, a square block of black robes, fanning herself with a worn copy of Oh la! magazine and staring menacingly. Other women burst through the door, armed with shopping bags filled with designer clothes. They wiggled their ample figures in and out of garments at least two sizes too small, grunting and sweating and invoking Princess Caroline, patron saint of the Euro-trash community. They stared, envious of my twenty-three-year-old figure, then cooed that I was so lucky to be going to Morocco with cousin Doo Doo because he was VERY gentle.

  When I heard those words I realized the general expectation was that I was going to be having sex with this guy. I had been a bit staggered by the suggested transfer of wealth my way. Of course there had been fleeting moments of concern, but I was a student with an opportunistic streak, and arrogantly, I did think I’d pull it off. I thought this was about a free trip with a little hand-holding to a city that Humphrey Bogart had made glamorous. I had assessed Doo Doo to be gentlemanly and devoted, and I thought I would somehow just slip out of the noose at the last minute. But I suddenly saw myself in an over-decorated apartment, clutching the embroidered arm of a faux Louis XV chair, about to sell my soul for a night in Casablanca. And just in time, a voice in my head screamed, “HELL NO!”

  Miserable in the streets of Paris that afternoon, I wo
rried about how I would escape this fine mess and come out wearing my own baggy clothes.

  I confessed all to Danielle. Flabbergasted, she dropped her croissant and grabbed me by the arm, hailing a taxi. I was sheepish standing beside her as she banged on the wrought-iron door of the apartment. In strident French she declared that I was NOT going to Morocco, there was a mistake, excuse us, but here is the ticket.

  The woman stared dumbfounded. She asked what the problem was.

  Danielle, bless her simple Canadian soul, said, “Doo Doo is married, right?”

  Miss Sad Eyes sharply sucked in her breath. She ran after us into the street. “Mais tout le monde le fait.” Everyone does it.

  Well not me, I finally whispered in response. “Pas moi.”

  A staff writer for the Globe and Mail, Deirdre Kelly has over two thousand stories to her credit, from ballet criticism to investigative reporting on the world of international art. Now the paper’s fashion reporter, covering the runway shows in Paris, Milan and New York, she travels frequently for business and pleasure.

  018Destination: Mexico

  WE TURNED SOME SHARP CORNERS:A Marriage Proposal in Durango

  Nick Massey-Garrison

  No sooner had I proposed marriage than I began to have misgivings.

  We were standing in the plaza major in Durango, our knees already weak from hours spent reeling through the Sierra Madres on a stretch of treacherous highway known as the Espinazo del Diablo. We were wearing creaking motorcycle leathers and clutching a bottle of tequila. And the bells of the cathedral were booming away in the empty square to welcome in the new year. The arcades were lit up with strings of lights, the hulking sixteenth-century basilica bottom-lit and lemon yellow against a black sky. Drunken singing came from a distant café. We were intoxicatingly alone, untold miles from friends back home who would be toasting and kissing.

  We were truants from that familiar world, untethered under the whirl of unfamiliar stars and privy to the mystery hinted at by whatever we call sacrament—that the everyday world is not where the important things are happening. Travelling on a motorcycle through Mexico induces this feeling regularly. We had encountered other tourists only once in two weeks. We had crossed featureless purple deserts and shrieked recklessly down mile after scrubby mile of dusk-bordered nothingness scattered with lonely oil rigs, telephone poles with their sagging wires loping along beside us, silhouettes leaning irregularly into the flat sky. Of course, we couldn’t talk on the bike, so we just held hands, squeezing every once in a while to draw attention to something interesting or to let each other know that we were happy.

  We had stopped for gas in tumbleweed towns with rusty old pumps, and breakfasted on burritos and bitter coffee in roadside cantinas. We had dodged chickens in dusty villages with bloated fly-blown corpses of dogs strewn on the side of the road. Christmas night was spent drinking imprudently in Cuatrocienegas with a seedy mariachi band and a cowboy named Nacho. And each night we curled up in a lumpy bed in an unlikely hotel and reminded each other of how lucky we were to be there, far from everything familiar except each other.

  We rode and rode. Crossing cold deserts on a motorcycle is a lot like drudgery, and eating burritos of indifferent quality day after day quickly loses its appeal. But we romanticized as we went along, quickened at every turn by the recurring realization: This is us; we are here. We were nothing like the swashbuckling adventurers we felt we were. But that didn’t really matter.

  I had heard, of course, of the fruity coolers and the SUVs that share the name, but I had never heard of the city of Durango before we saw the name on a map spread out on a table in a cantina somewhere in the Coahuila desert. It turned out to be a city of over a million people, a provincial capital, and when we emerged from the desert, we found it shimmering in the orange plains at the foot of the Sierra Madres.

  We had stumbled upon a city of ambiguous charm. Durango is a prosthesis of the Old World, built by people looking for gold, a place where the Inquisition was administered. From the plaza, all arcades and mosaic, you can see the spires of half a dozen brooding churches, each sheltering a mournful Madonna and a grotesquely lifelike Christ, some with human hair and painted rosy cheeks and dolorous blue eyes, his head mutilated by thorns the size of switchblades, dark blood dripping from his hands and feet. We marvelled at the dates on buildings—A.D. 1887, 1744, 1625—stupidly astonished that we could have gotten on a motorcycle and ridden to, well, this.

  Durango reminded me of some of the great cities of eastern Europe, like Belgrade; fashioned by carpenters and stonemasons and sculptors and architects of an unknowable past, then allowed to lapse into decay. The bottoms of intricately carved doors rotted away where centuries of rain had splashed, hinges rusting off. Sidewalks cracked and heaved. Friezes obscured by soot. Walls blackened by the centuries of bodies brushing by, hurrying somewhere.

  But this is not squalor or decrepitude, or not quite. It has all the haunting loveliness of ruins, which stand as testaments to their own lost mode of being, to uses to which they are no longer put, to the unforeseen nature of their desuetude. Ruins jut out of the irrevocable into the mundane, where tourists like me stumble over them and consider them minor epiphanies. No one builds things to fall down.

  Now battered, wretched cars lurch and jangle through the narrow cobbled streets where, presumably, the coaches of imperial functionaries once clattered. No doubt there had been torrid affairs, thrilling swordplay and knots of swooning women with heaving bosoms and scented handkerchiefs. Their coats of arms are still carved in the lintels of their decaying houses.

  A few days before New Year’s we had walked through a market. The vendors’ booths were arranged according to the objects they sold: one aisle of garish clothes, knock-offs and sweatshirts with the logos of faraway sports franchises and nonsense slogans (“OKAY Boy Is Here To Jazz It Up”); a florists’ aisle; an aisle of dry foodstuffs; a butchers’ aisle, reeking of generations of offal; an aisle of ceramic madonnas looking heavenward.

  In the leather goods aisle, among the saddle- and shoe-makers, we met an old man with the long hair and wild eyes of a locust-eating prophet. He stared as we approached. I warned Ange not to look. A glance would have made avoiding an awkward conversation impossible. But as we passed he called to us in Spanish. We turned to shrug innocently and mumble “No hablo Español” when he asked, smiling, earnest, “Are you married?” We conceded that we were not. “So young,” he beamed. To Ange: “So beautiful! Why you’re not married?!”

  These were neither compliments we could return, nor questions we could answer. We stammered and looked at each other. “You have children?” We smiled uncomfortably. No. “So nice, so nice, so young.” Shaking his head, but smiling. Then he pulled a yellowed photograph from the wall. He showed us a burly young man in a white shirt and a vest of indeterminate colour. The young man stares at the camera grimly, intently, as though trying to communicate something of grave import, like a euchre player trying to table-talk. His moustache is a push-broom and his hair is slicked back. One hand is on a hip.

  “Is me,” said the shoemaker proudly.

  We’ve all seen pictures of our grandparents as hale youths, photos of our middle-aged parents as infants, irrefutable evidence that things have not always been what they are. Strange, then, our assurance that they will never change. We will always be young, we will always be happy.

  We had left Mazatlan the morning of New Year’s Eve, heading for Torreon. But we had dawdled a little. I stopped at a cathedral to buy a St. Christopher medal, only to be admonished by a baleful old woman in the mandatory black dress that the patron saint of travellers had been de-canonized. I settled for the protection of St. Michael. We spent hours stopped on the shoulder of the highway, tossing pebbles over the cliff. We stopped in Durango for dinner and decided halfway through that we would stay the night. We immediately ordered the beers we had been lusting after. The other patrons in the cantina were drinking heartily in anticipation of the night’s
festivities, and the man at the next table, who had earlier offered to share his salsa, invited us to a disco. We declined, asking him whether a crowd would gather in the plaza. He seemed to say yes.

  We found a hotel room and set off through the narrow, exhaust-choked streets in search of a liquoreria. The city was abuzz, vendors selling peanuts and tamales. Street lamps cast cones of light through the haze of dust. We finally found a little shop, its iron grille almost shut, which sold only two brands of beer and two brands of tequila. We hurried back to our room through the gathering bustle to nap and have a quiet post-prandial, and smoked in the elevator, just because it was permitted.

  As midnight approached, we ran, hand in hand, toward the plaza. The narrow streets were quiet and dark. A car would pass and throw our shadows onto the sidewalk and the pocked walls with their peeling posters. We laughed and the tequila burned.

  But the square was empty. All the shops were closed. Little white lights outlined the contours of windows and arches. The cathedral leaned into the sky. We sat on benches in the little park and waited. The sound of drunken singing came from a distant window. We felt, once again, that we had discovered this remarkable place, that our intrepidity and boldness had brought us here.

  There is a mode of happiness that is the promise of happiness. Contentment in the moment is something that can be foreclosed upon by the thought of the future: the drinker contemplating his hangover. But to be happy because you expect to be happy, that horizons await—this happiness is not so easily extinguished.

  When the bell rang out, Ange and I stood there embracing. For a long time. The world spun while I weighed like pebbles in my mouth the question that had at that moment occurred to me to ask.

  The idea of proposing marriage had arrived uninvited and I had no words rehearsed. I stammered and shuffled my feet. Finally, exasperated, she told me to spit it out.