by André Alexis
After dinner, Tancred walked the half-mile to the harbour, then along the seafront, looking out toward Cuba and South America. It was New Year’s Eve and warm, and the streets and bars were filled with revellers waiting to ring the new year in.
Tancred, staring at the ocean, was thinking about how to change his life.
To do that, he’d have to accept who he had been.
And what did he hope for? That he might be virtuous without the blindness of virtue, that he might discover the good but without the arrogance of those who assumed it was theirs to possess.
The first step, at least, was clear. He needed help. He would write to Daniel and tell him all that had happened: from meeting Willow at the Green Dolphin to finding millions in a Crédit Suisse in Montreux, from leaving the carbonado for Colby to knocking Freud down the steps at King and Atlantic. He would leave no important thing out. He would abandon discretion.
Then he would take the letters and bank cards he’d found to Simone Azarian-Grau. She should know what her father had done and why. They all should. He would not keep their money, though it was clear they did not need it. It was not up to him to decide how others should be charitable. And if Alton objected to his keeping Willow’s share? He would stand up to him. It was not Alton’s right to decide how he should be faithful to Willow.
In the midst of these resolutions, Tancred thought of Ollie. What is it Daniel had said about him? That it was difficult to imagine Ollie being a father because it was difficult to imagine a man choosing, moment after moment, to be a father, to be virtuous. But Ollie had learned to make a habit of the things he’d chosen to be. He would follow Ollie’s example and choose a life away from exhilaration and adrenalin, until the new life became a habit.
And where was home in all this?
He had once wondered if home were people or a place. It was, of course, both and neither. Each person who lived in Toronto held a facet of the city. Naturally, he did as well and, to see himself clearly, to begin the new life, he would have to be in that place that held the old one, that held those who knew him.
Others, it seemed, could leave home to become different.
Not him. He needed the strength he drew from home in order to change. More than that, it now seemed to him that good and evil changed according to the place from which one judged them.
It was a cloudy night, but every now and then the moon came out. He could hear revellers singing in the distance. Not ‘Auld Lang Syne’ or anything like it but, rather, something recent that Tancred recognized but did not know.
He was twenty-eight years old, homesick but hopeful. For a moment, with moonlight trembling on the black ocean, he was reminded of Toronto as it is when one looks back from the night ferry to Ward’s Island. For a moment, he did not miss home because it flared up within him.
It was as quickly gone, however, and as he walked back to the house he’d rented on Petronia Street, he felt nothing that could be put into words.
Ocala, Florida, 2016
Quincunx 4
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
The Hidden Keys was inspired by a reading of Captain George North’s Treasure Island. The text incorporates snippets of – or allusions to – the following books:
La chanson de Roland, Anonymous (Somewhere, circa 1115)
The Marble Flea, Mikhail Bulgakov (Moscow, 1975)
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs (Paris, 1959)
Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens (London, 1865)
Le Platane, un discours sur les arbres, Denis Diderot (Paris, 1757)
The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot (New York, 1922)
Montreux, an appreciation, E. M. Forster (Lausanne, 1957)
Rouge 23, an unproduced screenplay, W. Alex Irwin (Toronto, 2012)
Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant (Riga, 1781)
The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, Harry Mathews (New York, 1975)
Treasure Island, George North (London, 1883)
Le Naufrage du Stade Odradek, trans. Georges Perec (Paris, 1981)
Impregnable Rooms: The Architecture of David Rokeby (Toronto, 2007)
Institutions and Power, Elaine Stasiulis (Toronto, 2014)
From Ritual to Romance, Jessie L. Weston (Cambridge, 1920)
The couple described in the final chapter of The Hidden Keys are Harry Mathews and Marie Chaix. Harry, Marie and the restaurant they frequent exist, but all three have been altered to suit the needs of the author.
The city of Toronto, as depicted in The Hidden Keys, is not entirely true to life.
The city of Etobicoke, as depicted in the novel, is not true at all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His previous books include Asylum, Beauty and Sadness, Ingrid and the Wolf and Pastoral, which was also nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His most recent novel is Fifteen Dogs, which won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Typeset in Albertan and Gotham.
Albertan was designed by the late Jim Rimmer of New Westminster, B.C., in 1982. He drew and cut the type in metal at the 16pt size in roman only; it was intended for use only at his Pie Tree Press. He drew the italic in 1985, designing it with a narrow fit and a very slight incline, and created a digital version. The family was completed in 2005, when Rimmer redrew the bold weight and called it Albertan Black. The letterforms of this type family have an old-style character, with Rimmer’s own calligraphic hand in evidence, especially in the italic.
Printed on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests and printed with vegetable-based ink.
Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox
Cover design by Ingrid Paulson
Cover image is Willows and Bridge. Japan, Momoyama period (1573–1615), early 17th century. Pair of six-panel folding screens; ink, colour, copper, gold and gold leaf on paper. Image (each): 61 5/16 in. ×11 ft. 6 9/16 in. (171.8 x 352 cm). Mary Griggs Burke Collection, Gift of the Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, 2015 (2015.300.105.1, .2). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.
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