Montreal Stories

by Mavis Gallant

  Not long ago, I sold the house where Carlotta came to look for me. The wreckers may have saved some of the tiles from the terrace floor, with their worn pattern of olive leaves. It used to be reached by a downhill flight of steps from a noisy highway. The steps continued almost all the way to the sea and came to a stop at a hedge of scarred cactus, bounding a narrow and stony public beach. Prewar cottages and villas descended the slope, with the stairs as common thoroughfare. My terrace overlooked a particularly ugly and derelict cottage; for years I had tried to buy it from its greedy absentee owner, so that I might have it razed and a garden put there instead. Unfortunately, while I was lingering in the Tuamotu Archipelago, trying to give Sandra enough rope, my Belgian tenant had met the asking price, and now maintained the wreck as a picturesque eyesore. That summer, it was occupied by his niece, Irma Baes, an amateur artist of great stamina and enthusiasm.

  There was a gate at the top of the steps, kept locked. The postman no longer included us in his rounds. This, and the shape and variety of aerials on every rooftop, and the installation of Irma Baes, were the most remarkable changes on my side of the gate. Beyond it nearly everything had altered.

  “I just jiggled the lock,” said Carlotta, when I asked how she’d got inside. There was a taxi up on the road, with an eight-kilometer fare on its meter, which was still ticking over. She had no money, she said—no cash, that is; just a lot of traveler’s checks. She talked in the accents of modern Montreal—accents that render the speaker unplaceable except within vast regional boundaries. One would have guessed she was not from Mississippi or California, not much else. Lily had had the old Quebec-Irish inflection.

  I settled the cab, locked the iron gate, and fastened the chain bolt; it could be removed by reaching through iron bars, but no matter. Carlotta meantime had carried the telephone outside and lay prone on the warm terrace, talking to Lily, or perhaps to some transatlantic drifter she had picked up and turned into an intimate friend. I wondered if she knew enough French to deal with a local operator and to reverse charges. I am sure I was not niggardly, but I would be retiring before long on a tight pension; my personal capital, scrupulously amassed, judiciously invested, might need a long stretch. In my family, old people seemed to hang on forever, exacting and hale. My parents lasted nearly a century, offering to the brink of speechlessness their unsolicited advice.

  Carlotta said, “Kiss, kiss,” and “Bye,” and “O.K., I’ll tell him that.” She smiled up at me and said, “It’s all right for me to stay here, Steve. I mean, if it’s all right with you. Just two days. I’m going to Paris, but my mother’s friends can’t take me right away. Their place is full up.”

  Only a few women still called me Steve. She was using inherited form. When I was much younger, around the time when Lily ran away with Mr. Chadwick’s gardener, I changed my signature from “Steven B. Burnet” to “S. Blake Burnet” and became, I thought, a different person. Old school friends went on saying “Burney,” but new acquaintances took it for granted my name must be Blake. I was just twenty-five, the age when new acquaintances gradually begin to fill one’s life.

  I was not accustomed to addressing recumbent adolescents. I wished Carlotta would stand or at least sit up. I said the first thing that came into my head: “Do you mean to say that your family let you come to France without making any arrangements for you?” I kept back a question just as insistent: how it was that Lily knew I still had this house. My aunt and her parents had once been settled in the same town, Châtelroux, just south of Montreal, but several significant streets apart. The Quales were rooted in Catholic, English-speaking, bungalow territory. Most Catholics were French Canadian. The Quales and their kind seemed wedged like a piece from the wrong puzzle between English Protestants and French Catholics, matching neither in coloration or design. (The Quales were probably capable of making great sacrifices, my aunt had once said. They had eked out a year of boarding school for their unaccountable daughter.)

  “No,” said Carlotta, trailing scorn for elderly hebetude. She had just spent a week with a couple in Monaco, people her stepfather knew. The lady was nice, but the man had tried.

  “Tried what?”

  “Just tried. I had to lock my bedroom door.” She raised an arm, as though signaling, and imitated turning a key.

  “Where do these people live?”

  “I just told you. In Monaco. They’ve got a house, and a sort of dried-up garden. There was no water in the shower half the time.”

  “Where was his wife while you were locking your door?”

  “In the Princess Grace Hospital,” she said, without a dot of hesitation. “She got a bleeding ulcer from some stuff she drank.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Some sort of cleaning fluid.”

  “I must speak to your mother,” I said. “Where is she? In Montreal?”

  Carlotta got to her feet. I was confronted by myself in her opaque dark glasses. “Not in summer. In summer they’re mostly in Vermont. Anyway, I’ve just talked to her.”

  “I’ve only your word for it.”

  A harsh thing to say to someone young, but she answered equably, “When I called them from Monaco, they said if I couldn’t find you I was to fly home. So I said I’d found you. Anyway, my stepfather’s going to call you. You never gave me a chance to say. He’s waiting for midnight. He never calls before midnight, except on business.”

  “How did you get away from the house? Didn’t that man try to stop you?”

  “I stayed in my room till he went to the bank. Then the cleaning lady came. She helped me get a taxi.”

  “Who told you he’d gone to the bank?”

  “That’s where he works.”

  “Get me the number in Vermont,” I said.

  “They’ll only tell you what I’ve already told you,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  Her stepfather, Benjamin Harrower, answered. He had an agreeable voice, English sliding into American; a clergyman’s voice. I had no idea what Harrower did. Someone had told my aunt he was an immigrant entrepreneur who ran a tourist bureau. “It’s a terrible imposition,” he said. “We’re very grateful to you. You’ve heard the story. Carlotta sounded pretty upset.”

  “I’m glad she had my address.”

  “Well, no, she didn’t. Lily told her to find out if your number was listed, and to let us know. She told Carlotta not to call you, to let us handle it from here.”

  “She didn’t call. She just drove straight over in a taxi. Eight kilometers.”

  “She’s never been away, not without Lily and me. She thinks adults are always where they’re supposed to be.”

  “How long is she going to be homeless?”

  “Just three days.” One more than Carlotta had said. “If it’s a nuisance, would you just put her on a return flight? We don’t want her to be on her own. She’s still awfully young, though she doesn’t believe it.”

  “We don’t need to send her back. Not for the sake of three days. I’m leaving myself at the end of the week.”

  “She’s a good kid.” Harrower seemed to be waiting for me to confirm the opinion. “She should have called collect. I suppose it’s too late to do anything about it now.”

  I tried to entertain Carlotta, although her youth bored me, and her belief that she was here to learn and that I could teach made me sententious and prosy. On her second day, we went to a Fellini festival in Nice, saw two movies, had lunch in a courtyard. Carlotta had promised her mother not to eat meat or fish in France. While I searched the menu, she glanced past me, over my shoulder.

  Presently she said, “Steve, there’s a really sick bird in a cage on the kitchen windowsill. It doesn’t like the hot sun. I’ll bet they haven’t changed its water. The kitchen doesn’t look too clean, either. Maybe somebody ought to report the restaurant.” Then, “Look at the two gays over there, eating fish soup. My stepfather says they mean the end of civilization as we know it. He says they caused the fall of Rome. The gays.”


  Her maternal grandfather, Ernie Quale, quit the Montreal police force to become a private detective, making a special pursuit of divorce cases. He used to set up false evidence of adultery or stalk real lovers until he caught them in bed. Once he tried to blackmail a Quebec politician, and got the lobes of his ears slit. That was before Carlotta’s time; almost before mine.

  In the evening, I took her along to a dinner party. Carlotta excepted, the youngest person at the table was sixty-one. The oldest ninety-four. A few of them had known Lily. There was Victor de Stentor, who had kept his hair and teeth and eyesight but lost his eyebrows; Watt Chadwick, a novelist Carlotta had not heard of but whose work she now gallantly proposed to read in its entirety; a couple of antique dealers, husband and wife, who traded in the furniture heirs try to sell off in a hurry. Across from Carlotta sat a retired American naval officer who had lost an arm and had to have his meat cut. Americans seldom washed up along this fragment of coast. His neighbors referred to him as “the Admiral,” and had never bothered to decide if he was Bessel, Biesel, or Beisel, while the antique dealers called him Ivor instead of Ira. Next to him, attentive to his requirements, was the former wife of a French minister of state. More as chatter than conversation, she announced to the table that her ex-husband was threatening to bring legal action against her for continuing to use his name.

  Carlotta, whose French was better than fair, said she should never have given up her own name. Taking another name was like signing a brief for slavery. Carlotta had been in France nine days now—long enough to know the whole malefemale business was due for an overhauling.

  Ira Biesel looked at me and said, “Lily’s daughter?,” as if he could hardly believe it.

  “Lily is my mother,” said Carlotta, “but Steve isn’t my father. At least, I don’t think so.” She seemed so startled, hurt almost, when we laughed that I wondered what nonsense was taking its slow course through the child’s head. To Victor de Stentor, sitting beside her, she said, “I’m a committed vegetarian,” and, holding a slice of roast beef between knife and fork, deftly removed it to his plate. I wanted to ask why she had helped herself to something she had no intention of eating, but remembered with some thankfulness that she was not mine, and that she was probably too old to be checked in public.

  Later, as we left the party and climbed a number of steps to my house, she said, “I enjoyed that. I really did. You can learn a lot from older people. In Monaco, we just watched TV.”

  We brought books to breakfast, as if we had been living together for a long time.

  “Why do you call this a terrace?” Carlotta said.

  “What would you call it?”

  “More like a deck, but not exactly. I like to get things right.”

  Irma Baes, already at grips with creation, waved from her garden. In only five weeks, progressing well beyond the symbolic hurdle of my “Chapter 1,” she had completed the freestanding structures Quaternion I, II, and III, and was pasting sequins one by one on the naked framework of IV. Irma belonged to the subversive, incompetent forces whose mission it is to make art useless. Her work, which I believe she unloaded on loyal friends, could not be got inside any normal dwelling except by dint of pulling down a wall and part of the roof. Cultural authorities the world over were prepared to encourage her by means of grants; indulgent relations were disposed to gamble on her future. I suppose it was a sign that I had lived a long time and seen a great deal that everything meant to reflect the era seemed out of date. Try to tell them it’s already been done, I thought. (I had told her; her eyes filled with tears.) I had reached the step of the staircase from which one cannot estimate age; I could only look down and think, Young. I’d have put Irma at thirty-odd. When her present grant, or her uncle’s patience, ran out, and she had to go back to the hardboiled and standpat world of filling out new application forms (“Age? Shows? Group? Single? Sponsors?”), something would need to be done with her summer’s work. There was no possible way the structures could be carried up to the road without smashing some of my windows. No van, no hired truck, no container could hold the complete Quaternion. Perhaps it could be conveyed the other way, beyond the cactus hedge, and burned on the beach.

  “I like her hair,” said Carlotta, waving back. “That’s its natural color. I asked her. It’s a natural streak effect.” Carlotta dropped her voice. “You know? She had this racing-car driver who loved her? He went into a canal in Belgium and drowned. He could drive, but he couldn’t swim.”

  “I’ve heard the story.”

  “So now she just has her art.”

  “Loved her” was surely fictitious, like her bogus facade of art. I thought she invented both to explain her solitude. Her tragedy, if she had one, was her own unwieldy enthusiasm. She was like a puppy bounding against one’s legs. One wanted to throw a stick far out in the water; anything to keep her away. I did not say so; in any case, Carlotta had gone back to her book.

  “There was a French queen who threw her lovers out of a tower,” she said presently. “The tower’s been wrecked, so I won’t be able to see it when I go to Paris.”

  Any likeness of purpose between Queen Jeanne and Lily must have escaped her, and I certainly did not try to sow one in her mind. From hints and attitudes, I had already discovered that she looked upon her mother as a classic case of pre-liberation womanhood, stumbling from man to man in search of the love and support no man can give, except when it suits him. In a way, it was true. In another, a man repeatedly flung out of a tower may lie for a long time hors de combat, of no help to anyone.

  Carlotta did not expect conversation, except in the form of informative remarks or answers to questions. It made her a comfortable companion. She said, “What’s your book about?”

  “It’s a guide to local landmarks.” I proposed to drive that morning to a Saracen fortress, restored a great number of times and now refurbished more or less as it may have looked in the seventeenth century. I asked Carlotta if she’d like that.

  “Are there people living there?”

  “I don’t think so. Not now.”

  “Could we take Irma? She never goes anywhere.”

  “Miss Baes has her art.”

  She carried our breakfast dishes to the kitchen, rinsed them, helped me fasten the shutters—we were going to be out for much of the day—and found a hiding place for the telephone so ingenious that, later, she could not remember where it was. (Wrapped in a pajama top, under a pillow.)

  We drove inland, on winding mountain roads. She may have felt homesick, for she began to talk about her mother and stepfather—what they liked and approved of, how they lived, where they went for holidays. I did not respond, not directly; there was no question of my discussing Lily with her child. However, by the time we reached the castle, some two hours later, I decided I could not go on behaving as though I had scarcely known her at all.

  “The first time I ever came up here was with your mother,” I said. “We hadn’t been married long. Five weeks, I think.”

  There was a parking lot for tourists, now. We left my rented Peugeot and started up an unpaved avenue, between lines of yellowing shade trees, chestnut and oak.

  “She never mentioned any castles,” said Carlotta. “She just remembers a kind of shack, and a beach with a lot of seaweed.”

  “The shack, as you call it, is my present house. The terrace used to be the kitchen floor.”

  “Did you buy it because it reminded you of somebody? I mean, you wanted …” She paused. “Like, if you kept the house, this person might come back to it?”

  “I bought it because it was unbelievably cheap. The only deal I’ve ever made in my life.”

  She looked up, first at me, then at the faded leaves. “What’s wrong with the trees? It can’t be pollution. We’re practically on top of a mountain.”

  “The European tree disease—virus and mystery.” Actually, it was as much as anyone knew.

  “Who do they belong to?”

  “The trees? I’ve never th
ought about it. The state, I suppose.”

  “Which state?”

  “France. You’re still in France.”

  “I know that. Only France isn’t a state. It’s a country. Vermont is a state. Florida’s a state. They ought to be fined for not looking after their trees. The French, I mean.”

  The castle, which we could now see clearly, had died long before, gutted by neglect. Then, restored, its spirit had been gutted, this time by the presence of tourists. Every stone in the tower and battlements had been quarried early in this century, when an American couple had bestowed imagination and money on a ruin. I wondered if I had a duty to inform Carlotta, for whom the whole of past time could be contained in a doll house, immeasurable periods crammed under a small roof. “It hasn’t the charm of the lovely places along the Loire,” I began, as though Carlotta might care; as if she knew where the Loire was. I was leading round to the tricky question of fakery; tricky because Carlotta was young. I wondered if, in dealing with the young, illusion wasn’t safer ground. “Here in the South, castles were really fortresses. When there was no more need for a fortress, it was allowed to crumble. Villagers hauled the stones away and stabled their goats in whatever remained.”

  She took off her sunglasses, perhaps to make sure I was telling the truth. I had treated her to a two-hour drive over terrible roads, with the Mediterranean revealed in greens and grays rather than shades of sapphire as we climbed. She could have been at the beach, learning from Irma. She said, “Who built this one?”

  I gave up on restorations and said, “The Saracens.”

  “They should have paved their driveway. You could twist an ankle.”

  “Your mother liked the view.” What else? “We came up by bus, I recall. We were too broke to rent a car.” I said this, I hope, not sentimentally. By no means did I ever wish to visit anything with Lily again.