Heroine

  My surrealist coin, sign of the conflict between the power of the unconscious and our objective condition of existence, falls on the McGill gates. Ugh, English Montréal. Reluctantly, I go over. The WASPies have just stepped from their student coves to enjoy the spring. They sit in loose jeans and round backs under huge sweaters on the stone fence. As if their little pea heads were the only body part that worked. Above the fence their long necks swing vaguely in the air. Bending now and then over the books on their knees, for exams are near.

  Then this woman passes. I notice her because she’s flat chested like me. But in her case there’s no hiding them. Under her wine sweater she throws her shoulders back as if she owns the street. Every part of her body wears another shade of pink. From the purple flower holding her blond hair behind her ear. To the bright lipstick. To the wine-pink stockings between her tight black skirt and her lace-up high-heel boots. All of us stare in wonder as she strides by, so confidently, so beautifully. However I can’t get started on the automatic writing. Feeling as I do in a situation of parasitical complicity with those thin men eyeing her from the fence beside me. Maybe the unconscious isn’t innocent. I mean there seems to be some assumption of power in the choosing of anomalies. R would say: ‘Then you’re not going deep enough.’ I do love the cutting accuracy of certain phrases surging up in our automatic games. As if reflected from a futuristic mirror we can’t quite see, Qu’est-ce qu’un mot d’amour? Le doute discret échangé au comptoir de nouvelles idées. Us, my love. The love affair of the seventies. Don’t be silly.

  Now I don’t feel like returning to the others. Pierre will ask me to go back to his room. He’ll say something stupid like: ‘Let’s go to home and rub our minds together.’ Trying to be a correct male and practise his English at the same time. Besides if I go with him, my love, I’m leaving the field open for you to do the same thing with someone. Just when we have domestic peace again. I’ll go home. Maybe you’re making dinner.

  I climb the stairs, sensing immediately you’re not there. From behind my back, the blue-pink light of late afternoon outlining the mountain with the cross on top is reflected in the window of our door. The cool dim flat seems so empty when you’re expected. No note, either, on the messy table, piled with books by Trotsky, Marx, Lenin. Maybe you’ll phone. A cold breeze from some open window (no doubt to get the smoke out) blows on me as I wander aimlessly in the narrow hall. Trying to be reasonable. Emancipated spirits must be free to come and go as they please. Except earlier today you said to me (with your usual sweet smile): ‘I’m glad you’ve met those surrealists. It breaks your isolation as a writer. But don’t forget your political priorities: you have a text to do for our women’s intervention. After all, you really fought to lead it.’ This really annoyed me. I wrote in the black book: Leninism is really like a man. The same constant pushiness.

  So then why am I waiting? The more I try not to, the more obsessed I get. I know, I’ll go to the mountain. Out the door. Across the park. This steep path up will open up the tightness of the lungs … I’ll climb the steps to the chalet on the top.

  I believe there are 104 in all.

  Only a few more now. Through some trees –

  Damn, is that R and Mary standing over there? I forgot they were going out to hang up surrealist posters. LA BEAUTÉ SERA CONVULSIVE OU NE SERA PAS. Who’s that Black guy R’s talking to? Trying to persuade, I bet, that there are similarities between the Québécoise and Black revolutions.

  ‘Yeah?’ says the Black guy. ‘I doubt it. Listen to this. A brother was shot in the thigh by a white guy during a card game last month. He crawled bleeding to the road. They just left him there until he died. They even drove by. That never happened to a French guy.’

  ‘Maybe,’ says R. ‘Whereabouts down south was that?’

  ‘Near Halifax.’

  ‘Oh,’ says R. ‘You’re from there?’

  ‘I was talking about the brother,’ says the tourist.

  ‘Well,’ says R, getting ready to give him one of Mary’s posters. (A good revolutionary never gives up.) ‘If you don’t trust white revolutionaries, what about we artists?’

  The Black tourist says: ‘You tell me: how would you treat me in a novel? Among other things, I bet at every mention you’d state my colour.’

  I step back in the trees, unable to bear another contradiction. With the gash in my stomach, my love, where you’re pulling away, I start running. My feet in the sand, my head in the leaves. No, you’re not pulling back. It’s hysterical to over-dramatize everything like that. The surrealists say hysteria was the greatest poetic discovery of the nineteenth century. But they were referring to the hallucinations when a person’s really sick.

  I feel better, jogging purges anxiety. Helps one to focus on the exterior. This is a boot city. The boots I pass on the road are all colours. Red, brown, turquoise, green. Happiness is pleasure in the little things. Where are you, my love? No, think about writing. If I were to start the novel what would be the opening? Quick, free associate. A shrimp in the labia.

  Where did THAT come from?

  Tomorrow I’ll really start gathering material for it. Spectacles like the one we saw that shiny Sunday when you and I were walking near the chalet. That little girl passing in the stroller. And suddenly she shouts at her father: ‘Daddy, daddy, there’s my friend.’ The father says: ‘Yes, dear,’ and keeps walking. The little girl is standing up in the stroller, trying to grab her friend’s hand (he’s held by his mother on a leash). Too late. She falls back in incredible frustration. And others that I see through windows. The pompous fat orthodox bishop dangling his beads in front of the laundromat run by born-agains. The sounds from the park that grey June day when I came home sick from an F-group meeting. Bessie Smith singing of painful love. As if the thirties. But the sound got drowned out by ‘O Canada.’ Looking out the window I saw the orchestra had moustaches and their tails were draped over the backs of chairs. Must have been some sort of celebration.

  Great. You’re home now. You and some comrades, who say: ‘We’ll have to take an Olympic Vacation. The whole group. Otherwise, rumour has it, we’ll be arrested.’

  On that trip to Vancouver we borrow somebody’s old Saab and head over the gulf to the west coast of Vancouver Island. But just as we’re putting up our tiny tent (with a separate one for the little Chilean kid who’s with us) a forest ranger appears and says:

  ‘There’s bears in the camp.’

  ‘Well, get them out,’ I say tensely, looking up from chopping carrots at the picnic table. I can’t handle it, tired as I am. Because of what you told me just as we were boarding the westbound train. If it’s who I think, she’s so beautiful. That shrink at McGill claims you do it for me. As I’m the type who gets bored in relationships.

  Adopting a moralistic tone, the ranger answers: ‘Ma’am, they have as much a right to be here as you do. In fact more. It was their territory before it was ours.’

  Above our heads in the giant cedars the jays scold. I notice they’re bigger and more aggressive than in the east. Below the cliff in the bright blue sea, too cold to go into, the seals play. I want so much to be alone with you. Therefore, I hate to say it, but we let the little Chilean kid sleep in the small tent despite the danger. Sepia, I can’t believe we took a chance like that. In the morning I must be feeling guilty. For as I start to fry bacon over the fire, I think I see something black and hairy behind the bushes. ‘Don’t move,’ I say to you and the kid, over my shoulder. ‘There’s a bear cub there. Which means the mother can’t be far away.’ The words are no sooner out of my mouth than a little black dog emerges. You two are laughing so hard you nearly fall down. I cross the road to the can. Feeling useless. Closing the toilet door, I notice as I sit down that the graffiti says: CUNNILINGUS. THE BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS.

  III

  ENDING

  Fluffy White Clouds Floating Forward and Back in a Blue Sky

  On the mountaintop a sinking sunray hits a tile floor. Shining through t
he public chalet’s glass doors. The coffee machine guard has gone home. But there is a troubled rumour in the room. Suddenly the place fills up with freaks. Hippies left over from the sixties. And some striking hospital workers. Everybody’s stoned. The sky is gathering like a stormy sea. On the radio, a voice says: ‘Bonsoir, les amis. Nous voilà à presque dix ans de la Crise d’octobre. Notons, par ailleurs, l’approche d’une tempête de neige vers 20 heures.’

  The tourist awakes with a start. From the chalet loudspeaker comes an interminable waltz. Across the enormous room, the Canadian Olympic champion rowing team draped in maple leaves and posing for a picture. ‘Let them eat cake,’ shouts a voice in the tourist’s head, still partly from his dream. Now the presidential candidate is on the radio: ‘My fellow Americans. The good news is we’ve bombed the Russians. (This turns out to be a joke – he didn’t know the microphone was on.) And now we’ll have peace, for our nuclear weapons have wiped the place out.’ To erase the horror, the tourist clutches at his throat. Trying to think of something nice.

  Puttin’ on the ritz.

  He steps out into the sparse snowflakes again, a funny smile on his face.

  Yes, tomorrow’s winter. I love the solitude of white. Tonight the storm will do it, do it. Sometimes rigidity of the body precedes catharsis. That’s okay. Flying high. Then appears that country road going by the gravestones and Her cameo in the sky. Just focus on something else. That passage from Colette. Au haut du ciel, le soleil buvait la rosée, putréfiait le champignon nouveau-né, criblait de guêpes la vigne trop vieille et ses raisins chétifs, et Vinca avec Lisette rejetaient, du même mouvement, le léger Spencer de tricot …

  Shh, for a novel I have to be more rational. The heroine could be from Brecht. Emphasizing the external the better to distance from inner chaos. What was it that Dr. Schweitzer said on the radio? Women often lack the moral courage to synthesize what they know. Due to fragmentation of consciousness resulting from current upheaval of their roles. What does he mean? Maudit chauvin. We’re not scared. Just exhausted from wanting to change the world and have love, too. Anyway, a heroine can be sad, distressed, it just has to be in a social context. That way she doesn’t feel sorrier for herself than for the others. We’re all smarting from retreat. Two steps forward, one step back. The trick is to keep looking toward the future, thus cancelling out nostalgia. Standing there among the dark oak booths in the Cracow Café was just a moment in passing time. (For a thing begun has already started to end.) The hookers were dancing, the politicos talking politics in their lumberjack shirts. Very seventies.

  The place also had a slot machine, reminiscent of the fifties. They used to have one in the restaurant back in Lively. You put your quarter in and a steel hand came down to grab a present: rhinestone rings, water pistols, pink-rimmed glasses. Faute de quoi faire I stood in line with the other well-combed ducks in leather jackets waiting for my turn. Suddenly, my love, you were standing behind me. ‘Cigarette?’ you asked. ‘Yes,’ I answered, thinking: ‘to get through the walls of prayer.’ I always thought that with the first smoke in the morning. It was my declaration of revolt. Because, Sepia, Her sickness led to Her conversion. So when She found tobacco traces in Her little beaded evening bag I’d borrowed, She stood in the night garden adding tobacco to the list of dancing, cards, fornication, and other pleasures Christians aren’t allowed. I know it’s silly, but that first smoke always gave a kick smack in the guilt-lined stomach. After that, each transgression seemed easier.

  We took to meeting at the Cracow daily. My love, you said you liked my toughness. It’s too bad, then, that the paranoia poked through the surface. Starting the night they called me to the office at the wire service. And the boss said: ‘I’ve been told you have subversive links.’ I was astounded because as yet I hadn’t even joined the group. After my shift, rushing in the grey dawn to the Cracow for one more cup of coffee and some sausage before I slept, I kept thinking maybe I should never see any of you again. Then what to my surprise, my love, but to find you weren’t even there. Because your group had to keep moving to avoid cops at counters listening in on conversations. And word had come, without my knowing, to change to Figaro’s.

  The new café has a NO EXIT sign on the brick wall. (Some kind of existential joke.) I guess the fear of losing what I’d found struck pretty deeply. Because later, my love, when the comrades showed me a group photo round the jukebox taken on that very morning, I immediately noticed your absence. ‘Where’s Jon?’ I asked, my voice rising as I looked harder at the picture. You had told me you were there. The comrades stared with hostile eyes. Probably thinking: ‘Uptight anglaise. No resistance.’ Janis was singing that song about freedom equalling nothing left to lose. Turned up loud so people at other tables couldn’t hear Comrade X advising new recruits. He was talking of the need to be professional, to have total commitment to the group. Revolutionaries, in view of the effort required for the collective project, had to share everything. This included, uh, personal things (his pockmarked cheek twitched). He added: ‘Never leave evidence for cops of appartenance to the group. Because they’ll charge you with sedition.’

  Naturally, there were certain zones libres (where a person could really be himself). Dans ces lieux, on vivait déjà les lendemains qui chantent. One was that funny high-up apartment of the surrealists, standing on the knoll overlooking St-Denis. Spring of ’79, I’m there dancing in Comrade N’s arms (while you, my love, sleep nonplussed in an upstairs room). I loved the image. That redheaded woman getting skinnier and skinnier from cigarettes and coffee at all those meetings. But also more intense, more knowledgeable, more daring. N and I move across the floor, ever closer, under a huge eye painted by Salvador Dalí. Past those bedrooms our new surrealist friends call Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Thanks to them, our political actions are becoming pure theatre. This excites me. Soon we’re going to occupy the Chilean consulate. N and I neatly sidestep a red banner on which they’re painting: PINOCHET = DICTATURE = TORTURE. So huge that every letter has to dry and get rolled up before they start the next one. The idea is to shock by unfurling banners the passing bourgeois people can’t avoid.

  ’Tis a beautiful May day. Across from the cement-block consulate is a hill on which rises the phallic tower of l’Université de Montréal. On appelle ça le pénis d’Ernest Cormier. He was the architect. The mayor wants to match it with one of his own on the mountain or somewhere. My role is peripheral but essential: that of a bourgeois woman. Pretending to be chatting, chatting in a strategic telephone booth near the consulate. (The costume is a tailored skirt, nipped-in waist, lipstick, kid gloves. Very French.) That way the phone will be free to warn the occupying comrades when the cops arrive. Now the comrades are unfurling the giant banners listing tortures committed by Pinochet: DOIGTS COUPÉS À UN GUITARISTE DE GAUCHE. This banner bleeds down against the wall. Another, marked DES CENTAINES D’ENFANTS DISPARUS slowly folds and unfolds in the breeze. FEMMES ENCEINTES VIOLÉES EN PRISON reaches over and catches on the branch of a tree.

  Oh, this is kind of fun. Outside my booth the air is perfumed with budding maple. A cute couple from the university strolls by. I smile at young love. And thank God I’m not up there with the others. I hate closed spaces, locked rooms, elevators. If I’d been in there and got arrested, the dark tight space of a paddy wagon would make me panic. That happened to a comrade who got picked up pretending to prostitute herself in support of the hookers. In the Black Maria she felt terrible, scared as she was her parents would get the wrong idea. She cried and cried. Finally an older woman arrested at the same time said: ‘Don’t worry, honey, you can get used to anything after a while.’

  Still, I wondered why Comrade N gave me the outside job the way he did. His voice sounded ironic when he said: ‘In your telephone booth you’ll be safe.’ As if the English weren’t as tough. We were in the revolutionary headquarters waiting for the others to come back from postering for the next week’s action. The room was chilly and kind of dreary, due to the black cop-proof cu
rtains. N handed me a Gauloise, his nose twitching. The sexual tension was phenomenal. I loved the scent of his long brown hair, the tan skin which in certain lights made his eyes look turquoise. On the radio, coincidentally, they were playing ‘Dancing with Mr. D.’ He took my hand and started moving, left foot over right. I followed, breathing in his earthy odour. My love, for both of us I was about to smash monogamy. What better way to end my jealousy? Just as my head and N’s moved close enough to kiss, the door opened. A group of comrades came in.

  Sepia, the guilty part was that even though I did my part of the consulate job right, it didn’t help. The cop cars came so fast the comrades didn’t have time to organize their forces. From my little knoll I watched them getting dragged from consulate to paddy wagon. Later, Denise, a bank manager’s daughter from Mont Laurier, said she was held in a steel elevator between floors at Parthenais prison. And felt up by three big cops (she has beautiful full breasts) to make her talk. Then she looked at me kind of suspiciously.

  Well, I wasn’t the only one who deep inside felt cowardly. A member of the central committee didn’t even show. He said it was because he’d had to save his rare collection of poissons rouges. For the tank broke as he was moving from a burnt-out flat on St-André, torched by the landlord for the insurance. Making him, he pointed out, another victim of the greedy capitalist gentrification rampant in the city. His friend Comrade X said it was unprofessional to think everyone must put themselves at risk. A serious organization never permits more than minor amputation in order to remain vigorous.

  For a while after, N and I hardly spoke, due to ending up in different F-group factions on account of organizational tensions arising from the occupation. But despite the problems, the operation was deemed successful. It got good press. There was a picture of our banners in the newspaper.