Appropriate Place (10 page)

And now here he has close at hand, in writing that reminds him of his
mother — whose letters he'd read and loved across all the distances from which she
had written him over a period of more than twenty years — the journal found in the
bag of a dead woman who may be, who is without a doubt, the woman in red from the
American salon. According to the Ethiopian soldiers' report, the accident had
occurred two days earlier, during the terrible descent from Dejem, the one that
plunges towards the shoddy bridge over the blue Nile. She'd been on her way home
then, a day at most from the capital. But it was only yesterday that the sky had
finally cleared.

He suppresses a temptation to go to Dejem, has a memory of green tea,
its taste masked by the smell of turpentine that permeated the inn and its overly
high walls, erected against unlikely inquisitors. Last year he'd spent a night in
that village, a stopping place, which was perched as a belvedere above the canyon,
with its long houses, pride of the rich, built to last, yet more humid than the huts
made of cow dung that were scattered over the far-away plateaus. It had been a true
African night, solitary, filled with obsessive fears and ghosts that refuse to
disperse before dawn, that enter blindly the mauve of regret, pummelling what have
to be called sins, irreparable debris of a life spent drinking, eating, smoking,
caressing, talking — while waiting to accomplish great things. Some of those
magnificent things of which one could see the yellowing underside, in the distance
near Sudan, the last ray of light in a dusk that would not retreat.

What would be the point? He knows what she saw when she was dying and
that it bears no resemblance to Dejem's diffident luxuriance. The accident must have
happened in the afternoon, drivers usually stop before nightfall. But when it rains,
even in broad daylight the descent is a night. And it brings to bear on travellers
the most powerful of seductions — the appeal of melancholy. Spread out like huge
recumbent images, the plains at the summit lose their few areolas in the fine shades
of grey of the sky, the breath of clouds brushes against the skins of animals and
earth, the sharpness of the cliffs becomes a sooty fleece that it would be good to
sink into. Vertigo, the body's rudimentary caution, vanishes. What's a little silt
on the road? The foam of this sea of sky, of which one must touch the bottom. In
that way the sun, when it becomes visible again during the descent from Dejem,
regularly finds shattered men to burn who in reality are drowned.

Today, the tribute is a woman, a more uncommon event in these
escarpments transformed into a cemetery of all the carcasses, carts, Jeeps, buses,
and tractor-trailers, whose young drivers are sometimes spared, they fling
themselves onto the road as soon as they lose control of the wheel and let their
load go hurtling down, plunging kilometres further along and catching fire. Their
iron sun crackles in silence, from the belvedere, villagers will look down on it.
They stopped counting some time ago.

The first to arrive at the scene of the minor carnage of a Jeep with
driver and passenger will have been the children of course, as agile on the mountain
peaks as their goats. Two boys and a girl, shivering at dawn in the frayed blankets
that enveloped them from knees to head, their fingers as fine as their features,
inherited from Araby, the eyes without fear because they're unacquainted with
mirrors. If they touched the dead women in red, or in blue denim because probably
she hadn't travelled in her dress, it will have been the way they approach any
foreigner, gripping her hand as a sign of friendship for these lost souls whose
concern or even sorrow they can guess at, they're confronted with so much space and
horizon. They won't have stolen anything, they take only what they are given. Even
the youngest ones, in robes the colour of their sheep, have that reserve. Afterwards
they'll have crouched down, unmoving, guardians of the blue, empty sky, till an
implacable sun rises at noon and their older brothers arrive, whose work is to
convey stones from the mountains, who are able to transport corpses too. Still
hesitant, the blue sky will then have cast a green glow over the mass of fallen
rocks, as if moss were dancing where the children pass. The Jeep will have impaled
itself halfway there, still a long way from the bed of the Nile, replete and brown,
on the season's rich alluvium. If she bled to death and sensed for a moment the
iridescence of dawn, at least Abyssinia will have spared her its lot of dirt. She
hadn't got to the bridge, which is under surveillance by soldiers in boots and
berets, sentinels in decrepit shacks, wary-eyed and rifles at the ready. They would
have stopped her in the stifling heat that makes them so malevolent deep down in the
canyon, and they would have been odious for hours. Instead of that she had rested
for a moment in the light, when her pain had departed before life itself.

The Canadian ambassador to Ethiopia, who is also responsible for Sudan
and Somalia, has a most poetic way of toning down the probable terror of one of his
nationals, who's been stolen from her family and friends by a terrible accident on
the way out of Gojam province on a day of impenetrable fog. But he won't share his
ranting with the woman's relatives and he wonders why he's so impressed by the
incident, he has known worse: two teenagers whose throats were cut in the middle of
the old Roman road outside Algiers, an archaeologist held and tortured by thieves in
an abandoned grotto in Petra, a colleague shot to death in a Cairo souk. That the
most recent Abyssinian rains should take a life is normal, they've always done so at
the end of the season, just as the ice in Quebec's rivers claims its victims every
spring.

He can't help feeling though that this woman wanted the descent from
Dejem to be a journey with no return.

He pulls himself together, accuses himself of suffering from the
“colonial blues” of which Michel Leiris, the literary ethnologist, wrote in
L'Afrique fantôme
, an account of the minor woes encountered by a 1933
mission from France during the famous crossing from Dakar to Djibouti. The
ambassador is one of the very few to have read and savoured every page. The
distinguished Leiris, who spent as much time bickering with camel drivers and
wondering about his sexual abstinence as he did noting facts about African life,
wrote outlines of novels he never completed. The finest is the one about the
gentleman, also an ethnologist, who wants to cure himself of his impotence by
sleeping with a native woman, and finally sends her away after lacerating her; then
comes an epidemic that he manages to use for his own suicide, after putting all his
papers in order and writing, in the form of allusions, some farewells and
confessions to a distant lover. The ambassador has often dreamed of taking up this
thread of Leiris's, of writing the story, bitter and nonchalant and African, of an
individual so gifted for the incomplete.

Another great achievement left in the lurch. All he has written, from
one difficult posting to the next, are confidential and succinct reports to
ministers that were summarized by other colleagues before being filed away forever.
The grey notebooks in which the woman named Marie scribbled a few pages, he's very
familiar with, a good many diplomats fill similar ones instead of drinking during
countless idle evenings, hoping one day to publish their memoirs, at their own
expense if need be. Some do it and then turn to alcohol, retirement is sad if it's
lived alongside boxes of unsold books.

Marie's squared-paper notebook, made in France by Chatelles for
schoolchildren, has heavy extra-white paper and a photo of a virile Greek mask seen
in profile. It's unlikely that she bought it for the picture, which has nothing to
do with her. But it's well made, spiral-bound, in a size convenient for travel. Does
the ambassador have the right to read it? The question is superfluous, he's alone
with Oscar and why bother mastering discretion, first requirement of his profession,
if it's not so as to become judiciously involved in other people's business? He
pours himself a Scotch, it won't hurt just this once, and settles himself in the
study, dark with bookcases, which is most often used as a
TV
room. He'll go back to the chancery a little later than usual, they
can get along without him for a while.

First he leafs through the notebook, curious about the writing, rather
untidy for a teacher, slanting sometimes left, sometimes right, with no apparent
hesitation but concerned about legibility. Of a page where all the lines are used,
you could say that it's reminiscent of a badly weeded lawn. But then if you look
carefully it's not a diary, there are no dates, no place names, the pages follow one
after the other, front and back, like the manuscript of a novel written in prison,
saving paper. Yet she has filled only a quarter of the notebook, indicating that she
was interrupted. Maybe, contrary to his assumption, she was not intending to
die.

The first paragraph gives some indication. At the top of the page,
capital letters written in blue ink by an awkward hand, read
BURTUKAN
, followed in parentheses by the word “orange,” scribbled
hastily.

Someday I'd like to revisit Burtukan, the name means orange
in Amharic. Yesterday saw me at the Gennete Maryam church, the paradise of Mary,
just outside the holy city of Lalibela. A surrounding wall carved out of the rock
like the church held a dozen children who'd come running as soon as we arrived, one
was a little girl in braids, only slightly less timid than the others. At first all
I could see was her sloppily woven empire-waisted grey dress, draped as gracefully
as taffeta, which grazed her ankles. She wore colourless leatherette ballerina
slippers, a reject from some international charity but perfect on her feet. She
said: “My name is Burtukan
[I hear Brutkan, brute, I'm stunned to hear
English].
I have a nice name. I am ten years old. What is your name?”

“Marie.”

“You have a nice name, Maryam, Mary. Do you have a pen? I am in fifth
grade.”

She spoke with the same accent as the pupils in the first class
assigned to me in Montreal when, though I hadn't really mastered it myself, I was
teaching English to bored teenage girls who nonetheless pronounced it better than
their own language. Over her shoulder she had a threadbare cloth bag, buttoned shut.
She opened it, showed off her exercise books written in Amharic, there were crosses
here and there. There was even one drawn on the back of her hand. Salomon, the
driver, says that she'll be given away in marriage in two or three years, in spite
of school, it's the practice outside the towns, and all Ethiopia is outside the
towns. “They're so young that their first pregnancy often kills them,” he noted in a
voice that now sounded urban. I asked her to write her name on the first page of my
notebook. Salomon said that it means “orange,” an ultrarare fruit for these
children, it's possible they've never tasted or even seen one. I told her in turn,
“You have a nice name,” and gave her my pen. I was the perfect tourist, stirred by
the first of what would be, as soon as the next day, a whole series of graceful
children who would materialize whenever we stopped to look at churches, trees and
rocks, knowing how to declare their names in English, to request mine and to ask for
pencils. At Addis, a famine worker told me that in Mekelle, the most skeletal of the
children ask first for pencils from foreigners who are there to distrib-ute milk.

But the image of Burtukan disturbs me for other reasons. As if with her
notebooks, her stench of school, the iron cross around her neck, her sycophantic
English, her gentle submissiveness, she were the replica of what I once was, Marie
the ready-made, already false. She is the contradiction of what I've come here to
look for.

The reflection stops there and the text begins again after
two blank pages, as if the writer had wanted to set aside some space she could come
back to during her journey, when she would have a better grasp of the nature of
little Abyssinian girls. The ambassador thinks though that she has understood
everything from the outset.

Eight

ABOVE ALL
, leave
Rimbaud out of it.

He has nothing to do with what I'm looking for here — that
mama's boy who left home to come down with his fevers in Africa so he'd seem
more interesting when it was time to meet his maker as so many others did in
that era of infections and poor hygiene. He got it — his parent's pity, his
sister's grief, and the everlasting veneration of those in our lands who saw
themselves as damned and dangerous poets, not all of whom were lucky enough to
have buggered Verlaine at the dawn of their versifying careers. Let him keep
them all for his cult, those vaccinated tourists on pilgrimage to Harar with
their filter-ground coffee, their tamed hyenas, their recreated Rimbo House. I
too have had my Disney and Eiffel Tower periods. But at least I had the excuse
of having studied literature with the nuns and of having encountered Rimbaud and
Verlaine, both text and sex foreshortened, only in the Calvet textbook.

I am searching for the earthly paradise. Paradise on earth.
The land of paradise. Once I'm there I myself will drive myself out. For I'm not
seeking it so I can settle in, chew khat and let myself be penetrated, through
the toes, by the faith of their churches you must enter in bare feet. For a
moment or less, I want to see the earthly paradise without humanity inside.
That's all.

It's an idea that came to me small and then grew, the way
ideas do when there is still so much room in the brain. I myself had a lot when
I wakened at the age of eleven, knowing very well how to read and write the
trifles it was considered essential to fill my head with, in a green clapboard
house with a huge willow behind it that didn't weep but that could have had
reasons to do so in the area around the lane separating those who were poor and
clean from the ones who were soiled. In the cellar that had a dirt floor at the
time and smelled of cat pee, just next to the furnace a rock showed through, so
big and solid that it had to be left in place when the basement was finished
because it would have been impossible to dynamite it without endangering our big
family home. I think that was where my idea came from, from the light bulb that
long hung above the rock, the eye was in the grave and was looking at Cain, I
suppose, but I certainly didn't make the connection at the time.

One thing is certain, nothing would suggest to me, not even
in the most subliminal manner, any historical episodes prior to the one
involving Cain. My parents seemed to have well and truly chosen to move as far
as possible from the pleasant valley of the St. Lawrence and the indescribable
charms of the lovely city of Quebec where they had met and chastely converged —
I don't say “loved,” how could I know that when at the time I was acquainted
with them they were no longer making babies and their bedroom in the morning
smelled more of mustiness than of coitus interruptus. For that matter, I
couldn't have told one from the other, I didn't even know that my brothers peed
from the end of a rod. Perhaps they loved one another in their way, she glad to
have found someone to help her avoid the desires she dared not have, he amazed
to be in the company of that pretty brunette, very temperate but industrious, at
his still fairly lean side.

There was no question then of exile, never did I sense in
them the slightest nostalgia for the people and things of which the bards then
beginning to crisscross Quebec were declaring the sublime neo-French beauty. Cap
Diamant, the Île d'Orléans, the giants who had slept there and who apparently
were waking now to prepare for independence — the entire past strand of a
present that was becoming glorious seemed to have left them indifferent. And
even less was it a question of a sin having led to banishment. They and their
friends along the St. Lawrence had inscribed on their brows the serenity of the
innocent. They were careful not to sound off too much against sinners, my mother
so feared carnal knowledge that even a reference to it for the purpose of
condemnation struck her as perilous. With every fibre of my being, which derives
from theirs for better and even more for worse, I'm certain that they hadn't
tripped up before marriage.

Anyway, the forbidden fruit didn't tempt me. We ate apples
very rarely, they came from Ontario by train, there were brown spots on their
skin, anyone who likes that fruit is foreign to me, they make me want to vomit.
Consequently, the metaphor of the apple eaten by the couple — invented to
symbolize the cunnilingus and fellatio Adam and Eve discovered with delight —
could have launched me on the trail of an ordeal of metaphysical dimensions, the
deprivation of orgasm because of an urge to puke springs from prohibitions all
religions have invented. But I wasn't really philosophical, at home we didn't
have even a hint of a conversation that might have forged a link between the
taste of the fruit and the meaning of life.

I have a clearer memory of garter snakes, descendants of the
Serpent. They were all over, zigzagging through the patches of wild blueberries.
They're short, garter snakes, and so small that you can't even see their
venomless sting. They are their ancestors' lovely bastards, able to wrap
themselves around an oak, they have adapted, they live in groves of aspen born
from the ruins of burned spruce forests. They are exactly the colour of the
peacocks in Mexico, but that's not well known because they are reluctant to let
themselves be seen in the sun. If I wasn't with my sister, who would cry out at
the sight of one, I was sometimes able to observe them. I spied one that was
writhing on some moss, in pleasure or agony. How I envied it! I have retained of
it at most some suggestion in my belly that came back to me, like the glimmer of
a lightbulb, at the point when I was becoming interested in the earthly paradise
that it took me a long time however to locate.

Through I know not what penchant for contradiction,
something a number of those educated by the nuns are familiar with, I preferred
Cain to his brother, Abel, though the pages of the Old Testament attribute to
him, with no extenuating circumstances, all the miseries of the world through
the ages. Today, thanks to the bits and pieces of psychology I've studied, it's
easier for me to grasp the mechanisms of my adolescent reasoning. Then, I was
only recently pubescent but I was one of those who were bleak, small, shy, with
the creases of my childish folds inadequately smoothed. In class I rubbed
shoulders with a few girls who were rich and beautiful, tall and cheerful, whose
appearance matched, feature by feature, the heroines in the sagas in the
Veillées des chaumières
, those magazines for silly girls of which
some French publisher dumped his surplus in the log cabins of Canada. It was
obvious, clear, unquestionable that had an Abel existed, he would have been
reserved for those girls, because he'd have had every virtue and a boy who has
every virtue doesn't need to go fishing among the bleak to find love. He only
has to choose the nicest one from the sirens placed at his disposal by their
wealthy and pleasing parents. And some of them are nice, despite the reputation
they've acquired for being idiots.

Unattainable, impossible — the Abels become abhorrent to
girls with no assets. Cain, on the other hand, might well exist in their lives.
Not only has he too been tested by envy, but also his murderer's destiny is more
interesting than that of the handsome murder victim, and a girl who's in the
mood to complicate her life can find reasons to slip away with him. The
virtuous, for example, will want to accompany him along the road to repentance,
while the depraved couldn't imagine a better accomplice in perdition. At the
start of my menses I certainly didn't go that far in my calculations of destiny,
but Cain was a brother to me, I attributed to him brown eyes and dark clothes
whereas the other one, with his blind grace forever petrified in the flannel of
his shroud, seemed instead to be a brother to the terribly tiresome Maria
Goretti.

If these impressions, which should have been fleeting, have
stuck in my memory, it's because I choked back several questions having to do
with Cain during religion classes that were not yet catechesis so that it was
impossible to discuss anything. I found it hard to understand why fratricide
suffered an irreversible, eternal curse, when we were taught that every sin
could be forgiven. But such questions flew away as we removed ourselves more and
more from the confessionals — which in my case happened fairly early.

It was much later that the character of Cain came back to
me. I was about eighteen, I'd stopped growing, I found little to do, little to
think about, textbooks were still censored. Spring had been dry, inflammable,
hard to live through. The town talked with stupor about a Ukrainian couple who'd
taken their own lives in a shack below Normétal. They had been found in one
another's arms beneath the black cross of the temperance movement, though they
had only polluted water to drink and nothing at all to eat. My father knew them,
he knew all the destitute people who tried to cultivate the Abitibi soil, he
loved animals and stood in for the veterinarian with them; it was his form of
proselytism, he sometimes saved the lives of calves and, to his great joy, a few
horses. He'd gone to see the Ukrainians a few months earlier, but their hens had
died anyway. He was not surprised by the tragedy. He came out with a few words
of anger, quickly suppressed by the good Catholic he was, at the politicians and
priests who deluded the workers in the cities about the fertility of the Abitibi
soil. “One of the worst of the pieces of land God gave to Cain,” he said about
that of the Kowalchuks.

He meant by that soil that was rocky. We knew about those
plots of land shaved out of areas that already were producing stunted trees.
Neither machine nor man could smooth it, for the clay soil, once turned over,
yielded only stones. We drove past their unfenced fields, they would have served
no purpose, the animals couldn't survive on the sparse grass, dotted here and
there with brown clumps of earth that towards the end of summer took on a
mineral hue. As most of this land had been quickly abandoned, at best it roused
amazement at the malevolence of whoever had even suggested it could be
cultivated — and pity for those who'd believed it.

At an age when we want to make names for ourselves I had
acquired some affection for these places. I thought they were poetic in the
moonlight. The stones, turning to marble, evoked beneath our skies the
sepulchral blue so prized by the Romantic poets, at least in the excerpts we
were offered at the convent which was, by definition, a friend of graveyards. I
savoured their silvery glints. As it had not provided food, the cultivation of
mineral soil did give rise to progress in housing. Many were the small tarpaper
shacks that little by little were faced with round rocks, patiently cemented. It
took time, sometimes years — not for lack of material, but because once the
process was started, it had to go on, using stones that were all same size,
which became more laborious to collect once the surroundings had been skimmed.
Long snubbed by the bourgeois whose taste extended only to cut stone, these
structures are now greatly appreciated by lovers of folk art, they see them as
an ingenious, aesthetic and functional way to make the most of a hostile
environment. I was still far from able to formulate such judgements, but those
houses seemed to me filled with joy, erected to amuse the always large numbers
of children around them. The fathers of these youngsters had to have been good
to have embarked on such an adventure. These houses were also the first to be
graced with a few boxes of flowers, the growing of which was a luxury if not a
scandal in our land that was unsuited even to vegetable gardens.

I also liked rocks for themselves. You could find them here
and there in the clearings, vast and warm, where I'd go during my walks on the
outskirts of town. From those shapes hollowed out by the millennia, I made for
myself beds where I could close my eyes in the sun and feel my lids become
iridescent, or read, silly things generally, but so what. Without shelter, skin
roughened, gaze bleached, I too was a stone. I recognized myself in the area
around the mines, I thought I could make out their subsoil with its veins that
resembled my own, I liked hearing about the fires that would denude our
landscapes even more.

When people cursed these landscapes, calling them “the land
God gave to Cain,” I was offended. It was entirely possible that the Ukrainian
couple had committed suicide for some other reason than poverty and hunger, they
could have succumbed to a longing for their native land, to a problem of
sterility, to an incurable disease that would separate them and their love
couldn't bear the prospect. I was still rather marked by the literary excesses
of the previous century that would live on in isolated corners of French Quebec,
so late to produce its own novels.

All the same, the image stuck in my mind and I found myself
thinking, for the first time in a somewhat orderly manner, about Cain. I had
some recollection of his crime, cutting the throat of his brother Abel to take
his property, or out of jealousy over Adam and Eve's obvious preference for
their eldest, an odd thing because in Quebec the youngest child is usually the
best loved. The punishment though I couldn't recall, only the part about the eye
that pursued him even to the grave, an allegory thoroughly exploited in our
classrooms to keep us quiet when the teacher left for a few moments, entrusting
us to a Cyclopean and vengeful God.

There was no question of Cain's being sentenced to prison,
prisons didn't exist when there was only one family of four on earth, he too
must have been banished, like his parents. An interesting notion, releasing the
guilty to the four winds, returning them to wild countryside that they must tame
in order to survive, instead of shutting them up and turning them into imbeciles
by subjugating them. Had it not been for the unforgiving Eye, Cain would one day
have become a free man. Some of his descendants think it did happen, that he
divested himself of the burden of evil by cultivating his solitude, where there
is no room for jealousy. In that case, in the twilight of his life the Eye would
have been merely a sun that was setting and then had set. Justice and hope are
better served by this thesis but when my father, who owed his education to
tradition, evoked the land God gave to Cain, it seemed murderous and merciless.
Not a bird passed there, not even to fly over.