Appropriate Place (11 page)

And so the land where I was born, and the rock that gave me
some idea of happiness by transforming me into stone, were the reproduction of
cursed places. Ugly until the end of the world in the eyes of the deity and of
man. Instead of being disconsolate, I surprised myself by marvelling at it. In
fact it was difficult at age eighteen to hold on suddenly to a better dissidence
to be explored. Cain would be my hero. I would put myself on his trail.

?

Here the text breaks off and a very large question mark, redrawn
again and again until it cuts through the paper, seems to have been an attempt
to disavow the preceding pages, as the following suggests:

But who am I so vain as to think I am, all of a
sudden? A Maryam on whom an annunciation falls? No more than Burtukan, who may
become her village schoolteacher, was I able to imagine any connection between
the origin of the world and the land where I had grown. The story of Cain barely
takes shape in my aging head, where books have talked about other books. I am
scribbling on the terrace of a hotel in Lalibela that's at once new and
decrepit, because my journey has been halted by the rain that closed the roads
and I have nothing else to do. Constructing it gives shape to a life that had
none, that tumbled down the way life does here, between people with small
desires whom fate has caused to be born in spaces too big for them.

I was unaware in fact that I was on the side of Cain.

No matter what was written about it by all those men seeking
to endow their Quebec with the genes of giants, even as they were settling in
the most impossible places, our line has always originated in unadventurous
bodies. They had certainly been hard at work, they'd opened clay roads and
cleared jungles of ice, but at the end of their days, they had never stopped
telling one another thin stories wherein victories were so many stakes to block
their horizons: the arrival of a
caisse populaire
or a movie theatre,
the passage of a surveyor, the replacement of wooden sidewalks, the building of
a hospital. When they had triumphed over the elements enough to tame them, to
set limits to their living and their dying, they were content — much more so
than those who ventured to the poles, whose desires had no end.

I was born long after the limits were established, they had
multiplied, now you need a bus to get from one to the other. And under those
conditions, what was most certain was not revolt — that was something we'd have
had to draw from our ancestry which was devoid of it — but boredom. It doesn't
always lead to fantasies. There's an unwitting shadow over days that are
nonetheless full. I don't remember having wallowed in it but I see myself coming
and going in the town, checking new arrivals at two or three boutiques, making
dresses and buying a coat, teaching, cashing my paycheque, phoning one woman or
another about a Saturday outing, but there were six other nights in the weeks
and where was I? In front of the television and sometimes in books whose titles
I can't recall, past the age for novels about romance. Yet I read a lot, till
late at night. And so the days, though boring from end to end, seemed short to
me.

The first Cain to block my path was Ervant. I was right to
leave him shortly after I'd married him because he ended up driving in even more
stakes than my parents; but I rediscover, still intact, the hunger that came to
me from that skittish body, that knew how to get in tune with mine so I felt
constantly naked, and wet, and ready to fling myself into him again and again. I
had no self-control. Today it's easy to give him the face of the outsider, the
alien who disturbed villages, who seduced virgins and reduced their parents to
not very much. It corresponds to the idea that we form of spasms in quiet
places, they're always due to a young man who has come from somewhere else, with
stiff prick and mystery in his eyes. But Ervant didn't come from some Sodom, not
at all, sulphur was not his country. He had fled the smell of it, which still
lingered in Eastern Europe, he made love with knowledge gained in the old,
self-confident cities he'd passed through without really seeing, eager to get to
the New World and finding himself now and then having to assuage himself with
liberated women who demanded caresses in the right places. Along the way, he had
become a handsome beast.

With my appetite aroused I cared little about the futures
he described to me in broken French. He would have liked to have found grace
with my mother, who cold-shouldered him because he was an immigrant; dusk made
him talk about big warm houses for bringing up children, he saved his money, and
while he deplored them, at my insistence he recounted a few stories of women and
girls on the shores of a Danube forgotten by him. I never tired of his
evocations of Fatima, the little girl who'd masturbated him in a church and
already knew how to demand money, it was a long way from my childhood with its
odour of purity and its clean cotton undershirt.

On rue des Bouleaux the concierge is also called Fatima,
she's the right age to have aroused Ervant in Vienna, and seems to me also to
have the sheep's eyes that still made him blink from embarrassment and guilt
when he talked about her. She would be completely square, that Fatima, without
the fat deposits swelling bust and buttocks, but in her voice, in her Spanish
throat, I hear the swelling that comes to little girls at the same time as the
swelling of their breasts, the sound of the first fondling. If I go back there
I'll try to find out if she once lived in Vienna, with a father who ran a
café.

There was nothing of Cain about Ervant but his wandering,
and that was coming to an end. I realized that during the year of our marriage
when I befriended a woman who was more of a wanderer than him, she was
hotheaded, she loved sex, she took away any desire I might have had for a child
by giving birth to an acid and awkward boy, most of all she taught me the need
to go away, she did so constantly. Anyway, the town was about to close in around
its ultimate limits. Then came college, university, libraries, theatre, all
institutions that lead us to think we are appeased. I got away from him just in
time, without realizing it, mainly I had the impression that I was leaving my
husband.

To become alienated as I am now, it's necessary to have been
free. I had a gift for that, I think. The years before François I see as smooth
and full and round, though to others they might seem a form of Lent. I had
bought a small house near the school where I was teaching English to girls who
were biding their time till they turned sixteen and could escape. Behind their
peroxide bangs, the cheap lipstick smeared on their pouts, their smokers'
voices, I nonetheless saw gazes I'd never met before, a sense of defiance that I
approached but without fraternizing. I wouldn't have had the words to console
them about incestuous brothers, violent boyfriends, drunken mothers. But I knew
instinctively how to talk to them about other things, about the pleasure of
being a brunette or their dreams of becoming nurses. It was as strange to them
as Alberta or Catalonia, but they were grateful that I gave them some air; one
girl became an optician and let her hair go back to being chestnut, by chance I
found myself at her shop on Mont-Royal a few months ago, she remembered me as
taller, she said. It's a sign that I was feeling good at the time.

The school kept me company, it was alive with the
electricity of the now unbuttoned Quebec, teaching English was a very simple way
to take note of it, I was doing it in a void and I didn't care. I was on my own,
my pleasure was boundless. I would buy a newspaper that helped me understand the
few bombs and the many demonstrations, I participated from afar by reading
Vallières and acquiring political prints in galleries where I knew none of the
long-haired leaders. In fact I went unnoticed though all in all I'd been a
charming teacher. I had no regrets because I particularly liked to get on the
road to the United States in spring, summer, fall, to go and while away the
hours in Maine and Vermont, in antique stores or boutiques where people sold
homemade jam. They were perfect conversationalists, anonymous too, and thanks to
them I could get by without any others during the week.

In the winter I went at least once in search of something
similar in Florida, there are plenty of interesting things to be found there off
the paths beaten by bad taste. It was there that I heard
Orpheus
for
the first time, in an Italian theatre reproduced in Sarasota, and it was there
that I met François.

Since his death I can't tolerate music.

Who is worth the trouble of loving that way? Surely not the
François Dubeau who is becoming blurred nowadays in itemized publications:
professor of art history; teacher of a generation of artists; progenitor of his
devotees through homosexual sex, which was what had actually brought him to
power; among the first to die on the field of horror that the gay plague was for
a time; and henceforth ennobled if not altogether tamed. As well — and this is
something the articles and anthologies will never say — adulterer to all those
aesthetic and amoral commitments that had won him the respect of his circle, for
he had secret sex with a woman, in her brick house with fireplace, elegant
suppers, Sauternes and chocolates savoured between the sheets, moonlight
glinting off a white orchid, which he caressed. As if it were me, Marie.

No one can imagine. I found jubilation, as it says in the
Magnificat, in that awkward body made spirit that brought to me, inside me, all
the servile flesh that flowed into him, all the rage choked back in artists'
studios, all the stammerings of those who would give voice to this still-mute
country, all the slackening of muscles barely exercised yet already weakened by
who knows what sadness about their art, when it becomes a mere meeting of those
who make it, who are by definition ordinary. François's torment gave meaning and
voluptuousness to things. I found the echo of it all day long, in the acidity of
black coffee, in the eyes of a teenage girl in crisis, in the stripes of
streets, in the stunned Muzak of supermarkets, in the uneven gold from my lamps,
in the toneless voices on the radio, in the door to be locked against danger.
But never again did I find in him whose words were laughter, the light hair, the
fingers nimble for writing that could have created tales and canticles. I knew
though what he refused to talk about in the ferocity of the world, I read it in
his thin nape with the slightly twisted sinews, in his fear of orgasm, which
passed through him as if despite himself. I felt I was on my knees when faced
with such remorse. I sometimes thought I was pregnant by him, though I was
unaware for as long as he was that the dried sperm on my skin was steeped in
death.

I loved a condemned man, I loved a man who was damned, I
know that because I'm no longer a free woman and I don't give a damn. I didn't
see him die, he was in the arms of others who made a grave for him, and if he
wrote me a letter as he'd promised, no one ever gave it to me.

It doesn't matter, I had a choice between two ways of lying
down, that is of spending even longer at his side. It would be in Laval or in
Abyssinia.

I thought for a while that I could be both of us, be
François and me, and live in the unlikely place he'd once suggested, on a whim.
He'd got the idea one night when we were returning from the Laurentians, sated
on the cirque of lakes and mountains, silent now as we were on the verge of
resuming our parallel lives, we were driving past the new apartment blocks
springing up now along the highway access roads. They were all alike, unreal,
with their deserted balconies, their flickering lights, and we couldn't tell if
they reflected the setting sun or some lamp switched on at the beginning of a
solitary evening. They were a long way from everything. “We'll live halfway
between Laval's two shopping centres,” said François. “We'll only go out for
food and wine, we'll be a ball of rosy pink in a square bed and our neighbours
will be our world, they'll suffice.” We'd turned it into a game, we had invented
dozens of possible neighbours, from the worldly assassin to the bestial
nonagenarian, from the incontinent diva to the piggish nun. We would have
prowled around their secrets by night, for no reason, just for something to do,
with no repercussions. Or to marvel at the fantastic human resistance to virtue,
up to this very century that had designed these perfect cavities, intended to
confine excess in all its forms.

I sold the house, moved to rue des Bouleaux and met there
only ordinary people, an aloof concierge, a quarrelsome old couple, singles with
forced smiles and — the one surprise — a former cabinet minister, still young,
who seemed to have shut herself away to write her memoirs, as if anyone in
Quebec could still be interested in the why's of our failures. I didn't see much
of her, my balcony faced the Laurentians, hers faced the river, but there was a
shared recognition between us, no doubt because we'd wandered one day into
similar dead ends. She had been minister of cultural affairs and of course it
was she who, for a time, awarded the grants that those in François's circles
lived on. A tenuous bond, now abandoned.

But to whom do I intend to lie in this notebook that no one
will read? Why have I been silent, or almost, up till now about the real Cain
who is practically my son?

I was never really alone with François. In my house there
was also that boy who has been clinging to me, has been underfoot, since his
birth, the son of my friend of that summer following my marriage, a corrosive
and passionate child who took away any desire for motherhood but whom I had to
adopt despite myself. She, Corrine, remained a free woman, time and again she
expelled him and turned him over to me, we were a made-up family, he and I, and
as foreign to François as his virus-bearing lovers were to me. I cared for
Pierre's fevers when he was a newborn, I took him in when he was a teenager, a
russet shadow in my house where he stayed because he knew nothing else, no one
else. I allowed him to roam the city, he never came in very late, he grew up
slender, caustic, taciturn, skilled at doing odd jobs, and had no other goal. If
I became his mother to some degree, it was because I was the right age, my
friend had disappeared into one of the northlands she was fond of.