Appropriate Place (12 page)

But most important, the silence between Pierre and me has
the depth of the small Oedipal tragedies so common in our houses. He knows
nothing about Phaedra, he's a product of our schools where this kind of tragedy
is unknown and untaught on account of its great age, but that's how he sees me.
I look brunette and passionate, my widow's weeds are red, it's possible that he
is disturbed.

Pierre followed me to rue des Bouleaux, where else could he
have gone? I don't know who it was that more or less deflowered him — man or
woman, night or day — but he began prowling around me, sweet smelling and
pubescent. Towards the end of the hottest days of summer, I kept my distance
from that smouldering fire, I decided to abandon him the way one decides on an
abortion, I imagine, knowing that you'll be left with a lump in your belly and
that it could become like the eye of God, unless you find a way to puncture it.

The other way to keep François alive then was Abyssinia. So
he'd know that he was free to exclude me from his worlds, I had told him that
one day I would go to Ethiopia, a country that was the very contradiction of
mine and that was intended for me. Certain books said that the first man had
appeared there in the first rift in the earth, the oldest skeletons in history
were exhumed there; where I come from too there were regularly born, along the
last fault in the new world, bodies that might have considered themselves
immortal, conquerors of the final frontier. The sun of Abyssinia flowed with
milk and honey; the moon of Abitibi hardened gold and copper. I must go towards
that contradiction. There I would lie down in a field of stones, their greys and
blues similar to mine, to complete the circle, to recover the first moment in my
life as a girl, a warm rock that streaks the skin of a child and makes her
smile. In the distance, a brief storm. When I get there, the season of heavy
rains would also be drawing to an end.

François did not believe in my Abyssinia, which was borrowed
from a collection of illuminated manuscripts published by
UNESCO
, any more than he believed in the apartment in Laval. He went
along with the game, the land of Rimbaud can count on a favourable bias on the
part of artists or art historians who like to think themselves unkempt and
suicidal, a state they confuse with the melancholy they have learned. His pet
name for me was Vitalie, the name of the poet's mother and his sister. I was
certainly less well prepared for a trip to Ethiopia than for a move to Laval,
but I acted quickly in the middle of the summer, volunteer aid workers aren't so
numerous during this period of famine when the corrupt regime appreciates
English teachers all the more, because the language is that of international
outlays. I have an iron constitution, I had no problems with the vaccinations
and I didn't have to discuss my decision with anyone. Because I am alone, no
matter what Pierre, to whom I've left the place, thinks.

At the airport, embracing me as is customary, he tried to
brand me like a mare, his cock pressed hot against my hip, there is nothing more
vulgar. In the plane though, dispelling the slight turmoil he'd provoked, I
really did see the image of Cain taking shape — wandering, damned, hunted down.
I more or less wondered, before I dozed off while waiting for the stopover at
Frankfurt, why I so often found myself on the damaged side of individuals. And
if it was even possible that I'd been born of a land God gave to Cain.

One thing is certain, and I am writing this journal to etch
its reality indelibly, to imprint it: this morning, I saw the earthly paradise.
For twenty or thirty minutes, I don't know which, along the road to Lalibela. We
had set out early because the road might be hard to negotiate, it had rained
until late the day before. But at eight o'clock, when the truck turned onto the
first rocky outcropping that seemed from the beginning to block the road, the
air was as dry as the stones. We were driving slowly but still stirred up a fine
ash that the landscape, which had been flayed grey, absorbed as its due. I
thought about the horrible picture of eternity that was given to us at school.
It would last, so we were taught, the length of time it would take to wear down
a mountain if the wing of a bird brushed against it once every hundred years.
They have no idea how terrifying that is to children, who fear more than
anything being unable to move. In the mineral flow that carried me off this
morning, there was worse. The mere thought of a bird was impossible and the
infinite expanse of stones was feeding on dust and becoming a mountain. Eternity
was getting longer.

After a sharp pull of the wheel at the foot of a cliff,
suddenly there was the valley. A great lake of thick grass where nothing was
lacking from what would create our happiness on the morrow of the mists of time:
rolls of wild honey on the high branches of the eucalyptus; ridged paths where
white-robed children run; herds of cows sniffing the teff and the ponds; a few
goats walking in step with a few masters, who lean on golden walking sticks;
huts clinging to the low ribs of escarpments; branches that would produce smoke
to caress lithe-bodied women; bouquets of shrubs; patches of coolness on the
horizon that dance well back but refuse to recede. I describe the scene as
François would have described a painted composition, in strata, we are perverted
by our way of looking at pictures, which are odourless.

But it happened that I asked Salomon to stop, that he went
off for a cigarette, and that I acquired fraudulently that hint of the earthly
paradise. It is surely indescribable.

And so, tonight, I am content, though it's all stupid. I
know that the huts are made of cow dung, the cattle are diseased, the goats
feverish, the children starving, the women, servants and the men, porters. That
they are able to eat not by putting their herds out to graze and by growing
teff, but by lugging to the villages in the high plateaus the stones from which
the tyrant's henchmen build their houses and businesses, hotels like this one
where the pipes leak, the pool is cracked, and the flowers in the dining room
are plastic. Beer is served there, and fake coffee ceremonies to the few Greek
tourists who come to experience the Coptic Easter at Lalibela. Salomon, who
knows people everywhere, says that many priests are considered to be thieves;
they are entrusted with treasures, some of which God himself gave to their
ministry a dozen centuries ago, nowadays their ornate gold stirs the greed of an
unscrupulous government. The crosses and crowns are gradually disappearing from
temples policed by men with Kalashnikovs, but evidently they can be bought; it's
impossible to be armed and honest in Ethiopia, I quickly became aware of that in
Addis.

Nevertheless I fall asleep slowly, the window open on the
stridency of a handful of crickets, coiled in the idea of beauty. I touched it
today and now it's as if it is not in my eyes but at my fingertips. One touches
love, I can do it, in the same way.

Tomorrow, I get back on the long road to Addis Ababa. What's
left for me to look at? It's time to make myself useful.

The ambassador closes the notebook, torn between
finding this Marie interesting, in writing at least, and deploring the way that
she's steeped in those remnants of a Christian education that nowadays sends so
many young people to remote countries in search of impossible revelations.
Nothing is less certain than the appearance of the first hominids in the
Lalibela Valley, though one must acknowledge that the contrast between the scree
that holds up the plateau and the greenness of the valley combines all the
elements of a setting for Adam and Eve and later on, for Cain and Abel,
especially since fratricidal wars have regularly marked the region. As for her
love affair with the man called François, it seems to have been just, if not
beautiful, which makes her death a form of privilege. Would she have gone on to
betray him? An Abel could have taken the edge off her, Marie being still fresh
and rather seductive. He sees her suddenly, precise down to the first wrinkles
clawing at eyes at once so brown and so bright. A woman in red. An
impromptu.

He pulls himself together, realizes she didn't write a word about
her stay in Addis, or about meeting him in the salons of the American embassy.
She though had seemed worthy of memory. Perhaps, in spite of his interesting
postings and his fairly erudite knowledge of the terrain, he has become someone
bland, covered like the stones up there with an ash of words, the diplomatic
tone having finally dulled his wit.

Thus passes his desire to stay in the residence. To listen to the
fountain and to think in his turn about the colours of the origin of the world.
Ethiopia is no longer Abyssinia, there's a famine to be dealt with, and in a
while he will have to inquire about where to send this notebook that belongs to
her estate. The question really answers itself, it's obvious that he must send
it to rue des Bouleaux in Laval, and that young Pierre will have to endure the
disagreeable reading of it. The Canadian ambassador to Ethiopia, Sudan and
Somalia will also suppress the urge to start looking for a Burtukan in the area
around Lalibela. The evocation of that child, a type so common in Ethiopia, was
nothing but the epigraph of a schoolmistress — a profession that is not safe
from mawkishness.

Nine

BUILT AT THE HEIGHT
of the Canadian
government's inferiority complex, the Lester B. Pearson building unfurls its
shades of grey and its batrachian gaze down onto the Ottawa River and across to
the Quebec shore, with a close-up of the federal parks and a long shot of the
anthracite suburbs, a pleasant place to live within biking distance of the
Gatineau Valley. On this autumn morning the eye can still rest on the rust and
blonde and probably warm moss of this neutral zone, though it's hard to judge
the weather from inside an air-conditioned office. Perched up there, Marcia
Nelson, who still lives with her parents, experiences the first doubts inherent
in her first job after graduation, here in the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Yet she felt destined for this life, so well nourished was she at the University
of Ottawa on the understated nostalgia for that same Pearson, who seems to have
been at once a good man and a visionary, the way officers in the Canadian
foreign service are required to be, or to become. In charge of diplomatic travel
documents while she waits for her first posting abroad, she is musing over a
dispatch from Addis Ababa, where the Canadian ambassador, who ought to be
offering judicious advice that can be forwarded to the United Nations on ways to
relieve the famine or bring about a truce in Eritrea, is getting worked up over
the repatriation of the body of a road accident victim. For two days now Marcia,
though highly bilingual, has been trying in vain to find any trace of a family
for this woman named Marie, whom
CARE
seems to have
recruited from another planet. Her file contains nothing but an address in
Laval, to which phone calls go unanswered. At this very moment police are
carrying on investigations in the vicinity, but the ambassador is getting
impatient. The morgue in Addis is not a model of its kind, there are no daily
flights via Europe, and before deciding on the route he has to know where the
dead woman is supposed to end up.

Marcia upbraids herself for treating like a parcel the first dead
person of her young career. The task should inspire her, but instead it's
upsetting. The sun ought to go into hiding instead of being so softly beautiful
over the valley of the Gatineau. Unlike her parents, Marcia is of the generation
that sometimes dares to take the air of Quebec, amazed that it's breathable. But
now it's giving off the smell of viscera. In this department people are prepared
for death in foreign countries, it goes without saying because the planet is
disturbed everywhere, but the decay that she's about to confront is of another
order. It is that of a kind of unknown rival who was able to make her life a
tragedy such as she, Marcia, will never experience. That's obvious when you go
home to Nepean every night, and when Dad and Mom, civil servants too, are so
lovable or loved, always.

When she comes back from lunch in the cafeteria, where everyone
was scandalized over the assignment of a prestigious European embassy to an
over-the-hill politician, the information finally arrives. This Marie was
originally from Abitibi but has been an orphan for some years, she was briefly
married but long since divorced, with no trace remaining of an individual named
Tateossian, an immigrant who left on his own, the way he had arrived. She has
only some very distant relatives, no doubt indifferent to her life or death,
somewhere in Massachusetts. The Laval apartment, which she owns, is inhabited by
an unemployed youth whom she seems to have supported for obscure reasons,
they're unknown in any case to the concierge who supplied the few pieces of
information that were later confirmed by the Office of the Registrar General.
The police were unable to interview anyone else, the boy was away, the corridors
deserted, the whole place is a desert.

Marcia advises the ambassador where the parcel is to be sent and
by what route: Ethiopian Airlines to Frankfurt, then Air Canada to Montreal.
While all that is being done they'll locate a morgue in Laval to receive the
body and a funeral parlour to see to the formalities for the unclaimed dead, a
problem to which such an operation surely holds all the keys.

The vague migraine that was threatening Marcia dissipates; someone
places on her desk the always excessive bundle of her superior's African
travels, which she must process with her eyes closed to the images of the
starving villages to which he drags around his big belly and his outmoded
opinions, feasting his eyes on the barely pubescent girls. What he doesn't dare
to claim as an expense is their services, which he will in fact avoid paying
for. He has sometimes had to hurry home because of gonorrhea, it's well
known.