Appropriate Place (13 page)

Around four p.m. the phone rings and a husky voice, barely that of
a man, asks: “Are you Marcia Nelson?”

His name is Pierre. He explains with difficulty that he is the boy
in Laval and that he wants to know if it's true that Marie died over there, as
stated in a message the police had left with the concierge. There's been a
mistake, he thinks, Marie is working in Addis Ababa, she never said anything to
him about travelling outside that city. How could she have ended up in a Jeep
hurtling into a canyon?

Marcia wonders who could have transferred this call to her, she's
responsible for travel documents, not for special services of all kinds. It's
some male who has taken off this Friday afternoon and the receptionist is
directing everyday matters to officers who can be relied on to do the job.
Anyway, it's true that she is in a position to confirm whatever information the
government of Canada possesses about this death.

She doesn't want to hang up first, the boy's state of mind worries
her: he refuses to believe her and demands to see the body as soon as it
arrives. But as what? While she tries in vain to extract a shred of identity —
is he a son, a nephew? — she sees smoke, even flames rise up at the end of the
Alexandria Bridge. Another of those matchstick houses in old Hull is burning,
late in the season; generally it's midsummer storms that clear the region little
by little of its shabby past. Now the strange voice becomes scorching too, as if
it had caused the fire. Marcia leaves behind, against the rules, a little of her
skin. She promises to call him back, she has to review the situation, she
becomes insistent and motherly though she's barely twenty-five and has had no
experience of solicitude until now.

There is a stain turning red above old Hull. A cremation must be
violent. The body arrives on Sunday at midday, Marcia Nelson volunteers to take
receipt of it at customs, it's not her responsibility but it suits her superior
who is short of officers on the eve of the long Labour Day weekend. He takes
note of her zeal, thinks she must be hoping for a promotion and it would be a
good thing, she's the kind who sooner or later would take offence at the number
of his trips to Africa, which everyone however has to admit are indispensable to
maintaining Canada's impeccable reputation in humanitarian matters.

Because she wants to prowl around rue des Bouleaux, Marcia Nelson
leaves Nepean on Sunday at dawn and instinctively turns onto the Quebec shore of
the Ottawa River. Gatineau, Montebello, Papineauville are asleep in their
history-book gravity, villages crammed with the names of the most renowned of
the French-Canadian bourgeoisie. Their illusions have so successfully postponed
their country's death throes, for the time it takes to abdicate responsibility,
that now they're considered to have possessed superior wisdom, whereas they were
merely indecisive and tormented — like Pearson himself, from whose myth Marcia
is reluctantly breaking free. She, who has inherited all his dreams, who is
young and masters both languages, eager to serve the public good, having read
and absorbed Anne Hébert and Margaret Atwood, certain from the outset that the
two peoples can be reconciled, is nonetheless experiencing this journey along
the other shore as vaguely menacing. The menace becomes clearer in the long
series of blighted villages leading to Laval — villages that are awake.
Suddenly, Marcia is driving her Honda clumsily and is now constantly being
passed by vans, she asks so timidly in French for a muffin and coffee that a
good girl will naturally serve her in English at the Dunkin' Donuts in a mall
whose parking lot is already full, at ten a.m. on Sunday. It takes her a while
to find rue des Bouleaux, in a neighbourhood under development that no one's
familiar with, not even at the service stations.

She parks near a bed of begonias where there's not a soul in
sight, and sits in the car for long minutes, stunned by the pink brick apartment
blocks, all identical, all silent, all decked out with a circumflex hat above
their wide and ostentatious doors, all no doubt signed up with the same chemical
maintenance service for the lawns, whose green is withering uniformly; no autumn
leaf will linger there because the trees, if there are any, are planted at the
back of these bunkers that are the colour of poor-quality Renaissance prints.
Marcia is stunned because rue des Bouleaux is a precise replica of Pine or Birch
or Oak Street in the neighbourhood that was grafted onto Nepean's side five
years ago and was soon filled with a new generation of civil servants, most of
them from the other provinces. As if the plans not only for the houses but also
for the places themselves came from one catalogue, inspired by settlement camps
in the occupied territories, which smother their anxiety by means of tidy lines:
camps for refugees from the quiet middle class.

She doesn't dare to stroll through this entrenchment where all the
windows are covered with the same blinds. Here people can observe you through
half-closed slats without one eyelash moving in the building. A cold volley of
shots that she, who has no reason to be on rue des Bouleaux, should shy away
from, her department hasn't asked her to investigate, only take care of the
formalities at Mirabel. But Marcia Nelson feels that her life of adventure is
finally beginning, her life as an external affairs officer prepared to go
further than required by duty. She enters 10,005 and rings the concierge's bell
to the right of the front door, laughter bursts out, inappropriate here in such
a gloomy place, and a faint aroma of peppers fried in oil. It makes her hungry,
which is also inappropriate. It's obvious that she's going to disturb this woman
at the beginning or in the middle of the Sunday meal. Her name suggests that
she's Catholic, so interrupting her is something that should not be done without
some powerful reason, which is nonexistent here. For Marcia though, the moment
is intoxicating, unique, she must seize it because it's unlikely to come back —
on Canadian soil anyway — and she prepares to find the words to apologize, to
invent an emergency.

Fatima greets her however as if she'd been expecting her. It's
aperitif time and she's drinking it in the company of a man her age, forty or
so, whose deep-set, laughing eyes contrast with his stringy complexion, the type
whose looks are described as “Mediterranean.” Marcia's arrival is well timed,
she and Felipe have been talking about the events, word of which has spread to
the upper floors, a visit by the police attracts attention in a peaceful spot
like this.

Fatima is voluble, abetted perhaps by alcohol. What is this
business they want to involve her in? She's been asked to identify the body
because she, the concierge, is apparently the only source of credible
information. She'll do it because she's obliged to, she has no choice, but she's
getting fed up with 10,005 rue des Bouleaux, which has the evil eye. In fact
she'll be leaving next month, with Felipe, who owns a bar and bistro near the
Plateau Mont-Royal, she'll move in upstairs with him. That will be fine. She'll
be a waitress, wash dishes if necessary. She knows something about that kind of
business, her father ran a drinking place in Vienna where he had finally settled
down after a series of immigrations. If she thinks about it carefully, the
clientele of the forlorn who went there, some of them so deprived of women that
they had their eyes on her as a child, were much better people than the
underhanded gang who live in this building, all of them turned in on their own
probably sordid secrets. And stingy on top of it.

“I'll just send the kid back to the States and I'm out of here.”
Marcia learns of the existence of Virginia, takes pity on her loneliness in this
place where only adults live. She has found an easy way to make Fatima gossip
more informatively about the inhabitants of the building and in particular about
Pierre, whose influence on the child has the concierge worried. She'd known boys
like him in the past, who pretended to take her out walking and ended up asking
her to touch them. Pierre gave Virginia a little quartz watch, a cheap trinket
that excites the little girl. Now she waits for him every evening. He doesn't
always come home, he hangs out in the arcades with queers, maybe he's a hustler
himself. Felipe saw him once leaning against a car near the vacant lot over
there, he was with a fat guy covered with tattoos, the kind who likes being
beaten with chains, apparently blood turns them on. What would he do to her, to
the little girl? You never know.

Fatima talks more discreetly about the woman on the fourth floor,
who used to be in politics and has decorated her apartment so nicely. Pierre did
the painting, but she finally kicked him out. He didn't seem to work very hard,
you'd often spot his lanky silhouette on the balcony in the sun. She'd seen so
many like him in her father's café, men who were soft except for their pricks,
who fantasized about their talent for seducing older women. But that
distinguished woman wasn't taken in, she fired him and a good thing too. As for
the dead woman, what Fatima thinks is that he tried the same thing with her but
she took off instead of kicking him out, nobody knows why.

Or maybe he's her son, though the concierge doesn't think so. She
saw them side by side in a corner store at the beginning of summer, his hand was
on her hip, as if she was his girlfriend. With those low-cut red dresses she
wore maybe she brought problems on herself.

In any event, Fatima mutters more softly, as if to herself, he
drives the people around him crazy, trouble piles up, it's unbearable. One of
the owners tried to murder his wife with fire, the way those barbarians in India
do. And there's been a lot of petty thievery, which isn't normal, only a few
deliverymen come to 10,005, the concierge keeps a close eye on them, the
robberies must have been an inside job. The owners' meetings are becoming
stormy, people are starting to criticize Fatima. So before they drive her away,
before the boy rapes the little girl, she's leaving, with her friend Felipe. She
certainly wouldn't want to be around if he caused another death. It's the fault
of that Pierre, finally, if the woman died from moving away from him and into a
dangerous country.

Marcia's not sure she has understood everything, she was brought
up in a climate devoid of superstition, she can't imagine having a conversation
about the evil eye. Anyway, it's only good manners to leave Fatima and Felipe to
their meal.

Far from being haunted, the corridor is ripe with the scent of
peonies mixed with disinfectant, one of the new concoctions the maintenance
company employees like, you can see why. Marcia doesn't experience the thrill
she was hoping for from her incursion into such foreign territory. The air is
perfectly conditioned, a big mirror by the elevator sends back the image of a
twentyish Anglo in a flowered skirt drifting above flat heels, a beige blouse
over a slender bosom, straight shoulder-length hair, a permanent, faintly pink
smile. She thinks she looks ordinary, whereas salesladies find her definitely
pretty, she looks good in whatever she tries on, it gives them a rest from all
the inelegance they see parade by. In her own opinion though she looks more like
someone visiting a hospital.

Marcia decides to check out the building the way the heroine of an
action movie would do, to make something happen. She'll go to Marie's in fact
just to fix in her mind's eye the image of a threshold the dead woman would have
crossed. Suddenly she realizes that she's never seen a corpse. Families no
longer expose their dead, urns are replacing coffins more and more, from their
finest photos the departed bid farewell with beautiful smiles and in excellent
health. It's morbid and unseemly to be curious about the condition of a body,
waxy and disfigured, but she can't help herself.

Two or three times she paces the fourth floor, nothing is moving
there. It's a garret like any other, more antiseptic than the hallway in a
convent, where the air always carries some trace of the sweat that flows
abundantly in individuals who are overly chaste. She takes the elevator down,
disappointed but relieved to be back in the sunlight. She opens the door of the
Honda, briefly lets out the torrid air that was scorching the leatherette,
observes 10,005 rue des Bouleaux for the last time. Suddenly Pierre looms up, as
if he had passed through the wall stage left. It's him, thin, musky, poured into
bleached jeans, with a swelling at the crotch from an erection or a knife. As if
they were on a date he gives her a little bow. A handsome specimen, desirable
but, alas, the type that's never interested in her. She escapes.

So ends her adventure. At Mirabel, the customs officials don't
even ask her to accompany the box to the morgue, because the police are taking
care of the follow-up and the identification. She won't see Marie. Once
repatriated, a dead person is no longer under Foreign Affairs jurisdiction.
Marcia drives home along the Ontario side of the Ottawa River, a view for her
mind's eye only, because the waterway is invisible from the highway.

For your world to be exciting, your name has to be Fatima.

Ten

THE ORGANIZERS
of the benefit for
AIDS
research had hesitated for a long time
before deciding on a maison de la culture in Laval. In spite of the good-sized
lobby, the well-equipped stage, the efficient ticket office, it seemed shrunken
because the auditorium could seat only a hundred and fifty. The idea of holding
this first public rally around the tragedy of a disease that was about to become
epidemic had come to them in July, from images of Live Aid, the rock concert
broadcast worldwide that had placed the Ethiopian famine, until then tolerated,
at the forefront of reasons for global indignation. The flow of emergency funds,
sustained by millions of guilty viewers, had multiplied a hundredfold.