Appropriate Place (16 page)

“That Susan Finney's right, you know, and the sovereignists should
have thought about it before. They have to show the world that reconciliation
and the growing integration into Canada is going to create the most colourless
people on earth. A nightmare, a new form of the revenge of the cradle!”

But Madeleine was wrong. As Susan Finney had noted, because of the
absence of desire, Gabrielle explained patiently, there would be very few of
those attractive and colourless children. Aside from the literary episode, she
had no interest in this thesis, in fact she wondered if Finney's undeniable
talent wasn't being secretly used by opposing forces still intent on
destabilizing the party. The government's mandate would soon be up, the troops
were worn out from the demands of power, the option was languishing in the polls
and now the slight amount of intellectual energy still liable to be harnessed
was being exhausted on a banal sex story that claimed to be a powerful symbolic
discovery! But Madeleine stuck by her guns. “All I know is, you haven't kept up
the healthy tradition of fornication in Nouvelle-France. Just when some real
urges are being talked about . . .”

Which allowed the conversation to turn to Madeleine's own most
recent urges and let harmony prevail, as usual, when they hung up.

With the blinds all open onto mid-September, the apartment was
drinking in a greenish early evening, a foam of low sky. Gabrielle stepped onto
the balcony but came right back in, shivering. She realized for the first time
that summer would always be shorter here on rue des Bouleaux, looking down on
the river. Then she recalled the chill that comes over small children, even
during heat waves, when they're at the top of a Ferris wheel, swaying in midair.
It took her back to that height, to the verge of a faint nausea. There was no
place to get off and no one to start the wheel moving again.

In the library she switched on the lamps whose power she had
studied so as to reproduce the warmth of winter lighting, especially on stormy
nights with wuthering winds.

What books to plunge into? The grotesque debate that was upsetting
her former associates, over a book in fact, managed to blight the magic of the
place. Turning her into a nostalgic old woman, the kind she loathed. Her lost
and better bygone days were there before her, on the shelves reserved for books
on palingenesis, that magnificent scholarly word she had dared to get close to
though she'd never studied Greek or, in the narrow schools she'd attended,
elegant French. She found there, intact and as mellow as the memory of a
perfume, the route that had allowed her, a bus driver's daughter, to propose for
what Quebec would become an interpretation that had won her the unanimous
congratulations of the French jury before whom she'd defended her thesis.

It had all started at the time of her first contact lenses and her
long hair tied back in a big bow, at the end of her college days. A literature
teacher, an intemperate Balzac enthusiast, was constantly boring his students
with the notion that the crossroads of all modern science, no less, could be
found in the preface to
La
Comédie humaine
. The students didn't understand a word of this
pretentious-sounding gobbledegook wherein Balzac declared that he was describing
variations on the human species the way others described those of animals. The
teacher had nonetheless ordered them to pick one of the scientific references
the novelist had amassed, a veritable name-dropping for nineteenth century Paris
salons, and write an essay on it. Chance had sent Gabrielle to one Charles
Bonnet (1720–1793), a Swiss naturalist and philosopher whom Balzac considered to
be a genius for having formulated a theory of the world as “an interlocking of
similar components,” where “animal vegetates as does plant.” Which made of
Bonnet a brilliant disciple of Leibniz, improving upon his thesis on continuity
in the universe, a systematic mind perfectly suited to the great novelist
seeking coherence for the thousands of characters in his boundless work.

Gabrielle, who didn't think she had a scientific mind, had taken
an interest in Bonnet as she would have in a game. Aside from his birth and
death dates, she found nothing on the man's life in Quebec's meagre libraries.
She had been content to imagine him as dismal and destitute until years later,
long after she'd defended her thesis, which did not contain these frivolous
notions, in the public university library in Geneva, where she was able to
consult the originals of his works and two amazing paintings. One was a portrait
in oil signed by one Jens Juel, revealing Bonnet as a handsome man with a high
forehead and an arrogant pout, obviously acquainted with the finest hair
curlers, tailors and manicurists, the open book under his hand appearing less
central to the composition than his emerald silk lapels and the frothing lace of
his shirt at the wrist. The other, dated 1780 and signed by Simon Malgo, was a
rather insipid and green “
Vue des environs du lac Léman du côté du Midi
prise de la demeure de M. C. Bonnet à Genthod, à une lieue au Nord de
Genève
,” whose very existence attested to the bourgeois comfort that
philosophers, it's true, rarely spurn and often seek.

But in the days when she was obeying her literature professor,
Gabrielle had available only a few titles and some resumés of the work of
Charles Bonnet, whose treatise entitled
Palingénésie philosophique, ou idées
sur l'état passé et sur l'état futur des êtres vivants
, published in
Geneva in 1770, presented a cosmogonic doctrine uniting geology, embryology,
eschatology, psychology and metaphysics to illustrate the continual rebirth of
living beings, while at the same time considering in that endless repetition,
their capacity for evolution. British dictionaries attribute to Bonnet the
authorship of the term, while French dictionaries assign it rather — and quite
shamelessly, given the truth of the dates — to the Lyon philosopher Pierre-Simon
Ballanche, whose
Essais de palingénésie sociale
, published between 1827
and 1829, are today considered to be pale copies of Bonnet's thinking, distorted
what's more by blasts of religious mysticism and the digressions of a dilettante
more concerned with impressing his friend Madame de Récamier than with
contributing to scientific progress. Balzac, though his contemporary, had been
right to prefer his predecessor in palingenesis.

The dissertation was supposed to be limited to five pages, but
Gabrielle was able to make such good use of the few scraps of knowledge on her
subject that the Balzac scholar gave her an exceedingly high mark. And from then
on, the fine word “palingenesis” was a secret asset, proof that she could
perhaps become an intellectual — to her, the most amazing destiny but one which
she didn't think she could dream of because, as a rule, she'd have had to
descend from other intellectuals to get there or, failing that, to be a boy
who'd come to the attention of teachers in a classical college reserved for
boys. At the time, no woman in Quebec had published a serious work of nonfiction
or taught at the graduate level in the departments that manufactured
intellectuals.

She had become a sociologist anyway, agreeing to study social
statistics, which at the time passed for the major doctrine in a discipline that
claimed to be scientific. It was not until she arrived in France, during an
early conversation with her thesis director, that, to impress him, she had dared
to utter the word “palingenesis” to describe her reading of the cultural
renaissance Quebec seemed to be experiencing. The master had been delighted and
had continued to be during the following two years, helping her to put that old
notion in contact with contemporary sociological thinking, at the same time
encouraging her to restore the reputation of Ballanche, some of whose spiritual,
if not religious, investigations could be found in Madaule and possibly in
Poulantzas.

In short, she had landed her doctorate with rather disconcerting
ease, given her background and the earlier limits to her aspirations. And she'd
come home to the shores of the St. Lawrence, to her country whose turmoil she
would contribute to that much more because she had now mastered a scientific
explanation for a sovereignist movement whose inconsistencies and chaos the
fearful curmudgeonly analysts who still reigned supreme at the reins of
newspapers denounced.

The very French weight of her intellectual trappings had however
quickly lightened. In the new university, professor and students were the same
age and the liveliness of their discussions was no less striking than the
lightness of their morals. The sexual revolution often moved faster than the
revolt against Canadian shackles or capitalist exploitation, her years of
teaching were less studious than her years of thesis writing had been.
Palingenesis was gradually reduced to a vague memory before it became, in
politics, a useless object. Because first and foremost it was necessary to speak
in a way that people understood.

In a waiting room a few weeks earlier, she'd been leafing through
one of those magazines that specialize in treating females as brainless, which
offered a long list of therapies for sicknesses of the soul. There it was, under
the letter
P
: “
PALINGENESIS
: a method of
breathing that allows you to achieve greater self-awareness and express
repressed emotions. See also Rebirth.”

There had been a renaissance, an evolution too, and they had
generated fools. So Gabrielle Perron was tempted to think, fascinated as she was
by the dust motes dancing in her library in the lamplight, despite that
morning's dusting.

She pulled herself together, reminding herself that she hadn't
settled in parallel with the world in order to detest it. She turned on her
computer, created a file called
GL
under
“Correspondence,” and started a letter to the man who had been her first
intellectual model and, all things considered, the only one.

Georges,

During a recent trip to Paris, I was tempted to see you
again. To tell the truth it was a rash idea that struck me when I was crossing
the Île de la Cité in a drizzle. I opened my umbrella just in front of your
door, at 1 rue des Deux Ponts, and it took me a moment to realize that I was
actually on the threshold of the building where I'd gone so often, with so many
friends, part of the traffic that so exasperated your neighbours on every floor.
The concierge who gave us a motherly greeting had flown away, were we not also
half-plucked fledglings, far from our native lands, begging for the beakful of
words from the assured talker that you are? Number 1 rue des Deux Ponts is now a
blind door, soundly bolted, where the concierge is an electronic keypad
displaying the apartment numbers. Caution or fear is so extreme that no name
appears next to the numbers and I suppose that the entry code is changed every
month, one must be prepared for the baseness of tradesmen.

That is so unlike you that I thought you'd retired to some North
African land, surrounded still and again by those slender coffee-coloured lads
you used to pretend to educate along with us, knowing we weren't taken in. As
for me, I was quite fond of them, they added to my feeling of liberation, to the
stirring sense that I'd finally reached a shore where everything was possible. I
went into the bistro across the street, consulted a Paris directory and found
you at the same address, immutable. I dialled the number once, twice, in vain.
It was around six p.m., I decided to wait for you for a while, sitting at a
table like a character in a Paris film, but over the course of an hour the only
person I saw go inside was a little old lady who I'd have sworn, on account of
her hard-wearing World War II–vintage raincoat, was the whining widow of the
past, the one who shared your landing and murmured the worst racist remarks
about your little North African friends. Her or her daughter. There's nearly a
quarter century between me and that image, which I enjoyed rescuing from
oblivion. But of Georges, nothing. Not on the following days either, when I
dialled the number several times before giving up for good.

What did I want from you? When I was in Paris, nothing. I'd
probably have hidden the fact that I was a cabinet minister, embarrassing in
view of the values you'd inculcated in me, which were rather foreign to any
exercise of power. Today though, Georges, I would ask you for an accounting of
my life. I am now the age that you were, or nearly, when I first knew you. You
were a creature of farandoles and words. What did the nature of your love
affairs matter, your eyes were sated and bright in the morning and that, it
seems to me, gave you even more words for picking away at our theses, for
teaching us to recognize and describe “social change” as we said reverently at
the time, that end in itself which you maintained had to be provoked before it
could be analyzed. To bring about that change, you were offensive. We wanted to
be. Your way of sating yourself with your little North African boys may have
done more than all your books to give them access to knowledge, in the
universities that were springing up in the suburbs. I came home from Europe
telling myself that I too was going to have it all, farandoles and words and the
social change that would come of it.

So what am I doing here, before I have one real wrinkle, organizing
life as if it should no longer be touched?

I am still delighted, Georges, by what I, like you, contributed to
breaking down. I hate what the world was before we got there, a bundle of fear
and suffering dictated to the ignorant. I taught and taught, as a number of us
did, and they came in the thousands to listen to us and to hand in their papers,
as we'd done with you. But do you not also hear, in your educated and changed
city, the sound of a new trivialization? Palingenesis has become “rebirth,”
Georges, and it's as if I were seeing you tonight, absent from 1 rue des Deux
Ponts because you are giving adult paying students a course in the management of
desire. Who knows, maybe you're even there, behind your electronic padlock?