Appropriate Place (7 page)

“Nice people.”

Pierre poured the coffee. He was starting to take root.

“I know where they're coming from. My mother was always telling me she
should have got rid of me because I was the result of some Italian passing through
and she'd loved him, which wasn't a good recipe for making a kid. Now it's killing
her and I don't want to go back there.”

Gabrielle held back her clichés. It was the longest meaningful
sentence about his background that he'd uttered in the few weeks he had been coming
to her place, something welled up from it that was like a threat to what she'd
thought was his tranquility, there was a difference between initiating a young male
and getting to know his demons.

She sent him away on the pretext that he couldn't go on painting with
the windows closed, she had errands to do and would perhaps even go to a nursery in
the Laurentians that specialized in ivy, where she might find a way to plant her
balcony. But after he left she didn't move. She suddenly cared about the moment of
which she had just robbed him. There was a story that would live only in her, on
this morning of ashes. The fire at 10,009 rue des Bouleaux was opportune, it was
time for it to happen, for life to start resembling what she had hoped for when she
settled into this apartment, under lock and key.

She turned on her computer, went through the disorganized files on her
hard disk, found the letters that she'd never sent to her lover because he would
have burned them, not out of malice but because he had no safe place to keep them.
In fact they weren't love letters, because at the time, she could love him with real
words, when they lay down in the middle of the day and “I love you” meant absolutely
that: that they were in love with one another. To write it was superfluous, though
she had now and then, in short, breathless, disposable notes.

She found the one from the highway, the last one. She had written it
back in Quebec City, after one of those afternoons stolen from the university by
him, from the government by her, they happened then only once a month or so and
sometimes the interval was as long as six or seven weeks, making her wonder if they
were still lovers.

Especially as they weren't always, he couldn't bear the thought of
sleazy motels where the lingering odours of other anxious couples, most of them
smokers, assailed him. They would talk in the car, then, sitting close but barely
touching, a caress on the neck could last an hour, awakening a commotion in her
belly, it had been genuine desire, and it always comes, how amazing.

They'd had lunch in Saint-Sauveur, in what thought of itself as a
bistro because of wine and blanquettes. They had not set foot inside the art
gallery; now that she was the minister responsible for that sort of place, she could
no longer visit them without attracting sycophants or whiners, without people
tracking her reactions or counting up their acquisitions, it was the same in
bookstores where she no longer even dared to buy the English women novelists that
were such a fine distraction from dreary late evenings in Quebec City.

We took the highway home, it was getting late, you weren't
saying much and my role was to chatter about this and that, I was charged with
telling those tales that reasonable men want to hear and there's nothing more
reasonable than men like you, who were no longer twenty years old when everything
toppled in the land of Quebec. The day was winding down and I was too, I'd had
enough of what awaited me. I was on my way to meet Jean-Charles and the limousine, a
common Chevrolet full of insipid newspapers and woeful files, and he would drop me
off two hours later at a hotel in Victoriaville with mauve and pink carpets where at
some meeting or other I would unveil some elements of the future cultural education
policy that was still gestating. At the end of the meal I would hear spoons clinking
in coffee cups, the sound of the infinite lack of attention that greets our speeches
and stands apart from them before they're delivered, even though these people would
have taken umbrage had I refused them my presence. When at length they applaud not
my words but the fact that it's time for a drink or bed, I am still thinking only of
you. I call you in my head. The line crackles and burns between us who are never
there.

Never weary, like this afternoon in your car — canary yellow for a
daytime delinquent. It was my role to tell stories and I concocted them easily.
Along highway 440, at the level of what had been Fabreville, stands a series of pink
brick buildings with brown roofs, each of which holds around twenty apartments. I
pointed out that you never see anyone on the balconies, even when the day is
declining and the sky is turning gold, which will surprise only the simpleminded.
When you settle here, into what was recently the middle of nowhere, with hay, cows
and horses, the sociologist tells you that it's not so as to gawk at the horizon
that's been stolen from our good farmers, or to hear the lighthearted songs of their
swallows, which are well and truly gone. The place has been tamed, the doors merely
open onto screens. It's inside that it is pleasant, in the unvarying light of
kitchens and corridors, sheltered from nature's dirty tricks that make every species
prey for another, particularly among the loveliest shadows and the softest sounds.

My presentation had conviction. I was imagining the serenity in every
one of those fine and private places along the highway, because no doubt people live
there who have suffered pain, whose children have betrayed them, whose villages have
been destroyed by bombs in hills that are nonetheless enchanted, who have been
stripped of love and even of coitus by something ugly, who have perfected arts that
no one wanted. When the television murmurs and the clean sink goes pale under the
fluorescent lights, they are untouchable. They achieve peace, whereas I, with my
hand on your knee and knowing that I arouse you, my pleasure is too acute, filled
with dread. I am already preparing to forbid myself, as always, to have the grief of
you.

Then I told you the shocking story of the girl who would move there
after a love affair gone sour, who would be still too young. As in Pasolini's film,
she would set fire to all these tidy existences. Before long she would seduce the
oldest man, fumble around in his tin trunk, that of a Balkan refugee, only to
discover that he was not victim but executioner. She would open up about it to the
plump sad woman, abandoned by her descendants, and be surprised to find that she too
was on the side of the killers, for she was the wicked stepmother, now forgotten,
the one who crammed her twins with rotten food and whose dogs were fawned upon,
there had been stories in the newspapers years ago. Then she would attempt to be
proven right by an ugly normal woman, one who goes shopping with coupons and cleans
her length of corridor herself, to hear her say that children are poison, that she
was once a schoolteacher and that the only way to survive is by constantly
overcoming the temptation to torture the handsomest of the little men, those future
lovers of dolls. And she would buy from the failed artist one of his youthful
pieces; with hope revived, he'd go back to his dying.

What would become of this haunted house in the final sequence?

You laughed, it was obvious to you that I was seeing myself as the
Pasolinian girl and that this whole hodgepodge was only the desire, a vain and
stupid one, to reach some semblance of Italy instead of Victoriaville on a night
that was turning to rain. You upbraided me a little for my way of going under
protest to see useful people, public service is in your blood and you'd like me to
be the same. What you love in me though is the very opposite of the good behaviour
you've been able to teach me. It's a talent I have. When you come on my greyhound
back you defy and you dance, I'm tenderly well placed to know, it leaves marks on my
corolla as they say in erotic novels from the nineteenth century, I could have been
a character in one, I have their same lightness.

And so we went, crusaders, on this day when we had nonetheless barely
touched. Perverse abstinence. As for those pink brick houses where people go to
sleep before the sun, where they construct a kind of peace with sharp angles, where
pent-up love can become tolerable, it was on that day that I began to desire
them.

Sunlight slanted in, divided the parquet into yellow and grey. The
computer lisped its background noise, the day would be watertight. That day,
Gabrielle wrote the final instalment, it was what she was there for.

The morning I went to the Morgentaler Clinic, Madeleine came
with me. We took a taxi. The fetus wasn't yours, or so we thought, but that was not
the reason for your absence. You loathe hospitals, not so much because of the colour
and smell as the shamelessness with which viscera, blood, excrement are treated. You
are such a reserved creature.

An abortion clinic has nothing to do with that however, or very little.
The curtains are brightly coloured, the reception desk is like one at an inn, the
nurses wear the engaging smiles of massage therapists who presently will strip you,
unembarrassed.

They took me before they opened, a small act of cowardice that had been
recommended by the management secretary, to spare me the curiosity of others. Yet
there was nothing scandalous, the procedure hadn't been illegal for a long time now,
thanks notably to some women as well known as me who had signed petitions, declared
that they'd all been there. The yellowest press couldn't have pointed to my presence
at Morgentaler's without creating an immediate mobilization that would have been a
rampart for me, and no one would have dared to ask a free, mature and independent
woman who the father was. Still, I was grateful for the privilege of such
discretion, telling myself in fact that these were things women had fought for.

The officiating physician was young and handsome, I mention that
because I noticed, yes, I am frivolous. I remember an instrument at work, grey,
metal, cold between my legs, it was hidden by a sky blue sheet but I could see it
through the eye that we all have in our vaginas. He explained the vacuum machine to
occupy my mind while he was working, and I could indeed hear the tube sucking out
the waste matter he was extirpating from me and which he of course didn't show me.
It wasn't too painful but he did say something very bad: “The mass is significant.
You may have been pregnant longer than we estimated.”

If he was right, the child was yours.

It was the accident I'd tried for months to bring on. I'd given up the
iud, I'd even bought a soft jersey dress, brick red, a designer model, which I wore
too often, for the pleasure of letting my stomach become familiar with its fullness.
At the slightest nausea at my desk in the National Assembly, where I often felt that
way for various reasons, I would track a bubble rising from my entrails to my head,
it bore your son — I never doubted that it would have been a boy, complicated like
you but with dark brown eyes like mine because, according to Mendelian law, the gene
for brown eyes is dominant. But the tests delivered from pharmacy to pharmacy to
Madeleine, who was in on it, were always negative. My red dress, which in fact you
didn't like, was sterile.

Why did I have sex with a stranger after the brief official trip to
Italy that I'd extended by three days on the Adriatic for myself ? I was able to
tell Madeleine that the weeks had been long without you, that I was exasperated, or
desperate, that finally, away from home, I had worked up the courage to anger you by
taking the stupidest risk, to sneer at your intelligence, your wisdom and its laws.
No, that's not true, you had nothing to do with it. The man was there for the
taking, he was smooth, easy, hot, he made me laugh for forty-eight hours, took me
dancing on the sand, humming his song. I have a nomadic body, I always have, you
knew that too before you took me, and when I drink I can have the mind of a shop
girl who sees herself whirling on the beach with a handsome dark-haired man in the
setting sun.

That was why, when a nurse sat me in a deep armchair, wrapped in a warm
sheet, and suggested that I rest as she stroked my hand for a moment, I whirled
again. I had plenty of sobs, the kind that she, a nice girl with beautiful teeth and
golden hair, would soothe again and again, all day long. Mine welled up from nowhere
or from my shoulders, a little higher than my heart in any case. I saw myself as the
very image of infinite desolation because a thread of blood would be soaked up by
the white gauze that parted my legs, what a pity. Madeleine brought me back to the
house. My absence was shorter than for a case of bronchitis, the whole thing was
uncomplicated.

You came by day after day, for a few minutes or an hour. I'd rarely
seen you so often. We engaged in idle chitchat, you kept asking if I needed
anything, as if chocolate or tea or a newspaper could make the late afternoons pass.
The evening when you decided to rock me, with all the lights out, to murmur that I
must get over the black spider dwelling in me, I thought you were about to take me
back and that life would be more beautiful, because more solemn than before, like in
the song about the lovers, those whose bodies are exultant yet who know that they're
together in a bedroom without a cradle.

The time had come to be more beautiful than before, and under your
fingers I was, you left very late, for once. And never came back.

But I am certainly more beautiful than before. There's light in my
little head that has chosen to come here to be illuminated, as if it were a clinic
where they kindly extirpate waste matter from you before it builds up.

What I know is that you didn't leave because of the boy on the shore of
the Adriatic. At the moment when I was dancing with him, you were starting to look
at other women less innocently and to acquire from me some lightness that may have
led you afterwards to the bed of some laughing woman or other. Nor did you leave
because of the child, that ball of shadow that disappeared at an age when it's still
possible to have two fathers. You left because I'd lied to you about my desires and
the reasons for the red dress, and because I made love to you with ulterior motives,
with thoughts that betrayed our luminous noons and that betrayed you.