Cockroach (19 page)

Just after 3 p.m., my doorbell rang. I went out into the hallway and saw a
school backpack mounting the stairs.

I am here, I said.

I got lost, Sehar said. This building is confusing.

She entered my apartment. I waited for her to pick up
the
CD
, but she was more interested in the walls and in assessing my few
sticks of furniture. She looked at the bed and the desk, and then she glanced out the
window. A view, she said sarcastically.

Well, here are the boys, I said, and handed her the
CD
.

Cool, she said. Can we play it?

My
CD
player is in the shop, I said. I think I'll get
another one soon.

She laughed and threw the
CD
on the bed.

So, what are we doing here?

Tea, I said.

Tea, she repeated and barely smiled.

I told her to sit, and she looked out the window while I gathered tea from
a kitchen drawer. I was out of sugar. I excused myself, took the stairs, and knocked at
the door of the Pakistani family downstairs. The wife opened, half veiling herself with
the door, peeking out at me like a Bollywood heroine from behind a palace window.

Sugar, please? I asked.

She nodded, closed the door, and wordlessly opened it a moment later, a
small bowl of sugar in her hand.

I danced up the stairs. In my kitchen, the water was boiling. Good timing,
I thought. Timing is important. I offered Sehar tea.

I do not have much time, she said, and wrapped her fingers around the
mug.

Well, then. Have you ever had sex? I asked her.

No. But I've kissed boys.

Did they touch you?

A little.

I do not want to touch you. I just want to watch you touching
yourself.

I am not sure if I can do that . . . with you here, looking at me . .
.

I won't look at you, I said. We can both face the wall and pretend
that neither of us knows what the other is doing.

Sehar stood up, went into my bedroom, and got under the bedcover. I closed
the curtains. A feeble light laminated the white wall. I sat on the chair near the bed.
We both faced the wall, although first I saw her hand slowly disappear under the
bedcover. There was silence. I turned my head and saw that her eyes were closed. Her
knees lifted the sheet like a tent. I imagined her fingers steadily rotating and her
mind projecting on the wall images of boys and young hairless singers.

I can't do it, she said after a minute. She looked at me. Are you
crying? Oh my God, your eyes . . . This is weird! I can't do it. I have to go.

She pulled up her panties, got out of bed, fixed her skirt, opened the
door, and ran down the stairs.

AFTER SEHAR LEFT
, I took back the sugar bowl to the Pakistani
family downstairs. The woman opened the door. This time none of the children stuck their
heads into the doorway. When I asked the woman where her husband was, she said, Factory.
A baby started to cry from inside. She slowly, apologetically, closed the door. I ran
back upstairs. I opened the curtains in
my bedroom and for some
reason I felt an overwhelming urge to pull out the professor's letters. They all
had the same type of envelope, yellow with an aged feel. The paper inside was rough and
thin, the handwriting impeccable, large and clear. Each letter started with the words
Mon cher
— no name, just
Mon cher
. In the first one there
was a lengthy description of the writer's long walk on the beach, details of the
sky, the blue water. She (I determined that the letter writer was a woman when she
accused the breeze of lifting her skirt and carrying her away) described an older couple
who were walking hand in hand, and how seeing that made her feel happy;
le sable qui
se lève avec le vent
reminded her of something, her childhood, her
grandmother, a stroll among the flowers. Everything seemed to be about the past, the
writer's own past. The letter dripped with Proustian memories:
Le visage
mélancolique, les textures, l'innocence, les pas, le vieux monsieur avec
un chapeau
. The subject was her feelings or some romantic escapade. The
professor was never mentioned, or addressed for that matter; the letter was a monologue
about the writer's own emotions, her transcendent state of being, with the
professor a receptacle for her
temps perdu
. Poor professor, I thought, how
deprived and left out he must have felt, excluded by all these
préoccupations
avec la nature, le vent, les hirondelles
. What a lousy lay she must have been,
imagining him to be someone else when he was on top, and something else again when he
was on the bottom.

In the second letter, the writer seemed to reply to something the
professor must have hinted about money, poverty, and their relationship. But everything
was dismissed in a smooth, complacent romantic phrase:
Ah, les artistes et
l'argent,
toujours la souffrance pour l'art et l'amour,
and the letter proceeded to talk about a luscious meal that was presented to the writer
by
le chef René lui-même, sur une terrasse sublime avec une vue très
agréable. Le poisson frais et la dame au visage ridé
. The professor
must have eaten his shoes from envy and hunger. The writer signed only L. at the end,
not even a return address. She reminded me of Sylvie, a piano teacher I had met at the
gourmet store where I worked before my rope incident. I used to deliver Sylvie's
groceries. One time she offered me wine and pâté — or was it foie gras?
— and I woke up the next morning in her sensual silk sheets.

Sylvie did not walk, she floated, her expensive silk nightgown trailing
behind her as if it came with its own breeze. For her, everything had to be beautiful.
She had to live a permanent life of beauty, and everything that surrounded her had to
have a nostalgic or poetic meaning to it. Her soft voice, her stylish dresses, her good
manners concealed a deep hidden violence and a resentment of nature's indifference
to her ephemeral existence. We always met in sophisticated places. There were always
dinners, cocktails, theatre. I soon became fed up with her make-believe life. I was
bored. I hung around for a while because of the food, the wine and cheese. But any hint
of misery from me, of problems or violence, was automatically dismissed and replaced
with something happy, light, or pretty. Everything was described as
charmant,
intéressant, d'une certaine sensibilité, la texture
. All her
friends, too, lived in a state of permanent denial of the bad smells from sewers,
infested slums, unheated apartments, single mothers on welfare, worn-out clothing. No,
everything had to be perfect,
every morsel of food had to be well
served — presentation, always presentation, the ultimate mask.

I slept with all of Sylvie's friends. It was easy — all I had
to do was call them and ask something about
un regard que j'ai senti de votre
part et je voulais savoir si je m'imaginais des choses
. It worked on all
of them. Stabbing one another in the back was fine as long as it was for romance, a
story — in short, something presentable. One night when we all went for a dinner
at a French restaurant, I stole their wallets, walked through the restaurant kitchen,
and took off out the back door. I took the cash, tossed the empty wallets in the gutter,
and went down to the Copa, sat at the bar, and drank.

Of course, Sylvie and her friends knew that I had done it. They knew
perfectly well that it was I who had slipped my hand into their leather bags. None of
them said a word; not even their boyfriends dared to confront me. They knew that I would
slash their tires, enter their homes, poison their dogs, and break their stereos. They
knew because I had showed them my scar. I made up stories about it. The preppie
boyfriends felt that they were in the company of a noble savage, and they liked it. One
of them, Jean-Mathieu his name was, the son of some big-shot industrialist, invited us
once to his apartment in Île Ste-Hélène. He lived in one of those
expensive apartments with faux shantytown architecture. While everyone was dancing and
sniffing coke downstairs on the kitchen counter, he called me upstairs to his room. He
closed the door, went to his closet, and said,
Regarde, mon ami. Ça, mon ami,
c'est pour ceux qui
want to mess with me. He pulled out a Magnum, a
beauty of an arm, all silver. It must have been
worth thousands of
dollars. He pointed it at my face and started to laugh. The fucker was high. His hand
extended, he was smiling at me, playful.

I smiled back, looked him in the eyes, and faked a loud laugh, leaning my
body away from the gun barrel. I pretended to admire the gun and slowly reached for his
wrist and pointed the weapon towards the bed. Then I pulled his face towards me and
said: Did you ever show that to your mommy? His expression changed as I started to twist
his arm slowly. He got confused. I kept my reaction ambiguous, smiling at him, giggling,
talking about what a beauty the gun was. Then I said, This beauty,
lâche-le
, I want to see it. I took it slowly out of his hand. I popped
out the magazine quickly and pulled back the top, and the bullet in the firing chamber
jumped onto the bed. I pressed the button and the chamber snapped back to its original
position. I pointed it at Jean-Mathieu, and said, Now it is safer to put in
someone's face, no? He nodded, gazing at me with coke-glazed eyes. I found the
bullet on top of the bed and inserted it back in the magazine. Shoved the magazine in.
Pushed the security button down. Then I opened the closet, grabbed one of
Jean-Mathieu's cotton shirts, wiped the gun with it, and, laughing, I said to him,
A baby like that has to be well taken care of, no? We do not want any fingerprints on
it. I held on to the gun with the shirt and put it back on the shelf. Then I patted my
palm on Jean-Mathieu's face like a godfather, and said, Nice gun. You should
always be careful where you aim it. Let's go downstairs before the bowl with the
white stuff gets lost in the noses of those brats.

I was the one who provided Sylvie's friends with drugs. I
bought the low-quality stuff from Big Derrick and over-charged the
friends for it. They were corrupt, empty, selfish, self-absorbed, capable only of seeing
themselves in the reflection from the tinted glass in their fancy cars. The women lived
a hedonistic existence, not caring what the boys did as long as their surroundings were
fashionable and presentable. I despised them; they admired me.

THERE WAS NOTHING IN
the professor's letters but lost,
empty lives and illusions of escape from life's ugliness. As I read them, I
thought how some people must despise how they look. They must vomit when they see
themselves naked, filthy, and wrinkled. They must be horrified to realize that they are
made of skin, flesh that can be cut, boiled, and eaten, that they perspire, that fluid
runs through them, that always, whatever they eat, no matter how presentable it is, the
food that comes on fancy plates, that is savoured as it is illuminated by small candles
on red tablecloths, that gives off the aroma of spices, will always, always be
transformed into something ugly and repulsive. They are obsessive about masking their
humanity, their dung, their droppings, their sweat, their curved toenails that grow and
never stop growing. They despise this world and therefore they are engaged in a constant
act of covering themselves up — covering up their faces, their feet, their nails,
their breath, their decaying bodies. Though I discovered that one of Sylvie's
friends, Thierry, the heretic son of a well-known conservative politician, was fed up
with it all. He could no longer see beauty in the make-believe. I gave his girlfriend,
Linda, a
few orgasms between chains and slaps, and she told me
about Thierry and his obsession with feces. He eats them, she said. He calls them
mes petits bonbons
. He waits for me every morning outside the bathroom,
reminding me not to flush the toilet. He hates it when things disappear down the drain.
He scoops out the feces and I have to clean everything afterwards.
C'est
horrible!

Meanwhile, my poor naïf professor was charmed by
le savoir-vivre,
le savoir-faire, le savoir
this and that. Peasant! Educated peasant! He must
have thought that some of this beloved letter-writer's glamour would spill over
onto him and provide an ingenious cover for his deep desire to hide his misery, his
provincial childhood. He was waiting for someone else to give him cover. He was too
proud to do it himself, and too conscious of his own revulsion at life's raw
truth. At least I am not. I see people for what they are. I strip them of everything and
see their hollowness. I strip them, and they are relieved of the burden of colour and
disguise.

I walked to the kitchen, struck a match, and lit one of the
professor's letters. I watched it burn in the sink. A magnificent bonfire rose up
and consumed it all: the Mediterranean shores, the fancy resorts, the rolling green
landscape that stretched down to southern beaches, the old couples walking hand in hand,
and the soft winds that passed by and carried the puffs of smoke out of my window. I
looked up at the wall and I saw hundreds of roaches hypnotized, turned towards the light
source, waving their whiskers in farewell to the fire.

ON FRIDAY AT WORK
, Sehar was absent. I
was very curious about her whereabouts, but I knew it was useless to ask the waiter or
the cook or the dishwasher. Only her father knew the answer, and I could not ask him.
What if she had suddenly grown older, I thought, and could stay home alone? She would
walk the streets by herself, straight to her own house, and make her own food, get her
own cup of tea and sugar. What if she decided to leave home and find rapture with her
own kind and embrace the snow and long roads on her own?