Self (28 page)

To get my three-year Bachelor’s degree I needed to take two philosophy courses (I chose philosophy of language, and philosophy and the sciences), but I also opted for Roger’s Conrad course. So the activities of a summer — Conrad and fucking — were prolonged for a whole year. What with my private creative efforts and the necessities of sleeping and eating and a little swimming, it was a busy year.

It ended in the same weather and the same state of seeming depopulation as it had started in: a studentless Roetown in the hot humidity of summer. Yet again he had been “tricked” into teaching a summer course. I knew he wouldn’t be back before nine in the evening at the earliest. I stopped up the bathtub and the bathroom sink, plugged the excess-water drains and turned the hot-water taps on. Roger had great water pressure; his taps were gushers. As the carpet in the corridor was turning a darker shade of red, I wrote FUCK YOU on his bed with his shaving cream. Downstairs, as I was finishing choosing which of his books I would steal — as many as I could carry, including the small
Fables de La Fontaine
— his staircase was becoming part of a fountain, with a rippling effect that was very pretty. I left just ahead of the water. You may think that, having confessed to these immaturities, I feel apologetic. Quite the opposite. I was too young to have the daring to burn his house down; that’s my sole regret. A fire is the only suitable punishment for a man with a cold, selfish heart. The worst he came back to was a house flooded with Congo water, with bloated floors that did not creak, for once, as he splish-splashed across them and up
the staircase. I am sure he did not seize upon the small detail that this cold water had once been hot.

I will not go so far as to say he was a fraud. But to live with such a discrepancy between intellect and physical passion indicates a lack of integrity. I was supposed to be a secret not only to others but to Roger himself. I couldn’t be seen by family, professors and students; most important, I couldn’t be seen by Joseph Conrad. I was something neatly and conveniently bowdlerized from Roger’s mind. To him I was no more than terrific sex. The passion suffused no further than his loins, certainly not to his heart — which is what he wanted to hide, this chasm between cold indifference and wild abandon, this lack of communication between what he felt and what he did. Surely Conrad would not have approved, he who detailed the twists that humanity can put itself through while he was securely moored to his Jessie. When Roger dressed he made himself presentable not only to the world but to himself. He put on a garb of civility and introspection that was exquisitely tailored to reflect the folly of the human condition as lived in trading-posts and on ships in the distant Malay Archipelago — but not in Roetown. In Roetown, everything would be orderly and on his terms. Thus we fucked on his schedule, at his absolute convenience. He had not only no interest in visiting, say, South America, the very thought of which sent my mind into dream-mode overdrive, but no interest in deviating one inch from his chosen path. If Roger had been out buying milk and I had been on the other side of the street and I had told him that, if he didn’t cross over, things would be finished between us, he would have shouted, “No, I’m going to buy milk,” and he would have continued.

Meanwhile, not realizing that I was as replaceable as a litre of two percent, I invested myself in him. I never felt I was compromising because it was always a pleasure to be with him. Being the undisciplined student that I was, I always had free time for him. It was only when I understood what little magnetic draw I had on him — none — that I saw it all as a compromise, saw how there was never any balance, only a master and his pet, a dot with a circle around it. The sex we had was amazing, I can’t deny that. The memories of it still crackle in my mind like a dry wood fire. But in barely a moment I went from “When next?” to “Never again.” Between the last time of carefree carnality and my near-destruction of his house there passed no more than a few days and one conversation, which started when I turned to Roger in bed, when we were reading, after, and I asked, for the first time, “Roger, what are we? I mean, you and me, what are we? What is our relationship?” It was a conversation he would rather not have had. Words, with their precise meanings, even if hedged and taken back, would trap him. They did. When I silently turned back to my book and stared at the page, two feelings swirled in me: surprise and confirmation. My mind was busy going over events, reassessing exchanges, understanding things.

After that I couldn’t do it any more. His dick was the same, but something in me had changed. He was a vulgar man — how can you fuck vulgarity?

I was not in love with him, I must make that clear. Despite what romance novels claim, love, like any living thing, settles where it feels it has a future. I never thought Roger and I had a future. I never envisaged settling in Roetown with him in some permanent domestic arrangement. There were too many differences, not so much in ourselves as in our lives. He
was fifty, I was twenty-two, he was established, I was not; and so on. So our pleasures were of the moment. My mistake was to believe that he had faith in that moment. He didn’t. His vasectomy, that little scar on his scrotum, reflected not only the output of his penis, but that of his heart. If I were not there, if I drowned in the river Wade, he’d find himself another fresh young cunt. I doubt she’d get the key to his house, though.

I left Roetown in a single motion, a single breath. I walked from Roger’s place to mine, loaded with books, pausing only to throw his key into the Wade (did he think I kept it? Did he have his locks changed, fearing my return?) I packed my things, dashed off some goodbye letters, made a few phone calls, said goodbye to Sarah, forfeited my part of the rent for the rest of the summer, donated my futon to a future resident of the house, sold my desk and chair to Martin for a song, left some old clothes to fend for themselves, loaded up a taxi like a mule — but he wouldn’t take my bike, so I cycled to the bus station while the car rode empty — and departed for Montreal.

It’s only when you’re young, or living near a volcano, that you can uproot in under three hours. I arrived at my aunt’s house in Montreal not in catastrophe, only unexpectedly, and quite tired. And I didn’t stop there. By the time I finally allowed myself to catch my breath and think, I was in Mexico, the cheapest exotic destination I had found at short notice.

(Some may wonder at the short treatment I give my only living relative. My childless aunt — and she exuded childlessness, like her husband — was a conventional woman. Her life had flowed like cement: it had been changeable only when it was fresh, for once it had set, she had set. Life to her was a
mould, not a moult. I remember coming down one morning to find her ironing some of my clothes. She had been ironing her dog’s winter coats, she told me, and thought she’d use the occasion to smooth out these few items of mine. Beside two tartan dog coats (it was a Scottish terrier) lay a carefully folded blouse or two, a skirt, a pair of pants and a man’s shirt. She had laid them in two piles: the blouses and skirt in one, the pants and the shirt in the other. When she had finished with a last blouse, I thanked her, pointedly stacked her two piles into one and carried my clothes away. This was as close as we came to broaching the personal matter of sex. Our smiles were the glue that held up our masks: behind hers was an older woman who was shocked and scandalized; behind mine a young woman who was quite happy with who she was. Her husband, a retired engineer, mostly kept himself busy in another part of the house.)

At the Cancún airport the question “What in the world am I doing here?” struck me hard. I thought of scurrying back to Roetown to try to patch things up with Roger, but I steadied myself. I spent two and a half months in the land of the Maya. I met Françoise, a French woman, and together we explored every Mayan site we heard of or read about, which, considering the paucity of public transportation and the remoteness of many of the smaller, less-known ruins, involved a lot of walking, some insistent waving at the occasional passing truck, car or mule, and the odd night in the open air in our sleeping bags. Once we got a ride on the back of a truck with farm workers being driven to the fields. Our presence elicited smiles and shy laughter from these friendly, unassuming men. I idealize them when I say this, but I felt they lived simple, whole lives. They were grounded, their toes like roots, and
when they lifted their hands above their heads with their hoes, they touched the blue sky. I envied this.

My most lingering memory of Mayan civilization is of an isolated site whose name I forget, just a few ruins struggling to survive in the jungle. Françoise and I had the site to ourselves. Atop a small hill lay the remains of a square temple. The hazards of decay had resulted in the caving in of all four walls of the ground floor, with only the corners holding things up, and the entire collapse of the second floor except for one expanse of wall. The result was a structure that looked remarkably like a huge chair, a chair for the gods. I thought of Joe’s painting. In that setting, though, alone on a hill looking up at the sky, surrounded by a strangling jungle, this chair, empty for centuries, struck me as a symbol not of expectancy but of death. In the other Mayan sites we visited, I could never quite imagine the people who had once hurried in and out and about. But looking at this ruin, transformed into something new, unintended and outsized, I felt in a forceful way the ceaseless passage of time and the silence of those it leaves behind.

We saw a barbarity in a village north of Mérida. With a few hours to kill before catching the bus back to town, we had the good fortune, we thought, of coming upon a
fiesta taurina
, a bullfighting festival. Françoise and I were excited. This was the perfect complement to the austere silence of ruins. We talked animatedly to the people around us.
Oh no, our Spanish isn’t that good, but thank you.… One month.… To Mérida and then to Quintana Roo.… Oh beautiful, we love it
. The word Kah-nah-dah spread around us. My country always fared better than Françoise’s. A poorly played trumpet split the air.

In fact this
fiesta taurina
was neither a festival — it was a single event starting shortly after we arrived, as the sun was
setting — nor a bullfight, since there was neither matador nor
toro bravo
. Here in this makeshift plaza de toros there was no fearsome beast with killer horns that circled the arena furiously, only a bewildered domestic bull, a grass-eating bovine with a camel-like hump of fat on its neck that trotted in, basset-hound ears flopping, and then stood still, surprised at the number of people and the level of noise. It peered about with its moist black eyes, which I imagined short-sighted. It dipped its head, probably searching for grass. As for the putative bullfighter, there was not one but many to confront the single animal, and they were not dressed as matadors but as women. These mustachioed cow-badgerers wore exaggerated makeup, long dresses, hips of stuffed clothes and huge balloon tits that constantly moved about, to the unending hilarity of the mostly male audience. They pushed the bull, they kicked it, they pulled its tail, they spat in its eyes — everything and anything to get it to charge. But it merely bellowed and shook and jumped a little — the limits of its fighting abilities — and so the spectacle was transformed from a bullfight to a rodeo: if it wouldn’t charge, then who could stay the longest on it? When it became obvious that the beast had no more bronco in it than it had
toro
, “How many” became the question of the day. The bull staggered as three, then four, then five men clambered onto it. As a sixth made the attempt it collapsed, to an uproar of laughter. A knife flashed and a man in drag stabbed the animal in the neck. Red blood oozed to the rhythm of a pounding heart.
This
would get it going.
Olé, olé, olé
, cried the people. Indeed. The ruminant bellowed and shook as it never had before. It even managed a few arrested charges, which produced quite a hoopla. Dresses swirled. A sword appeared. The brute would be put to death like the real
thing, with the plunge of a blade between its shoulders, right to its heart.
Olé, olé, olé
. White handkerchiefs waving. Except that there was this bothersome hump of fat exactly where the sword should go. No matter, he would try it anyway; he placed himself in front of the bull, adopting the pose of a matador, and charged. But all he managed to do, the prick, was to get his sword stuck in the hump. The bull shrieked. Wild-eyed and slobbering, it hurled itself against a truck that formed that part of the arena wall, hoping to push the vehicle aside and get away, while men and boys kicked at it and laughed joyously. Which is when we stood up and left.

I felt the chill of horror — really, a drop of several degrees Celsius within my chest. We burst into tears of rage and hurt in a deserted street. A woman in a doorway noticed us and looked concerned. We turned away and headed for the bus stop.

At odd moments during my trip I started work on a new story. My life lacked any structure, any pattern, seemed to lurch from one heartbeat to the next. But this would steady it. I remember working on the story on a small, wobbly table facing a whitewashed wall in a hotel room in pleasant Mérida. Paper, pen, some ideas — and me, alone, again.

I could have continued travelling, but September had rolled around and my mind still worked like a student’s: September was the month when order and discipline started, even though I had given up on doing an honours year at Ellis.

I returned to Montreal and, for no reason stronger than it was where my plane landed, I decided to stay there. I found myself a cosy dive of an apartment in the Plateau Mont-Royal, furnished it with cheap odds and ends that I bought on
Ontario Street, kitchen stuff that I got at a Jewish store up the street, and a thin, hard futon that I purchased on St-Denis street and carried home on my back. It was the first time I was living on my own and, cheerless though I suppose the place was, I was delighted with it. It was
my
place; the quaint gas stove lit up only for me, the bath filled up with hot water only for me, the mail in the box was only for me.