The Origin of Species (66 page)

“How are you doing, Ma?” he would ask her on the phone.

“
Eh,’m’beh
. Not too bad.”

Alex had wandered through the Jean Talon market a few times watching the Italian women at their shopping, silent old ones in black whose lined faces read like history books, or thick-legged
molisane
from Campobasso or Agnone doing their shopping for Sunday dinner.
Lasagn’ a tacchun’
, his mother used to make on Sundays, her local specialty, homemade lasagna noodles cut into squares and sopped with tomato sauce. Alex had never really liked them much. He’d preferred the real lasagna, in the oven, with meat. Most of his childhood, in fact, had been a matter of not liking things much, what he was, where he’d come from. He hadn’t liked his mother, for instance: he couldn’t remember what had triggered it, but suddenly, at eight or nine, everything she did had become loathsome to him. He couldn’t stand being touched by her, the least sign of affection—false, false, it all seemed, as if it were some kind of play for him. He had forgotten that. He was always thinking that she was the one, a cold fish, but she had tried and he had repulsed her, in the heartless way of a child.

His meal had come up. Tony, the second son, the sensitive one, maybe, slimmer and more morose than Carmen, brought it over. No doubt he wanted to be a poet or hockey star instead of languishing here in his father’s restaurant.

“Dad wanted to know if you wanted a cappuccino after. We just got the machine in. On the house.”

So they had sold out like the rest.

“Sure. Thanks. Why not?”

He felt comforted by the familiar hodgepodge of the place, the hockey sticks, the Paris street scenes, the maps of Italy, the family photos near the cash. There were grandchildren, it seemed, two beefy Domenic-like boys of three or four, identical twins, from the look of them. A photo showed them with their mother, beefy and Domenic-like in her turn, the whole lot of them hopelessly ungainly and unattractive, with their round balloon faces and sausagey limbs, yet somehow necessary.

Alex ate his special. Spaghetti and meatballs, Disney cuisine, but his secret favorite. As he was finishing, Domenic himself came waltzing over with his cappuccino, done in the Italian style, with just a whisper of scummy foam across the top.

He rested a wide butt cheek on the corner of an empty table.

“What is it, Alex? Woman problems, I’ll bet. That’s what it looks like.”

“Something like that.”

“My sons, you know, they used to bring girls home all the time, a different one every week. Finally I said, enough. Just bring the one you’re going to marry. Otherwise it’s a waste of time.”

The old story. They all got together, it seemed, these immigrant oldsters, and thought up ways to screw over their children.

Domenic’s eye was already scoping the room for someone more important to talk to.

“And your family? They’re okay?”

“Everyone’s fine, I think.”

Domenic dropped his voice down to his preaching tone.

“Don’t ever forget your family. They’re all you’ve got in the end, don’t forget that.”

He was off again, glad-handing. Not like Alex’s mother at all, really. Someone like Domenic you could read with your eyes closed; not his mother. If she died, she would take all the stolid mysteries of herself to the grave, all the things he had never asked her about.

Some years earlier two of her brothers had been killed in a car crash in Italy. This was at the point in Alex’s undergraduate years when he’d been going through his first round of therapy and had thought it important to talk about your emotions.

“How are you feeling about your brothers?” he had finally ventured, in his halting dialect.

There was a long pause. Maybe the question merely baffled her.

“You can’t say what it is when something happens like that,” she said at length. “There aren’t words for it. I can’t tell you.”

She was like him, maybe, only more so, more distilled. She was someone not much for this world.

He got up to settle the bill. Domenic took his cash, all the while talking around him in a florid, execrable French to the man in the suit and tie, who was working on his gnocchi at one of the counter seats. Alex noticed Domenic had charged him for the cappuccino but said nothing, paid his money, and headed out to the street.

H
e couldn’t bear returning to his apartment and kept walking east on St. Catherine, past Ogilvy, now liberated of its apostrophe, past le Pub Peel, past le magasin Eaton. Before he knew it he’d gone beyond Place des Arts and St. Lawrence, and the chain stores and designer shops had given way to the gay bars, the hookers in alleys, the discount shops and empty lots. It was like shedding history, like slinking out to its seedy outskirts.

He passed the California. He hadn’t seen Louie since their night there. There had been something angry in him then, something reckless. The situation in his homeland had gone bad again just as he had predicted, but he hadn’t wanted to speak about it, as if he was a free element now, as if the place had ceased to exist for him.

He cut north at St. Denis. The landscape grew briefly civilized again—
UQAM
was here, with its reclaimed church front, the Bibliothèque Nationale, a few jazz bars, a string of student eateries. He and Liz had come out here one of their first nights in the city, when the place had still seemed exotic, then never again. There was an empty stretch up the hill between Ontario and Sherbrooke that was flanked by a ruined church, another fire victim, a huge barn of a place sitting gaping and charred like a casualty of war.

He crossed Sherbrooke, just anonymous high-rises here, and walked up to St. Louis Square. The place sat quiet and still in its mellow lamplight as if it had never left the nineteenth century, the trees and shrubs that bordered the walkways offering out their little gifts of trembling leaves. Around the square sat the houses of the old bourgeoisie, with their mansards and scallops and turrets, most of them newly regentrified after
dereliction, so that even the down-and-outs who mainly peopled the square had the dignified look of young clerics or bank clerks out for their promenade. In one of those ironies that gave Alex black-hearted pleasure, the square’s French name, Carré St. Louis, was a misnomer: the correct word in French for this sort of square, as it happened, was
square
.

He doubled back toward downtown along Prince Arthur, where the first straggling sidewalk merchants and performers of the season had set up shop, and crossed again. Without quite realizing it, he had instinctively kept to his own little shoal of city, the few dozen blocks he had hardly strayed from his entire time here. Over on Milton was the ominously named Last Word bookshop, whose dusty, narrow aisles he had spent many hours among; then St. Urbain, former heart of the old Jewish ghetto, and the monstrous apartment-cum-shopping complex at Parc, for which whole city blocks had been razed. Up Aylmer was the Yellow Door, a basement hole-in-the-wall: Margaret Atwood had read there, and Leonard Cohen had played.

He had reached McGill. Around the residences great heaps of belongings had been piled up along the curbs, beanbag chairs, stereos, green garbage bags full of clothes, while squealy girls in tennis gear or sloppy sweats hugged each other and cried and made fusses and their fathers stared off into the middle distance or loaded things into their cars. Another year gone. Alex cut across the quadrangle, already ghostly with abandonment, and hiked up McTavish to Pine. From there the mountain stared at him, and from its peak, with its grid of Christmas lights, the Saint-Jean-Baptiste cross. All his time here that damned cross had loomed over him from every angle and he had never been up to it, had yet to piss on one of its girders or give one a kick to say he had come and seen.

He started up the mountain. It was a lot darker here than on the streets, positively spooky, the greening trees whispering in the half-wind with the high-pitched trill of winging bats. He had no proper sense of the mountain’s network of paths, and as soon as he had started up, his objective, the cross, was cut off from view. He would just keep going upward, he figured, until he reached the top. At least the weather was holding: the stars were out despite the earlier clouds, clearly visible here away from the haze of light from the streets, and the temperature actually seemed to have risen since the dip of the afternoon, hanging in the
pleasant zone between muggy and cold that marked the city’s few good days of spring.

The gay romping grounds were around here somewhere, but Alex had never been able to pin down exactly where. In his mind they were like some ancient Greek woodland or the forest of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, sylvan and unpredictable, bacchanalian, though the reality was probably a bit more sordid. Maybe the Honorable Mr. Trudeau was frolicking out there at that very moment, in his secret life; maybe Lévesque was there as well, and Fidel with his riding crop, and they were sorting out the question of bottoms and tops. “You fucked me,” Lévesque had apparently said at the constitutional talks. Maybe he had meant it literally.

Now, isn’t all that stuff just rumor? I mean, he practically made his name because of his way with the ladies
.

Yes, but just look at the ladies, Peter. Look at his wife—what was she, all of sixteen when he met her? Meanwhile he was pushing fifty. There’s got to be something funny there
.

Well, I don’t mind the occasional sixteen-year-old myself, when I can get one
.

(Laughing) I think you’re going to see some mail on that one, Peter
.

All kidding aside, yuk yuk, sure, I can see the whole manly thing, the canoeing and the spearfishing in Cayo Largo and all that. I’m thinking of that scene in D. H. Lawrence where the two guys wrestle naked in front of the fire. But when it comes down to the crunch—

Making babies, I guess you mean. Ensuring the line
.

That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but I see your point
.

Alex continued upward. He passed a jogger, then no one. It was amazing how quickly the city disappeared here—a few zigs, a few zags, and it all fell away, the noise, the traffic, the lights. He was in the middle of bush. He could smell the damp of the earth, the metallic after-smell of old cold, the rot resurfacing from the fall; he could hear every rustle of leaf and crack of twig. Everything was shadows. It was only once he had gained the wide path that led up to the lake that the small fear in him began to abate—there were cyclists here, other walkers. He had forgotten what a beast the dark could be, how the fear of it was coded in his cells. Maybe that was the main job of civilization, to ensure adequate lighting.

He came to the curve that overlooked the lake, which was just a crater of inky black now. Just below was the spot where Jimmy had smashed Ariel’s head with a rock that morning. So long ago. He ought to leave a
little marker of what had happened, a pictograph or something. Then a million years from now, when the fossil record had grown patchy and the achievements and failings of this particular phase of human development indistinct, archeologists would puzzle over it and form a theory of a lost subculture of protohumans, a warlike tribe of limited brain and primitive culture that had flourished briefly, then vanished from the earth.

At the Chalet he paused for a smoke. He had never figured out the use of this place: it was the size of a banquet hall, with buttressed rafters and Group-of-Sevenish paintings ringing the walls like the stations of the cross, but no concessions, no place to sit, nothing but empty space, as if it was still awaiting its august purpose. Beyond it, at the lookout, little clusters of hooligans and lovers stared out at the lights of the city, which were nothing but the incandescence of tungsten yet seemed to promise a million mysterious things, on and on beyond the snaking river until they gave way to the night.

Signs had started appearing for the cross, but they led into the deserted frontier that was the far side of the mountain. He rounded a curve and it was as if he had gone over to the dark side of the moon—to the west was the floodlit dome of St. Joe’s, the city’s great tit, and beside it the lights of U of M, but then beyond that was black. It took him a moment to make sense of this blighted dark: it was the cemetery. It seemed to stretch as vast as the park itself, rising to a second peak that was like the first one’s doppelgänger. Alex felt a little chill: all along, this second mountain had shadowed the first. He had the dim sense he ought to be able to wrest some sort of meaning out of that, maybe that things came in twos: the male and the female; the quick and dead; the yin and the yang; the light and the dark. The French and the English.

He was alone out here now, walking the line between the opposites. Some thug could come out of the bush, some wild animal, some fearsome monster of the soul.
I shall tell you all
. Or maybe Satan himself, come to take him to the pinnacle.

Lucky you brought old Peter along with you, at least. You couldn’t spare one of those smokes, could you?

His shoes crunched in the dark with the gut-rattling distinctness of a soundtrack. He couldn’t have mapped his route but had the sense he’d been spiraling around and around up the mountain, as in those pictures you saw of Mount Purgatory in the
Divine Comedy
. Then at last the
cemetery ended and the city began to reappear again in occluded swatches through the bush, though at angles Alex had never seen it from before, that made it appear completely unfamiliar. Views north into the streets of Outremont; views east, the lights stretching flat as a prairie, flat as the sea. It was more or less alien territory in that direction—
pure laine
Quebecois who went back to the Conquest; Azorean fishermen who had come from a world as lost as Atlantis and sold Tide and Mae Wests now in corner grocery stores; Chinese who had been here for decades but whom no one knew anything about. Then the Italians, the Guatemalans, the Hasidic Jews, and more Quebecois, as cultured as courtiers or the worst sorts of louts, Gitanes-smoking, Pepsi-drinking cursers of the tabernacle, but who might as well have lived beyond a wall like East Berliners for all Alex had had to do with them.