Affairs of Art (2 page)

Two

H
ÉLÈNE, KNOWN AS BÉRANGÈRE, THE NAME
with which she signs her poems, wonders why François Dubeau chose a Christian funeral. She has spent enough time around him to know he was indifferent to the rituals he is imposing on them this morning. He had just come back from Mexico when she ran into him for the last time, in March, at the annual Symposium of Arts and Letters of which he was the magnificent driving force. She was fond of him, a tall boy with a rather feverish way of talking, always weighed down by a hundred file cards that he would change before your eyes into a discourse as orderly as a thesis, but crammed with anecdotal digressions of which his young disciples never tired. His peers feigned less interest but they wouldn't have missed a session, especially this spring, which they knew would be his last. Under the fluorescent lights they examined his colour and assessed his breathing, and their strained listening contained sorrow but also pleasure at being in the front row for the drama they would recount one day in some dialogue on tragedy.

She was truly sorry and had decided to tell him rather than wait until it was time for condolences. She had asked him outright to give her five minutes at the break, and they'd said their farewells before a bulletin board already covered with useful messages about the fall session of the university. “You won't be here,” she had said with a brutality of which she didn't know she was capable. “I wanted to tell you that I'll be very sad.” François's smile had been one of delight and he had replied that he would be very unhappy himself if she were to die the next day. Then he had immediately apologized.

“The eternity I'm about to enter is banal. I am perverse to the very end. I want to create moments more trying than death itself.” And thanked her for having provoked one.

She had not believed in his detachment but it didn't matter, it was far too late to try to solve an enigma that was none of her business. And so she had never thought him perverse. Not with those eyes, as brown and bright as the eyes of a beloved brother. And she had only to look around her, at the small groups that were converging again towards the amphitheatre, to make out far more convincing forms of duplicity, virtually inscribed on the genes, she thought, thereby accepting it in herself.

The hearse stops at the door of the church, the pall­bearers emerge from cars that follow it, their black suits like those of characters by a Magritte who would also have invented the May sky, blue with rounds of white. Had François wanted to strike his final pose as a functionary of the arts? A risky interpretation. Groups form and dissolve on the steps and the porch of the highest church in Outremont, dark clothes and controlled voices — except for Lucien, who distributes his soprano shrieks in all directions, his red scarf and his freshly hennaed hair, with the usual fabricated details of a death about which he knows nothing. François Dubeau simply wanted to bring them all together in an unsettling context, thinks tttt, as she resigns herself to going to the vestibule where Madame Dubeau, the mother, is presiding, in the company of the Abbé of the Arts.

Everyone knows her and she knows them all. She has the calmness of a death professional, skilled at putting them at ease with precise questions about their own lives, the progress of their work and, sometimes, about their children. She manages to dispatch them in thirty seconds that seem like minutes. The line of sympathizers is already thinner and she will have exhausted it before the coffin has been carried up the twenty steps to be placed beneath the Abbe's inaugural solemnity. To the very end, Madame Dubeau will take advantage of the fund of elegance her son has given her by dying publicly of the disease of the day, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, which she never refers to by its acronym and which suits her own slenderness so well. She is wearing the clinging monk's habit couturiers are beginning to combine with broad shoulderpads, which give her a stockier build.

Hélène feels small and utterly lacking in ancestors. She admires the composure without which this comedy organized by François would have turned into a bad joke. Perhaps mother and son had planned every detail of the ceremony together. Perhaps the very beautiful widow who is burying her child today promised a personal greeting to each of them, for it was she who taught him both the elegance and the utility of the warm,' friendly asides that became his trademark and inspired the digressions in his discourse.

Armchair psychology, Hélène chides herself as she takes her seat at the back, with those who represent the literary crowd rather than those in the plastic arts, who were closer to the great critic and historian who was François Dubeau. She continues nonetheless to assign to Madame Dubeau sorrow both atrocious and masterfully repressed. That, no doubt, is why they have all been for­bidden to accompany her to the cremation that will follow immediately after the funeral. Marianne Dubeau has decided to attend that alone, absolutely alone. The flames of Hell. Hélène will never find the words to get near them.

She does not know why she has instead been invited to François's apartment, along with a few others, an hour after the cremation. Madame Dubeau spoke vaguely about something he had prepared to be read to them. Hélène did not dare ask any questions. She finds it hard to imagine François writing some sort of spiritual testament; he wrote enough, some of it quite splendid, to have no need of repeating himself. Everything is known about his theoretical apparatus, which is not one, since he pushed iconoclasm to the point of always declaring his subjectivity in a ritual last paragraph wherein he professed (confessed) his love of art. Another would have been unable to extricate himself from this marshmallow. Not him. In the beginning he had been able to count on the protection of one of the big names in international criticism. Later, he himself became untouchable because he protected others in his turn. And exploited it to the full.

Hélène assumes she was invited because of that last conversation in March, which touched him perhaps. But she is not happy to be here among the chosen. She would rather go home to Van Home Street, have a coffee on her narrow balcony overlooking the woods that belong to the Sanctuary, and allow the notion of death, which will perhaps come to her in words, to seep in. She wonders if there was one who loved François, of the lovers who were known and who dot the nave now nearly full. It is they, most likely, whom she will see shortly, in the Outremont apartment, so near yet so remote, where she has never before set foot. She has no desire to absorb the discomfort of those boys whom she has never seen as men, a guilty thought that makes her smile. All sins are permitted in this place where the organ is hissing the first tremors of a false Mass for the dead intended for a bright spirit that has already taken flight.

A latecomer, the cultural affairs critic for the Opposition, has slipped in behind the gang from
Parallèle,
who are ostentatiously isolated on a side-aisle. Their prayerful attitude is the sum of all appearances, intended to be bare of pomp and ceremony.

No whisper, no shudder greets an adolescent altar boy who makes his way down the aisle to the bare coffin with the incongruous stride of a mercenary. On it he lays a fern whose forked root still drips damp earth, which leaves a mark on his surplice. Then on top of the fern he places an oblong engraving, a simple vellum picked out with gold leaf on which has been overprinted in black a thick question mark. Executed by brass-rubbing, a technique for tourists borrowed from Protestantism. Conceptual mockery. Interrogation of the living. Signifying and signified, farewell, through a sign. Crucifixion reinterpreted. Insult.

The adolescent altar boy also reads the epistle, a single paragraph without God, surely chosen by François Dubeau, as if he had wanted the harsh timbre of that changing voice. “For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” (Second Corinthians 4: 16-18)

From it the Abbé of the Arts takes a homily delicately shaped for non-believers, purged of any reference to Creator or Judge but finely crafted from the secular material of creation and justice. He takes them through the visible and the invisible in the days of François Dubeau's life, days devoted to the art of seeing. From the “eternal weight of glory,” he fashions an innocent desire to live on in their memory. For all of them, men and women devoted to the imagination, the critic's gaze will continue to penetrate that which is opaque, to indicate transparency.
Amen.

An ease settles into the coagulated substance that had held them frozen there. The choir crackles with the preparations for communion, there will be at most a dozen, distant cousins or childhood friends, who ‘will share the bread of the ignorant while the emancipated sit bathed in the dissonances of a piece for
ondes Martenot.
The purity of François, who had insisted on the presence of the
ondiste
though increasingly they were being replaced by synthesizers. Strident against the softness and assurances of the sun, which the stained-glass windows faded into a vulnerable light that was liable to strike you in the solar plexus.

Hélène watches the adolescent altar boy, wonders which of them, the Abbe or François, had spotted the high forehead above eyes of ice. From a distance their colour escapes her, but she can clearly sense the white body, naked under the cream-coloured alb, and the trace of pink that must recall from very close, when one em­braces him, the red mop of his childhood hair. Hélène is certain she has never met him, there is something impossible about him in their midst.

The pallbearers are back now, they loomed up out of nowhere as soon as the Abbe stopped waving the incense around the coffin, with the grace and brevity of a maïtre d'hôtel who knows when to step aside. Marianne Dubeau, alone in her pew, will be the only cortege. Heads turn towards the organist up above who should be starting some funeral march, but he is not at the keyboard. He can be seen gathering up his scores, preparing to leave. Now the reedy sound of a harpsichord can be heard from everywhere and nowhere, followed by the honeyed phrasing of a violin, and another, in canon. And equally round, equally clear and warm, a woman's laughter drinks in the first bars of Pachelbel's
Canon
that fills the nave from a hidden sound system: a London stereo recording by the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra under Karl Münchinger.

A brown-haired woman in a bright dress, the one who was laughing, looks at them defiantly now as she stands erect against the holy water stoup from where she observes their procession. The torrents of the full orchestra bury the violins when they reply to them. A canon. The
Canon,
now a vulgar piece of period music, serious music for imbeciles, lyricism for parvenus. He has inflicted on them this still life, this trickle of colours. No one dares to murmur in the presence of this un­known woman whose laughter has become a smile. The adolescent altar boy has come to stand one step behind her — watchman and archangel.

Hélène trembles at the beauty of the
Canon,
the version she has been listening to in secret under an envelope of pink and blue since the summer she turned twenty. There are sheets, there are burning sensations and long, long kisses in the curves of the strings. Indecency streams outside the church. For a moment, Hélène holds the gaze of the brightly dressed woman, who is the age of François and whose first wrinkles resemble his. In her smile, on her lip, is the atrocity of a lifelong pain.

Three

A
NEARLY PERSIAN CAT, DUSK BLUE, SLEEPS
under the closed piano. He never played it. Except for Hélène everyone knows that, having lived here for a few hours or a few days when François Dubeau still entangled them all. One after the other, or during the other, they had known his body, his bed, his coffee, his cat, and sometimes the words that pirouette beneath a lamp. They had poked about in the long bookcase that started low on the wall, to leave room for paintings. Only novels were corded there, aside from the Flaubert section that held stacks of biographies and secondary material, forbidden to even the closest friends.

Denis Léman was the last to have had the chance to be amazed by it. To secure François after an affair of a few days, he had made him a drawing. A wavy line emerging, black, from a red triangle, to which he believed he had succeeded in giving depth. What was important was the title:
An Unbroken Lament Rises from the Ergastulum
(Flaubert). But Dubeau knew the quotation came from the
Robert
dictionary, he knew everything, and he had given back the drawing and the trickery, had shown him to the door, had banished him without a word. That evening, François Dubeau had stopped needing disciples — or wanting them.

The air is heating up in the living room where the seven invited guests take their seats, squeezed onto the leather sofas three by three. Denis Léman will make do with the piano stool, with its view of the poignant Betty Goodwin that depicts in a pink holocaust the death of the body of a woman who has grown up without being born.

Marianne Dubeau came in only minutes before them but the Bordeaux is already in the glasses, simple ones, on the table — bare, Italian. The silence, the absurdity gnaw at them. Denis Léman thinks of those novels by Agatha Christie that assemble murderers or future murderers on a desert island or a train so they can inflict upon themselves the fate that has already been assigned them.

Dubeau was no joker, indeed he imposed gravity. Denis Léman wonders if he is going to die, though he has no sign of the terrible disease, nor does his lover of the moment, who faces him without meeting his gaze. A slow-acting poison, perhaps. It is still so obscure, the virus that is beginning to kill within their ranks, the plague that some say has a latency period of ten years. It has been three or four years since Denis Léman became entangled with Dubeau, and what does he know about Jean-Marc Daigle, his soon to be ex-lover of the moment, who was so beautiful before the terrible shadows killed his already dark eyes? Their gazes meet amid a shared terror brushed with hostility.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. The Seven Deadly Sins. Better, the seven of hearts, immortalized in Dubeau's bathroom by a Québécois emulator of Warhol, now consigned to obscurity. François was fond of that lithograph, printed in an edition of seven copies; it suggested a secret formula behind the number in the shape of a question mark. A sign, well, well, like the gold-and-black engraving that's just been burnt along with him. Seven of hearts, the death card. They had all been naked before the seven of hearts, surrendered during the most innocent ablutions. Certainly the boys, and, Denis believed, most likely Hélène and the calm dark-skinned woman who introduced herself as Évelyne and who is now meditating before a minute sketch by Dallaire, a cat-blue vase under pastel peonies planted on both a Niçois sea and a grandmother's shawl (1951). Denis Léman doesn't remember this weakness of the critic's. Pachelbel again. Surely François cannot have died a contrite convert.

He follows the thread and finds nothing. They've all slept with François Dubeau. The girls, no one knows when, but Jean-Pierre, the eldest man, has always maintained that François could as well have loved women — a poet like Hélène, a bright shadow like Évelyne. The other three are former lovers but above all the heirs apparent. Jérémie Viens,
Parallels
second official critic, who visited the Scandinavian countries with François, bringing back material for a thesis on modernity and the idea of North, which has just been given a promising brief mention in
Artpress.
Paul-Marie Lassonde, the junior faculty member who is in the best position to inherit François's tenured position; he is tuned in, like his mentor, to the Italo-French avant-garde to which he now connects the emerging Southern-Latinity. Gérald Marois, his rival, who should not be underestimated despite his more North American specialization, a clever operator who has obtained for the dean an invitation to a symposium on the fringes of the Venice Biennale.

They will share the spoils. Denis Léman and Jean-Pierre Daigle wonder to whom they will open their studios, to whom they will have to offer in collusion the scraps of their work that François brought into the world and never stopped defending, even after the cool flesh and the nights guarded by a blue cat that slept all the day long.

But it has been a long time since they've felt his presence, which became blurred when the plague appeared. Perhaps François Dubeau has repudiated them. An intellectual testament is about to be read and it will kill them: a manifesto for peonies and violins. A cruelty worthy of Flaubert. They should have been suspicious long ago.

Marianne Dubeau refills their glasses and, with a blink, asks for silence. “It is at François's request that I've brought you together here, as I'm sure you realize. He never told me why he chose you, you know that I never involved myself in his relationships. He has left me two texts. One for
Parallèle,
which he insisted, Jérémie, be published without the slightest correction or annotation. The other is in his bedroom under lock and key; he began writing it in February, and I swore that I would wait and hear it with you. Évelyne will read it, he wanted an unfamiliar voice, she's in her final year at the National Theatre School. Thank you, Évelyne, for taking on this unusual task.”

Her voice is expressionless and strong and Hélène wonders where she comes from. Nothing in the apartment reflects François's origins. A parvenu like all of them, perhaps, despite this mother with her educated widow's intonations. The furniture and the piano are ageless, all the edges of all the books are clean, he must have gone into art and literature less than twenty years ago, when we made the move from Presley to Vigneault and from Menaud to Major, in a few weeks, a few months. François was one of the first to go faster and farther, to free himself just enough of the overly Québécois straitjacket, to buy everything published by Editions de Minuit, to relinquish the study of Riopelle and devote himself to Pollock's heirs, to sniff out what was new in the new. Despite the harmony in this place, there is a clinical murmur in the air. Madame Dubeau is laying on the studiously cold manner a little too thick, she could have acquired her education and her class as a museum volunteer. Intellects made from yesterday's material, thinks Hélène, who owns the classics in paperback. François did a better job of gaining a foothold in the ‘world that finally came to this land of ignorance. But he is dead.

Madame Dubeau leaves the room, takes some time finding the text, they finally exchange a few words. “It's his last thesis, most likely,” says Jérémie, to ward off what the others fear and what Denis half dares to put into words. “Or his memoirs . . .” Small terrors insinuate themselves, which spring from the small miseries they've experienced here, the jealousy that accompanies breakups, the slander of rivals, the confidences surrounding their calculations. And occasionally the tears, on a shoulder that could not tolerate them. Even in the dark, amid the violence inflicted on skin, François always gave the impression that he was taking notes. He would make sentences from them in the days that followed, as if they were pinned butterflies. Memoirs, his memoirs would be fatal for their desires.

A door slams at the end of the corridor. The bedroom
is closed to them, they understand that. Marianne Dubeau appears, empty-handed. She had found the lock on the drawer picked and the window shattered, the one that opens onto the back balcony. Nothing else has disappeared, she thinks, except the big orange notebook he had written in every day before he left the apartment forever, for the place where he would die. She doesn't understand, she was here this very morning before she went to the church, everything was intact. They follow her, on edge, to the vast bedroom, a breeze lifts the black comforter, a shadow stirs at the edge of the immaculate Gaucher, backdrop to their yesterdays.

It looks grotesque, the window with its fangs between which their secrets have lately flown. They will have to catch up with them in the alleys where their hiss will be heard before they scatter across the city, roll beneath cars, enter the homes of enemies through doors always open to the unspeakable, find the radios that repeat and kill, go back to them, hunt them down, crush them at midnight on the threshold of the emergency exit, at the end of blind alleys. But the lane is deserted, there's not a diurnal rat in sight. Sunlight and thistles between the garbage cans, a neighbour has brought out a stained mattress, softly the light stops on mute, invisible traces. (
Visible things are here for only a brief time; the invisible is eternal.)

A frieze of penises runs along the corridor, the work of an unknown artist, he said. All rise, in every texture, every colour. It made them laugh, it laughs at them.

Évelyne has waited for them in the living room, she is twenty years old, she is drinking in a noon-hour theatre, to tell her girlfriends. What did he look like, who did he look like, this François? With so many boys here she can guess his sex, she pictures him a little taller than they are, with brown hair most likely. They're all of them pretty in their pallor. Évelyne has been quick to learn, in the theatre, to love girl-men. They experience so intensely the backstage terrors, the weariness of rehearsals, the loathing of directors. They have straight hips and words that dance, and she would enjoy undressing them and closing their eyes, so they would forget her and become big dolls.

Denis Léman is afraid; he's the youngest. She smiles at him through the cloud and the wine, she lifts her glass to make him pick his up again. He could be a European cousin, one of those slim, long-haired men who, like Gérard Philipe on the posters aimed at young damsels, will pout until the end of time. She would like to take him away from here, the others are too old, and that Hélène woman too strange. The will or the memoirs, they should just make confetti of it, and there would still be time for him to shrug his shoulders and dance with her.

But they continue to spy on one another, exchanging platitudes as they seek, on the hands of the others, the trembling or the scrape that will betray the thief. The cat
stretches, someone's getting ready to scratch, they know neither the day nor the hour. Silently, Marianne Dubeau sends them away, as Hélène is the first to understand. She would have liked to spend a few hours here, to hear François again, and try to interpret the shreds of Flaubert. All this is going on to one side of her, she's almost managed to touch it, sorrowful death is sorrowful no more, the hell these boys must live through is not hers. She will go back to the university.

At the corner of Lajoie and Rockland she turns right, Évelyne and Denis go left, there are parks for their twit­tering. As for the others, who are sick with anxiety and barely say goodbye, Hélène doesn't give a damn about them. Bérangère goes out for the rest of the day, so she can rest in peace.