Appropriate Place (15 page)

“Anyway,” said Simon, “let me reassure you. I don't want to get
married or adopt a little orphan. Now less than ever.”

He'd stated it as a joke but by the end of the bottle of Brouilly,
Gabrielle knew there was no mistake. She had just been given the most moving
confidence possible by Simon, whose laughing mouth had grimaced slightly. Things
must have been going badly in Trois-Rivières. But asking would have endangered
their friendship. She merely repeated that Simon could use her name and her
former title, that she'd help organize the evening if he wanted. A speech was
out of the question though, no matter how brief.

She took a walk in Old Quebec, to sober up before getting back in
her car. The blast of tourists still masked the charm of the place; she saw one
spit onto the wheel of a calèche and heard another making fatuous remarks in
front of some wonders of Inuit art on exhibition at the Brousseaus, who were
impervious to the commercial trivialization of the genre. She'd be better off
going into Simons and poking around in the new fall accessories, the hats whose
secrets are known to the store's buyers, the gloves that in the interior light
of Quebec City give you the hands of Laure Clouet. She bought gloves and hat in
rusty brown, though she knew that back in Laval, she'd never wear them.

Without really admitting it to herself, Gabrielle was going to
enjoy being involved in a good deed. Particularly because
AIDS
was now a little like what sovereignty had been in the days of
the pioneers. The cause would make it possible to separate the fearful from the
brave. Her old acquaintances, those who had given up on changing the world and
were now tending to their gardens or their investments, declared their sympathy
— their hearts and their reading were still in the right place — but claimed to
be terribly busy. The children were entering their teens and going through
identity crises, the start of the university year was a gridlock of meetings,
their old parents were sick and dependent, they themselves worked hard on behalf
of theatres or orchestras that, despite their reputation, were experiencing
severe financial problems — something a former culture minister in a government
that had initiated the era of cutbacks ought to know. A brilliant way to make
her step back, to force her to appeal to those generous souls who, dreaming of a
sunny Quebec, could not be insensitive to these young men who were living on
borrowed time and cruelly deprived of the chance of living until the great day.
They gave sums, small and sometimes large, promised to be present. They
confirmed the existence of decency, that greatest of mysteries.

Strong arms were needed for building the sets and Gabrielle had
the idea of dispatching Pierre. At the end of the summer she had closed her door
to him; there'd been no scandal, it was like turning a page, and she'd talked
with him only briefly when they met in the lobby, about Marie's departure and
her death. A stupid accident. What would become of him? He wasn't related to the
woman, the estate would kick him out of the apartment once some official had
determined where her belongings would go, to the State or some distant
relations. He'd go back up north, he said. Gabrielle didn't believe it, he was
now part of the city's fringe, but she wouldn't question him further. In fact
she hoped to see him disappear; he'd been a vulgar passing sexual fancy for
which she now reproached herself. He had a way of looking at her now that placed
her among those old ladies who haven't lost their looks. She regained the
advantage by treating him as a handyman and a pal, as well as teaching him a
couple of things about preventing a disease that could threaten him some day, in
his roaming.

Pierre turned out to be an excellent assistant to the video
editor, a volunteer from Radio-Canada, carrier of the virus and released from
his everyday activities by colleagues openly compassionate but secretly
terrified of his mere presence. Some disinfected any equipment he had used,
producers gave their instructions by telephone, most of the time he ate alone.
In contrast, Pierre as a pupil was attentive and intense, overcharged with
interest because of some hunger for danger. The plan was to slowly bring up on a
large upstage screen the features, confused at first, then clear and sharp, of
some
AIDS
victims of the past two years. Some were
known, others weren't. The editor had run into some of them at the clinic, the
only one where the doctors told the whole truth.

Denis, a grizzled thirtysomething with dusty blue eyes behind
thick glasses, his neck venous and seemingly twisted, had been one of the first
to die. He was a painter, he inscribed on his canvas, in shades of grey and
flesh, the walls that he came up against in life. A silent soul under sentence
of death.

Marc, bald, dry, his gaze like knots on a parched vine, ended up
blackened as if from third-degree burns. He was a journalist, of average talent
but highly cultivated, assigned to rewrite reporters with bylines who ignored
him.

Michel, with the kindly mug of a busker, a child who never tired
of teaching other children at the university. He was a biologist and didn't
forgive his science for missing out on his disease. He was furious, for once,
when he died.

Yves, his face half-hidden by his long, tragic, manicured hands,
in the hazy pose of the dying, already snatched up by the ether. He was a
writer, read less and less, for him the virus had been a suicide of rare
elegance.

And François, of whom there were no close-up photos but who was
very recognizable, with his stooped height, sharp profile softened by flyaway
hair, talking to an invisible audience. He was the best-known art critic in
Quebec, prone to having sex with his disciples, most of whom were now infected
but still under his spell.

“I know him,” said Pierre. The editor laughed. How could he? The
world of François Dubeau had nothing to do with that of a dropout from up north
now a resident of Laval, a suburb rather impervious to intellectuals unless
they'd settled there early and raised small families on their small salaries.
François was anything but that.

Bristling, Pierre asked a lot of questions about the man. He had
recognized him beyond any doubt, he'd been Marie's lover, the tall cheerful guy
who marked off the garden's seasons with her in the little house where Pierre's
mother had dumped him, the man who talked with her about Abyssinia and whose
presence he'd eventually grown accustomed to, though they never really got used
to each other.

It was just a double life, the editor would have said had he
believed it. Suddenly Pierre understood its refined seams, the nights spent this
way or that, the spaces reserved for one and for the others, the sentences
slipped on like clothing, according to the climate, according to the clients.
Having sperm in common, all the same. Marie had no doubt consented to the game,
she never seemed bothered by her lover's absences, she made no plans. Her lie
added to his made a mountain of waste between yesterday's child and his
memories. For the adult he was now becoming, reminiscences in the form of
excreta.

The smell of sweat was in fact filling the little office that
adjoined the auditorium. Two members of the organizing committee had just come
in, engaged in a virulent debate on how to use the small profits expected from
the show. The editor went on impassively lining up photos and dreaming of the
effect he wanted to create, similar to that of Thierry Kuntzel's fantastic video
on the death of the Swiss writer Robert Walser, a piece that had given new life
to the art of the dissolve.

Eleven

THE POLITICAL EVENT
of the autumn
made its first appearance in the arts sections of some English-language
newspapers and magazines. A young anglophone Montrealer — that rare creature of
direct British descent — brought out a magnificent book on the Canadian psyche,
entitled
French Bastard
. Stunningly intelligent and subjective, it
defied the conciliatory syrup that had been flowing from the leading anglophone
nonfiction writers ever since the 1945 publication of
Two Solitudes
. In
it, Susan Finney made mincemeat of the theory underlying MacLennan's novel and
even more, those of his followers. In their opinion it was the distance between
social classes that had poisoned any attempt at a loving fusion between the
respective offspring of Canada's two founding peoples and consequently, kept the
political divide between conquerors and conquered from being filled; whence the
idea, highly conventional but even after half a century not yet hackneyed, that
the enrichment of francophones and their progress towards some kind of economic
equality would lead to growing interpenetration between descendants of these
offspring. Which sooner or later would snuff out the collective desire for
separation.

Aside from a few details, such as the still mostly anglophone
ownership of houses on Summit Circle or country mansions on Brome Lake, the new
writer reminded her readers, we had however achieved financial equality. Any
interpenetration was still limited though, and generally ended in the most
poisonous divorces, as any specialist in family law, with whom Susan Finney had
spent a lot of time, could testify. In her opinion, the lasting error of the
political scientists was to sublimate their own anemic sexual appetites while
they wallowed in subsidized Canadian conferences, which had kept them from
coming to grips with the notion of desire. Its absence, so striking in
heterosexual relationships between francophones and anglophones, had thus
escaped them. Aside from some passing superficial oddities, analogous to
vacation flings, interpenetration hadn't happened. If one compared the customs
of linguistically mixed and linguistically homogeneous suburban couples, one
would note that the English-French connection was the one that would fade most
rapidly and most surely. And blandness, she declared, the smell of poorly aired
closets that's given off by genitals at rest, was well on its way to becoming
the existential definition of Canada.

She for her part saw no problem, therefore offered no solutions.
She simply set out a masterful description of the peculiar blockage of the
fibres or nerve endings in the pelvic area. It had been noted by observers of
brief news items that crimes of passion between francophones and anglophones
were practically nonexistent, even when squabbles over money reached a paroxysm.
Which also explained the damp squib that terrorism in Quebec had been, lacking
any genuine will to destroy.

Susan Finney's book took a totally exceptional turn in the chapter
devoted to her own attempt to verify degrees of intercultural desire. She told
how she had forced herself to become a sovereigntist, by joining the party but
mainly by offering herself as a transit between the “two solitudes,” the
MacLennan cliché being common currency in all political circles. She'd become an
adviser and had set her heart on a cabinet minister who rumour had it was a
big-time stud who'd fooled around with her in the back of a government plane one
evening after a pointless trip to the Baie des Chaleurs. He'd tried to seduce
the old-stock anglophones and in the end had to be content with getting it off
with Susan Finney. The description of their carryings-on attained pornographic
exuberance, as free flowing and high performance as you could wish for during
traditional interpenetration, but toned down while fooling around with sodomy.
Even between two famished temperaments in still young bodies that were exploring
one another for the first time, she had noted, desire could not transcend a
threshold that was invisible but genuine, and abnormally low. Susan Finney had
pursued the experiment to the point of conceiving a child, the French bastard of
her title. The book would reveal the child's existence to its progenitor, whose
anonymity she otherwise protected. “My child,” she concluded, “is in radiant
good health. But no one stops me in the street to tell me how gorgeous a baby it
is. I push the carriage of a creature who is imperceptible, as if volatile. It
is my future and yours. It won't kill us.”

Gabrielle had a clear memory of Susan Finney, who was once
connected with a ministry close to her own. She was amazed at what she read — a
few magazine excerpts and ecstatic reviews. The impassioned style, the gritty
way of hijacking the political debate, the exhibitionism that was the antithesis
of Canadian tradition, should have been the acts of a beautiful sex kitten. But
as the public could now observe on its screens, there was nothing of a Mata Hari
about Susan Finney. She was more like an apple. Timid sea green eyes, plump
cheeks, a cherub's colouring, dirty-blonde hair that fell straight onto a cotton
blouse, full flowered skirts in summer, pleated ones in winter, sensible shoes
at all times. The body seemed clumsy but, as men will confide, girls who are
ordinary and chubby are often wilder and more unrestrained in bed than those who
emulate scrawny fashion models. Still, if she'd had to predict a literary career
for Susan Finney back then, it would have been as a writer of cookbooks or
gardening manuals. And here she was, invited on all the talk shows, facing
psychoanalysts, psychosociologists, constitutionalists and journalistic analysts
of all sorts, chattering exceptionally well in both languages, buttoning lips
and shutting traps, and once her debating partner had been cornered, bringing
him to a full stop with sexological references that were apparently irrefutable
and foreign to them all.

In Quebec, which revelled in its tolerance of politicians' morals,
where the press ignored gossip about their extramarital flings or even about
their family happiness, a kind of erotic fever was suddenly running through even
the news sections, with insinuations as to the identity of the minister, who was
immediately recognized, or phrases referring to the thesis of
French
Bastard
. Gabrielle wouldn't allow herself to buy the book but
Madeleine, for once taking an interest in politics because it sounded like a sex
scandal, had gone through it zealously. On the phone, she burbled with
enthusiasm. She drew some strange lessons from the thesis about Canadian
blandness.