Appropriate Place (17 page)

And there's worse. I know of no one, absolutely no one, who has
made a success of his farandole, the one that you promised us, that you said was
the guaranteed companion of our knowledge.

I don't even know how to have a failed love affair. Yet if I take a
good look, I have one. I'm one of those who have met a living being and then
been inhabited by him, every second, and who have had the grace one day, in a
train or in a car or in a strange bedroom, of hearing him say, “You've made a
new man of me,” while realizing he was happy at what he had become. And that's
what loving is, and being loved. We didn't know how so much rapture could have
come about. Bodies lived through it, there weren't enough sighs to steal from
one another, enough salt to lick from the sphere of an eye or a small pink
genital fold, of palms to press between legs before sleep, not too long, just
before starting again, quickly. For the hours weigh double when they are
parentheses stolen from other lives. And the love lasted, it still lasts, it is
inexhaustible.

Except that it's no longer current. That living being no longer
wants to say it or to enter my mouth or my belly. There were too many weeks
between us, too long a road to travel in a few hours, we wasted the time that we
needed to domesticate our worlds before we opened the sheets. We started to make
love like others, who don't wait. We consummated, we consumed it. The weeks
became months and now a year. He won't come back because we don't know how to be
reborn. I ought to be tragic because he inhabits me still, every second. To such
a point that it's he who kissed my neck or massaged my pubes when others clung
to me and I smiled at them. I moved here to meet up with it, my failed love, a
privilege that stemmed from it. But it makes light of me, breaking away and
breaking my heart so thoroughly that I don't have one left to experience it.

And I'm angry with you, Georges, because I can look at us, at my
love and me, I can observe every chink in our affair and dissect it, and
understand it. Instead of inhabiting it, in this place that I wanted to be
appropriate. It is you whom I hate tonight, because it was through you that the
words came to me, sweeping over me today, driving away the ache. As a child, I
used to speak the musical notes that way instead of listening to them. I
believed you though when you explained that the right words were life itself and
that what's more, we would have love. You were a crook. My wish for you, behind
your bolted door, is a life of never-ending silence.

Through some inexplicable feeling of urgency, the
letter was sent special delivery. On October 4, it came back to Gabrielle,
stamped by the French post office, “Unknown at this address.”

Twelve

THE SHOW TO RAISE
money for
AIDS
research took place amid chaos, or so the
newspapers reported the next day, while the
TV
stations kept running footage of the small fire that had forced the evacuation
of the maison de la culture around eleven p.m. The damage was limited; for some
reason yet unknown one panel of the set had caught fire and, despite the swift
arrival of firefighters, some parts of the set had been ruined. More than the
fire itself, smoke and water damage would send the bill into the tens of
thousands of dollars.

And so the fire had eclipsed the news stories that the team at the
clinic had been so afraid of when a good dozen reporters and cameramen showed up
in Laval just as the dignitaries were arriving, and clustered around some
well-known faces. Including that of the minister of health, a decent man who had
rejected the advice of his political attachés concerned about the disease's
dissolute image. According to those who had skimmed the American press, which
had more to say about this still mysterious subject,
AIDS
was not the terrible threat evoked by activists. It was indeed
a devastating mortal ailment of a new kind, but it probably affected only the
most debauched homosexuals, who were suddenly looking for pity. And even if they
refused to pass moral judgement on the victims, it was still much too early to
compromise themselves on the question of research assistance; they would seem to
be rushing to meet that particular lobby while other foundations that battled
terrible diseases were knocking at the ministry's door only to see their hopes
constantly dashed. But the minister, because of some premonition about a greater
disaster, had ignored their grimaces.

And so, along with Gabrielle and her colleague, Simon, he had been
subjected to the questions that reporters borrowed from one another, few having
taken the trouble to bone up on the thin file about the appearance of
AIDS
. Did the minister's presence indicate that the
plague was a genuine epidemic, one that was beginning to spread through Quebec?
That the situation was alarming? Were figures about deaths available? The
answers were evasive and despite the
PR
people's
pleas, the cameras ignored the young doc-tor, the sole respondent who could have
given accurate information and calm the first signs of hysteria. With his
slender adolescent's manner and his anonymous looks, he was left to the
scientific press, absent from the show to which editors had chosen to assign
general reporters. The worst had seemed about to happen when the lenses started
scanning the small crowd gathered in the main lobby, a majority of long-haired
males, a large proportion of whom sported an earring. It seemed as if the
evening would be a model of the art of creating stereotypes, when the goal had
been to create a breach in the wall of prejudices. An imminent disaster.

The fire then had been a wrong in exchange for a right because it
had modified the structure of the news reports, eliminated idiotic questions
about
AIDS
and even — something no newspaper would
talk about — put an end to an embarrassing situation that had suddenly arisen on
stage, just before the final speech.

The organizers had had a terrible time coming up with the lineup
of performers. Given their casual ways, their extroverted temperaments, their
well-known generosity and the boldness of the event, recruiting volunteers
should have been easy. But nearly all the voices at the other end of the line
turned vague. As if in the grip of some unspeakable terror. Idiotic excuses were
stammered, conversations were abruptly broken off, leaving messages was
pointless, everyone was much too busy this season. Except for Pauline Julien,
who was always magnificently responsive to the call, the rare brave ones had
materialized from the serious musical circles, notably contemporary music. In
other words, celebrities no one had ever heard of, though they'd been the pride
of Quebec in the international networks of the avant-garde. And so, even by
extending her dissonant repertoire to include some Mahler lieder that the
average mortal wouldn't find too unsettling, the sublimely talented soprano
wouldn't make the ticket office blow up. As for the more popular groups or
singers, whose melodies would definitely have been closer to the tastes of the
young, male, gay audience, the best-known had dodged the invitation and they'd
ended up with the B list of new talent that had not yet hit its stride. So that
to fill the two hours of showtime, including the intermission, they'd had to
resort to some postrural poets, a very productive but very private network,
eagerly awaiting the rare opportunities to make their work known. Pauline, who
had agreed not only to sing but also to host the evening, had promised to
introduce them so warmly that the audience, even if it included a few backward
individuals still loyal to formalist aesthetics, would willingly applaud poetry
that was impossible to read and consequently to chant. The poets would be asked
to offer nothing that would exceed the attention span of an average crowd, in
other words, three minutes and change.

But that was without reckoning with Clothaire Lemelin. He it was
who had begotten the postrural school of poetry and he fully intended to
exercise his primogeniture. He had reserved the closing act for himself.

Dramatic in a charcoal suit and red tie, reminders of apocalypse,
he perched on the edge of the platform, demanded total darkness onstage, save on
his person, so as to highlight his mane of hair with its blue-tinged waves and
his white, nearly diaphanous hands — the hands of a full-time visionary.

“What I am about to deliver was written and published in Paris,
for close friends, a good many years ago. You'll see that it's an occasional
poem. But as its style will attest, it is neither by me nor by our friends here
present. It was written by a gentleman who passed away last night, at Montreal's
Sacré-Coeur Hospital, of natural causes, that is they had nothing to do with
AIDS
. That death, however, coming on the eve of
your gathering, must be brought to your attention because it sheds light on
those deaths that we are recalling here and another death, on the same order,
that Quebec is striving towards, its current negligence announcing the death
pangs.”

A murmur of impatience ran through the thin ranks of
VIP
s. They had been assured of an apolitical show, an
order Pauline Julien had scrupulously respected. Was this a trap? The zealot
inhaled their concern, looked up to the flies and began to declaim from memory
his chosen piece.

In the dead of night, embittered and alone,

I set down lines unfit to be read by man.

I am a pilgrim who has clambered far too high,

Beyond pleasure for the hand or for the eye.

My mad shunning of this sordid world

Augments with age and implacable distaste;

I can but oppose a passive face

To monsters brought to life by some fiend's rage.

I thrust my icy scalpel into nature's breast,

And sound the boundless baseness of the flesh.

Whoever would prevail against this rot

Must bow before the connoisseurs of hell,

A hell that's of this world and observes no truce.

Pilgrim of the infinite, votary of the beyond,

Why seek in other climes what you desire

When you may sink with ease into this mire?

“Your stomach turns of course,” continued Clothaire
Lemelin, “when you hear that accumulation of dripping alexandrines, detrimental
to the memory of Baudelaire who has never been so poorly imitated. Pretentious
too, thinking he's an albatross shot down by the rest of us, the carrion
universe. There's worse. I only recited a poem suited to the occasion, one that
talks about flesh and death. But that poet had something for every taste, from
Claudel to Nelligan, idiotic images, moon-women who were also flaming suns,
books that rhymed with crooks, and even inane advice to the lovelorn.

I withdraw into myself

And find myself serene

More enduring than tears in their dotage

Life is a joyful pilgrimage.

“Composing such trivia, it would have been better had
he died sooner. Yet this versifier, writing a century after the genuine writers
of melancholy, was one of the greatest intellectual influences in French Canada,
one of the first literary figures to recognize the foundations of the
independence movement, as well as being the symbol of our collective apostasy,
for he gave up the soutane long before those noisily defrocked priests turned
sexologists. He deserved praise, François Hertel, about whom you'll read
hagiographies in the papers tomorrow, whose coffin certain eminent federalists
will follow because he taught them how to read, he gave absolution to their
first ejaculations — alone or in company — and he had the good sense to choose
exile before he began to express his doubts about Canada. Tonight, I am
presenting him to you as he was and as we are. Phony tragedians, borrowed
fanatics, about to be chilled forever.”

Then Clothaire Lemelin, who now was pacing the stage under a
follow spot, the lighting man thinking he was obliged to use it, launched into a
disjointed but not uninteresting soliloquy, talking in particular about the end
of innocence.

During that year, 1985, the irruption of
AIDS
into public awareness had driven us from the brief paradise of
a decade of debauchery that had been a genuine freedom, one that others would
envy us for until the end of time. For of that serene, intense copulation had
emerged, thanks to the sacred still clinging to us, loving passions of biblical
quality, the most genuine since the world began.

That night however we said together the
Ite Missa Est
which it was agreed had been uttered by Hertel, the former Jesuit. His death in
that year, 1985, marked the end of the intellectual dilettantism that had
allowed an entire generation to listen to itself talk about the country with a
felicitous candour that its descendants would envy, like its moral freedom,
forever. From that demented, Hertelian, boundless chattering had been born in
some of our hearts a revolt so powerful that the country had been lived before
it came into being. This wouldn't happen again. The advent of
AIDS
, after the lost referendum, brought us into an era
of precautions. To preserve what remnant of life?

Clothaire Lemelin, battered by the depressing prospects he evoked,
was losing his vehemence, carefully picking his words, stretching out some
silences that even Pauline couldn't interrupt to bring it to a conclusion. The
entire house was impatient now, having opted out of this grim discourse that had
far exceeded the three minutes prescribed. The health minister, brave as ever,
was getting ready to simply go onstage; he would walk briskly, shake hands with
Lemelin while murmuring admiration of the poet's presentation, and the follow
spot would abandon the nervous man. The closing speech would come back to the
main question — the need to mobilize around
AIDS
research. As for sovereignty, the minister was one of those who thought it was
dormant, bound to come back, people mustn't worry about it the way those poets
do, they tend to exaggerate. It was enough for a two-minute address.