Appropriate Place (18 page)

Clothaire had launched into a roundabout speech on the inevitable
massacre of the innocent when a slight commotion shook the wings. Flames were
already licking out on the left, at the screen where the video was projected in
a loop. The first thing to burn was the portrait of François Dubeau.

There was no panic — with its wide corridors and numerous exits
the auditorium was easy to evacuate. The small crowd had time to congratulate
itself some more outside while the firemen did their work. In general, people
were laughing at Clothaire Lemelin.

With a shrill voice, his chest bulging in an expensive leather
jacket, a clean, well-groomed young man was dominating a conversation with
others like him at the entrance to the parking lot. He was lashing out at the
organizers of the evening. A retrograde idea, in his opinion, to have accepted,
even solicited, the presence of Lemelin and his disciples. “No wonder we lost
the referendum, when we give the floor to a bunch of incompetents who've served
their time, who ought to go home and cultivate their pot and smoke it before
they go to sleep in their beds after spending the day asleep on their feet. It's
because of them that we're blocked, I've been waiting eight years for a
permanent job teaching literature at a
CEGEP
in the
Laurentians where the students are bored to death by their pathetic bullshit.
Did you hear that lecture of his on the symbolism of the death of François
Hertel? Tomorrow he'll waste the time of his stunned students who are suffering
through their first literature courses, unloading this totally uninteresting
story, those pedantic musings on a minor player who's just gone to join Adjutor
Rivard in the limbo of our literature. Clothaire Lemelin doesn't even have a
doctorate, he has no scientific apparatus, they're all phonies, he and his
followers. They already were when they were teaching me because I had the bad
luck of being in the first generation of
CEGEP
students. One day we got stuck with some semiological ineptitude to justify the
triteness of their poems, the next day it was digressions on the liberation of
Quebec, and the day after that, if the weather was grey, their perorations on
the absurd, topped off with their feigned melancholy à la Marguerite Duras. No
consistency, no structure to their thinking. And besides, they weren't very
clean, they had bad breath, never changed their shirts, smoked Gitanes . .
.”

This speech had an undeniable success. A girl, the only one in the
group, with arms crossed and eyes bright, took up the crusade. “And those
dimwits are selling this evening short. What they should have done to benefit
AIDS
research was organize a prestigious public
lecture, invite Professor Montanier, get interviews in all the media, examine
the scientific angle instead of constantly falling back on music. As if we
haven't moved beyond old folk songs. They're provincials totally out of touch
with what's going on in the world and all they can do is gripe. They're a
disgrace.”

Gabrielle, slightly off to the side, picked up only bits of what
the woman said, distracted as she was by the appearance of Pierre, with whom
she'd expected to go back to rue des Bouleaux. The little group's bitterness
upset her. She was quite fond of Clothaire Lemelin, whom she'd run into at
various forums, even if he nearly always disputed the cultural policies of her
government, of all governments. She envied him his easy indignation and she'd
probably kept in some box of files the wonderful letter he'd sent her, in an
official but luminous tone, to threaten the State with the collective
resignation of all its poets if the project of liberating Quebec were put on the
back burner: “Madame Minister, we will no longer be the carriers of your stars
if you become the sawyers of our dreams . . .”

True, there was no follow-up to the letter, literary circles were
much too divided. And above all, if a collective resignation by the poets were
to be taken seriously, they'd have had to turn their backs on programs that
provided grants to artists, programs that, though modest, were much sought after
by the poets in the
CEGEP
s who unlike their
university colleagues didn't have access to sabbatical leaves, but would also
like to spend some time writing in Provence. The missive had remained a secret
between her and Clothaire. She had kindly invited him to lunch at a bistro in
the Petit-Champlain neighbourhood and it consoled him over his friends'
desertion, he wanted to repudiate them. As a sociologist, she had put forward
some objective findings on human nature, on the prevalence of mediocrity save
during periods of severe crisis. It was obvious that Quebec wasn't experiencing
one, or at least didn't think that it was. They took time to sip a cognac after
coffee, something that hadn't been done since the sixties. The small group that
was gravitating tonight around the junior lecturer with a Ph.D in literature
most likely didn't know the taste, just as the young woman with a scientific
heart most likely no longer swallowed semen and possibly never had. It was the
age of white wine and, increasingly, the condom.

Gabrielle returned to the building, there was only one fire engine
at the rear entrance, the hoses were being rolled up. In the lobby she spotted
Pierre in conversation with two police officers, the female one was taking
notes. She went up to them, it was over now, and she realized vaguely that
Pierre had had something to do with starting the fire but that, until further
notice, the matter was being treated as an accident. He had left a dry rag on a
turned-off spotlight, the lighting man had switched it on again to follow
Clothaire, the rag had caught fire and the screen upstage a few centimetres away
had burst into flames. He would be questioned again tomorrow should the need
arise, but that was enough for tonight. Anyway, there were no other
witnesses.

Gabrielle wasn't sure what to think. The story held together, it
was hard to imagine anything that would have driven him to wreak havoc, but he
seemed to her to have the evil eye. He appeared to find it natural to walk home
with her in the cool clear night, beneath a froth of milky clouds.

They walked past vacant lots, bungalows, cottages, a small
shopping centre with all its lights off, the jumble of remnants of what had been
thirty years earlier a village and its surrounding countryside. The night lent
charm to the disparate neighbourhood, it seemed possible that children lived out
their secrets there, that the forsaken lived torrid affairs with individuals
come from foreign parts, that cuckolded husbands would rather pamper their cars
than defy intruders, and that the streets enjoyed recounting it from one
celebration to the next. And that a boy who was fated to be a writer would one
day turn it into a multivolume best-seller, gem of Quebec literature.

Pierre became serene once more. Again he described the fire,
showed himself to be concerned about the damage but not really sorry. She shared
his lightness, what could one do, these things happen. Then came the question,
which he asked in a casual tone: “Did you know that guy François Dubeau, the one
with the picture up on the screen that burned?” She paid no attention to his
peculiar curiosity, he shouldn't have even known François Dubeau's name, he was
just a teenager with time on his hands, poorly educated, conscripted into doing
odd jobs. “I knew him slightly. He was a great art critic, at least he was very
respected here in Quebec. But he stayed in his own world, the university,
periodicals, symposiums, away from the political battles, very different from
someone like Clothaire Lemelin, for instance. All I know is that he was very
influential and that his death was a shock in his milieu.”

Pierre kept trying, despite her vague answers. “And how could he
have died of
AIDS
?” Gabrielle started. “He was
homosexual, you know, he was even considered to be particularly active, his
travels, the baths, all that . . . He was one of the first to be struck by the
virus, it's because of him that the others started becoming a little more aware
of the danger . . .”

Pierre stopped, grabbed her elbow to slow her down, became abrupt.
“That doesn't make sense, what you're saying. I knew him, he was Marie's
boyfriend, he slept with her, he was at the house a lot. I know I'm right, his
name was François, it was him.”

Gabrielle sighed. “Are you sure? Lots of intellectuals resemble
one another. Still, it's possible. In those circles you see all sorts of things.
All I can tell you is that he certainly didn't have a reputation for being
interested in women.”

Why was it so important to him to stir up that old story? François
Dubeau was dead. Marie was dead. And if she had been his lover, she had well and
truly survived him for a while, she too had moved to Laval, made a new life for
herself, a job. There was no connection between their deaths. A few minutes from
rue des Bouleaux, Gabrielle tried to inculcate in Pierre, in the simplest words,
some notion of the dissociation between human beings and their sexual practices,
a phenomenon now prevalent, for better or worse. To please him, or so she
thought, she brought up the possibility of a genuine love between François and
Marie, despite François's other affairs. Maybe he couldn't afford to be seen
with a woman: his sexual practices were part of his image. Social prohibitions,
she explained laboriously, always find a way to renew themselves. And then she
reminded him — because she had to conclude her remarks, they'd reached the
freshly turned earth of the begonia bed — who were they to judge?

She heard her own emancipated tone, she recognized the inner voice
that had authorized her also to be unfaithful to whomever she wanted. “Really,
Pierre, we can't judge.”

It would not have been surprising, after that lecture on animal
nature, for him to try to end the night between Gabrielle's sheets. But he made
no such move. They took the elevator in his stubborn silence. Just as the doors
were opening he held them for a moment. “I'm leaving the apartment for good
three days from now. I'll drop in tomorrow night if you want and show you some
of Marie's papers.” Why not? Gabrielle was filled with curiosity. That's what
happens when you become a well-behaved woman, she thought before falling asleep,
easily, sated with the good suburban air, naked but with no appetite. Short news
items can be interesting.

Thirteen

AND SO, ON THE MORNING
of October 6,
1985, Gabrielle Perron embarked upon another new life, with the exhilaration
that accompanies such resolutions. Her retreat to 10,005 rue des Bouleaux, as
she had finally realized, had been until then a simple flight, as several of her
acquaintances muttered. Next stop suicide, she upbraided herself as she emerged
from the perfectly streaming shower, inhaling the tender scent of the creams
that though not perfumed, give women of every age the illusion that they are
pleasant to the touch. But death has no appeal for her. None.

A sound mind in a sound body, she took a rapid count of the
disappointments she'd been turning over in her mind since her return in the
spring. The sum was large. Lost love, of which she had sullied the memory by
succumbing to others. Lost country, for which she had been one of the first to
give up hope. Lost ideas, of which she had cut ties with her former master. Lost
beings, for she hadn't been able to give them her time — which was lost as
well.

The inmost depths should have sucked her in, she saw that very
clearly through the finest black coffee. But vertigo didn't come. Her life had
been anything but a tragedy, of that she was well aware. Even if she were gnawed
at by a cancer, she thought, she'd have had no reason to complain. She could
simply go out and listen to the murmur of the city to discover some real
calamities. She'd met so many: women terrified by their children's mental
handicaps, fathers hopeless because they couldn't make ends meet, ugly girls
walled up inside rejection, drudges weighed down by contempt, old women
collapsed at the backs of buses or on park benches. And the cripple at the
university, remember him, Gabrielle, that superior intellect imprisoned within
dribbling speech, whom you all avoided in company? He was there last night, at
the
AIDS
benefit, taking in the sobs of the beautiful
people over a disease of the beautiful people.

The unhappiness of those like Gabrielle was merely a facsimile.
Despite multiple impasses, it had to be pushed away like a guilty thought. Today
would be the day for her to do what was necessary to ship it away towards
exterior darkness, the day when the confinement she'd chosen would take on its
meaning, when she would stop doing things by halves. She smiled, was amused to
think of herself as the reincarnation of Jeanne Le Ber, the recluse of
Nouvelle-France, walled inside her father's house of her own free will and
surviving on bread and water, for the redemption of the nonbelievers. That story
had made a big impression on her at school, not so much for its salutary merits
as for the logistical problems it posed. How did she wash? Who dealt with the
chamber pots? Who cut her hair? The nuns didn't talk about such things and no
pupil would have dared to ask, so the image of Jeanne Le Ber remained duly
virginal. No, Gabrielle preferred to see herself as Laure Clouet, her story
taken up again long after its conclusion, when the old maid from the Grande
Allée, whom readers had seen straightening her shoulders and soaking up the
sensual sun in the final pages of Adrienne Choquette's novel, would many years
later approach the other shore of her liberation. Tall and still beautiful,
well-educated about men's bodies and maybe about women's too, having had a
glimpse of what Quebec could have been, had it wanted, she would be neither
weary nor bitter but determined to remove herself from the tumult, to seize from
inside everything that the intense outside had brought her. She would go back
inside her beautiful house, quietly close the door and make of it an appropriate
place for her detachment.