Appropriate Place (19 page)

The spirit of the cloister was turning up here. At its best,
though, that is without the absurdity of renunciation. No servitude towards God
and his saints, no sacrifice of the earthly nourishment that we discover so much
more effectively after forty, generally imported, like fine wines and exquisite
woollens. “All human evil,” Pascal had decreed, “comes from this, man's being
unable to sit still in a room.” Recalling that lovely cliché, Gabrielle saw it
as a challenge over which she could triumph. She experienced a conceit similar
to what she felt after her first successful speeches, proof that no nun was
asleep in her.

On the first detachable page in one of the large-size
Rhodia writing pads she'd accumulated with the idea that one day she would write
important things in them, she listed the prerequisites for her new life:

• to look at every document she'd brought from her Quebec City
  office and get rid of whatever should not be turned over to the National
  Archives;
  
• to renounce officially and permanently any sexual adventure
  that was not a loving relationship (and therefore, no doubt, give them up
  for good);
  
• in the proper time and place, to recall the splendour of the
  lover's touch and manage to experience it again;
  
• to undertake to read the finest works available to humankind,
  limiting herself however to works of fiction, which tell of history and
  humans so much better;
  
• to acquire a cat, a young one so that its life expectancy can
  match hers.
  

The list was odd, but perfectible. She saw it as a good
start, some ways to relegate the past without denying it and an entry, through
books and the cat, into a welcoming room. She had just succumbed to the notion
of a cat after having long rejected it. She liked cats, from little
grey-and-white balls of fluff to fat yellow crippled alley cats, but she hated
the old-maid appearance they give to the women who pamper them, talk to them,
turn them into presences. Another attitude to reappraise. And she'd do it that
very day, inviting Madeleine to lunch at Vito's, for old times' sake, then
taking her along as a consultant to the
SPCA
, the
ideal spot to find a gutter kitten, the toughest species and the smartest, as
hers was duty bound to be.

Côte-des-Neiges was teeming with students still in the daze that
marked the beginning of the school year, you could see them in groups at
bookstores, drugstores, hardware stores, stocking up for the next academic year
which most would have tired of by February, when the neighbourhood would close
in around its frozen mud and its poorly maintained apartment blocks. Few went to
Vito's, the restaurant now attracting mostly professors or retired people from
the neighbourhood, for the prices had gone up though the food was still the
same, Italo-Québécois for stomachs equally hybridized. The owner counted on
nostalgia, which helped him hold on to his past clientele, now sufficiently
well-heeled that they no longer drank house wine by the litre. He chose well,
Gabrielle and Madeleine had trouble finding a table in the first room, facing
the street. The former minister, still recognizable, attracted looks, and she
regretted her unthinking choice of restaurant, this was no way to start a new
life, being stuck here in the territory of gossip for which she provided an
excellent pretext. They were reduced to whispering rather than speaking out loud
and Madeleine, who wanted to talk Gabrielle out of her desire for a cat,
couldn't complete her arguments. She would have ridiculed, caricatured her
friend, got carried away a little, but she limited herself to pointing out the
problems of maintenance — litter, food, smells — and care. “And most of all,
don't count on me!” “I won't need a cat sitter.” Gabrielle displayed an ethereal
smile which displeased her friend intensely and brought their discussion to an
end.

Definitely, this was a difficult turning point in a woman's life,
thought Madeleine, who for some time now had been rather concerned about her own
capacity for enjoyment. It wasn't a symptom of menopause, hormones erased them
easily, but a lessening of her appetite for fun. She who had never sought brainy
partners found herself too often, once her legs were together again, regretting
that they had nothing to say. Besides that, she was reading a little more; soon
she too would be contemplating a cat.

On rue Jean-Talon they were warmly welcomed at the
SPCA,
where the July dispersal of pussycats left behind
when their masters had moved was not yet over. The choice was quickly made: an
animal just a few months old, housebroken and having had all its shots, that
displayed even in its golden eyes the self-confidence of the big tabby cat it
would become, introverted but likable, and adaptable to a cloistered life. The
young woman who dealt with adoption procedures had no idea who Gabrielle Perron
was and observed the rule of suspicion to the letter. Gabrielle had to answer
questions about the lifestyle in store for the cat as well as about her own
abilities, psychological and financial, to devote the necessary time to its
happiness and health. Finally, the cat was in a box on the backseat, dignified
and silent like the good companion it would be.

“What will you call him?”

“Hertel.”

Madeleine, who got her news from television only and therefore
knew nothing about Hertel's death, wondered if her friend was heading for a
breakdown. She promised herself to call her more often. For now though she was
in a hurry, she had a tennis lesson before dinner.

She just had time to buy all sorts of cat things at a pet store
before it closed and Gabrielle was finally at home. While she was getting to
know Hertel, she renewed the determination that had been given a rough ride by
her stop at Vito's. After a shower, she donned a royal blue dressing gown, its
velvet like warm silk, and remembered, as she put in the oven a vegetarian
lasagne precooked at a steep price, that Pierre was probably going to turn up.
He bothered her, that was another of today's mistakes, fortunately the last one
because he was leaving soon. She was about to change again because it was out of
the question to greet him dressed like this, when he rang the bell. Too bad,
she'd simply cut the meeting short, she certainly wouldn't invite him to share
her dinner.

In fact he was the one who said he couldn't stay long. She had no
reason to worry about how she was dressed, he didn't look at her. He handed her
Marie's notebook, the one that the federal government had given him once the
formalities were complete and they couldn't track down other family or friends.
The notebook confirmed Marie's relationship with François Dubeau, she had to
read it, and there were references to Gabrielle too. They settled in, face to
face, in the library. Her first truly solitary evening was in ruins.

The pages had been read and reread, skimming through them she had
the impression that the boy was following the progress of her reading. But
eventually she forgot that he was there. She absorbed Marie's words as if the
notebook were a testament intended for her; she saw the woman at her side,
slender, brunette, dressed in red, delivering her story aloud, line by line.
Exorcism would drive away the Cain who was spoiling the moment and the two women
would stay behind to share, until late at night and maybe till the next day and
after, reproaches to the wicked gods who had caused them to be born in the wrong
places. Most important, they would have shared their way of leaving them. Marie
urgently, Gabrielle calmly. After all, they were both barren, and free.

She smiled at her interior movie with its triumphal ending and
turned towards Pierre. She wished he could leave the notebook with her until he
left, there were passages in it to be copied out and kept, in the past she'd
have urged publication. “What a pity, that accident,” she said, “she was so
right to go away . . .” He folded his arms and straightened his shoulders as if
he had become a man. “Do you think so?”

She was too distracted by her vision of Marie to pay attention to
the hostile crackle of the question. She was about to speak, to serve up to this
boy, who was on the whole rather uncouth, some cliché in praise of flight, when
he cut her off, suddenly standing, shouting because he'd never really learned
how to talk. “It was me that started the fire yesterday. I've been doing that
since I was born. I'm unhappy. I don't understand anything. You always lie. And
when you're tired of telling lies you put on airs, you talk about exile. What's
that supposed to mean, exile? Do you know what it means for me? I started the
fire while that crazy poet was talking about it. Marie died in exile. And it's
your fault, you and people like you. You can read in the notebook, a country of
the destroyed. She went away. She was mine since the day I was born. And you say
she was right . . .”

He grabbed the notebook from her, rested his elbows on her art
books, a rather fine collection from the primitive artists of Oceania to the
conceptual artists of Europe. At his fingertips, Marie's pages began to blaze.
Where had the lighter come from? In Gabrielle's eyes there was none.

If the victim had not been till recently the minister of cultural
affairs, the crime on rue des Bouleaux would have been in the headlines for a
day at most, and even then on an inside page. It was a classic story, barely
juicy: a forty-year-old woman stabbed, an awkward attempt to camouflage the
murder with a quickly extinguished fire in an apartment building equipped with
every alarm and fire-prevention device, the young occupant of a neighbouring
apartment being held for questioning and then jailed on convincing evidence, no
other witnesses, especially since the building had been without a concierge for
several weeks. Emotions were guarded on this street in a new section of Laval
where, despite her brief career in politics, the woman was one more unknown
among others. All the same, some concerns were expressed about peace and quiet
in the neighbourhood. Had it not been for the detail of the cat acquired on the
very day of the tragedy and sent back at once to the
SPCA
, orphaned again, the dose of pathos would have been nil.

In spite of orders to be discreet, the police still had to deal
with a certain commotion, and the story had spilled over from the pages devoted
to news in brief and seeped into the political coverage, where the right to
comment made possible some fanciful exaggerations. One declared that a colleague
of Gabrielle Perron's claimed her seclusion resulted from a depression of
amorous origin, another took up the depression theory the next day but
attributed it to the blocking of the sovereignist horizon, because she belonged
to the idealistic side of the party. Another, more audacious, focussed on the
crime itself, suggesting that the official trail of the investigation, attempted
robbery, was an indulgent official cover-up for a sex scandal, Gabrielle
Perron's life having long seemed, let us say, unorthodox. Whatever the truth may
have been, it was a very sad ending for a talented woman whose retirement had
already been seen as political suicide.

The sole female editorial writer at
Le Devoir
, who was
the same age as Gabrielle and had always found it interesting to run into her,
contributed a brief but heartfelt piece marked by sympathy for the life of a
recluse. “In the space known as Quebec, where for a quarter of a century now our
generation has never stopped ceding its overly vivid hopes to the lasting
practitioners of the old forms of resignation, interior exile freely chosen is
an act of courage.” Nothing about the circumstances of the death, they were of
secondary importance, an editorial must try to take the readers' thoughts a
little further.

And that was the tomb of Gabrielle Perron, made of paper
henceforth recyclable. As for the apartment she had owned, a buyer was found
quickly. A securities broker, recently divorced, assured of the speculative
potential of a good location along the river, moved in with a new girlfriend, to
an appropriate place.

Also By Lise
Bissonnette

Following the Summer

Affairs of Art

Cruelties

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