Appropriate Place (3 page)

Which is what they are doing one Saturday before dinner, puzzling out
a piece for four hands, grinding away at a rather out-of-tune Heintzman. Then
Guylaine goes upstairs to look for her mother while Gabrielle plays from memory the
piano version of
Peter and the Wolf
, whose phrasing, while childish, flows
gravely towards the man reading. Long afterwards, she will ask herself if this
moment hadn't been the first instance of the false innocence she'll learn to master,
if by accentuating the melancholic effect of the wolf's notes she hadn't wanted to
trouble the dry individual at her side. Why had she turned towards him before
launching into the twittering of the bird unless it was to test the line she'd just
held out? In a moment he'd been all over her, clinging to her back, hairy arms
grasping her shoulders, hand seeking the buds of her breasts under the angora
sweater, boring into her body to nestle it in his chest. She remembered the acid
smell of his green-striped woollen necktie as much as the tongue that had scraped
her neck, and the seconds to free herself and run away.

She should have cried out, but instead she had climbed the stairs,
getting back her aplomb, she'd gone into the kitchen quite naturally, offering to
help. She should have had her heart in her throat instead of feeling a shiver of
pride at the person she'd become in this bourgeois house. That at least was the
image of the moment she had finally settled on: that of a young girl who had been
able to dominate at the first assault the droppings that ooze from Pharisees in
heat. There had been so many others in what would be her profession that the
pharmacist had been a useful preliminary exercise.

She was forgetting that, all the same, she had steered clear of
Guylaine for days and that later she had constantly avoided the calm gaze of the
father who seemed to have no reason to feel guilty. “Maybe he was just being
affectionate, friendly,” suggested Madeleine, who preferred the least awkward
interpretations for anything having to do with sex. Maybe.

She had never breathed a word to Guylaine, who every now and then
remained her friend. Guylaine had a beautiful soul. She'd enrolled in nursing
science because her father pictured her in a lab coat, following in his tradition,
but also because she had an image of herself relieving all forms of suffering, she
dreamed of holding the hands of children with cancer and incontinent old people, in
the same way that Gabrielle was waiting impatiently to enrol in sociology courses
given by Guy Rocher, whose vocabulary was sprinkled through the communiqués from the
Presse étudiante nationale
. Social classes meant her at the bottom with
Guylaine above, and equalization was in the wind, it was inevitable. It had seemed
certain to her late one summer, next to the pool in the garden that suburbanites
were beginning to take better care of, when Guylaine had confirmed that she was
engaged to a nice accountant who'd been hovering for two years and who had just
inherited, prematurely, a chain of book and stationery stores. Guylaine was well
aware that boredom lay in wait after too many of her Fernand's embraces, she was not
so dumb and she'd already sampled the body of this future golfer obsessed with
performance. The books he sold did not include those Gabrielle was engrossed in and
which she no longer even bothered to tell her friend about. Anyway, she'd moved on
from Rocher to Bourdieu, whose more indignant jargon gave her an appetite for
action. Guylaine would have been alarmed.

To get a glimpse of the future, she had only needed to catch the hint
of concern in the eyes of her friend, who was going to get married and was well
aware that she was choosing the wrong path, nearly apologizing. “It will be simple,
in the country, the church will be a formality, my dress is ecru and short, the
caterer will be waiting at the chalet in Saint-Sauveur, there'll be a little
dancing, in October it will be too chilly to have the party outdoors. It will be
perfectly ordinary, nothing fancy, you can come on your own if you want.” Of course
she would go on her own, to watch the assurance of the rich quietly fade away, to
waltz out of step with the pharmacist whose fingers are stiff now, and delight in
the lovely autumn blaze that would envelop her friend. If she were pregnant, which
seems to be the case, the wedding would be even more agreeable. Gabrielle, who had
just obtained her master's degree and was about to become a research assistant in
the Université de Montréal sociology department, in other words a marker of student
papers, would make allowances for tradition, last refuge of the higher classes. And
the fact remained that she believed she truly liked Guylaine, plump and brunette,
who had not been born to white niggers of America, but was that her fault?

Bone cancer carried Guylaine away in a matter of weeks nine years
later. Another wolf perhaps, the beast that had eaten away at her soul since the
birth of the twins, a boy and a girl without grace, dull-witted since their first
cry. Guylaine removed herself from the road where they were growing up the wrong
way, she refused all chemicals, and Gabrielle blames herself for having been kind
enough to understand her, and thus to have tolerated her apathy. “But bone cancer is
always fast,” she tells herself, to shake off the shadow that could let remorse seep
in.

She samples from the basket the season's last strawberries, the hulls
come away between her teeth, warm, smearing lips and fingers, one of those sensual
pleasures that should have been enough to keep Guylaine attached to life.

She didn't die in strawberry season. She died one October afternoon at
the Hotel-Dieu, skeletal and absent, hydrated through her veins, under the scarcely
bereft eyes of her children, her parents, Fernand and Gabrielle, who had torn
herself away from the orientation meeting of the party in which the young
sociologist was establishing a reputation for being a most useful analyst. It hadn't
taken much to make her nearly pretty — contact lenses, a light permanent to give
some life to her ultrafine hair, the pleasure of having published a few articles in
one of the papers, a few emotionally painful lovers, though there'd been none that
autumn. The death was serene. Nearly nothing — a gasp, then hands squeezed, vague
gratitude to the doctor who'd had to step up the dose of morphine. They all had
cars, they would meet at the funeral when the date and time had been set.

A week before, Gabrielle had had half an hour alone with Guylaine
early one night. The dying were allowed unlimited visitors, and that time was as
good as any other for a friend whose days were so full, in fact she was sure she was
helping to relieve the anguish which must be terrible in the hospital dark. She
helped Guylaine to drink through a straw, in a covered glass like the ones now sold
for babies. She'd had to bring her ear close to her friend's white lips to take in,
through her disgusting breath, her whisper. Stanzas as slow as a heat wave, piercing
as a blizzard. “I detest you. You ruined my youth. You ignored my children. You
sneered at my husband. You seduced my father.”

He had revealed it to her, weeping, in the early days of this cancer,
begging her to forgive him for having caressed her friend who had undressed in front
of him years ago, while he was reading Bernanos and paying no attention to the
languorous melody she was tinkling on the piano. If Gabrielle had said nothing,
betrayed nothing, it was, so he said, because she had wanted it all, beneath her
intellectual manner she was a whore, she was always exposing a thigh, a breast, when
she came to the house. One day, he could swear, she wasn't wearing panties under her
miniskirt, he was the only one to have noticed, if he had mentioned it to his
daughter and his wife they'd have thought he was crazy. He had in fact remained
crazy about Gabrielle whom he'd dreamed so much of entering. If only she had given
him the chance, this story would have ended, he'd have been a father to his
daughter, a grandfather to his grandchildren, a husband to his wife. Perhaps
Guylaine's bones would have stayed healthy, it wasn't normal, this punishment
imprinted on a young woman. His daughter. It was his own diverted sperm that was
muddled up.

He was ugly and trembling, he had asked her for secrecy because it was
too late and he didn't want any drama during his child's last days. But she, the
dying woman, knew very well that he was still trying to keep up the old desire that
continued to swell, that she was dealing with two obscenities, one of whom wouldn't
come to see her five times before the end. And then, because she was Guylaine, she
had given in, again. She would talk when no one could hear her, when Gabrielle could
simply shrug and close a white door on a shadow that peed in its adult diaper, under
a sheet as dry as her bones.

She had one final hiss, at the moment when she knew that Gabrielle had
had enough. “There's one thing you won't have. The one you want.”

What do I want? Gabrielle wondered, as she finished off the memory of
the pharmacist who may have been right to think she was offering herself. She hadn't
worn a bra that day, it had been pleasant to feel her nipples becoming erect and her
belly pressing against that hard thing which she didn't yet know how to name, and to
grow old exciting him from afar, though she doesn't remember going to his place
without panties, except during the period of long Moroccan robes, and he wouldn't
have been able to see anything.

What was it I wanted? she thinks that evening, crammed with the play
of a man who is still adolescent. Before her, the Rivière des Prairies, which are no
longer prairies but fields of bungalows and towers that are also crammed with
seniors in small apartments, the pink streak of the sun dying drowsily over
Montreal, the horizon barred all the way to the United States. The strata of a
country about which some wrote poems at the time when she did or did not wear
panties under a miniskirt or a long robe that had come from Africa, like the words
of Frantz Fanon.

Three

AN ORDINARY HANDSAW
could have cut up
what remained of the two caraganas planted at the beginning of June and dead in
August. But the contractor arrived with a small excavator, chainsaws and two
workers, through some misunderstanding that's still unsolved, if Gabrielle is to
judge by the chorus of curses rising from the lawn.

With the powerful voice of a skinny man, the owner of the garden-level
apartment declares that they must also remove the hedge of honeysuckle, it grows
like a weed and blocks the view of the river, its roots are so tenacious that
drastic measures are called for. The owners' meeting, he claims, had agreed on the
principle of putting in low plants so that people on the garden level (even though,
as he doesn't add, they've paid less for their three rooms and kitchen) can enjoy
the building's interesting location as much as the people on the upper floors. As
proof, he brings up the caraganas with their twisted trunks, whose thin, drooping
branches should have grown low and broad if the acid soil hadn't killed them so
quickly.

From the fourth floor Gabrielle hears only the rumbling of the debate
— including the indignant barbs of Fatima, who hasn't been ordered to make the
honeysuckle disappear and who dares to confront the mule-headed man. Pierre is
familiar with the quarrel because he's heard it more clearly from his place. He
tells Gabrielle when he arrives that she should watch out for that Monsieur Poupart.
“His wife has one cheek purple from a burn, she'd spilled a bottle of oil and to
punish her he set fire to it and she won't lodge a complaint.” In his opinion, it's
the husband who killed the caraganas by pretending to water them during the summer
drought, who knows what mixture he was using? Honeysuckle can take anything, it's
common.

Long after the workers have gone, leaving the hedge intact, angry
hissing rises up from the terrace of apartment 101, where the brute tells his wife
at length about what he plans to do. Like a saw, he in turn disturbs the morning
air, which had been washed by a cooler night, at last.

In the yard, the cutting has been done cleanly, the remains of the
trunks blend with the mulch, the tired grass appears to have been tonsured for some
autumnal ceremony, Gabrielle tells Pierre, who doesn't understand the image. “What's
a tonsure?” She laughs at this child who has never known priests. He's better off
that way. Besides, the last one she'd known had brought bad luck.

“It's a sign of chastity,” she said. Though she knows nothing about
it. She assumes that the ridiculous shaving of the top of the head was intended to
lessen desire for women. Surely it's hard to caress a man whose brain has been
denuded by some old bishop dressed like a vestal virgin. His kisses must reek of the
void.

Pierre inquires about that last priest she'd known.

She wouldn't swear that Damien Perreault had been an abbé, despite the
premature baldness that suggested it, as well as what he gave her to understand
about a stay at the monastery of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, in Brittany, where he had
apparently been introduced to the teachings of the monk Abélard. Saint-Gildas was a
small seaside resort with a handful of inns that were more inviting than its austere
abbey, and Gabrielle had trouble picturing Damien as a reader in the refectory.
Rather, she saw him devouring a book on medieval philosophy at the beach, coated
with luxurious suntan oil, between two naps in the sun. He did seem to know all
there was to know about Abélard, having thoroughly penetrated that vanity so
brilliant it had become theological, that faith in oneself that really does turn
certain men into images of the God they've created to invite comparison. That would
have been Damien's style, had he persevered. But he also talked about cliffs, sea
spray, jellyfish with as much precision as the teachings of Abélard, with whom the
encounter finally seemed more like a vacation affair than a mystical experience
before an altar. Moreover he'd said nothing about Héloïse, whose spirit seemed to
Gabrielle, from the little she'd read about her, more riveting than that of her
illustrious seducer.