Appropriate Place (4 page)

“Damien always lied,” she says. And at that moment she senses, as if
it were in her windpipe, the slight bitterness he exuded when he was talking to her,
that flowed only in her, it had taken her months to understand why.

She sends Pierre back to his work, the rest he wouldn't understand at
all.

Damien and Gabrielle had been colleagues at the university, vague
adversaries at the beginning of the school year, having quarrelled over the only
course on class structure offered in Quebec. The period of strikes was over, but
there was still plenty of fraternization between the few supervised hours of
teaching. It had all started in the office of the dean, who was very tall, very
handsome, very silent. They were drinking manhattans. Present were Damien,
pink-faced after one sip, skinny Alexandre, whose wife would wait for him, and
Serge, trying to discipline them into a six p.m. meeting with plans for another the
next morning. Gabrielle had worn a blue wool dress, the blue of the dean's eyes,
with a full-length zipper nearly to her boots, which girls wore all day and from
which they never managed to scrape off all the salt from the streets. Alexandre was
talking about women's underwear as a gauge of the changing times, he claimed he
often cheated on his wife. Gabrielle played scatterbrained because of that blue
which was suddenly unbearable, ice turned to silk to be torn between her and the
tall silent boy. Never would she be virginal enough for him. Something evil was
alighting, radiant, at the end of her twentieth year.

Damien had seized the moment before they did, he had filled the
glasses, spattered some paper by suddenly raising his, challenged Gabrielle to take
off her clothes to test Alexandre's thesis. With a sharp tug of her zipper she'd
done so. A few seconds and a few centimetres of the bra-slip she was so fond of,
that pushed up her small breasts in a double layer of lace which she washed by hand
with expensive soap flakes in the hope of preserving it for a long time. It was only
when half-naked that she was somewhat beautiful. And now there was at least that
between them, this perfect waste.

The blue did not break, it even became the first laugh in the love of
a lifetime, one she would never recount.

But Damien wouldn't rest during the months and years when he would be
their mutual friend, until he tried to have a go at this miracle, marvelling at
having been the first witness while pretending to be its guardian.

He was also a visitor to the home of the married lover, reporting to
Gabrielle the colours of the house and of the children's curls, their mealtimes, all
those bits of answers to the questions that she didn't ask. Little by little, in
front of the Alexandres and Serges, he had even played at being Gabrielle's lover,
they all got drawn into that
trompe l'oeil
, as a favour to the lovers. One
night, at the faculty Christmas party, Damien had groped her in front of her
colleagues until she'd thought that he really was interested and tried to console
him afterwards, in the car where they were sobering up while they waited for some
heat. He had kissed the tips of her fingers as one might do to some inconsequential
trollop. From his blank expression during the drive home, she realized that she was
just the proxy for his own love of the same boy.

That was the only chilly episode between them. Afterwards, she let him
kiss the other man's juices on her neck, seek in her the trace of stolen bliss and
breathe in the unhappiness of absence. The hours, at least, were filled.

It was Damien who had signed her up for the sovereigntist party he'd
been associated with since its beginning. The adopted son of quiet bourgeois, he
was, he said, the natural son of a former Nazi who'd found refuge in Canada, who had
tracked down his son who was also the son of a whore and left him a fortune of
dubious origin, which Damien chose to spend discreetly and had put at the service of
the democrats in our liberation movement, after associating for a while with
terrorists, the first ones to have finally drawn some lessons from our history.
Those who favoured violence were all poor and neurotic, he said, and you had to be
healthy and rich to have a normal relationship with freedom. And so he'd left them,
after his sojourn for reflection at Saint-Gildas, and he had given some energy in
the form of cash to the petits bourgeois hungry for a normal state, the kind that
are respected by the newsmagazines and are the only ones that matter.

Why had she believed that nonsense? Because he spouted it without the
usual hesitation of our local thinkers? Because he read
Der Spiegel
in the
original and summarized brilliantly all the French and American periodicals piled up
on the backseat of his comfortable Citroën? In any case, she had developed a liking
for the topicality of things. And had got it into her head that palingenesis
couldn't come about without the commitment of people like her, who understood the
source and the term. Or so we believe at the dawn of our thirties, in a country
where bombs no longer go off and where intellectuals socially on the rise
nonetheless owe something to the neurotics who are in jail. She had acquired a
membership card, paid more than her dues, and started to attend meetings.

Damien wanted to stay in the shadows but to make Gabrielle, who had a
way with people, into a figure. That was how he put it. While she was spending her
evenings on a detailed dissection, in the original, of Rosa Luxemburg's relationship
with nationalism, persuading herself against all evidence that it hadn't been a
total repudiation, Damien extricated from hundreds of newspapers and magazines signs
of a rebirth of patriotism, and it was from them that she finally drew her
arguments, around party tables where there was no time to waste on debates about the
particular circumstances of the Spartacus League in the early years of the
century.

Little by little, Gabrielle had shed the jargon of her discipline,
preserving only her admiration for that little bit of a woman whose speeches had
galvanized men and who hadn't feared the police. One day she would go to Berlin and
sit on the edge of the canal where murderers had thrown Rosa's corpse.

Gabrielle's students now found her more fiery, they were glad to see
dispelled the dissertationlike atmosphere that she'd previously felt required to
keep up. The same was true in the party, where some were beginning to think she had
the makings of a
pasionaria
. Not the kind of which leaders are made, a
woman was out of the question, but the kind that strikes the proper vein among party
members.

There was a small triumph one Sunday morning at a National Council
meeting, one that would bolster the development of her political career. A
confrontation with the Maoists had been brewing for weeks, there were still a few —
people of speeches and spirit who wanted to make the party into a ferment of
proletarian revolution in North America, a place where the future would be not only
French, but fair. She led a workshop organized with the help of Damien's notes. “You
think,” she told them in some introductory remarks, “that there's a country
dedicated to revenge and justice, a country that will not lay down its arms, that
will not lay down its spirit until there is a global confrontation. You think that
three hundred years of European energy are being wiped out, that the Chinese era is
beginning. Mao reminds you of the power of emperors, but he is actually a carapace
covered with rust, like those army leaders you see at funeral processions or
abandoned in the sorghum fields where the Chinese people toil. Mao is nothing but a
solitary shadow, watching and hoping for the twilight of a world. Proletariats will
join capitalist states as has happened in Russia and the United States. Mao is old,
he's watching the revolution slip away while he shields his eyes from the sun. With
him, you would take a great leap into the void.”

It was clear to see that she read, that such literary considerations
weren't spontaneous. But in a party that cared about an image of culture she really
did stand out as someone who knew how to write, who could carry on a conversation
with the few political tourists from France who were coming more and more often to
look into the effervescence of their picturesque American cousins. Without
altogether retreating, the Maoists had changed halls. The Great Helmsman would die a
few months later, in a climate of revolutionary rust that she certainly hadn't been
alone in pointing out, but the party recognized her instinct as being reliable
enough that she was entrusted with other missions on the ideas front.

On the day after Mao's funeral, the university's internal mail brought
her an anonymous missive: “Young Woman, I too have read page 561 in André Malraux's
Antimémoires
, Folio paperback number 23, Gallimard, 1972. Fear not, I
wish only good things for you and for Quebec's independence, I shall respect the
secret of your brilliant inspiration.”

Gabrielle had not read Malraux. She immediately obtained a copy and on
page 561 found, nearly word for word, the text that Damien had written for her.
There was fog between the lines, and lessons that would serve her well, later on, in
the company of other liars. She didn't waste time hating Damien before she
confronted him in his sun-bathed office where he was reading an article on
Kissinger's strategy in
Foreign Policy
. Barely did his plump priestly
cheeks turn pink, as they did during their alcohol-fuelled chatter. He took so many
notes on so many subjects, he said, that he could easily have copied out passages
from
Antimémoires
two or three years ago and inadvertently incorporated
them into something he'd written himself. She could use the same excuse if anyone
complained, it happened to so many professors, apparently Malraux himself liked
nothing better than to heighten facts by seasoning them with lies. She shouldn't be
so puritanical, as people learned in abbeys.

What did he know about Malraux? He didn't read many books. She
realized that when he copied, it was cheating. From that day on she separated what
she wrote from what Damien did and put herself in a condition of infidelity.

She now saw him only in the elegant restaurants to which he was fond
of inviting her, where he behaved like a regular, where he drank too much of wines
that were too fine. She went along as if she were going to a show, for the wild
stories about his life to which he managed to give some verisimilitude.

Over noisettes of venison at Postel, he had claimed to be the owner of
hunting grounds in the Camargue to which he went incognito, because local
descendants of the partisans would slit the throat of this son of a Nazi who had
taken advantage of a miserly old woman to appropriate the property legally.

Over champagne in an elegant Vermont inn, where it had pleased him to
drive her some hundred and fifty kilometres in the snow, he had given himself a
brother in the States, a rather famous ophthalmologist, whose wife had become
Damien's lover in room thirteen of this charming retreat; of it had been born a
daughter as beautiful as the daylight but deaf and blind, the mother had been
shattered by grief, she would die soon.

Over tea in the Ritz garden he had told her he'd recently become
engaged to a Toronto actress, daughter of a ruined Greek ship owner who had made a
new fortune in Canada by selling copies of Hellenic sculptures to the nouveaux
riches with swimming pools, with whom the Queen City abounded.

He was always coming back from amazing trips, from hotels that no
guidebook had spotted, routes that no one else had followed, encounters that no one
else could imagine and that gave him information on how foreigners viewed Quebec
sovereignty — with hostility, in general. The worst was yet to come, he repeated
again and again, Gabrielle should be on her guard.

She listened as if she believed him, she knew how to make those eyes.
Just as she knew that Damien was as afraid of planes as of women, which demolished
all his lies at the outset. But he was a contrast with the pale creatures she met in
the department, shadows of their borrowed ideas, brains hesitant under the greasy
hair that soiled the pillows of their unsatisfied girlfriends. He carried her along
too, most often away from the party militants who adopted the missionary position
both in bed and in their political sermons, unversed in either the subtleties of the
flesh or the perversions of the powerful. The shadows Damien talked about were
false, but they were more real than the hopes that rang out in the fleur-de-lys
flags those political enthusiasts waved.

One late-summer evening, at one of the new terraces on Saint-Denis
Street whose vulgarity Damien deplored, Gabrielle told him that she'd requested an
unpaid leave from the university and that she was going to run in a north-end
Montreal riding. She had spent her childhood there, still had some useful ties,
liked places on the river. The party thought it had a chance there, though they were
all aware of the limits to popular support for the idea of sovereignty. She herself
wasn't even sure that she altogether believed in it, she told Damien, but
increasingly she preferred meeting with adults more than with students barely out of
adolescence. Their hopeless ignorance had come after their insolent ignorance, she
was a good enough pedagogue but preferred to exercise her talents on people less
impudent and more cheerful, who would address her respectfully. What's more, like
everyone else, Quebec's sheep-like history turned her stomach. In the universities,
it was forgotten. But on the streets of her childhood, how many people still thought
that the genuine God, if he spoke to humans, would have done so in English, and that
it was incumbent on them to put up with it?

Damien's expression became intractable before she had finished her
third sentence. “You're crazy. Not only will you lose the election — as will the
party — you'll wreck your own life too. Rumours will spread about your married lover
— or lovers. You won't be able to withstand them. You don't have the nerves for
debate. You can't write a good speech that's clear and succinct. Besides, I know the
party activists, they won't even support your nomination.” There was a threat in his
voice. On his chubby face small wrinkles were appearing, signs of near old age,
unattractive. In a moment, she had grasped everything. That he thought he could hold
on to her. That she was merely a cog in the machinery for transmitting his stories
to the other man, to the person he wanted to continue interesting through her. That
he could see her getting away, leaving the triangle, occupying the stage by herself.
She realized that he was the author of the anonymous letter, that he'd wanted to be
the bird of ill omen at the beginning of her public life, while playing the role of
her lover. One day, at a moment of victory, he would tell all, he would betray
her.