Appropriate Place (5 page)

And so, with no outside teaching, she absorbed the first rule of her
new life: to get the perverts on her side. Instead of appearing wounded, she asked
him for advice. At the second cognac, he thought he still had her. His colour came
back. And until he became the wreck whose colleagues took over his courses when he
was in detox, she treated him as a scout.

Which happened every now and then, when he was in the capital. He came
for her in luxurious limousines of a kind the government no longer allowed cabinet
ministers, they would go to Serge Bruyère, where nouvelle cuisine offered
civet
de lapin
with a blueberry coulis,
they would wash down Damien's
latest fantasies with the finest Pouilly, they'd be seated near tables of Americans,
to shield their conversations.

One night of black ice on the maze of highways that run out of the
overly old city, he told her that he was going to New York for treatment of a
mysterious sickness in his blood. She could only see the red blotches settling into
a face that was barely puffy, she pretended to believe him, as usual. He disappeared
for six months though and only resurfaced for a brief call to her place at dawn. He
was after a job in a French university, he was going to set himself up overseas to
reconnect with his origins, a letter of recommendation from a minister of cultural
affairs would enhance his file, everyone knows how sensitive the French are to the
proper connections. Gabrielle was annoyed. She had learned to be sparing with her
signature for fear of abuse by sycophants and most of all, she didn't want
circulating in France, one of the rare countries to befriend her government, proof
of her relationship with an individual as disturbed as Damien. And what if there
were some basis to his story about a Nazi father? She gained some time by asking for
a copy of his c.v. so she could put useful comments into her recommendation. He hung
up with promises to send it. She knew that such a document had never existed,
Damien's curriculum vitae existed only in the current of his dreams.

The following week, on a day of thaw and mud all the way to the
Parliament, she learned through Marguerite, a mutual friend, that Damien had been
found in front of the fireplace in a chalet he'd rented in Sainte-Adèle. He hadn't
paid the rent since December, he was in debt beyond all measure, he had defied his
cirrhosis to the point of confusing codeine and cognac, sleep and death. It would be
called suicide.

He had left nothing for Gabrielle, neither a message nor anything in
his will, because there wasn't one, the copy of Malraux's
Antimémoires
having like everything else taken the road to a secondhand book store. Any sign
would have been a gesture of the kind that are invented for novels. But Damien
couldn't have done that, he'd been exhausted.

At the burial — they were maybe a dozen at the Cimetière de l'Est,
near the oil refineries, in the shadow of depressing apartment buildings — she saw
an old woman who was crying and who looked like Damien. His mother, the only one.
She saw a young woman who was crying and who looked like a photo. The Toronto
actress, or the American girl, or a new secretary in the sociology department to
whom he had often given flowers. Just one friend, anyway, which Gabrielle no longer
was. She had made him incidental to her love and to her work. In the end, she had
been more skilled at betrayal than he was.

These were things that she thought about for the first time in the
shadow of the so strange presence of Pierre. She touched the railing from which the
warmth of the day was withdrawing but which still held the memory of the sun. Since
that time the only place in Quebec that upset her was the square of crabgrass where
Damien was rotting, where there wasn't even a tombstone. She'd gone back there
often.

Four

IN MOST MONTREAL
neighbourhoods they
still ring the angelus even though no one hears it. The angel of the Lord does not
however descend onto rue des Bouleaux, in Laval, because the apartment buildings
there were built on meadows where only yesterday the clinking of cowbells could be
heard, far from the villages and their churches. It wouldn't have occurred to anyone
to put up a house of worship in the vicinity, not even the sects that are beginning
to prosper further north, in the folds of the Laurentians. Here, everything is neat
and tidy, even inside the residents' heads; for a long time they've been spending
Sundays cooking or cleaning, they hope for an easing of Sunday store hours so they
can do their shopping before taking in a movie at the mall, it would be more
convenient.

Gabrielle knows that it's noon though when the door of a pearl grey
Cadillac that belongs to the sister of a lady on the third floor slams in the
visitors' parking lot. Whenever it's sunny the two women lunch together on the
balcony. Gabrielle's view of them is from above and too close. They are tanned like
the Floridians they become in winter, with backcombed hair of greenish blond, heavy
shoulders bare under tank tops meant for teenagers, bodies preserved in a certain
age. Look-alikes, maybe twins, though their voices clash. The visitor speaks
coarsely, the other woman softly, so what makes its way up to Gabrielle is an odd
monologue, one-half of a conversation, like telephone scenes on
TV
soaps. Most of the time in fact they seem to be chatting about
programs they watched the day before, their delivery is not disturbing, it's the
smooth rhythm of a spool, barely broken by the clinking of cutlery.

What's most remarkable to Gabrielle is the roundness of the scene.
They have never cast a curious glance at her own balcony, at the little scandal,
within reach of their understanding, that is the presence of Pierre. He doesn't
touch her except in late afternoon, moments of tender and silent fornication that
already are starting to feel like the rendezvous of old lovers. But still, he seems
settled in and a little too bare, decent ladies could whisper when they see him. But
they are absorbed in one another, exchange polite small talk, serve one another
juice and water, salads and cakes that are always topped with mounds of ice cream.
They don't laugh, they chat on and on, they're fond of each other. Around two p.m.
the car door slams again, the neighbour doesn't reappear on the balcony, maybe she
uses the afternoon to put together food for the morrow, no detail is superfluous for
one who cares about harmony.

“I knew a senator,” says Gabrielle, “who had the very same car.” It
was the last of the Cadillacs with any style or presence, the rear end bulging like
the cushion of a marchioness, the leather buffed to stir a woman's sex, the
dashboard cut from mahogany like an ocean liner's, the nose of the hood like a
diadem, contemptuous of the ordinary people on the road, those with small engines.
The senator of course was tiny, he seemed just rich enough to be appalled by all the
rumours and to pray that God would preserve him from louts. One of whom Gabrielle
would have been had she not been a woman before being a separatist, a race that he
thought he abhorred.

She had met him and seduced him, but chastely, during the first
televised debate of the election campaign. Her victory was a foregone conclusion;
she was slender and fresh, filled with the grace of the words of the future,
dignity
being the most powerful, a subtle reminder of the humiliations
that were still too frequent and of the immense pleasure to be gained from making
Canada stick to its false promises when the time came. Time wasn't urgent, she said
in a voice of velvet, we'll take what we need to bow out graciously, and while we
wait we will better confirm our modernity. Was she not the very image of youth and
of the skills hence-forth asserting themselves in French to the four corners of the
territory?

The host from the public network favoured her side and the little man,
who had become a senator through business, not politics, who was discovering the new
situation of women under the spotlights, stammered banalities about the good will of
Canadians. Still, he lost the match with elegance and invited her to lunch at the
Mas des Oliviers. Out of the dimness, where jurists of all tendencies still drank
martinis before their
bavette à l'échalote
, rose a distinct sound, the
sound of the west end of the city, of money duly counted. Men entered in twos and
threes, coatless despite the September chill, they would nod in the direction of a
table, stop at another, murmur greetings laden with complicity. One could gauge
their status from the time it took them to get to their seats and on how long the
route was, a geography far more complex than what's discussed in sociology texts
where status is however a seminal notion, one that is measured with the greatest
obsessiveness and with instruments that are constantly being refined. There were
lawyers who advised investors, lawyers who created numbered companies into which
they poured investors' money, lawyers who served as intermediaries between
investors, lawyers who merged investors' assets and lawyers who'd become investors
themselves, by dint of having been there when the bill appeared, the high point of
their day. Across from Gabrielle was a man who had used the various categories of
lawyers and who was therefore greeted by nearly all of them, except for those newly
minted who would have appreciated an introduction. Among these young people a few
women formed as did she a bright, nearly damp spot, one of those moist breezes that
on the shores of the St. Lawrence announce so certainly the end of summer.

No one in these circles knew her, the program wouldn't be aired until
the following day. They must have thought that the senator, long unattached, was
trying to get back in shape. It was the impression he gave in fact, he was
attentive, gallant, already tamed. Gabrielle drank white wine, which placed her on
the borderline between virginal and brazen, and she was enjoying a
filet de
doré
meunière
, a fish that does not fear butter, thus allying sobriety and
seduction. She was clearly displaying a sound instinct, including that for pleasing
her contradictor by asking him to tell her about the people and the place. He was
not as banal as he'd been in the studio, he even sparkled behind his round glasses.
To hear him talk, the diners were nearly all cuckolds, and the most fortunate in
business were the two tall grey-haired ones at the back, whose recent merger was so
perfect that their wives were already sleeping together and were even sharing a
well-known actress. Gabrielle discovered that, as well as being a direct route for
advancing one's ideas, politics was the most fascinating of kaleidoscopes.

The senator became one of her amused companions in the other camp, of
whom she learned to have many, with no ulterior motive, for the fun of it. It was
harmless to spend time with them, to laugh with them, to get in their cars along the
Ottawa–Montreal–Quebec City corridor and to inquire about their families or their
love lives. After all, the future of Quebec was not a matter of life and death. No
one was the enemy and one had to wish for others what they were reluctant to wish
for themselves, what they'd be happy to have when the time came. They were getting
old, she thought, and they were afraid of the wind. She had the energy to cleave it
for them.

Heady weeks that brought her party to victory, contrary to all
expectations, by accident. Not once while she crisscrossed her future riding,
overcoming her jitters before making some speech or other at some meeting or other,
even a friendly one, was she really prepared for the wild notion of winning a seat
in the National Assembly and for a government that would be hers. For the thought of
handing over her course outlines to a replacement, along with the keys to her
office, of renting a furnished apartment on rue Sainte-Ursule, of memorizing train
and plane schedules along with the names of her new colleagues, all of them as
stunned as she was on the night of the victory. The bottom of her heart, that blue
place where she formed an island with her lover, felt solemn and emotional. They
only needed to work well and the country would be within reach.

She knew Quebec City from reading Adrienne Choquette's novel
Laure
Clouet
and she remembered the first chapter as clearly as if she herself
had been the woman whose youth was in suspense, who on an early September day like
this, from a stone house with a fenced-in garden across from the provincial museum
“went out, wearing kidskin gloves and a gabardine suit.” It was dove-coloured
alpaca, the suit that she wore for the swearing-in, the skirt too tame, her hair too
well-coiffed, she was surprised to hear herself say aloud, “So help me God,” when
she intended to erase the last sign of God, preventer of all women, from cultural
affairs, the ministry entrusted to her.

The ministry building, tall and grey on the Grande Allée, overlooked
what had been the world of Laure Clouet, and during the few weeks when she was still
anonymous, Gabrielle liked to walk there, filled with the old silence that seeped
from the homes. Deserted by the good burghers and transformed into restaurants with
atmosphere, in the morning they possessed the haughty blindness that made Quebec the
most Pharisaic of cities with class, slower than any other in America to uncorset
its daughters and to demand fewer lies of its sons. Gabrielle, who was preparing to
bring together the best minds of the province to write the most audacious and the
most complete proposals for cultural policy, inhaled the last residues of the
constraints that she would disperse, smiled at still-unknown bureaucrats, had few
doubts and, unlike Laure Clouet, didn't wear gloves.

At least not until the December winds, they were vicious and laden
with all the revenge of the ancestors. The mood turned grey then, even in the trains
that week after week took her back to Montreal. The Saturday arts sections, while
more tolerant of her than of her predecessors, were already finding plenty to fault
in her policy outlines, mocking their ambitiousness for such a small people. The
writers thought their chatter was harmless enough, but it weighed heavily in the
government's faint understanding of anything cultural.