Appropriate Place (6 page)

It took less than six months for the area in front of 225 de la Grande
Allée Est and the side entrance to the Parliament to erase Quebec City's charm. She
no longer saw the beauty of the stones, she travelled past the fortifications in a
limousine, liked only the bridges across the St. Lawrence. She enjoyed some success,
particularly at the beginning. She had an instinct for maintaining equidistance
between heritage preservation and support for the avant-garde, though she had little
time to read, or to understand where she was heading.

On the eve of a federal-provincial conference she was happy to meet up
with the senator in Ottawa. In his discreet
pied-à-terre
on the tenth floor
of a tower on Metcalfe Street, he was as anonymous as the Quebec minister of
cultural affairs, who was surprised to find agreeable and teasing the notion of a
transgression on federalist turf. Time would weigh less heavily up there. Champagne,
smoked salmon, Russian bread, even caviar obtained from who knows what embassy: he
had prepared well for the pause.

His name was Champfleur, a ridiculous one for a man reputed to be
grim, though he did have a silky way of shaking hands. He settled her —
deliberately, it seemed to her — in the
voltaire
chair with too many studs
that sat next to his enormous library, the kind that seems to have been purchased by
the metre by parvenus. But she was wrong to think that. While he was attending to
his platters, she saw that what he had assembled there was a sizeable collection of
the world's poetry, meticulously bound, ordered, filed in our two original or
translated languages. Nothing else.

She asked the most idiotic of questions.

“Have you read them all?”

There was irritation in his smile. “I tell ladies, or young ladies,
that I have no more need to read all these books than they need to wear all their
jewels.”

But he soon took pity. “Anyway, I see that you wear very few.” It
would have taken more kindly remarks to mitigate Gabrielle's feelings of inadequacy,
she who had come to cultural affairs without knowing personally a single poet, much
less an entire opus, except for bits that had been made into songs. As for the
troubadours of the land who celebrated its powerful panoramas and assigned its
animal might to its men, she kept them to one side. Sociology makes one invulnerable
to collective illusions, to anthropomorphic drift, even if it's carried along by the
most beautiful music. If she believed in the rebirth of Quebec it was through other
forms of progress than those that accompany grand sentiments.

While he was pouring inexhaustible champagne and teaching her how
cream and black bread together had been setting off sturgeon eggs since the time
when French singers were at once rending and refining Russian hearts, Étienne
Champfleur talked to her about the importance of poetry, of which he read very
little.

“My walls are cushioned with words. I have close at hand when I need
it all the ways, brilliant or naive, to express all the states of mind and body of a
lifetime, and several lifetimes wouldn't be enough. They are there, I'm sure of it,
they have existed and sometimes still exist, in other places. I like owning them,
the way others amass great wines that they don't drink. Besides, we couldn't taste
them. We have had the misfortune, you and I, to be born into a world immunized
against tragedy. Here, all of us can consummate our loves before we lose them, which
makes the loss less painful, and we die from accident or disease, at a normal age
most of the time. Horrors are rare, we experience them by proxy. I will even tell
you that you're right to steer clear of our poets, their greatest tragedy is not to
have one, and to use words like forceps to bring them into being. They lack
agitation, cruelty, they have nothing to do with them. I've classified them
separately, with their calculated sadness. I'll change my mind, I'll follow you when
just one of them is overjoyed with our mediocrity, with being the Job of our own
dung heap.”

He fell silent. She didn't really understand. The champagne blunted
her attention, and while she thought she'd understood a warning against strong
emotions, she was suddenly very unhappy, or allowed herself to become so at this
time of night, so far from everything she thought she hoped for. She was not yet
forty years old, her body was a minor parenthesis in her lover's life, poetry was a
wall in a strange house, in a stubborn city. Power was beginning to please her and
she knew that that was bad. Tomorrow, others would compose for her statements as
hollow as those of her adolescence, and she would enjoy the press conference game.
How could she hate herself more than that? By knowing, like our poets, that you
don't kill yourself over such a thing. That there would never be enough pain in the
entire lifetime of a bus driver's daughter, now a cabinet minister, for her to die
of it.

She drank far too much and cried just as much, in the dim light of a
little man who didn't even hold her hand. He was content to become the bespectacled
senator again, who, to help Gabrielle regain her composure around midnight, the hour
when she should go back to the Château Laurier if she wanted to arrive at the
conference centre a little fresh, inquired about her new life in the other capital,
amused at the similarities between the vanities of the two parliaments, told her
that a few days earlier he'd overheard a conversation over Sauternes and foie gras
at Café Burger in Hull, between the Montreal president of a major bank and the
federal finance minister; they'd been assessing the effect on separatist feelings of
a threat to move the head office of the institution that had been established in
Quebec at the turn of the twentieth century. “Their minds may be twisted,” the
senator agreed, “but they have a better hand than you do.” While she waited for an
Ottawa taxi, a rarity at night in this well-behaved little town, Gabrielle caught
herself debating with some brio.

The federal–provincial conference had as usual left no perceptible
public trace except some awkwardness between Gabrielle Perron and Étienne
Champfleur. They saw one another now and then, on the neutral ground of restaurants,
and they stuck to parliamentary gossip. The senator was useful to Gabrielle all the
same, with what he gleaned from remarks in the federal capital, which had been
throbbing with nerves since the separatists had come to power. Some said they were
in the service of a foreign power, it was known through the Canadian mistresses of
French diplomats, others claimed to be taking part in highly intelligent meetings to
prepare for infiltrating enemy ranks in the very heart of the Quebec capital. Rue
d'Auteuil would soon be bristling with microphones, the senator said, amused. She
repeated little of this nonsense to her colleagues, who wouldn't have appreciated
her relationship with a man who belonged to money and Canada.

Their last meeting took place in Quebec City in the fall, at the
Closerie des Lilas, which was to the Upper Town what the Mas des Oliviers was to the
centre of Montreal, with the addition of some senior government officials. Thin,
emaciated almost, Champfleur alluded to the doctor he'd come to consult, one of the
leading Canadian specialists in prostate disorders. It was no longer fitting to
smile at it, to imagine that in another life, before the Cadillac, the little man
could have been a charming, lanky lover, one of those who can hold back their
pleasure for hours, probe a girl so thoroughly and gently that she is only a sex,
afterwards taking his in her mouth, grateful. He was the father of three sons, all
in business and scattered to other provinces, he rarely had anything to say about
them, or about their mother who early on had flown off to New York with someone
richer and less intelligent than he was.

At the Closerie he drank only water, and that had limited confidences.
She asked Jean-Charles to drive him to the airport, she was in a hurry, she'd go
back to the ministry by taxi, to prepare for the public hearings that had finally
been called to study her cultural policy. The worst of the winds made her take her
leave very quickly, she had on thin shoes and the sidewalk was icy.

Two months later she heard of his death on the radio and though she
was in Montreal on the day of the funeral, she didn't put in an appearance at the
Saint-Jean-Baptiste church, the false cathedral of Plateau-Mont-Royal, where he had
been born, son of a storekeeper. From the death notice in
Le Devoir
she
learned that he'd also had a daughter, Gabrielle, a teacher and poet, dead at
thirty. But she hadn't had time to go and greet an entourage now indifferent, the
man had been such a loner. The party caucus was shut away for two days in a downtown
hotel, a kind of meditation before the upcoming battle of the referendum on
sovereignty; it was unthinkable for the minister of cultural affairs, who was being
counted on to rally the artistic community and to find words for the most memorable
slogans, to turn up, out of place, at a gathering, even an obscure one, of
opponents.

She didn't even know in which cemetery he had been buried. She thought
that now she had plenty of time to make inquires, to place a rose on his grave or
even, if it wasn't too late in the summer, to plant a perennial. After all, the
match between them was a tie — nothing they had debated had reached a conclusion,
twisted minds on all sides had manipulated the fearful, who held the fate of the
world in their dried-up brains and constantly postponed deciding what it was until
the morrow. It was indeed impossible for the poets to extricate any images from this
limbo, the only truly lasting inheritance of the catechism. They were no more
inspiring than the junkyards that the country was full of, which were beginning to
be recycled into flea markets.

What had become of his library? He'd had the intelligence, or the
pity, to bequeath it to someone other than Gabrielle, or to the National Library of
Canada, which prided itself on assembling a world-class compilation but whose poetry
collection, save for the required legal deposit in our two languages, was until then
very limited. Few would note it because few had complained.

Five

A FIRE IS AN EVENT
far less spectacular
today than it was during Gabrielle's childhood, when there were regular
conflagrations, winter and summer, with the tremendous noise of blazes swallowing up
the possessions of large families and sometimes one of the children, who would be
found under his little iron bed, burned to death. The entire school would then file
past the gilt-handled ivory coffin that would take the dead child to paradise. Long
after the firemen had left, the bowels of the kitchen could still be made out, with
walls where hung, miraculously, a holy picture or a calendar. And over the following
days, the victims had time to force their way cautiously to the cellar, where they
would recover the useless objects relegated there. If it was January, the month most
conducive to overheating, the place would be devastated until spring, and the dead
child's soul would remain frozen in the vicinity — an object lesson for young
smokers of the cigarettes to which many of these disasters were attributed, to the
unrelenting shame of their parents who often had to resign themselves to fleeing to
other neighbourhoods.

There was nothing like that in the new suburbs. If the fire had been
caused by smoking, as might have been the case in a neighbouring house that night,
it was easily contained thanks to the fire-retardant materials used nowadays for
sofas and mattresses; it was very rare now for a bed to become a child's tomb. And
in the event of more serious negligence — cooking fat catching fire or the improper
use of some electrical appliance — the flames rarely went beyond the inside walls,
stopped by the increasingly effec-tive firewalls required by law. Television still
showed the occasional sequence of a carnage that had decimated a family, but they
nearly always took place in the country, to people who were not only impoverished
and poorly housed, but also careless. In Laval, in a neighbourhood such as rue des
Bouleaux, people had at most been wakened by sirens around three a.m. Only two homes
had been briefly evacuated and in less than a week the traces of soot were gone from
around the ground-floor windows. All that remained of the tragedy — for it was one,
it was learned that it had been a deliberate act of vengeance by a teenager
forbidden to see her boyfriend — was the ongoing traffic of service vehicles:
cleaners, carpenters, carpet layers, electricians. The young girl, whom Gabrielle
couldn't recall having met on the street where people got around mainly by car,
would disappear after having existed for a moment, the responsibility now of social
services, as it happens the realm of an excellent minister.

Still, the weather was waxen all around, despite the sun that had been
very active on the roofs of Montreal since dawn. It was as if it was unable to cross
the river, bluish like old veins and dozing now before it had even taken notice of
the day. A fine dust had settled onto the balcony furniture, Gabrielle had had to
close all the windows to protect herself from it, and she'd had to eat breakfast in
her kitchen. When Pierre burst in around ten o'clock, despite the air conditioning
it was as if one were breathing inside an enclosure and Gabrielle had no desire for
him or his work or anything else.

He'd gone prowling around the area of the fire, as she'd have done too
at his age, no doubt. He brought back the first bits of news.

“Apparently she's pregnant and the guy wanted to marry her.”

“So what was the problem?”

“He's Pakistani or Jamaican, nobody knows which, and the girl's
parents didn't want to know, apparently they even forced her to have an
abortion.”