Appropriate Place (8 page)

Is lying exhaustible, like grief? For two years now I've been walking
in the long labyrinth of my black spider that I'll finally arrive at, my sister, my
friend, who will tell me why I was born dark and deceitful. When I hold her in the
palm of my hand — she is here, I saw her yesterday, before the night — you will come
back and you'll take my key. As we will be old, we'll sleep together all through the
night.

While I wait I am alive and I know that you are in the city.

Thus wrote Gabrielle, in vain.

Six

PIERRE COULDN'T HAVE
cared less about
Gabrielle's sudden aloofness. The beginning of August is rich with storms, Laval's
malls are made for taking shelter, for stopping the wind, the rain and later on the
snow, all those climates he'd hoped to escape for good when he left the North.
Surprised that he'd taken months to discover their endless corridors, he never tired
of walking on the cold tiles, of breathing the smell of rags that rose from the
fast-food restaurants, of hearing children sniffle and fake fountains wheeze. He
paid particular attention to the icy store-window dummies that didn't all resemble
one another, regardless of what people think. Though window-dressing fashion
dictated headless women, you could distinguish between the sylphlike and the union
types from the size of their busts, the angle of the neck, the thickness of the
waist, though they all lacked buttocks as did the male dummies in the neighbouring
stores, which were insignificant in comparison.

Pierre turned up around noon, wolfed down some chemically fresh
doughnuts from the day before washed down with a spruce beer, didn't touch the
soiled and crumpled newspapers on the tables whose screaming headlines would give
you a bead on this country. Lightning had killed a golfer, a former cabinet minister
had drowned in his pool, the Hells Angels had acquired a historic manor house, an
epidemic of caterpillars was ruining the lives of campers in the Laurentians, the
explosion of the Chernobyl power station would leave thousands dead there and could
contaminate the skies of Canada. But fortunately there were no skies here, where the
air was purified by passing through vast wind tunnels whose rumbling could be heard
behind the washrooms. Late that afternoon, after the final coffee break for young
salesgirls more or less clad in rayon and polyester, whose sour speech he liked
listening to, he would hang around the arcade till late at night if he happened to
be at the Carrefour Laval.

The blistering hot levers on the machines created mauve and silver
movements for the season's most hopeless young males. With his belly pressed against
some electronic tomb where sparks made love to mermaids, to Ferraris, to gold ingots
or vanishing horizons, Pierre thought more clearly about Gabrielle, about the
cloying whiteness of her walls, her hips, her breasts. She was a store dummy with a
head, burdened with eyes that diminished him. That wanted to take something from
him.
Free game
. His cock at rest, he reddened his palms against glass and
metal and discovered that he was happier.

One Wednesday around six o'clock there was a power failure. In the
darkness pierced by the glimmer of exit signs, the young men tossed off curses that
sounded, after so much noise, like silence. After lashing out at the flanks of some
dead machines, they began to scatter. A tall man with very curly grey hair, whom
Pierre hadn't noticed but who was perhaps the arcade manager, went out with them,
offered cigarettes to those who were lingering around one of the entrances to the
mall. An unfamiliar sun was showing through the final curtain of rain at the very
back of the parking lot. The grey-haired man invited three or four of the young men
to board his luxury van, a black Yukon with two rows of seats, they would go to St.
Catherine Street West, power failures usually spare the downtown area and besides
going to the arcades, they could spend some time in the dens of the triple-X dancers
upstairs. Pierre followed him. In the spreading rosy dusk he thought the man's
features were a little delicate for a connoisseur of dancers. But there was beer in
the trunk, which might help him overcome his reserve and drop a few bits of
sentences here and there into the string of expletives that served as the young
men's reaction to the unexpected as they travelled towards adventure. On the other
side of the Viau bridge, the north end of Montreal was as deserted as Laval, they
spattered only the void, though there were lights on behind the blinds and fences.
Even so, they shuddered a little in their damp T-shirts, as they went directly
inside the Cabaret du Sexe.

They all duly went for a piss, then the grey-haired man, insisting
that they call him Jérôme, flopped down next to Pierre on a sofa recently covered in
leatherette. The dancers were taking a break, except one little brunette with round
thighs, uncomfortable in an overly tight G-string. Facing the back of the stage she
swayed her hips, spreading the cheeks of her ass with her hands, as if it were an
obscene gesture. To believe that, she'd have to be a student of literature. Jérôme
took a notebook from one of the big pockets of his safari shirt and began to draw.
Pierre thought it was the outline of the girl but he saw that it was the profile of
the brothel red lamp that only lit the arm of the sofa. Jérôme finally turned
towards him.

“Your hair's a weird colour.”

“Yes.”

“Is it dyed?”

“No, natural.”

“So your parents aren't from around here.”

“Around here, somewhere else, what difference does it make to
you?”

“I study men, it's what I do.”

He fell silent. Three long-haired dancers, clearly well aware of the
ways of masculine concupiscence, were offering themselves in full frontal view,
breasts swaying to a blues number, eyes smiling at the young men's flies and then,
without actually doing anything, miming some lesbian foreplay. To really warm the
place up though they'd have needed more customers. After twenty minutes, the scene
ended with the propriety of an old video and the little brunette substitute came
back on duty. Pierre was sure that now Jérôme was going to touch his arm or his
thigh, unless instead he slipped a hand into his fawn-coloured hair, the way his
mother's logger clients used to do in the last camps of the North, wrecks who would
have fucked a muskrat if they could, who jerked off while they groped at the
underpants of a child. Jérôme's face was blank like theirs just then, but he gave
Pierre a shove and got up. “I'm hungry. Want to come to Ben's?” They left behind the
others who had shed their embarrassment among themselves and now were chuckling
about cunts.

Over a smoked-meat sandwich oozing orange mustard, in the most
brightly lit restaurant in town, Jérôme asked his permission to take some notes on
the origin of his fawn-coloured hair — a cross between the acerbic blonde of a
Corrine of the miners' taverns and the mahogany mane of an Italian moaning for the
sun he'd left behind. Jérôme recorded the bits that the boy dropped parsimoniously.
Pierre didn't know if the ashes of his father, a suicide, had gone back to Sicily or
to whom they would have been sent. He didn't know where Corrine was since she'd
recycled herself as a cook in hunting and fishing camps for Americans. Surely she
didn't sleep around any more but who could say? She was in her fifties now at most
and would no longer be the object of such close attention from men getting drunk in
the new-style lodges with their pathetic clientele of nouveaux riches. Pierre
recalled Marie as being merely a temporary guardian. “She comes from up north, she's
a friend of my mother's, she left her husband there, an immigrant with no ambition.
She's a teacher here. And she's in mourning for her lover, a well-known man who
wrote books about art.” Jérôme tried briefly to learn more, but in vain. The alcohol
of Laval and the cabaret had dispersed, the ceiling lights at Ben's were becoming
stage lights, the coffee had cooled down at the first sip.

In the Yukon that brought Pierre back to rue des Bouleaux, Jérôme
explained his vehicle and his grey notebooks through his profession — he was a
retired anthropologist, now itinerant. He claimed he was collecting data on
unsuccessful crosses between the peoples who meet here, in this land of immigration,
whereas most of his colleagues, those who published, were more interested in
demonstrating the new vitality that comes from interbreeding. Their research was
better regarded and above all, better funded. A great part of the truth, and of
their errors, could be seen by observing nude dancers, the most easily observable
human beings, which was why Jérôme came to watch them regularly. “Remember the
little brunette, the chubby one who was so self-conscious in her G-string? Just
looking at her I know that her mother must be Huron or Iroquois and her father of
old French stock, from a bad lineage, all of them poor half-wits. That gives you an
intellect stuffed with confused connections, with some fine savage instincts but an
even stronger atavistic predisposition to submissiveness. It also produces a very
tough physical type, with solid flesh and short limbs. Natural survivors, yes, but
confused inside their heads, with a gift for perpetual hesitation, for
non-existence. It seems to me that most of our interbreeding leads to individuals
like that, I call them subtractions. Other researchers, the ones who speak, see them
as additions. It might be different in another country where desires may trigger
passions, forge characters with those mixtures, I don't really know.”

They were approaching the island of Laval. “You,” Jérôme added, “you
could have been a wild animal.” But in profile under the suburban street lamps,
Pierre resembled at most a stubborn fox, a sly little animal for whom even rabies
isn't fatal in these regions. Then the man began to laugh, barely audibly. From a
distance, from more than forty years, suddenly came to his ears the first notes of
Peter and the Wolf
, the Prokofiev record that had been played so often
in the luxurious house of his childhood. He no longer recalled the end of the story
but all at once he understood that the words of the tale, quietly recounted to the
horror music, had resulted in the destruction of terror in some pampered children.
From the dark forests where the wolf gorges on blood should have risen the smell of
crime, the sweat and excrement of torture victims, the gas from decaying carcasses.
And from that stinking mist, after the dumb death rattle of the slain, the true
sound of death — that of the killer licking his chops — should have ascended. The
Russian steppes still know something about that, about those dawns when the tyrant
goes to bed sated while his clones aim at the cities, in their offices that stand in
for watchtowers.

But what was he afraid of, this boy falling silent at his side,
settled into the costly cushions, taken into streets purged of all vermin? At most,
the rutting of another male, or even his mere insistence on conversing, as if prying
out a few words were a form of rape. His night, which in that respect resembled the
nights in all the apartment buildings lined up in their inconsequential sleep, was
not weighted with any other threat, no dogs were out. Yet fear was on the prowl in
the cabin.

Jérôme fed a cassette of Pergolesi's
Stabat Mater
into the
tape deck, the truck was filled with the luminous voices, and Pierre had only to get
out quietly, cooled down, at the door to the big pink brick cage where he was
spending the summer. At least he was walking upright, his shoulders square. Jérôme
had a fairly accurate idea of the mother, a bare-armed woman who surely didn't bend
beneath men, the kind who would have screwed them in broad daylight. The father was
a bigger puzzle. After all, he had begotten this duplicitous youth who, like so many
who hung around the arcades, was lazy only when it came to thinking. The fraudulent
youth could also be the wolf who's waiting for his moment.
This Peter, Pierre,
is the
wolf
. Jérôme promised himself that he'd track down the Prokofiev record, no
doubt its stupefying version had been reissued a thousand times, and went off to his
ranch in Saint-Lazare to transcribe his notes into the database that he would never
submit for publication. In any event, if he were to do that he'd have had to pursue
his investigation a little further.

It was midnight, that is to say very late inside the pink brick cage,
when Pierre stepped inside Marie's apartment, still excited from the choral singing.
The lights were all still on in the apartment, which was laid out exactly like
Gabrielle's but far less carefully designed. A few pieces of antique furniture, a
French-inspired armoire, a near-refectory table, two brass standing lamps with
jigsawed brass bases, had been flung among square armchairs, plain carpets and a few
paintings. The only works of art, prints by Francine Simonin with broad streaks,
soaring or fixed in mauve and yellow, still waited to be hung. There were a few
plates on the serving hatch to the kitchen, that was unusual, and the
TV
set was spitting out a black-and-white film that from a
distance sounded like a war movie, which was not at all like Marie.

The door to her bedroom was open, in fact she never closed it. He
heard her moving around. He stood in the doorway, surprised. She was filling two big
suitcases that he'd never seen. One, already packed, seemed to overflow with
lightweight clothing. In the other, a jumble of papers and books was piling up.

She greeted him with a preoccupied smile. “I decided to make some
headway with my preparations while I waited for you. I'm leaving on Saturday for a
few months.” She was going overseas to teach and he could stay in the apartment, in
fact she preferred to entrust it to him.