Appropriate Place (9 page)

She talked to him a little about her next place, Ethiopia, as if it
were the next town, while she went on bustling about. He watched her moving to the
sound of gunfire from the living room. Her fine hair pulled back roughly into a
ponytail, held by a blue elastic. Her fingers, almost too thin, the polish on the
nails with golden accents. A red dress that fell straight, with no waist, over hips
not as slim as the ass. The bare feet that maintained the arch of the high-heeled
sandals she inflicted on herself all summer. The beauty spot, hairy perhaps, that
marked her left cheek and held the night on her face, the face of a woman with light
brown hair he had never dared to discover from up close and who would escape
him.

It never crossed his mind to touch her or to push her down as he had
Gabrielle. He found her strange now, suddenly distinct from the vaguely concerned
and smiling figure she'd always been to him. According to his mother, who scowled as
she recounted these events, Marie had wanted to abduct him when he was a child. She
had coveted him, quenched his thirst with the finest milks and soothed his fever,
and Corrine had had to go away to disengage Pierre from such unwholesome
suffocation. According to Corrine at any rate, and it didn't make much sense because
in her wandering, she seemed always burdened with her son and was prompt to chuck
him for hours to anyone who would take him. When he had reconnected with Marie,
she'd shown no sign of coveting him, but it was true that she tended to want him
better fed, to slake his thirst incessantly, to protect him from the sun. “You burn
enough as it is,” she would say, a remark he didn't try to understand. So the reason
she'd let him wander since the beginning of summer was that she was preparing to
abandon him, he guessed, and he was surprised at the capacity for lying in a woman
who'd seemed unlike the others.

It was really late; she ordered him to go to sleep, in the
schoolmistress-y voice that she sometimes used and that he'd be glad to get away
from.

The next two days were idiotic. She had to arrange with the bank to
issue drafts for the mortgage payments in her absence, get the long list of
over-the-counter drugs and sunscreens she assumed she wouldn't find in Ethiopia,
fill out medical insurance forms in the event of accident or repatriation, meet the
nervous beginner who would replace her in a class of the emotionally challenged in
the fall, and make sure that Pierre was registered in a nearby college where she'd
managed to have him admitted despite his borderline grades. There was also Fatima to
be mollified, who had, in her other language but quite clearly, cursed the news that
this trouble-free occupant was going away and that a teenager who she sensed was
filled with glowing embers would be camping in her stead.

Pierre had at least instinctively grasped the way to co-operate. With
Virginia, he established the peace of orphans. He took her to the corner store for
ice cream while the women talked, and he spoke American to her, repeating the
syllables of the summer's hit
parade. He understood practically nothing of
the words in these songs about excited bodies, about swelling sex, and Virginia was
too young to go there. Besides, without music Pierre had the wrong accent and knew
even less what he was saying. It was Thursday. The next day, Virginia was still
clinging to his legs when he helped Fatima bring in the garbage cans, as Marie had
suggested, and near the fence at the water's edge he gave her a silent botany
lesson. On a few square centimetres of lawn he showed her ten kinds of weeds and
even more, the pleasure to be had from pulling them, digging to the root with a
fingernail, through the damp-crusted dusty surface where the grass clung, from which
it drew its yellow-green by sucking up the black. The little girl's laugh was shrill
and long as she scraped at the soil with fingers already darkened.

Strange that Fatima should leave her with this boy who could have
abused her, there was abundant talk about such things in the cities, about the
threats against little girls who were regularly found deflowered, their throats
slit, always in the vicinity of water, because Montreal is an island, with countless
creeks in its suburbs for committing evil.

On Saturday, Marie's departure was set for 7:40 p.m., like most
transatlantic flights. She would stop over in Frankfurt, then leave at dawn for
Addis Ababa, there wasn't even one full day of transit between rue des Bouleaux and
the Hilton where all foreigners who were interested in their safety stayed.

Pierre was surprised that Marie wanted him at the airport, true, he
was the person closest to her, of her women friends he only knew a few and they were
married, abstracted, casual. It was also true that her suitcases were heavy. He felt
very sure of himself as he drove the Ford Capri, an old fake sports model that she
was fond of and was leaving with him for its last few usable months. He liked the
corridors at Mirabel, packed with people, yet deserted. He found a thousand shades
of grey there, crossed by the yellow plastic counters that took away any urge to
cry. The restaurants, constantly being remodelled, sputtered with the sounds of work
and gave off no odour. Yet beneath the high ceilings there was something like pure
air that could go to your head. Freedom without the skies, it can exist.

For the first time in three days, Marie talked about her destination.
She was going to train teachers who would go on to train others in that vast country
with its hundreds of ethnic groups, its fifty million humans, to which it had taken
war to bring a handful of roads but where schools were plentiful, more so than
anywhere else in Africa. Since the dawn of time they had been a people of books, but
there were concerns that only the culture inherited from parchment was being handed
down, now they must add English and the training of masters with an aptitude for
teaching it. Her knowledge of English was good, coming as she did from a border
region where you couldn't survive without first hearing, then speaking it. She had
even now and then escaped entirely into that language, where dreams were without
depth or danger.

And then, Ethiopia was Abyssinia. She had always assured her lover,
the François who had died and whom she wanted to convince of her ability to live
without him, that it was her own, Marie's, desire to make her way to Abyssinia. He
mocked her, did François, he didn't believe her, he'd come across so many poets
whose impotence festered on the routes that Rimbaud had taken, he warned her about
all the pilgrimage clichés. But Rimbaud had nothing to do with this journey, which
had started thirty years before with a children's book she had later lost. It was
about King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, shown in an illustration lying under a
tree whose name seemed familiar to her.

“From Abitibi to Abyssinia,” she concluded as she swallowed the last
sip of bad cappuccino. The scenario was stupid but according to her, the absurd was
an interesting bulwark against the temptations of misfortune, which for some time
had been brushing against her.

He thought he understood and so became mature. Framed by sleigh bells,
the voice of Noël-Christmas announcing departures had just summoned the Air Canada
passengers en route to Frankfurt. Near the frosted wall that concealed the security
control, they were supposed to kiss. They embraced. He was a head taller and could
press her whole body against his, from shoulder blade to thighs. He had a violent
erection against Marie's belly. He stirred her, she caught fire, he'd done it. On
his own he pulled away, her back was already turned. He was free now, and angry.

Seven

THE BLOND LABRADOR
that belongs to the
Canadian ambassador to Ethiopia, the Sudan and Somalia, is panting, flopped beside
the indoor fountain that gives the fortified residence an unexpected grace. Between
Oscar's paws rolls a grey bone, normally forbidden on the straw carpet that matches
so well the light that has finally come back to the late-September sky after a more
than usually vicious monsoon. But Oscar's mistress and the children are on holiday
with her family in Jonquière — statutory advantage in a posting classified as
difficult. In front of the tablecloth that would be immaculate were it not for the
trace of blueberry coulis on angel food cake he's just been served, the diplomat
lights a cigarette, it's allowed in the garden.

He thinks he can recall the still-young woman who will occupy his
entire afternoon at the chancery. Her personal effects have to be sorted, by his
secretary as much as possible, it's more discreet to have another woman deal with
what might be intimate objects. Communicate with Ottawa about repatriating the body
and most important, find out how to get in touch with her family. Who knows if the
satellite phone will be working today? And more, who knows if she even has a family?
Because if she was the aid worker in a red dress that fell straight over her hips
but was slit fairly high on her left thigh — he has served under a dozen sunny
latitudes and flatters himself that he can spot the thousand ways of baring flesh —
a woman he met at the home of his American counterpart at the beginning of the
month, this will be a difficult case.

He who so loved the country, to the point of staying behind when his
family fled to Quebec during the summer rainy season, had exaggerated its baleful
effects, to warn her. Of course he understood her boredom with Addis Ababa, a city
that was dead day and night by order of the tyrant whose sinister image dominated
public places, guarded by henchmen in Mao-collared grey jackets. She'd had enough of
the Hilton's discos where the international famine workers took turns having a short
break from the shorn land in the north, from the hospitals where they saw children
about to die, unable even to swallow, from the tents where they saw others being
born, deformed for life, from the adult eyes burned by humiliation that no water
could wash away, and from the rumbling of war, booming, sated, through this decay.
Evenings, they savoured fresh pasta at the Italian restaurant downtown, going there
in procession for fear of more or less recognized cutthroats, or made do with the
hotel's American meals before getting together with the gorgeous prostitutes
tolerated by the regime, the most beautiful Semites on earth. For foreign currency,
these women were prepared to embrace any of the awkward bighearted leftists
recruited on other continents by their churches, most of them Protestant and
prudish.

It wouldn't be the first time, he'd told the woman with the insolent
eyes, that young men would lose their innocence during a journey of sanctification,
he'd known many of his own generation who had left their virginity behind at
Jeunesse étudiante catholique
summer camps. But she showed no interest
in observing such an ordinary phenomenon and she was weary of her vain searches in
Addis for some cultural signs of the ancient land for which she'd prepared herself.
The tyrant had purged the city, muzzled historians and musicians, even banished
embroidered cottons from the markets where local crafts had been replaced by plastic
utensils imported from China. She was not a famine worker, she was part of a pilot
teacher-training project set up by
CARE
USA
, tolerated for reasons of currency and the need, even
in a communist country, to master international English, the kind that was heard
around the oh-so-prosperous hotel pool and tennis court. Some new form of extortion
or some whim on the part of the men in grey had postponed the start of the
CARE
program till the beginning of October, and she wanted
to get out of Addis, something the ambassador had strongly advised against, even if
what she had in mind was mainly the Abyssinian plateaus, which war and famine had
spared. The entire territory was nevertheless crisscrossed by foreigners in the pay
of the tyrant's allies, or spies in the service of his enemies in nearby Eritrea, he
had told her, and everywhere, the poverty was so sordid that the safety of tourists
could not be guaranteed, not even among a people recognized for their integrity and
gentleness. In the rare villages petty gangsters were now beginning to lay down the
law.

He had also brought up the question of spoiled meat from diseased
herds, of schistosomiasis in the ponds and lakes, and above all of the dangers
during the final days of the monsoon, when you think you're settled into the dry
season and then the downpour comes out of nowhere, transforming the rocky paths into
swamps, blurring all markers. To reach the high plateaus then, crossing the gorges
became a nightmare, he himself had had to retrace his steps last year at an even
later date, it was madness to venture there, even if the terrible drought in the
north seemed to alleviate the rain in the centre of the country.

It wasn't normal for her to have listened to him so abstractedly, the
two of them compatriots happy to meet here surrounded by American murmurs, saved
briefly from the boredom of ambassadorial salons, which were particularly beige in
Ethiopia because any traditional object found locally, which were generally prized
by foreign decorators, was prohibited in deference to the moods of the regime. She
didn't care about risks, she said. At the suggestion of the Italian restaurant owner
in Addis, she had hired for a high price an experienced Ethiopian driver, whose huge
Jeep could generally get out of any unsuspected dangers. “And if I disappear, don't
go looking for me. There's no one to claim my remains.” She was smiling, playing the
confident loner, but he was convinced of her incompetence. He had met a good many
intrepid souls with no apparent family ties only to discover, when they were
repatriated maimed or dead, that they had fled marital problems and flocks of
descendants who would fight over the insurance for years. This girl, who could have
been his type if he hadn't been the contented lover of his own wife, definitely had
the intelligence necessary for lying, so their conversation was in fact
inconsequential.