The Origin of Species (59 page)

The stovetop was covered in pots and pans, the counter a heap of onion skins and wrappers and greens. Alex had never seen the place in such disarray.

“So.” Félix took Alex’s bottle and looked it over appreciatively. “Very good, very good. You know your wines.”

Someone had come soundlessly into the kitchen through a side
doorway, a slightly hunch backed man whose head was ringed with a perfect circle of baldness like a tonsure, mesmerizing in its symmetry. Below that mysterious clearing a luxuriant crop of hair that looked as if it had been under cultivation since the sixties fell away in shimmering waves down the man’s shoulders.

He looked over the wine Félix was holding, then over Alex.

“
Alors, mon ami
. I didn’t know your tastes ran to the Italians now.”

Félix let the comment pass.

“Alex, my good friend André. From my radical days.”

“So you’re the famous instructor. Félix has talked about you.”

He set about fussing around Félix while he cooked, tidying things as if reclaiming territory.

“What part of Italy, then?”

“From the south. I mean, my family is. From Molise.”

“Molise, I know it.” This was so uncommon that Alex’s first thought was that he was lying. “Campobasso, isn’t that the town there? The Low Field. A curious name for a place in the mountains. And then of course all the Samnite ruins.”

“André is a journalist,” Félix said. “You must excuse him.”

“Don’t insult me, I’m not a journalist. I’m a terrorist.”

The living room, which Alex had been dreading, was starting to look less formidable than the kitchen. He had the feeling of being stuck at the wrong end of a long evening.

A rattling pot distracted Félix while he was chopping parsley and he cut his finger.

“
Merde!
”

At the sight of the blood Alex instinctively started. It puddled on the cutting board before Félix managed to stanch it with a dish towel.

André had caught Alex’s reaction.

“
C’est rien
,” he said at once to Félix. “
Attends, je prends un Band-Aid
.”

He took his time dressing the wound. Félix, an eye on his pots, was getting impatient.

“
Vite, là, ça brûle!
”

André, as soon as Félix’s back was turned, gave Alex a brutal look.

“
À table, messieurs et mesdames!
” he called out. “
C’est prêt!
”

Félix’s notion of informal, Alex saw, stretched to name cards at every setting and an array of cutlery that looked like the armaments of
a medieval battalion. A great deal of talk was given over to the cutlery as people took their places.

“
Oui, oui, de France
,” Félix said. “
Du dix-huitième siècle
.”

Matters careened toward disaster for Alex right from the start. Félix, busy with serving, left André with the job of introducing him.

“
C’est notre jeune professeur d’anglais
,” he said, as if he were a character in a Molière play.

“
Mais il parle français?
”

“
Oui, il parle fritalien, français à l’italien. C’est très drôle, apparemment
.”

With a few deft strokes André had managed to sabotage any hope Alex might have had of finding his stride. It was true—how had André known this?—that his French was peppered with Italianisms. He ought to have made light of the matter but was put off by the thought of everyone waiting to hear his funny accent. A few polite questions were put to him but he fumbled his French so badly that the overtures soon dwindled away.

“
Voilà
.” Félix had been busy in the kitchen. “
La soupe
.”

By the main course, Alex had long ago lost the thread of the conversation. The woman next to him, a stiff-backed professor from
UQAM
, had taken pity on him at one point and spoken to him in English, but the two of them had seemed such an island then amidst the
bons mots
flying across the table that their conversation had quickly grown stilted and forced. He was reduced now to staring into his food, all his appetite gone, or to smiling grimly as he pretended to follow what was being said, the room having taken on the menacing warp of a Dali painting. Félix had more or less abandoned him, caught up in his serving like an old queen, though all Alex could see was that Band-Aid on his finger.

“
Messieurs et mesdames, le plat principal. Filet de porc normande avec des pruneaux et des tomates farcies
.”

André had been holding court the whole meal. He had got the table onto dirty jokes, apparently a specialty of his, telling a string of them in a broad
joual
that had people guffawing and shrieking with feigned offense.

“
Qu’est-ce qu’il y a de la part de notre jeune anglophone?
” André said, at last turning to Alex again, the moment Alex had been dreading. “What do they say, over there in Westmount?
Pas beaucoup d’affiches là, je parie
. If you don’t like 101, take the 401.”

It was an old line, but it still got a few titters.

“
Laisse-lui, André, voyons donc
,” Félix said.

“No, I’m curious.
Voilà un anglophone
in flesh and blood,
c’est une occasion
. Maybe you can explain to us, Alex, what’s the anglophones’ view on 101?”

A few more titters.

“
André
—”

“
Non, non, laisse-lui répondre
.”

The room seemed poised now, waiting for the punchline that could send it safely back into laughter.

“I haven’t really asked them,” Alex said warily.

“
Parfait
,” Félix said. “
Exactement
.”

But André had him on his hook now, and wouldn’t release him.

“What about you, then? What’s your view?”

He should just have shrugged the question off as he’d done the previous one. But for the first time that evening, he had people’s attention.

“I think we should follow the Constitution,” he said, though his heart was pounding.

“Which Constitution is that, exactly? Mr. Trudeau’s?”

André had dropped any pretense that this was just some friendly airing of views. Alex felt the sort of panic he used to get after he’d thrown the first punch in a fight.

“He has a point,” Félix said to André. This came so unexpectedly that Alex felt a deep sense of gratitude go through him. “It’s a perfectly normal Constitution, even if we didn’t sign it.”

He got a few laughs at that, and the tension seemed to ease a bit. But André wouldn’t let the matter go.

“He’s such a saint to you anglophones, your Mr. Trudeau. But in Quebec we didn’t need Mr. Trudeau to come along to tell us who we were. You should ask him where he was in the war, with his human rights, marching down St. Laurent with a swastika on his arm like the rest.”

There was a silence.

“
Ça suffit, André
,” Félix said.

A gravity had come over the room, as if André had betrayed a family secret.

“
Bon
,” Félix said. “
Ça c’est la fin pour la politique. Alors on passe à la religion
.”

If anything the exchange tipped sympathies in Alex’s favor. Félix brought out his Barolo, to many appreciative murmurs, and the woman
beside Alex made another attempt with him, until they finally managed to find some common ground on the subject of migrant farm workers. But he was marked now, he could feel it, like a foreign element that had to be contained.

“I really should go,” he said to Félix, as soon as propriety allowed. “I have a lecture tomorrow.”

“Yes, of course.” He stared down at his hands. Alex saw that he had changed his bandage. “You mustn’t mind André. That’s just his way.”

“No, no. It was interesting.”

Félix saw him to the door.

“I’m away next week,” he said. “For our lesson, that is.”

“Oh. I’m away the one after, for Easter.”

They were drifting into a zone of indecipherable courtesies.

“So we’ll talk when you’re back, then.”

That had been nearly a month ago and they had yet to talk. Alex didn’t know if he was the one who ought to call, though with each day that passed it felt more and more unlikely that he would. Two fucking solitudes. He wished he had never got near that bastard André. Their argument kept playing over and over in his head, along with the acid responses he ought to have made.
We didn’t need Mr. Trudeau to tell us who we were
. Who was that, exactly? The priest-loving, wood-hewing anti-Semites that Quebeckers had been before the likes of Trudeau had come along to drag them into the twentieth century? But André’s swastika comment had had the ring of truth. Trudeau had been raised by the Jesuits, after all, he’d attended lectures by Lionel-Adolphe Groulx himself. Maybe his whole career after that had just been an elaborate denial of the messed-up
Maria Chapdelaine
notion of his roots that the priests had pounded into him. It would make sense: he had had to kill off Quebec to rise above it. Classic Oedipal stuff. Alex had seen the footage, how he had promised Quebeckers the world and then delivered up only his piddling Constitution, cutting Lévesque out of the deal at the final moment and sending him home like a beaten dog.

So how did that hit you, exactly? I mean, here’s this role model, this man you’ve looked up to all your life, this champion of human rights, and you find out he was some kind of Jew-hater
.

Well, I wouldn’t want to go too far with this, Peter, it’s really just hearsay at this point. And if it comes to it, my own grandfather was a fascist. They were different times
.

It was all beside the point, of course. None of this was what really rankled; none of it was what had kept him, all these weeks, from picking up the phone. What really bothered him, what had left the bitterest taste, was how he had recoiled like the worst sort of homophobe when Félix had cut himself. That André had caught him doing it.

Months from now, maybe, he would run into Félix on the street wasted to skin and bone and would have to face up to the fact that he’d learned nothing, that people were dying off all around him and his only reaction was,
Better them
. Or maybe he would find out that Félix was fine, that he wasn’t sick at all, that he’d merely been on a diet, that the whole drama he’d been playing out in his head had just been his own bigotry. All the more reason, then, that he should call him: it would be pointless to go on shouldering the guilt of having abandoned him if Félix was actually going to carry on in his cushy life to a ripe old age.

Alex had come out to the bottom of Simpson. The gaping ruins of the Unitarian Church still sat there, monstrous and charred, virtually untouched since the fire that had consumed it a few weeks before. Another blight, now, along his path. Such a waste. It was that jerry-built woman that Alex had caught a glimpse of one day from the church doors playing the organ who had set it, out of some gripe. A transsexual, it turned out.
Brilliant! Stunning!
Alex had actually come here for a service once, not long after Amanda’s suicide, and had not felt entirely out of place: this was religion, he had surmised, for people who didn’t really believe in it but couldn’t quite bring themselves to do without.

Whatever chance he might have had was lost now, reduced to this burnt-out shell. He had seen the smoke from his balcony and had been aghast, when he went out to it, to see that it was his own little Unitarian jewel going up in flames. It had been a fearsome sight, the great stained glass windows of the façade lit like a scene from the end times and flames reaching out above the last of the roof in building-high licks. A crowd had gathered behind a line of police tape, people stared at the fire with a kind of horrified fascination, amazed that this huge stone thing, this monument, was being consumed, and there was nothing to do but watch it burn.

Nothing much remained of the church except the rectory and the spooky outlines of the rest, jagged stretches of wall, the stumpy remnants of the façade. Its demise had left the prospect along this part of Sherbrooke hopelessly impoverished, shattering the symmetry the
church had formed with St. Andrew and St. Paul up the street and the Eskine and American United further on. No trinity for the Unitarians. The fire was part of an assault against Sherbrooke that had been going on for some time, year by year its glory fading, the few old mansions that remained changing over one by one into brand-name outlets, and even the tonier shops interspersed now with empty windows showing
FOR LEASE
signs and middlebrow galleries selling cheap watercolors or mass-market Inuit soapstone.

The Golden Square Mile. All the good Calvinist Scots’ nose-to-the-grindstone pecuniousness and hard work that had made this place was coming to naught. They were the enemy now, those old city builders; somehow they had got lumped in with the English, though the Scots had hated the English as much as the French ever had. If it came to a question of blood the English shared more with the French than they did with the Scots, by way of the Normans. Trudeau had been right about that, at least: there was no building a nation on bloodlines, that was just nuts. Like Alex’s claim to the Samnites—all bunk, he’d discovered. He had actually looked them up, with an eye to somehow working them into his dissertation, and had found out the Romans had done to them what they’d always done to their troublesome vassals: they had scattered them to the winds, replacing them with Albanians, Macedonians, Turks, whatever slave race they could lay their hands on. It turned out Alex was a mongrel through and through. The purest line in him probably descended from none other than those same Normans, who had come through raping and pillaging and spreading their seed somewhere back in the eleventh century. To this day, he had cousins on his mother’s side who were as blue-eyed and blond as any Swede.

He ought to call Félix. It would be a national disgrace not to make the effort. Years from now he’d be teaching in Nanaimo or Moncton or Red Deer, God forbid, and he’d be singing the same tune as every backwoods Anglo.
Oh, I lived there a few years, but I couldn’t take the French thing after a while
. He hadn’t been able to put the awkwardness from his mind that he’d felt between Félix and him at Félix’s door that night, the rawness of it. There had been something between them, at least, some connection. Maybe his Norman blood finding its place at last across the centuries.