Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon Page 3

  Most of the major laboratories are located along the highways to the west of Montréal. They often lie between two puny ‘resto-bars’ tattooed with flashy signs advertising nude dancers. The buildings are rectangular, single-storeyed blocks of cold cement or great panels of tinted glass on which skim fat white clouds like those painted by Magritte and little red cars which at full speed resemble long lean red fishes. The research workers are of both sexes, young, passionate and relatively well-paid. The secretaries are young, touchy and undeniably poorly paid.

  At four thirty, Axelle gets into her car. She immediately puts on the CD player. Cassandra Wilson’s voice fills the little red Echo, this year’s model, just purchased. This morning’s weather forecast was for rain later in the day but the sky is still blue. Axelle will make a stop at the Loblaws on Sainte-Croix Boulevard which serves as her drugstore, supermarket and clothing store. Today Ray Something, the tall redhead from Lab24, said he’d made some headway regarding arguments likely to be used for the company’s defence in the many lawsuits brought against it. A learned popularizer, Ray Something ends every day by howling with pleasure ‘And of course eternity is what I’m getting at.’

  Axelle loves her work. She devotes herself to it with a beginner’s energy, her curiosity equalled only by her ambition. She spends part of her weekends reading and gathering material about it, the other dancing until, breathless, she leaves the silken skin that covers her from head to toe on the dance floor. There’s no controlling her excitement when the music, pumping hands, legs, sexes, even the night’s fragrances, seems to want to settle forever inside each and every one of her cells.

  In the car Axelle repeats out loud, ‘I need no such pessoa’(in Portuguese in the text), speeding up a bit more each time. Yesterday, in a Côte-des-Neiges bookstore, she’d noticed the word on a book cover. A little later the same word appeared on a sign recommending that no more than six pessoas ride an outdated elevator. Words are grandiose muscles. In social situations, Axelle claims she enjoys reading. She never says that it allows her to stock up on puns that help time go by when she feels like dying.

  Now that I’m alone in the world, I’m free to imagine without being afraid of imagining. It’s like being naked without a protective you as a roof overhead. Facing the night now feels easier, that buio of night prior to nights of figs and olives in olden gardens, to acid nights of glass and steel cities, to nights in holy cities where souls frightened by the appearance of their bodies take refuge like swarms of quivering insects.

  It’s the first time I’ve experienced the feeling of being without a roof over my head. Nothing between the universe and me. Nobody offering a patch of shoulder and tranquility. From now on I will go bare-headed, exposed to lightning and rain. Head free, head bare. The over-perfect solitude of a woman writing elliptical notices on numbered index cards. Someday, all centuries will end up looking alike under the stars’ dust. For now I’m content just to cherish my favourite centuries, beginning with mine, so fierce and sly, brilliantly fuelled by science, unquenchable in its rage against nature. Gradually gobbling up each one of the best ideas that our obsession with comfort will have ripened inside us like little just-in-cases.

  Adieu, gorgons, griffins, gargoyles and dragons. Nuclear times have dawned, the time of serial killers, clones and bio-industrial pipe dreams. Now is the time of productive sterility and fruitless lucidity.

  Simone Lambert looks up toward her office door just as the new employee, whom everybody here calls ‘the narrator’ because of the stories that even the most insignificant objects inspire in her, knocks twice on the frame of the half-open door. ‘Come in.’ The new woman puts a pile of small cards on the desk. Her fingers are stained with green ink. Simone asks her what she thinks of the exhibition. The narrator replies that people around her are talking about it, that everything is going well because the exhibition is causing much ink to flow and many cursors to course.

  – I’m asking for your opinion, Simone repeats.

  – I don’t have one. All I can say is that the exhibition creates a strange impression. It acts on the nervous system more than on our thirst for memory, on which our whole sense of history is supposed to draw.

  – All exhibitions act on the nervous system, otherwise they’d be of no consequence. Even the dullest exhibition triggers a series of stimuli our nervous systems need to momentarily get us out of the dubious here and now sucking up our quiet lives. Any exhibition snatches us from the present, the better to give it back to us in its agonal fracture.

  – By strange impression, I mean I don’t feel comfortable in this exhibition.

  – You need to be more specific; otherwise, how do you expect – ? Thanks for the cards. Please close the door behind you.

  Simone turns to the river, an almost Mediterranean blue today. Rare. For in each of its waves the great river glitters an ancient grey, Normandy grey, northern colouring that swiftly engulfs any vague desire for bright colours. The words exchanged with the narrator have upset Simone; and then easily, too easily, she turns her thoughts to the past as if hoping to draw from it new resources that would unburden her of the immediate present.

  Delos, 1950. Alice is by her side. In an emerald-green summer dress that contrasts with the whiteness of the stones and sculpted marble. Simone’s hands would do anything to make Alice happy. Alice asks for nothing. Her quiet gestures of seduction are directed at the sea. Simone would like to cherish, caress, care for each one of these gestures. And even for their shadows, their origins and their raisons d’être in this world, on this June day when white marble devours the huge perfect blue of the sky. They walk in silence. All around, blades of russet grass throw off little dry sparks which the gaze captures by chance. Alice can’t stop marvelling at the Lions’ Terrace – lionesses, no doubt, for there’s no trace of a mane on the magnificent crouching beasts, ready to spring, jaws wide open on the sea and the world. The island that witnessed the birth of Apollo and Artemis is sacred. The two women tread through the dust and the past. Here and there broken columns, toppled over or rising into the heat of the day like a great mathematical opus tamed by the sun’s rays. The silence of civilizations. And always the grass keeps growing.

  Yesterday, still at the Clarendon: Simone Lambert’s name falls between Carla and me for the first time, casting new light on our exchanges. I listen differently. At first Carla notices nothing. Then, too late, realizing that the name Simone Lambert is disrupting the ritual that triggers our exchanges, she hastens with an author’s cheekiness to pull me close to her father.

  – You know, all his life, that man had trouble forgetting. I know. Je le sais. Very young I’m able to read his mind, to follow him through the streets of Stockholm. He’s looking for his mother. He repeats: ‘Flown, gone, pschitt! Robbed of what was most precious to her because she refused to laugh and talk like a respectable woman. I was born, okay, but after that. No more children.’

  I don’t want to enter the fifth chapter of Carla’s novel. I want to talk about Simone Lambert, the intransigence with which she requires that the world resemble a museum. I would like Carla to help me understand what’s attractive about that woman. Carla speaks and, before I know it, I find myself walking through the streets of Stockholm with her father. It’s raining. His clothes are soaked. He’s been drinking. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t cry. None of his gestures escape me. We walk past a mannequin shop. He says, ‘I’m a dog’ (in Swedish in the text). He runs his fingers through his hair (there is no explanation for what he sees). A car drives by. He turns left, heads into Komhamnstorg Street, enters a little bar next to Engelen’s where he orders a beer, is served some herring. He leaves without paying. The owner catches up with him in the street. Because of the fog, both men disappear for a moment. The owner comes back grumbling.

  Carla knocks her glass over. I catch it. A few drops of wine spread out on the table. With the back of my hand I clean, I erase. Carla is annoyed: ‘What’s the matter with you? I need to talk.
Listen to me. Can’t you see, my father is miserable. He walks the streets of Stockholm because he’s afraid he doesn’t exist anymore, because his mother is about to stop existing. Listen to me, I’m telling you a story. As true as my grandmother’s life and my father’s. Papa, he walks in Gamla Stan. He’s unhappy like a man who loves his mother. He knows she will never be able to have more children. He has heard about the law that allows that. He knows how that is done. I’ve been working on this chapter for two weeks now and I’m dying inside looking at your river, listening to the songs of your Diane Dufresne and the poems of your Gaston Miron. And that crazy Hubert Aquin you want me to read. He wasn’t any unhappier than my old man on chinook nights.

  ‘Papa walks faster, goes down the little stairs of Marten Trotzigs Gränd, runs toward the Baltic Sea. He is still very young. He hasn’t slept with a woman yet. He walks with long strides, trembling as he recites a Gunnar Ekelöf poem. Like a crazy man he repeats a word I can’t quite recognize and walks in the cold night. He is thinking about Christmas, he is playing with a boat. Under the tree he had just found a wooden boat. All of a sudden it’s summer, he thinks he’s going to cry because the boat is sinking into the lake. Per and Olaf are watching, so he doesn’t cry. The boat resurfaces. Per takes it from him, saying, “It’s mine.” Papa goes back home. The door creaks. He sits in the rocking chair next to the dining table. Mother is folding diapers. Outside, the Prairies gulp all the wind they can.’

  The waiter brings two more glasses of wine. Carla thanks him, then, turning to me as if nothing she’s just said existed, asks if we can meet again tomorrow. Without thinking I say, ‘Of course, Carla.’ Two young musicians are setting up their electronic equipment. Carla looks for her umbrella under the chair. Tomorrow, Montréal awaits me for the signing of a contract with a city-run cultural centre.

  Yesterday, in Fabrice Lacoste’s car:

  – You enjoy living in Québec City?

  –Yes.

  – I’m told you read a lot.

  – My work requires it.

  – I mean, you like literature?

  – Yes, what about you?

  – That depends. Proust, Thomas Mann, André Roy. Do you know why Death of the Virgin, a painting by Caravaggio, created a scandal in 1601?

  – I haven’t the faintest idea.

  – He’d made the Virgin Mary look like a drowned woman. Her belly was swollen and you could see the flesh of her legs. Plus, her features were apparently those of a famous prostitute. At the time it was forbidden to depict saints with the features of living persons. Today we have no idea how heavily coded art was back then and how risky it was to venture off the beaten path. Four centuries later, knowing how to look at art remains an art. Knowing how to detect a transgression, an anomaly, in a flash, is an integral part of my job, of my enjoyment, I should say. I don’t know why I suddenly felt the urge to talk to you about this painting. You’ve no idea how many paintings have the Virgin’s death as their theme. Giotto in 1310, Hugo van der Goes in 1478, Albrecht Dürer in 1510, Nicolas Poussin in 1623, Carlo Maratta in 1686: they all wanted to tell their own version of a story which in principle should be told the same way.

  – Where is Caravaggio’s painting now?

  – At the Louvre. You like women, don’t you?

  – Yes. You like theatre, don’t you?

  – Very much, especially Québec drama.

  Simone Lambert enjoys walking through the museum during the first days of a new exhibition. She watches tenderly as schoolchildren stream into the museum rooms and old ladysouls proceed with a heavy step, bending over with difficulty to read the notices. Today, children from four schools are expected, and two buses from Vermont. She left the apartment earlier than usual this morning. She spent a long time at Café Krieghoff on Rue Cartier. There she leafed through a recently published photography book about the pyramids. Too late. The memory of Axelle falls across it: her daughter Lorraine is holding the child by the hand. She raises her arm as though waving goodbye or ‘You’ll never see me again, Mother.’ A compact, colourful crowd surrounds them. Members of the military, guardians of the present, of the past and of corruption. Behind the mother and child, a pyramid. Since Alice’s death and her daughter’s departure, Simone Lambert has managed her life, her desires, her thoughts, in such a way as to keep only an idea of light around Alice and one of silence around Lorraine.

  At the museum, she sometimes stops a child on the run to show her a statuette, a mask, an old toy, to explain in two words and a smile what the object’s original function was, or to ask if she is enjoying her visit round the museum. But the word round unravels in her head and wound is what she sees planted mid-sentence. This also happens to her when she says, ‘When shall we meet?’ and the word meat insidiously intrudes between herself and the other person. Today, still, she blushes when dictating to her secretary, ‘I look forward to meeting you.’

  Today, Simone is happy just to watch the noisy stream of young lives as she spies on their dialogues, the meanings of their words with their high fantasy factor, attentive to the plot line of their little stories which, barely begun, are immediately diverted toward another subject, greater danger, bigger sound, a larger screen. Civilization, culture. Simone goes down to the cafeteria. At the back of the room, some children are wolfing down their sandwiches, a glass of Coke within easy reach. Civilisation oblige.

  Sometimes I feel like I’m walking on this transparent glass floor where the great humanist principles form a narrow bridge with no safety railing, and it must be crossed while pretending to feel neither fear nor vertigo. Going forward in life, fists clenched, eyes terribly knowing and vibrant with identity. Once we’ve acknowledged lying and violence as an integral part of the survival and domination kit, once we’ve understood that the idea of progress is a handy way of eliminating the smell of shit without eliminating the odiousness of pain and death, how can we claim to adequately reflect on the meaning of life? How can what’s going so well in my life and what’s going so badly in the world coexist before raw consciousness feels like just cancelling the appointment?

  People around me talk about the war and frown like professional actors. Yet in our everyday life war has no smell or taste. But it’s there, occupying a part of our lives in real time as if time devoted to doing the work of humanism were simultaneously devoted to understanding war. Can one exit humanity without entering fiction? Some talk about war as though it’s a scandal. Others as notta nother choice. Arguments fray in the course of the conversation. Only television images remain. The non-stop movement of salaried mouths, those of female presenters, journalists, specialists and diplomats. All that’s left now is to add up the profits from the next Humanitarian Salon in order to reinvent war as real suspense, a powerful soap that cleanses the tiresome smells of everyday life.

  Rue Sainte-Catherine glitters all over, to the west and to the east, storefronts having, they say, regained their glamour. There was a time quite recently when businesses were like cavities on each side of the street. ‘Cruising la Catherine,’ Lorraine used to call it. Axelle knew only a few of the names that had made the street’s reputation: the Montréal Forum, Eaton’s, Morgan’s, the Casa Loma, the Continental, where, surrounded by young friends and old poets, her parents plotted the revolution and rolled some joints. Today, despite the May sunshine, the street seems forlorn. The sidewalks sag, here and there sad lads hang about or walk around, cigarettes drooping from their lips, dog leashes in hand. Young women garbed in slutty micro-minis and sadness, awkward muscular squeegee kids, boys in big boots and pee-stained pants, all walking around amid suits, ties and polished shoes, walking around like her, distractedly, eyes riveted to something rare, alluring and unreal.

  Axelle thinks she should go to the movies, like she used to do so often when she lived with the Moreloses in New York. But the body now needs to keep moving non-stop. Just before the corner of De Bleury, she is sucked into a booming black hole. For a while Axelle wanders through a bank of how
ling screens and the continuous hum of virtual cars powered by high-cost dreams and electricity. Here and there, young males smoke, jostle each other while emitting sounds like mutants and warriors, rattle dozens of cages to death, just for fun and a rage to live. Dizzied by the noise, she finally stops in front of two timid pinball machines. She slots a loonie into one of them, then her index fingers activate the plastic knobs that allow her to control the game. The silvery beads swirl around in a stream of sparkles until, with a spectacular hip move and the effort of a final answer, Axelle robs chance of two free games. On tippy-toes still tense with excitement, she thinks about her grandmother who, as Lorraine told it, found guilty pleasure in playing these once-illegal machines which used to be found in snack bars here and there along the road toward the Laurentian lakes north of Montréal. So in the reconstituted taste of French fries, Orange Crush and spruce beer, for a few seconds Axelle imagines Simone as a glamorous character smiling with pleasure in the muggy heat of a Québec summer.

  Yesterday, after signing a contract with the Côte-des-Neiges cultural centre to produce the index cards for their exhibition entitled Migrants and Gypsies: I stop at Librairie Olivieri. I leaf through some books. In the science section, a young woman who seems rushed turns to ask me if Genetic Manipulation has arrived yet. Just a minute earlier I’d noticed that title in a nearby section. With a specialist’s flair, I go over and get the book: ‘You’ll enjoy it, I’m sure.’ She thanks me pleasantly like someone practiced in the technique of eye contact. Stirred by her savoir faire and her style, I follow her with my gaze, first to the travel books section then to the cash and the exit.

  A few minutes later, a book tucked under my arm, the body shudders in a slow-motion farewell. I head for Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery. My mother’s ashes are there somewhere in a little wooden urn. Suddenly the light of the world is unleashed, flowing toward me full of an inopportune silence. At the intersection of Queen Mary Road and Decelles, a road sign says ‘École polytechnique.’ The name revives images of terror, a massacre, early winter. I walk between the tall maple trees bordering the alleys. I imagine the body yielding to the rippling pallor of time and its iconoclastic movement. I absorb a simple kind of pain, one without specific object. The pain grazes the vocal cords, the eyes, making all comparisons flawed. I settle into thinking about what the final seconds of a life must be like, the ones they say bear the light of everything that once mattered to the child inside us, those ultimate moments which like greedy gourds fill up to capacity with the energy of the present. I absorb the light. The energy of the present and of its invisible creatures. Around me, weeping willows offer their parasols.