Appropriate Place Read online

  An Appropriate Place

  a novel

  Lise Bissonnette

  Translated by Sheila Fischman

  Copyright © 2001 Les Éditions du Boréal

  English translation copyright © 2002 House of Anansi Press Inc.

  First published as Un Lieu Approprié in 2001 by Les Éditions du Boréal

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  This edition published in 2012 by

  House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

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  NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Bissonnette, Lise [Lieu approprié English]

  An appropriate place / Lise Bissonnette. -- 1st ed.

  Translation of: Un lieu approprié.

  ISBN 978-1-77089-116-6 (epub)

  I. Title. II. Title: Lieu approprié English.

  PS8553.I877288L5313 2002 C843’.54 C2002-904129-5

  PQ3919.2.B52L5413 2002

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  for Godefroy-M. Cardinal

  One

  AT THE VERY MOMENT when Gabrielle Perron is brushing against her chauffeur’s knee, he slams on the brakes. For the last time. The limousine comes to a halt across the pavement, the door slams and, instead of going to open Gabrielle’s, Jean-Charles becomes absorbed in a bed of begonias, a pallid spot on the already yellow lawns on rue des Bouleaux where a single eponymous birch tree is growing, sickly.

  Gabrielle joins him just as he turns away, she sees the little calico cat whose brains are spreading onto the white begonias, its forehead split down the middle and its life departing through an orange smudge, its black-and-grey flecked belly stops twitching, the eyes are already closed. Gabrielle grazes the sweating muzzle — she who detests being kissed by a cat — but she has to put off her caress till later.

  And so all is well, despite the incident. Jean-Charles is dropping her off one last time at 10,005 rue des Bouleaux; it was a mistake for her to sit in the front, but the backseat was jammed with the thousand items left over when an office is cleared out — the papers, the photos under glass, the collection of prints by Charlène Lemire that she’d been one of the first to admire and that now, in her home, would finally be given the softer light necessary for their silken ghosts. There was also, wrapped in old-maidish tartan, the huge and fragile rosewood ashtray that had belonged to a prewar premier and that the museum didn’t want, nor did the custodian of the storerooms in Parliament, where smoking was now forbidden. But Gabrielle Perron had sat in front today to be silent in the presence of the man to the nape of whose neck she’d been speaking for four years, his name is Jean-Charles and he has never wavered, neither when avoiding a deer in the pitch black night nor while driving through a demonstration in broad daylight.

  All is well, he will empty out the limousine and go on his way, he will always believe that she brushed against his knee to draw his attention to the animal, she’ll offer him a glass of water at the kitchen counter and walk him to the fourth-floor elevator, he won’t imagine that she would have stripped naked today, in front of his brown eyes and his firm hand, in a puddle of sunlight from the living room to which he couldn’t imagine being admitted.

  Jean-Charles has wadded a page of a newspaper lying on the backseat, he wipes the bumpers of the navy Chevrolet, such a small cat can’t have left any traces. Gabrielle wonders if he too is trying to put on a brave face, but apparently not. “We’ll have to find out who the cat belongs to,” he says. She disagrees, rue des Bouleaux is lined with identical apartment buildings, all pink bricks and deserted white balconies, very few children there have cats, Gabrielle knows that, for she bought the apartment because there weren’t many children and she’d thought that animals were not allowed. Instead, she sends Jean-Charles to the concierge, who will know how to dispose of the animal and restore the line of begonias. “Her name is Fatima,” says Gabrielle.

  Plump and hefty, she is already on the doorstep, a still-young woman whom Gabrielle pictures always sitting at a table over hams and potatoes. Between her legs stands a little girl Gabrielle has never seen, but then, what does she actually know about Fatima? The building is new, the hallways shiny, the garbage cans taken out on time, there’s no need for conversation.

  The child cries over her little calico cat, she swallows, then she howls, then she shrieks the tears from her throat. Her hair is too short, her eyes are too huge, she could be an embryonic seamstress in a factory, she’ll know how to blaspheme before she reaches puberty. Like Fatima, who is shouting now in her own language, guttural, a language of the sun but of curses too, of which Gabrielle knows that she herself is the object. Rue des Bouleaux murmurs now like the lanes of her childhood, when the mothers cursed one another between the clotheslines and the boys deliberately killed all the cats, in the sheds at night.

  Jean-Charles has two sons, Jean and Charles, teenagers who perhaps do the same in their part of town with its still-lively laneways. Gabrielle sighs. She wonders in what way the brain of a cat is less than that of a child, on the brink of summer on rue des Bouleaux, in Laval.

  She offers an apology that isn’t heard, goes back and forth with Jean-Charles from the limousine to the fourth floor, while Fatima finally drops the little corpse into a garbage bag. The chauffeur will be entitled to a glass of water. From the vestibule he won’t be able to see the puddle of sunlight in the living room that Gabrielle Perron will air out. Finally now, in June, she is going home to the place where she told her life to wait for her.

  There are three things to do to make the place liveable. Disconnect the answering machine so that unknown supplicants, hearing only a ring, will henceforth apply elsewhere. Buy flowers, potting soil and flower boxes to dress up the balcony, because now she’ll be there to water them. She’d like too some ivy that would climb up a trellis on the east side, where the vacant lot was supposed to be turned into a park but where, instead, small houses for small growing families had sprouted, happy owners of garden furniture behind tall fences. But first she’ll have to learn how to grow ivy, which needs to take root somewhere. And she must arrange the books on the shelves she’d made to measure for the guest room, with a sliding ladder for looking at books near the ceiling, the idea comes from castles. Large sections of shelves are still empty, for five years she has shelved only novels, art books and the works of sociology and politics that she had underlined and thought she’d understood in Strasbourg or Paris, that she’d brought home so proudly in her student trunk. There was a metre of Rosa Luxemburg, by Rosa the Red herself or by others, half that by Enver Hoxha, a very incomplete
collection of Esprit above the complete collection of Parti pris and then, in alphabetical order, the material for her thesis on palingenesis. At one glance, she can identify the books that mattered from their spines: Madaule, locked inside his Christianity, Poulantzas, who killed himself and Touraine, who still today talks about the change of which she’d thought she would be the transmitter over the course of a summer like this one, locked inside words while other brunettes were being married in white.

  She’d had to reinforce the corners carefully so that the weight of her library wouldn’t rest entirely on the floor, apartments in Laval don’t have the joists that castles do. Now she will be able to put away the green papers and the white papers and the commission reports, the books on sovereignty and federalism, cases of them were delivered the previous week after being flung into boxes any old way in the big office that she left without regret. She’ll have to go through them and preserve only those documents that she can recollect, that she cares about because she contributed paragraphs or chapters to them, or because she found in them echoes of her own developing social commitment. She’ll get down to it tomorrow.

  This afternoon she is still full of energy. The refrigerator is empty, she’ll have to get bread, milk, salmon from the fish store that’s opened in the mall adjacent to the highway, and maybe get some choux à la crème, if she has any, from Irène, the woman who has given her own name to her white cakes. Then she’ll just have to put some Sauternes on ice, and at seven o’clock, when the sun won’t set on her balcony because it gives onto the northern side of the Rivière des Prairies, though you can see its light dying over Montreal and its lives, for which she is no longer responsible, she will finally begin to resemble Colette, the photo of Colette at her window looking onto the garden of the Palais-Royal, surrounded by faded books, adrift in her memories of lovers, and tasting the sugar as the aroma of the last coffee wafts up.

  Gabrielle Perron has no wrinkles, but she wants the time to see them come; this summer will be perfect. Sitting on the counter is the Sico paint card, she picked it up at the hardware store months before, thinking that she would repaint the whites, they’re turning grey in the kitchen and the living room, the finishing is downscale in these apartments that were hastily put up as soon as the zoning laws permitted. It will be white again, because of the paintings, which don’t tolerate colours, neither pale nor bright, but there are plenty of whites on a Sico card, matte ones and glossy ones, ivories and velvets, orchid and lily, Adriatic stones and Abitibi snow. Above all, she wants nothing iridescent.

  She’ll have to call Madeleine, but not today, even if she would enjoy hearing her prattle away, over light wine, about the disarray of her latest encounter — a man she met in the supermarket or at the university — whom she’ll have undressed and dressed again between midnight and dawn if he wasn’t married, to whom she’ll have neglected to give her phone number. The last one was from Cambodia and he’d been one of the rare ones who knew how to disappear discreetly, Madeleine had even been slightly put out. In any event, on a sunny day like this she’d be at the pool, colouring herself amber. She’ll try to talk Gabrielle out of white, she herself never wears it, it’s hard on the complexion of any woman over forty.

  Gabrielle Perron’s Toyota, a cream one, will be cool in the underground parking space. Not a sound from the corridor, that’s another reason why she chose to live here, with walls and an elevator so blind that you only encounter the shadows of neighbours there, they sometimes say “hello” or “have a nice day,” like characters on American television, and if they know who Gabrielle Perron is, which she doubts, they behave as if she is merely the owner of apartment 401, with a balcony like theirs, and otherwise of no interest.

  She goes to pick up her mail on the left side of the lobby. Virtually nothing — a leaflet from a real estate agent, but Gabrielle has no interest in selling, and an invitation to a benefit dinner for the party, which she’s no longer obliged to attend. It’s nice to be able to tear them to pieces.

  To be done: order paint, ivory or off-white as the clerk says, and Gabrielle pictures millions of pigments just off the scale, prettily, around her enormous windows, then bread, milk and finally salmon. There are no choux à la crème at Irène’s. She’ll have to go directly home, she’s always afraid of poisoning herself with stale fish, even though they assure her that the crushed ice in the display cases keeps it cool, it comes mainly from the Pacific, thousands of kilometres in refrigerated trucks and who knows how many hours in the open, in those little fish stores that are always run by boys with dark hands. What she likes about salmon, what restores her confidence, is the pink colour that in a few moments will burn under the broiler, a dish for a woman on her own who is elegant enough to be in tune with the dusk, so many would gobble a piece of cheese in front of the TV set and mope around, waiting for night.

  As she leaves the parking lot, she sees that some teenagers have put up a booth with a large banner warning of a new famine in Ethiopia. She’d thought the disaster was over, but you never know with desertification and global warming and the forgotten people whose lives are no more stable than bubbles, the real story never makes it to our newspapers. Now, at the onset of a heat wave, the young people are selling polar bears decked out in red tuques, scarves and mittens, mounds of them sit in big cartons, they recycle unsold Christmas stock from Eaton’s, salve your conscience for twenty dollars a shot. Gabrielle ends up with a stuffed animal on the passenger seat, the timing is good, she’ll make a gift of it to Fatima’s daughter who is her Ethiopia today, her little devastated zone in the sun.

  Fatima always answers right away, as if she spends her life on the doorstep, her concierge’s apartment is tiny, you can see the ironing board jutting out from the kitchenette into the crowded living room, where a huge aquarium fills the entire wall on the right, to each his library. The child is in front of the TV set, where a half-naked woman is crackling under the bullets of an invisible killer. Her eyes, which were weeping a while ago at the gentle convulsions of a calico cat, are scathing. The stuffed animal won’t do. Gabrielle holds it out instead to Fatima, who is again displaying the closed smile that she’s noted for, it’s part of her job description. Gabrielle hasn’t earned even a hint of forgiveness, but at least the day is slipping past a forgettable misfortune. The garbage truck will be here at six a.m. and, after all, she couldn’t offer the little girl another cat, that would have been despicable; anyway it takes time to get over the death of a cat, at least according to Madeleine, who’s had several and who claims that it’s harder to recover from being abandoned by a cat than by a lover.

  Fatima arranges the toy with its back to the aquarium, on the armrest of a flowered easy chair, and the mood does lighten. To connect with it, Gabrielle talks about painting. Does she know of a painter in the vicinity? One with satisfied customers in the building? It’s not urgent, but Gabrielle has been away so much in recent years, she’s not sure where to inquire. Fatima has an accent that sounds at once Spanish and German, at least to Gabrielle, who knows nothing but a few sounds of the so-distant Alsace. No, she wouldn’t dare to recommend anyone, but there’s a boy in 202 who did quite a few odd jobs for the owner of 404, the terrace apartment, last month. The man seemed pleased, he’d even let the boy have the key for the day, as long as he returned it to Fatima at five o’clock. And that’s how a concierge knows everything and nothing.

  Gabrielle has occasionally run into the shadow who lives in 404, with a view of the sunset but also of the row of apartments opposite, all the way to the highway ramp, on rue des Mélèzes, rue des Érables, rue des Lilas, rue des Amélanch
iers, though none of these trees grows in Laval. He’s old, he wears thick glasses of a kind that opticians don’t sell any more, he looks like an activist in her party who kept pondering the same books, though at least he could quote them in timely fashion to young people devoid of memory, which was reassuring. She’ll ask him about the boy. It will all work out, the eyes of Fatima’s daughter are still just as scathing, but they’re focussed now on a commercial for La Ronde and its water slides. Timidly, Gabrielle finally dares to ask her name. “Virginia,” Fatima replies. Virginia is the daughter of a remote cousin, now American, who shipped her here for the summer. Actually, Gabrielle had been under the impression that Fatima didn’t have a husband and therefore, most likely, no daughter.

  The fourth floor has the disadvantage of being the top one; in return for its guaranteed silence, there is the summer dampness, which comes in through the insulation in the roof. Someday she’ll have to replace the beautiful neutral grey carpeting, which is starting to fade despite the museum-quality sheers that she’s hung on the windows to protect her paintings and the original colours of the big and very costly antique armoire that had travelled via an Outremont antique dealer from a seigneury to an apartment in Laval. She should have insisted on oak floors, but the carpet was included in the price of the apartment, she hadn’t anticipated the musty smell that was trapped there in winter and did not disappear altogether in the spring. There are decorators nowadays who are bringing back a kind of linoleum with a permanently waxed finish on which to lay Oriental carpets woven of strong silk that won’t wear out. That’s something she’ll have to look into.

  Finally, into a tall glass Gabrielle pours Pernod and orange juice, drops in ice cubes one by one. She has never developed a liking for the liquorice taste, first experienced in France. But it’s what you drink in the summer when you finally settle into a white wicker chair with an apple green cushion, looking out on the Rivière des Prairies at the testosterone-powered boats. At least from here she can’t hear the roaring made by men who wouldn’t dare to live by themselves in a fourth-floor apartment in Laval, who’d think they were surrounded and would break things to prove otherwise.