Appropriate Place

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.