The Last Bullet Is for You (2 page)

On the way home, my heart was leaden. I wanted to tell you how the audience was invited to sit on the stage like in the lobby of a grand hotel or the business lounge of an airport. I wanted to describe to you what I felt when Antony leaned against my shoulder during a tirade so he wouldn't lose his balance as he moved among our bodies. That evening, Shakespeare was speaking to me through Antony's mouth: “Thou hast seen these signs; they are black vesper's pageants. That which is now a horse, even with a thought, the rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct, as water is in water.”

I don't know who you are anymore. For months, I felt like I was living with a stranger. I wonder what happened to the man I knew.

When I walked back up the Main, it was late and the sidewalk was crowded. Punk nightclubs, chic restaurants patronized by the Mafia, half-naked girls in high heels, and gorilla bouncers guarding the doors. The voices were shrill, crystalline high notes spilling from scarlet lips, music scattering onto the street and those long platinum manes, the extravagant punctuation of their heads.

Their voices entered my ears like a foreign language, accents I didn't recognize, and that irritated me. Like a dog shaking itself after a bath, I brushed them off, I freed myself from the particles of this world that had nothing more to do with me. A cloth has wound itself around me, a shroud of pain. I don't belong to this world.

Antony took his life when he learned of Cleopatra's death. Would you die if you learned I was gone? If you died, I could mourn the dead instead of burying the living.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. I will compose my tragedy in their company. In the ruins of ancient Rome I will write our love story, the end of what we had, in which you played every role. Prince, emperor, and dictator.

Only a wound can cure me.

You forbade me
from writing about you, as if writing could steal some part of you, pilfer your soul, as they say about photographs. You talked about writing the way the ancients did, claiming that icons had the ability to reveal the invisible, or maybe the opposite, that by beauty and the emulation of reality, art could step between God and his faithful. You said that writing should be revelation and not description, and you forbade me from creating images that were too much alive, and you forbade me from bringing your existence onto paper.

I will write my love for you until it dies so I won't die from losing it. I will write it and rewrite it until it wears away completely, the joy of my body against yours, the sweetness of your skin, my fingertips along your chest, sliding down your body to touch you. My hands travel back to the nape of your neck, I grab onto you, I sink my claws into your hair. I need to go back to that, whatever the cost. I need to answer the call, my name on the list of those sent to the gulag of love. The dictatorship of desire still demands that I satisfy it, that I conquer the territory one more time. I want to remain romantic, relentless, innocent, and pathetic, go on believing that nothing better exists, that Stalin is the father of the motherland looking after its children and that I can write to him and denounce the evil people who sent innocents off to their deaths in Siberia because I firmly believe he's not aware of it, tell him there are lists where the names of the next victims are inscribed, and that he, Stalin, must do something about it.

I want to imitate the naive and stay faithful to love.

Write until the images fade by themselves, worn away or replaced, images on their last legs, at the end of their rope, and only then will I retreat, and give up the fight.

I'll stop waiting for text messages. I'll stop checking my inbox fifty times a day in hopes of reading a note from you. I'll stop jumping every time the phone rings. I'll stop dreaming of the country you described so often, the country of your childhood , the magical city where you grew up with Kafka's castle, the Charles Bridge and the Church of St. Nicholas. I'll stop conjuring up men drunk on absinthe, sauerkraut and dumplings washed down with great tankards of beer on a wooden bench deep in some uproarious
hospoda
. I'll read the messages I received and delete them, one by one, except for the last one where you said you loved me and didn't want to lose me. I wanted to believe that until it wasn't possible to do anything but face the facts because things weren't going to change, you wouldn't change, and I had to leave you no matter what, even if I still loved you. It was a crime against nature, and it was going to hurt me until I let go because there was no use hoping any different, there was no bridge between us, just a border, we didn't share the same grammar.

I write to linger with the man I knew, and whom I lost almost as soon as he came into my life because I had made him up. I saw the tip of the iceberg, but I couldn't imagine what lay beneath the surface and I crashed head-on into it like the
Titanic
in the dark Atlantic night. A gash opened up in me and the water rushed in, salt water, undrinkable, the kind that dries up the marshes where rice grows, the kind that gives hope that our thirst will be slaked yet only makes our need infinitely greater, that perverse, icy, awe-inspiring water, carrying bodies down into instantaneous sleep, laying them on the ocean floor with the remains of the bridge and the bow, porcelain plates and chandeliers, wood inlay and satin tapestries.

Sometimes I dive back into those images, I throw bravery overboard and choose cowardice, I throw myself upon your mouth, I take your saliva and bang against your teeth, I hold your head prisoner and bite your lips, your cheeks, your forehead, your eyes. I moan with the pleasure you have stopped giving me. Nothing can satisfy the hunger I still have for you, not you inside me or my thighs wrapped around your hips, not my hands that run the length of your chest when, in the marriage of our skin, I don't know whose body is whose.

I remember a friend who told me how his lover would sit on him and jerk off their penises together, how my friend would put his hand on his lover's hand and take pleasure in not knowing which hand and which penis was his.

He admitted he still took pleasure picturing the scene after they broke up, when he made love to other men or when he touched himself.

Sometimes I have to make myself come to be able to cry to be able to write to be able to go on writing this novel, this farewell, once and for all.

Sitting in the seat next to me on the flight from Amsterdam to Montreal, a young globetrotter on his way back from Vietnam described that feeling of urgency he had just before landing, when only a few minutes separated him from the arms of his beloved. If he couldn't hold her in his arms immediately, he told me, he was afraid he would start screaming.

So many times I was sure I would die if I didn't feel your hands on my body, right away, right now. But today, I would die if I saw you again, if I didn't let time and space do its work of separation and fashion me a shield against this senseless love.

After you left, everyone had a disaster story to tell me. Everyone had one hidden away in a drawer and they took it out so I wouldn't feel so alone in my despair. With a look of tender compassion, they told me it was a fact, Slavic men are a real goldmine, nesting dolls of unhappy love affairs.

Julia told me about one of her girlfriends, a psychologist, who went on a mountain-climbing vacation to Siberia. Her guide was a magnificent Muscovite who hit on her the whole time, his hand firmly on her thigh during meals, his hip innocently stuck to hers during a heated conversation complete with a bottle of vodka, his fingers in her hair when they were away from prying eyes. The final evening, before her return home, when everyone else had gone to their rooms to sleep and they sat up to finish off the bottle, the guide grabbed her, put his hand on the back of her neck, and pulled her to his side. His intentions were firm. He kissed her passionately as if his life depended on it. It went on all night long.

The next day, the group ended up in a bar in Irkutsk to celebrate the adventure with a farewell drink. There, the guide introduced her to a very pretty young woman. In a soft voice, caressing her words and digging deep into her throat for her h's, she said, “Hhhe's my hhhusband.” The guide, Igor or Ivan or Boris, grabbed his young beauty, held her tight, and demanded a kiss. Laughing lasciviously, her eyes fastened on the psychologist's as if she suspected something, the Russian masterpiece asked,
“Pochemu ya?”
Then she put her blond head on Igor or Ivan or Boris's shoulder, and he buried his face in her neck and licked and sucked and nipped at that delicious flesh as the psychologist watched, helpless.

My friend Constantine told me about one of his friends who for years had a complicated and passionate affair full of plot twists, a thriller version of life. The guy practically died of love, so besotted was he, and years later, he still talked about it, still a prisoner of the woman, unable to free himself from her charms. Some sort of Salomé, a Scheherazade who makes love last forever by making it unlivable, with death close at hand, waiting to be encountered, either the death of the lover or the death of love.

I remember that man, born of Polish parents, with whom I briefly shared the front hallway, the living room sofa, and the dining room table of my third-floor apartment on De Lorimier Street. He'd gotten married very young to a Natasha who ended up leaving him for another man, after ten years of marital bliss, a candlelit ceremony in the Orthodox church, and three children conceived on nights when copious amounts of vodka had been consumed. As we were going at it on the sofa, he told me how he had found her leaning against a wall in the Moscow subway. She was an orphan, given to depression, with a sublime beauty worthy of Tolstoy. He fell in love with her and quickly became her saviour. She became an attentive, patient wife. She opened her arms wide when he returned home, happy she didn't have to drag him drunk out of a gutter as was the custom in her country. He told me she was an exemplary mother wholly dedicated to her children, when they had some pain or sickness she would hold their bodies close for however long it took, until the hurt subsided. She never complained until, one day, she simply packed her bags. Out the door and gone. After ten years of married boredom, another man had conquered her heart, a handsome doctor who would look after her children. From then on, only one thing would count for her: the love of her life.

The night after you left
for Prague, before I decided to end our story, I had a dream. I had been thrown into an arena with a lion. He seemed gentle and charming, nothing savage about him. He rolled onto his side like a cat that wants to get into your good graces. He made you want to stroke his fur, and bury your face in his mane, and look deep into his dark eyes. I came near, slowly, so as not to startle him. I wanted to tame him. He was a magnificent lion, a splendid circus lion, and I was Blandina, the little girl sent into the arena by Marcus Aurelius, and the wild beasts could not touch me.

I was ready for anything, and now that it's over, I have to mentally tie my hands and feet to keep from running back to you. Since I can't get an exorcism or a lobotomy, or an amputation of the heart, I have to work from the outside. Pascal said that the more you pray, the more you believe. The more traces of your presence I wipe away, the less you will live in me. I will light candles, burn incense, kneel down before a statue. I will spend hours in St. Peter's Basilica among nuns from around the world and young priests dressed in black cassocks, and in their presence I will hope to find some peace. I will murmur endless prayers, I will splash my forehead with holy water and apply it to the insides of my wrists in imitation of Christ's stigmata, either that or the perfume I can't wear anymore since you left because I bought it just before I met you, and they say a woman who changes her perfume changes her life. I will load all the cannons to shoot you out of me and write all the words so that one day, sooner, or later, or never, on your deathbed, you will finally hear what I was trying to tell you.

Give me a heart transplant. Replace my heart with the heart of a woman who does not suffer, a simple heart, a quiet, well-brought-up heart, a heart made for family life, that takes the kids to school and the park, then puts them to bed, a heart that does the shopping the cleaning the cooking, that works and is convinced making other people happy is the meaning of life, with coordinated schedules and not a moment wasted. A heart a bit naive, a bit lethargic, that knows what it has and appreciates it, a heart that beats to the rhythm of a quiet life.

I don't know if there is any deeper solitude than a broken heart. I don't know if my pain is greater than what I felt when we lived together, the suffering you dragged me into, taking me by the neck and holding me under, trying to drown me.

One day I found myself in the Place d'Armes metro station near the Old Port, one of the places I like most in Montreal, where bureaucrats from the courthouse mingle with Chinatown merchants and tourists, the entryway to the old city, and Notre Dame Basilica overlooking the luxury hotel where we spent our wedding night.

As I climbed the steps, a flashback shattered my peace of mind. Like a stray bullet to the heart: a memory.

Eighteen months earlier, we had agreed to meet just inside the turnstiles. I was trembling. I was waiting to see you come into view, your pale beauty on the steps leading up from the platform on the orange line. You were passing through Montreal, it was the very beginning, we were going to spend the day not in bed, for once, so you could get to know the city a little, a day without making love, without touching, it was a game, a way of letting desire build.

When I saw you, my heart stopped, and my whole body yearned for you. I wanted to draw your skin over me, find nourishment in each of your pores, dive down to the wellspring of your tears, deep in your eyes. I wanted to be your blood, your soul, a quiet beating inside you, I wanted to live in your heart.

That day, the day of the stray bullet, I saw a sheet of paper glued to a window on Coloniale Avenue. Someone had written on it, “The only way out is through.”

The weeks go by, a month has passed since I wrote to say I was leaving you, a month without you after two years with you in my heart, in my arms, in my bed, you monopolized all my time, you took up all the space I had in my head, like an ink blot spreading across a sheet of paper. You left a month ago, you left Montreal, and Quebec, and America, that rotten place, but now that I have taken you off life support you refuse to let me go, your letters keep popping up on my screen, plaintive words, sometimes loving, other times violent, words whose sole purpose is to maintain your hold on me.

Your letters are like the archers' arrows that flew toward the body of St. Sebastian, and every time I'm afraid I'll fall back, I fear I'll surrender and end up drowning with you.

Once Julia asked me about the ideal image I had of myself, how I pictured myself. I told her, “I'm the head of a group.” Joan of Arc leading her army, liberty on the barricades, I dream of myself as a guide or a female Dirty Harry. But it's just a dream, a construction. I spend too much time sitting quietly in front of a computer.

Deep down, while the world is important, it matters little to me. It interests me as a kind of playground but its geography leaves me indifferent, along with nature's outlandish inventions, its flora and fauna, topography, what things are and how they became that way, the great battles, the conquests, ancient customs, the way people once acted, the movement of populations and the passage of time, everything that has made the world the place we live in. I live a floating life, always apart from things. Very few places interest me outside of New York, Rome, and Montreal, the only spot in my native country I was willing to live. The alleys of Plateau Mont-Royal, the old houses hidden in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, Verdun, and Griffintown, the lookout on the Mountain from which I gaze down at the tower of the Olympic Stadium, the amusement park on St. Helen's Island, the grocery stores in Chinatown, and Anna's Deli on Queen Mary that I didn't know, and where I've discovered gefilte fish and potato pancakes, the
pala
č
inke
and the goulash and the saleswoman with the big green eyes who told me no one can hire Ukrainian cleaning ladies anymore, now that they've understood they were being abused.

Few places on this planet really interest me, but there's always Montreal, the city that took my heart, and there's Rome, especially when it grows brittle and cracks beneath the summer sun pouring down on the crowds in the streets, Rome in chiaroscuro like in the Caravaggio paintings unearthed from the depths of some church, in the folds of a pieta in lamentation, Rome in the curves of the young women in Trastevere. That is where I will write the end of our love, in a world of pastel stucco, under an infinitely blue sky. I chose Rome instead of travelling to your country to see you because it was no use, your invitation was an excuse to continue your reign, and you can't change people, their madness can't be cured by some magical thinking. I knew I would land in Ruzyn
ě
and nothing would have changed, after the first day, the first stroll together, the first night in bed, I would stumble on a snake and slide down to square one again.

Since she was burned by a breakup, Julia has been addicted to travel. She told me how she forced herself to leave the man she loved most. One day she showed me his photo, I told her he had a beautiful mouth, and she turned pale. He had asked her to marry him and she said yes, she was ready to sacrifice the life she'd dreamed of for him, the hours of solitude in the workshop where she designed jewellery in pieces that fit one inside the other, the image of what had always tormented her. For him, she was ready to put aside her work, just enough to make room for love, and for children, and begin a new life. But when she moved toward him, the man she loved, he turned away. He didn't leave her, but he kept her hanging. He had her on a string, he cast her away, then reeled her in to make sure she was well and truly hooked. One angry night, he cast her too far away, and she could not return. He yelled at her to leave and she took him at his word. She packed her bags. She's been packing them ever since. Any excuse to jump in a plane, fairs, meetings, workshops, travel numbs her, it's a way to leave herself, her memories, her lost love, her despair at being tricked.

One evening, as I was soaking in the bath after one of those hellish days when, for some banal reason, your anger overflowed and levelled everything, you knelt down next to the tub and begged forgiveness, and as you ran the bath mitt over my back, you told me about one of your old lovers. She was a dancer in the corps de ballet of the Státní opera Praha. Before she met you, she had been in love with a dashing Italian, a Florentine from a rich family who wooed her intently, then asked her to marry him. Her name was Milena, she had enormous light-blue eyes and long blond hair, the kind of Slavic beauty you can't find anywhere else. She lived in Prague in the Mala Strana with her mother and grandmother, like all young people who don't leave home until they're married. He lived in Florence in his father's house. He gave her a mobile phone that was to be used only for their conversations. They soon decided she would leave to be by his side in Italy, she would forswear the ballet and marry him. Her departure date was set.

The evening before, the company threw a big party for her. Music was played and songs sung to wish her a fond farewell. The young ballerinas choked back their jealousy, but kissed her and wished her happiness. Milena didn't sleep a wink that night, she dreamed of the man awaiting her in a new country, the green valleys of Tuscany and the bachelor apartment in San Gimignano, the Prada fashion shows, the cocktails they would sip at Canova's on the Piazza del Popolo before going back to make love at the Hotel de Russie. Very early on the day she was to leave, her mobile phone informed her that a text message had arrived. She glanced at the clock and saw her suitcase by the door. She pushed the button and the message appeared. Her heart froze. “Wedding impossible. Sorry.”

She immediately called Fabio or Francesco or Massimo, but no one answered. For hours, then days, then weeks, she dialed the number over and over again. For months, she waited for her lover to come to his senses and send word. In the evening, in the kitchen with her mother and grandmother, they agreed that the father's authority was behind everything, he had thrown a wrench in the works of love. They ripped and sewed the story back together endlessly, evening after evening, wanting to believe that love was still there, untouched, and it was only a matter of time before Prince Charming would return.

With her tail between her legs, Milena returned to the ballet, hoping to get her spot back. When she presented herself in the rehearsal room, the once-jealous ballerinas were delighted. They embraced her wholeheartedly, but they were chortling inside.

Years later, the former lover surfaced. The mobile phone had long since disappeared, thrown into the Moldau in a fit of rage. The Italian ended up writing to her. Her mother and grandmother wanted her to answer, maybe it was better to believe in him than not believe at all, maybe there was a lot of money to be gained in the end. But Milena refused. She would have nothing to do with him.

When I heard that story, I thought of the message I almost sent you one day when I was sick of your hesitations, all your I'll-come-I-won't-come-and-live-in-your-country that you repeated like a mantra, when the ups and downs of your moods were beginning to take up too much room in my life. During the months of purgatory that were a foretaste of the hell you would put me through later, I opened a window in my email program and typed these words: “A mandarin was in love with a courtesan. ‘I will be yours,' she said, ‘once you have spent one hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool in my garden, beneath my window.' Which is what the mandarin did, until the ninety-ninth night. That night, he got to his feet, slipped his stool under his arm, and walked away.”

I wrote those words, and read them, and read them again and, lacking in courage, I did not send them.

Later, when you were living in Montreal, one rainy autumn evening when we were walking down St. Catherine Street on our way to the movies, I told you that story and laughed at my cowardice. In that tone of voice that could have been sincere or mocking, you said, “You should have sent it to me!”

I looked at you, dumbfounded.

In the end I figured it wouldn't have made any difference; you enjoyed that intimate violence enough to keep making me suffer. Your provocation was the best way to feed my resistance.