Читать книгу Larry Volt - Pierre Tourangeau - Страница 17

Dong Ha, 66-67

Live like a dog, work like an ass, fuck like a mink, die like a rat.

Inscription on a Zippo lighter,

Unknown G.I.

I didn’t know how to go about it, but I had to talk to Anna. You see, she was tormenting me, the female. I needed to tell her I couldn’t sleep anymore because I couldn’t keep from moping whenever I thought of her, and I thought of her all the time, night and day. Like when I was seven years old and drooled over the woman next door. Even though she was a good twenty years older than me. It didn’t matter. I ached so much to touch her I didn’t dare come near her or even leave the house for fear that I would go straightaway and jump her. How sad! I’d have been better off in a windowless room so as not to spend my whole life trying to spy on her. I’d have been better off emigrating to Japan or Papua New Guinea, but my parents turned a deaf ear: moving there was out of the question.

“Papua New Guinea? Really, Larry, what an idea! Ah, kids today, I ask you…”

Of course, eventually she stopped haunting me, the woman next door. I can’t recall by what miracle. All I remember is, one day, she’d become fat and her hair had changed colour. I didn’t think it would be that easy with Anna Purna. I couldn’t see myself asking her to dye her hair black or to put on weight. In any case, I’m not sure it would have made much of a difference. You’re less demanding at eighteen than at seven. Go figure that one out.

Finally, I made up my mind. I took advantage of the fact we were near one of those immense windows that look out over the trees and are always inundated with sun or clouds, depending on the weather, alone in the dining hall, munching on our daily sandwiches, and I said to her in the simplest possible way, “Anna, don’t you think you would be pretty with black hair and a few dozen extra kilos?”

She gave me a peculiar look.

“You don’t like me like this?”

“Just the opposite. I see you in my cereal every morning, as naked as you can get, your beautiful ass delicately dipped in the sweet milk. You turn your back to me and look at me over your shoulder, pretending to cover your buns with a flake of oats. I see you at night, too, even when my eyelids are shut. It’s a strain. Something’s got to be done about it.”

“Such as?” she asks me, with two or three epicurean creases at the corner of her mischievous eye. Signs of aging, already.

“I dunno. What if we went somewhere, just the two of us? We could play at making each other shiver. You could strip while I watch you dip your magnificent ass in a big bowl of milk. Then, I could lick you and do all kinds of disgusting things to you. Unless you felt like something else.”

She didn’t hesitate.

“OK for the disgusting stuff. So long as it doesn’t become a habit. You know how much I cherish my freedom.”

“Hey, me too! Long live freedom!”

This wasn’t sarcasm. Not even humour. Perhaps just a touch of over-enthusiasm. I felt happy, high on happiness. For once, freedom wasn’t teamed up with solitude. Which didn’t stop me from already imagining the time I’d be deprived of her presence, of that moment when, having taken barely two steps away from her after a final kiss, I’d feel as far from the shore as a shipwrecked sailor hanging onto his lifesaver in the middle of the ocean. Alone in the middle of nowhere, free as the air, and as empty.

We took her car and sped to her apartment. My place was too far away. We didn’t have much time. It was noon and she didn’t want to skip the three o’clock philosophy class. It was perfect, as perfect as Anna Purna.

Her apartment was small, but warm and pleasant. There were only two rooms, so it wasn’t hard for me to guess where the bedroom was. I led her there once she’d taken off her coat, and very soon our clothes were scattered around the bed. After that I can’t quite remember what happened, except that I froze and she was the one who did everything. It should be pointed out that she didn’t have to do very much. For her to be there was enough, or just about. I’d never seen anything so beautiful in my entire life. That girl was an angel! How anyone could be that well-moulded is beyond belief. And to think, I was there in her bed, as bare-ass as her.

She must have been used to having that kind of effect. Anna giggled to see me go so catatonic. As for me, I actually would have liked to take a more active part, but I could hardly keep my eyes open, that’s how tortured I was by her nudity, which I found unbearable. She sucked the marrow right out of my bones, just by being there, and it was as if whatever energy and intelligence my body possessed had taken refuge in my cock.

Finally, what had to happen happened. She lay down beside me and placed her head on my belly. Then she did the thing she ought not to have done, but which I so badly wanted her to do - she stretched out her hand and, to amuse herself a little, took hold of my organ. It was terrible, because I went off with no warning and she got all of it right in the kisser. Just thinking about it still makes me shake. It took her slightly by surprise, but not as much as I might have thought. It was her fault too. One should be aware of what it is to be that perfect. Perfection makes you so horny it ends up being a form of castration. The only clever thing I could find to say to her was “it’s apparently good for the complexion, due to the astringency.” Afterwards, since she hadn’t yet gotten off herself, and as I was no longer in any danger, I practised boning her because I was still hard and you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.

It ended in total confusion. She told me, with a wry smile, that wasn’t the way to make a woman come, but she didn’t have time to show me how, since she had to leave because Nihil’s course was going to start soon. I gagged. It’s always hard on the ego to have someone tell you you don’t know how to fuck, even when she’s a friend, and even more so when she’s a friend who, theoretically, doesn’t want to hurt you but says it because that’s what she truly thinks.

She could tell from my look of dismay that I was taking it badly. So, while we were dressing, she promised we would have another go at it, when we were in no hurry, and she advised me not to be upset, because sex, like everything else, can be learned.

My own thinking was that with such a goddess there was no room for mistakes, and that even if I put my name back on the list, my next turn would be a long time coming, and I would never again have the chance to learn from Anna Purna, and it made me miserable and broke my heart.

My teeth stayed clenched the entire way back, despite Anna’s smiles and her doing everything possible to encourage me not to take such a bleak view of life. I was hardly any more talkative in Nihil’s course, and he found I wasn’t taking enough part in the discussion.

“You don’t have much to say today, Mister Tremblay. You have accustomed us to more loquaciousness. I would, all the same, like to hear more from you. You certainly must have something to say.”

I answered that I was not in the mood to talk, at least not with my lips, that I would have to talk to him with my heart and doubted his ability to understand. The songs of the heart ought to be audible without the involvement of the mouth, without the interference of the tongue, that leech, distorting the emanations of the words and cries of the heart.

“The heart does speak, believe me,” I added. “It actually speaks much more than it beats. In fact, only the heart can speak adequately. The vocal chords, the mouth, lips, tongue, teeth, palate are there just to translate, just to interpret what the heart has to say. What the heart has to say is essential. The heart doesn’t beat for nothing. Heartbeats are man’s true language. The mouth warps everything it says. The mouth is a parasite of the heart. The heart says one thing, the mouth says the opposite. Mouths ought to be made to shut up, they’ve already led us astray enough as it is. Mouths are for eating. Man’s voice is the heart. When the heart goes silent, a man dies. When the heart no longer knows how to beat, a man no longer knows how to speak, how to live. We should learn to speak without moving our lips.”

Nihil claims what I’m saying makes no sense, that it’s inherently contradictory, that it doesn’t stand up since I’m speaking with my lips. Nihil likes whatever is logical. What I’m saying isn’t. He says one should be careful about what one says, that one can’t say just anything, lose control, that grandiloquence can backfire, that one should think before speaking, that essence precedes existence.

He wishes I would justify my point of view, explain, endeavour to eliminate the contradictions. I’m unable to do so. There is no justifying the language of the heart. To justify is to betray. To explain is to destroy. I am not logical.

Nihil insists. I keep quiet. Not a word. He demands a response. He doesn’t know how to listen.

“Listen to the silence,” is what I tell him. “That’s my heart speaking. Try to understand!”

Nihil doesn’t want to play the guessing game. He asks me to stop acting like an idiot. I keep quiet.

“Why do you keep quiet? Say something!”

“I’m too taciturn for that. I don’t have anything to say. If you’re incapable of listening to the words of the heart, you must be deprived of that organ yourself. People who have no heart make me lose heart. You tear my heart out, you dishearten me. You’re just a pair of stammering chops, an overactive tongue. What you say always makes perfect sense, but it doesn’t interest anyone. You’re smothered by your logic. It’s not with those lips that you’ll drink nectar. You should drink hemlock instead. It would do you good to die a little. In fact, it would allow you to verify the existence of an afterlife. A little trip to the spirit world would restock your brain. Travel blows the mind. It would expand your horizons. You could discuss your beautiful logic with Saint Thomas Aquinas. That way he could take a rest from angels with boas and feathers and you could take a rest from illogical students.”

Nihil didn’t have time to reply because the course ended on my harangue. But I could plainly see I was busting his balls and that it bothered him, even though he probably didn’t put them to much use. I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

I slipped out in a hurry because I didn’t feel like meeting up right away with Anna after my performance that afternoon. What can you do, I’ve got my pride.

I went home by way of various detours that all led to alcohol. The usual circuit of Saint Catherine Street joints, where I got methodically and diligently drunk. A good eight hours of mixing everything together so the head might forget the heart and the brain lose its bearings. A man has to take the necessary time and measures to work off his shame, no, to drown it in the hope it’ll never rise again.

When I emerged from the void, it was only to populate my night with a long nightmare, the kind of dream that seems so present, so frightening, that even as you dream you try to persuade yourself it’s not real, the kind of vision that pursues you even once you’re awake, that’s how much it’s taken hold of you. The grip of this particular dream was so strong, it wouldn’t leave me when I opened my eyes in the early hours of the morning after spending a good part of the night sobering up by puking while stretched out on the bathroom floor. Then, as I gradually came to my senses, I was overwhelmed by panic. Because the more I thought about it the less sure I was it had been a dream. And it was enough for me to go down to the basement to be convinced, to have it all come back to me, and for me to realize then and there that I was buried in deep shit, in the mother of all shit.

It must have been around one in the morning, and it was all I could do to get back home after my night of stupor and intoxication. He was leaving his mistress’s house and heading toward the street corner, where there were always taxis to be found. He had his back toward me. I don’t know what came over me. Maybe it was just too easy because he hadn’t seen me, because there was no one around, because I can’t stand CEOs of multinational corporations when I’ve been drinking, and because all of a sudden I was presented with a golden opportunity to assert my freedom - how should I know? Maybe I was simply too plain drunk, and it was enough for the back of his neck and that big rock lying by the curb to both come into my visual range at the same time, just about when he was passing directly in front of my house. Anyway, it took me three steps to catch up with the guy and whack him hard on the back of the neck with the rock. He fell without knowing what had happened, and I dragged him by the hood of his duffle coat.

While extricating my mind from its solution of alcohol, I remembered finding it odd that a CEO of a company as huge as United Motors, and American to boot, would wear this rather working-class garment. The whole operation couldn’t have taken more than a minute. I took him down to the basement and tied him at the wrists and ankles to a chair next to the washing machine.

Afterwards, I must have made him inhale some ether and swallow three or four sleeping pills, because when I came upon him I found, next to the chair, Virgo’s bottle of Halcions and the pint of ether that Taurus uses as a solvent whenever the cabinet-making urge moves him. The CEO, his mouth sealed with tape, was still asleep.

I was aghast. Anyone would be for less. I didn’t even know this guy’s name. In fact, I didn’t know anything about him, except that he was humping the neighbour and was the American CEO of United Motors of Canada. Fat lot of good that could do me! I called United Motors to ask the name of their top manager. The night shift receptionist, who could never have suspected, kindly answered that his name was Robert Gagnon, which threw me for a loop because it doesn’t sound very American.

“That’s a funny name for an American,” I pointed out to her.

“Mr. Gagnon is not American,” she replied with a chuckle. “You must be confusing him with his predecessor. His name was James Taylor and he went back to the United States last year. Mr. Gagnon was VicePresident and became the first French Canadian to head the Canadian branch of United Motors.”

She said this with obvious pride in her voice. I stammered thanks and hung up. Either I had gotten it all wrong, or it was Taurus. But the results were the same: I was in absolute shit and didn’t even have the excuse of it being for a good cause. So I quickly had to find an alternate cause. OK, he wasn’t American, he wasn’t even an Anglo, though that didn’t prevent him from uttering those yes-yes’s when he was humping my neighbour. All the same, his fucking corporation did build the engines for those planes that were showering Indochina with napalm. It had been in the news again the week before: the UN had even lodged a protest because it found that, frankly, the Americans were inflicting far too much suffering on them before rubbing them out and that they were rubbing out far more of them than necessary if their dirty war was to become a clean, presentable war. Oh well, it was better than nothing.

I was thinking at breakneck speed the way you do when panic ties your guts up in knots. I could have simply put him back on the sidewalk as though nothing had happened, but it would have been too risky and I was chicken.

In the end, I got out Taurus’s old typing machine and drafted a communique explaining that the Movement for Solidarity with the People of Vietnam (MSPV)¹ had kidnapped the CEO of United Motors of Canada, Robert Gagnon, and he would be freed only if the production of military engines at its Quebec plant were stopped. Then I took Virgo’s Polaroid and went down to the basement to take a mug shot of my hostage, who was still sleeping like a log. I put the press release and the photo in an envelope, being very careful not to leave any fingerprints on it, to make it look more authentic. I collected all my stuff and went out almost at a run, letter in hand. It wasn’t yet four in the morning. I needed to move - my heart and head and lungs were in danger of exploding.

I walked, robotically, toward the college. As I went by radio station CQFD, I slipped my letter under the door. Que sera sera. That’s how I ended up, long before daybreak, sitting on the ground in a porchway in front of Mother Missal’s stand, a woman I pestered every morning as a matter of honour, and this morning most of all. It was in return for the way she soothed me with her rosary of ready-made truths. She was priceless in her tiny newsstand, this inscrutable woman, serving her regular clients without taking her eyes off her blasted missal.

I waited in my niche for dawn to break and for the shabby plywood hatch of her stand to swing open.

I’d run from my house, wobbling, still sodden with the alcohol that had lured me into stupidity and horror. My legs could no longer carry me, I was exhausted from the darkness of the night and tortured by what I’d dared to do.

I’d walked for two hours to come to this place, where I looked out for the vendor’s arrival. Not her newspapers. My crime was too fresh to have already made the news. Only for her, who would be as grouchy and narrow-minded as ever. I was sure her faith, good or bad, would warm my heart like a blowtorch. Shaken as I was, I needed for someone to prod me.

I observed her from a distance piling her papers on the sidewalk and leaning her magazine racks against the brick wall of the shopping centre. She wasn’t surprised to see me there, at that ungodly hour. She hardly looked up.

“Did you fall out of bed or miss the last subway? Or was that your couch, you little roach?”

“Still lost in your blessed book?” I shot back at her in a forced tone of voice, for the hundredth time.

And for the hundredth time she answered, “This is all I read. Nothing comes close to it. It calms you down, it thinks for you about everything worth thinking about in this world.”

“And your newspapers, do you read them?”

“What for? I don’t need them to have nightmares. It’s enough for me to see your kisser every day on the street, my sweet.”

I bought La Presse from her every morning. I talked to her a while, generally about the day’s headlines, and as a bonus I let her have my comments and recriminations. She made a show of listening, never of understanding.

“I don’t get you, you youngsters. Everything’s a problem for you. Being so intelligent and educated, you ought to know that you have to be resigned down here on earth. That’s the whole thing. Resignation. When you don’t want anything, don’t expect anyone, you’re never disappointed.”

“That’s a wonderful attitude! If we let it, the world’ll go to hell, no doubt about it. As far as I’m concerned we’ve got to rock the boat with our last breath to keep this twisted world from sitting on its fat ass. Otherwise, it’ll end up believing it’s not spinning out of control, and us, we’ll be obliged to die to prove we’ve had a life.”

She didn’t like offensive language, she said, it made her nervous, disturbed her tranquility. But that was the only way to draw her out of her missal, if only for a few seconds. It was always the same: her large red ex-rubby’s face became even more flushed as it emerged from her badly combed mop of shoulder-length hair. And she roared:

“Little punks like you, make me run for the loo, Larry!”

That’s all she said when she got carried away. Her anger never pushed her beyond that limerick sentence. The words sometimes changed, the rhyme too, naturally. But the gist, rarely. She took a deep breath before going back to her missal, to her saintly certitudes and her resigned resignation. Admirable.

Given the agitated state I was in, I told myself it wasn’t a good idea to show up at the college. I left Mother Missal, and my feet dragged me up the hill, toward the big park on the mountain. The walk and the cool of the morning somewhat straightened out my thinking. And by the time the twitter of the sparrows started to get on my nerves, I’d gathered up enough courage to confront the situation and my hostage. So I went back home. My guest must have been awake, because I heard noise downstairs, a muffled growling. I right away turned on the radio and listened to the twelve o’clock news bulletin before going down to see him.

Naturally, it was the lead story. No one had ever heard of the kidnappers, the police had no clues, it wasn’t even known where, how, or when Robert Gagnon had been kidnapped. All they had was the communiqué claiming responsibility for the kidnapping and the attached photograph, showing the unconscious CEO tied to a chair. There followed the statements of the politicians, who assured the public and the victim’s family that everything possible would be done to find the hostage and punish those responsible for this vile act of terrorism, and that of a United Motors spokesman, who pleaded for the liberation of his employer, arguing that he had no part in the company’s decision whether or not to build engines for American military aircraft, that an engine was nothing but an engine and that everything depends on how it’s used. Then it was the wife’s turn to beg the kidnappers to return her husband to her and to do him no harm. Poor fool - if she’d only known she would most likely have prayed for his execution. We were even treated to a White House representative, who promised the Canadian authorities that the United States would fully cooperate with the investigation. You know, the usual circus.

It made no difference that I’d regained some of my composure, I was still snafu. How was I going to get out of this trap? I took my old ski mask to hide my face from him and went downstairs. He must have been staring at the door, because his gaze jumped on me as soon as I opened it. He rolled a pair of frantic eyes when he saw me. I came over to him and in one go tore off the tape covering his mouth.

It was as though I’d uncorked a bottle, because he instantly began to shout.

“Where am I? Who are you? What am I doing here? What do you want? How long have I been here? Untie me, I beg you, I’m in agony in this chair. Let me go, I’ll give you everything I have…”

I said nothing, because I didn’t quite know what to say to him. Instead I played back the news bulletin, which I’d taped on the little recorder that Taurus uses to dispatch orders to his secretaries. The more he heard, the wider his eyes grew. When the tape stopped he simply asked me if this was serious. I nodded yes. He seemed to cave in, but the way he was tied up it was hard to tell.

“Why?” he asked me again, this time in a barely audible voice.

I wasn’t about to tell him it was a mistake, that I’d thought he was American and all that. I’d have looked ridiculous.

“Because you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” I finally answered. “Because you’re the CEO of a corporation that takes part in beating the brains out of some poor people who’ve done you no harm and who’re too far away to defend themselves against you. They need a hand, otherwise there really would be no justice and everyone who was helpless to do something about it would lose hope. ’ve got nothing against you. It’s not my fault you’re the head of United Motors.”

“What are you going to do to me?”

“If I knew, things would be simpler, mister. I guess it depends on what happens.”

My response didn’t seem to particularly reassure him. In the meantime, I couldn’t leave him permanently tied to the chair. He had to eat and go to the John from time to time since I didn’t want him to turn the place into a pigsty. I’d had time to think all this over before coming home. Luckily, Taurus owned a cage where he used to keep his guard dogs when travelling from one construction site to another and which he stored in his basement workshop, the adjacent room. It was quite cramped but would certainly be better than an ordinary straight-backed chair.

I left the CEO in his chair while I prepared his new lodging. I opened the cage and fitted it out with a few pillows and a blanket for comfort, and a bucket for his bodily needs. The cage was two metres square and slightly more than a metre and a half high. He wouldn’t be able to stand up, but he could relax a little. At any rate, there would be nothing for him to do but bide his time. I went back to get him and untied him from the chair, but without freeing his hands and feet, so that he wouldn’t try anything. He was so stiff he had trouble staying on his feet. I helped him hop over to the cage, warning him that if he gave me a hard time things would get bad for him. When he saw the accommodations I had in mind for him, he squawked, but with a few swift kicks to the butt I made him understand that he had no choice, that things were complicated enough already, that I was pretty nervous and that I didn’t feel like being messed with. I must have been especially convincing, because he went inside the cage by himself, on all fours. I closed the door and padlocked it before goingback upstairs, where I poured him a large glass of milk mixed with the powder Virgo uses in her slimming diets and of which there are tons in one of the kitchen cabinets, making very sure to stir in three Halcions. That would calm him down, and me too. I added a hasty ham sandwich, and it pissed me off to think that I would have to cook for him as well, whereas I already had enough trouble doing it for myself.

When I returned downstairs to bring him his chow, he was stretched out at the back of the cage, because that was all he could do, and he was snivelling. I asked him to place his wrists, then his ankles, closer to the bars, and I cut the restraints with a kitchen knife. After that, I gave him the milk and the sandwich, and I had pity on him seeing him like that, lying there like a wild animal in his cell. So I thought a little about the Vietnamese, and I felt better.

“Don’t worry too much,” I told him before going back upstairs. “There’s bound to be a solution. I’ll come back to see you later. By the way, it’s useless to scream, there’s no one but me in this house and the basement is soundproof.”

This was the first time I’d ever played the jailer, and I thought I was doing a pretty good job. I went by the fridge and prepared myself a big snort of mescaline before dropping onto the living-room couch in front of the TV.

I was obsessed by my CEO. It bugged me no end that he wasn’t American. But what was done was done, and I had to make do with the situation. We’re very resourceful in my family. But it wasn’t just him. I was obsessed by Anna just as much. I really couldn’t wait for her to show me what to do with her body. Christ, what a hell of a life.