Читать книгу Combat Journal for Place d'Armes - Scott Symons - Страница 15
ОглавлениеHugh awoke slowly — dredged himself from bed, and installed himself at his portable typewriter, duty-bound. It had been his faithful comrade-at-arms for eight years. An Olivetti Lettera 22; it had never failed. He had written his first book on it. And ever since. He opened his briefcase, reached in for his Journal, and started to type.
“The morning is deep downcast in me, numbskulled, and my brain bloats against greysky. Catch my dreams by the tail … reach out to prey upon them. But they are gone even as I reach … Well, if I can no longer feel, at least I do have time to think. I have reached shelter, a hide-in, and I think I am undetected. No one knows I am here. I’m not even sure I realize I’m here yet. And certainly no one knows why (I like to think that I don’t know why — but I know deep in my bone I do, that’s why I’m here.) If anyone did know then my Disaster would be disastered. The important thing now is to keep a meticulous record of the assault, so that if I fail at least the ground will have been broken. If I succeed then others can follow; the results will be self-evident. In either case a day-by-day account, in detail is essential. For the novel — and for the Real Thing. I’ll keep on taking notes. And then write them up as I can in this journal. Flesh them out … flesh me out!
Irony: I bought this journal six years ago, when I was still in Montreal, with CBC … meant to keep a daily record. Never did. And now I’m here, writing it, because I didn’t dare then … didn’t dare me. Serves me right. Remember the day I bought it — after lunch with George Carter, at Delmos Oyster Bar, walked along la rue Notre Dame and down-dropped in to an antique shop … one of his clients. All that Canadiana (little did I suspect then it was my culture in the raw). It was lying in the bargain pile on a gate-leg table. Picked it up unthinking, uninterested … perhaps to look interested, perhaps to protect me against other purchase — the redflare of cover caught my eye I guess, the red and black while George talked shop … balancing the book in my hand — an old-fashioned journal and notebook — my hand tested by its heft, substantial. With a good spine to it. None of that paperback stuff (a paperback culture has no tiger in its tank — must needs make one up). And open to the marbleized end-papers … curls my coil (there’s the rub).
Plus a pocket for papers … containing one reproduction map of old Montreal and a couple of postcards — one of the Bank of Montreal, the other of Notre Dame’s gut …
Bought for $1.
George laughed — “You’re a symbolist.”
“Why?”
“The date — 1867!”
I hadn’t even noticed … But I never wrote a word in it: fled to the respectability of Toronto instead.
Stop yapping and write!
7:46 a.m. Waking this morning and even last night I was aware once again that my novel is in fact some deeper assault on reality than I care to admit. It is … it is a war — between reality and me. Maybe it’s a Holy War. I can’t tell (stop lying — of course it’s a Holy War!) Alright — it is a Holy War — so this journal which is a diary which is my log-book is really a Combat Journal. It couldn’t be anything else. I should type it in red.
Must keep a duplicate. In the hotel strongbox to be forwarded to Eric in case of emergency. I know he’ll see to it that it is published. (Don’t let me down Eric — you have no right to. What I say belongs to my community — to what is left of it, that is. It is all I have to give. All! And if they don’t want it … well at least they can never say they weren’t told.)
Between my notebooks, my Combat Journal, and what I manage to write of my novel, the picture should be complete. As complete as I can make it. And if I succeed, then I’ll have my novel from it. Then the rest can be set aside….
But I’m not going to fail. I have no right to do that either. I am honour-bound to succeed … And I must bind me to my word. Screwed to the sticking point! I’ve rubiconned every river that ever ran, bombed every bridge — just to make sure I’ve cornered my cowardice. For the rest, ten years of meticulous preparation. Of training. Maybe fifteen, if I include those first years, at the University of Toronto … when I furtively, almost unwittingly, protected my counterpoint to the Amurrican Dream. Ten years anyhow. Ten years of tacking back and forth — but always to the same end. Always the same preoccupation. What subterfuge it has meant … I always the subterfugitive! No matter. What counts now is that I’ve reached my target. It is still here. That was the work of yesterday. I took few notes yesterday — even though it was the First Day. The First Day on the site. I just didn’t have the energy; it had all been consumed in getting to the hotel, into a striking position. I remember now that I had felt how dangerous my sense of calm was to the whole purpose of the expedition. Because it is war — and I realized already it was war, and that any placation was capitulation. Yet I persisted in feeling calm. And I had to keep telling myself that this adventure is essential. Of course I knew that it was — even if for some time yesterday I only knew abstractly and had to keep sending me mental telegrams, like “EXPEDITION URGENT STOP NO RETREAT STOP KEEP YOUR COCK UP STOP.” No, I knew well enough that it was essential. That was it: I was dangerously smug about the fact of the danger. That was what worried me. Lulled me into a security right in the face of absolute danger.
And then later yesterday — in the late afternoon, I harvested the exhilaration of recognized danger, and the whole thing was implicitly clear again. I could relent.
… 9:25 a.m. Breakfast at the hotel — while the waitress clucks about this dining room like some pullet over her brood — and I ponder the matter. Really wonder whether I can achieve it. It is mad. This “adventure.” I suppose the real question is whether it takes place at all. My fear now is for the adventure itself — because that is the basis of the novel. Amongst other things. And at this very instant, as the oatmeal porridge ballasts my grumble gut, I am denuded of everything except my faith in the possibility of the adventure. Yet even as I fear for the venture I realize that the fear is of no way out — fear of the final extinction of my plans. And once again I realize how serious it really is … this goddam “novel” of mine. It is a matter of life and death — whether I like it or not. Moreover, if I turn back, then it is automatic death. So I know again what is at stake, and the Adventure, the Novel, simply is. I am dedicated to victory, because I am dedicated to life against death.
In the strain of this recognition my appetite is gone … because my body is gone — has been nullified by the act of questioning. I have lost corporate credibility again. It is detached fingers that wipe detached mouth as I pick me up and carry me back to the room…. At least I can study the map of the quarter …
As I re-enter my room on the third floor my ear is cocked to the shunt of freight-yards just below the hotel…. I am huge again with the dream I forgot this morning … muster me once more to typewriter before it evades me again … if nothing else, I can keep the goddam log-book up to date …
It was home … in the home I’ve never built. In my old Toronto Rosedale … that house, on Crescent Drive, Tudorbethan, with park ground behind it…. the banquet hall in the basement — wine-cellar banquet hall; vrai cave! (Virulent in me … every detail — as I hear bells from trainshunt.) Twelve-foot dining table from Les Frères chrétiens of Montreal, a drawer for each monk’s pewter cutlery … 14 places in all. Generous places. Table with the trestled feet, wide plank top, and the iron crane drawing out from the end, for the marmite. Item #377 in Jean Palardy’s illustrated Furniture of French Canada. Around it those chairs I could never afford to buy … those chaises à la capucine, circa 1780. With their flowing arms joining balustered back and legs, front and back. And the cherub-winged backslats. Fourteen of them — a dozen in dark hardwoods — walnut, butternut, stained maple. Plus two in tiger-stripe maple — voluptuous in the wood’s countercurve to the curvette of the design of the chair itself. This in the very centre of the room…. Walls white plaster roughcast. Ceiling high (it keeps getting higher as I recollect it.) Around these walls — upjutting from every corner and pillar and beam — the strut of the cave — a dozen Coqs canadiens, rampant. At the far end immense rocaille hulk of sideboard — like some purebred milchcow decked out for a fête champêtre at Versailles. Clawed balled feet. Atop it, large carved cupboard for eaux-de-vie … straddled by six torchères that stand four feet each. All in white and gilt. On the left wall, a huge mural scene, a fire…. But scarce time to take all of this in, even in recollection, when the guests arrive. Who are they to be (trains — keep shunting — I would know who arrives!)? Suddenly candles blare, ignite, and She arrives in sheath dress that cracks my whip … followed by Him in dinner jacket and bespectacled smile, teeth wide-eying (High Church Ipana!) and hair in kempt dishevelled pelt. No Announcements. Simply an informal elegant investiture of this home hall à la canadienne … investiture of us, of what we are as citizens, as people … I serve them un vin d’Honneur — a Bernkastler Doktor 1959er goldbeerenauslese — in my grandfather’s high Victorian Hock glasses. High Victorian, High Hock, High Glasses … with Chinese waterchestnuts and bacon … serve them from the front seat of the Child’s Hearse — lifesize — from Lévis, P.Q., hearse all inordinate with angels and roses and garlands, steep carved pine, white and gold, and all celestially earthy (those trumpetting angels have firm French-Canadian buttocks.)
As I pour the Bernkastler into the onion-skin green of glass diaphanous under tremble of fingertits wine flows down necknape of Tony’s hairline, down vertebration into the roothouse that used to be behind Great-grandfather Jameson’s homestead at Grimsby (Ont.) … into roothouse and up spat back out at me into the glass of Princess Meg from her left breast that was cut clean from the dress, displacing the Order of the Garder. Eau de vie, I gasp, and kneel to let it tumble my crown…. Scene only interrupted by the Canadian Chairs that come assclasp us all to a stewboat of Oxtails stewed as meet for Mighty Methodists … and serve with a red wine that I grow myself, below the house on the slope behind the Toronto subway just to prove that Ontario wine need not be the red Niagara piss with which we glut our home market … a little red brute strong enough to grapple these tails — secret being, of course, that as in certain small crus of Pomerol, I leave the stems and all in the pressing, to flesh out the wine, give it mastication … un petit vin masturbateur de l’Ontario … l’état de l’Ontario, S.V.P. Till Margaret had been oxtailed, and Tony with, and everyone ordained therein because it is meat and right so to do … and as I look up (the bell of freight train clarifies the site now) I see that the sideboard is 18th century French-Canadian baroque-rococo church altar, Ecole de Quévillon, and that the angels are now suspended from our lowering ceiling, and that Tony is my chair and Princess Meg clutches regally every oxtail to her Order of the Garter, and all we guests concerted shout — “Alleluia, I’m a bum….”
I wake, just in time to curtail an unsolicited harvest of me, and now, in recollection, remember clearly that as a child I had been deeply preoccupied with the conjugation of OurBelovedKingandQueenandwasthereabeginningnoranendtosaidconjugationIwasconcernedtoknow atwhatpointitdi dallen din us, as I was sure it did.
Then I realized that there is a huge silence resonant in me, as dream dies on my vine … the freight-yards are tranquil, and the bells have stopped.
Sit in this sweet bereavement. Evacuated. Suddenly recall my tourist map. Bought it yesterday … but hadn’t courage to look it up. The least I can do now is circumscribe my area. On earth, in North America, in the Dominion of Canada, in l’Etat du Québec, in La Ville de Montréal, in the centre of the city, the old centre, by the side of the St. Lawrence, where Seaway begins as Lachine Canal, this area. The area — I pinpoint it now, with precision — bounded by the St. Lawrence, McGill Street, running up from the river, north-east to Craig Street, then easterly, past City Hall as far as Berri, down to the waterfront again. Le Vieux Quartier, plus a bit. Within that a still smaller area … bounded by la rue St. Jacques to the north, la rue St. Paul to the south, the Bonsecours Market to the east, la rue St. Pierre to the west. Within that — La Place itself, La Place d’Armes ….. and within that again, of course — but that will have to wait.
These are the names, the streets; the shorthand for the reality. I know that. It is the reality I seek. Yet even as I succumb to the map, looking at it, I feel La Place, the whole quarter, ebbing dangerously out of me … And I bitter realize that I have committed the cardinal sin, reducing the quarter to this map. To allow this map — even as guide. Perhaps if I slip out now, quickly, I will catch the quarter, La Place, the bulk of it, the embodiment of it, before it all folds away into this map that betrayed me … in a moment of weakness. Fling me into parka and beret, sortie out … not with intent to site the quarter definitively — but to make honourable amends for having slighted it — for having presumed to reduce it to a few square inches of map. Running down the stairs of the hotel, out the door, into La Place Jacques Cartier … up past the Nelson Monument and the Court House … down la rue Notre Dame, quickly hurry now … to La Place, the central Square, noting fearfully already how vague these are become in me … till I reach La Place itself and enter, unwitting now, and not till I am half way across it, the buildings flowing past me, shadowing me, shadows in me, in the corner of my eye, do I realize that it is already too late. Already I am invisible … and La Place is detached, receding out of me. Already. Stand, in centre Square, glaring at the buildings, the Place; and only shadow. Intermittently a lurch of something more substantial. But in essence, only shadow … only the remains in me of the Place. I drift on, across the square, down St. James Street, trying to regroup me, to pull me together, to substantiate me…. But I can’t … the best I can manage is some sort of condition midway between incarnation and excarnation. At best I am half-cocked now … my body is midway — neither here nor there. Nothing is specific. And then I am at an intersection (which that cursed map tells me still is McGill and St. James!) In front of me a modern business building … a sheath-glass tower. And I am falling straight into it … on pretext of looking for someone who isn’t there (if he is, he’s lost). But the truth is. I fall into my own vacuum! And then, in minutes, shoot out again, like some electronically processed statistic. My chameleonage complete now … feel as I felt I was about to feel in the bar-car of the Rapido. Something has happened to my gut … something gone out of me. Somehow I have been dispersed … would panic — but there isn’t enough of me in one place now to panic … and then do panic — and when I stop running, I am back across the Square (it passed through me absolutely unnoticed — it is only by looking back that I know that I have passed through it!) and I am having a belated lunch in some plastic-nicolodeon joint … my remaining embodiment looses its teak timbre from the executive suite of the glass-sheath tower and goes salmon pink along the counterline now … Soupe du jour et biftek, au point … The food descends my elevator shaft and congeals in my salmon plastic-pinked stomach — fortunately I can’t vomit, can’t even feel nauseous: my stomach is artificial now. Soooo … I’ve chameleoned to that point. I’ve decarnated further than I feared. Only the old imitation wrought-iron coat-wrack in the corner, splattered with taches of aluminum paint to modernize it — only that keeps feeding me now, intravenously. And it is out of place, as is my blood. My heart founders. Under these conditions my plans are simply impracticable. How can I share the intensity of joy that the Square is in me, has been for me, always, implicitly, till today, till now, when I actually reach out to prove its joy for the sake of others? How can I write the Novel. There isn’t any Place to live, to see, not any more … it has gone out of me. Worse, the very converse — the same Place d’Armes has become for me simply a bloodsucker — each building a leech, draining me of my remaining corpuscularity. What I had come to see, still vainly hoping to share, not only has failed me, but has turned against me. I am left with an inversion of my verity. Gathering up my encroaching invisibility and my check, I flee — so discountenanced that I am able to walk past target, site unseen — a mutual agreement almost. Slink to my hotel. No — all my tactics are wrong. I cannot give what I now no longer possess — nor can I leave dispossessed. My Novel is out the window. So is my life!
I try to think … no use. I can’t feel anything … and out of touch, I’m out of mind — out of my mind. For a brief moment I know that I am on the verge of insanity … Lie down, lie down. vertebra wrench, open and squeeze clamped closed like accordion, ramming the punch of me from tail to necknape, head threatens to detach — and suddenly bolt upright from the thrust I’m awake to the realization that my body has simply corporately echoed the sound from freight-train shunting in the yards — my ear still thrums bright as the trainbell rams the entire cargo home it freights. 7 p.m. How long did I sleep? My guilt musters me to typewriter … and for two hours I record this day’s disaster of me. Dispassionate, because detached now. Disembodied.
Done — I wonder what next? Technically I’m through — washed up, or washed out. I can go home now. Settle into being a civil servant or university prof or a bond salesman. It’s as simple as that. I’ve just died. Why not accept the fait accompli … and enjoy my retirement into the Canadian Social Welfare State; climb into the trough, with the rest of the Citizenry. Head reels again … and I know that this is impossible; I would shoot myself first … What the hell have I been doing these past ten years, if not evading that issue! That impasse. The All-Canadian Clunk — no, I’ld rather die, again, than say yes.
Out into the night air … aware that I need food, though not hungry. Wend me through the velvet dark of the humid December night, to the restaurat of Paul-Marie Sanson … Le Chat Botté, just a few doors from Le Devoir on the same side…. Le Devoir — our only relevant journal of opinion — the only Canadian newspaper that absolutely had to say what it had to say these past ten years … and said it. It had guts. And at Le Devoir it had been André Laurendeau — the editor. One man, who stood up to be counted. When it hurt … But for some reason or other no one from Le Devoir ever eats chez Paul-Marie. Paul-Marie is a Frenchman … from Le Midi … and that, finally, is unpardonable. That he serves the best food in Montréal, that he is no more expensive than the other intellectually or socially chi-chi restaurants nearby which are also reasonably inexpensive, that he is actually only a few doors from the newspaper. None of this matters. Paul-Marie is French, obdurately French. Moreover his decor is neither improved Habitant, nor a clinically clean version of Paris Left Bank. No — Le Chat Botté is simply eternal French bistro in a Canadian Victorian setting that has been here since built … the mantlepiece settles the period pretty well; one of those carbuncular wooden mantles with knops and finials and chip-carving overall, thoroughly clotted with a grained golden oak finish multiply varnished. By the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee it was honourably aged. So Paul-Marie’s clientele is English-speaking mainly. Because of the atmosphere and because of Paul-Marie, and because it is in Le Vieux Quartier near such quarantined denizens as Le Devoir. A visit to Le Chat Botté for an Anglo-Canadian Respectable is as risqué as a tour along the Red Light lane … I remember watching them order meals here, many times … invariably the same — steak after an onion soup, finishing with a crême caramel, or a pâtisserie française. In fact I never was entirely sure what Paul-Marie used to do with his tripes and brains, and bowels, and pigs’-feet, and head-cheeses and illegal game, and all the other pungent extremities of barnyard flora and fauna. The answer I supposed all along was Paul-Marie himself … as I see him again, now on entry, I am sure of it. Six foot three, he hasn’t lost a single one of his 329 pounds. Sitting with his back to me, in front of the TV, eating his blood sausage and terrine de foie de vollaille. Seated amidst the clamour of his oh so empty tables. If possible he has grown even more Paul-Marie, has grown further into himself. The Paul-Marieness of Paul-Marie — absolute self-fidelity. He hears me, and pivots his chair … impounding me with his 329-pound eyesight, probing me deep for my food potential, for my significance as a man-of-food. Decides I’m insignificant … and is about to let his waitress guide me to a table, when suddenly his eyes focus on mine … “Monsieur Hugh …” and he is on the instant dissolved from implacable food concentrate — like some fossilized but pliant pemmican — into inordinate activity … in seconds we are safe, in the kitchen, with its ten-foot stove, wood-stove. Paul-Marie promptly stuffs it with more wood — which it patently does not need, and then armed with an outrageously undulant ladle undertakes a constrained elephantine ballet from pot to pot … a joyous war-dance of the foods, in my honour … digs ladle down to turnip and gourd and leek and all the bloated enormities from its international reservoir of innards. Roils the stews, the soups, the sauces, in a free molestation that would please any voyeur of feed. High tribute, that. And I am embarrassed by it. On the centre table a mound of brains that could only be from a dinosaur, did a dinosaur have sufficient brains to still be dinosaur. And guarding these, from the far end of the kitchen, perched on a pair of bar-stools, the lares and penates — King and Prince — German Shepherds eying me with the same intent I apply to the food — a fierce friendliness.
I know exactly what I feel … like the gentle man in Galsworthy’s story of the old custom shoemaker, whom he must frequent, out of loyalty … I would eat Paul-Marie’s food were it rotten! “It’s changed, Paul-Marie, it’s better than ever.”The Frenchman smiles amidships — “on va manger, eh Monsieur Hugh … on va manger” — and he masticates each word he proffers … leads me triumphantly back to his table, afront the TV screen, gouges me tablespoonful of terrine, and leaves me, irritated by the TV, and sad…. God knows I didn’t come to Montreal to watch TV … offended, I raise a breadful of the best terrine in the nation to my mouth, hopefully — suddenly I vibrate, terrine glowers … it is the voice on the TV. I know that voice — know it gutwise. It’s Jean-Pierre Préfontaine … talking political leaders; how often we did that during my stay in Montreal. I watch the terrine, rich on the bread, and then lower it to my plate, untouched. That munificent voice of Jean- Pierre, voice that is what he has to say. Voice from these same innards that Paul-Marie marinates and steeps and stews and eats, all by himself (and I remember now that Paul-Marie, too, has a huge voice, a voice that, once on the rampage in song, turns your earth upside right.) And then, my terrine grounded, I concentrate me, almost malevolently, on what Jean-Pierre says — because I know that he says nought. Now all the questions are into me again as a great tidal bore. Why does this man say nothing? Why does he settle for $50,000 a year … with his seat on the Royal Commission on Canadian Culture, a face on TV and a voice on radio? It’s all balls … or rather it’s all no-balls at all. Absolute irrelevance. Jean-Pierre knows that … knows that he is saying nothing…. There’s the rub. He knows the impotence of what he says…. The terrine, on my bread on the plate, catches my eye again — it is the sound of the voice that does it — Jean-Pierre has started in again … that is it — it is how he says it that is inordinately potent, I quiz the screen again — poor Jean-Pierre, you are left only with the right to hear the sound of your own voice. Echo of a fecundity forever unused, untapped…. What happened to you — why did you desert? Where did you go? What do you see now as you leer out at us from within your electronic cage? Pauvre Jean-Pierre …
“Qu’est-ce que vous-voulez, M’sieur … ?”The waitress is at my back — and I realize that I am speaking out loud — apostrophizing the shadow of the shadow of Jean-Pierre, that I am even imitating his voice … in French. And that as I imitate it I eat of the terrine de foie de volaille. It tasted of … but even as I rejoice at the empire of taste in this terrine it has gone. Christ — I’m back at absolute zero again … headspin. I hang on to the carafe of ordinaire that Paul-Marie has squatted afront me. I appall me … I cannot taste any of it. I know that — my taste buds have folded — closed down for the night. It is the sight of Jean-Pierre … his deliberate demission. He is posthumous … and knows it, and accepts it, and goes on living it warmed by the sound of his own voice … warming the last cockle of his heart. I cannot stop me now, watching this television spectre … no stop, stop — wrench my eyes out of it just at the moment when body threatens dissolution again — just as I see Paul Marie’s terrine descending my transparent gullet — proof positive of my desubstantiation.
And now, eyeballs popped back in, I am reprieved (if not saved) — a trio arrive, and my instincts apprise me of a Scene.
Young couple. Plus a little Big Daddy. Out on the Town — the Lower Town. Big-Little Daddy pays. She smiles upon him; hubby talks for their supper. I listen out the corner of my ear … Paul-Marie bounds over onto them, accosts their appetite, waitress smiles and we convene complicit over Paul-Marie’s campaign …
Me — “what an urgency to Paul-Marie now … services them as though they were on Messianic mission, dependent for capacity to Resuscitate upon a warranted feed-station….”
Waitress — “c’est toujours comme ça. If they leave food uneaten he is sad … mopes.”
See their eyes skirt the menu … Big-Little Daddy smiles approbation. Wife smiles upon husband. Husband talks more fluently. Thus the bargain is made … “three filets Mignon, three onion soup …”
Paul-Marie knows their lines — plays them out, his feet pounding time, whole body urgent to the metre, scanning their food-place … “et comme desert nous avons pâtisseries françaises … fromages … crême caramel….” He is almost malevolent … the “crême caramel” only comes out after a hopeful pause, and then is said with culminating authority in the absence of theirs.
I can’t take any more of this … watch the TV an instant. Reduced to that. Paul-Marie pounces on the kitchen, armed to the teeth with his orders … his pots-au-feu bubbling for only him and me, and now only him — as I am a hit-and-run victim of TV. The trio play out their night’s engagement. For one unperceived moment, witless, I realize how fine the terrine is … catch the colour of it out the corner of my eye … “colour”? — yes, that is what it is — I see colour on the TV screen, and realize abruptly I am nibbling the terrine and catching its kaleidoscope … catching all the essential out the corner of my eye. And then it is gone — just as I know it, it is gone … like the Place, with the map…. And I am gone, in absentia.
They have their crême caramel. My eyes are dry with the screen or I could cry. I want to go over … to wheedle. “Excuse me Sir … but Paul-Marie serves the only cêpes in town, as a savoury! Cêpes mesdamesmesdemoisellesmonsieurs! Cêpes! And un petit vin de paille. And with coffee, he has his own eau-de-vie, from his village, near Carcasson, it’s all on the menu … in English.” But I know if I wheedle they will mount their high horse and I shall have to take out my knife and cut off the vestiges of their humanhood, scrotumsacking them with a single twist of knife like coring dead apple for stewpot….
I am out on the street again. Sauve qui peut! Told Paul-Marie I would come back later in the week … that this was but a tour de reconnaissance. Bandying towards me, short legs, crooked nose with dilating nostril (left one), deep bruised eyesockets, barrel chesting over those legs … a reporter turns in to Le Devoir: God — how habitant he still is … Habitant! But he has just turned my country inside out with his “quiet revolution” — 150 years too late.
Oh God — that’s it … my country, my eyesight, my taste … all gone now! I knew I had forgotten something. I had forgotten everything. And La Place … I stumble my faith down la rue Notre Dame, blinkered, saving me again for La Place d’Armes. Past la rue Bonsecours with its church, and La Maison Papineau, and the Chateau de Ramezay, and the Hotel de Ville, and the Court Houses, old and new … screening them with my televizor, to evade stumbling over them in my dark. To La Place. And only there open my eyes, wide opened, to embrace La Place … mumbling “I’ve come … I’ve come … look, I’ve come back, I promised.”
It’s gone too. Why fool myself? There’s nothing there. Oh, there’s something — I see the outlines, delimiting the buildings around La Place. And with an effort, from memory, I can still name them — at least the major ones — clockwisely, from St. James Street side — new and old Bank of Montreal, that pair of skyscrapers on the east side — one with the old Banque Cdne nationale, the other, the old Providence Life Building. Behind me l’église Notre Dame and its Presbytery … But it’s all irrelevant now. The veil has come down in me, over my eyes. I am shut off — cannot see, nor hear, nor touch. Look again at the Place — no, it’s just a postcard there now, a site through a viewer, and even that is ebbing from me.
So that is it — I came to La Place, to prove possession of it, to fling it in the face of the infidels, to cower them with the reality they have sacrificed, and, at the very moment of proof, find I have already lost it … lost everything.
Stumble up the steps of the Church, can’t harm me now, no longer; sit down, go and sit down, enter and slump in the first pew … slump my body still ironclad around my core, body frozen over me frozen in my own steep freeze … ironsides … and dump me here, moribund. My eyes rebut the body of the Church I can no longer see, sweeping over its body — in a reassurance that I am unscathed by it, and even as I confirm the armour-plating I am stabbed … from the right, and I turn stunned to the face of the wound, follow the trajectory of thrust from my flank, across the aisle till I am up to our hilt in the eyeballs of a youth who curious appraises my arrival. I withtract instantly, close the ironclad, close … but I have been penetrated and cannot and look back up again along the same trajectory of sight and am imbedded again in those eyes on me … stumble back out of the Church that sudden flares in me, anywhere … and as I exit, turn to exorcize those eyes and still cannot, and now we are talking under the huge arcade of the entry and walking in the light snowfall that I feel against the hot socket of my left eye windsown.
Down the sidestreet by the Church, and after a five-minute walk the bar closes around us and we are babbling. Deep inside I am taut, closed … I Know where I am, but I don’t want to know … I Know this is the last remedy, the disastrous prerequisite, but don’t want to know. Peer cautiously at the barroom … there are about 75 of us here … I glue my arsehold to the chairseat like bitch in heat, while trying to wag my tale in self-deprecatory defence. Seventy-five of us … from 15 to 50. I’ll watch — no harm … parry an eyethrust from leftflank. Parry and feint. In front of my screen a blondie convenes an entire tableau around him … watch his progressions … five other she-males resuscitate at the end of his fingertits … all engaged in the rhythm of his embodiment…. The rotten French-Canadian teeth, sleezy tights, fuzzy-wuzzy parkas … all these disappear as I too dance at the end of those fingers, my armour-plate clanking to the floor … my flank is open now, unveiled left toe twitches, nostril flares and as blond boy quivers his court to renewed palpability, I sudden retreat, on the run, back into my safety of insensibility — but even as I do I am stabbed again, and turn to the boy from the Church still beside me … Yvon … 18, in turtleneck skisweater, a snood of dark hair, and eyes climbing all over inside me, as though I am some site … “insite,” that is it … all that land inside us … Yvon — shy, but firm — nothing coy. He has just pierced again my flank, emancipated me again from my ironsides … and I have just swallowed him eyeballs first. The pact is simple, frank, immutable. This then is disaster … the complete, instant immersion in another. No holds barred. Absolute accessibility. And it is disaster … consequence of my desertion of all I hold dear — the requisite Disaster…. “Il me faut cinq piastres … je suis commerçant.” My head roars … senses close — I turn to grapple with that Judas-kiss…. Everything left in me focuses my deception … my eyes muster my accusation, and as I look at him we are imbedded along the line of looking; his eyes flow into me again, and I accept their need, and my own.
Walk the greystone street from the bar, the same side of La Place as my petite place … down towards the harbour … along a grey way of stone houses … flanked by them each side, till we are in front of a fine Regency stone home, now for tourists … up the curving cast-iron steps two flights, from whose top I can see the white new dome of the Marché Bonsecours, the rippling cupola of the City Hall … and if I step to one side, the towers of Notre Dame, with the Bank of Montreal behind. The front door is bullworthy — no battering would breach its stolid convolutions of wood panel and applied pilasters. Inside everything clean, in place … a snugglery amidst these Georgian townhouses that are become everything but what they were — boutiques, tourist homes, warehouses, brothels, antique shops. I can only chuckle … if only the Regency gentlemen of old Montreal could see this … or the Historic Sites Committee today.
Yvon’s room … an extension of the bunnycoats I saw in the tavern. Those parkas canadiens which no English-Canadian male nor even she-male would be seen dead in alive. A kind of blatant cuteness. The walls bleu-pale, of dribbly plaster pattern; crucifix on the wall (after all — I met Yvon at the foot of the altar!) flowers potted on a low star-spangled coffee table (Air Canada styling!) — they are plastic, but I scarce note that except by mental recollection, they seem so right … live flowers here would be fake! All warmly cosmetic. Yvon reporting to his “colleagues” (think that is the academic term) in the basement.
… what the Hell am I doing here? What are the chances of getting out? There was a murder in this block a few days before I arrived — my cleaning woman told me all the details … I scout the innards of the cupboard — no one there. On the table, beside the potted plastic flowers three colour photos of Yvon … in each one he has the same intent, diffident look. In each one he shields his eyes from the probe of the camera … never really letting the camera see what I have already seen in him, through his eyesite. How can I possibly believe him conscientious accomplice to murder. His innocence is so articulate in these photos … his self-consciousness.
Yvon back — close the door … lock it carefully — turn, look at me … it is a warm looking. A male prostitute — he patently likes his métier — his clean bluejeans already taut as he stands akimbo, gentle, awaiting — nothing slut, nothing brazen, nothing aggressive, nor weak. He is simply there … all there. And he wants to be there — that’s what he is there about. What’s more, he expects me to be there. I watch this open and absolute salutation in silenced admiration … this complete self-presentation. My presence acknowledges him … gives birth to him. God — this métier of his, it is divine. No actor could approximate this extraordinary gift of self that the $5 conceals. This boy simply wants to give and to be given. The five bucks … give it to him now … hand it to him saying “You can go now if you want.” Yvon folds the bill carefully in his shirt, looks me up and down — is it reproach? And then steps forward, unbuttons his checked shirt and draws my thighs to him gentle and hands on my back kneads me into him … I watch us wary … not a false move. What Yvon does comes from within him — from some inner law he follows now flawlessly, while his eyes palp mine. I watch intently for the slightest failure in that law — at the slightest deviation from it I would be released, and would flee … There is none. This boy is an artist. And he sells his body the way artists do, only they do it at once remove, on canvas, or sculpted … his art is consummate, direct….
Yvon jabs cocked pants now steep into my thighside … thrust him back and eat his body wholemeal through my eyeballs. Still he awaits. And as though unveiling virgin I part his bluejeans and complete our divestiture, till we are naked in us…. His body proffers so naturally — so freshly — the virginity lying in the renewed wonder it reveals for him so clearly now.
Imbedded together I man his rood that fulfils my palmed handling … firm in the hand … the rediscovered heritage. Yvon eyes always follow me through mine, always completely there, always implicating my own, so that what is done at manrood is already assured in eyesite … once only do I avert my eyes, and as I do the thunder of my ear dies and I am alone. I panic, and my eyes turn quick to filch him at cockhead, and as they light thereupon I see his eyes again, ears open, and again I feel steep inside of me.
“Comment veux-tu arriver?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Yvon’s eyes summons us … “Je ne l’aime pas dans le trou….”
I feel my disappointment … because there is a negative in us now. Then I see his eyes — they are not negative; they are only the look of a boy about to take Communion. Run my rood along his, lying us askewer, touching us together for the first time, thus, lightly, run it along, till our cocklips touch, run it down the firmed centre of his manhood (simple statistic: he has 10 fine inches of gift), and slowly creep my cocktip up to his, his eyes on my cockhead, then his eyes clamped in my own, we eyesite each other, till with easy implacably concision the cocklips kiss again and I am inflorescent, bathing his rood in liquid moonstone. Yvon’s eyes close in a Mona Lisa smile of the line of the lids, and as he lie so immersed in my harvest I gather his root till it blurt sperm bolts clean up to our breast.
His eyes open, incredulous with wonder … dresses as I watch him. “Where will you go now?”
“je rentre au club … je vais danser….” Yvon smiles, pats the $5 … I know that although our conjugation has been tentative, yet I will always remember Yvon, because he restores to me an entire world … suddenly he reincarnates me after twenty years of meticulous self-destitution. For twenty years I have adhered meticulously to the code of the latent Civil Serviceable. For twenty years I have flirted with sterility. Now, at the final moment, I have broken. Yvon breached me at the moment of final closure. I am free to be myself responsibly … free to know the world I have so conscientiously extruded.
For that Yvon is blessed … I look at the crucifix on the wall. “I met you in the Church … yet you are … you are” (I couldn’t say, or didn’t want to say “prostitute”) He sees my difficulty … as I stumble out my compromise word “you are promiscuous.” Yvon smiles “oh non, tu vois, je suis Catholique.”
Wonderful variation of a theme — “non anglised angeli” — “not promiscuous; catholic….” Out of the mouth of babes.
As we go out, the door of the next bedroom is open. The same reality to it: definably French Canadien — incredible “bad taste” … but incredibly complete bad taste … nothing out of its own taste — all of a piece. And that piece is of podgy flesh paste … a plaster-of-Paris incorporation! Polychromatic! Like those same plastic flowers hung beside a same Christ. All of life as some bloody waxy image … with all artificial colouring — like margarine, maraschino cherries. Pinks, powdered blues … star-dust! It loyally revulses me….
And in a wicker armchair, in the corner….
“Bonsoir Pierrot … je m’en vais au Rock.” Yvon is gentle, polite … saving him from a kind of smugness, from a holier than thou so clearly produce of his fortune with me … his duty done for the day. A kind of sainting for sinhood.
“C’est Hughes, Pierre….” For one catastrophic moment I fear Yvon is going to say “C’est Hughes … de Toronto.” And bless him for not damning me with it.
Pierrot cocks a toe up at us … bigtoe, barefoot. Same lifekit as Yvon. Jeans, plaid checkered shirt — plus a slight cravat, gold, knotted at his Adam’s apple: Little Lord Fauntleroy as good Amurrican Bad Guy … Bigtoe eyes me, still cocked (toenail cut and cleansed … into me. Taken by bigtoe! — as decisive as that unseen flankglance penetrating me in church with Yvon still unsighted. Ears thunder. Sheer lust of life.
“Cinq piastres?” The voice is mine!
“Ouaé msieur … non — sis … c’est déjà minuit pawssé”
“Je reviens tantôt.” And I am walking along the Greyway with Yvon, leaving him at his club — Eden Rock (I didn’t notice the name when we first came): odious name … en anglais du reste. Yvon smiles — “au revoir … tu étais chic avec moi … tu vas aimer Pierrot … puis il adore le 69!”
And I am at hotel, to my room, for the extra money … and then back along Greyway to Pierrot … it’s crazy, but now I know I must honour this lifelust in me, or live still-born. And within an hour of Knowing Yvon (because only the Biblical “Know,” with its capitalized “K” describes for me this kind of knowledge) I am knocking at the bullworthy door again. Betrayed back into life again by bigtoe! Pierrot answers … barefoot. Back into his room where the bare-assed Christ bleeds down the pucker-plastered blue wall. Pierrot is reading Manorama — not a mag I know, I note wryly … picture spread of other Pierrots. None of them is Pierrot: not that I expected — but none of them carries himself the same as my Pierrot. Something drastically different … in the embodiment. Pierrot senses my thought train.
“Ils sont tous Américains…. Pas comme nous autres … pas du tout.” So he knows too.
“Et pas même comme vous autres, non plus.” I bless him the condescending compliment — pauvre Angluche que moi.
“They are all Squares” — Pierrot is proud of his comment, and his English.
“And what are we?” I blurt aloud … unwitting expecting an answer — the answer. He shrugs … and quietly undoes himself … his shirt aside, and over to his sink, washes hands, feet “mais jamais ça” he smileblasts into me, patting his hand to his crotch … “je ne le lave pas — pas jusqu’à après … ça goute vrai comme ça” His smile seconds his point … Yvon’s teeth are singularly un-French-Canadian, almost Ipana bright — but Pierrot’s are indelibly Canayen … like rotted patates frites.
And in the shuddered observation note that I have some answer to my question — “what are we?” — it is this remaining capacity for some kind of life-giving dirt. “Pourriture noble” — that mould blooming on French grapes giving a lusher, richer wine. Pourriture noble … and again sight those teeth, that green bloom of fleshbronze. “Ca goute mieux” — Pierrot is hideously right. Bouquet and body … tang that doesn’t come in an economy bottle. All the difference between.
Pierrot is lying in an open loll on bedface, twitching me with bigtoe … immense beckoner as my captive eye swallows it whole and am unawares into his manscape still at ten feet distance yet touched in a way that nobody has ever touched me in my own community d’Angluche. Into it and feeding … guzzling a sheer gluttony. Pierre is a slut … and I buy his body … like over-ripe wine. (Dizzy said — was it in Coningsby? — that any man can like good wine, but it takes a connoisseur to enjoy bad wine …) watch his body cocking, his hidden Man risen under bluejeans … bigtoe down and rises rises me slowly rising with him rising me and in me am over to this manscape standing high over hawkeying this land this whole nation lying rampant under my very eye as abruptly I skydive onto this sweet prey, headfirst beakfirst onto swollen jeans nuzzle into the manmusk seeping through the closed fly breathing deep into this musk, as Pierrot grasp my head of hair, probing into my overbrush, then I am back up to eye this site again … yes, ohhh yes, it is entire land spreadeagling there entire land I always knew was there, never absolutely lost, merely out of site, and now is confronting me hands down to grasp entry opening in earthquake of us the Man of Pierrot hidden still under winding whitesheath of underwear I reach in to palm the body that clasps my hand around and around its trunk to root Pierrot sifting thigh into my gasp as I bare the massed trunk of him, uncircumscribed land naked in fullflesh, head down to bigtoe in fierce Ptolemaic circumference sucking me down down inexorable to imbed me in this land as Pierrot certain of the way divest me still standing aside him, till free naked I am fallen back into the land to plow us under … running my muzzle over this countryside surging up on me, alive into this banished world so suddenly restored whole … swarm me over Pierrotland from all directions as this manscape gets on my horse to ride into me from every direction riding all of us at once everywhere we move is always everywhere moving to everywhere else in the free fields that wind unending up our valleyside to peak and back while Magpie highdives down with Icarus into a blue-skie seat that afterwarns me now I am in the same world that Pieter Brueghel says he so rightly saw four centuries ahead of us but we forgot to entirely believe with him yet is so absolutely here now from the moment I bury my nose in this burning bush whose 10 inch stalk batters my nose is hoof of horse from that plowman behind (he doesn’t notice Icarus skindiving below) each furrow cavalcading into this eternal Campagna worldwide that I bloodhound relentless into the wideyed distance that is all immeasurable foreground Pierrot given each brush and rock and clump pummels me roundalay in my mulburied bush … as I eat this all edible manscape of Everyman feeding to my need, famished and it is true then that we poor Protestants deny the Body and Blood that was given for us as guarantee for our Sinworthiness … denying the world on this Ptolemaic platter only circumscribed here by the bounds of that dire need I nurture hearandnow while I pangful recollect divine Raphael’s “Disputa” whose very detachment from all flesh whose very vaunting perspective would cut my tenuous umbilink with all this land still left latent in me to plant and plow to belated harvesting as I soar now above the Plowman all the land white and warm beneath my birth and soar centred over all circle down and down onto the head of this brave Plowman whose toe still touches the deep earth still imbeds us all in the land that feeds us as down now onto his head I engulf in my anxious mouth for that manmusk Pierrot said he kept clean for such meet needs while I mouth this landcocked head savouring oh at longed-for last this noble rot to cleanse me knowing how rightly Moutarde de Dijon is gutted from the furrowed land while mere Amurrican hotdogs are clotted with that quickblotted tang that kills all taste of truth in Man so now I savour this sheer landmusk grateful that Pierrot thighrides into me so I grasp his bushimbedded rod striding up and down around its rot articulating my manhood at each gust of lush fleshscape salting me plow deep this landman that plows me to impending harvest Pierrot moaning steep in flush we fondle dandle clasp and run along the hedgerow by our shore I ply and row wondering this Icarean Sea wherein Pierrot has engulfed us both face to cockface and I sink to rise us again sucking huge in me the pod burst from this land spurting seed in our gathering mouthfulfilling with that first citric precision of spermblurt followed by the glut of man splashed in throat and gullet, spermspurt in nostril flaring wide as Pierrot grasps my ebbing trunk to earth of us lying thigh by thigh turning at last only to kiss the mutual musk of seed sown around our muzzle as he lopes last over to the basin to wash away any lost part of our deed as I watch knowing it is the lope I marry land to man in that conjugation all free flesh knows from a world that quakes with every step we take….
Give him his cinq piastres, plus un piastre parce qu’il est minuit passé, plus encore un piastre en souvenir de Pieter Brueghel (and his Icarus) and I am into the night air … walking with sure stride. Where — where the hell are you going, I ask me? Till I am at La Place d’Armes … and enter, and stand in the centre, free man with the key back in to the kingdom … Christ — so that is it … the veil rent from my eyes, all the Place sears in me, with a lucidity that….
I don’t stop running till I am at my hotel. Safe abed….
Ahh — so that is it. The issue is joined — squarely (heinous multiple unwitting pun!): To see La Place, to write my novel, to come alive, again, I must fall, utterly. To share my love I must humiliate me … must grovel. Stand waistdeep in the shit … and then sing. Sing, goddam it, sing. I try to sing a little … what? What shall I sing? I don’t know anything to sing. Hit Parade is crap (and “crap” is just shit-substitute: crap is pseudo-shit, ultimate degradation.) And “Onward Christian Soldiers” seems so inappropriate…. “Things go better with Coca-Cola …” — no good! I’d better do the Christian Soldiers. “Onwaaard Chrissstyenn Sooo-olldyerse …” Ok — enuff. The main truth is out now — I’ve got to pay homage, or I’m done. Real homage — call it “hommage” — fealty to my Liege Man. So be it. But who will bless my God-damned soul?
Clock tolls 2 a.m. I feel immense relief now. An immense cleansing.
Surely that can’t be right — “cleansing”? … my dear Hugh, you are out of your mind! …
Yes, but I’m back in my skin — I’ve jumped back into my skin … back into my wits….
So it is a cleansing. That is it … exactly what I do feel. Even more precisely — a purification: now explain that one — no I don’t want to — I’d only explain it away. And then I could write a little essay about it — a tract for the times.
Purification — and the need, the intense need now to live again; all because of that accomplished deconstipation … that’s it — a deconstipation — blew twenty years of shit out of me … opened me up again — tore the veil aside … and left me whole again, made me whole … holy: has made a man out of me again.
But you’ve just slept with two teenage male prostitutes! You are beneath contempt, defiled … a lifetime of honourable chastity sold for tripe….
No no no — that is not so — and my whole body shines now in the face of my mobilized accusation. What is it then? Have I simply accepted Hell — simply (good Protestant) reassured myself of it … my holy life-insurance? And is this apparent defilement now the prerequisite of Heaven?
And the Place d’Armes … I ran from it … just as I was about to see it again, with ferocious clarity — see it as it has always been, latent in me … Why did I run — just as I was about to repossess it? Why?
Idiot — because it looked you in the eye the way Yvon looked you in the eye. It wanted you … and had you returned its gaze you would have been dismantled again. La Place is a voyeur … it hunts you as you it.
But I couldn’t give me again. Not to La Place. Not that way.
Then you will never see….
As I turn to bed I see IT — that map — that goddam tourist map … the fatal flaw … the moment of lack of faith, when I looked at it, instead of the reality, instead of the Object itself. Throw it out. Throw it out! Too late. Pick it up … and those abject postcards I wanton bought — I see it now — as substitutes, as mediators between me, and the Object Incarnate. Notre Dame Church, the old Bonsecours Market, La Place Ville Marie, Nelson’s Monument, the Bank of Montreal…. Throw them out! No — insert them into Combat Journal. They are part of the Evidence … for and against. Ah — traitors! You betrayed me….You led me down the garden path — to smash, against Eden Rock. Well — you can stay now, to stand trial. Stick you in with the rest … over my marbleized face.
Asleep. It is 3 a.m. Preparing me again for my novel. I lunch with Luc Raymond tomorrow which is today. I will begin, right after Luc. These first days simply a false start. Completely wrong — the very opposite of what I wanted. Must eliminate them from the Novel.
