Impurity
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Talonbooks is a small, independent, Canadian book publishing company. We have been publishing works of the highest literary merit since the 1960s. With more than 500 books in print, we offer drama, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by local playwrights, poets, and authors from the mainstream and margins of Canada’s three founding nations, as well as both visible and invisible minorities within Canada’s cultural mosaic. Learn more about us or about the author, Larry Tremblay, or the translator, Sheila Fischman.
IMPURITY
A Novel
LARRY TREMBLAY
Translated by Sheila Fischman
Talonbooks
for Rémi
L.T.
for Don
S.F.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Impurity: A Novel
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10: A Pure Heart
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
About the Author
More by the Author
Copyright
Page List
Cover
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Landmarks
Cover
Title Page
Impurity: A Novel
Could it think, the heart would stop beating.
—Fernando Pessoa, “A Factless Autobiography,” The Book of Disquiet, translated by Richard Zenith (1991)
She would like to believe in God, in the immortality of souls. She cannot. She lights a candle in the columbarium chapel. She doesn’t cry. Her tears have dried up. All that’s left to her are memories. The beautiful, radiant ones. And those that tear her apart. She doesn’t know how she was able to close her eyes for so long to what truly mattered. There were hints, however, details that could have awakened suspicions before it was too late. She also is to blame, that she knows.
Nervous, she looks at her watch. Six o’clock. There, now he’s back from the college. He’s parking in front of the house, climbing the front steps, taking his key, opening the door, immediately sensing that there’s something different. It’s the silence. The silence that is born from absence, from emptiness. He takes a few steps, enters the living room. There is no more furniture, no carpet, no paintings on the walls except for one, which is now immense. His heart is beating faster. She’s certain that at that moment his heart is beating faster. On the floor, he sees a book. He bends down to pick it up. On the cover there is a reproduction of the same painting, a maelstrom of blotches that suddenly makes him afraid. He closes his eyes for a moment.
Then he opens Impurity.
IMPURITY
A NOVEL
There are no remains yet. Journalists note with caution that the search is a rescue operation. But no one is fooled. You don’t rescue people whose plane has plunged into the ocean at two thousand metres per minute. You search for the carcass that acts as their underwater tomb.
The disappearance of the Piper Saratoga – a poetic name for an airplane – is reported on July 16, 1999. The pilot was John F. Kennedy, Junior. His wife and his sister-in-law were with him as well.
Unable to tear himself away from the television, Antoine follows all the coverage, zaps, looks at the same item ten times over. As he is on vacation, he can spend all his time living the event live. The CNN reporters encourage him to do it by showing non-stop the same images, the same archival photos that mark the milestones in John-John’s exemplary life. The prince of America is one of those who are crowned with a tragic destiny, as if beauty, wealth, glory, when fused in one individual, emerged directly from the thigh of fate.
After a few days, Antoine has spent all his capital of sympathy for the victims and their families and friends. Zapping from one network to another, he compares the different ways of covering the event. This outrageous media coverage of death exposes the pathological state in which society maintains its members. The vulture in this story is also him, especially him, sitting comfortably, his hand lengthened by a TV r
emote. Sweating bullets, fused with the leather of his armchair, he is revelling in the bad luck of others. He is in this state of accepted intellectual sloth when he learns that after a five-day search, the Piper Saratoga has been found, and learns in the same news bulletin of the suicide of Félix Maltais.
His death also makes the news.
Félix, whom he hasn’t thought about for a good thirty years. He has immolated himself on a tiny island, scarcely a few trees. A rock, in fact. He set fire to the island. Waited for the flames to devour the spruce trees and, along with them, his body. The fire was extinguished on its own, leaving a ring of grey ash in the middle of a blue lake.
They had once been very close. Life came between them. Antoine forgot him. Nothing simpler than to delete from our lives people who have mattered deeply to us. The news drags him out of his televisual lethargy. He pulls on his sandals, goes out to buy the papers. Walking rapidly, he has the impression that he is sowing the thoughts taking shape within him.
Ever since the JFK Junior episode, along with the local and national papers he has been buying some American ones. He thinks it’s ridiculous to join in that binge of paper and ink where ads and stupidity chew up more and more space every day. He assigns himself the role of scavenger in this American tragedy that, after all, is none of his business. Why be so upset at the death of John-John? He’s behaving like a character in a novel by his wife.
Back home, carrying his paper loot under his arm, he reminds himself that he’s on vacation and should be taking advantage of it. Since early summer, he has been feeling the need to repeat to himself that time is something he ought to take advantage of. In his pretty house in Outremont, time lingers around the furniture, paintings, photos like a melancholy tune.
He opens the papers, skims them rapidly. The tragedy of the Piper Saratoga and its illustrious occupants is still in the headlines. As if God had blessed the media, a heaven-sent tragedy lands on them every summer to fill the blankness of vacations, occupy it with sensational headlines and pictures. Not long ago, remember, there was the providential death of Lady Di. As he is turning the pages a photo suddenly draws his attention: a Buddhist monk, in the lotus position, being burned alive amid tall flames. It’s a famous image, dating from 1963, of an act of protest against the war in Vietnam. Antoine is intrigued: a reproduction of that photo was found in Félix Maltais’s car. That was all. No letter. No explanations.
Félix Maltais, 45, apparently wanted to imitate the monk Thích Quảng Đức with his suicidal act. An act to sensitize the world to the degeneration of the forests.
If you want to save the trees, why commit suicide surrounded by spruces and not TV cameras? Antoine can’t help finding Félix’s act somewhat naive. A shot in the dark. He wonders, though, if his friend stayed imperturbable in the flames. If he’d breathed his last breath with his face convulsed in pain. If by leaving as a farewell letter the photo of the protesting monk he’d been sending him a sign after so many years.
The phone rings, interrupting his questioning. A journalist wants to meet him. She intends to write a feature on his wife, Alice Livingston. Her last novel is to be published posthumously in the fall. Does he have any comments on his wife’s final work? Antoine hesitates before agreeing to her request. He has never liked the totally predictable plots, with a drop of suspense, that Alice generally churned out without too much stress every couple of years. Her books were anticipated by a readership won over in advance. Reviewers praised them mechanically with a purring of adjectives. She appeared on TV, ultimate accolade for a writer. But this whole circus never drove Antoine to think of his wife’s novels as literature. To him, Alice placed on the market supposedly cultural products. He conceded, of course, that she had qualities the absence of which he deplored in himself: rigour, discipline, determination, optimism. He admired her. She was happy, he thought, because she was perfectly in tune with the shallow and pointless world she lived in. On the day when she was getting ready to receive a prize, dazzling in a dress purchased for the occasion, hadn’t Alice told him that her writing was building the world of tomorrow? He had asked her how.
“Just read my novels carefully. Between the lines there is space and time. That’s where everything happens. That’s where the world is bursting out, emerging from the present.”
Antoine hadn’t wanted to antagonize her on this day when she would be receiving a prize. He had held back a laugh. Did his wife really believe what she was saying? Was she intoxicated to that point? But when he entered the reception hall on the arm of his celebrated wife, he could not prevent a quiver of pride from misting up the mirror of his thinking.
In the end he agreed to meet the journalist the next day. She would come to his house. As he hung up he blamed himself for agreeing. He has nothing to say about the novel that had monopolized his wife’s final months. He would pocket her royalties, at least he’ll be able to say that.
Antoine heard about the monk Thích Quảng Đức for the first time in 1971, when he started college. On the first day a student arrives late for class; he’d lost his way in the corridors. It’s Félix Maltais. He asks Antoine if he can borrow his notes. Why him and not someone else? Does he really look like a serious student meticulously taking down every word that falls from the professor’s sacrosanct mouth? That’s not the image Antoine has of himself, with his outrageously long hair. That day he has on a military overcoat from an army surplus store. He has even dared to keep it on during class, though it’s not cold. The last days of summer outside the windows are casting a vibrant and joyous light not in the least conducive to taking notes about Ferdinand de Saussure, linguistics, and the intriguing distinctions between signified and signifier.
The next day, Antoine finds himself face-to-face with Félix just as he’s coming out of the Tabagie 500. This is a mythic place in Chicoutimi. They sell magazines, tabloids, slander sheets like Allô Police and Photo Police. At the very back, there’s a counter with a row of red stools fastened to columns. Most of the customers prolong their coffee by chain-smoking, turning the greasy pages of a magazine, or ordering a club sandwich, finishing their feast with a slice of apple pie weighed down by a gigantic scoop of ice cream. What attracts Antoine in particular stands at the front door: a revolving rack of books. He likes to make it turn around, feigning a sudden interest in one title or another. Nonchalantly, he takes a book, runs his hand over it, opens it, flips through it briefly, and buries it in his army coat with no one the wiser. After that he moves to the magazine section. He’ll leaf through a few psychology and sociology periodicals which he manages to spot among the Paris Match and fashion and sports mags. Then he moves to the counter where cigarettes and chocolate bars are sold. The small bit of change in his pockets often forces him to buy cigarettes singly. At times, he leaves Tabagie 500 with two or three Caramilk, Aero, or Caravan chocolate bars, his favourites, hidden in his pockets.
That Friday, he arbitrarily stole Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. When he runs into Félix on the sidewalk of rue Racine, he opens his coat. At first Félix doesn’t see what he’s getting at and pretends not to recognize Antoine, whose linguistics notes he’d borrowed just the day before. Antoine extricates his loot, wedged behind his belt. With a theatrical gesture, he holds out the book. Félix appears horrified. He doesn’t want to touch the paperback, as if it were contaminated. At once Antoine feels an attraction for this boy who is staring at him with his very dark round eyes. He puts de Beauvoir’s book back under his shirt, buttons his coat, and invites his new friend to a restaurant, Le Top, that has just opened on the roof of a furniture store, a surprising new arrival in Chicoutimi. He really wants to know this exotic type who flaunts moral values to the point of indignation at petty shoplifting.
Antoine plies him with questions on his view of the world and his beliefs. Before long, Félix is telling him about the monk Thích Quảng Đức.
“His heart was found intact in the calcified remains of his body.”
&nb
sp; “How can you believe such a thing?”
“To me it’s organic, physiological proof which is spiritual as well, that matter dialogues with the spirit. Just now when we’re talking peacefully in this café, do you know what’s going on? Billions of events. Antoine, it’s enough to think of one’s body as an antenna, a radar if you prefer, to enter into contact with the whole universe. And the universe for me is not the cosmos. The universe is everything that has to do with humankind.”
“That’s nonsense. The universe, the cosmos, are the same thing.”
“No they aren’t. But that doesn’t really matter. What matters is what connects humans. It hardly matters what they think, what they do. People are connected. No one can escape the universal connection. What happens if you and I, at the very moment when the waitress tucks away a lock of hair and the client sitting on our left gets up to pay, if we open our eyes, our ears, our hearts, and send our consciousness out to listen to the universe like an enormous radar?”
“Lots of things, I imagine.”
“Exactly. But above all, we’re astonished. See, you put sugar in your coffee and at that very moment American soldiers are slaughtering Vietnamese children in their villages. I put milk in mine and in Washington, young people like us are demonstrating against Nixon. They’re beaten with clubs, they’re dragged through the mud by armed policemen. Young people like us are thrown in jail.”
“What should we do? Organize a demonstration against the war in Vietnam here in Chicoutimi, or stop drinking coffee?”
“I’m trying to make you understand what I mean by ‘universe.’ Do you know that right now there’s a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh?”
“No …”
“Well there is, a terrible epidemic. And when we’ve finished our coffees there’ll be a thousand or maybe even ten thousand more victims. Whole villages where the corpses are dumped into stinking pits. Men with gas masks over their mouths suffocate in the acrid smoke from the pyres they’ve lit to burn the victims’ furniture and clothes. That must be how it happens. Like the plague, d’you see? Radar, Antoine. No one can escape. And the heart of Thích Quảng Đức, in my opinion, is just that: the absolute act condensed into one muscle. Something that no one can explain, can comprehend. Because explaining and comprehending mean nothing when you’re dealing with a … a … I can’t come up with a word for it. The same as for music. Must we explain, must we understand music? No. Music is what most resembles the heart of Thích Quảng Đức. Something that acts in the whole universe but we aren’t able to explain or comprehend it. Do you understand?”