Impurity

by Larry Tremblay

  Antoine gets off his bench and, with his hands in his pockets, heads for the rue du Havre. His apartment is close by. At this hour of the night the city is deserted. He thinks about his new pal. Can’t get over the fact that Félix carries around a rosary. A fetish! He can’t stand all the religious hardware that he himself threw in the garbage at the end of his childhood. He takes malicious delight in declaring that God is dead, denouncing the lies of religion. Proudly proclaiming himself to be an atheist, he impresses his friends by the cutting aspect of his declaration. He has no place for doubt. He makes no concessions and he judges severely the hesitations and half measures of his professors when he hounds them with his metaphysical questions. The vastness of that which exists above his head resonates with mystery, and he insists on not storing that mystery in the drawers of religion. He is appalled by the banal and suffers from being just a simple student among others, in a sleepy city surrounded by forests and lakes.

  As he undresses for bed that night, he finds Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter still wedged behind his belt. He takes the book to bed. He doesn’t know Simone de Beauvoir. He will spend the night with her.

  Had Alice anticipated her death? Pretentious question. No, not pretentious, mercenary. This journalist wants to sell his wife’s death to her readers. Alice was a thousand times more alive than he is, the shadow of her own death had never touched her. That was what got on his nerves about Claire, yes, that way of living for which he envied her. Claire? What was Claire Langlois doing in his head? An embarrassing slip of the tongue. No, it’s not a … a sexual dream, not with her, with that journalist …

  He wakes up.

  4:20 a.m. The hour when a muffled anxiety hauls him from his sleep. Antoine feels that he is in the throes of a silent torment suffered by a fish emerged from the water and flung onto inhospitable land. Since the death of his wife, sleep has become a precarious undertaking. He behaves as if the only moment when a dead person could act was when the living one was asleep. As if Alice, for the duration of a dream, entered his memory and judged him – from recollections he had buried and padlocked so forcefully that he’d forgotten their existence. Antoine no longer likes to sleep.

  He switches on the reading light above his bed. For one brief moment he is taken over by the sense that she is asleep at his side. He can’t help lifting the sheet. She’s not there, of course. For more than six months now her ashes have been resting in a ridiculous urn, in a columbarium of dubious taste, but chic. He goes there now and then to do the things expected of a mourner.

  At the bathroom mirror, Antoine searches for traces of his dream. All he sees is a haggard face. The face of a woebegone dog. And old. Alice had seemed much younger than him. Both of them born in 1954. The last wave of baby boomers. Alice invested significant sums in creams, spas, massages. The worst thing was, they worked. The photo on the back of her latest novels shows a vivacious woman with teasing eyes, a perfectly drawn smile, with dazzling teeth that invite the reader to dip into a healthy book. She looked thirty-five at most. She’d been forty-four on December 23, 1998, the day of her death. Antoine, still busy studying his reflection in the mirror, thinks that he looks ten years older. His puffy face looks as if it’s one of his bad days. Too much humidity in the air.

  An erotic dream! How long has it been since his unconscious has treated him to that? He notices a damp spot on his pyjama pants.

  A photo. She wants a photo of him. Very well, let her come and take it now, he’s ready.

  He opens the medicine chest. Alice had chosen it herself. Impressive, enormous, with a number of shelves on which are lined up the tubes, the jars, the various flasks necessary for healthy skin, elastic, soft, and firm. All of it still there. Antoine hasn’t thrown out or given away anything. Not even to the cleaning lady, who has asked him several times if he wanted her to “clear some space in the medicine chest.” It’s not at the columbarium, in front of the niche where the urn sits, that he can have the feeling that his wife is still there. It’s on opening the medicine chest to let out all the scents that danced around her, pervaded her clothes, perfumed her hair. All those fragrant little totems make up Alice’s altar, the altar of her soul, if she has one. For if Antoine seems to believe in a kind of existence after death, the philosophy prof in him considers that belief to be soothing bullshit: after death there is nothing, just as there is nothing before birth.

  He grabs a tube, unscrews the cap. The scent of fresh melon and cut grass fills the air in the bathroom. He presses lightly and a thick, greenish cream oozes out. It’s a mask that Alice used on Friday nights. Why Friday? Antoine wasn’t curious enough to ask his wife about the secrets of her beauty regimen. He tolerated them, made no comments, didn’t laugh at them. He coats his face with the cream, breathes deeply, and goes back to bed. He notices a spider on the ceiling. Imagines what it must be like up there, with eight eyes and eight legs. Would he be lonely? Would he spend the night lying in wait for prey? Gradually the herbal mask hardens on his face. He closes his eyes. A mild fear, unnamed, sweeps over him like a breeze announcing a distant storm. He thinks about his son.

  Antoine is dazzled by Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Describing the first years of her life and her feverish discussions with her classmates, Simone de Beauvoir stimulates his desire to be different, too. In those pages he sees for the first time the name of Jean-Paul Sartre. Spurred by young Simone’s infatuation with the École normale student whom she refers to at the end of her autobiography, he brings home an impressive haul of Sartre: Being and Nothingness, The Wall, Nausea. The last book delivers a lasting shock to him. Especially since Sartre called Antoine Roquentin his alter ego. Antoine slips behind the eyes of that other Antoine over the course of the pages. Overnight, he identifies with Sartre’s hero. He no longer lives, he exists. He signs up for existentialism without suspecting that the school of thought, which had also become a fashion, no longer interests anyone in the place where it was born. Who in Saint-Germain-des-Prés casts a nauseated glance at the windows of cafés? Down the streets of Chicoutimi strides Antoine, a long-haired Roquentin. He doesn’t need to follow a fashion. He smokes hash and reality opens before him like a brightly coloured fruit. He is loath to declare himself happy. Happiness is too banal, something that’s good for others.

  Wanting henceforth to be responsible for his acts, he attempts to flush out in himself any trace of bad faith, at the risk of becoming a salaud, the term used by Sartre to describe individuals fleeing the truth of their being by becoming set in inauthentic behaviours. That will never happen to him. He will ward off the stagnation of his ego, the self-inflicted blindness regarding himself. That Sartre did drugs also reassures him. The philosopher didn’t hesitate to take mescaline to understand how the imagination works. His exploration nourished the writing of Nausea, a novel of heightened awareness, irritated by a reality on the brink of being transformed, of losing its outlines, of liquefying. He, Antoine, will not lose his outlines, he’ll keep a cool head. He swears that above all, he will seek the truth about himself and about others. In particular he will be pitiless toward himself. Like Sartre, he won’t hesitate to think against himself. Never will he become a salaud.

  Elated, he loses himself in the abundance of Being and Nothingness, a tome more than seven hundred pages long. He reads it with the feeling that he is a diver, inexperienced and ill-equipped, disappearing into the depths of a dark and glaucous ocean. After three weeks of frenzied reading he comes up to the surface of the everyday, transformed. Thousands of words crash together in his head. Their meanings change constantly. Antoine has the impression that his bones have switched places. Something has moved in him, disturbing the routine of his blood. What a man thinks modifies him as much as what he eats, if not more, he thinks to himself. And Antoine thinks without counting. But he hasn’t understood a tenth of this tremendous philosophical essay. He gives himself the illusion. Force-fed with what he has read, he trains himself to dissect the world, to scratch its varnish, update its inner
workings. In his apartment on rue du Havre, an uninsulated basement where hot-water pipes run across the ceiling, drying the air and making his nose bleed, he plays at being Jean-Paul Sartre, thinking that he possesses the man’s lucidity and his authenticity. He merely masks the weakness of his being through a philosophical system that he uses as a screen. Under the sinuous effect of hash, he is on the lookout for nothingness in his apartment. He struggles to see it at work, imagines it as a sewer, a hole that swallows the present, transforming it at once into the past. Settled comfortably in his scruffy armchair, he observes the river of time flowing from his eyes, his ears, from the motions of his head, directing it like a spotlight that casts an astonished light on the living-room wall with its flaking paint. The shadow of a smile appears on his lips. He is listening to The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm.” Each note stands out like a drop of water. It is certain that Jim Morrison’s lyrics are addressed only to him.

  He itemizes the walls, the windows, the furniture. Each object has its own meaning that comes not from an omniscient god but from his own gaze that is projected endlessly forward. Without awareness of his being, the music he is listening to just now would be reduced to a series of disconnected notes. No melody, only noise. He would not associate his perceptions and sensations with an ego. He would not be capable of saying “I.” He would be a new person every second, operating like an existential dotted line, with no possibility of past or future, condemned to live in the cold shell of a constipated little present tense. His existence would be meaningless. His name would crumble into dust as soon as it was uttered, his reflection in the mirror erased as soon as it was perceived, replaced by another, equally ephemeral. It would dance in the void like an atom in a tailspin.

  In that whirlwind of thoughts that he thinks are brilliant, Antoine tells himself it’s time for him to find his Simone de Beauvoir.

  Something is choking him. He touches his face. It’s not his. The violent beating of his heart drives him out of bed. Then, all at once, it all comes back. He fell asleep with his wife’s herbal mask on his face. He showers. Greenish water runs off his face and disappears, swirling down the bathtub drain.

  He has slept for a long time. It’s nearly noon. He goes out to buy the papers.

  It’s the kind of day he likes: humid, sultry, heavy. He arrives at the terrace of the Fleur d’oranger, on avenue Bernard. Orders bacon and eggs. He can’t remember the last time he was so bold. Generally, he strictly follows his doctor’s orders: a fat-free diet. His cholesterol is high. He’s not overweight, doesn’t take escalators, walks as much as possible. But he doesn’t play any sports and the mere thought of physical activity bores him. He laughs at the over-fifties, in head-to-toe Nike, sweat-stained, breathing like hopeless cases longing to postpone the moment when they’ll breathe their last. He observes with disgust the grimacing faces of Sunday joggers, their twisted lips seeking air, their expressions demented, as if they were being pursued by death itself.

  Antoine eats with gusto, plunging into his newspapers. Nothing about Félix Maltais. Not even a snippet. For the media, file closed, subject exhausted. The way that Félix had chosen to put an end to his life unsettles Antoine. Ever since hearing of his death, memories keep recurring. He orders another coffee and drives this wave of nostalgia from his mind. He prefers not to reopen that page of his life. He doesn’t like emotivity and its jolts. Just as he can’t stand tear-jerker films and, even less, TV shows that deal with family reunions. He is appalled by emotional exhibitionism. Why must millions of viewers, transformed into slimy voyeurs, witness the misfortunes of others, their heartbreaks and their minor happinesses when the camera zooms in on their shameless embraces? A son, a mother, a twin sister lost for ten, twenty, thirty years, has been found for them and here they are, snuffling on the set of a TV show, surrounded by lights, their outbursts encouraged by a presenter with an impeccable smile – irrefutable proof of the depth of her intentions. Why participate in this media circus to deal with your relationship problems, to confess to the woman in your life that you’ve been cheating on her from the start, to tell your parents you’ve been a sex worker since you were thirteen, to announce to your children that you’re going to start changing genders in one week’s time?

  When his son was still in his teens and living at home, Antoine quarrelled with him more than once about that kind of program. Jonathan was not ashamed to let his tears flow when a mother embraced a daughter who’d just been found. Though he explained to the boy that it was just a trick to hike up profits, Jonathan refused to listen to his arguments. He couldn’t see how bringing together people separated by the vicissitudes of life could be a malevolent venture because it was taking place under spotlights.

  “I think just the opposite of you, Dad. Reunions or confessions, when they get media attention, become exemplary, and those who experience them come out of them magnified.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “For once in their lives they emerge from the shadows. They can finally be seen. Their struggles and their joys are legitimized.”

  “Know what you are?”

  “I have a hunch you’re going to tell me.”

  “A sentimental decadent. You can’t analyze a phenomenon from its causes, you’re too obsessed by its shimmering effects.”

  “Thus sayeth the philosophy prof!”

  Antoine has often imagined that his son’s taste for cultural products manufactured with a view to exciting the tear ducts of their consumers originated in his first name. He’d never liked “Jonathan.” But it was Alice, at the birth of their son, who had won. She had imposed her “Jonathan” so vehemently that he had to retreat with his “Philippe” between his teeth. Would he have been a better father, a different one anyway, if he’d held a “Philippe” in his arms?

  Alice had wanted to give birth to a little seagull like Jonathan Livingston, who had so moved her that she’d sworn that one day she would have a little Jonathan of her own. She and Antoine had had a heated discussion about the work of Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Actually, neither of them had read the novel, but they’d seen the film a few years after the book came out. Antoine had hated it and enjoyed ridiculing it in front of Alice, who’d been overwhelmed by it. Yes, the metaphor was exaggerated, sure, it was somewhat sanctimonious, but the message was so profound and the values so universal that one could only be touched by the story of that bird.

  “Jonathan,” she argued, “represents the search for oneself. He recognizes his own difference. He knows that life is a journey. He must find the road that will lead him to himself. You see, Antoine, it’s simple: gulls only fly to look for food. They spend their time quarrelling over fish heads. They rummage in garbage cans. That’s their life and for them, it’s fine. No one questions their way of doing things. Little Jonathan, though, is different. He wants to fly for the sake of flying, not just for food. He is thirsty and hungry for freedom, don’t you get it? It’s simple, maybe a little too facile for you, but it’s genuine: not to live to eat but to eat to live. That film is a hymn to audacity. It’s an appeal. We must fight against all the conformity that prevents us from being what we are. We have to leave the clan that forces us to be content with garbage piled up in dumps when the pure and infinite sky is shining above our heads.”

  “You’re just babbling clichés. You don’t hear yourself: to be what we are! But we are what we are. Find our difference! Yes! What a discovery! I’m born. Fine, so far, so good. Then one day I discover that I’m different. Fantastic! So what do I do? I go out to search for what I am. What an adventure! And what do I discover? I discover that I am what I am. Let’s hear it for Jonathan Livingston Seagull and his flights of philosophy!”