Impurity

by Larry Tremblay

  “You changed the novel’s ending?”

  “I dared to do that, yes. And I’m not proud of it, far from it.”

  “Félix Maltais’s suicide inspired the end of the novel, and not the other way around?”

  “I only rewrote the final pages. Not many words, but I concede, they’re quite important for the end of the story. Alice might not have appreciated the very last lines. This heart that doesn’t burn … But that ending allows the reader to find again the theme of purity. The circle is complete.”

  “You’ve betrayed Alice.”

  “I repeat, I’m not proud of myself.”

  “You have no idea how her novel has wounded me.”

  “Antoine, it’s just a novel. Like all novelists, Alice took some elements from her own past to write a story that, in the end, has nothing to do with her life.”

  “And what about my life?”

  Before leaving Louis-Martin’s office, Antoine sneaks a look at the large photo of Alice that is judging him with its glossy paper gaze.

  Never has Antoine found it so hard to embark on a new academic year. His heart is pounding as he enters his classroom. His legs are heavy, his mouth dry. Though after twenty years of teaching, he knows his subject: “What is a human being?” This is the question he’ll present to thirty or so students this late-August morning as the summer outside the broad windows of the classroom quietly bids farewell. This philosophy course requires little preparation. It’s a basic course that explores the major conceptions of man. Over the years, Antoine has simplified the subject matter, in particular its vocabulary. As a young teacher, he didn’t hesitate to talk about logico-mathematical deduction and hypothetico-deductive reasoning to signify that there were different ways of thinking. But he could read the boredom and incomprehension on his students’ faces, and little by little he acquired a certain linguistic humility. He lost his illusions, he was not, certainly at the college level he taught, going to explore the depths of human consciousness, but rather to modestly follow the Ministry of Education’s guidelines.

  “What is a human being?”

  He throws out the question so half-heartedly that most of the students keep talking among themselves, some getting to know one another, others talking about their vacations. He writes the question on the board. His head is buzzing, his hand is trembling, and he makes the chalk squeal as if each letter traced required a huge effort. He puts down the chalk, turns around. He wants to open his mouth to begin his lecture, but stands frozen before his students. He hunts for words, ideas, the meaning of the question he’s just inscribed on the board.

  Plato. He has to begin with Plato: man is a being of reason. And end with Sartre: man is a project. He can’t forget Nietzsche. Nor, above all, Freud. To speak of that, of the chaotic impulses ruled by the pleasure principle. To deal with sex. Then to insist on what distinguishes man from animal. To introduce students to the cogito of Descartes: I think, therefore I am. For Sartre, it’s something else: I react, therefore I am. Because no one can exist without the other. Mention Kant. For morality. And come back to Nietzsche: to think beyond good and evil. God is dead. Alice is dead. And Félix as well. And finally to enumerate the three elements comprising the soul according to Plato: reason, emotion, and desire. Very important: the carnal element, because we must eat, drink, copulate; the rational element, because we must think so the body will not assume control; and … and the third element, which is …?

  Antoine can’t remember. He draws a blank. He gropes, he loses himself, goes back to Descartes: what does he say? One must doubt. And think. And what is Antoine now thinking? He thinks that Alice is watching him, that she’s hearing him think, that she’s divining things. Maybe she knows it all. He mustn’t panic, he must simply lay out for them the broad outlines of his course. The question is clear: is he having illusions about himself? Is he hiding behind beautiful ideas so as not to see the abject person he really is? Is he one of those salauds, as Sartre calls them? He loses himself amid these dangerous questions. He has to come to himself, to focus on man as a social being … the Marxist analysis of social classes … consciousness that is just a product … to not talk to the students about what is tormenting him … to forget Freud, go back to Plato. What is important is the third element composing the soul … and which is … which is … it’s coming back … and which is the element of the heart … and what does Plato say? That the element of the heart reposes in the breast and that it incites the human being to prefer the beautiful to the ugly, the good to the evil … the evil … the evil … yes, the evil!

  His wife describes him as an arrogant man, petty, pretentious. She has a reason, a purpose … It’s just a novel, Antoine repeats, a novel, just a novel … Don’t get lost, don’t fall into the trap, don’t try to say everything at once, focus on the question, and the question is: what is the human being when he loses his humanity, when he destroys what he most loves in the world, when he doesn’t know why he’s doing it? Does Antoine have a soul? Yes, a good question to ask his students: does he possess a soul? The soul that, according to Plato, is made up of three elements that are … that are … But no, forget Plato, he’s too distant, too disconnected, go straight to Sartre … Man is free … a being who renews himself at each moment of his existence … but Antoine can’t renew himself, that’s what he must tell them, the professor is dead … Look at him, he’s simply going on and on about the world’s great thinkers, while Alice has written a novel about the unsuspected baseness of the human soul. You don’t get the connection? He’ll explain it to you one more time. The soul is made up of three elements: the lustful, which is found in the gut; the rational, which is found in the head; and the third, which is found in the breast and is called … is called … the heart! A pure heart.

  A student rises and taps Antoine on the shoulder.

  “Sir, are you all right?”

  Antoine looks at the girl’s face with astonishment. He is suddenly aware that the class is watching him, waiting for him to say something. He mumbles a few words and runs off.

  The next day, he is unable to go back to work. The following day as well. The very idea of finding himself in front of a class gives him stomach cramps. The following days, the smallest task requires a huge effort: answering a letter, paying a bill, buying bread, eating, dressing himself.

  His life is slipping through his fingers.

  Anasty wind is ripping the leaves from the maple trees. Antoine is gazing fixedly at the cold October rain as it lashes the living room windows. His antidepressants are slowing the pace of his thoughts. Since he’s been on sick leave, he has been spending a lot of time in front of the TV set. He watches documentaries. He bemoans the fate of the polar bears; of geese being force-fed for their livers; of sharks being killed just for their fins. This sudden vulnerability seems to come from a miniature of himself, from a tiny little Antoine buried in a distant past. One night when he can’t sleep, he empties out his son’s closet, where his old jeans are gathering dust along with his faded T-shirts, a kung fu outfit, and two Halloween costumes that Jonathan had worn as a small child. He gathers up records, books, posters of actors and singers, the remains of his son’s still-recent adolescence, and dumps them all into garbage bags. He repeats the exercise with Alice’s clothes. He empties the medicine chest of all the beauty products that fill its shelves. He thinks he’s emptying out his head and his heart. But nothing works. He has the feeling that she is observing his slightest gesture, capturing his most intimate thoughts. He sleeps less and less, nightmares pulling him from his bed. He often has the same dream: he’s playing with little Jonathan, explaining to him that a cat says “meow,” that a cow says “moo.” Suddenly his hand detaches itself from his arm and scrabbles like a spider over his son’s body. Antoine then wakes up, drags himself to the living room, and for the tenth time listens to the last message Jonathan left on his voice mail. Then he dials his number, and at the last moment, hangs up.

  By the middle of November, he ha
s lost ten kilos. He’s let his beard grow. Its Nordic fairness is no more than a memory. After having been shut up at home for two months, he again goes out to buy the newspapers. Everything dealing with the Y2K bug draws his attention. The question all the news media are asking is how, on January 1, 2000, computers will interpret “01.01.00”? Because the “00” could mean both “2000” and “1900.” They’re anticipating a chaotic, disastrous situation when the new millennium kicks in: the obliteration of computer networks, plane crashes due to the malfunction of air traffic control, a financial system in a state of collapse, the accidental launching of nuclear missiles. On the night of December 31, Antoine gets up to make sure that the world is still out there. He sees that there is still electricity. He hears no suspicious noises such as the explosion of an airplane in flight. The telephone works. He turns on the radio and the TV and hears only year’s-end broadcasts with humorous flashbacks. He zaps, watches for a moment the New Year’s Eve broadcast from Times Square. Thousands of people are screaming with joy and drinking champagne, their smiles as broad as an ocean liner, surrounded by enormous publicity screens. Through his living-room windows, he contemplates the little piece of the world that is his: a snow-covered street, house fronts lit up with Christmas decorations. He’s disappointed. He would have preferred that the Y2K bug destroy all this masquerade. He would have preferred that the world be as badly off as himself. He would have preferred, above all, to disappear.

  He goes into the “aquarium” and opens the iMac’s packing box. Unlike his wife, the computer was not even scratched at the time of the accident. Apple protected well its cheerful box, its plastic cover, and its hard foam balls. He plugs it in. The sound, as it starts up, reminds him of a gong’s vibration. The operating system’s icon smiles at him with its stylized twin faces, proclaiming that Apple, too, is poised on the shores of the third millennium. Antoine sheds hot tears.

  * * *

  On the afternoon of January 1, he is astounded when his son rings the doorbell in the company of Frédéric Létourneau. Antoine lets them in, still in his pyjamas, eyes bleary from his sleepless night. Jonathan has not seen his father for months, he doesn’t even know that he’s on sick leave. He apologizes, he should have called to announce their visit. They’re on their way to one of Frédéric’s sisters’, who lives in the neighbourhood, where a big family party will celebrate the year 2000. He thought he would take the opportunity to introduce him to Frédéric, especially because his friend has a proposal for him.

  Frédéric holds out his hand to Antoine. He has no choice but to ask them in.

  “Well, Happy New Year.”

  They take off their coats and go into the living room. Antoine mumbles that he has nothing to offer them.

  “Don’t worry, we won’t stay long. I see you’ve taken away the big painting. How come?”

  “Just like that, no reason.”

  Antoine checks out Frédéric discreetly, a little bit at a time. This is the man who spends his nights with his son. The man Jonathan loves. A man dressed like a teenager, who must spend hours in a gym. He knows that they’re the same age, but Frédéric is far from showing his. Not a trace of grey in his short, brown hair. A face with no apparent wrinkles, freshly shaved, almost aglow in the living room’s dull light.

  “Are you listening?”

  Antoine, deep in thought, has lost the thread of the conversation.

  “You were saying?”

  “I was telling you that Frédéric would like to talk to you about something.”

  The two men look at each other.

  “And what would that be?”

  “Your wife’s novel. Here’s my idea: to adapt A Pure Heart for the movies. This story of love betrayed has tremendous potential. Alice Livingston had a good instinct in presenting this idea of purity of heart. But adapting it for the screen would require, how shall I say, a certain amplification … a dramatization that gives more importance to the visual … I’m thinking in particular of the end of the novel.”

  “Tell him about Carrie.”

  “Let me talk, Jonathan.”

  “But tell him about Carrie, it would be simpler.”

  “Okay. You must know Carrie, Monsieur Ste-Marie? A film that was a huge success, adapted from Stephen King’s novel. At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be any connection between Carrie and A Pure Heart. But when you think about it, it’s obvious. Stephen King gives you an adolescent persecuted by her puritan mother, who is obsessed with religion. Carrie, like Philippe, represents the story’s pure heart. A heart that is being betrayed, humiliated, abused. Everyone remembers the famous scene where Carrie has a pail full of pig’s blood poured over her head. The idea I’ve had is to make Philippe a kind of male Carrie. So imagine that the Saint-Jean-Vianney mudslide is due not to a natural catastrophe, but to a supernatural catastrophe. It’s Philippe’s anger, his rage, his need for revenge that triggers the destruction of the village.”

  “Yes,” Jonathan goes on, “imagine that Philippe has destructive psychic powers like Carrie’s. Copying her, he manipulates objects from a distance. He makes windows shatter, rips houses from their foundations, twists lampposts out of shape, destroys streets and sidewalks, and wipes Saint-Jean-Vianney off the map. Can you picture it?”

  “I think Jonathan would be perfect to play the part of Philippe. What do you say?”

  He waits for an answer from Antoine that doesn’t come.

  “A few weeks ago, I made a call to your wife’s publisher. He seemed thrilled by my project. He told me that I ought to talk to you, because it’s you who holds the rights for now. He needs your consent for my idea to go forward.”

  Antoine doesn’t react. He retreats into his silence. He doesn’t understand what they are doing in his house.

  Destructive powers, his son in the role of Philippe in a film – none of it makes sense. Jonathan approaches his father and bends over him until their faces are almost touching.

  “You don’t seem well,” he whispers. “Is it Frédéric’s proposal that’s the problem? You wouldn’t like to see me playing the role of Philippe? It might bring back happy memories. So, will you give Frédéric your consent?”

  “You think I’d like to see myself playing a bastard on a big screen?”

  “Mama’s portrait of you in your youth is a good likeness.”

  “Your mother invented everything.”

  “Me, I recognized you, and that helped me understand a lot of things about you.”

  “It’s a novel, Jonathan.”

  “You haven’t changed with the years.”

  “I don’t get what you’re trying to say.”

  “Do you want me to refresh your memory?”

  “Shut up! I’m asking you very calmly.”

  “You’re afraid I’m going to talk in front of Frédéric? Don’t worry, he knows already.”

  “He knows what?”

  “Your little games.”

  “You loved me like that, have you forgotten?”

  “I was six years old!”

  “Get out of here, both of you! Leave! You aren’t going to turn my life into something out of Stephen King!”

  “I don’t care about the film. You want to know the truth? I didn’t come here to talk about cinema. Even less to wish you a Happy New Year and celebrate the new millennium with you. I want you to tell me what was in your mind when you slipped into my bed. Don’t you have anything to say about that, Papa? You with your theories about everything, explain to us why a father abuses his child. Explain to us what leads him to corrupt that child, to rob him of his innocence. Frédéric and I, we’re going to drink in your words. There must be a reason, a logic, something that escapes most people – but surely not you. Come on, get out of your chair and give us a lecture on the subject. What are you waiting for? Are you embarrassed? Is it because your pyjamas are stained and wrinkled? Might you be ashamed of yourself?”

  Jonathan grabs his arms and forces him up. Antoine stands in the middle
of the room, his face haggard.

  “Tell Frédéric what you did to me. Show him your moves. That will help him to imagine the only true film he dreams of making. Recite the beautiful words you used to make me accept your way of loving me. Have you forgotten them? Talk!”

  Antoine tries to say something. The words are stuck in his throat. He has trouble breathing. Sweat is running down his face. An unbearable pain courses through his body. He brings his hand to his heart.

  “Jonathan, help me …”

  As soon as he has finished reading Alice’s manuscript, Louis-Martin calls her to set up a meeting. The next day, Alice takes a deep breath and walks determinedly into her publisher’s office. Louis-Martin greets her in his usual manner, that of a man overwhelmed by work, but something in his look indicates to Alice that he is waiting for her with a certain uneasiness. Impurity, her manuscript, is in full view on his desk.

  “Surprised?”

  “’Specially to learn that you die in the very first pages, and that I’m the one who delivers your elegy, quoting Confucius!”

  “To write one’s own death is every author’s fantasy.”

  “Alice, your manuscript disturbs me. You shamelessly paint a picture of yourself and your husband. You haven’t even bothered to change your names.”

  “I did in the passages from A Pure Heart.”

  “All right, but not for the rest of the novel. You didn’t even change mine. Fiction? Autofiction? And then you talk about your son as if he were still … alive.”

  “I had no problem imagining myself dead, but where Jonathan was concerned, it was too hard, I couldn’t.”

  Louis-Martin picks up the manuscript and weighs it in his hands.

  “Can I know where the truth is hidden in this novel that swallows another?”

  “It’s hidden in the title.”

  “Impurity?”

  “Yes.”