by John Brooke
Now he saw the four bald boys start pointing. And heads turning.
He saw the man addressing the assembled guests trail off…
It was a terrible feeling — as if he were in their kitchens with them, watching them turn the dial to another station. Marcel Beaulé stopped talking. He stopped talking as the last listener turned away to see the man on the roof of the house on the other side of the yard. He heard one woman remarking to her friend, “He’s like the thing we saw in Washington…the three soldiers raising the flag?”
“Oh, oui,” remembered the friend, bemused by the sight; “it was very strong.”
“Oui.”
Marcel felt he should say something. Hail the man. Challenge him with all the eloquence at his command. Insult him. Tease him? Vas-y, Marcel: saying something is what you do best. But it was the four boys with Patrice Painchaud. They were budding warriors, the kind who act, and they were sprinting for the garden fence without a second thought. In the instant they moved into action, Marcel knew that any chance of further oration had evaporated in the afternoon sun. He was an honoured recipient of the Chevaliers de Cartier Patriot of the Year Award. He had the highest ratings in the Montreal listening area and a best-selling book. Yet in the space of a movement, he was just another spectator, standing frozen with a glass of wine. Looking on.
Patrice Painchaud was also watching, the cigarette between his fingers trailing smoke.
Imagine! A moment like this and it all came down to the boys.
And they were over the fence!…into the alley, the first one already half-over the next fence and into the enemy’s yard.
Suddenly they stopped in their tracks, all four of them.
Suddenly the boys were as frozen as the rest of them, confronted by an old man at the back door of the house beside the house of the man on the roof. From forty metres it looked certain that the old man would shoot the rifle he held trained on the boys if they did not obey.
Still, one boy had to test him…picking up a stone.
“Faites pas ça,” growled the old man through the stillness, taking a closer bead.
“Arrêtez!” It was Father Martin, rushing to the fence.
Marcel watched the four boys turn with one face…to the priest, then to Patrice Painchaud. The one boy dropped his stone. Instead of climbing back over the fence, they shuffled out of the alley to the street. It looked like another one of them was saying something in the direction of the old man. When the old man jerked his rifle, the four boys dashed away.
After that, the party dwindled rapidly, although some lingered. Out of respect; and it was a lovely afternoon for a wake. For some others, quietly defiant, it was a question of pride. And it wasn’t every day you got to have a drink with Marcel Beaulé. The last of the guests might have noticed a diminutive black woman trundling down St. Gédéon, past the maison garden.
Madame Damas looked tired, like she had been at work since early that morning. But she sported a magnificently flower-bedecked straw hat, and her smile was electric as she waved up to her neighbour, who remained on his roof with his flag.
It took a few weeks, but Bruce finally found out from Geneviève. She had gone to the corner to talk to the priest who had saved the day. “Her name was Marie-Claire Lamotte… Yes, very old. Eighty-seven. Apparently she was a patriot and she had a lot of friends.”
“Some friends. Was there anyone else we should know about?”
“Oh…” Geneviève snorted one of her withering snorts of Gallic contempt; “that Marcel Beaulé — quel imbécile!” She had always made a big point of refusing to listen to the man.
“No kidding,” said Bruce. Then he asked, “Was the priest her friend?”
“I asked him that,” said Geneviève. “He said he was her priest.”
There were changes down at the station. In the days immediately following the incident, not a single caller mentioned the man on the roof at Marie-Claire Lamotte’s wake and Marcel Beaulé was loath to push the matter. He had a sense his listeners felt Madame Lamotte was dead and they should turn the page. The Friends of Marie-Claire Lamotte Society, which he’d been promoting enthusiastically in his speech just before the thing occurred, was stillborn. Her flag, which the family had graciously donated, remained folded on top of his filing cabinet, by his desk in a corner of the studio. He was expecting to hear from Father Martin Legault. The priest had left the party shaken, declaring that he was going to set the reason for Madame Lamotte’s flag straight for the public, and that Marcel, if he was truly the child of a church-going mother, would take his call.
But it seemed the priest was biding his time.
Les belles couleurs was discontinued. At Thanksgiving, traffic reporter René Bonenfant quit, moving over to Radio Canada where his reports were done in-studio via a feed from rotating cameras fixed to crucial vantage points along the city’s major arteries.
Marcel’s producer called a meeting. He said, “You may not have noticed, Marcel, but our market base is shifting and we’re going to follow it. They’re smart, young, interested in healthy foods and successful people. They like to hear the odd song as they bundle the kiddies into their snow boots and mittens. They want advice on mutual funds and the Internet. They’re interested in alternative medicine and Eastern stuff — meditation and Tai Chi, you know?”
Marcel nodded into his coffee.
“And they don’t want you giving them a hard time. They want it to be gentle…peaceful. If they want confrontation they’ll go to a movie. Bottom line: there has to be a lot more give and take.” Sylvain Talbot sipped his own coffee and asked, “Are you up for this, Marcel?”
“Of course I’m up for it”
“And there’ll be a lot of experts coming at you, some of them pretty flaky, I would bet.”
“No problem.”
“Promise me now.”
“Oui, oui, oui,” sighed Marcel.
So people kept calling — of course they did; there were still many things to talk about in Montreal and his numbers were bound to stay high.
While Marcel reflected on the thing that had almost happened…
And how many times had he been on the verge of telling his representative to get on the phone to that priest? Because the only ones to make a move were the boys. Beyond the reflection in the glass that guarded Marcel in his womb-like studio, he still saw those four boys scrambling over that fence and he wondered how they could be so automatic. And would an old Italian immigrant actually have shot them in defense of a flag? Marcel wanted to talk to someone about the gap between the middle-class life and things revolutionary. The spiritual gap. What did it take in this day and age to cross it? What kind of pain? Or wisdom? Could those extreme qualities ever flourish in a place like Montreal at this time? And if that gap was too large to be realistically bridged, then what was the point of words invoking it? Four dull boys…Marcel felt these kinds of questions might fit the new, more thoughtful format, and that Father Martin Legault might be the man to explain.
Yet something was preventing him from making the call to Villeray quarter.
As for Patrice Painchaud, Marcel’s producer trained their production assistants to recognize his voice. If he called (which he had been) they were instructed to put him at the end of the line — effectively on hold till well past their sign-off at ten.
Bruce’s flag remained standing through the fall. He saw it as he walked up rue St. Gédéon each evening, signaling the place of his home in Montreal. It was defiant in its brightness in bleak November, and like a shadowy centurion through the darkest hours of December, then proud, if a little weather-worn, on a white Christmas day. Bruce thought he was beginning to understand the old lady. Marie-Claire Lamotte.
And when his flag was frozen solid, then gradually obliterated by the ice storm which arrived in the second week of January ’98, Bruce was feeling he had lost a friend. Small comfort that the ice had ruined every standing flag in Montreal, and within cannon range thereof; without his flag, Bruce f
elt weakened. He fell to wondering when and how the enemy might surface next.
In paradise there is no “next.” All things are simultaneous. Marie-Claire is with René again, and always has been. When they look down, they see all the flags ever raised in the world. René, looking more perfect than she has ever seen him, swigs from his beer. “Regarde, toutes les belles couleurs!”
“Mais oui,” says Marie-Claire. “It’s the ones who are left behind, signaling their love.”
Extreme Fighting
Vittorio (Vic) Battaglia came from Italy in 1958 and would never go back. Village life was too fraught with Old World inevitability in its demands for a certain type of man. He wanted nothing more to do with a place where they knew every inch of a man’s life dating from the Middle Ages, his darkest passion to his greyest debolezza. It was those connections that pinched and tucked and hemmed the soul; it was compliant souls in ordered lines, too much like the midsummer dance. Vic gave in to passion only once. A man needs a wife. He took her and left for Canada. Standing at the rail on the back deck with his new wife, he studied the widening ocean. Half-listening to her hopes and fears, he told her, “Of course you will have a garden.” As for himself, Vic planned to live by rote till he’d perfected his wine, then he would disappear. He had an image of a man cut loose, who would walk and talk with the gods. Disegno — design, in the sense of an idea, a vision: this was something the greatest of the Renaissance lives were said to have had. Just so: in the New World, Vic would build his own.
His wife envisioned a large garden, much like the garden behind his father’s house in the centre of the village. She believed that soon they would live in a similar large and lovely house, as soon as her man became established. He had been to the university. He read. He knew how to build a road. He had chosen her because she enjoyed his way of finding things and imbuing them with magic. Her Menocchio — he was a special man. It would be a new and exciting life… In fact, the garden was box-sized, behind a boxy semi-detached duplex in the north end of Montreal. Her brother-in-law Pacci had snapped it up when she wrote and told her sister Marisa they were coming, and sold it directly to them. A good plan, she thought — something to get them started, it wouldn’t be for long; and they’d be close to family. Marisa and Pacci and their family lived in the mirror-image place next door.
Vic had hated that mirror effect. As for relatives: wasn’t the point of his journey to get away?
He had studied the situation with an Old World eye. In taking the measure of his nosy brother-in-law, Vic saw an opening, the door to his imagined freedom. His engineer’s eye soon saw an eight-inch discrepancy in Pacci’s favour where Pacci had built the fence. Vic paid an arpenteur to confirm it. Of course Vic would not contribute to the tearing out and rebuilding of the fence. And when Pacci expressed his rage at this, Vic used the peasant ploy of disdainful silence to remind everyone that his brother-in-law was a cheat. Pacci, a peasant if ever there was one, responded in kind. His own resentful silence… Blessed silence on the other side of the fence. It had stayed that way for over thirty years, the two men refusing to acknowledge each other’s presence.
Because there would be no large house on a spacious property. Vic hated money. And the way they worshipped it here in the New World was worse than they did back home. He had put on his Old World disguise and worn it everywhere. No one knew him, it worked like a charm. An educated man who never let on, he worked dusty road construction jobs instead. When they put him on the Arrêt/Lente sign at the far end of the site, he created hellish lineups. Peering into fumes wafting from the tarmac, breathing pitch and creosote, listening to the cacophony of honking, he marvelled at the insidious bridge the devil inevitability had built from the Old World to the New. Vic swore they would never trap him, held firm to his Arrêt/Lente sign, made the evil eye at motorists, and watched the heat rise from the tar.
Work. Wife. Mass. Garden. A tenant upstairs. Wine. Bed. Children. Two girls: Sophia, brown, earth-bound. And Claudia, as white as a spirit, whose speaking voice ranged from a lilt to a whisper, always in the ethereal range of song. In return for her daughters and his weekly cheque, his wife had never said a word. By the time she’d assessed the damage, trying to reconstruct the cultivated man from the large house facing the piazza del paese, the man who had attracted her and taken her to Canada, it was far too late. Vic’s Old World machinations had carried him too far.
Once, much later, the Anglo neighbour said, “You remind me of Picasso…” probably because Vic was large, bull-shaped and brown. Vic made an evil donkey face, a twitching finger extended from the nose, tongue darting manic and wet, a braying sound to match, and chased the fool away.
He hated cubism. He hated psychology and fame.
They had long since fired him from work, citing emotional difficulties. Vic had taken his disability and smiled. He took to wandering the streets, picking up lost things for his pockets, random things, a real Menocchio, piecing together his own unassailable frame of reference in which nothing was inevitable, where nothing could ever again be foisted on him by church or state, market or academy, and, not the least, a woman’s smile. Vic saw his walking as a masterwork-in-progress with himself as the focal point for all perspectives, these vistas of absolute freedom. He felt himself becoming timeless, falling into step with the gods. Children around the quarter enjoyed observing l’homme qui ramasse, stooping, examining, announcing, “This is perfect! This will fit.” The neighbours dismissed him as notre isolé and left him alone. He gathered lost, forgotten, and broken toys for his grandson Nicolo to wonder at, and discarded doors from building sites for his separatist son-in-law to help him hang. Another ruse: With his engineer’s eyes and hands, Vic could easily hang a door. Jean-François could never do it, but at least it shut him up. Vic stood by and watched him. Vic hated politics too.
When everyone whispered he was not well, his wife did not disagree. Vic knew she was the one who’d first whispered it. It was inevitable. He shrugged it off and went for a walk, came home with another piece of his personal puzzle and had a glass of his own wine. Numero uno!
Sure, Crazy Vic. Just give me some room to move here. This is all I want…
Vic’s wife despaired in silence. Sophia got married and moved out.
But Claudia was thirty, and angry. Claudia believed her life was all her father’s fault.
Claudia, a little girl who had listened to his visions of a life of wine and walking, and believed the way a daughter sometimes will. The way a daughter ought to? He had always admired her fragile whiteness. It was something different in his family, an aberration, a break from the inevitable, a sure sign from the gods. He had always told her she was special — like himself. And little Claudia had always loved the two grand poplar trees that graced the lane behind the house. She was forever staring up at them, dark eyes wide, happy arms outstretched, and this love was another sign for Vic. It was evening, before supper one warm Saturday in spring. Vic and Claudia were in the lane. She was twelve and beginning to grow up. That day Claudia sighed, “Pa, the poplars are the only ones who know the big blue feel of the sky.”
He told her, “So you will be married to a tree, my dear. It will be Claudia and the poplar tree, forever joined in love.” Vic had laughed, delighted by the thought. Claudia laughed too. And strangely, but rightly, she believed him.
Strangely, because Vic knew his sentimental whim would be profound.
Rightly, because any father wants to be believed, regardless of outrageous lies.
Then, gazing up, he’d asked, “But which one?”
Claudia couldn’t choose between the two poplars and it caused her pain.
Vic, magnanimous, said she could be married to both of them.
She’d held to it fiercely through her adolescence though Sophia chided and her mother began to fret. In the kitchen Vic stayed quiet. But in the lane he watched his Claudia living out her romance with the poplars and thought, Good girl! This supposed New World was eating itself up, growing
smaller, more inevitable by the day. If Claudia could hang on to her “baggage,” as Sophia took to calling it, if she could truly learn to love those trees, she would endure, unimpeded, like himself. You had to have a story all your own; that was the secret to survival. Oh yes, Vic was secretly proud.
When Claudia was nineteen and doleful, sensing her fate…when she began her life of constant crying, he’d tried to make her see it anew. “Two trees, Claudia, two beauties! And just you try to find two better ones. Two heroes! just for you. Claudia’s trees, Claudia’s story. Build your life from it, cara mia, believe me, it’ll save you.”
She whimpered she was lonely.
He advised, “Enjoy your freedom! The gods love you. Like they love me.”
Claudia scowled. She no longer ever smiled.
He found he resented her resentment. “Don’t be so literal, child…That’s the thing. Do you hear me? That’s the thing!”
She had never heard him speak like that and it confused her. She rolled her eyes and turned in circles, staring into the highest branches. Claudia believed she was married to the poplar trees. She had lodged herself inside this conceit and lingered there, becoming ghostly. Vic was vexed. Of all the countless words he must have spoken to her, she had to latch onto those. Words!…you had to see behind them. When she filled her mind with more words — from her sister, from J-F, her sister’s gormless man, from a string of soulless counsellors, Claudia told Vic his willful retreat from life had pulled her in its wake. His footsteps led nowhere. The things he found for his big idea, these added up to nothing! She was sure his freedom meant her emptiness. She accused him of anger. “Harbouring a morbid anger! Infecting everyone!” Indeed, his wife had said something about Sophia suggesting the whole family go to a counsellor to talk about Vic’s latent rage. Something about this being common to lots of first-generation immigrants.
