by John Brooke
Vic laughed. “Oh, cara mia…” He wasn’t angry. He was intent on sticking it out. Disegno. Was her counsellor not capable of grasping that? He made a clumsy attempt at a hug — one of those hugs Sophia and J-F were always going on about, but Claudia pulled back, refusing.
He offered, “Come, I will show you how to make the best wine.”
“I don’t like wine! I like rain…We like rain,” she cried, reaching up with ivory arms.
This was Claudia’s bitter joke. Vic left her standing there beneath her trees. A father, a daughter, cross-purposes, what could a father do? And where would it lead? Their purposes were crossed, but they were tied. Blood was the core of inevitability.
His wife began to attack him. This was her period of reassessment and she said she saw the damage he had wrought. “Why can’t you face life like a man?”
Vic fought back. “I am a man, and happy enough. You have everything you asked for. You want for nothing. You keep your side of the bargain and leave me alone!”
“She’s doomed! You condemned her with your useless dreaming…my poor Claudia.”
“Not very charitable, you. She thinks like me and I’m the only sane person in this quarter.”
Said Vic. And walked away. And held firm.
This is my life. To hell with you! To hell with all of you.
His wife had gone past the point of no return; there was little she could do. But when Claudia tried jumping off the Cartier Bridge, Vic’s point of view was shaken. She was saved — talked out of it by a legless man in an electric wheelchair. A rotting man. The worst man you could imagine. No one got his name, but there was a sign attached to his rig that read Last Days of Montreal. When he saw it, Vic thought: Disegno; oh si, what else could such a man exist for? And he’d shivered.
A week later he had dared to ask her, “What happened?”
They were in the lane, the afternoon sun twining through the poplars, finding Vic’s perplexed and squinting eyes. Claudia, sulking in their darkest shade, sniffed, “They told me I could fly.”
“Ah, passion. Passion makes a fool of everyone at least once. It’s inevitable. But this is necessary — so long as you learn.”
“How would you know?” she whined. “Have I ever seen you even pat poor Mama’s hand?”
Vic heard it: high and fragile, and, as always, since her first sweet words, on the edge of singing. But now so sour. He smiled. “Trust your old Pa.”
Claudia complained, “No! I’m too lonely to trust. You prove it!”
Prove it? How can you ever do this for your child?
When a girl called Violette came out of the park and up the lane toward them, Vic said to Claudia, in Italian, “You want proof, there it is. Clear. Flagrante delitto.”
Violette was eleven or twelve, the same age as Claudia when she’d been promised to the trees, and sexually precocious, still skinny but budding, proud and pert in her tight jersey, bright eyes and laughing lips laden with harsh colours, the effect hardened further by sharp hints of the cigarettes she’d been smoking in the park. Claudia stared; but Claudia stared at everyone and Violette was used to it. “Salut, Claudia!” She pinched a mauve-tipped thumb and forefinger to the region above her breasts and proudly stretched the fabric of her jersey, the better to display the man’s name emblazoned there. “Aimes-tu ma nouvelle Tommy?”
Claudia nodded, tentative. Violette grinned proudly and continued on.
“That girl hasn’t a chance,” said Vic. “They’ve got her. They know everything about her before she has even started. Her attitudes, her reactions…it’s these so-called solutions your sister’s always on about, this rage to manage everything. That girl’s just one more target.”
Claudia blurted, “Sophia says they should shoot you! Like an old dog.”
Vic, vexed and now a little frightened, reared back and howled like said dog. And he made an Old World doggy face. Then he laughed — much like he’d laughed that day so long ago. “But who is they?” he asked, ironical.
Gently ironical for Claudia. Because he loved her.
Claudia didn’t know, and Vic’s irony drifted, useless, into the heat.
So he told her flatly, “That girl’s soul has been co-opted!” He whispered it with force. “Everything is inevitable for her. For Sophia too. And for my grandson, pauvre bambino…” Did she hear what he was saying? Could she feel her father talking? “You…” Vic squinted up through the poplar leaves, straight into the sun, conjuring the mystical element she had loved when she was young; “they’ll never find you, Claudia. A million different branches to hide you. You are free! Something that poor girl will never know.”
Claudia, no longer charmed by her father’s words, was watching as Violette met a friend on St. Gédéon — busy hands gesturing, loud laughter. It seemed to Vic that Claudia smiled slightly as she whispered, “I think she’s in love with Fadi.” The younger of two Lebanese boys who lived around the corner in rue Godbout.
“And you wish you were her?”
“How could I be her?”
“I mean the woman she will become.”
“How can you know what she will become?”
“It’s written on her shirt.”
Claudia winced, yearning. “It’s a pretty shirt,” she moaned. As if she were pleading.
Which angered Vic. Which angered her still more. Ah, the ties that bind keep tightening.
Two years later, Claudia was still stuck at home with her mother, mired in mystical frustration, vague and staring; but on the verge of something. Vic, now watching closely, knew. When the cat appeared, Vic, an educated man who had never let on and had managed to fool most everyone, knew it was her proxy.
It was a stocky ginger tom with beady eyes, of no fixed address, the blasé sire of many cats around the quarter, and it could have pissed anywhere. The yard behind the maison de retraite, not thirty steps away, had several well-tilled flower beds where it could scratch a toilet. But it chose Vic’s vegetable garden. It appeared on the fence and jumped down lightly. Staring directly into Vic’s eyes, it hunkered, dug a spot in the carefully softened soil along the lettuce row, and pissed. Vic interpreted this as an unequivocal challenge
Disegno? Time for the gods to take your vision’s measure. Fight or lose her, paesan.
Vic put his wine aside, grabbed the hoe and went to war.
It was early August. The children, summery, dithering, highly bored, soon noticed. They watched in wonder as Vic fought the cat. He told them. “I fight for my daughter’s soul.”
Not to save it. To keep it in his pocket. That secret thing. Mine.
That was not the children’s problem. They said, “Cool!”
For a weapon Vic would use whatever struck his fancy. It was usually the hoe or rake — something to help his reach, to counter the cat’s quick turns. But as the war stretched on it also included an aerosol spray (WD-40), a poker, the chandelier on a chain he’d found discarded in the street…Vic swung it over his head and roared and flung it! A frying pan. Luc, nine, pronounced the frying pan fight, “Fantastique!” Once he used a fishing net he hadn’t touched since Italy. Another time, a hockey stick, which led the Anglo over the fence to accuse him (via the despised Pacci, via Pacci’s wife Marisa, via Vic’s wife) of breaking into his garage (which he had, one quiet afternoon when all the world was somewhere else). He would cry out to his opponent as it squatted with its business under the shade of a vine. “I don’t care who you are! I will walk on your lice-filled body and grind away your hateful eyes!” It was an exhortation. A call to battle. A part of Vic was always waiting for the cat to reply, despite the better part knowing the gods would never be so unsubtle.
Once he tried to squash it with a thirty-kilo bag of fertilizer.
Once he brought out a brick, and threw it, and threw it, and threw it…
The cat had only its claws, speed and cat instinct. It would rise, spitting, defiant, claws bared, ready for another round.
The first time she saw it, Rosa
lie, ten, screamed. “Stop! Monsieur…stop! You’ll kill it!” Responding, Vic faked left to freeze the cat, then lifted his weapon high (a pair of shears that day) and charged the fence, lunged to strike, tripped over his own feet and fell flat. The children scattered, all but Violette, now more grown, and more precocious. She held her ground. She could’ve touched Vic’s nose as they faced each other through the chain-link barrier. She told him, “My mother says fighting is transformative.”
Vic screamed, “The gods will not forget you!”
But he screamed it in Italian (I dei non dimenticherano!)
Violette added, “Maman says you should try to look for the meaning in your illness.”
Vic never worried about killing the cat. If he ever managed to kill it, well, a crushed back or a head split open was the inevitable answer to a cat’s existence, not to say closure on the curse of inevitability. But he knew he never would. No, it was a cosmic exercise: arch and condensed, the way the gods enjoyed it most. The ongoing fight was pure pathos within a ten-by-thirteen-metre yard…pathos and ecstasy, the bitter ecstasy of the unwinnable war.
Some days his hands would shake with inevitability. Lucky he had his wine.
The second Sunday the audience swelled. Although the Française made a big show of picking up her book and drink and going inside, the Anglo sipped his beer and chortled back and forth across the fence with Pacci, sharing joking commentary, blow by blow. Mario, two yards away, laughed out loud. Maurice, Vic’s upstairs tenant, stood above with classical music pouring from his balcony door. The Ngs, Pacci’s Chinese tenants, both watched amazed. Plus all the children. Vic’s wife, mortified by their attention, hid in shame behind her kitchen door. Sophia sent young Nic into the living room and made him watch TV; you could hear the boy’s bewildered tantrum, no inkling as to how to absorb this circus of adult tension. Sophia ordered her husband J-F into the garden to run interference. Of course J-F failed.
And Claudia waited by the poplar trees.
Throughout it all, since the first day, Claudia had stayed in the lane with her trees.
She would not acknowledge it. And she could not forgive. So Vic and the cat kept on — to break the impasse in Claudia’s heart. By Labour Day the garden was beyond saving.
Extreme Fighting: that was what the boy Christophe had taken to calling it. Apparently it was something you could go to see chez les Mohawks. His father had gone. “Oh oui, way cool! These guys just killing each other without any rules. My papa says it’s ten times better than boxing!”
“Sauf les couilles,” corrected Fadi. Not the balls. “Pas permis de taper dans les couilles!”
Vic had not heard of it but he could see the link to the inevitable wave.
Si, si, cara mia…Extreme fighting. For you. For Claudia!
What else could he do? He sure as hell wasn’t going to any counsellor.
Then it was late September. Vic sat on his step and sipped. Mmm! Numero uno. As always, he felt that god-like tingling in his roots. The cat appeared on the fence. It jumped down and pissed, then waited. Vic sipped his wine. The cat raised an eye. There was no hurry, the autumn sun was still pleasantly warm. Vic and the cat eyed each other in desultory fashion, drifting in and out of dreamy speculation. The children appeared in the lane, on their way home from school. They took their places in the passage between the gardens. They settled on their school bags and waited too, as still as the dying grass. Except Fadi. Fadi was bold. He crept up Danny Ng’s back stairs, silent like another cat, stopping halfway, where he had an unobstructed view. Soon a dozen kids were waiting. Violette took out a book and pen and filled in the time with her devoirs.
That day Vic dove, missed, rolled through cat piss and lay there.
The cat assessed Vic and moved closer, eyes shifting, strangely unsure. First time anyone on the other side of the fence had seen it. From his place on the tenant’s stairs, Fadi whispered, “No, don’t! …It’s a trap!” The cat, pausing elegantly in mid-step, looked up at the boy.
Vic grabbed it.
The children uttered a collective, “Ahhh!”
Vic stood, hoisting the cat by the scruff. He stretched it like a sailor’s knot and wrung it like a dish rag, held it aloft like a fish, stroked it obscenely, even kissed it. The thing spat. Vic spat back. Then he roared like a bear. Bringing it close to his face again, Vic cooed like a smitten daddy: “Such a lovely kitty.” Then closer, so no child could hear, Vic looked deeply into the cat’s quizzical eyes. He murmured, “So now you will tell my Claudia that I am a credible man?” Grinning, he kissed its nose. “Hmm? Will you do that? She needs to know this.” Now bending an ear as if for a secret, Vic whispered, “Can you tell me that you will?” Which was Vic’s mistake, and you could see the cat just waiting for it. The cat swiped to the best of its constrained ability and drew blood in Vic’s left eye. It broke free and dropped to the ground as Vic moaned and clutched his wound.
Blood! The children, who’d begun to squeal, hushed once more. Vic’s wife peeked out her kitchen door. The cat got set, ready to continue. Vic stooped to collect his hammer. He made a face at the cat. An Old World face, demonic, tragic… Oh yes, life was tragic.
He moved toward it, hammer nodding in his massive hand.
Rosalie, gasped, “Non!” She put her hands across her eyes.
“Yes,” grunted Vic advancing. He turned and sent her a deathly smile. “Oui, oui, oui.”
The cat was bristling. Then the only sound was the drag of Vic’s gigantic feet…
Till the clinking of metal, the gate being opened. Stepping into the garden, Claudia admonished the children. “Please go away right now! My father is not well.”
Hearing it, Vic sank to his knees, blood streaming, in the place where the garlic had been.
His wife came down the steps, her arms spread wide. Claudia stood beside him, head bowed.
Wife and daughter tried to soothe Vic’s pain. The children lingered.
The cat got bored. It went softly up onto the porch…then into the kitchen. Vic’s wife saw it dart inside. She rushed up the steps with a dreadful precision and Claudia was close on her heels. There followed a melee of crashing, counterpointed by horrific feline yowls from behind the kitchen door. Vic slumped on the steps and reached for his wine. The kitchen was his wife’s domain, none of his business; he only ate there.
Half an hour later Claudia came out clutching a green garbage bag knotted tight. Vic toasted it as she passed him on the steps. “Your own fault, my friend.” Colpa tua amico mio. Claudia went out the gate and around to the entrance to the lane, where everyone stacked their garbage. She placed the bag amongst the others and returned. Ignoring the children, she went back inside and shut the door.
The children left Vic there on the steps with his bottle, withdrawing slowly and separately, each one alone with his or her sense of it, drifting in their young, uncertain ways back into the lane, then gradually regathering by the pile of trash beside the street. It was Tuesday; the truck would be coming just after supper. They had only an hour or so to get up the nerve to open the bag to confirm that the cat was indeed inside.
Neither Vic’s wife nor Claudia spoke of it in his presence and he would never stoop to asking, so he could only guess who’d struck the fatal blow. He watched them, together as they prepared meals or kept the house, and in unguarded moments of solitude. For a while he believed it must have been Claudia. She seemed to carry herself in a manner Vic had never seen, regal now, as she stood at the kitchen window watching the poplar leaves drift and blow along the lane…then the snow, filling the spaces in the poplar’s empty arms. But in the end Vic knew it was his dull, grey wife. She was his woman, he was her man; and he knew. Inevitable? Hmm…
He was down in the cellar in the murk of early March, testing his new wine. Numero uno!
He heard Claudia in the kitchen, proclaiming to her mama, She had met a man!
The Erotic Man. . . A Plouc’s Progress
On a Saturday morning in the spring
of ’98, Bruce left the small house on rue Godbout and drove down rue St. Denis to buy the weekend papers. It was a warm and already uncomfortably humid day, the kind to make a body edgy and weary at once. He passed a prostitute strolling between St. Zotique and Beaubien. Distracted…addicted, that was obvious, she was turning every few steps to smile at men like Bruce. Here was another woman at the corner of Bellechasse, emaciated, but brazen and wearing almost nothing. Bruce was thinking that, dressed like that and given the weather, she was bound to earn enough to secure what she needed to make it through this day. He was thinking it would be a big day for sex: the landscape would ripple, responding to the shudders of men releasing their seed. And it would be a big day for drugs: the landscape would sigh as hookers relaxed and forgot that men existed.
He passed under the railway bridge. He stopped for the light at the corner of rue Carmel.
Here was yet another working girl, pretending to wait for the bus. She smiled as Bruce waited for the light to change. He smiled back without saying yes or no. It was something he had taught himself to do: Don’t look away. Acknowledge the fact. For better or worse, these women were part of the landscape. If they could smile, then so could he. And sometimes there was something there. Attraction was the glue holding the landscape together; the more fleeting, furtive and peripheral to one’s own life, the more intriguingly circular it always turned out to be. Bruce sensed the path to one’s deepest possibilities was routed through the eyes of strangers.
The light changed and off he went. He bought the papers and turned around.
Heading north again on St. Denis, at rue Carmel, same light, same story.
Although the hooker had been replaced by a Carmelite nun. She crossed in front of him and looked straight into his eyes. She was draped in the drabbest brown and almost featureless. But her eyes had escaped the rule of the cloister. In that instant, Bruce knew — and she knew he knew — that she too was a true citizen of Montreal.
