Last Days of Montreal

by John Brooke

  Replacing a hooker with a holy sister was schematic in the extreme.

  But whose schematic? Had nuns and prostitutes aligned?

  Could be. Could be some underground cabal…lots of underground in Montreal.

  No. A higher power had chosen this corner. A higher power was attracted to this city where the heavy sentimentality attached to language and history had stretched the landscape to the cracking point and a new truth was peeping through. Twenty steps from the corner, the nun slipped through the gate and was lost behind the convent’s high stone wall. The light changed. Bruce had to go.

  He fell back into his own distraction, wrestling with a decision.

  There was a hardline/softline schism developing in the race to lead the Alliance, the umbrella organization representing the English-speaking community. Tomorrow his English Rights group was going to vote on which candidate their delegate would support. It was one of dozens of such groups that had formed after the trauma of the Referendum. They were serious people committed to changing the situation once and for all, yes they were, and everyone said the meetings had nurtured solidarity, reinstilled the strength to regain their rightful place. But now, some two-and-half years later, Bruce found himself engaged on another level.

  Was he hard? Or was he soft? He wasn’t even sure if he was still a political man.

  Bruce was starting to feel his life depended on the right choice.

  Not his literal life — Montreal was not Sarajevo or Belfast. No. (And could it ever be?)

  His life as it related to the landscape. The landscape was Montreal. Bruce had to choose how his life fit into Montreal, and, conversely, how Montreal fit around his life. It was a two-way thing — that glimpse of something in the eyes of a nun. A smile from a hooker, travelling to Bruce and back again. One man, one vote. He was feeling his choice would last beyond his time; that Montreal would know his choice, and remember.

  The hardline man was saying it was about rights and the preservation of identity. Most of the group seemed inclined to go along. The softline woman was fighting a losing battle…

  While Bruce’s sense of identity had grown increasingly fragile. And he was enjoying it!

  Bruce thought his sense of identity had more to do with landscape than with laws.

  For Bruce, it wasn’t about Quebec or Canada anymore. It was only about Montreal.

  But if not a political man — what? What kind of logic does landscape conform to?

  Allusive patterning, inchoate contexts. Long views, sudden shadows’ edges.

  Erotic logic. So, thought Bruce, what about an erotic man?

  There was language. Language was the gateway; how a few words could shift the soul’s vantage and the landscape would change. Say, “La lune est un parfait miroir,” while sitting by the window; feminine and masculine merged in this idea and the street below was new once more. Ask, “Alors…qu’est-ce qui est drôle?” while turning to watch her undress, and the act of love would always shift to warmer waters. (What’s so funny? She would never tell.) So why would anyone be worried? Anyone who opened their mouth could create small miracles. And beyond the place where language ended, the eyes took over. From there on in — into the heart of the matter, meaning was sensual. And consensual.

  In Bruce’s vision there was a sign posted at the city’s entry points: “Agree to look before you speak!” In both official languages. “Then cross the bridge and be subsumed.”

  For Bruce, it was about how to live in Montreal.

  North of the tracks, St. Denis is straight and dull, passing Bellechasse, Beaubien, St. Zotique, Bélanger and Jean Talon. For an erotic man it was a wandering hill and dale of views that took his sense to the edges of unmarked attractions from which he gazed out. Longingly. These instants of longing, never defined, always there…Along the way, people on balconies were looking down as he passed, using him in exactly the same manner. The landscape was reflexive, everything folding back upon desire. Yes. He would go to the group and tell them. He would stand up and say, “Montreal is surrounded by water and water is the mirror of desire.” He had learned this from Claudia, his neighbour’s lonely daughter. She said she had seen this from the highest point on the Cartier Bridge. She was a true Montrealer.

  He would proclaim it: “We live on an island protected by desire! We’re blessed! Let’s not blow it!” They would say, Protected from what? He would tell them, Protected from dryness.

  He would tell them desire had nothing to do with signs in Eaton’s. (Eaton?) And that desire did not care whether it was fulfilled within Canada or in a country called Quebec. The markets, the means by which Bruce made and mostly lost his money, could not affect desire. Nor was a citizen’s desire sparked by a city’s connection to ancestors; he would insist this was a false thing on both sides — a hole in the erotic ozone encompassing the landscape. As were rules allowing or disallowing children to learn in a legislated language. Desire was the key to education. He would intimate that his own children, Charlotte and James, had both been to bed with people who spoke differently, that he was proud of the fact, and that he knew they could survive in Montreal. If they desired…Bruce would confess that he’d allowed himself to hope Denise, his ex, would try it too, before it was too late. He would share his fear that it was too late for his parents. They were on the West Island, living out their last years as hardliners. He would go slowly round the meeting room, looking each member in the eye, and tell them, “Dying in French has to be the same as dying in English, surely. ”

  Then he would lighten it, lift them off the cold political ground by offering to be their tour guide, to lend his eyes and heart and his own complexities to a ride through the city: Bruce the horse, Bruce the carriage, vigorous, in motion, and mainly in wonder — which was desire’s bag of oats. And, sure, they would laugh at him: How? Or, why? they would say. Or, prove it! And he would tell them that because when he was watchful, when he was lucky, his excursions brought him home to lighter-than-air idylls in a garden packed with colour, purple-blue clematis winding through the fence, one or two drooping, to rest on her belly where she lay in the sun.

  Whose belly? they would ask. Why, Geneviève’s. And her house, her bedroom, her love. He’d confess she was his touchstone, that the paths through the landscape of Montreal always ended up at Gen; that she kept him oriented and well fed. And that morning, when Bruce drove back into the alley behind the cul-de-sac, she was there in the garden, snipping and raking, planting, replanting, preparing her bower for June. He was feeling fateful; and correspondingly important. He said, “When the energy’s right, this place can be a paradise.”

  Geneviève knew he’d been brooding. She was not a member of the group and thought Quebec’s political problems a waste of energy. “There is no paradise,” she replied.

  No? Well… Suddenly Bruce deflated. He settled down to read.

  The weekend papers didn’t help much.

  Bruce knew he feared the group. They would hear his plea, remember his last speech — his one and only, in which he had bemoaned the dearth of Canadian flags flying across said landscape — and they would say he was a traitor. They would point and say he was the sentimental one, a feeble romantic in a time of profound political stress.

  By Saturday night he was beset with uncertainty, irritable, unable to come to terms with his instincts. The unseasonal humidity had become full-blown; the air was like a tight box shoved over his distracted mind. And the Expos were down by five in the third, which only put him more on edge. “Oh, God!” Moaning as another chance disappeared. He jeered at the TV, “Asses!”

  “Bruce!” snapped Geneviève, aghast at his display, “Don’t watch if it gives you such pain.”

  “I have to watch. They could disappear at any moment.”

  “T’es bête.”

  Yes, probably very stupid. He shook it off with a shrug and a sniff. The Expos were just a filter; he was now playing devil’s advocate to his own notion, pulling it all apart. That erotic man he’d co
njured was backed into a corner, the hardline man was looking good. “Is it because I believe in principle? Or is it because I lack imagination? And if it’s a yes to either one of those, does that mean I’m hard or I’m soft? Eh, Gen? What d’you think?”

  She stared at the television and shook her head.

  The only thing to be gleaned from this was that she did not like baseball.

  “I’m actually trying to be responsible about this,” he stated. “I mean, I know damn well the last thing we need is an obstreperous ideologue running the show. I don’t want to be associated with someone like that.”

  “Then don’t be.” Geneviève always went against Bruce’s devil.

  “But,” he continued, “we do need someone who’ll stand up to their ideologues, someone who’s smart enough and not afraid to fight them tit for tat. It’s not easy, Gen. It’s crunch time. The principle of the thing. Democracy.”

  “Non,” she breathed. “This talk of principle by that hardline man…cela vole bas.”

  “Quoi?” But he’d heard her: It flies low. It’s cheap.

  “Bruce,” she advised, “just live here. Be a citizen. This is all you must do. La vie suit son cours.” Life will take its course.

  “Right. Just sit here and let them screw us. Am I too much of a wimpy WASP to take a stand? Could it be as simple as that?”

  “No,” said Geneviève, “it is because you are a plouc.”

  “A plook?”

  “Oui. Un vrai plouc.”

  Thanks to Geneviève, Bruce could now speak French with anyone on the streets of Montreal about almost anything, including politics if it came to it. Still, she would occasionally throw these words at him. Fine; he was sparked by her challenge. In the little house on rue Godbout, a basic part of love was learning to love the discovery of words, to take delight in following etymological trails to cultural bridges in the most surprising places. It could make the world feel like a story passed ear to ear as in a party game, always changing as it moved along its common thread. Bruce hauled himself out of his collapsed position and shuffled to the bookcase.

  Geneviève grabbed the channel-zapper and went to America’s Most Wanted.

  He flipped through the Shorter Harrap’s English-French Dictionary. “I can’t find it.”

  “C’est de l’argot.”

  He picked up the Petit Robert and tried again. “With two o’s?”

  “B’en non, Bruce,” she snapped — apparently the humidity was affecting her too. Rising, half an eye on the screen, she snatched the Robert from his hands. “In French we never use two o’s. Plouc. p.l.o.u.c. Plouc…voilà. Parfois avec un k.” Leaving him with it, she sat back down to some true crime. America’s Most Wanted had found a fugitive right here in Montreal!

  Bruce read: PLOUC ou PLOUK [pluk]…it originated in Brittany. Adj. et n. Pop. et péj. Paysan; pedzouille; péquenaud. “Péj means?”

  “Péjoratif.”

  “Paysan is peasant, right?”

  “Oui.”

  “So what are you telling me here? Because I’m a peasant. That’s why I’m stuck on this thing? Come on, Gen, don’t get up on your French high horse and give me that snotty stuff.”

  Geneviève rolled her eyes and leaned toward the television, far more interested in the tale of a man from Oklahoma who had embezzled his employer’s money and threatened and harassed the employer’s wife before fleeing the heartland and ending up in the South Shore suburb of Brossard. America’s Most Wanted was explaining how the man from Oklahoma had befriended a man in Brossard, and how the man in Brossard had twigged to his new friend’s true situation when he’d seen the show, then had arranged to turn him in.

  Bruce was not impressed. He trusted Geneviève, and he needed information: a mirror, a sounding board — something to provide a hint that might confirm the right inclination. To let him vote his soul. Instead, she had offered an insult without context, then given herself over to the crass fantasy of Reality Programming. He stared again at plouc and its variations, then blurted, “What about pedzouille? Or péquenaud? Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

  “Oh, Bruce…” The tension in Brossard was building breathlessly, as designed; she remained glued to it as she told him, “C’est un paysan, un péquenaud qui est dans son trou, quelqu’un de déclassé, sans goût, mal élevé, qui ne sait rien de ce qui se passe en ville, un pedzouille! très gauche et pas au courant.” Rapid-fire — far too quick for him to catch it all.

  He mumbled, “Right. Thanks.”

  Flipping back a few pages, he found PEDZOUILLE [ped-zoo-y]. Same idea. Pop et péj. A peasant. Ref. Colette: Personne naïve et ignorante des usages de la ville. “A hick,” said Bruce.

  “Oui, comme ça.”

  “Reference Colette,” he went on, needing to entice her away. How could she call him a plouc and watch that stuff with a straight face? “Didn’t she have an affair with Flaubert?”

  “Shh!”

  He was stymied. Turning more pages, he found PEQUENAUD [peck-no]. A pequenaud was a paysan…which was a peasant. Damn it. She had him going in circles. Then he noticed: Listed just below PEQUENAUD was PEQUISTE [pay-kist]. The two terms jumped out at Bruce’s eyes, linked like the hyper-symmetry of a hooker and a nun. He blinked and closed the dictionary. This was where the word-trail stopped.

  On America’s Most Wanted, they were re-enacting the capture of the man from Oklahoma. The Brossard man was relating how nervous he’d been, alone with a desperado he had unknowingly befriended, waiting for the police to show up according to plan. Bruce considered the awful futility of running all the way from Oklahoma only to be betrayed in the off-island nowhere land of Brossard. He asked, “Can you imagine turning in your friend?”

  Geneviève ignored the question. Without taking her eyes from the screen, she responded to his deeper fear. She said, “It is none of their business how you vote.”

  Then the simulated drama in Brossard ended. The bad guy was headed for jail. America’s Most Wanted went to a commercial.

  Bruce asked, patient, calm, reasonable, “Alors, what exactly do you mean by peasant?”

  “I never said that.”

  “You said I was a plouc. A plouc’s a peasant. A paysan.”

  She bent her mouth in a lopsided pout. “It is more than that,” she sniffed.

  “So now you’re changing the terms on me?”

  No answer.

  And Bruce almost let it go. Why should she answer? The terms always changed, and would the erotic man want it any other way? The shifting ground was the erotic man’s starting point — the starting point along the circle of attraction. Which was, according to his own idea, a circle back to himself. But he’d followed her and come to a point (high? low?) on this circle where he needed to be certain. So he pushed. “Gen…”

  “Do you really care if your language does not receive the official stamp on it?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  (The erotic man reminded Bruce: It was the point this morning in the car.)

  “Mais oui,” said Geneviève. “People talk to each other. Ici, la plupart parlent français. The world does not stop. Are you really going to break the quarters into pieces because of this?”

  “It’s not the quarters. It’s the municipalities. The regions…”

  (Had the erotic man lost his way and gone wandering out the other end of Montreal?)

  “It will be les quartiers. It will be streets.”

  “Geneviève…I thought you were on my side.”

  (Could the erotic man see himself standing alone, without his woman, in need of a street?)

  She said, “I am on the side of reality.”

  He asked, “What about principle?”

  “For here, in this time, this Montreal, ce n’est pas la vérité. This is not the truth for people.”

  “What’s the truth then?”

  “B’en…” That shrug again; it was obvious. “Regarde dans la rue.”

  “No. It’s principle. It’s our integrity.�
��

  She repeated it. “Cela vole bas.”

  “Oh Lord,” sighed Bruce. “I get it. It flies low so all the ploucs can see it without having to think. We’re all a bunch of dim peasants and we’re going to let one man lead us into civil war.”

  “This has happened before.”

  He watched her: no wispy girl, but, six years into their relationship, thickly, sensuously handsome at fifty-plus, swirling châtain piled high against the heat, sitting ramrod straight at the other end of the divan. But she was a new citizen, relatively speaking. Although it was twenty-five years since her arrival from France, Bruce was feeling you had to have been born here, right here in Montreal, to really understand. He said, “Gen, I don’t think you’ve been listening to me at all.”

  (But that was lame; clearly not the voice of the erotic man.)

  Geneviève pursed her lips and tightened her eyes. America’s Most Wanted had returned and was beginning a story about a woman who had been living with a murderer and didn’t know it. The woman was saying how shocked she was to think that she’d even taken him to church… So Bruce reopened the Robert and went looking for French words with double-o’s. Gen was right: there were none. “Except zoo,” he announced. And its derivatives. He said, “Maybe they should put all the ploucs in the zoo.”

  Geneviève pushed the volume button. The voice of America’s Most Wanted boomed.

  Bruce raised his — so often the devil’s advocate does not know when to rest. “They could do it right there on America’s Most Wanted — round up the ploucs and put ’em in the Granby Zoo.”

  “Bruce, tais-toi, arrête!”

  Bruce laughed. “If you know the whereabouts of a plouc, please call this number.”

  Geneviève pressed the button harder. The television thundered. The bachelor nurse who lived next door pounded on the wall. It was the first time this had happened since Bruce had moved in with Gen.

  “Wow,” he wailed, “all these years pretending to be alone, she’s been harbouring a plouc!”

  Geneviève stood and shouted back: “You ask but you don’t listen! You don’t trust me! This means you will not trust yourself. Not a very useful man — hard or soft!”