Cruelties, p.1
Cruelties, page 1
ALSO BY LISE BISSONNETTE
Following the Summer
Affairs of Art
Cruelties
Stories
LISE BISSONNETTE
translated by Sheila Fischman
Anansi
Copyright © 1998 by Lise Bissonnette
Translation copyright © 1998 by Sheila Fischman
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This edition published in 2013 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
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Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bissonnette, Lise
[Quittes et doubles. English]
Cruelties
Translation of: Quittes et doubles.
eISBN 978-1-77089-120-3
I. Title. II. Title: Quittes et doubles.
PS8553.1877288Q5713 1998 C843’.54 C98-931892-3
Cover design: Angel Guerra
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
for Godefroy-M. Cardinal
THE SLAIN WOMEN
He read the Bible on the bellies of girls
then poured his concrete there
The city acclaimed the beauty of his towers
and the genius of the man with the cranes
Now in this harsh time the walls are cracking
and no runaway can hear
the slain women as they stir
Take the central characters in European or American or Canadian novels that turn up in these parts, then add our own, and I defy you to find anything like the one I’m about to bring into being.
Because he’s of no interest.
It would never occur to a writer to give the leading role to a building contractor by the name of Jean-René Salvail, who was born in Alma to an engineer father who worked for a big aluminum company, and a part-time real estate broker mother. He has two sisters, about whom we’ll hear nothing more because they will marry and be relatively happy, one to the owner of a Burger King franchise in a Montreal suburb, the other to a middle-rank public servant with the environment department. They both graduated from nursing science and are capable of being self-sufficient in the event of the divorces that will likely occur in ten years or so, but we’ll learn nothing about them.
At the junior college, where he’s studying science and getting more or less passing grades, Jean-René is successively interested in various things, traces of which can be seen in his bedroom with its natural pine furniture featuring a TV set fitted into the armoire: Saharan insects, video games, Robert Charlebois, weight-lifting, Pink Floyd.
Here, let me add a qualification about something. We don’t yet know if it will have any repercussions. Jean-René Salvail gets perfectly tolerable grades in French and he speaks it correctly, thanks to the vigilance of his mother, who knows how important it is to express yourself clearly now at the dawn of the information revolution. If you were to root around in his dresser drawers or under the pieces of a Meccano set he never discarded, you might even find a book that is undoubtedly unknown to you but which brought a glimmer of light into his life one summer evening. Bleeding Bread is a solemn, impassioned, outrageous slim volume of verse by Jean-Gauguet Larouche, a local poet and sculptor who acquired a certain national notoriety during the late sixties before he categorically abandoned us to our mediocrity and went away to die by drops while he fished in the Rivière Noire, out back of his tarpaper shack. If Jean-René Salvail possesses a copy of that coarse collection of poems that lacerate us, when you can’t even find a copy of it at the finest second-hand book dealers, it’s because it was lent to him by his literature prof on the night after his final exams, which was also June 24, the feast of St. John the Baptist, which around here, as everyone knows, is an occasion for serious drinking.
That night, the cold had prompted not so much lust in the moonlight as a walk home with the prof, shivering, to the peaceful apartment where she lived alone, which for Jean-René amounted to the same thing. There’s nothing unusual about an eighteen-year-old from a family of freethinkers losing his virginity quite uneventfully to a lonely thirty-year-old prof in the equivalent of a village. But at thirty, you need to make up a reason for welcoming between your sheets the equivalent of the first man to turn up, and Jeannine Lahaie had thought that she’d gone beyond mere rutting by deflowering his brain as well, if not his heart. She had read some lines from Bleeding Bread while he was still groping between her thighs after two coital acts that were rather good considering that they were his first. The ghost of Gauguet, a distant cousin of hers, had slipped away as dawn glided in between the shutters. The poet and sculptor loved the flesh above all else and that amorous dalliance had delighted him; Jeannine must have been dear to him, though he hadn’t been interested in her as a child and had died before he could know her as a woman.
The fact remains that Jean-René Salvail, either to show that he was equal to the task or because he’d been touched by the edge of a pain that would be forever foreign to him, had borrowed the book after a shower and a coffee. And had never returned it. She hadn’t wanted to see him again and it is unlikely that he’d have tried to push the relationship, being already well aware of what is unseemly or quite simply dangerous for a prof’s job, as teaching positions were becoming scarce.
It’s hard to say whether he sometimes re-reads Bleeding Bread and whether Gauguet, from his splendid place in hell, finds it of any interest to have been spirited away by so pallid an individual.
It may be that Jean-René Salvail gave some brief thought to enrolling in literature at the Université de Montréal, or so a young woman who was studying the harp at the Vincent-d’Indy music school and had met up with him to the point of sex in the apartment of a mutual friend thinks she remembers him confiding to her. Or was that a tenuous recollection she might have confused with that of another of the tall clean-cut men with brown hair who found favour with her at the time?
Instead, we find Jean-René at business school, where early on he developed an interest in real estate. Whether this was a cultural trait inherited from the French, who were firm friends of stone, or a cultural trait of the Francophone middle class, who had exchanged stuffing their savings into a sock for rental properties as they became urbanized, or a cultural trait peculiar to his mother’s side of the family, he had an instinctive grasp of the profits to be drawn from building during a period of heavy inflation like the one that had started when he’d finished his MBA — which he’d landed with decent grades.
The fact that he knows how to read better than most of his colleagues may also have had a felicitous influence on his choice of career. Rather than limit himself to the class notes and textbooks that were a professorial industry, he checks out specialized publications fairly often, in particular, American ones that offer the additional advantage of putting the finishing touches to an indispensable knowledge of English. Great fortunes were built on concrete, granite, and glass, with the participation of the banks before and the tenants after, in a fusion of interests that will soon verge on epiphany. It’s already the case in Toronto and Calgary, and Montreal is there for the taking.
Because his capital is slim and he has to create it first by confidence, he puts his brand new MBA at the service of a developer of suburban housing projects along Highway 40, at the eastern limit of Repentigny. In no time at all, he makes himself indispensable, to the point of demanding to be made an associate, heading the Chamber of Commerce, and marrying the daughter of the other major local contractor; it could even be that it wasn’t out of self-interest, as you may think, but because of her vague resemblance to Jeannine Lahaie. Although this Martine is some kind of a geographer, we won’t get to know her well enough to find out whether she finds poetry in relief.
He is solid, both physically and mentally, when the Caîsse de Dépôt helps to finance his first series of buildings in an industrial park on the outskirts of Montreal, where government laboratories are setting up. He has the pair, one son, one daughter, enrolled at private school and they’re of no interest to us. In memory of a June 24 that seems to him the acme of a wild youth, he voted oui in the referendum, while remaining silent and even nodding agreement when, on the board of a bank where he’d got himself a seat, bigger players scoff at the indescribable madness of the separatists and base their own self-assurance on the fear of the people they call ordinary, the guttural pronunciation that the French word requires creating a slight spray.
I couldn’t tell you how he came to keel over, or even if he did so, despite the tragic events that eventually sprang from his actions.
There comes a time when the boy is a man of forty and more and has panoramic office windows that lo
The normal sequence of events, without there necessarily being any giddiness or anxiety in Jean-René Salvail, is that he has dinner one day, because he can read and thinks he enjoys it, with a business writer passing through Montreal: Ivan Fallon, the Saatchi brothers’ biographer, for instance, or Neil Lyndon, for Armand Hammer. The upshot is that only a patron of the arts is immortal, but that he must burn with some inner flame, even if he’s the worst of the demons. Jean-René Salvail doesn’t know that he is one himself. (This would have been the perfect time to reopen Bleeding Bread and finally understand that Jeannine was the only woman who had touched his soul with sex, but it’s pointless to expect such introspection from a man who is constantly forging ahead.)
He’s in a hurry. Illumination comes to him during a fishing trip near the Moisie River, in the drawer of the bedside table, in a motel where the delay of a chartered airplane has kept him and some buddies behind. There’s nothing to read but the Bible, and only beer in the minibar. He leafs through the book. He’s astonished at the number of rich men who inspired the authors of the Old Testament, at the fascination wealth and power exerted on them, and at the supporting roles held by the wretched. Above all, he understands why the wealthy absolutely have to be wicked, for God is only interested in reprimand and atonement. As for the poor, they are wise and are praised with polite remarks that you sense are an obligation of the Supremely Virtuous.
The next evening, when the outfitting company delivers girls along with the smoked salmon, he doesn’t need to get drunk to be ready for action. As he pulls on his condom or empties himself onto the navel of a fairly pretty woman with big hair, he thinks he’s entitled and that he resembles no one else.
Neither lust nor plunder will attain great summits in him, as far as I know. He pays better than most of the consultants who inflate the rental prospects on towers like the ones he erects in the downtown core, which his vision is in fact helping to expand as far as some formerly disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Before the board of Laval’s most luxurious golf club, he recommends admitting a labour leader, whose flowered shirts clash with the linen appropriate to the green. The crane operators then agree to work overtime on building sites, where an enviable peace prevails. He provides wine for the dinners of a young municipal councillor, whose conscience is uneasy as soon as zoning regulations change. He supports lawyers whose only scruple is having none. And he sleeps, once a week, with women who are not Martine.
He is the man of the cranes. The whole city acclaims the beauty of his towers.
He is the man of the cranes. God decries the infamy of his sins.
And his female companions do not fear him, for he is the lamb of God who sweetens the copulations of the world. He asks only to be drunk before he lays his head on their vulvas, which he leaves in peace. He reads strange verses.
A man impure in the body of his flesh —will have no rest until he has lighted a fire.
To the impure man all bread is agreeable — he will be calm only when he is dead.
The man emerging from the conjugal bed — says inside his soul: “Who can see me?
“All around me is darkness, and the walls hide me — no one sees me. What have I to fear?
“The Almighty will not remember my sins.” — But it is the eyes of man that he fears.
And he knows not that the eyes of the Lord — are thousands of times brighter than the sun.
That they look at all the ways of men — and penetrate into the most deeply hidden corners.
Before they were created, all things were known to him — and just as much after they were created.
That man will be punished in the public square — and where he least expected it, he will be caught.
Young women follow one another and they resemble one another or they don’t, other empty bodies suck them in, it makes no difference to him, he is only interested in the Almighty and in those whom He created in His image. He is reading Chapter 23 of the Book of the Ecclesiastic, which threatens him more directly, when his reading is interrupted. He is required in the evening, nearly every evening, to be at the office, where his acolytes are bustling about, worried about a situation that seems to be turning difficult.
As for the rest, newspapers and magazines have repeated it ad nauseam. The analysts who used to celebrate the great real estate fortunes now agree to deplore them as being built on sand, inveighing against the improvident, accusing the banks of complacency and the tax experts of cunning, discovering complicity on the part of public financing companies, insisting that heads must roll. Cameras sweep the empty premises, the unfinished towers, the paralyzed building sites. Freelancers who used to churn out dazzling profiles of Jean-René Salvail and his like now sell equally dazzling retrospectives of the errors of their ways and harsh descriptions of their falls. Vice-presidents of finance companies lose their jobs, deputy ministers are demoted. The cranes of what was once Salvail Inc. are sold off south of the American border. Martine keeps, in her own name, some suitcases in a safe place near Nassau, where she is resting with the children while her husband looks for a paid position. He’ll find one, one that doesn’t exploit his abilities to the fullest and will leave him in a certain stupor till he retires. Small suppliers declare bankruptcy and some commit suicide. The jobless are condemned to remain so. Hack writers cling to their only metaphor, the bursting bubble, which makes for a lot of bubbles whose shreds they will examine rather lazily, unaware that what they’re chronicling is the end of a world.
And that is what you see, with your eyes that are not a thousand times brighter than the sun.
But it is otherwise in the bubble of the just, the one that’s rising up into the empyrean.
The man’s sperm gushed into the mouths of girls. They closed their eyes as they swallowed. They drank the ass’s milk they’d read about in a Bible story. They kissed their rough wedding veils. They licked the honey they would have churned with their children. The male’s ejaculate grated against their esophagi. It thickened in their stomachs. It hardened in their intestines. The girls died, clenched around their concrete bellies. There he laid his head upon his deathless work and, through the Book, he praised the wisdom of beautiful women.
In the city which he loved likewise, there did he hid me rest (Book of the Ecclesiastic, Chapter 24, Verse 11).
There were rose-coloured towers, dove-coloured towers, coal-coloured towers, almond-coloured towers, gay shrouds in which he buried his lovers. They were the cornerstone, the foundation of his glory. In the city’s entrails it would come about that they heard one another bemoaning their lives that had not come to pass, which would have been more upright than the towers. One night, they recognized each other and talked about how insignificant the man was. They moved. And saw that they could move. It was the beginning of winter, the water was freezing in the fissures of hastily erected structures, the walls cracked, collapsed on the powerful, and tumbled onto the passersby, their debtors. Only the humble and the meek of heart, who did not think of running away and whose low houses had avoided ruin, celebrated with the slain women.
THE CALLIOPE
The musician shuts himself away with his calliope
Breathes its fumes, muffles its reason
To make it sing
He burned double basses, oboes, and clarinets
He’d come to the viols when the orchestra fell silent
The calliope has played off-key
the arpeggio of the dying
