There is no true love for those who take cover from the storm.
Through the airplane window she observed the clouds, which didn’t look at all the same on high as they did from down below. From underneath they were all curves, and formed sheep or hills or faces. But from aloft they were broken lines, and formed arches and streets and facades and for a moment she thought to herself that things would have been different with Paul if they’d been able to live in one of those cities in the clouds. Soon Ireland’s pasturelands appeared in the window, and as far as Orly she watched Europe unfold as a life-size map, and thought no more of anything.
In Paris, jet-lagged, she took possession of the apartment she’d rented for the week. It was two rooms, furnished with a kitchenette, bathroom, and flowered balcony, on an upper floor of an Eleventh Arrondissement high-rise. In the afternoon she went up Avenue Philippe-Auguste and the Boulevard de Ménilmontant to Père Lachaise. She bestowed a sloppy kiss on Oscar Wilde’s monument, paused for a long time before Édith Piaf’s, and meditated over the remains, minus his heart, of Frédéric Chopin. The next day she visited Notre-Dame and saw two lovers light a candle, wondering what they might be pledging to each other. She then walked along the Seine, crossed Pont Royal, and stopped at the Musée d’Orsay, where she lingered over the Déjeuner sur l’herbe to examine the curves of this young woman who Paul had often claimed looked a lot like her.
She ate alone and went back to the apartment, heavy-hearted. She felt like crying, and had trouble breathing. She’d suffocated as a young girl in her village, she’d suffocated as a young woman in Montreal, and she suffocated now as a merry widow in the world’s capital. She went to bed with the growing unease that sometimes stopped her from leaving the house in the morning, and even from dragging herself out from beneath the bedclothes.
She was awakened at dawn by thunder. When she got out of bed, she saw through the window that the city was wrapped in fog and covered by an opaque layer of grey clouds. Later on, sirens wailed in the midst of the storm to signal that it was noon. The sirens dated from the war, and could have been those heralding an invasion. The rain pounded down on the city like shrapnel, and the widow watched it falling all day long from the balcony.
She saw the Eiffel Tower’s steel structure dissolve into an anthracite silhouette, then vanish completely. She saw the rain swallow up the Panthéon, the Montparnasse tower, and Notre-Dame. She saw the Butte Montmartre and Sacré-Coeur being washed away like dead trees in a rushing river.
She thought: terrible dreams are coming true.
The Romans and the barbarians wanted to destroy Paris, the English toyed with the idea for a hundred years, and Hitler wished for it with all his dark soul, not suspecting that the man responsible for razing the city would show himself more loyal to the splendours of Lutetia than to all the swastikas in Berlin.
For millennia, they had failed.
For two hours the widow hovered between sky and earth and watched the rain wipe away Paris.
The next day she got up, took a shower, and went down to the tobacconist to buy blonde Gitanes and a café crème. It was hot. Nothing remained of the storm, other than the heavy humidity being exhaled by the paving stones. She went back home to change and met an old man in the elevator who lived on the same floor. They greeted each other. He was a polite gentleman who wore a thick corduroy jacket and large, tortoiseshell glasses. He ought to have had a pile of books under his arm, but he was carrying records, old 33 r.p.m. jazz recordings. Dexter Gordon, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins.
“Are you renting the Becqueret apartment?”
“No,” she replied, “I live here.”
“Really? You’re moving in?”
She smiled.
“I’ve always lived here.”
The old man looked at her, perplexed, then he smiled in turn.
“It’s true, you’re right.”
The elevator door opened. The old man added:
“And if you’ll allow me, Mademoiselle: in all this time, you’ve always been right.”
Returning home after an aperitif with friends a few days later, the widow came across a writer, much prized by the media, sitting at a table with a young woman, in front of a half-empty plate. She stared at him through the glass as if she were looking at a screen, not realizing what she was doing, until he lifted his head and gazed back at her with annoyance.
She gave a start, burst out laughing, and strode off. That was the most enduring impression the city left on her. Paris was a large zoo where intellectuals were shut up behind café windows.
It was time now to make her way north.
The Centre of Leisure and Forgetfulness
ARVIDA II
My grandmother, mother of my father, often said:
“There are no thieves in Arvida.”
The Americans built the town beside the aluminum smelter in a hundred and thirty-five days. There’d been nothing around for 200 million years, then there was the Alcan smelter, and a hundred and thirty-five days later, a town. The spiteful claimed that only after the 1941 strike did the Americans decide to no longer treat the workers like cattle, but my father and others said that was a lie.
Look at the evidence.
The Americans allowed the four parishes to be built around enormous churches, and contented themselves with two chapels, one Evangelical and the other Anglican, two little chapels in red brick, one beside the other, in front of the Notre-Dame-du-Sourire school, and beside Riverside School on Boulevard des Saguenéens. The sinuous and labyrinthine designs of the town’s streets, the proximity of the bosses’ houses to those of the foremen and workers, the big parks at each corner, and the flanking of the houses of worship by two schools and a skating rink, everything in Arvida attested to the fact that this model town was the little utopia of a billionaire philanthropist, built from scratch right in the middle of nowhere. The plan was laid out in full knowledge that the sons of the bosses would be playing hockey and baseball with the offspring of the others, that the daughters of the one would be doing their homework alongside those of the others, and that all of them, boys and girls, would perhaps one day be sleeping in the same bed.1
That’s how the town was seen in my family, and even today it’s hard to budge my father. In 2004 there was a television report to mark some anniversary or other, and it was suggested that the original parish of Sainte-Thérèse be declared a UNESCO heritage site. There was old Madame Tretiak, wife of a worker, who claimed that in the little house where she lived with her husband and eight children, the Alcan builders had skimped on the insulation. She said that in the depths of winter the walls were covered in a thick layer of ice. When one of my visiting friends repeated the story, my father dismissed his argument with the back of his hand.
“The walls of the house froze because it was the good woman Tretiak who was skimping on the heating. I’ll bet you a twenty that she herself ripped the insulation out of the walls to add it to the lining in her coats. She was tight with everything, Madame Tretiak. Her husband drank almost all his pay plus half that of his teetotalling brother. He left her two bucks a week for the laundry, the groceries, and the bills, and she still put something aside for a rainy day.”