Well, I can’t really remember exactly where I left off. Could you read the last few lines for me?
Yes, you felt helpless to defend your sister from her husband’s aggression. What was the man’s name, by the way?
Tony.
Tony, she said. Okay, Tony.
Are you going to write it down, before you forget? I asked.
No, that’s okay. Later. So, tell me more.
Well, doctor. .
Genevieve. Call me Genevieve.
Yes, Genevieve. I feel as if I do not know you and here you are, asking everything about me. But who are you? I mean, you are silent most of the time. You remind me of priests in the confession booth. Nodding all the time, and then telling us to go kneel and mumble a few prayers for a virgin, and one for a man with a beard. You know?
Did the priests hit you?
Well, of course. Sometimes.
Did they do anything else?
Like what?
Like maybe asking you for something or touching you?
No, not that I remember.
Okay. So, your sister?
Well, my mother went to the hospital for the delivery of my sister’s baby. This was the first time my mother met Tony.
Yes, Tony. The shrink wrote the name down this time.
Tony, I said. He was in the room when my mother came in. He was smoking next to the window. And my mother, the first thing she said to him was to go smoke outside.
He hid his cigarette behind his back and extended his arm to my mother, and when she ignored him, he smiled at me to show her what good terms he was on with me. Then he walked outside the room and smoked in the hallway with the rest of the fathers.
Was your father there?
No.
He did not come?
No.
Okay, go on.
Well, my sister had a girl. And Tony wanted a boy to shoot guns with. My sister called her Mona.
What kind of work did Tony do?
I’m not sure, really. He joined the militia at one point and he would disappear for a few days every now and then, and then he’d come back. At first, when he made money, I suspected it was because he was in charge of some kind of racketeering. People feared him because he was allied with the people in power. He always had guns.
How did your sister feel about that, guns with a baby in the house?
With a baby in the house? The baby does not understand about guns. What would the baby care?
Yes, but. .
Maybe what my sister wanted was a fighter. Maybe she wanted to bring a fighter into this world.
Nietzsche!
What?
Nothing. Go on, please.
Well yes, things are different there. Some people had guns over there at the time.
Did you carry a gun?
Yes, later on I did. And I tell you, if I had a gun with me here, I wouldn’t have looked for a rope and a branch.
Why didn’t you get one?
I did not know where to get one in this land. And I did not have any money! I raised my voice.
The shrink was silent. I was silent. I looked her in the eye. She looked back at me. Neither of us moved.
She finally blinked and said: You might get a job. Then you could afford one.
I got up, opened the door, and left. The shrink did not follow me. She did not call me back. That woman is living in la-la land, I thought.
I went downstairs and waited at the entrance to the clinic, and as I waited I paced. I smoked and watched the newcomers to this land dragging their frozen selves into the elevator of this poor neighbourhood’s clinic, where they would wait in line, open their mouths, stretch out their tongues, inflate their lungs under the doctor’s stethoscope, breathe the names of uncles with tubercular chests, eject their legs like pompom girls, say “Ahh” with an accent, expose the whites of their droopy, malarial eyes, chase their running noses, wives, and imaginary chickens. . I checked my watch. It was around four-thirty. At five, a few employees started to leave the clinic. I imagined the white ghosts of their aprons hung by the neck on the back of their office doors. I positioned myself in a corner close to the elevator and waited for the therapist. For Genevieve.
When she passed, I did not recognize her at first. She had covered herself with a dark coat. But then I recognized her ankles and shoes, and I followed her. She walked from Côte-des-Neiges towards Outremont. I crawled behind her and six legs appeared from my sides like external ribs, and a newly thick carcass made me oblivious to the splashing water from passing cars. No element of nature could stop me now.
It was a long crawl. I noticed that Genevieve did not seem cold. Some creatures are oblivious to the heat and the cold wind, I thought as I crawled behind her toes. She did not stop to buy supper, or even bread and butter. She lived in a rich neighbourhood with shop windows displaying expensive clothing and restaurants that echoed with the sounds of expensive utensils, utensils that dug swiftly into livers and ribs and swept sensually above the surface of yellow butter the colour of a September moon, a cold field of hay, the tint of a temple’s stained glass, of brass lamps and altars, of beer jars, wet and full beneath wooden handles that gave me a thirst for an executioner’s hands, for basement doors and the downward swing of falling boats, sailor’s knots, and ropes stretched around gulping, gorging, foaming throats, sounding calls for the last meal, the last count, the last sip before the return of the sun.
I saw where Genevieve lived, and then I crawled home.
THE NEXT DAY, FRIDAY, I woke up early. I returned to Genevieve’s place and watched her leave her house for work. Then I slipped past the building’s garage door, went down to the basement, and crawled along the pipes. I sprang from her kitchen’s drain, fixed my hair, my clothes, my self, and walked straight to her bedroom. On the bedside table were a few prescription pills, some books and magazines. A painting of a naked lady in an intimate, yet unrevealing, position hung above the bed. She had a large bed, unmade. I crawled up onto it and sniffed her pillow and bathed in the scent of her sheets. I found a spot that was still warm. I measured it, speculating that the weight of her torso gave it that curved shape (I am fond of torsos, the arched ones that stretch like endless valleys between soft green hills). I curled up and rolled like a kid down the hills. I covered myself with a sheet, inhaled, and wept a little under clouds of cotton and the blue sky. Then I made Genevieve’s bed and lay on my back and looked around her room. I wanted to see what she saw before taking off her glasses, before she closed her eyes for the day. What if I were to stay here, in her bed? I thought. What if she comes home and sees a considerate stranger who makes the bed and saves the other side for her to slip her toes into as she asks me if I am asleep, if I had a good day, kissing my forehead, hoping that I will wake up, take her in my arms, listen to her story about the man who was caught with a rope on a tree looking for a solid branch, in the park, early on a cold day, on a sunny day, and how he confided that he had had the best cup of coffee that morning, and he insisted that he wanted to escape the sun, and why the sun, what is wrong with the sun, mon amour? Can you tell me before you sleep? Can you ignore the desire to stroke my inner thighs, can you please listen to me after my long day in the office nodding to battered wives, impoverished immigrants, depressed teenagers; I need you to listen to me. .
The stranger stood up and walked to the kitchen, opened the fridge; it was filled with food — French cheeses, ham, and eggs. He made himself some toast, pasted on some ham and tomato slices, dropped a few thin sheets of cheese on top, decorated it all with lettuce, and moved to the living room with a large plate in his hand. As he ate, he examined souvenirs, figurines, pottery, travel books, and coffee-table books. He opened the pages of a large, heavy photography book. Then he picked up a book on Weegee, with its photographic work from the forties and fifties. He ate his ham sandwich and examined Americans dancing the cha-cha, poor people working, kids with hunched shoulders smiling under the fountains of fire hydrants, and then images of murders, people stabbed, shot in the face, men stretched out bleeding, a dead man lying under the shiny shoes of inspectors, and curious hats gathered to watch the dead, many men with round hats, spectators, some even smiling at the camera. He flipped the pages again and again, looking at well-dressed men lying shot, with open arms, as if still calmly breathing through their blood-covered faces. And the stranger laughed at one caption under a photograph that said: “Here he is left in the gutter.” “Dead on arrival,” another caption said. But the stranger was intrigued most of all by the one that said: “Their first murder.” The image showed a crowd of kids and adults, a close-up of their faces. The photographer must have been very close to the crowd, thought the stranger. Some of the kids were even laughing and playing and stretching their heads towards the lens, and in the background a woman, surrounded by the crowd of kids, was crying.