turn out badly. We changed the subject.
The boy arrived, a month later. Iâd come in stage left as usual and there he was, tall, slim, translucid, redheaded, in the kitchen, pouring himself some Abyssinian coffee in my cup. âIâd like you to meet Corinneâs son,â you said from the back of the living room, forgetting to tell me his name. Perhaps he didnât have one. His eyes were tawny, his skin so white it should have radiated cold, but it blazed around him.
He spoke little, was listening to some horrible metal music.
I would have thought youâd reject this reminder of your troubled summer, what was left of the woman who had abandoned you fifteen years before, who had gone up north, become ordinary again, and had got together, said her son, with an Italian. Corinne had a weakness for Italians, youâd told me. But you had not told me the extent to which you were in a way the mother of the boy she was sending to you now because he and her man often came to blows and she was not a woman to forgo her pleasure.
You thought you had been present at the childâs conception, in a water tower, where the male had been merely a willing stalk, one that Corinne had squeezed inside her before your eyes. The child should have died at birth, heâd been consumed by all kinds of fevers, you had bathed him, unfailingly. And then she had stolen him from you.
You fixed up a bedroom for him upstairs, the walls seemed like glass to me, now I took you up to the Laurentians more often, to make love in small motels, I didnât have the impression I was jealous. His name was quite simply Pierre, but I called him Cain to give an edge to our strange conversations. For him, everything was mineral, from his music to his fondness for killing, which might come to him if he was holding a knife. You smiled as though he were still a child and not a threat, you were going to enroll him in school in September, Corinne would come for him again one day, but for a time we were three.
Iâm not angry with him today, even if he was our evil eye, the flint on which we stumbled, as you had done during that summer. We were no longer two on our island when Bruno Farinacci-Lepore wrote to beg for an invitation, he said he needed to leave Italy, his mother had died and the estate would lie fallow again, he wanted to come to Montreal to pull himself together and what was the wonderful Charlène Lemire up to now? I was at the summit of my small power and I had no choice. He would stay on Rockland Avenue for two or three weeks, then go down to New York for the opening of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, which was grateful to me for having suggested he attend and happy to share expenses with my university.
At Mirabel, I thought he looked thinner. He was lost but gracefully so in a vast overcoat of dark brown alpaca. No white now. Not even a scarf, that would have been unbecoming with his greenish complexion. I observed him as an expert untouched by dilemmas, as an art historian who was left cold by effects.
But is there a better talker than Bruno Farinacci-Lepore? Before we had left the Laval city limits I had regained my appetite for the way he expressed himself. We would soon be required to take an interest in the first generation of artists with no memory, already he had decoded all their signs. Artists who made a profession of their youth, who rendered the signs of terror in shades that were harsh but attractive, there was something of the Nazi in them and we, their elders, instead of confronting them, would pretend to understand them, to see them as apologists for the absurd in its fin-de-siècle version. He named them all for me, from the German obsessed with the Reich who gave us the most sublime charred paintings, to the Puerto Rican who paid for his heroin by making everyone who was anyone in New York come running to the barrage of his graffiti.
I knew all the words but only now did I understand them. There
The boy arrived, a month later. Iâd come in stage left as usual and there he was, tall, slim, translucid, redheaded, in the kitchen, pouring himself some Abyssinian coffee in my cup. âIâd like you to meet Corinneâs son,â you said from the back of the living room, forgetting to tell me his name. Perhaps he didnât have one. His eyes were tawny, his skin so white it should have radiated cold, but it blazed around him.
He spoke little, was listening to some horrible metal music.
I would have thought youâd reject this reminder of your troubled summer, what was left of the woman who had abandoned you fifteen years before, who had gone up north, become ordinary again, and had got together, said her son, with an Italian. Corinne had a weakness for Italians, youâd told me. But you had not told me the extent to which you were in a way the mother of the boy she was sending to you now because he and her man often came to blows and she was not a woman to forgo her pleasure.
You thought you had been present at the childâs conception, in a water tower, where the male had been merely a willing stalk, one that Corinne had squeezed inside her before your eyes. The child should have died at birth, heâd been consumed by all kinds of fevers, you had bathed him, unfailingly. And then she had stolen him from you.
You fixed up a bedroom for him upstairs, the walls seemed like glass to me, now I took you up to the Laurentians more often, to make love in small motels, I didnât have the impression I was jealous. His name was quite simply Pierre, but I called him Cain to give an edge to our strange conversations. For him, everything was mineral, from his music to his fondness for killing, which might come to him if he was holding a knife. You smiled as though he were still a child and not a threat, you were going to enroll him in school in September, Corinne would come for him again one day, but for a time we were three.
Iâm not angry with him today, even if he was our evil eye, the flint on which we stumbled, as you had done during that summer. We were no longer two on our island when Bruno Farinacci-Lepore wrote to beg for an invitation, he said he needed to leave Italy, his mother had died and the estate would lie fallow again, he wanted to come to Montreal to pull himself together and what was the wonderful Charlène Lemire up to now? I was at the summit of my small power and I had no choice. He would stay on Rockland Avenue for two or three weeks, then go down to New York for the opening of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, which was grateful to me for having suggested he attend and happy to share expenses with my university.
At Mirabel, I thought he looked thinner. He was lost but gracefully so in a vast overcoat of dark brown alpaca. No white now. Not even a scarf, that would have been unbecoming with his greenish complexion. I observed him as an expert untouched by dilemmas, as an art historian who was left cold by effects.
But is there a better talker than Bruno Farinacci-Lepore? Before we had left the Laval city limits I had regained my appetite for the way he expressed himself. We would soon be required to take an interest in the first generation of artists with no memory, already he had decoded all their signs. Artists who made a profession of their youth, who rendered the signs of terror in shades that were harsh but attractive, there was something of the Nazi in them and we, their elders, instead of confronting them, would pretend to understand them, to see them as apologists for the absurd in its fin-de-siècle version. He named them all for me, from the German obsessed with the Reich who gave us the most sublime charred paintings, to the Puerto Rican who paid for his heroin by making everyone who was anyone in New York come running to the barrage of his graffiti.
I knew all the words but only now did I understand them. There
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