Impurity Read online

  “Are you a Buddhist?”

  “Not at all. I believe in Christ.”

  “So why are you talking non-stop about this Thích Quảng Thing and his fireproof heart? I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

  “Do you think I know myself? Lots of things escape me. I may be the one person who knows the least about myself.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “What?”

  “That business of the suicide by fire.”

  “On June 11, 1963. I can give you all the details if you want. I did a paper on it. The teacher asked us to write a dissertation on a person who had changed the world with one simple act. He wouldn’t let us choose Christ or people like Hitler, Napoleon, or Nero. He wanted us to dig around, waste hours in the library. So then I remembered that photo. I was nine when I spotted it in a newspaper.”

  “The oldest event I remember is the assassination of Kennedy. On that day I lost my virginity.”

  Félix freezes. His gaze clouds over. Antoine has just surprised him, maybe even scandalized him. He savours the brief moment when you think you can hear the heartbeat of the person facing you.

  “Yes, my virginity,” Antoine resumes. “Just not the one you’re thinking about. See, JFK’s assassination was an event that cut my life in two. When I saw my mother in the living room, crying in front of the TV, I realized that something serious had happened. In her eyes, the president’s assassin was the devil incarnate come back to earth. The world had just appeared in our living room. The end of childhood. That day I lost my innocence, and I understood one essential thing: evil exists.”

  “Then you believe in the devil?”

  A wave of pleasure crosses Antoine’s face.

  “No, Félix. Genuine evil is something else.”

  Why does he work himself into such a state? Antoine waits nervously for the journalist’s arrival. He has vacuumed the living room and cleared up the dirty dishes in the kitchen. Claire Langlois arrives on time. He figures that she’s at most twenty-five. He shows her into the living room, offers coffee. She comments on the paintings on the walls. Finds them interesting. Whenever someone describes something as interesting he forms two conflicting hypotheses: either the thing in question is worthless or the person who drops the hollow remark knows nothing about the thing in question. Antoine grows tense. Still, he can’t help commenting on the young woman’s dress. Elegant. He’s just paid her a compliment. The journalist tackles the first question:

  “We know that Alice Livingston liked to surprise her readers. She had a gift for creating banal situations that start slipping imperceptibly toward dark, tormented zones. Her characters, at first so approachable, I mean, so much like us, always end up taking on complex meanings. Did Alice resemble her characters?”

  Langlois’s question surprises him. Banal, yes, he agrees with that. His wife’s novels exploit the banality of feelings, the well-oiled delicate machinery of minor dramas. He believes sincerely that in a few minutes he could jot on a scrap of paper the quintessence of an umpteenth novel by Alice: a woman, happy, beautiful and desirable, a professional, with a husband and children, dies of cancer when she has just taken a lover. Question: would the woman have survived if she hadn’t cheated on her husband? Or even more mundane: a happy man with wife and children, a prominent and sought-after profession, a hefty bank account, dies in a plane crash when he is on his way to meet another, younger woman. Question: was he really happy? Antoine often wondered why his wife didn’t write for television, the ideal planet for her characters.

  “Was Alice Livingston anything like her characters?”

  The journalist has just repeated her question. Why should he tell this young woman the truth? Why should he share her life story with a stranger who’d just landed in his living room with her notebook? Because, in fact, the question involves him. He spent twenty-two years with Alice. Was their shared life a hidden tragedy or the unruffled happiness of an uneventful life?

  “Actually, I’ll go back to the introduction to your question. I don’t think that over the pages, Alice’s characters build up an excess of contradictions with the goal of telling readers about some complex realities concerning humankind. Instead, I would say that her characters are increasingly simplified in the course of the action, until they resemble just anybody.”

  “Interesting. Over the years, did your wife start to resemble just anybody?”

  The young woman’s question rattles Antoine. He scratches his head, realizes it’s a gesture that will not escape the journalist’s eye. He takes a slow sip of coffee.

  “In her eyes,” he thinks, “I’m less than just anybody. The husband of the famous woman, tragically dead.”

  “What can I tell you? A character in a novel will never have the complexity of any living being. Life is mystery in the pure state. You can’t go further. The rest, you understand, is a little like dust in the wind.”

  “You teach philosophy, I believe?”

  “Yes. In a college.”

  “Interesting. Your wife once created a philosophy professor, in The Great Upheaval, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “You are.”

  “It wasn’t in The Great Upheaval?”

  “Yes. But that was a literature prof.”

  “Ah … I imagine that your wife’s work, like any great work, is largely autobiographical.”

  “You can imagine that.”

  “There’s a lot of interest in her last novel, A Pure Heart. Her publisher, Louis-Martin Vallières, talks about a significant change in her approach. He talks about a book that’s more personal, more intimate. Instead of the usual five-hundred-page doorstop, Alice Livingston is offering readers a brief story, punctuated by numerous dialogues. Can you talk to me about it?”

  “I haven’t read it.”

  “No? That’s rather surprising.”

  “I’ve always read my wife’s novels once they were published. Often, only months later. I didn’t even know the title of her last one; I’ve just learned it from you.”

  “Did she ever talk about any creative anxieties?”

  “Alice didn’t have anxieties.”

  “Did she have a foreboding about her death?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I sense that you’re on the defensive. I realize that it’s still very hard for you to talk about your wife.”

  Antoine says nothing. He wishes that he knew what he has genuinely felt since Alice’s death. He can’t.

  “Would you allow me to come back with a photographer? He was supposed to be here today but something came up. I’d like to illustrate my article with some photos.”

  “Photos of what?”

  “I thought about her office, the chair where she wrote. And I’d like to have a photo of you as well. I’m positive that our readers would like to know something more about the man who shared the life of Alice Livingston.”

  “No, no photos. And I can guarantee that Alice would be totally against using a photo of her husband to advertise her last novel!”

  Irritated, he gets up. He has on shorts and an old short-sleeved shirt. He’d gone to the trouble of tidying the house, but it hadn’t occurred to him to dress more suitably. Standing across from Claire Langlois, his bare legs seem out of place. She smiles at him.

  His new friend impresses him. Antoine has just met someone who doesn’t think like him, yet doesn’t irritate him. Even if he is far from sharing his enthusiasms, he doesn’t want to brush him off with sarcasm. In particular, he doesn’t want to ridicule him for that business about the heart found intact that, according to Félix, you can gaze at in a museum in Vietnam.

  “I’ll buy you another coffee if you’ll tell me the rest of the story about Thích Truc Bang.”

  “Thích Quảng Đức.”

  “Whatever.”

  “The scene is set in Saigon. A monk is sitting at an intersection. There’s a can of gas on his right. People form groups and watch as the monk is burned alive. The flames are enormous a
nd they create a blotch of light that spreads out toward the left. Aside from that, all you could see would be a blaze. As if the fire, impressed by the monk’s determination, had by itself moved left to reveal to the whole world the generosity of his soul. His back is straight, you can’t see his legs, but you sense that he’s in the lotus position.”

  Félix’s eyes fill with tears.

  “What’s most moving is his face. Not a sign of pain, eyes peacefully closed, no tension in the lips. The whole left side of his face, though, has been eaten by the flames. He remains composed. He was sixty-six or seventy-three years old, I never knew which exactly. And d’you know what I found out a while ago? Some Americans have also set themselves on fire to make American troops leave Vietnam. It’s just happened near here. Without the photo of Thích Quảng Đức, none of that would have happened.”

  “What? The war in Vietnam wouldn’t have happened without that photo? Gimme a break!”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Then I expressed myself badly. Basically, if that photo fascinates me, it’s not for what it reveals but for what it hides: the heart.”

  “A heart is meat. And meat burns.”

  “Not Thích Quảng Đức’s. I told you: it was found intact among his carbonized remains.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Have you seen it, even in a photo?”

  “No, but I believe it. Which is enough for me.”

  Their inflamed conversation seals their new friendship. They feel as if they’ve known each other forever. Leaving Le Top they head for the college where Félix lives in the student residence. Lost in the twists and turns of their discussion, which they seem to want to keep going until dawn, they find themselves roaming in the Chicoutimi cemetery which lines the college buildings. Leaning against a tombstone, Antoine gazes at the nearly full moon. Its halo exposes the blue-shaded depths of the sky. With his hands in his jacket pockets, Félix looks cold. In September it may seem like a summer’s day, but after nightfall it’s not unusual for the ground to freeze. Antoine rolls a cigarette with Drum tobacco. He always has a package in the inside pocket of his army coat. He feels good. A strange euphoria fills him. The cold doesn’t bother him. Autumn is his favourite season. He can’t understand people who behave as if they are living in a waiting room made of black ice, wind gusts, and icy squalls. During ten months of the year they stare at the summer door, a very small one, and wait anxiously for it to fall half-open. As soon as a pale ray of light slips out of it, they rush with shrieks of joy to force it open. Then their waiting is over and, hysterical now, they walk out the door that they’ve just pulled off its hinges. But they’re back in the waiting room only weeks later, and with a sour look, they stare again, each in their corner, at the summer door, double-locked for long months once more.

  That disproportionate enthusiasm for summer irritates Antoine. Even spring seems to him like an act of aggression. Bulbs, seeds, anything that stirs restlessly under the barely thawed ground bursts through the earth with such violence that it seems to him that he is picking up the smell of anger all around him. What is green is in a hurry to come into bud and prove that in Québec, summer really and truly does exist. And once autumn arrives, though nature swaggers with her wildflowers, the glittering yellow of her birches, the magnificent purple-red of her maples, very soon she will find herself stripped bare in the sad shadow of the black spruce planted like soldiers at attention in the mute and solemn snow.

  When he flicks his cigarette butt into the emptiness of night, Antoine realizes that Félix has disappeared. He calls him, looks for him. Finds him kneeling on a grave, a rosary in his hands. Praying. Antoine holds back a laugh. Félix looks like a cartoon figure in this setting like a horror film, which sows doubt in Antoine: is he playing a trick, or is he praying for real?

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Praying for my cousin, Anaïs.”

  The monument is obviously recent, modest. It is crowned with a vase in which flowers are breathing the moist night air.

  “She died in May. Along with her whole family.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  Félix, gesturing broadly, clears some space in front of him, as if he were revealing the stage of a show that’s about to begin. Antoine then notices the nearby tombstones: all the inscriptions note that the people died in 1971. On a monument larger than the others are written in gilt letters the names of Martha and Pierre Bouchard. On four smaller stones, the names of Rénald Bouchard, Maryse Bouchard, Jules Bouchard, and Anaïs Bouchard; it is in front of the latter that Félix, his expression grave, is kneeling. Antoine tries to think of what to say. He’s certainly not going to offer condolences. The place is ideal for such a demonstration, but he has no talent for the formulas that are supposed to express the tearful sharing of sincere feelings.

  “What happened?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  “A highway accident?”

  “No.”

  “Surely they weren’t murdered?”

  “Antoine, think.”

  “An epidemic.”

  “In the Saguenay?”

  “Why not?”

  “Think: what happened last May?”

  “Saint-Jean-Vianney!”

  Why had he not realized earlier that these graves belonged to a family that had perished during the landslide in Saint-Jean-Vianney? News of the disaster had travelled around the globe. On the night of May 4, 1971, part of Saint-Jean-Vianney was struck off the map: a tremendous landslide carried in its wake houses, streets, streetlamps, cars, and inhabitants. At dawn, emergency workers couldn’t believe their eyes: the spring sun was lighting up a crater thirty metres deep and some two kilometres long. People told of hearing laments and cries for help rising from the chasm, then dying out forever, swallowed up and swept away by tons of mud.

  Félix straightened up and dropped his rosary into his pocket.

  “Her body was never found. Her parents’, her two brothers’, and her sister’s were all pulled out of the mud. But not hers. A month ago they found a victim’s body as far away as the baie des Chaleurs. Someday, maybe, Anaïs will turn up. She’ll stop travelling deep in the icy water and rest here for good, here in this grave.”

  “Travel? You mean rot.”

  He immediately regrets his remark, but Félix doesn’t seem upset. He explains that they had placed a big photo of Anaïs in her coffin.

  “Can I tell you a secret? Last year I was doing my classical studies at the Séminaire Saint-Augustin de Cap-Rouge. I decided to continue here to be closer to Anaïs.”

  Félix takes a flower from the vase sitting on the monument. A rose, astonishingly fresh. He pulls off a petal and puts the flower back in the vase. He keeps the petal in his hand for a moment, then brings it to his nose. Antoine thinks it’s rather phony.

  “Was it you who brought these flowers?”

  “Yes, this morning.”

  “There’s something I don’t get. You left Cap-Rouge to get closer to a dead girl. But why here? Why go to the trouble of crossing the parc des Laurentides? You said it yourself, her grave is empty. You wanted to get closer to her photo? For all you know, your cousin could’ve been eaten by scavenger fish.”

  “Her soul is here, that I know. Her soul is hovering very close by. Makes sense, her parents are here, her brothers are here, her sister is here. Where else would Anaïs be?”

  “First of all, the soul has to exist.”

  Antoine walks Félix to the student residence and goes back to his own apartment, which he’s just rented on rue du Havre, in the town centre. He didn’t want to stay with his parents any longer. He thinks that at his age, it’s high time he spread his wings and left the nest. Better to live meagrely but with freedom of movement. To make it to the end of the week, he steals some of his food.

  Although it’s late and he is tired, Félix doesn’t go straight to bed.
He takes his pen, opens the journal that he’s been keeping since he was fourteen, writes to Anaïs. He thinks that he can sense her presence like a gaze slipping over the words that he traces in black ink.

  Anaïs, you can’t be simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. Dying doesn’t mean to disappear, it is to appear elsewhere. I hear your laughter in the wind that blows through the trees. In the morning I sometimes find traces of your smile on the window of this room – so sad, so grey, so stifling. So much cement around me. I met a strange guy. I talked to him about the heart of Thích Quảng Đức. He listened very attentively. I had the impression that he was laughing at me. But he’s not like the others. I think he’s angst-ridden. Terribly angst-ridden. And I find that amusing. I mean, it’s good to know that such angst exists. His name is Antoine. He lent me his linguistics notes. His writing is atrocious. I really couldn’t decipher it. Maybe he suffers from a derangement of the senses (Rimbaud, remember?). In any event, his hand is certainly deranged to have such handwriting. I brought you flowers. Till tomorrow.

  * * *

  Before going inside, Antoine sits on a bench overlooking the Saguenay. The wind has come up, carrying odours of mud and earthworms. Antoine likes the wind, its impatience. Ever since his hair has been as long as Robert Plant’s, he appreciates even more the surge of his ideas, scattered by the autumn squalls. Smoking one last cigarette, he can’t help thinking about the corpse of that girl, Anaïs. Maybe it’s nearby, in the dark depths stirring at his feet. Like many people in the region, he cried at the tragedy of May 4. But his tears, he recalls a little mischievously, weren’t being shed for the victims of Saint-Jean-Vianney.

  That night, the whole family is watching a hockey game, Montréal–Chicago, on TV. Except him. He is in his room finishing À la recherche du temps perdu. He had borrowed Proust’s masterpiece from the municipal library. For several days in a row he barely eats, too absorbed in his reading. It seems to him that he’s living on another planet, to the point where he has the impression that the people around him are speaking a foreign language. He perceives it as some unusual material escaping from their lips. Antoine will have that sensation again when he drops acid some weeks later. Proust’s novel disorients him in the literal sense of the term: he has lost his country and floats now, like an astronaut, in a space-suit of labyrinthian, sinuous phrases that protect him from everyday preoccupations, cut him off from the boulevards and neighbourhoods that he crosses on his way to school. He glides along the repetitious reality of the days that keeps life from being an adventure. When he is reading, he lends his body to the search of the narrator, young Marcel, and to his capture of the past where sparkle like rare flowers, deployed shamelessly, proper names that excite his imagination: Odette Swann, the Baron de Charlus, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Madame Verdurin … Antoine is sixteen years old, but when he turns the final page of the novel he has lived for a hundred years, years heavy with life, with accumulated anguish, with frustrated hopes and gutted illusions, all stolen from Proust’s novel. That’s why he cannot hold back his tears. It’s over. No more pages to read. Proust is merely dust and his characters nothing but the dust of dust. But he, in his room, is throbbing with blood, with ideas, desires, and his life seems to him like a long and desiccated plain. What can he do with this life? What will his future be? Like his father’s? His brothers’? His friends’? And now, on a night when through the magic of literature Antoine is in the throes of an acceleration that is swiftly speeding his youth into decrepitude, he learns that some twenty kilometres from the place where he now is, a cataclysm has just swallowed up a village, sweeping part of its population into death. Horror exists, close at hand. Everything is weighty with truth. Antoine’s tears, shed for ghosts in their Sunday best, vanish, ashamed. But he finds himself unable to feel any genuine compassion for the victims and their families. The tragedy is too sudden, too absurd to touch his heart. Fiction is more skillful at reflecting an outburst of feelings. Reality, in the brutal sense of its phenomena, leads him to protect himself from it by observing it behind a wall of irony. On this night he discovers that his heart is cold, which does not make him unhappy.