The throng pushed past me, apparently satisfied. At first the men smiled when I seized their lapels, attributing my imprecations to revolutionary ardor. At first the women laughed when I took their hands and checked them for traces of my pubic hair, because I wanted her, the girl I’d come to the dance with, the girl whose round sweat fossils I still wore on the back of my shirt.
– Don’t go. Don’t leave! Seal the park!
– Let go of my hand!
– Stop hanging on my lapels!
– We’ve got to go back to work!
I implored three big men wearing QUEBEC LIBRE sweatshirts to hoist me on their shoulders. I tried to get my foot hooked on the top of a pair of trousers so I could scramble up their sweaters and address the disintegrating family from the height of a shoulder.
– Get this creep off me!
– He looks English!
– He looks Jewish!
– But you can’t leave! I haven’t come yet!
– This man is a sex pervert!
– Let’s beat the shit out of him. He’s probably a sex pervert.
– He’s smelling girls’ hands.
– He’s smelling his own hands!
– He’s an odd one.
Then F. was beside me, big F., certifying my pedigree, and he led me away from the park which was now nothing but an ordinary park with swans and candy wrappers. Arm in arm, he led me down the sunny street.
– F., I cried. I didn’t come. I failed again.
– No, darling, you passed.
– Passed what?
– The test.
– What test?
– The second-to-last test.
48
“Let the cold wind blow, as long as you love me, East or West, I can stand the test, as long as you love me.” That was number seven on the Western Hit Parade long, long ago. I think it was seven. There are six words in the title. 6 is ruled by Venus, planet of love and beauty. According to Iroquois astrology, the sixth day should be devoted to grooming, having your hair done, wearing ornate shell-woven robes, seeking romance, and games of chance and wrestling. “What’s the reason I’m not pleasing you?” Somewhere on the charts. Tonight is the freezing 6th of March. That is not spring in the Canadian forest. The moon has been in Aries for two days. Tomorrow the moon enters Taurus. The Iroquois would hate me right now if they saw me because I have a beard. When they captured Jogues, the missionary back in 16-something, one of the minor tortures (after having an Algonquin slave sever his thumb with a clam-shell) was to let the children pull out his beard with their hands. “Send me a picture of Christ without a beard,” wrote the Jesuit Gamier to a friend in France, showing an excellent knowledge of Indian peculiarities. F. once told me about a girl who was favored with such a luxuriant growth of pubic hair that, with daily brush training, she taught it to descend nearly six inches down her thighs. Just below the navel she painted (with black liquid eye liner) two eyes and nostrils. Separating the hair just above the clitoris she drew it apart in two symmetrical arcs, creating the impression of a mustache above pursed pink lips, from which the remaining growth appended like a beard. A piece of costume jewelry squeezed in the navel like a caste mark completed the comic picture of an exotic fortune teller or mystic. Hiding her body under sheets except for this section, she amused F. with humorous renditions of Eastern sayings so popular at the time, casting her voice from beneath the linen with the skill of a ventriloquist. Why can’t I have memories like that? What good are all your gifts, F., the soap collection, the phrase books, if I can’t inherit your memories, too, which would confer some meaning on your rusty bequests, just as tin cans and automobile crashes achieve high value when placed in the context of a plush art gallery? What use all your esoteric teaching without your particular experience? You were too exotique for me, you and all the other masters, with your special breathing and success disciplines. What about us with asthma? What about us failures? What about us who can’t shit properly? What about us who have no orgies and excessive fucking to become detached about? What about us who are broken when our friends fuck our wives? What about us such as me? What about us who aren’t in Parliament? What about us who are cold on March 6 for no apparent reason? You did the Telephone Dance. You heard the inside of Edith. What about us who poke in dead tissue? What about us Historians who have to read the dirty parts? What about us who have smelled up a treehouse? Why did you make everything so baffling? Why couldn’t you comfort me like St. Augustine, who sang: “Behold the ignorant arise and snatch heaven beneath our eyes”? Why couldn’t you say to me what the Blessed Virgin said to the peasant girl Catherine Labouré on an ordinary street, Rue du Bac, in 18-something: “Grace will be showered on all who ask for it with faith and fervor.” Why do I have to explore the pock marks on Catherine Tekakwitha’s face like the lens of a moon missile? What did you mean when you lay bleeding in my arms and said: “Now it’s up to you”? People who say that always imply that that which they have done is so much more the major part of the ordeal. Who wants to just tidy up? Who wants to slide into a warm empty driver’s seat? I want cool leather, too. I loved Montréal, too. I wasn’t always the Freak of the Forest. I was a citizen. I had a wife and books. On May 17, 1642, Maisonneuve’s little armada – a pinnace, a flat-bottomed sailboat, and two rowboats – approached Montréal. The next day they glided past the green, solitary shores, and landed at the
