Combat Journal for Place d'Armes. Scott Symons
and then lower it to my plate, untouched. That munificent voice of Jean- Pierre, voice that is what he has to say. Voice from these same innards that Paul-Marie marinates and steeps and stews and eats, all by himself (and I remember now that Paul-Marie, too, has a huge voice, a voice that, once on the rampage in song, turns your earth upside right.) And then, my terrine grounded, I concentrate me, almost malevolently, on what Jean-Pierre says — because I know that he says nought. Now all the questions are into me again as a great tidal bore. Why does this man say nothing? Why does he settle for $50,000 a year … with his seat on the Royal Commission on Canadian Culture, a face on TV and a voice on radio? It’s all balls … or rather it’s all no-balls at all. Absolute irrelevance. Jean-Pierre knows that … knows that he is saying nothing…. There’s the rub. He knows the impotence of what he says…. The terrine, on my bread on the plate, catches my eye again — it is the sound of the voice that does it — Jean-Pierre has started in again … that is it — it is how he says it that is inordinately potent, I quiz the screen again — poor Jean-Pierre, you are left only with the right to hear the sound of your own voice. Echo of a fecundity forever unused, untapped…. What happened to you — why did you desert? Where did you go? What do you see now as you leer out at us from within your electronic cage? Pauvre Jean-Pierre …
“Qu’est-ce que vous-voulez, M’sieur … ?”The waitress is at my back — and I realize that I am speaking out loud — apostrophizing the shadow of the shadow of Jean-Pierre, that I am even imitating his voice … in French. And that as I imitate it I eat of the terrine de foie de volaille. It tasted of … but even as I rejoice at the empire of taste in this terrine it has gone. Christ — I’m back at absolute zero again … headspin. I hang on to the carafe of ordinaire that Paul-Marie has squatted afront me. I appall me … I cannot taste any of it. I know that — my taste buds have folded — closed down for the night. It is the sight of Jean-Pierre … his deliberate demission. He is posthumous … and knows it, and accepts it, and goes on living it warmed by the sound of his own voice … warming the last cockle of his heart. I cannot stop me now, watching this television spectre … no stop, stop — wrench my eyes out of it just at the moment when body threatens dissolution again — just as I see Paul Marie’s terrine descending my transparent gullet — proof positive of my desubstantiation.
And now, eyeballs popped back in, I am reprieved (if not saved) — a trio arrive, and my instincts apprise me of a Scene.
Young couple. Plus a little Big Daddy. Out on the Town — the Lower Town. Big-Little Daddy pays. She smiles upon him; hubby talks for their supper. I listen out the corner of my ear … Paul-Marie bounds over onto them, accosts their appetite, waitress smiles and we convene complicit over Paul-Marie’s campaign …
Me — “what an urgency to Paul-Marie now … services them as though they were on Messianic mission, dependent for capacity to Resuscitate upon a warranted feed-station….”
Waitress — “c’est toujours comme ça. If they leave food uneaten he is sad … mopes.”
See their eyes skirt the menu … Big-Little Daddy smiles approbation. Wife smiles upon husband. Husband talks more fluently. Thus the bargain is made … “three filets Mignon, three onion soup …”
Paul-Marie knows their lines — plays them out, his feet pounding time, whole body urgent to the metre, scanning their food-place … “et comme desert nous avons pâtisseries françaises … fromages … crême caramel….” He is almost malevolent … the “crême caramel” only comes out after a hopeful pause, and then is said with culminating authority in the absence of theirs.
I can’t take any more of this … watch the TV an instant. Reduced to that. Paul-Marie pounces on the kitchen, armed to the teeth with his orders … his pots-au-feu bubbling for only him and me, and now only him — as I am a hit-and-run victim of TV. The trio play out their night’s engagement. For one unperceived moment, witless, I realize how fine the terrine is … catch the colour of it out the corner of my eye … “colour”? — yes, that is what it is — I see colour on the TV screen, and realize abruptly I am nibbling the terrine and catching its kaleidoscope … catching all the essential out the corner of my eye. And then it is gone — just as I know it, it is gone … like the Place, with the map…. And I am gone, in absentia.
They have their crême caramel. My eyes are dry with the screen or I could cry. I want to go over … to wheedle. “Excuse me Sir … but Paul-Marie serves the only cêpes in town, as a savoury! Cêpes mesdamesmesdemoisellesmonsieurs! Cêpes! And un petit vin de paille. And with coffee, he has his own eau-de-vie, from his village, near Carcasson, it’s all on the menu … in English.” But I know if I wheedle they will mount their high horse and I shall have to take out my knife and cut off the vestiges of their humanhood, scrotumsacking them with a single twist of knife like coring dead apple for stewpot….
I am out on the street again. Sauve qui peut! Told Paul-Marie I would come back later in the week … that this was but a tour de reconnaissance. Bandying towards me, short legs, crooked nose with dilating nostril (left one), deep bruised eyesockets, barrel chesting over those legs … a reporter turns in to Le Devoir: God — how habitant he still is … Habitant! But he has just turned my country inside out with his “quiet revolution” — 150 years too late.
Oh God — that’s it … my country, my eyesight, my taste … all gone now! I knew I had forgotten something. I had forgotten everything. And La Place … I stumble my faith down la rue Notre Dame, blinkered, saving me again for La Place d’Armes. Past la rue Bonsecours with its church, and La Maison Papineau, and the Chateau de Ramezay, and the Hotel de Ville, and the Court Houses, old and new … screening them with my televizor, to evade stumbling over them in my dark. To La Place. And only there open my eyes, wide opened, to embrace La Place … mumbling “I’ve come … I’ve come … look, I’ve come back, I promised.”
It’s gone too. Why fool myself? There’s nothing there. Oh, there’s something — I see the outlines, delimiting the buildings around La Place. And with an effort, from memory, I can still name them — at least the major ones — clockwisely, from St. James Street side — new and old Bank of Montreal, that pair of skyscrapers on the east side — one with the old Banque Cdne nationale, the other, the old Providence Life Building. Behind me l’église Notre Dame and its Presbytery … But it’s all irrelevant now. The veil has come down in me, over my eyes. I am shut off — cannot see, nor hear, nor touch. Look again at the Place — no, it’s just a postcard there now, a site through a viewer, and even that is ebbing from me.
So that is it — I came to La Place, to prove possession of it, to fling it in the face of the infidels, to cower them with the reality they have sacrificed, and, at the very moment of proof, find I have already lost it … lost everything.
Stumble up the steps of the Church, can’t harm me now, no longer; sit down, go and sit down, enter and slump in the first pew … slump my body still ironclad around my core, body frozen over me frozen in my own steep freeze … ironsides … and dump me here, moribund. My eyes rebut the body of the Church I can no longer see, sweeping over its body — in a reassurance that I am unscathed by it, and even as I confirm the armour-plating I am stabbed … from the right, and I turn stunned to the face of the wound, follow the trajectory of thrust from my flank, across the aisle till I am up to our hilt in the eyeballs of a youth who curious appraises my arrival. I withtract instantly, close the ironclad, close … but I have been penetrated and cannot and look back up again along the same trajectory of sight and am imbedded again in those eyes on me … stumble back out of the Church that sudden flares in me, anywhere … and as I exit, turn to exorcize those eyes and still cannot, and now we are talking under the huge arcade of the entry and walking in the light snowfall that I feel against the hot socket of my left eye windsown.
Down the sidestreet by the Church, and after a five-minute walk the bar closes around us and we are babbling. Deep inside I am taut, closed … I Know where I am, but I don’t want to know … I Know this is the last remedy, the disastrous prerequisite, but don’t want to know. Peer cautiously at the barroom … there are about 75 of us here … I glue my arsehold to the chairseat like bitch in heat, while trying to wag my tale in self-deprecatory