Appropriate Place Read Online Free PDF Page A

wouldn’t
have been able to see anything.
    What was it I wanted? she thinks that evening, crammed with the play
of a man who is still adolescent. Before her, the Rivière des Prairies, which are no
longer prairies but fields of bungalows and towers that are also crammed with
seniors in small apartments, the pink streak of the sun dying drowsily over
Montreal, the horizon barred all the way to the United States. The strata of a
country about which some wrote poems at the time when she did or did not wear
panties under a miniskirt or a long robe that had come from Africa, like the words
of Frantz Fanon.
    Three
    AN ORDINARY HANDSAW could have cut up
what remained of the two caraganas planted at the beginning of June and dead in
August. But the contractor arrived with a small excavator, chainsaws and two
workers, through some misunderstanding that’s still unsolved, if Gabrielle is to
judge by the chorus of curses rising from the lawn.
    With the powerful voice of a skinny man, the owner of the garden-level
apartment declares that they must also remove the hedge of honeysuckle, it grows
like a weed and blocks the view of the river, its roots are so tenacious that
drastic measures are called for. The owners’ meeting, he claims, had agreed on the
principle of putting in low plants so that people on the garden level (even though,
as he doesn’t add, they’ve paid less for their three rooms and kitchen) can enjoy
the building’s interesting location as much as the people on the upper floors. As
proof, he brings up the caraganas with their twisted trunks, whose thin, drooping
branches should have grown low and broad if the acid soil hadn’t killed them so
quickly.
    From the fourth floor Gabrielle hears only the rumbling of the debate
— including the indignant barbs of Fatima, who hasn’t been ordered to make the
honeysuckle disappear and who dares to confront the mule-headed man. Pierre is
familiar with the quarrel because he’s heard it more clearly from his place. He
tells Gabrielle when he arrives that she should watch out for that Monsieur Poupart.
“His wife has one cheek purple from a burn, she’d spilled a bottle of oil and to
punish her he set fire to it and she won’t lodge a complaint.” In his opinion, it’s
the husband who killed the caraganas by pretending to water them during the summer
drought, who knows what mixture he was using? Honeysuckle can take anything, it’s
common.
    Long after the workers have gone, leaving the hedge intact, angry
hissing rises up from the terrace of apartment 101, where the brute tells his wife
at length about what he plans to do. Like a saw, he in turn disturbs the morning
air, which had been washed by a cooler night, at last.
    In the yard, the cutting has been done cleanly, the remains of the
trunks blend with the mulch, the tired grass appears to have been tonsured for some
autumnal ceremony, Gabrielle tells Pierre, who doesn’t understand the image. “What’s
a tonsure?” She laughs at this child who has never known priests. He’s better off
that way. Besides, the last one she’d known had brought bad luck.
    â€œIt’s a sign of chastity,” she said. Though she knows nothing about
it. She assumes that the ridiculous shaving of the top of the head was intended to
lessen desire for women. Surely it’s hard to caress a man whose brain has been
denuded by some old bishop dressed like a vestal virgin. His kisses must reek of the
void.
    Pierre inquires about that last priest she’d known.
    She wouldn’t swear that Damien Perreault had been an abbé, despite the
premature baldness that suggested it, as well as what he gave her to understand
about a stay at the monastery of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, in Brittany, where he had
apparently been introduced to the teachings of the monk Abélard. Saint-Gildas was a
small seaside resort with a handful of inns that were more inviting than its