Appropriate Place by Lise Bissonnette

who knows what embassy: he
had prepared well for the pause.
    His name was Champfleur, a ridiculous one for a man reputed to be
grim, though he did have a silky way of shaking hands. He settled her —
deliberately, it seemed to her — in the
voltaire
chair with too many studs
that sat next to his enormous library, the kind that seems to have been purchased by
the metre by parvenus. But she was wrong to think that. While he was attending to
his platters, she saw that what he had assembled there was a sizeable collection of
the world’s poetry, meticulously bound, ordered, filed in our two original or
translated languages. Nothing else.
    She asked the most idiotic of questions.
    â€œHave you read them all?”
    There was irritation in his smile. “I tell ladies, or young ladies,
that I have no more need to read all these books than they need to wear all their
jewels.”
    But he soon took pity. “Anyway, I see that you wear very few.” It
would have taken more kindly remarks to mitigate Gabrielle’s feelings of inadequacy,
she who had come to cultural affairs without knowing personally a single poet, much
less an entire opus, except for bits that had been made into songs. As for the
troubadours of the land who celebrated its powerful panoramas and assigned its
animal might to its men, she kept them to one side. Sociology makes one invulnerable
to collective illusions, to anthropomorphic drift, even if it’s carried along by the
most beautiful music. If she believed in the rebirth of Quebec it was through other
forms of progress than those that accompany grand sentiments.
    While he was pouring inexhaustible champagne and teaching her how
cream and black bread together had been setting off sturgeon eggs since the time
when French singers were at once rending and refining Russian hearts, Étienne
Champfleur talked to her about the importance of poetry, of which he read very
little.
    â€œMy walls are cushioned with words. I have close at hand when I need
it all the ways, brilliant or naive, to express all the states of mind and body of a
lifetime, and several lifetimes wouldn’t be enough. They are there, I’m sure of it,
they have existed and sometimes still exist, in other places. I like owning them,
the way others amass great wines that they don’t drink. Besides, we couldn’t taste
them. We have had the misfortune, you and I, to be born into a world immunized
against tragedy. Here, all of us can consummate our loves before we lose them, which
makes the loss less painful, and we die from accident or disease, at a normal age
most of the time. Horrors are rare, we experience them by proxy. I will even tell
you that you’re right to steer clear of our poets, their greatest tragedy is not to
have one, and to use words like forceps to bring them into being. They lack
agitation, cruelty, they have nothing to do with them. I’ve classified them
separately, with their calculated sadness. I’ll change my mind, I’ll follow you when
just one of them is overjoyed with our mediocrity, with being the Job of our own
dung heap.”
    He fell silent. She didn’t really understand. The champagne blunted
her attention, and while she thought she’d understood a warning against strong
emotions, she was suddenly very unhappy, or allowed herself to become so at this
time of night, so far from everything she thought she hoped for. She was not yet
forty years old, her body was a minor parenthesis in her lover’s life, poetry was a
wall in a strange house, in a stubborn city. Power was beginning to please her and
she knew that that was bad. Tomorrow, others would compose for her statements as
hollow as those of her adolescence, and she would enjoy the press conference game.
How could she hate herself more than that? By knowing, like our poets, that you
don’t kill yourself over such a thing. That there would never be enough pain in the
entire lifetime of a bus