Appropriate Place by Lise Bissonnette Page B

party caucus was shut away for two days in a downtown
hotel, a kind of meditation before the upcoming battle of the referendum on
sovereignty; it was unthinkable for the minister of cultural affairs, who was being
counted on to rally the artistic community and to find words for the most memorable
slogans, to turn up, out of place, at a gathering, even an obscure one, of
opponents.
    She didn’t even know in which cemetery he had been buried. She thought
that now she had plenty of time to make inquires, to place a rose on his grave or
even, if it wasn’t too late in the summer, to plant a perennial. After all, the
match between them was a tie — nothing they had debated had reached a conclusion,
twisted minds on all sides had manipulated the fearful, who held the fate of the
world in their dried-up brains and constantly postponed deciding what it was until
the morrow. It was indeed impossible for the poets to extricate any images from this
limbo, the only truly lasting inheritance of the catechism. They were no more
inspiring than the junkyards that the country was full of, which were beginning to
be recycled into flea markets.
    What had become of his library? He’d had the intelligence, or the
pity, to bequeath it to someone other than Gabrielle, or to the National Library of
Canada, which prided itself on assembling a world-class compilation but whose poetry
collection, save for the required legal deposit in our two languages, was until then
very limited. Few would note it because few had complained.
    Five
    A FIRE IS AN EVENT far less spectacular
today than it was during Gabrielle’s childhood, when there were regular
conflagrations, winter and summer, with the tremendous noise of blazes swallowing up
the possessions of large families and sometimes one of the children, who would be
found under his little iron bed, burned to death. The entire school would then file
past the gilt-handled ivory coffin that would take the dead child to paradise. Long
after the firemen had left, the bowels of the kitchen could still be made out, with
walls where hung, miraculously, a holy picture or a calendar. And over the following
days, the victims had time to force their way cautiously to the cellar, where they
would recover the useless objects relegated there. If it was January, the month most
conducive to overheating, the place would be devastated until spring, and the dead
child’s soul would remain frozen in the vicinity — an object lesson for young
smokers of the cigarettes to which many of these disasters were attributed, to the
unrelenting shame of their parents who often had to resign themselves to fleeing to
other neighbourhoods.
    There was nothing like that in the new suburbs. If the fire had been
caused by smoking, as might have been the case in a neighbouring house that night,
it was easily contained thanks to the fire-retardant materials used nowadays for
sofas and mattresses; it was very rare now for a bed to become a child’s tomb. And
in the event of more serious negligence — cooking fat catching fire or the improper
use of some electrical appliance — the flames rarely went beyond the inside walls,
stopped by the increasingly effec-tive firewalls required by law. Television still
showed the occasional sequence of a carnage that had decimated a family, but they
nearly always took place in the country, to people who were not only impoverished
and poorly housed, but also careless. In Laval, in a neighbourhood such as rue des
Bouleaux, people had at most been wakened by sirens around three a.m. Only two homes
had been briefly evacuated and in less than a week the traces of soot were gone from
around the ground-floor windows. All that remained of the tragedy — for it was one,
it was learned that it had been a deliberate act of vengeance by a teenager
forbidden to see her boyfriend — was the ongoing traffic of service vehicles:
cleaners, carpenters, carpet layers, electricians. The