The Origin of Species (22 page)

Dr. Klein’s door, as usual, was ajar. Alex, his heart pounding by then and his armpits drenched with sweat, paused a moment to collect himself, then pushed through and said quickly, “Sorry I’m late.”

Dr. Klein was staring out the window. As far as Alex knew there was nothing to see out there except some kind of storage yard boxed in by the hospital’s other wings. The doctor turned as Alex came in but instead of the tight, unrevealing quarter-smile he always had whenever Alex was late, his mouth opened an instant in what looked like surprise.

“Oh,” he said.

“I was at a conference,” Alex said, flustered. “I completely forgot.”

“It’s fine. It’s fine.”

Alex took off his jacket and shoes and lay down. After months of chafing at every reference to his lateness, he thought,
It can’t be fine
. If it was fine, then it meant nothing. If it meant nothing, then maybe all of this, all these days and weeks and months—as he’d always suspected; as he’d always feared—meant nothing as well.

“Maybe it was because I was with María,” he started.

He was glad he’d got María in off the top instead of having to finagle her in later. He wouldn’t have predicted it, but María had ended up dominating his time here. Meanwhile all the rest—Ingrid, Desmond, Liz—remained stagnating in the usual backwater where Alex kept them.

He was waiting for Dr. Klein to pick up his cue.

“We ran into another friend of mine,” Alex said finally. “Félix. It was a bit awkward.”

Another pause, but then Dr. Klein said, “Félix?” with the irritating shorthand he had for flagging points he wanted elaborated, and Alex felt on familiar ground again.

“Not a friend, really. A student. From Berlitz.”

And so they began.

María had come into their sessions through the sort of subterfuge Alex used to sneak in anything suspect, in this case by couching it in high-mindedness.

“It just seems so self-indulgent,” he’d said, striking a new low for sleaze. “I think of my Salvadoran friend, and what she’s probably been through, and then of me lying here every day talking about my little problems.”

“But you’re still here,” Dr. Klein had interrupted, in a rare instance of
unvarnished impatience, which had shut Alex up. But once María had entered the picture he found any number of ways to obsess over her, dreams she’d figured in, anxieties she’d touched off, contact he’d made through her with his Feminine Archetype. It was mostly bogus, just a way of being with her in a way he couldn’t be in real life, yet often his family crept into things when she came up, oddly, since she wasn’t anything like them. Not his mother, who was as phlegmatic and un-Latin as he was; not either of his sisters, whom he could not recall having ever seen on a dance floor except maybe doing the chicken dance and who would surely have looked at him as if he were deranged had he ever tried to kiss them. But then maybe María was not like María either. Despite how energy flowed out from her like heat from a stove she had a strange reserve, as if there was something important she was holding back. It made him think of the Samnites, his mother’s people—they were tough mountaineers, not Latins at all. The Latins had conquered them, but they had held themselves apart. That was his mother through and through, beleaguered but unbowed.

In El Salvador, rather more recently, there had been
la Matanza
, a great massacre of peasants after an uprising that had managed in a matter of weeks what four hundred years of colonization had not: the almost total assimilation of the country’s Indians, who’d been blamed for the revolt and had quickly erased every mark of distinction to save their lives. El Salvador was a country of half-breeds now, what María surely was: no more Latin than Alex, just another of the world’s conquered indigenes. He took heart from this at first, as if he’d discovered some secret of birth that threw over an insuperable obstacle to their coming together.

“Yes,
la Matanza
,” María had said when he’d brought the subject up, in that pointed tone of hers. “Of course is very important.”

And that had been the end of the matter.

The problem with his own family, maybe, was that they weren’t anything at all. They didn’t eat well, as Italians should, weren’t especially good Catholics, had never been especially close. The only time he could remember his mother hugging him when he was a kid was when he’d got lost once at the Heinz picnic. He could still picture the instant when they’d been reunited, how her face had lit up, as if some child in her had got loose.

He was still talking about Félix.

“It’s a little surprising,” Dr. Klein said, sounding almost peeved, “that you’ve never mentioned him before.”

Alex took some pleasure at that.

“Oh? Do you think he’s important?”

What he remembered most about his childhood now weren’t particular incidents but an atmosphere, pleasant enough when he was small but then growing thick with something, what he might call shame, but that at the time had seemed more particular, like an odor his family gave off. The worst had been when David had lost his arm—he still didn’t like to think about that. He had walked home from school after a field trip to find his brothers and sisters home instead of at work and his grandmother crying in the kitchen.

“What happened?”

“
S’ha fatte male
,” she said. He got hurt.

He had to piece things together. Gus sat hunched at the kitchen table; Bruno sat in the living room, staring at the blank TV.

“It was from the tractor,” Mimi said. “He must have grabbed the power takeoff.”

What was the power takeoff?

“Oh.”

Later his parents returned and then the visitors came, people who at least weren’t crazy with hurt, who made the thing look almost bearable. But at some point the wailing started and Alex left the house. He wasn’t sure where was safe, and ended up in the doghouse with the dog. The place had a sharp, feral smell. He felt uncomfortable and false in there, in a way he couldn’t explain, and meanwhile the dog clearly resented him, shifting and turning and finally shambling outside.

He had made his pact with God there, in the doghouse, but it was just a rattle of desperate promises, of privations, the priesthood, if this moment would pass. He had known it was for nothing. Whatever was out there in the night beyond the dark, he couldn’t feel it.

He had an image of his father that Sunday kneeling in church and bawling like a child, there in front of everyone. But he could also see him, that same service, taking a toothpick from his pocket to clean out his ear—they might as well be animals, Alex had thought, they might as well just shit right there on the floor of the church.

He had fallen silent. God forbid he should ever mention any of this stuff to Dr. Klein.

“You were talking about Félix,” Dr. Klein said.

“Sorry.” It was the stink of the doghouse somehow that always came back to him, how insufficient and wrong it had made everything feel. “I was thinking about my brother David.”

He waited for it, the doctor’s flag.

David?

“I think our time’s up for today.”

The doctor stood hovering next to Alex as he put on his jacket.

“I’ll have to cancel our sessions for the rest of the week,” he said. “Something’s come up.”

“Oh.” It felt like a punishment. “That’s fine.”

“So I’ll see you again Monday.”

The doctor was already closing the door behind him.
Fuck you
, Alex thought, wanting to kick him, to crack his skull, though knowing that Monday he’d be back.

O
utside, his resolve already vanished, he lit up a cigarette at once. The sun had warmed the air to a stubborn October heat, though Alex caught a downdraft off the mountain that felt like winter crouching in wait. At least Jiri would be gone by the time he got home, he could be grateful for that. Jiri had moved in with him exactly around the time all the plumbing work had started—“Just for a couple of days,” he’d said—so that the past weeks had been hellish. By a stroke of luck some sort of domestic crisis had called him away to Toronto, where his wife and son had decamped, just in time to leave Alex alone for his evening with María.

He was still making his pilgrimages past Trudeau’s house. Across the way the Cuban consulate sat virtually unchanged from the spring, the upper windows still boarded and scorch marks from the firebombing still showing on the stone. Alex felt less pleased than he used to at Trudeau’s intimacy with the place: all summer long he’d seen the actions coming in against Fidel in his Amnesty updates, this one jailed for some leaflet, that one kicked out of his house or his job. It wasn’t the bone-crushing stuff of the big-league tyrannies, just this constant wearing away, a little message The Revolution sent to its dissenters that they were out of step. Alex knew the argument, the collective over the individual, but Trudeau had staked his whole career on the individual, then there he was pitching his tent across from Mr. Castro as if he were ready to receive the man at a moment’s notice.

There was another collectivist living just up the street, Alex had learned, whom Trudeau was less likely to be inviting over any time soon: his old nemesis Lévesque. Alex hardly knew what to make of that. Even
Alex, for all his disdain of Canadian politics, thought of the battle between these two in mythic terms, Goliath to David, Achilles to Hector, Apollo to Dionysus. Now they were both ensconced in their modest retirement homes—Trudeau, mind you, true to form, in a house of Architectural Significance while Lévesque, always the poor cousin, was in a condo building with all the personality of a Howard Johnson’s—not five hundred yards from one another, like the wolf and sheepdog in the cartoon Alex had watched as a kid who used every foul means to outwit one another all the day long but then punched the clock promptly at five and parted amicably. What made it even stranger was that the two of them were here on this unlikely stretch of busy road at the very foothills of Westmount, which rose up beyond Côte des Neiges into shaded side streets and cul-de-sacs watched over by private security, as if they were both, after all, still the colonial lackeys of old, begging for scraps at the gates of the Anglo establishment.

That wasn’t a sentiment that Alex was ever likely to voice around Félix—there were certain places, he realized, where Félix’s sense of irony wouldn’t go. Whenever they got anywhere near these sorts of issues Alex could feel an East bloc carefulness coming over him.

“It isn’t so much to ask, to learn the language of a place.” That had been Félix’s brisk dismissal of the spat with Louie. “It’s not racism to say so. If I come to your country, I do the same.”

There was no argument to make to this sort of reasonableness. Félix was right, surely, Louie had simply been grandstanding, yet the more time Alex spent with Félix the more he felt surrounded by the unsayable.

Félix lived in Outremont, on the other side of the mountain. The streets there were laid out in long rows of stately two- and three-story multiplexes, dark-bricked and white-trimmed and close as if the hodgepodge of the rest of the city had found here its perfect order. A hundred years earlier the place had been no more than unpeopled bush, yet Alex had the sense in its streets of an old, foreign life going on around him reaching back to the notaries and priests of the
ancien régime
and to squint-eyed officials in drafty offices near the port recording customs duties and census rolls.

He passed whole families of Hasidic Jews hurrying along the sidewalks sometimes, looking, in their strange jackets and curls and hats, as if they had just stepped fresh from the eighteenth century.

“They were very smart,” Félix had said. “They bought a lot here before the referendum, very cheap. Now, of course, it’s worth much more.”

Alex tried not to listen too carefully to comments like these, afraid of the moment they might overstep. In any event, different rules seemed to apply out here, on the other side—the feeling he’d always had of living in the midst of a mongrel non-culture, without claims or preferments, yielded to a sense of hegemony and right. Félix’s house, up toward the mountain, where the multiplexes gave way to restrained single-family homes, was a four-square place in brick and rusticated stone that conveyed a sense of generational solidity. Inside it was all rich wood hues and high ceilings and original moldings, books everywhere and polished antiques and framed posters of art exhibitions, Klimt at the
MOMA
, Man Ray in Paris, the Hermitage exhibition at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.

They had their lessons in a room lined with leather-bound books from Félix’s classical education. Félix brought out wine and crudités; he allowed Alex to smoke.

“So,” he’d said, their first lesson, settling in an armchair and tucking up his pant legs like a Gentleman at Home, “maybe we should start by getting to know each other a little more. Now that we’re free of Mme Hertz.”

That had remained the tenor of their sessions, this sense of being slightly delinquent, beyond jurisdiction. Félix kept a notebook where he’d jot down phrases and points of grammar he wanted to discuss, but after the calculated featurelessness of the Berlitz offices, it was enough for Alex simply to look around him to find a conversation point. Photographs that Félix had taken lined the hallways, carefully matted and framed like works in a gallery. He had done a series on the street kids of Rio, brooding black-and-white shots that Alex wouldn’t have expected of him, that would have required him to wander in dangerous neighborhoods, to speak to these children, to gain their trust.

“It’s a hobby since I was young. Just, you know, to keep the soul alive.”

There were shots of gaunt-faced uncles and aunts, of a brother in the priesthood, of weddings and feasts. In the entrance hall was a family shot Félix had taken as a young man in front of the house he’d grown up in in Longueuil, a bungalow in fieldstone and yellow brick that might have been in any fifties suburb on the continent. His family, a sprawling bevy
of them, were poised on the front steps like a paradigm of the middle class, the males with their hair slicked back and the females all in bobs.