The Origin of Species (7 page)

Domenic’s beefy son Carmen took Alex’s order. Domenic hadn’t so much as looked over at him—it was all part of the intricate push-and-pull
of insider relations, made subtle by a hundred different forces, the noodle salesman, the empty restaurant, that Domenic was from Campobasso, the provincial capital, while Alex’s people were from the boonies. Fucking Italians. Yet every time Alex set eyes on Domenic, he felt a visceral tug. It was the mountain look of him, hard and stoic and plain; his mother’s look. It was ancient, that look, you could feel that; the look of the Samnites, Alex thought, the old Sabine tribe of their parts. It didn’t show up much in his father, but Alex knew why—his people had come to the mountains a mere few generations back, fleeing some blood feud or crime, something Alex had learned from a cousin on his last pass through Italy, along with a few other facts about his family he’d never had any inkling of.

He ought to have picked up a paper before coming in. He and Félix had more or less dropped the Berlitz lesson book in favor of open conversation, unbeknownst, of course, to Alex’s Nazi boss, Mme Hertz. But now, with Félix, Alex had to go in fully armed and fully informed, lest he make the mistake of simply falling back on his usual half-baked orthodoxies. He’d almost lost it when Félix had defended Reagan’s bombing spree in Libya.

“But it was all staged!” Alex had said at once, though he’d barely scanned the articles on the subject. “That whole nightclub thing in Berlin, they didn’t even have any proof!”

Félix had merely shrugged his Gallic shrug, with an equanimity that had made Alex feel like the worst sort of conspiracy theorist. “So people say. Maybe it’s true, but so far nobody said what’s a better way.”

Anywhere else in the country Alex could have comfortably relied on a knee-jerk anti-Americanism, but not here in Quebec, where they still regretted not having joined the Americans in the Revolution. Alex was sick of it, all this pussyfooting around the minefields of nationalist politics, except that Félix, for some reason, had remained his most reliable customer, making possible indulgences like this restaurant lunch.

Carmen had brought out his penne, along with some sort of seafood antipasto that Alex had never seen on the menu.

“Did I order that?”

Carmen nodded toward his father, who was still talking to the noodle salesman.

“On the house,” he said, then motioned with his chin to say, Eat.

With Alex’s after-meal coffee—nothing like cappuccino here, just thick-as-crude espresso—the bill came to four ninety-five. A good deal, though with the expenses of the morning he was already way over his daily budget. He added a buck as a tip, given the antipasto, despite the fact that he’d had to choke the stuff down. Ever since his overexposure to fish in the Galápagos, any kind of seafood and he’d feel his gag reflex kick in.

I guess it happens, doesn’t it, one bad experience and it puts you off a thing for life
.

Well, Peter, I’m not sure “bad experience” really captures the magnitude of the matter
.

He popped up to his apartment again to change and get his Berlitz book, not daring to risk the wrath of Fräulein Hertz if he showed up without it. From there it was a quick dash over to University to Berlitz’s beautifully corporate offices. Alex had always thought of Berlitz as some fusty Old World holdover, but politics had served it well in Quebec, where it did a brisk trade among anglophones getting francisized under the hated Bill 101 and among francophones who’d thumbed their noses at English in their youth and now couldn’t get by without it. Alex had been hired at breakneck speed: three days of training and then plopped in a tony classroom at the princely sum of eight seventy-three an hour before a select handful of students toting their combination-lock briefcases and Chanel handbags stuffed with Berlitz workbooks and pads and complimentary pens.

He had to suppress a thrill of pleasure whenever he entered the Berlitz offices. The hush; the smell of the air; the sense of having penetrated, however obliquely and under whatever false pretenses, the inner sanctum. He breezed past reception to avoid a sighting of Mme Hertz and toward the warren of classrooms. Through closed doors he caught the reassuring patter of the Method: question and response, the Berlitz catechism. The order of it, the mindlessness, was a balm after the chaos of St. Bart’s. A gulf divided this place from St. Bart’s and yet he knew that in his toady’s heart this was the work he took more seriously, as if St. Bart’s was just slumming, a time-waster, a sop.

Félix was already waiting for him in one of the big leather armchairs set out in the special room reserved for executive one-on-ones. He rose to take Alex’s hand as he came in, towering over him like a rebuke.

“I suppose today you give me the
coup de grâce
,” he said, with the undertone of deference that always put Alex on edge, so little had he done to earn it. Alex felt the flush of conflicted emotion rise up in him that Félix always stirred, a strange mix of attraction and its denial. He was only a businessman, after all, patrician and gray, always in those suits of his carefully styled to give a hint of the casual but which probably cost three times as much as the stereo Alex had begrudged Miguel.

He wasn’t wearing one today, though.

“Ah, yes, I’ve just come from home,” he said, as if to excuse himself, though he was dressed in a cashmere pullover and plush cords that still gave him the air of the scion of some old seigneurial line.

Six weeks now, Alex had been meeting with Félix, as often as three times a week. From the outset he’d decided Félix was exactly the sort of smug, chip-on-his-shoulder Quebecois that everyone west of Cornwall thought was the norm here: it was that Gallic manner of his, like a sudden chill in the room, as if it fell to Alex somehow to carry the full blame for their coming together. Alex had started their first class with his standard opener in these one-on-ones, asking about Félix’s work.

“I don’t want to talk about that, it’s very technical,” Félix had said tersely, and right off the tone between them had been set, and Alex had seen his entire lesson suddenly give way to empty space.

All through their early sessions there had been this strange tussle of foray and resistance, as if Alex were some student wasting Félix’s time for a school project. They’d chance onto a subject that showed promise, but then just when they’d reached a certain momentum Alex would manage to derail things with an ill-considered question or found himself floundering in the vast bogs of his own ignorance. Félix would grunt, he’d stare at his hands, then lapse into silence.

“Ah, well, yes,” he’d say finally, with his little frown. “So.” And that would be the end of it.

They got onto literature once—Alex ought to have been grateful, someone actually literate for a change—but very quickly Alex ended up in the usual cul-de-sac: all of Félix’s background was in the classics, and in French texts Alex had never heard of, or had only gazed at on library shelves.

“It’s normal,” Félix said, in what seemed his idea of making allowances. “The schools now, they don’t teach these things. At my school it was different. You’ve heard of it, I suppose, Jean de Brébeuf, it was
Trudeau’s school, but they were all the same, those schools, very rigorous. I don’t think you have that on your own side.”

Arrogant nob
, Alex had thought. He hadn’t missed Félix’s ploy of mentioning Trudeau only to dismiss him, so he could have his pedigree and eat it too—they were all the same, these bloody nationalists, always playing both sides, damning the priests and then naming the metro stops after them, holding Trudeau up as a proof of their worldliness and then deriding him as a sellout.

“Of course, my own son, he’s like you,” Félix said, adding salt to the thing. “Latin, Greek, it doesn’t matter to him, only TV and sports.”

Alex doubted, indeed, that Leamington High, where he’d spent most of his time mooning over girls he’d never had a hope in hell with and working hard to keep his marks below the eighties, had come anywhere near the rigors of a classical lycée. What he remembered most about high school now, in fact, were the stupid fights he used to get into, over every minor insult. He’d had the rage back then as well: someone would cross him and he’d feel the blackness rise up, the sense he’d do anything to cause harm, although the instant he’d struck the first blow something would recoil in him and the fight would be lost. Somehow he couldn’t picture Félix in fights back at Brébeuf—he was probably one of those swanners who belonged to the tennis club and thought of themselves as the elite-in-waiting. Alex had managed to get out of Hertz that he was some sort of big wheel over at the Alcan head office: part of the
maîtres chez nous
generation, Alex figured, all those Quebecois technocrats and middle managers who’d seen getting ahead in the system as a way of sticking it to the English.

No doubt Félix came to Berlitz just to sharpen up his pronoun agreements for his business junkets to Toronto and New York, lest the Anglos get one over on him. It was not for Alex to pass judgment, of course, not in the Method, not over Félix’s thin-skinned nationalism or his Reaganite socialism or his perorations on Latin and Greek. But that didn’t mean he had to pander to him. He would sit there in stoic forbearance, ceding nothing, hoping language rights didn’t come up or native land claims or how to divvy up the national debt.

Alex hadn’t waited long, however, before putting a bit of distance between him and the Anglos by slipping in a mention of his own Latin roots.

“
Ah, vous êtes italien
,” Félix said, as if registering a mental correction.

Afterward, Alex wished he had left Félix to keep imagining him an Alex Brown or an Alex McPhee—Mme Hertz didn’t like to advertise surnames, given that ones like his own didn’t exactly trumpet competence in English—because Félix, it turned out, knew Florence, and now Alex had to put up with being bested on his own turf, Piero della Francesca this and Santa Croce that. The closest Alex had ever got to Florence was a short stop in the dingy outskirts for gas during a family trip when he was twelve, some spindly tower rising up in the hazy distance that to this day he couldn’t give a name to.

“But you must go, of course,” Félix said gravely, as if Alex’s humanity depended on it. “Or perhaps you are not so interested in art and so on.”

“No, no, it’s not that, my last girlfriend was an artist.” Why had he said that? He was coming off as an ass. “Just the time, I guess.”

Félix gave his little grunt.

“Well, you’re still young, I suppose. Young enough.”

Alex breathed a sigh of relief after their third session: three sessions at a go was usually the upper limit for Mme Hertz. She didn’t like her people getting too chummy with the clientele, lest the Method lose pride of place; instructors had to remain interchangeable, like priests in the Church. But then his schedule came up and Félix was still on it.

Fucking Hertz
, he thought, thinking she had it in for him, until she headed him off before his next lesson looking distinctly unpleased.

“He’s asked for you,” she hissed, as if he’d committed some heresy.

Alex hardly knew what to make of that. Maybe it was because Félix had found out that he was Italian.

“After our last session?”

“No. From the start.”

It was probably just that he was so innocuous, the kind of blank slate people like Félix preferred because they could leave their own mark on it. But he couldn’t help liking Félix a little better after that. Maybe he’d misjudged the man; maybe he’d been struggling as much as Alex to find some sort of common ground. Whether they actually had any was an open question, but Alex wasn’t an idiot, he could see there was something admirable in Félix amidst all that starched dignity. Things had gone better from then on. If Alex stuck to innocuous subjects like travel and points of grammar, there was a lot less of the grunting and bristling he’d had to contend with at the outset. Félix’s fondness for things Italian
slowly warmed to what seemed an actual
chaleur
toward Alex, the source of that vexing deference, no doubt, though what was vexing about it was probably Alex’s fear of losing it. But what truly fired the man up was English idiom: he’d show up with some irksome new phrase he’d come across and put it before Alex like a personnel problem he couldn’t solve or an insult that had been flung at him, and then an entire session might pass tracing the byways of it, down through the whole sluttish history of the English language. Alex was on solid ground here, thanks to a course he’d done on the subject.

He brought in some poems in Middle English, and Félix was fascinated at how much of the Norman showed through in them.

“It’s true: we don’t think of it, but of course the court was all French then. It’s an interesting thing, these histories. All those fights between English and French, it’s like a fight between brothers. They’re always the worst.”

This was as close as Félix ever got to levity on these sorts of issues; Alex didn’t push the point, lest he accidentally cross some forbidden border into the sacrosanct. Félix was a man of compartments, Alex sensed, everything carefully squirreled away in its separate drawer. All the weeks they’d spent together, and yet Alex had learned almost nothing about him: Félix had never mentioned his son again after that once; he’d never mentioned a home, his colleagues, a wife. Alex had learned more about Esther in an hour than he knew about Félix, though three times a week he’d been paid to do nothing but talk to him.

Félix was still standing at the window gazing up toward the McGill campus, though Alex had taken his seat and gone through the motion of opening up his Berlitz book, in case Madame checked up on him. There was an uncertain energy to Félix today, a distractedness. Maybe it was just the clothes—he looked thinner in them, more vulnerable.

“You know, why do we sit here in this terrible office?” he said. “We should go out. Come, I’ll offer you a drink.”

This was definitely crossing a Berlitz line.

“I’m not sure,” Alex started. “I should let them know—”