The Origin of Species Page 4

  Somehow it was not Dr. Klein, however, with whom he wanted to discuss these things. That would have been too awkward, really, too demeaning. From there, it would have been only a short step to making incontrovertible what for most of his life he had striven to hide from the world, namely the dark den of banality and self-absorption that his mind truly was. There were the self-improvement fantasies that kept his revenge ones company—I will be more generous; I will quit smoking; I will learn Spanish; I will call home more often; I will stop plotting stupid revenge fantasies; I will become a better, more perfect person—or the embarrassing interviews he was forever conducting with himself in his head, and that probably constituted his main mode of self-presence. The interviews were particularly insidious. Alex himself could hardly believe how much of his mind time they took up, and yet he couldn’t seem to muster whatever strength of will it might take to put an end to them.

  They had been going on now for as long as he could remember. At the very least, since he was nine or ten: that was when he and his brother Gus had started watching The Tonight Show, on those nights when their father stayed late at the club. Even then he’d had delusions of grandeur, casting himself as a movie star or NHL whiz kid and aping the rhythms and turns of phrase of Johnny’s guests. Well, Johnny, I learned to skate on a little pond near our farm in an old pair of skates I paid two dollars for at Leamington Sporting Goods. Things like that. Usually real things he dressed up in one way or another. Not so differently from now.

  To tell you the truth, Peter, the idea goes back to a trip I made to the Galápagos in my mid-twenties.

  Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t that have been just around Darwin’s own age when he was there?

  Well, pretty close, as a matter of fact.

  At least he had moved on from Johnny to Peter Gzowski, though any number of guest hosts might make an appearance over the course of a day—Liz, his academic advisor, perfect strangers, indeed anyone, it seemed, except Dr. Klein. What was most disturbing about these exchanges was that it was almost impossible anymore for Alex to formulate a coherent thought outside of them. This meant that for most of his waking life the only way he knew his own mind, as it were, was through the suspect utterances that he contrived for his imaginary public. What did it mean to have a consciousness if the only way it was ever present to him was through this infernal talking head? Who was he, really, in all that? What did he really think? How could he know? All he really knew, in the end, were the canned opinions he put together for Peter Gzowski.

  It was all more evasion, of course, the mind’s endless editing, exactly the sort of thing analysis was supposed to get beyond. But so far, everything he said on the couch had the feel of being as calculated and processed as his mental interviews—there were no unexpected breakthroughs, no stumbling through the underbrush into sudden clearings, just the Talk Show of the Mind made incarnate. It was as if, for all his spite toward him, Alex was just trying to dazzle Dr. Klein with the crystal clarity of his thoughts. Or worse: he actually wanted to please him. Since the start of the analysis Alex’s dreams had taken on an almost parodic level of Freudian iconography, rivers and trains, rotting teeth, subterranean passageways, as if his mind were cribbing mental copies of The Collected Works to dredge up offerings for Dr. Klein.

  Alex’s father had made predictably frequent appearances in their sessions. Alex had told the story of the family dog his father had killed when Alex was four or five: this was a classic of his childhood, full of nuance and possibility. The dog, a stray they’d named Lassie after the TV dog, though it was a male, had been getting into the chickens, and his father had chased it down into the back fields and felled it with a couple of blasts of his shotgun. It would have been easy to portray his father as a villain in the matter, but instead Alex had made light of it, as if it had been a lark, merely the kind of thing everyone did in the country. But then why had he brought it up at all? It had been just another offering: see how I need you, the story seemed to say, see what a perfect Freudian disaster I am, hiding my pain.

  The thing was, there was no pain in his actual memory of the event—it had indeed been a lark, a veritable family adventure, almost festive in its sense of occasion. Dogs came and went in the country; if they were pests you drove them out to a deserted concession road to let some other farmer get stuck with them, or you got out your gun. When it came to it, his father had actually liked the dog, though Alex didn’t quite say this to Dr. Klein, or rather, he didn’t say it very convincingly. It wasn’t clear to Alex what exactly he had been trying to do, please Dr. Klein or mislead him, vilify his father or excuse him. Maybe it had just been his way of introducing the whole issue of his father’s brutality, except that even there he was on shaky ground—when he tried to tally up in his mind the real instances of violence, he couldn’t come up with more than a meager handful, none of them touching on him directly. What had always been worse had been the shame afterward, how his father had sulked for days or weeks after some outburst so that they’d have to keep living the thing like a penance.

  Eleven minutes remaining. Still enough time, perhaps, to bring up something of import. Ingrid’s letter was the really pressing thing, he knew that; everything else was just noise. In his mind’s eye he saw it again, Ingrid’s familiar airy script, which had always made his heart leap, and then the familiar red and blue of the airmail stripes. The letter had reached him so freakishly it seemed to have been delivered by the very hand of fate—it was that blasted article of his in Canadian Studies again, which somehow had turned up in, of all places, a teacher education center in Lund. By chance Ingrid had seen it, and had written him, care of the journal; by chance the journal—since he’d happened to update them when he’d moved to Montreal to keep up his free-subscription-in-lieu-of-payment, though he never actually read the thing—had had his address. What were the odds of that chain of events? And yet the letter had come. The upshot of the letter was this: he had a son.

  Eight minutes. Blah, blah, blah. Liz this and Liz that. What he did not say was the truth: that Liz was not to blame in any way. She might be messed up, she might have lied, evaded, distorted, she might still have horrible unresolved issues with her parents, and yet he was the one, he, he, he, no one else. He was an asshole, a shell, there was no way around it; all Liz’s flailing had just been her pounding against the emptiness of him, to no response. Fuck, he thought, fuck, and then, where his mind always bottomed out, Fucking Desmond.

  He had lapsed into silence again. He heard the hand jump on the clock above the door, but didn’t look over.

  Well, Peter, I suppose what stopped me from bringing things up with him was a kind of superstition, the fear I’d wreck this precarious balance I’d set up.

  Isn’t that interesting. So you thought that by not talking about things you’d somehow keep them in check.

  Something like that.

  But you’d have to admit, that’s pretty Freudian.

  Tick, tick. Too late now to start something new. There’d be a three-day hiatus—he’d had to cancel the following day’s session on account of his exam, and then came the weekend.

  I want to thank you for being here, Alex—is it really Alex? Or Alessandro?

  Alex is fine.

  Though I guess it could also be Alejandro, since I understand you’re fluent in Spanish.

  Tick. He heard the doctor shift behind him, impatiently perhaps, and then he said, in the same slightly admonishing tone he used every day, as if to underline Alex’s foolish squandering of his time, “I think our time’s up.”

  Alex sat up and started pulling on his shoes.

  “Monday, then?” he said to the doctor.

  “Yes, Monday.”

  Outside, he saw that the rain hadn’t dried completely on the steps yet. He made his way down, negotiating the little puddles, feeling a bit less taken than before with the budding spring.

  – 3 –

  Alex just had time to pop up to his apartment to grab his lesson
books before heading over to give his language class at St. Bart’s. He was afraid he was going to run into Esther again—why afraid? what kind of monster was he?—but he got in and out cleanly, though he’d done so little in the way of prep he might as well have gone to class empty-handed.

  St. Bart’s was in Little Burgundy, a short walk down Guy past the new Faubourg market at St. Catherine and then the massive mother house of the Grey Nuns to where the road dipped down into the lowlands of the urban poor. The neighborhood had apparently been the heart of a thriving black community before the Ville-Marie Expressway had been carved through it. Now it blended nondescriptly into St. Henri and Point St. Charles. St. Henri Alex knew about from his Grade 13 reading of The Tin Flute—in the original French, no less, a feat he couldn’t imagine now—though the place had changed a bit from its Tin Flute days. Great swaths of it had been torn down to make way for courtyard-style townhouse complexes, and many of the older streets sported here and there, amidst the peeling paint and rotting porches, the occasional façade painted over in blacks and grays or newly sandblasted, signs of the growing incursion of the bohemians and yuppies. On the side of an old warehouse near the on-ramp to the Ville-Marie someone had spray-painted, in brazen English, “Artists are the shock troops of gentrification.”

  St. Bart’s, run by the Anglicans, was in a little square around the corner from the Sally Ann. A youngish do-gooder named Milly organized the English classes there. She was the sort of minority rightist Alex had done his best to avoid in Montreal, where the so-called minority, from what he could tell, was mainly a bunch of embittered Westmounters who still hearkened back to the days when their clubs hadn’t admitted French Canadians or Jews.

  The center offered English classes more or less gratis to refugees.

  “They don’t want to let them in in the first place,” Milly had told him, “then they make sure they’ll have to stay here by forcing them to learn French.”

  Unlike immigrants, refugees, being under federal jurisdiction, at least had their choice of official languages. But then because all the services were run by the province, they got streamed into French like everyone else. There, according to Milly, they got language labs, textbooks, professional instructors, everything state-of-the-art; the ones foolish enough to choose English ended up at places like St. Bart’s. Alex could vouch that there was nothing state-of-the-art about St. Bart’s: the instructors, all volunteers like himself and mainly short-term certificate students trying to log teaching hours for TOEFL, seemed to turn over weekly; the students, for their part, moved away, gave birth, lost interest, switched instructors, or had their cases decided and found jobs or were deported. As for materials, Alex generally had to manage with old handouts from his teaching days in Nigeria, photocopying them on the sly at the Concordia English office.

  “It’s better than nothing, which is what they’d get otherwise,” Milly was fond of saying, though it boggled Alex’s mind that this was the best his country had to offer its new arrivals.

  Alex had started a new class a few weeks before, a mix of Salvadorans and Iranians that had quickly become polarized, each group trading what were clearly jibes against the other in its native tongue that somehow managed to leap the barriers of language to create a mood of festering hostility. Alex, who could do no more than catch the occasional lonely word of Spanish, had imagined that some heated political dispute had broken out. But then one of the Salvadorans had befriended him, a slick character named Miguel.

  “Is jus’ sex,” Miguel had said to him, aping a North American idiom. “Is all jus’ sex business.”

  Apparently the Salvadorans had accused the Iranians of gazing covetously at one of their women, a diminutive and not even especially attractive peasant girl who always came to class in kerchiefs and long skirts. A whole series of insults had begun, communicated, as Miguel explained, in a language outside the official ones.

  “Is unibersal language. Language of the eye, of the face, of the hand. In Canada you don’ speak this language but in El Salbador we know it bery well.”

  Miguel seemed to take the whole thing as a joke, though the irony was that the most covetable woman in the group, whom the Iranians must have been blind to overlook, was Miguel’s own sister, María. Alex had picked her out at once: she was almost a caricature of voluptuousness, dark-skinned, full-lipped, long-haired, with just a slight excess of flesh, which she did not bother to rein in, that made it seem obscene merely to look at her, so much did his thoughts turn at once to the carnal. It had been a struggle getting through classes with her there, so nonchalant, so seemingly oblivious to her effect on him, though hardly ten seconds went by without his eye going to her. For her sake, Alex had incautiously welcomed Miguel’s advances to him, though he was clearly someone looking for a main chance and even the other Salvadorans seemed to steer clear of him. But he was María’s brother, and from what Alex knew of Latin culture he figured it would be suicide to try to do an end run around him. Not, of course, that he had a chance in hell with someone who could make his knees melt at twenty paces.

  Normally, Alex’s taste ran decidedly to the blond-haired and the blue-eyed. Liz, Russian Mennonite on her mother’s side and Danzig German on her father’s, had fit that description, as had Ingrid. Alex’s childhood, when he’d been surrounded at every party and social event by mustache-lipped Italian girls, had apparently been enough to put him off the Latin type. But with María he seemed to have reverted: it was as if there had been some gene inside him just waiting to be clicked on at the sight of a María, and now every hormone and sexual instinct in him was directed toward his possession of her. This might not have been a problem if he hadn’t actually liked her, but the fact was that she was as unaffected and no-nonsense as her brother was untrustworthy and slick, making up for Miguel’s eagerness to get in with the teacher by making a point, it seemed to Alex, of giving him no special regard and indeed of virtually ignoring him. Unlike her brother she was friendly with the other Salvadorans, particularly the women, for whom she’d become a sort of spokesperson against the Iranians, getting off good ones that had the women laughing behind their hands and the men slapping their knees and that left the Iranians grim-faced with defeat. And unlike her brother she had an impeccable fashion sense: next to his Latin dancer’s white shirts and black pants she wore faded jeans and loose-fitting blouses and flouncy sweaters, so that on the street it would have been hard to tell her from a native.

  When Alex came into class today he found Miguel slouched in his usual place at one of the flimsy tables that served as desks. María’s place, however, was decidedly empty, and María did not come hurrying in from the washroom or some appointment to fill it as the class got underway. Alex couldn’t believe the sense of desolation he felt at her absence when he had barely exchanged half a dozen words with her and knew almost nothing about her except what he’d gleaned in class through the scrim of a foreign language.

  He’d been planning to wing some conversation practice by starting up a discussion on Chernobyl, but right from his garbled introduction he saw the thing was going to be a disaster.

  “Is very bad,” one of the Iranians said. “Is close to Iran.”

  He saw a smirk appear on the faces of a couple of the Salvadorans.

  “Gorbachev, is bad,” the Iranian said. He was looking right at the Salvadorans now. “The Communists, always liars.”

  Alex didn’t know where he’d imagined this could lead. Nowhere good, it seemed.

  “What about nuclear power?” he said, foolishly carrying the thing on just beyond the point where he might have passed it off as casual conversation rather than an actual lesson plan. By then people were staring at him with squint-eyed, baffled looks, their notebooks spread expectantly. Alex was terrified at the chunk of unstructured class time still stretching before him. In a panic he resorted to a paired conversation exercise he used at Berlitz, but he hadn’t reckoned his numbers well and got stuck pairing an Iranian woman with a Salvadoran one. Almo
st at once the two turned from each other back to their own compatriots, so that soon all English had given way to the usual sniping in Farsi and Spanish.

  He ended the class a good twenty minutes early. Milly stood frowning at the door of the front office as his students filtered away. All Alex’s hopes for his party had drained by now. In any event, he had been a fool to imagine he would ever have had the nerve to invite María.

  As he was packing his things Miguel sidled up to him.

  “Bad day, yes?”

  Alex let this pass. He clicked shut his book bag, then said, as inertly as he could manage, “I see your sister isn’t here today.”

  He knew at once that he’d made a mistake.

  “No,” Miguel said slowly. “Not today.”

  The bastard. He was playing with him.

  Alex said nothing.

  “She got son’ meeting,” Miguel said finally.

  “Oh? What kind of meeting?”

  “Don’ know. Son’ kind of political thing. I say, María, why you want son’ political thing when they break our balls for that back home. But she say is a better way to learn things, in those meetings, than coming here.”

  Alex took the cut like a man, showing Miguel no pain. Meanwhile, María grew ever more remote: he imagined her part of some underground resistance cell, fighting for the end of El Salvador’s dirty war.

  “You wan’ a coffee or son’thing?” Miguel said.

  Alex knew he should just put him off.

  “I dunno. I’m pretty busy.”

  “You come to my home,” Miguel said. “I make you Salvadoran coffee.”

  Alex had to remind himself that he was indeed busy. But next to that was the prospect of seeing the rooms she lived in, of smelling her smell there, of running into her.

  “Is close,” Miguel said. “You come.”

  Somehow, Alex found himself trailing after Miguel into the crooked side streets of St. Henri. The few times Alex had been through here he’d stuck to the main roads, but Miguel was leading him on a whole zigzagging sweep through the place, across vistas that might as easily have been the barrios of San Salvador as Montreal. They passed dead-end streets that disappeared under the expressway, garbage-strewn empty lots, stretches of warehouse and corrugated-tin sheds behind which the skyline of the downtown rose up like a foreign country.