Combat Journal for Place d'Armes. Scott Symons
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enter, unwitting now, and not till I am half way across it, the buildings flowing past me, shadowing me, shadows in me, in the corner of my eye, do I realize that it is already too late. Already I am invisible … and La Place is detached, receding out of me. Already. Stand, in centre Square, glaring at the buildings, the Place; and only shadow. Intermittently a lurch of something more substantial. But in essence, only shadow … only the remains in me of the Place. I drift on, across the square, down St. James Street, trying to regroup me, to pull me together, to substantiate me…. But I can’t … the best I can manage is some sort of condition midway between incarnation and excarnation. At best I am half-cocked now … my body is midway — neither here nor there. Nothing is specific. And then I am at an intersection (which that cursed map tells me still is McGill and St. James!) In front of me a modern business building … a sheath-glass tower. And I am falling straight into it … on pretext of looking for someone who isn’t there (if he is, he’s lost). But the truth is. I fall into my own vacuum! And then, in minutes, shoot out again, like some electronically processed statistic. My chameleonage complete now … feel as I felt I was about to feel in the bar-car of the Rapido. Something has happened to my gut … something gone out of me. Somehow I have been dispersed … would panic — but there isn’t enough of me in one place now to panic … and then do panic — and when I stop running, I am back across the Square (it passed through me absolutely unnoticed — it is only by looking back that I know that I have passed through it!) and I am having a belated lunch in some plastic-nicolodeon joint … my remaining embodiment looses its teak timbre from the executive suite of the glass-sheath tower and goes salmon pink along the counterline now … Soupe du jour et biftek, au point … The food descends my elevator shaft and congeals in my salmon plastic-pinked stomach — fortunately I can’t vomit, can’t even feel nauseous: my stomach is artificial now. Soooo … I’ve chameleoned to that point. I’ve decarnated further than I feared. Only the old imitation wrought-iron coat-wrack in the corner, splattered with taches of aluminum paint to modernize it — only that keeps feeding me now, intravenously. And it is out of place, as is my blood. My heart founders. Under these conditions my plans are simply impracticable. How can I share the intensity of joy that the Square is in me, has been for me, always, implicitly, till today, till now, when I actually reach out to prove its joy for the sake of others? How can I write the Novel. There isn’t any Place to live, to see, not any more … it has gone out of me. Worse, the very converse — the same Place d’Armes has become for me simply a bloodsucker — each building a leech, draining me of my remaining corpuscularity. What I had come to see, still vainly hoping to share, not only has failed me, but has turned against me. I am left with an inversion of my verity. Gathering up my encroaching invisibility and my check, I flee — so discountenanced that I am able to walk past target, site unseen — a mutual agreement almost. Slink to my hotel. No — all my tactics are wrong. I cannot give what I now no longer possess — nor can I leave dispossessed. My Novel is out the window. So is my life!
I try to think … no use. I can’t feel anything … and out of touch, I’m out of mind — out of my mind. For a brief moment I know that I am on the verge of insanity … Lie down, lie down. vertebra wrench, open and squeeze clamped closed like accordion, ramming the punch of me from tail to necknape, head threatens to detach — and suddenly bolt upright from the thrust I’m awake to the realization that my body has simply corporately echoed the sound from freight-train shunting in the yards — my ear still thrums bright as the trainbell rams the entire cargo home it freights. 7 p.m. How long did I sleep? My guilt musters me to typewriter … and for two hours I record this day’s disaster of me. Dispassionate, because detached now. Disembodied.
Done — I wonder what next? Technically I’m through — washed up, or washed out. I can go home now. Settle into being a civil servant or university prof or a bond salesman. It’s as simple as that. I’ve just died. Why not accept the fait accompli … and enjoy my retirement into the Canadian Social Welfare State; climb into the trough, with the rest of the Citizenry. Head reels again … and I know that this is impossible; I would shoot myself first … What the hell have I been doing these past ten years, if not evading that issue! That impasse. The All-Canadian Clunk — no, I’ld rather die, again, than say yes.
Out into the night air … aware that I need food, though not hungry. Wend me through the velvet dark of the humid December night, to the restaurat of Paul-Marie Sanson … Le Chat Botté, just a few doors from Le Devoir on the same side…. Le Devoir — our only relevant journal of opinion — the only Canadian newspaper that absolutely had to say what it had to say these past ten years … and said it. It had guts. And at Le Devoir it had been André Laurendeau — the editor. One man, who stood up to be counted. When it hurt … But for some reason or other no one from Le Devoir ever eats chez Paul-Marie. Paul-Marie is a Frenchman … from Le Midi … and that, finally, is unpardonable. That he serves the best food in Montréal, that he is no more expensive than the other intellectually or socially chi-chi restaurants nearby which are also reasonably inexpensive, that he is actually only a few doors from the newspaper. None of this matters. Paul-Marie is French, obdurately French. Moreover his decor is neither improved Habitant, nor a clinically clean version of Paris Left Bank. No — Le Chat Botté is simply eternal French bistro in a Canadian Victorian setting that has been here since built … the mantlepiece settles the period pretty well; one of those carbuncular wooden mantles with knops and finials and chip-carving overall, thoroughly clotted with a grained golden oak finish multiply varnished. By the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee it was honourably aged. So Paul-Marie’s clientele is English-speaking mainly. Because of the atmosphere and because of Paul-Marie, and because it is in Le Vieux Quartier near such quarantined denizens as Le Devoir. A visit to Le Chat Botté for an Anglo-Canadian Respectable is as risqué as a tour along the Red Light lane … I remember watching them order meals here, many times … invariably the same — steak after an onion soup, finishing with a crême caramel, or a pâtisserie française. In fact I never was entirely sure what Paul-Marie used to do with his tripes and brains, and bowels, and pigs’-feet, and head-cheeses and illegal game, and all the other pungent extremities of barnyard flora and fauna. The answer I supposed all along was Paul-Marie himself … as I see him again, now on entry, I am sure of it. Six foot three, he hasn’t lost a single one of his 329 pounds. Sitting with his back to me, in front of the TV, eating his blood sausage and terrine de foie de vollaille. Seated amidst the clamour of his oh so empty tables. If possible he has grown even more Paul-Marie, has grown further into himself. The Paul-Marieness of Paul-Marie — absolute self-fidelity. He hears me, and pivots his chair … impounding me with his 329-pound eyesight, probing me deep for my food potential, for my significance as a man-of-food. Decides I’m insignificant … and is about to let his waitress guide me to a table, when suddenly his eyes focus on mine … “Monsieur Hugh …” and he is on the instant dissolved from implacable food concentrate — like some fossilized but pliant pemmican — into inordinate activity … in seconds we are safe, in the kitchen, with its ten-foot stove, wood-stove. Paul-Marie promptly stuffs it with more wood — which it patently does not need, and then armed with an outrageously undulant ladle undertakes a constrained elephantine ballet from pot to pot … a joyous war-dance of the foods, in my honour … digs ladle down to turnip and gourd and leek and all the bloated enormities from its international reservoir of innards. Roils the stews, the soups, the sauces, in a free molestation that would please any voyeur of feed. High tribute, that. And I am embarrassed by it. On the centre table a mound of brains that could only be from a dinosaur, did a dinosaur have sufficient brains to still be dinosaur. And guarding these, from the far end of the kitchen, perched on a pair of bar-stools, the lares and penates — King and Prince — German Shepherds eying me with the same intent I apply to the food — a fierce friendliness.
I know exactly what I feel … like the gentle man in Galsworthy’s story of the old custom shoemaker, whom he must frequent, out of loyalty … I would eat Paul-Marie’s food were it rotten! “It’s changed, Paul-Marie, it’s better than ever.”The Frenchman smiles amidships — “on va manger, eh Monsieur Hugh … on va manger” — and he masticates each word he proffers … leads me triumphantly back to his table, afront the TV screen, gouges me tablespoonful of terrine, and leaves me, irritated by the TV, and sad…. God knows I didn’t come to Montreal to watch TV … offended, I raise a breadful of the