Madame Victoria Page 4

  Nothing could hold her back. After running the news desk for a few years she moved to the assignment desk before finally joining the management. At every new level she smashed a wall that she was the first woman to break through. She did not look back, gave no more thought to the stenographers, who from now on kept their sneers to themselves, nor did she pay any attention, whenever she passed by there, to the college that had given her nothing but the urge to escape from the world it proposed. She raised high her glass of whisky, closed her eyes, and sucked in the fruits of her obstinacy.

  She was given a secretary. Had Olivia been an uneducated, overly made-up woman she would have been easy to hate. But she looked nothing like the cliché that Victoria had always despised. Tall, bright, and boyish, Olivia spent her breaks reading progressive journals or writing suffragist leaflets. She admired Victoria no end and took advantage of every opportunity to ask about her work, her youth, her ideals, unable to accept that her boss’s actions were not underpinned by any grand principle.

  “Do you realize you’ve paved the way for the women of Quebec?”

  “No. I paved my own way, and sometimes I’m sorry I didn’t lob a grenade behind me.”

  “But my whole generation is in your debt. You’re a pioneer.”

  “Exactly. And pioneers don’t travel across continents to wait for the others to catch up. They do it to find some peace and get away from social clubs.”

  But Olivia was right. Over the years more and more women had made their way into the newsroom. The young female journalists were looking for a mentor and they all turned to Victoria. But she was used to managing a male staff and found herself at a loss for how to deal with their apprehensions, their hesitations, and their muffled sobs in the washroom. Her bafflement soon changed into annoyance and then hostility. Seeing the editor’s lack of sympathy toward the newcomers, Olivia took it upon herself to welcome them. On the strength of her boss’s authority, she provided advice and guidance on the world of the newspaper, gradually transforming the waiting room of her office into a gynaecium abuzz with complaints about anything and everything. An exasperated Victoria finally exploded:

  “If you can’t come to work without whining you’re not cut out to be journalists. Murders, plots, disasters—in a word, reality—is not for the faint-hearted. Next time I hear anyone so much as squeak, I’m throwing her out.”

  While the terrified young women scuttled out of the office, Olivia glared at her supervisor.

  “You could try to be more considerate. After all, they’re the ones who will be taking over from you.”

  “I certainly hope not!” Victoria exclaimed.

  Her assistant let out an irate sigh.

  “Is there anything else?” Victoria barked.

  Olivia frowned. “You shouldn’t drink so much.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Liquor makes you cruel.”

  “It’s not ‘liquor.’ It’s Scotch. And if it didn’t exist your little friends would already have been fired, and you too. Starting now, your job here is to answer the telephone, organize my schedule, and keep that brood of hens away from me.”

  Victoria felt satisfied as she sank into her armchair. Yet what she had just said was not quite true. The Scotch did not help her tolerate others, and she did not drink out of despair or dependence. She drank out of love. Her goal was neither to forget nor to feel numb or satiated. She simply wished to make contact with that elusive, shifting, multiform essence that understood her, just as she herself intuited Scotch. But it was out of the question for her to explain this to anyone, especially not her secretary.

  From that day on Olivia adopted a steadfast coldness that suited Victoria in every respect. Bolstered by the support of her secretary, she took the daily in new directions, crushed her adversaries, and became an integral part of the complex networks shaping the province’s destiny. From behind the shaded windows of her office she orchestrated the downfall of a politician, the ascension of a starlet, and the disclosure of a scandal. She dominated her world with neither pity nor cruelty but with blade-like precision.

  The more power she acquired the more she avoided the limelight, shunning the galas for the tranquility of her office and decisions made quietly, when everyone else was asleep. Before going on to the next matter at hand, she would pour herself a few shots of Islay or Highland or Speyside, indulging her pleasure without compunction, getting drunk as if by accident, as a side effect of the kiss bestowed on her by her high-priced bottles. But she left her most precious Scotch untouched. The flask of Eon Special Reserve remained at all times in the inside pocket of her jacket, close to her heart. Whenever her colleagues teased her about it, her face took on a stony expression.

  “Come on, Vic, how about sharing a little? We’ve just bought our top competitor!”

  “It’s a one-of-a-kind blend, and it’s mine alone.”

  “But never tasting a drop of a whisky like that—what a waste!”

  “I’ll drink it in due course.”

  She saw wars and trends and inventions come and go, things that were supposed to change the world but left human nature intact. She crossed oceans, stayed in penthouses, ate caviar off the backs of naked women when the boredom of the wealthy had reached that point. She played golf, billiards, and hockey, hunted and killed a bear with her left eye shut and her right eye flashing. She shook hands, was hugged, delivered memorable slaps on the backs of her associates, and, once, a punch to a big oaf in a bowtie who had tried to kiss her. She slept alone and stored her secrets inside her flask of Eon Special Reserve.

  Her foes awaited her demise like scientists observing the erosion of a cliff. But they were unaware that Victoria, now over seventy, had already begun to erode, yet her heart, clean as a knife in cold water, and her alcohol-soaked nerves, let nothing show through. Only Olivia suspected the lesions and vapours that festered inside her boss, but she kept mum and got rid of the bloodstained tissues that Victoria carelessly dropped into the wastepaper basket.

  One morning in May, her body suddenly failed. After a long night of work, Victoria stood up and, immediately, the room went soft; the hard facts of the floor, the walls, the objects that she had always taken for granted, slipped away. As she collapsed she tried to grab something to break her fall, but for the first time reality proved inadequate. Finding nothing more solid than herself, she clasped her own elbows and fainted.

  On waking, she found herself in a drab room, parched and horizontal, tubes sprouting from every imaginable orifice. The bed on which she was stretched out smelled of the nameless multitude that had lain there before her. The corridor buzzed with activity that was at once hectic and sluggish, as if the surfeit of tasks was not enough to erase the weariness of the people performing them.

  Over the more than seven decades of her lifetime, Victoria had consistently managed to avoid setting foot in a hospital. She had been seen, just once, in a private clinic, but only because she needed sutures and her teammates in the Chamber of Commerce league had refused to stitch her up directly at the hockey rink. As for those institutions crammed with the miseries of humankind in all its density and complexity, she had always given them a wide berth. So how did she end up there, when just a moment ago she had been torpedoing a parliamentary bill concerning the newspaper industry?

  A note on her bedside table provided the answer.

  I found you lying on the floor this morning. You had fallen and hit your head on the desk. It seems you will have to stay in the hospital for a good while. Don’t fret about the paper. I’ll take care of everything. Olivia.

  “The little bitch,” Victoria spat as she crumpled the piece of paper.

  “You shouldn’t say that!” replied a voice that made her jump.

  At the far end of the room an attendant was folding sheets and looking at her in dismay.

  “The woman who left that note saved your life. If she
hadn’t given you first aid you wouldn’t be here.”

  “And you think that’s doing someone a favour?”

  “It’s better than ending up in the morgue,” the woman shot back on her way out.

  Annoyed, Victoria yanked at the tubes that had been used, it seemed, to tie her down. Her efforts apparently set off an alarm, as three nurses swooped in to restrain her, repeatedly urging her to “calm down, my dear.” Continuing to struggle, Victoria thought of Olivia and hated her with a passion. She spent the night sweating and shivering while she pictured the swarm of pretenders jostling each other in front of her office. Toward four in the morning, when her sweat stopped smelling of malt, she grasped the full horror of her captivity. During those first days at the Royal Victoria she tried to escape seven times without ever managing to reach the door of her room. The basic mechanisms of her body seemed to have thrown in the towel. Young doctors talked to her about her liver, her intestines, her esophagus as though they were minefields; they affirmed the absolute necessity of eliminating alcohol from her diet, oblivious to the fact that without alcohol there would be no diet, strictly speaking. She was forced to swallow disgusting meals, which she vomited up on her plate. The housekeepers were the only ones to leave her alone; they went about cleaning her room with a degree of enthusiasm in line with their meagre wages. They were the weak links in the hospital chain and they soon became Victoria’s main allies.

  In exchange for some paltry bribes they supplied her with bottles that made her days bearable. Deformed by dropsy, her skin yellowed by jaundice, Victoria would steal over to the washroom whenever possible and drink without restraint. Now that the long hours of work that had acted as a rampart between her and the Scotch were gone, what stretched before her was the slope of an unobstructed horizon, a barrier finally knocked down. Her sordid surroundings in no way diminished her delight. Like a tribute to the beauty of the world, the alcohol cancelled out the incontinence, the incivilities, the gastroenterologists, the gowns that exposed her backside. The boredom of being away from the newspaper.

  But it could not blot out Olivia’s silhouette when she arrived in Victoria’s room one dreary morning holding a small package tied up with ribbons. After briefly scanning the room, she went out only to return a moment later.

  “Pardon me, I’m looking for Victoria . . .”

  “Here I am,” the patient cut in.

  Olivia, struck dumb, peered at her former boss.

  “It’s you? Sorry, I . . .”

  “Yes, resting has worked wonders.”

  The secretary approached the bed.

  “No improvement?”

  “As sharp-eyed as ever.”

  “Well, at least your morale is holding up.”

  “Why have you come? To give me absolution? One last embrace after sending me here to rot?”

  “Why are you always so mean?”

  “Mean? That’s what you think of me?” Victoria grinned. “I’m not mean. I simply have no time to lose. People don’t interest me.”

  “Women don’t interest you.”

  “Women have never been of any use to me.”

  “So what does interest you?”

  Victoria took another shot from the bottle stuffed inside a rumpled drawsheet.

  “The ascent,” she declared casually.

  Olivia nodded for a while. Then she slowly took hold of the Aberlour, gently pulled it out of her boss’s grip, and raised it to her lips. One quick, emphatic gulp. She replaced the bottle between the patient’s swollen fingers.

  “I’ve come to tell you that Gendron has taken over your position again. The whole team thanks you for your work over the years.”

  She tossed the package on the foot of the bed and left. Victoria knocked back a mouthful of Scotch. Someone else, doing her job. Someone else. Her job. Turning her eyes to the present left behind by Olivia, she reached out and tried to sit up to grasp the thing, which seemed to mock her. It was no use. She finally called out to an attendant who was walking past her room.

  The woman sullenly handed the package to Victoria, who somehow succeeded in ripping it open. On a golden plaque were her name, two dates, and a Latin phrase summarizing her entire career. She clenched her jaws so hard it made her ears hum. So the world truly was the voracious, mutable animal that she had always imagined it to be. As soon as a crack appeared the organism spontaneously rearranged itself to fill the empty space and erase all signs of a gap. Someone else had taken over her job.

  She drained the bottle of single malt in a few minutes. The great intoxication came down on her habitual gloom like a bludgeon. She managed—as if her body had been waiting for this—to climb down from her bed. Determined though unsteady, she went to the closet and fished out the jacket she had worn on arriving at the hospital. Then she filched a walker, which enabled her to wend her way down the corridors haunted by women in white. They seemed on the verge of grabbing her, of holding her against her will, of turning her into one more docile, defeated, indistinguishable patient. She swore at them. The flask glowed against her breast.

  She made her way to the exit without getting lost, as if she had memorized the maze of the hospital’s geography. Waiting for her at the other end of the parking lot was a wood. The hill she had chosen overlooked the buildings where a small menagerie bustled in the midst of disease, where human beings stooped over the unwell, where newborns wriggled in the arms of their parents, where family members held each other close and their tears intermingled. She hurried. The holes, the abscesses, the varicose veins, and the lesions were flaring up inside her.

  At the foot of the knoll she cast aside her walker. The slope was steep and climbing it took an inordinate amount of time, but Victoria made it to the top as if out of habit. Breathless, she leaned her back against a young birch. The city was spread out at her feet: the roofs and facades that enclosed her former office, the rooms where she had slept opaquely through many nights, the college and, beyond the river, the muddy lands that had witnessed her birth—a landscape she could no longer fathom. For the place where logic and ambition had been in command was now occupied by a dizzy sense of fullness. Placing her hand on her chest, Victoria coughed and felt a hundred vesicles burst in the depths of her throat.

  She groped inside her jacket for the flask that had followed her everywhere for the past twenty years. When she lifted the container to her ear and shook it she heard the chime of molten gold. It seemed like rain was splashing down around her, yet she remained dry. An uncommon tenderness washed over her heart and the back of her head. Her vision grew blurry.

  Below, the city still throbbed, but Victoria no longer saw it. Her world sat in the palm of her hand. She had retained her primordial thirst, and now it was almost quenched—a feeling of having at once lost and conquered and, especially, of being precisely where she ought to be. Her fingers uncorked the flask. The redolence rose from her Eon Special Reserve like claws lashing out, and the too-sudden joy made her knees buckle. She filled her chest with a final breath of air and turned her face to the sky; ready now for the last triumph, she locked her lips around the mouth of the bottle. She thought she heard a gong ring out somewhere. She drank.

  Victoria on Borrowed Time

  I believe we didn’t quite know why we wanted to die. At that age, more than at any other time of life, you want to love, kill, come, suffer, but you don’t know why. You react to one desire by responding to another; you try to quench your thirst by lighting a fire, to heal a wound by thrusting your finger into it. I believe we wanted to die of love, which was very silly and at the same time surprisingly clear-sighted for adolescents. How were we to know that if we’d let our passion run its course it would have dissolved after a few years and given way to the humdrum disappointment that unites old couples? We had no idea what lay ahead, yet we wanted to avoid it. Our sadness had sharpened us like arrowheads and we were pointed north. Toward
the mine.

  He died and I lived, whereas the opposite should have happened. For a long time I thought I was the one who had corrupted him. With no childhood to speak of and no family except those assigned to me by the government, I had never learned to hope. But I had the trills and the alders of the grove, and the purl of the river. I suppose that’s what enabled me to bide my time until I met him. He came from another place, from a house as yellow as a Sunday morning egg yolk, as warm as the smell of roasted chicken.

  It started in history class, the worst course of all. We were told about the Inquisition, the witches burned at the stake, the African slave trade, the massacre of the American indigenous peoples, the Holocaust. All those horrors coated with a neutral varnish by the Department of Education. Sitting at the desk next to mine, Daniel began to cry while the teacher blithely recounted the death of the last Inca emperor. He wept so softly that it was the tiny plash of his tears on his textbook that caught my attention. The next day I sat down beside him on the bus. He was thin and handsome, he had eyes of different colours, and his hair was dyed the dark shade worn by all unhappy boys. I took his hand in mine and held on to it after that.

  We touched each other with the dread and awe once reserved for dragons and horses. He knelt before my bereavements and nightmares and transformed them into small pyres that refused to burn. I kissed every joint, every knot of his frail body, every blow received at random in schoolyards and vacant lots. He fashioned miniature clay figurines meant to reshape my life story and make me into a heroine, and in a hushed voice composed little melodies that I would learn by heart. I’ve never met anyone else with that kind of imagination and the knack for pouring it into such small forms.

  His parents liked me. They would probably have liked anyone interested in spending so much time with their son. I also believe that they pitied me to some extent. And, above all, that they were decent people. I was at their house all the time. After school, for homework. Before supper, to watch the stupid TV shows. Spaghetti on Monday, hamburgers on Friday. Weekend chores that wore us out, with Mr. Borduas cheering us on and laughing at our contorted faces; Christmas holidays with Mrs. Borduas insisting we sing carols in front of the tree. The citrus smell of their car at 10:30 p.m., when they drove me back to the hard-angled house that I was never able to consider my home.