On our way to St. Rose Street we paid a quick visit to the pharmacy, where I bought aspirin as well as what I needed “for a sleep-over,” those little things that men find useless and silly, but that women, me anyway, hate going without. He laughed at the sight of my paper bag which he thought was unwieldy and I told him he’d be very happy tomorrow morning to have me in his bed smelling of lime blossom and fresh breath, as well as being over my incipient flu.

St. Catherine Street east of Amherst was empty and I thought to myself that I would probably never set foot there alone, it felt so abandoned, sad and dangerous in a way that I couldn’t describe but that was all-pervasive. A woman alone in this part of town at such a late hour would not be safe, of that I was certain, even though we were just a few blocks from where I worked. People would assume she was a prostitute or a willing victim. For all our claims that Montréal isn’t a dangerous city, the atmosphere permeating this part of the street refuted it, and I couldn’t help looking over my shoulder frequently to see if some sleazy, malicious individual was following us with a butcher knife.

Gilbert noticed it.

“Why do you keep looking back like that, as if you’re scared?”

“I confess, I don’t feel very brave …”

He gave me a wink, set my bag on the ground, and started to hop and skip like a boxer practising for a big fight.

“I’m here to defend you.”

I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.

“That’s what I’m afraid of …”

That wonderful loud laughter again. So candid. A drug I was afraid that I could never do without.

The smell of hops had been getting stronger after Wolfe Street and I wasn’t sure that it was coming just from the Molson brewery: every time we walked past one of the many taverns – it was closing time – our nostrils were assailed by the combined odours of undigested beer and rancid sweat that were being blasted to the sidewalk in great bubbles of dry air through noisy ventilators. If ever I had to come back to Gilbert’s place, especially if I were alone, I’d take a taxi. To avoid danger … and the smells. If it was already so strong in April, imagine the July heatwave!

Guessing at my hesitation in this neighbourhood which he obviously loved, Gilbert chose to defend it, serving up for the second time his theory that this part of the city would become the heart of Montréal’s cultural life because of the two Radio-Canada towers, though work on one of them had stopped more than a year and a half before, and the proximity of the studios of Channel 10. I’d been hearing that ever since starting work at the Sélect four years earlier, but I couldn’t see any striking difference. An entire Montréal neighbourhood had been demolished to put up those two towers and it was said that once they were finished, in a year or two if work resumed, they would already be too small and probably obsolete. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of some of the most destitute Montréalers had been driven towards the north of the city where everything cost more and they were liable to starve to death, quite unscrupulously one of the most colourful neighbourhoods in town had been wiped out, but “the development of the nerve centre of the city’s artistic life" hadn’t started yet, the section of St. Catherine Street where Gilbert and I were walking, which was abandoned, dirty and foul-smelling, proved it.

I left him to his rambling, telling myself that surely he would wake up one day and realize that his poor St. Rose Street was never going to change. The cultural revolution hadn’t happened yet, those in charge had been content with simply killing part of Montréal, then abandoning it to an unenviable fate.

“You look so sad, Céline. Don’t you feel like coming to my place?”

A real guy question. Everything had to revolve around him, simply because he was there. It was almost reassuring, actually, to see that he wasn’t all that different from the others … My reply skirted his question.

“I wouldn’t want to give you my flu …”

“I wouldn’t mind catching your flu … If it means you’ll be spending the night.”

We walked down Champlain Street, dark and cheerless with its old houses so decrepit that they seemed uninhabited. He started to sing the song that talks about propellers and airlines that was part of the show he was taking part in.

I took advantage of it to change the subject.

“What exactly is this show you’re rehearsing?”

He started hopping and skipping again, I suppose because my question had sent his adrenalin level up a notch. He was agitated again as he’d been earlier that evening, as if he couldn’t control himself, as if he were skidding out of control without wanting to and couldn’t get a grip on himself. He was talking fast, getting carried away, not finishing his sentences.

“Ah! It’s going to be amazing! Amazing! You can’t imagine … Montréal’s never seen anything like it … There’s songs … sketches … monologues … but it’s not a variety show. Not really. Not the kind we know anyway … It’s so different we haven’t even come up with a name yet, if you can imagine … For now we’re just calling it the show because it’s the only thing we can come up with … I’m incredibly lucky to be part of it.”

“Have you known them long?”

“No. Well … See, it’s not me who was supposed to do what I’m doing. It’s Chubby, a buddy of mine that got sick … Mono … They had to find somebody in a hurry.”

“Is that how you ended up playing guitar in the band?”

“Oh, I do all kinds of things … I’m not just a guitarist … I’m in a sketch with Mouffe and Yvon … I’ve never done that before but I do my best … They get impatient sometimes because I’m slower than the rest of them … But Mouffe is more patient with me …”

“Is Mouffe the one with the straight black hair?”

“Yes. And she’s with Charlebois … Do you know him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“His songs are amazing, Céline! We aren’t in the woods any more with our ceinture fléchée and our step-dancing, those songs are so modern … So new … The rehearsals are incredible … but scary.”

“When do you start?”

“Next month … if all goes well.”

“Are you ready?”

“No. Sometimes I think we never will be. I mean we haven’t even got a title!”

We’d turned left onto St. Rose. A row of two-storey houses, without balconies and seedy looking, that opened directly onto the street. You went up two steps and right away you were at the front door. In the summer, when they’re crushed by the heat, the population of St. Rose Street must put their chairs on the sidewalk and gossip over their soft drinks, keeping an eye on the children so they won’t run between the cars. But now, in the spring, and in the middle of the night, you could think it was a ghost town in an American movie: no one in sight, a few shattered windows, a little draft because the street was so narrow.

“Here we are. It isn’t a palace but it doesn’t cost much and I like that a lot.”

I who boast so often about having no prejudices, I confess that I was expecting an indescribable mess, the smell of stale cigarettes, dirty plates sitting on empty pizza boxes, a bed unmade for months giving off a sickening funky smell – in a word, the pad of a bohemian who lives alone. What I found was totally different. It was attractive, it was clean, everything was neat and tidy, the dishes were done and the floor was gleaming. The living room, furnished with taste though without a big budget, bathed in diffuse indirect light from an assortment of old lamps that Gilbert had disguised with coloured scarves. As for the bedroom, it would have shamed a soldier’s barracks: you could have bounced a coin on the bed, the spread was so taut, nothing was lying on the floor and it smelled of patchouli and incense, not, as I’d expected, of dirty sheets and unwashed underwear.

I was a little ashamed of myself and my surprise, which I tried to conceal with a series of compliments that maybe went too far, did not escape Gilbert, who was smiling proudly.

“You can’t get over it, can you, that it’s clean and neat? Everyone who comes here has the same reaction. I’m obsessive. Not about myself, sometimes I let myself go, but the environment I live in has to be perfect. When I come here and see everything in its place it’s reassuring. I don’t know why. The only thing that doesn’t fit is me, the rest is organized. I don’t try to explain it … I’ve always been like this.”

I accepted the beer he offered me, even though I’m not crazy about it and wanted to move on to other things, and we settled on the living-room sofa.

I told him again how much I liked his apartment, I even confessed to surprise about his taste in interior decoration. What I did not admit though was that it worried me a little: the lanky beatnik who lives in a house so unlike him, where you’d expect to see a hooker or a drag queen, not a guitarist from an avant-garde show, didn’t reassure me and I was beginning to wonder what kind of world I’d landed in, with what kind of weirdo. Was Gilbert even more unusual than he’d seemed at first? He wasn’t homosexual – oh no, not another prejudice! – he’d proven that, but I was worried about what turn the surprises might take.