IT WAS NO kind of weather for the poor and ill-clothed to be outside, yet fifty or so of them were out there in the November snow-shower, half rain and half snow, heavy wet flakes sticking to their coats and faces. The humid wind blew right through them. They were the group we were infiltrating, and they were chanting polite slogans that we repeated along with them, “No foie gras, give us hamburger meat!” “A banquet for the rich, nothing for the poor!” It was a symbolic protest whose only goal was thirty seconds on TV after the minute about the charitable work of the foie gras eaters.
There were twenty of us, and we knew the drill. No one knew anyone else, we weren’t carrying placards, and we were positioned at equal intervals in the line of militants parading in front of the doors of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel as four benevolent policemen looked on, as frozen as the protesters. When Mr. Lafontaine and Jorge, another Chilean refugee, dashed into the hotel, two policemen ran after them, and Katarina, a young pregnant woman, fainted in front of a policeman who turned to his colleague for help. Mr. Lafontaine and Jorge headed left, toward the moving stairway that led down to the train station. They had a train to catch, they explained to the policemen. A dozen of us surged into the hotel. One floor up, and we were in the large banquet hall. Maria was next to me. We were supposed to grab several plates of food, hand them over to the representatives of the poor, and then fade into the snowy streetscape like urban Robin Hoods. But the guests took exception to our action. They tried to block us, some of them even used their fists to save their dearly bought food from our raid. Maria grabbed a large platter and I picked up two lobsters. The stairway again, the exit onto Mansfield, people staring at us, we turned right onto René-Lévesque to catch up to the demonstrators. With my two lobsters, I attracted all the attention. But there was no one. The poor people and their representatives had disappeared. But Maria was a real member of the resistance; she was never caught off guard.
“Get in the cab, Claude,” she said, and jumped into the nearest taxi. I followed her with my two lobsters. Not a word in the cab; from the rear-view mirror, the driver’s suspicious eyes watched the platter and the two crustaceans. I kept looking out the back window, convinced the police were chasing us.
Her apartment on Park Avenue above a Greek bar was tiny. On the living-room walls was a photo of Allende, and another of Che, the famous one. Piles of books stood on the floor. A Cuban flag separated the living room from the kitchen.
Maria set the platter on the table. “What’s that stuff?” I told her it was pâté. Dark pink slices, marbled with brown and chestnut, surrounded by golden jelly. “You should never waste food,” Maria said. She came back from the kitchen with two plates and silverware. “It was sort of fun,” I commented. Maria told me that the revolution must never be fun. We ate our lobsters in silence. I wasn’t having any fun. I was thinking of how our operation had failed. It was a humiliating defeat: two lobsters and some pâté eaten by two revolutionaries.
I searched for the right words to politely announce my departure, without mentioning our failure.
“Do you want to make love?” She could have been asking me if I wanted a cup of coffee. I knew about coffee, but I didn’t know about love. She got up and cleared the table. I heard her set down the plates and throw away the pâté behind the Cuban flag. Looking creates desire and from desire springs love.
“Well?” In theory, I knew that, as she stood there before me in front of the Cuban flag, her hands on her hips, I should have felt the stirring of an erection. Desire, even. Then I remembered my method.
“I’d like to look,” I said shyly, and launched into a long explanation about the gaze, and desire, and love, but I couldn’t get the words into the right sequence, and I stammered a series of broken phrases.
She took off her t-shirt, then her bra. She wasn’t smiling. She stood in front of the Cuban flag like a revolutionary statue. She didn’t even look at me.
“Now what?” I had no answer. Desire is not born from an admiring glance. I had never seen such pretty breasts, but I hadn’t seen any breasts at all outside of reproductions in dictionaries. I didn’t even have the urge to touch her. She slid down her jeans and spread her legs. She was completely naked, and for the first time I saw a woman’s sex. Her eyes were distant. “Now that you’ve seen, you can touch.” No. That wasn’t how I wanted to begin my love life. I had to leave. I drank a beer in the dirty, moth-eaten Greek bar downstairs. Old men with sagging stomachs, dressed in clothes from another time, were playing video poker.
I would never understand anything about women. I had to tell her I was sorry. I rang at her door. Maria accepted my awkward, labyrinthine explanations, then told me how it worked as she paced the room, smoking a stinking cigar. Desire can only be sexual, with no attachments. Desire through love was invented by bourgeois literature, and it weakens revolutionary convictions. Militants must accept their quotient of animal feelings and satisfy their sexual impulses in an objective manner that does not contravene the struggle. She kneeled in front of me and unbuckled my belt. I was trembling as she pulled down my jeans and my underwear, and I didn’t know what she was doing. She took my penis in her mouth. I thought erections were born of desire, but that turned out not to be true. She stood up, climbed onto the sofa, and straddled me. Then she went to work, her head thrown back, her eyes on the ceiling. I was just a tool in her personal quest.
It wasn’t till after I came that I felt desire. I wanted to kiss her. She pushed me away.
As I went down the stairs, I wondered if she’d do the same thing with someone else tomorrow. I was jealous already, and I wanted to see Maria again. And not for the revolution, but for her, though she neither looked at me nor kissed me; she satisfied herself and returned me to my ignorant status, after teaching me about that curious pain called sexual pleasure.
The relative nature of poverty took up all my time. Maria was working on affordable housing and suggested we infiltrate FRAPRU, a community organization that was greatly respected, even if its recommendations were rarely followed. In spite of learning the building code by heart, the vacancy rate for rental properties, the Rent Board regulations, the list of delinquent slum-owners, and maintaining a registry, Maria paid no attention to my comments or my discoveries during our meetings. But my efforts did earn the admiring approval of Mr. Lafontaine, who pointed out that revolutionary passion must be based on hard-headed analysis of the objective conditions. I didn’t try to get closer to Maria. I waited for the same thing to happen again. If she felt like repeating the experience, she would give me a sign and climb on top of me again.
“Father, is man an animal?”
“Yes.”
“In all ways?”
“No. He has awareness.”
“Can he only react like an animal in some ways, like for sex?”
“Of course.”
“And change the way he behaves as a human to satisfy his animal nature?”
“Of course.”
“And modify his objectives?”
“Yes.”
“How can we be animals without betraying our conscience? I mean, and still stay human?”
Father poured himself a whiskey and swallowed it down. And then another one. Was that a tear, a sign of emotion? Mist settled over my father’s eyes like a veil. I said I was sorry for bothering him. He stammered out an answer, it was all right, he was just tired. I went up to my room before he started crying, because I was old enough to know that after the mist comes rain.
My longing for Maria to take me back upset all my points of reference and logical analyses, and the care I took in planning an action. Because she was a refugee and the orphan girl of a woman who’d disappeared into a hole, she had a disproportionate influence over the group. She came up with a slogan for every situation, a scathing remark for every reasonable objection. She would talk fast, throw her hair back, cast withering glances, and mock the careful and the timid. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who thought Maria was leading us toward the dead-end of anarchy and pure provocation. But who were we, well-off members of the petty bourgeois, to contest the voice of the revolution incarnate? Had any of us ever suffered? She had, in her flesh and her memory. Her rage and passion made us seem small and cast us back onto our comfortable existences and our fear of risk. The Queen Elizabeth Hotel operation had been an enormous disaster, but no one questioned the basic rightness of the undertaking. By exploiting the shame we felt at not having a mother in a hole somewhere, Maria convinced us. As far as I was concerned, all she had to do was move and I lost all critical faculties.