You said that Montreal’s grid pattern made you feel you were in Kafka’s Trial, and to keep from getting stuck in the squares, you walked at a lively pace in a diagonal pattern, as if declaring war on space. For you, the land of the wild and the free was not synonymous with freedom, unlike Prague whose layout had to be followed on a map if you wanted to know where you were.

I had never noticed that Montreal was a checkerboard. When I walk, most of the time I don’t see further than a few steps ahead, the people I pass at close range, the shop windows I go by. Then I might lift my head quickly, clothes, shoes, the sun, a pretty face, before I dive back into myself.

You said that in another life, I almost certainly had been an animal that lived close to the ground, whereas you preferred the heights, you must have been a bird.

You attacked my city as if it were my skin. You liked to say that Montreal was a hole, an overgrown village. You said it was an open-air prison inhabited by poor people whose main objective was avoiding suffering at all cost. You said that here people spent their lives waiting, they were not truly involved in existence, a welfare society was not preferable to chaos and anarchy, democracy was just another face of fascism, and a person was more alive when he had to stare down death on a sidewalk in Bombay or a sniper’s bullet in Sarajevo. You thought my country was a hothouse where human beings were plugged into respirators. You said that whatever we needed, we invented, you laughed at your own joke about how we could grow strawberries in Alaska and make cakes without gluten. You said we were fragile, perishable, and afraid of everything, Americans were getting so fat that soon they wouldn’t be able to move and would go the way of the dinosaurs. You raged against our lack of culinary tradition, then accused us of thinking only of food, setting meetings in restaurants as if it were a great event each and every time, instead of living in an open house like gypsies. You said we feed off fear, and I replied ironically that yes, of course, but most importantly, our real fuel was the contempt of Europeans who came here to spit on us from the height of their centuries-old cultures.

Eastern Europe occupied the same spot in my mind as the rest of the world. I was never really interested in it. I found nothing mysterious about the great cathedrals, Sputnik, or the famous Kalashnikov. The only things that made me curious were those nesting dolls with their fine dresses sculpted from linden wood, and which you can now buy in the effigy of Stalin, Gorbachev, and Vladimir Putin. I was happy with the clichés I’d picked up here and there and stored in some dusty corner of my brain, in the same area as Reunion Island and Burkina Faso, countries that for me didn’t exist outside a poster in a travel agency or an advertisement. The East was just another place in the world that could be summed up by the exploitation of athletes, abandoned by their parents and sacrificed to the glory of the nation until they died in total anonymity. My knowledge was woven from proverbs, superstitions, and rituals, a collage of colourful flowery dresses, a glossy surface that reflected nothing more for me than what I knew, forests, fields, and snow, this North American Siberia where I grew up, you said it was worse than the other side because not only was the cold so intense, but the humidity too, and in any case everything was worse here than everywhere else, especially where you came from. You wondered why America existed, and why you had to suffer such a fate as a result of God’s cruelty.

During your time here, you kept a journal online, and took great pleasure in insulting Quebec. One day, I copied and pasted what you had written in your mother tongue into a translation program. I expected sadness or despair, the palimpsest of the pain you experienced long ago and which, so you announced, would return with your journey here. I expected melancholy, which I had anticipated before you came, the hours we would spend in shared solitude, less to make love and more to ease the transition between your elsewhere and my here. I pictured the slow passage across a dense river, a Styx you would cross but emerge from, cleansed of the fear and pain that tormented you. Instead, I discovered endless surliness and contempt in your journal, stories that mocked this place, and a portrait of Montreal as a giant garbage bag. Your disgust with Quebec was proportional to your attachment to European countries, the Czech Republic, France, and Germany, which you portrayed as a sacrificial victim. One day, you told me that by murdering the Jews in the gas chambers, Germany had chosen to commit a crime against humanity but someone had to do it, in the grand scheme of things bastards existed because they were needed, someone had to have the guts to assume the evil of others, and bad guys weren’t only bad but also victims of a destiny they could not escape. The executioners always came out on top in your version, and I would listen to you, incredulous, as you spouted that nonsense.

You preached love and compassion, with your long legs folded beneath you twice a day in the asana position, you could endure those contortions for hours without moving, you were channelling a master and claimed to be receiving his light from the other side of the globe, you opened wide the sluice of your hatred and with a clear conscience poured it upon the place where my ancestors set down roots, people from Normandy who immigrated here before the Seven Years’ War and remained along the St. Lawrence River. In time, some had become lawyers, politicians, and doctors, and they themselves had had boys, some of whom were writers, men who like all Québécois were failures, unlike the males of your country, and especially you, the superman, the Übermensch.

You turned Quebec into a monstrosity, and me with it. I took on the features of one of those extraterrestrials whose existence you liked to believe in because they put a face to your fears, the fear of being loved and having to trust someone, as if love were an obstacle to the potency you lusted after, and would deprive you of the power you always wanted to wield because it alone gave you the illusion of an identity, you were to follow the model of the Russian soldiers your mother admired, describing their arrival in Prague as a majestic thing, the way you had of tightening the screws on me until I imploded, until I diffracted, until I erased myself and finally stopped loving you.

I hate you for having defended the greatness of your world by spitting your venom on mine with so few scruples. I hate you for having positioned yourself in a watchtower like the ones you see in prison yards and, from that height, blasting away at us.

You liked to say you were Stalin’s son. Now I understand you were Hitler’s boy too.

On good days, you would ask me to tell you the story of the Patriots’ War. I did as well as I could, that is, not well at all, since my recollection of history class was full of holes. The slogan “Je me souviens”—I remember—didn’t work for me. National identity was not a thing that needed to be defended nor excused. Everyone had their place on this planet, without hierarchy and no matter their history, no country deserved it more than any other on the grounds that its cultural capital was greater, built on ruins, wars, kings, or divinities. But with you, suddenly, this was a subject for debate. You spoke of the cultures you admired, the peoples you respected, setting apart great and small nations, and I protested as if these things somehow concerned me, surprised by the way I defended that nameless, faceless thing that you called, in your careless way, country, roots, or origins.

I moved to Montreal fifteen years ago and since then the city has been part of me, its alleys and gardens, its electrical poles carved into the trunks of trees, its potholes and spiral staircases, its porches that throw a warm welcome around the houses. I like the neighbours who call from balcony to balcony, the snow that cloaks the city, the hysteria of Christmas lights, the garbage bags set like dotted lines along the sidewalk, their smell saturating the summer air. You cared nothing for the sovereignty issue and the battles over language. You said that social movements were idiotic, and I wasted my time trying to convince you of the country’s newness and the giant steps it had made so far, holding tight to its language as English was working to infiltrate from all sides, that few populations had made such advancements in so short a time. People liked to say that Quebec was a relic of the colonial past resisting modernity, and I was like that quaint relic, opposing you. My resistance enraged you, and you would swell up like a frog, you changed your strategy and accused my defence, as if I should have kept quiet while you freely attacked. I never felt so québécoise as when faced with your assault. Coloniale Avenue became the Plains of Abraham.

I should have remained indifferent, but for that to work, I couldn’t have loved you, or loved myself, or this country or any other, not the Czech Republic, Quebec, or Italy. For that to work, love could not have existed at all, I would have had to be a character in a film, the kind of psychopath that makes the lambs whimper. “First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing, ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature?”

I would have had to be an entomologist contemplating the splendour of a butterfly he has gently asphyxiated then pinned to a board, and do but one thing: talk to you about you. That way I would have told you who you were, I would have identified your species, I would have described its appearance, its behaviour in the natural world, its characteristics, and properties. In that way I would have kept you. Nothing would have touched me, neither your violence nor your sweetness, neither your capriciousness nor your terror. I would have been the Commander you admired, that statue against which you measured yourself because it was stronger than you and you would never succeed in dethroning it. You would have been neutralized. But then, would I have still loved you?

I have nothing to say against Quebec. I won’t join the choir of intellectuals and artists who love to reject their culture and puff themselves up because they’re closer to the old country and everyone knows that old is gold, worm-eaten woodwork, grey stone, marble, and mould. Those things seem more solid, old and immutable, the long term always wins over the ephemeral products of the new land, the logic of makeshift lodgings and fake facades, a gust of wind and everything disappears like the tourist hotels in Chennai.

Colonialism is a wound, and I go on the attack when I hear voices persuaded by their privilege, the singsong paternalism of those for whom we will never be anything more than fools, serfs, eternal losers, those who say that nothing can ever be born here, no sustainable development, only throw-away products, the dead end of the pioneers who a hundred times took up the same task, convinced that one day it would amount to something, and meanwhile others are telling us it’s a mirage, we can invent but we will never establish anything that will last for all eternity.

I won’t join the chorus of hypocrites.

I never knew what a family house felt like. My parents moved all the time, and I don’t understand how a person can get attached to walls, whether they’re built of brick, stone, or aluminum. I don’t know the place I was born and I don’t care to know where I’ll be buried. I left the shabby village where I lived as a child and didn’t know what was waiting for me at the end of the highway, and when I went back later to compare my memories to reality, I found nothing of what had occupied my mind for all those years. The place was empty. The playground was paved in cracked concrete. The hut at the entrance to the campground hadn’t been repainted for ages, and the blue of the swimming pool had faded. Nothing had been replaced and the holes weren’t filled the way you said they did in East Berlin, where they turned bombed-out zones into parks for kids. In my village, people built new houses at the end of a row of old wrecks, like a virus reproducing. The place smelled of despair, as if patiently waiting to disappear piece by piece into the junkyard.

I went back there with you to show you what sort of belly I had emerged from. We drove in on the 417. You squinted at the landscape of cornfields and farms adrift in endless space. Time stretched out like the white lines on the asphalt that children stare at until their heads spin. There was no one on the street, not a single living person. The solitude weighed a ton, the spruce was dying of sadness, the church steeple was alone, lost, fading into the thin fog. The village had become a cemetery, washing away the rest of the bitterness I carried within, the final regrets of childhood.

When we talked about our backgrounds, I would remind you of those pictures. To your high culture I offered up the bungalow and the rail line, and my stuttering native tongue. Deep down, I loved my village, the way I loved you when I took you there.

Last night, in my sleep, after the insomnia that has been my companion since you left, I heard you tell your stupid senseless stories again. This time it was about a neighbour woman you hardly knew at all, though you maintained that her outbursts of anger were caused by a stillborn child who had been her ancestor. I raised my eyebrows and you pushed on, you wanted to persuade me that occult forces dictate the relations between people and that we have to trust their shadowy embrace. You started talking to me about souls and the karmic cycle, the price that life makes us pay and the ancestors to whom we owe absolute fidelity. In my dream, you were the misfortune teller you had become in reality who, every day, sets down the law of bad news, the one who, in the absence of God, decides he’s a guru and goes looking for disciples.

As the months went by, your belief became a science, and I was strictly forbidden from questioning it. Sometimes, the rebellious dissident, I raised my eyes to the sky. You would shoot daggers at me and resort to the blunt weapon of your truth. I needed a manual to survive, or a crash course on von Clausewitz’s book on war; Hitler believed that every soldier should have a copy of it in his pack. I would have had to sign a protocol with you, the way warring countries do. Love had become a two-step of compromises and negotiated settlements to keep the peace. I was a UN Peacekeeper. I watched where I put my feet.

If love is an ordinary event that attracts all language to it, you were my dictionary, my Berlitz, my Assimil. But just because I’m writing about you doesn’t mean you really exist. The more time passes, the more your language becomes foreign. I have stopped recognizing the voice that enchanted and lulled and caressed me, your voice that bewitched me like the notes of a rat-charmer, your voice always working to persuade me. Aphorisms, directives, declarations, quotations, fine phrases, prayers, slogans, all those truths hanging like mobiles over everyday life, or nailed to the wall like crucifixes. Who could tell whether what you said was true, or if you even believed in it yourself?

Sometimes the words that poured from your mouth made me lose my way. The man I had met, for whom life was joyful, had disappeared. The one who had taken his place was the messenger of the apocalypse.

When, tormented by your convictions, I began to have doubts, I found myself in the vise of conflicting loyalties like the children of divorced parents, split between the you I loved and whose words I wanted to believe, and the me who didn’t believe you, who couldn’t believe you, and who really didn’t want to. Believing in God wouldn’t have solved anything, for that law couldn’t do anything for damaged beings and troubled minds, in the end even God couldn’t have soothed your anger.

Against your will, you came to join me in my country. In exchange, you demanded that I immigrate too. I couldn’t have imagined the country you would demand I adopt, a world of complete uncertainty, where everything could fall apart without warning, like in ancient Rome where a friend would suddenly become the enemy and earn the fatal thrust without warning, where the mistress of the evening became a woman abandoned the next morning, swearing vengeance, for it is better to kill than be dishonoured.

Overlooking the Forum, the antique Piccadilly that was once the beating heart of the Republic, I picture a Rome built on irony and sarcasm, where threats and declarations of love were whispered between the lines, where senators were both orators and butchers. Rome is like a Caravaggio canvas, made of mysteries, a world where reason and law never have the last word. The leaden blanket of the Vatican does not ward off transgression, and if men marry, they do not limit themselves to the marriage bed.

Even today I still wonder what in you echoed so strongly in me. What was the empty room, what was the need you gave the impression you could fulfill, what truth about me did your presence reveal? I wonder what battle you allowed me to fight, and what freedom I was meant to conquer.

I don’t remember which of the fathers of psychoanalysis said that love is the experience that most closely approximates psychosis without actually crossing over into madness, I don’t remember if it was Jung who one day succumbed to his passion for Sabina Spielrein, a former patient. Later on, when she had become a psychoanalyst and opened a kindergarten in Moscow, she had a strangely violent young charge named Vassili, Stalin’s son, registered under a pseudonym. Spielrein had always supported the system, but as time went by and events developed around her, she realized that her country had fallen into the hands of an insane person. Threatened by the KGB, her school was shut down. Apparently she died in a hail of Nazi machine-gun fire in a synagogue in Rostov, the city of her birth.

Once, when she was still very much in love with Jung, who had abandoned her to return to his wife, she wrote Freud a letter saying she wanted to separate from Dr. Jung for good, but couldn’t succeed until she was free enough to be able to love him, or until she had forgiven him for everything, or killed him.

When you brandished your homesickness like an olive branch, I loaded my cannons with Dostoevsky’s words: “When you encounter the first small instance of suffering, you brood upon it like a hen with her egg.”

It was hateful, you claimed, the way I mocked you when you defended the myth of the Slavic soul, the wound you said was impossible to cure, whereas I understood that you did not want to be cured, it was your way of establishing your identity. You loved the Czech Republic, that was the excuse you served up to anyone who would listen and accept to be contaminated in the process, for who could compete with such horrors?

You screamed at me, I didn’t understand anything about your world, only what you taught me, and now I was stealing it from you, you accused me of pillaging you to fill the empty container with what didn’t belong to me, since emptiness is what defined people on this continent. For you, the people of Quebec had nothing to offer, and you separated me from the rest only because I had a vaguely European background. You forgot that my father had immigrated here too, and the way you rejected the place that had opened its arms to him was repulsive, he had no part of your admiration for the French who were the ones, according to you, we had to rely on to build our culture, and for that reason their arrival like a wave in the Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood was a blessing.

You explained that Slavs knew how to live because they ate, fucked, and slept with death. You forgot that your origins were in part inventions and that your memory wrapped them in nostalgia that had nothing to do with reality, the sites of childhood always end up playing the role of paradise lost. You forgot that as the years passed and your travels added up, you had become a hodgepodge of identities, that was the destiny you were facing and the trouble with America, it mirrored the image of your identity, your body as a land of immigration.

You dreamed of purity and sometimes, without the slightest hint of irony, you came up with statements that were racist, snobbish, reactionary, and misogynist, and no one could tell if you believed what you were saying or even understood what you meant, or whether you were just trying to provoke. At those times you embodied everything I can’t stand, but I went on loving you anyway, the way we love teenagers and forgive them their outrageous assertions because they don’t really believe a word of what they’re saying, and it’s just a matter of time, they’ll grow up and leave this awkward stage, this rite of passage. I awaited the sign of the armistice, when you would emerge from the sinister exile you inhabited like a stateless orphan. You became Raskolnikov asking Sonia, “Well, you are crying and embracing me again. Why do you do it? Because I couldn’t bear my burden and have come to throw it on another: you suffer too, and I shall feel better! And you can love such a mean wretch?”

Except I wasn’t Sonia, that passive and infinitely patient woman you dreamed of, I couldn’t wait a lifetime for you to finally speak the words that would free you, the final confession that would recognize the pain at the centre of your world, and the desire to be cured of it and leave behind the inner territory you defended tooth and nail, risking your own life.

I ended up cohabiting with Stalin.