Alain Pasquier

Alain Pasquier had been living in his large 8½-room apartment on Hutchison Street for over thirty years. Over time, his home had filled up with furniture, objects, gizmos, thingamajigs, thick file folders overflowing with yellowed papers, and cabinets and bookcases crammed full of stuff. Paintings, posters and photos covered every square inch of the walls. His closets were bursting at the seams with big green garbage bags and beat-up suitcases that his children were going to pick up – I swear I will, Dad – just as soon as they found a bigger place to live. For some time now, the apartment had been covered with a thick coat of dust, which is not very feng shui, they say, because dust is a sign of death.

Alain and Marie-Claude, his first wife, had bought the apartment for fifteen thousand dollars at the end of the 1970s. They had found it expensive at the time, and would not have been able to buy it if Marie-Claude’s kind and rich aunt hadn’t died and given them a head start. They were both young part-time university teachers. She taught mathematics and he taught literature. Life was beautiful.

Looking at his downcast and disillusioned face now, you could scarcely believe that he had once been happy. Had he really? A man of Pasquier’s age has every right to wonder. When he was living with Marie-Claude he didn’t have time for soul-searching questions like am I happy, do I like teaching, do I want to have children, haven’t I wanted to be a writer since the age of twelve? His wife was a rather effective blend of a bulldozer and a nightingale, whereas he was indecisive and totally lacking in self-confidence. The bulldozer took charge when Alain was undecided and the nightingale smoothed over his lack of self-confidence. He was crazy about her, and her love for him would have saved the world, if the world and Alain could have been saved. Two children were born of their union and in this home.

You might think that he had failed to fulfil his dreams, and that was why he had such a shrivelled up and miserable look about him as he walked along Hutchison or anywhere else, that he had been defeated, like many others, by the hurly-burly of day-to-day life – work, kids, I make a good living so why should I worry about my lot in life, why would I wish for anything else? But, truth be told, he had never had any dreams. He had suppressed any dreams the minute they threatened to sneak through the backdoor of his consciousness. He had every right to whine, to be disgruntled, to resent the entire world, but he had not allowed himself to dream.

Alain was not fully aware of who he was. Any ideas or feelings he had about himself were amorphous or inconsistent. He would consider himself highly intelligent one day, but the following day or even an hour later, he would think he was the most stupid and incompetent good-
for-nothing. He was neither exceptional nor useless. Like seven-eighths of the world population, in fact, he fell somewhere in between the two extremes. But being average was of no interest to him. He preferred to think of himself as either superior or else bloody stupid. He was fifty-five years old, but it had never occurred to him to question the two opposite positions he had taken since childhood. It’s hard to break long-standing habits we adopt in childhood, as anyone who has grappled with them in therapy or other forms of soul-searching would tell you. Several times a day, Alain Pasquier fluctuated between vanity and humility, like a balloon that was inflated and deflated. A simple smile from one of his female students would get him pumped, just as a single word of criticism could upset him and knock him off his feet until the next benevolent look or kind word perked him up again.

In love or not, loved or not, he was never relaxed, calm, happy, self-assured. He was never worry-free. He was a troubled person, carrying a burden without understanding its nature and cause. He would smile and sometimes laugh, but his smile bore the traces of deep-rooted pain and his laugh, often tinged with bitterness, was joyless.

Alain Pasquier did not know who he was, but it didn’t matter to him. What he wanted, what he desired most in the world – and this was perhaps the driving force in his whole life – was to be loved by the woman he loved. Without the loving gaze of a woman, cracks would appear in the mirror in which he saw his reflection. His life would go off the rails, even though, when you thought about it, his life had never been completely on track from childhood on.

Alain Pasquier had always had a way with women. If you saw him slumped in his armchair, his eyes red from crying, you would wonder what women could possibly have seen in him. Oh, he has charm, a lot of charm. There’s something in his beautiful sad eyes and in his whole being that begs for salvation. Or, in a more poetic vein, he is saying, I am placing my head, my heart, my entire body in your beautiful white hands. Crush me, if you feel like it, without you I am nothing. Naturally, any woman who was the least bit maternal or romantic or who had the mettle of Jesus Christ our Saviour, or a female version thereof, would become entrapped by his beautiful misty eyes and his romantic poet’s mane of hair.

His lovers and his two legal wives were never disappointed, at least in one respect: Alain Pasquier was an exceptional lover. He loved women, womankind, femininity – except his mother and sisters, whom he loathed with a guilty passion.

He adored the company of women, their conversation, their interests, their concerns, their intelligence, their boundless capacity for love, their good nature, and the mood swings brought on by their menstrual cycles, whims or the simple need to be true to their feelings.

He had no interest in talking about hockey, cars, or the ups and downs of the stock market. He far preferred what the Brits would refer to as small talk over a cup of tea, gossip, and (yes!) shopping, going to the theatre, and, of course, reading books – popular novels as well as the classics from Duras to Yourcenar, from Proust to Fuentes and Vásquez Montalbán, authors he had introduced them to and taught them to appreciate. All of his friends were women, with the exception of one childhood friend he still had dinner with once or twice a year, which was just enough to remind him that the company of men meant little to him, and what would I do, dear God, if from one day to the next, there were no more women in the world?

Once he got over them, he would get in touch with them again, and they would come back, having forgotten the terrible scenes, the foul language, the lies, the blackmail and the insulting letters. He had charm, all right, and women liked his company as much as he liked theirs. His former students, who had got a lot from their professor, would reappear years later. Pasquier was generous with his time and knowledge. He was never condescending. He was always stimulating and his classes were full. No matter whether he was depressed, discouraged or disappointed in life, he always gave it his all when he walked into class and he taught brilliantly.

Alain Pasquier had always been incapable of looking ahead, of seeing himself in the future, but he could relive the past at will, down to the slightest detail, especially the things that had been painful.

Of all the women who had dumped him, his first big love, the mother of his children, still took the prize for the length and intensity of suffering she had caused when they separated. Depression, one year on sick leave. At the time, his mother, who had never loved him, had nonetheless come to look after him. Marie-Claude had walked out on him, leaving him the house and kids, and bye-bye, I don’t want to have anything more to do with you. He had fallen into the depths of despair, particularly since Marie-Claude had been ruthless. After having told him clearly why she was leaving, she had disappeared. Disappeared without a trace. She had given him back his life by loving him and, with one fell swoop, she had pulled the plug. Complete darkness. Nothingness. As if nothing had ever existed between them. As if he had never existed. He no longer had a grip on life. Everything collapsed. No floor, no ceiling. Only an old crevice into which he had fallen. He was disappearing into his childhood malaise, and reliving his own lack of life – if you can call such horror living.

He felt more or less the same kind of pain each time he went through a separation. “Why do they all leave me? I love them so much. I have loved them so much. I can’t live without them. I have done everything. I have done everything …”

His second wife has just walked out on him. “Oh God, I want to die …”

She has been speaking for a long time. He hasn’t heard anything, but he knows. It is final and there is no going back. He will never get over it. He is too old. Broken. At the end of his tether. An old dirty sock with holes in it, buried at the bottom of the laundry hamper. Life doesn’t mean anything anymore, it never has.

She is going down the stairs. “I am worth nothing because she doesn’t love me.”

He hears the front door close.

He falls to pieces completely. I am worth nothing because she doesn’t love me, a refrain recorded at the age of five, when he was absolutely sure that his mother would never love him. Sounds are amplified and distorted. “I am worth nothing. I’m a failure. My life has never amounted to much. I will die the way I was born. Rejected. A beggar. Even my mother. All my life, I have begged. Love me. Even my children love their mother more than me. I, too, loved my mother … Just a smile, a kind look … God, how I loved her. God, how I loved her. I am tired. Tired.”

Alain Pasquier’s daughter was in the habit of coming to see her father once a week. Actually, she came to do her laundry. That day, she found him asleep. It’s really unusual for him to be asleep on the living room couch, she thought at first.

She didn’t notice the handwritten note lying on the floor between the coffee table and the couch.

There were lots of papers lying all over the apartment. Two dressers and four desks overflowing with file
folders and piles of papers held down by paper weights in all shapes and sizes. Her father had a lot of projects on the go, some begun long ago, none of which had ever been completed. But he kept the paperwork handy, close by, just in case …