Chapter 67

Since she often worked late, she said that she would probably be spending the night at the hospital. I checked the odometer of the car before she went to work: thirty thousand five kilometres. I was going to check the odometer again when she came back, after she was supposed to have been working.

The children were spending the night with friends, so I went to a club on St. Catherine Street to check out some of the dancers there. There was one in particular, a brunette with a button nose and small brown eyes, that attracted my attention. Around the age of twenty-five, she looked like Chantal in the body: the same breasts, the same ass, even the same belly. She was about the same height as Chantal, but not as pretty. She was cute, however, with a mischievous smile. It was the smile.

I watched as the dancer strip little by little to the music on the jukebox until she was dancing completely naked. After she was finished dancing, she smiled when she saw me and sat down next to me. There was the intoxicating scent of perfume, and the bright red gloss on her thin lips. Her dark hair was in a queue — I liked her hair and her neck. When we introduced ourselves, she said her name was Désirée — a prostitute's name, I thought, not her real name. I introduced myself as Mr. Dégas. Smiling, she asked, "You have a first name, Mr. Dégas?"

"Edgar," I replied, "my name's Edgar..."

The drinks were really expensive here — outrageous — but I bought her a drink. When she said that she was a single mother with one child, I immediately had the image of Chantal as a single mother, dancing naked in a club like this one to support herself. Lots of dancers are single mothers, I'm sure, working regular jobs in the daytime, then dancing at night; Désirée also said that she was a nurse. I complimented her on her appearance and sang the apple a little; she flirted back. Then I suggested, "Hey, what do you say we go to a hotel after you get off work? I can pay the hotel..."

She said, indignant: "At the price of three hundred dollars, Mr. Dégas, I might sit with you the whole evening. Otherwise, I doubt that you could afford me. But excuse me, monsieur: I have to go dance now..."

She stood up to go dance on stage again. "The whore," I swore under my breath.

So I left the club and came home with my bitte under my arm, not very lucky that evening, then I fell asleep. I woke up the next morning, surprised to find Chantal sleeping next to me. I really had the demon, so I gently nuzzled her earlobe with my lips until she began to respond. Lazily, she let me feast on her body, set like a table before me. After she sent me off, I stood up and got dressed for my class that morning. She sighed with contentment and went back to sleep. She said later that she didn't remember it. I left the house with her stickiness and scent still on my body. But before I walked to the campus that morning, I checked the odometer of the car again: thirty thousand eight kilometres. I couldn't believe it! Though she was supposed to have been working in the States the night before, working the night shift, it was evident that she hadn't even left Montréal. Right away, I suspected her of infidelity again. "The whore," I swore under my breath.

I was soon back at the club, sitting with "Désirée," sitting with one or two other dancers also calling themselves "Désirée." I can be very charming, you know. In the end, I talked the first "Désirée," the brunette with the small eyes and the button nose, into going to the Lord Berri Hotel with me a few times, me, paying the room. I always gave her some money afterwards: "For the kid," I always said. "I like children..."

I was always tbe gentleman, because even ballerinas are human. However, I didn't like her after a while, because we couldn't talk; Chantal was a much better conversationalist. As well, Désirée was only mediocre in bed, and she didn't even like to kiss. Towards the end, she only wanted time to get used to having me inside her before thrusting. She wasn't having orgasms, I thought, and she didn't seem to care — she just laid there. But that's the way of prostitutes.

Finally, I asked, "You don't have bad knees, do you?"

"No, monsieur..."

So I asked her to get on her hands and knees on the bed, and I took her en lèvrette. She moaned with pleasure a few times, then she let out an extended wail as she came. As she panted after we were done, still on her hands and knees, I smacked her on the ass with my hand lightly and said, "You have a nice ass; you should have it bronzed."

But in the end, I didn't want to pay a ballerina who took herself for a high-class prostitute — not when I already had a ballerina at home. I wasn't a rich man, you know, and there wasn't a Maria da Conceição among those dancers. There was none to compare to Chantal either; who was much more intelligent, much more beautiful — much more adventurous — than Désirée.

The whole thing was a great disappointment. Since I wasn't seeing Chantal much that winter, I started seeing Arlette again, because we both wanted love without involvement. "I don't like to turn away a hungry heart," she said. "I'm a Florence Nightingale between the sheets..."

Nor did I want to deny a woman with a similar need. It wasn't the first time for us: we had been lovers even before I met Katrina, my ex-wife. We were old friends, but she always insisted that she didn't to be conjoined twins with me. After I married Katrina, she got married, then divorced. We had sex a few times while we were married to other people, and after we were divorced.

One night, she said to me, "Daigle says he and his wife saw Chantal with a Latin American type in the souterraine. I thought it would be better if you heard it from me than from someone else..."

"Old man Daigle?" I asked in disbelief. "Ouf!"

Then Arlette touched me gently on the arm and said, "She still loves you, Bob."

"How do you know?" I asked.

"I just know," she replied. "Even when I was fooling around behind my husband's back, I still loved my husband. I'll always love him..."

But with us, it began to feel like incest after a while: "It's the first time I've every felt dirty," she admitted.

So we decided to remain just friends. But the last time we "committed incest," it was the best. Arlette really let go.

Finally, I confronted Chantal with my suspicions about the odometer. Very indignant, she replied, "With who — José? I've found a new position. I work at Royal Victoria now. I didn't tell you because we haven't talked very much lately, you know. And you: haven't you been unfaithful to me? Haven't you been sleeping with Arlette all these years?"

"That's a lie!" I replied, angrily.

"Have you ever been unfaithful, Robert?" she asked.

I admitted to having been unfaithful with Flora in Rio, since she had always suspected anyway. She called me a hypocrite and slapped me hard in the face. Then she started crying. I felt like a goblet of shit.

Then she said, "Julie and Camille have flown in all the way from Sri Lanka, so I'm going to show them a night on the town. Don't wait up..."

Chapter 69

Donna met me early Friday evening at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, where she took me to some blues clubs on Michigan Avenue; the place was really jumping. One club was owned by a famous blues guitarist, according to Donna, only I had never heard of him. She also said that the best pizza was made in Chicago. We ate at a place called Barro's; it was the best pizza that I ever ate.

We spent the night in a hotel on Michigan Avenue and had lots of sex, then we took a morning flight to Los Angeles. Donna paid the air fare and everything as a favour to me, because I had said something about wanting to look for my father in Los Angeles.

LA was much larger than Rio, but situated in a valley hemmed in by mountains like Rio, a city of palm trees pointed like needles at the sky, and nameless streets and boulevards so long that some had addresses in six digits and always seem to run out of sidewalk so that you had to walk on the grass or in the street. There were cars everywhere — always cars — no matter where you went. There were a few smog alerts while we were there. Then there were the beaches: always crowded, with thousands of people on weekends, women in their bikinis, like Maria da Conceição. Donna and I spent a few afternoons at Huntington Beach, then ate some pizza. But our favourite pizzeria was at the very tip of Balboa Point. I wondered if there wasn't a lighthouse here at one time.

You could see the Hollywood sign on a hill from far away in the distance. At the corner of Hollywood and Vine, it seemed like every day was Carnival, with people always dressed in their costumes, but no less bizarre than Rio at Carnival. Some of the women, with their sheer fantasias might as well have been naked, but the prostitutes that I saw were the most beautiful that I had ever seen anywhere. "Actresses who can't get a role," Donna said, when she saw me looking.

When we saw how big LA was, I didn't think we could find my father. If he was alive, I thought, he would only be found if he wanted to be found. We tried the telephone directories, the Missing Persons Bureau, the morgues of every county surrounding Los Angeles — everything. We checked death certificates online but found nothing. We even checked the California Department of Corrections, thinking that he might be in prison, but we found nothing. We checked taxi companies as well, showing dispatchers the one photograph that I had of him.

A taxi dispatcher in Santa Ana remembered him: "He was a good driver — never had a problem with him. But he kept apart from the other Mexican drivers. Then he disappeared, like he was abducted by aliens. He didn't come to work, didn't call in sick or nothing — just disappeared. Happens all the time..."

"Do you think something happened to him?" Donna asked.

The dispatcher shrugged his shoulders and replied, "I don't know, miss. He could have been caught in a sweep and sent back to Mexico. Or he could have been robbed and killed, and then his body dumped in a gully somewhere. There's gullies and arroyos all over southern California, you know. His body could have been eaten by coyotes before anybody could make an identification — shit happens. Sorry I can't be more helpful, miss..."

Outside, Donna touched me gently on the arm and said, "I'm sorry, José. If you want, we can hire a private detective who can make a more thorough investigation..."

I shook my head. "Something must have happened to him," I replied. "He wouldn't desert his family like that."

Like Rio, downtown Los Angeles had thousands of homeless people downtown, people really destitute; LA wasn't much different than Rio in that respect. But we didn't find him among the homeless either. My father didn't come up to me, begging me for some change, you know.

Donna hired the private detective anyway, but we never found my father: he had joined the world of missing persons, or maybe run away to Mexico like the dispatcher had said.

*****

We flew back to Toronto, where I saw her apartments for the first time, two of them. They were the most beautiful apartments that I had ever seen, no bigger than mine back home in Rio, but nice and clean. Since we arrived from LA almost five o'clock in the morning, we simply went to bed. It was the first time we actually slept together without having sex, but it was actually very intimate, very reassuring, just having her in bed beside me.

The first week in Toronto, Donna took me to a baseball game at the Skydome, like she had promised. I asked a lot of questions, but I was eventually able to follow the game. It was long — nothing like soccer. I got bored. However, I like to watch an inning or two of baseball on TV, because it's a mental game.

She later took me to a hockey game as well, in the fall. Hockey was easier to follow than baseball, more like soccer, but maybe a little too fast. She said to me, "You have to learn how to see the puck. Just like you have to learn to see the ball in soccer."

People in Toronto were really passionate about the Leafs, though no gangster ever put a hit on the Maple Leafs' goalie for losing the seventh game in a series against the Ottawa Senators, like the Medellin cartel had assassinated that Colombian defender after the 1994 World Cup Finals. It seems that hockey fans were more civilized, I thought. That's why I love Canada — the people are civilized.

I got a work visa and a job with a taxi company in Toronto. However, I always went where a dispatcher sent me, rather than drive up and down Yongh Street like Donna had suggested. I wasn't freelancing yet. It was amazing how clean and how quiet the city was. Toronto was relatively free of crime, only about fifty murders a year. But my car had a silent alarm: if you pressed a button, a blue light on the trunk would flash, warning the people on the street that you were being robbed. They trusted people to call the police here, apparently. You were only aware of being in a bad part of town, Jane and Fitch, for example, when you saw how nervous everybody seemed to be. I actually saw somebody get shot there. However, this part of town was nothing like the worst parts of Rio. Sure, there was crime and beggars on the streets — squeegee boys, for example — but the people were friendly and courteous; the police weren't shooting homeless children like in Rio. Canada was more civilized than Brazil, I thought.

At first, I thought that Donna was really hot for me, but I was soon unable to tell where I stood with her. We went clubbing together, had lots of sex, but she was seeing some guy named Jack, who was a lot older than her, about fifty, maybe sixty years old. She always said it was business. As well, my nightmares disturbed her sleep, and she slept on the couch sometimes. She urged me to see a therapist, but I always put it off. "Not enough time," was my excuse.

I thought that Jack was probably married, but I didn't say anything; she probably knew anyway. I wasn't happy about it, but she was letting me stay with her and sleeping with me; she never brought him home.

Then one day, she said that she was flying to Porto Alegro, Brazil, for about ten days. It was just business, she said. Porto Alegro is on the Atlantic Ocean in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, near the Uruguayan border. South of the equator, its climate is much milder than Rio's, but it has beaches as well. People in Rio with money go there to escape the humidity.

"Are you going with Jack?" I asked.

"Yes," she admitted. "Why, is there a problem with that?"

I wanted to say yes, but I replied slowly, "No, but I would like to go to Brazil too, since I'm not used to the cold. I'm a little frilieux..."

"Frilieux?" she asked.

"It's a French word," I replied, smiling. "I learned it from a woman from Montréal..."

She just nodded and said, "Okay, but don't forget to feed the cats, eh?"

Then she kissed me. "I'll be back," she promised. "It's only business."

She was really attached to those cats — I got to know them very well. One of them was a handsome chocolate brown Siamese with blue eyes called Simon, who hissed at you whenever you came near him — I didn't like him. The other was an alley cat, white with a few large grey spots, called Captain Howdy; he was much friendlier than the Siamese. He purred loudly whenever you held him. Donna called him her "purr baby."

Donna was often away for as long as a fortnight. While she was in Porto Alegro — or wherever she went with Jack — I mostly stayed home at first, reading, watching television or playing my guitar: João Gilberto, Milton Nascimento — bossa nova, since I liked the old stuff. However, I soon got bored with this arrangement. I felt like the house boy after a while, so I started going out when I wasn't working — when Donna was away with Jack. I picked up a Chinese girl of joy on Spadina Avenue in Chinatown who called herself "Candy" — they all called themselves "Candy" or "Brandy," it seemed. There were other Asian comfort girls as well: Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino or Indian, whatever. Most of the prostitutes in Canada are probably brown in skin colour. Of course, I always used a condom.

I like Asian girls, I have found: shy and quiet, the ones that I have met anyway. I liked Donna, who was actually shy and quiet as well. Only she was like the sun and the moon: bright by day, dark by night. She had an infectuous laugh, but she could be very moody. I had to be careful when I teased her, because she might take it the wrong way. But I liked her as a person, always happy to see her.

The sex was always good, but she liked to do it against hard surfaces — a desk or a table. I don't know, maybe it was a Hindu thing. She liked bruises on her hips or on her ass, she said, only it was difficult to tell with her when she had bruises, since her skin was very dark. However, we didn't always do it against something hard: we did it in bed like normal people as well. She was very normal, you know.

While Donna was away, I had lots of time to think of Chantal. I hadn't forgotten that she was married, but it became an obsession — I couldn't stop thinking about her. I mostly imagined us talking, I had imaginary conversations with her while driving my car. I wanted to tell her my feelings, come what may. I didn't think about the sex very much, because I thought that it would come to that eventually, if we talked long enough. I was obsessed.

There would be no point in telling my story if I didn't call her, so I called her. I had to find out from an operator how to call information, since I didn't know how to call information in Canada yet. Then I asked the operator for her telephone number, which was listed under her husband's name. I started to call a couple of times, but I was always nervous, afraid that her husband might answer — afraid that she might answer. The first time, I couldn't even make myself dial the number — I just went to work instead. The second time, I dialed the number, then hung up as soon as it started ringing on the other line. Only the third time did I wait until the answering machine picked up.

It was her voice, asking in French to leave a message. I was about to hang up when somebody picked up the phone. "Hello," she said, somewhat timidly.

"Hello," I replied nervously, "como vai a senhora?"

There was a long silence, then she exclaimed, "Oh, my God — José! Where are you?"

"I'm in Toronto, I drive a taxi here..."

"So you made it to Canada after all, eh?"

I smiled, because I knew she was smiling, and I said, "Yes, I'm in Canada..."

Once I got to the purpose of my call, the words came out in a torrent. "Look, I really want to see you again, okay? Just to talk. We don't have to do anything you don't want to do, okay? I just want to talk..."

"I have to go to work in a few minutes," she said, after some hesitation.

"We can meet tomorrow then, or maybe on your day off?"

There was another silence. Then she said, reluctantly, "Okay, the Ville-Marie Hotel, the corner of Sherbrooke and Peel, Thursday at noon. There's a bar there. Be there or be square..."

Then she hung up.

Before I left for Montréal, I changed the litter and made sure that Donna's cats had enough food and water for two or three days. I was almost out the door when Captain Howdy, the alley cat, meowed in protest. "Hey, I won't be gone very long, amigo," I told him, "maybe a day or two, that's it."

When I was out the door, I said to myself, "Great! Now I'm talking to cats!"

Donna talked to her cats, you know, like they were her children. They acted like they understood, but they were only cats. I found this little eccentricity endearing, this habit of talking to animals. It showed the gentleness in her, I thought. She might be good with children.

Chapter 70

It was about a six-hour drive from Toronto to Montréal, because of the road conditions. The roads were clear, but there was a lot of snow to the sides of the road because of a heavy snowstorm the day before. But I got onto Auto Route 401 and headed east, about three hundred kilometres or so. The countryside along the 401 was impressive enough outside Toronto, but once you crossed the Ottawa River into Québec, the scenery was transformed. It was the same hills as in Ontario, but because of the snow, it was magical, la belle province. With the snow-covered hills, it was like a fairy-tale world, how Disneyland should have been conceived but wasn't. The road signs were all in French, orange construction barriers with black letters that read Travaux, though nobody was repairing the road. "She was right," I said to myself. "It's pretty when it first snows..."

I arrived in Montréal about an hour after crossing the Ottawa River, just missing the evening rush hour traffic. With the snow on the ground and on the steep roofs of some of the houses, the city looked more rustic than Toronto, steeped in its own past — French. There were buildings here going back almost four hundred years, churches with their gothic arches that looked like they belonged in Paris that were interspersed with some modern monstrosities like the Biodome and the Geodesic Dome that somehow blended in with neoclassical edifices that wouldn't have looked out of place in London. I remembered her advice to me in Rio: "When you drive into Montréal for the first time, go get lost!"

So I listened to her advice: I deliberately took a wrong turn at Décarie Boulevard instead of Sherbrooke East, where I was supposed to turn, and got lost. I found myself in an area of red brick tenements and balconies, with trees by the sides of the street that were now bare; the buildings that I saw were mostly tenaments of red brick. Most of the people that I saw in this quarter were Hasidic Jews in black caftans and black fur-lined hats that looked like Mexican sombreros. But Montréal was a cosmopolitan city, with many ethnic groups besides the French, the English and the Jews. Like Toronto, Montréal had a large Asian population, as well as Africans, people from the Caribbean, and Latin Americans. There were also European groups, like the Italians of Little Italy, and even people who spoke Portuguese, like me, but most of the people that I saw were dark-skinned. But nearly everybody that I talked to spoke English. Only some of the beggars that I ran into didn't speak English; they were all French.

Since I arrived the night before I was to meet her, I checked into the Ville-Marie Hotel and parked there for thirty dollars a night. The Ville-Marie was a white twenty-one story three-star hotel at the corner of Sherbrooke West and Peel with easy access to the Metro, about a kilometre from St. Catherine's Street, the main artery of the downtown district. There was a café that was open-air in the summer when the steel sliding door was raised, and a pharmacy on the ground floor of the same building on the east corner of the block. Mount-Royal Park was across the street to the west. It wasn't the best hotel in the city, but the room was bright and spacious, painted white, with a comfortable king-sized bed. If I could persuade her to spend the night with me, I thought, it would serve my purposes nicely. Since she worked at Royal Victoria Hospital on Victoria Avenue a couple kilometres north of here, the location should have been convenient for her as well.

Then I took the Metro to the Old City, where everybody spoke French. However, everybody was appreciative when I tried to speak French, and ended up answering me in English. I found my way to the Notre-Dame Basilica, where I entered with a tour group but sat down in a pew like a parishioner. The white stone gothic basilica was austere rather than opulent like the Saint Benedict Cathedral in Rio, but impressive enough on the inside, with dozens of wood carvings, a huge organ and a bronze altarpiece. There were all kinds of colours: blue, purple, gold and silver. I didn't understand the theme of the stained glass windows, because it represented French missionaries from Canada's religious history, not the lives of the apostles or the saints. Then I looked up and saw the silver stars painted on the blue ceiling. I wondered if they weren't of the northern sky, or if they were just stars, because I remembered her telling me that she liked the change in the seasons and the stars at night.

After the basilica, I took the Metro back downtown, where I picked up a prostitute who called herself Dulcinée inside a bar on Papineau Street. She said she was from Madagascar. She was tall, not especially pretty, but I liked her look — very exotic, I thought. With broad shoulders and broad hips, her skin was a caramel brown and her brown hair short and kinky, but her narrow eyes set deep in the high cheekbones of her square face made her look part-Asian and part-African. She was more fluent in French than in English, it seemed, but I was able to understand her well enough.

I was willing to pay what she wanted: one hundred dollars. I bought a bottle of vodka at a dépanneur and brought her back to the Ville-Marie. I just lifted up her skirt and pulled her panties down, then entered her from behind, com animal, thrusting when she said that she was ready. Of course, I used a condom. After she left, I finished the bottle of vodka and fell asleep, sufficiently drunk so that my sleep was untroubled by the bad dreams from my childhood, of the gang wars in Rio during the 1980s.

I was still having dreams, you know.

*****

I woke up about eleven-thirty in the morning, a little hungover from the night before, after a wake-up call from the desk. Since it was a strange place, I didn't know where I was at first. I instinctively reached for my gun, only to realize that I didn't have it. I showered and shaved, then went downstairs, ordered a beer at the hotel bar and waited for her. She walked in about ten minutes before noon. When she arrived, I stood up and we kissed each other on both cheeks, then sat down.

She was definitely uma duende, like one of Santa's elves, with her white woolen toque and a red down jacket. She wore little round glasses with black wire frames — very chic. Perhaps she was a little heavier in the ass than I remembered her in Rio, but her faded blue jeans accentuated her ass and her hips nicely, I thought. She was also wearing a red Montreal Canadiens sweater, though she said she hadn't seen any hockey games on TV that year or been to any games.

"Como vai a senhora?" I asked, smiling.

"Tudo bem, senhor," she replied, also smiling.

She kissed me twice on the lips again. Her cheeks were still red from the cold, her lips all cold. She started the conversation with: "So what made you go to Toronto — Donna?

I nodded and replied, "My younger brother is driving my taxi in Rio now. I saved a little money, but Donna paid for almost everything else: visa, airplane ticket — everything. I send most of my money back home, but I'm working off the debt to Donna by driving a taxi and watching her cats while she's gone away on business. When she gets cold, I keep her warm..."

"And did you take the cats with you?" she asked, slyly.

I shrugged and replied, "Hey, I just gave them more food and changed their litter. If they run out of food, they can go catch a mouse."

"If she has a bird," she retorted, "they won't need to catch a mouse..."

When I understood what she meant, I laughed and said, "Yeah, right..."

We spent a few hours in the bar together, just talking, laughing. There was another couple in the bar, that was it. We each had about three beers apiece, feeling good after a while. Sitting across from each other, we had our arms around each other's necks at one point, singing "Besame Mucho." I was surprised that she even knew the song, since it was from the 1950s or 1960s, before her time, and mine. She said that the Beatles had recorded it — that was how she knew the song. I wasn't familiar with the Beatles. "That song's Spanish, eh?" she asked.

"Yes, it's Spanish..."

I sang in a loud voice, but she whispered, laughing: "Shhh, there's other people in the bar!"

So I sang it in a lower voice, but she put her finger to her lips again and repeated, her forehead gently tapping mine: "Shhh..."

Then she sang, in a low voice, like a lullaby. I sang after her, but she stopped. "I don't know the rest of the words," she said.

I kissed her on the lips. "You don't need to know the rest of the words," I replied. "I know what you want..."

She kissed me back, her arms still around me neck. Then she removed her arms from my neck and asked me about Lourdes, my woman in Rio. I told her that Lourdes seemed to be doing well, that I talked to my family on the telephone every week or so.

"You didn't tell me you were married," she said, staring hard into my eyes.

"We weren't married," I replied. "We were only living together. But we have three children, ages six, four and three. Or she has three children: the first is from a previous relationsip..."

When I asked her about her family, she shrugged and replied, "The future is uncertain, José. My husband and I might divorce, we might not — I don't know."

"That's a pity," I replied.

"Then why did you come here," she asked bitterly, "if you didn't mean to break up my marriage? Why didn't you stay in Toronto? Or better yet, why didn't you stay in Brazil?"

"I wanted to talk to you," I replied, surprised by her sudden animosity. "Why are you here?"

"Because I don't want you to appear at my house and bother my family at midnight!"

"Oh, really!" I asked skeptically.

"Yes," she replied, but I thought that she lacked conviction.

She was still undecided, I thought, so I said, "You don't have to do anything you don't want to do, Chantal. I don't expect you to elope with me, okay? If you don't want to do it, I understand. I still love you anyway — I still consider you a friend. But if you want to, I'm upstairs on the eighteenth floor. It's supposed to snow again and I'm a little frilieux. Maybe we can warm each other up..."

"It's not possible, José," she said apologetically. "I love my husband and my children. I want to save my marriage, okay?"

"Okay," I conceded, "it's not possible."

She put her hand on mine and said, "I'm really sorry, José..."

"For what?" I asked darkly. "It's not like I caught you in bed with my best friend, like Rita and Gilberto..."

"I'm sorry that you came all this way," she replied.

Then I made an offer: "What do you say we do the thing for three months? After that, it's up to you. As well, you can break it off at any time."

There was an awkward silence for a few moments. I thought she might sneak out when she stood up to use the rest room, but she came back, sat down next to me in the booth, and put her head on my shoulder. Then she asked, with a sly look on her face: "Do you have a camera?"

"What are you thinking?" I asked.

She stood up and said, "Come — I'll show you."

When I didn't stand up right away, she grabbed my hand and tried to pull me out of the booth. "Come, I'll show you," she repeated.

We put on our coats and our hats and went outside; it was starting to snow again. On the same block as the hotel was a café and a pharmacy. She bought some lipstick, an instamatic camera, and some film at the pharmacy on the corner east of the hotel. Then she led me to the entrance of the Ville-Marie, where she smeared layer upon layer of bright red lipstick on her mouth — much more than necessary — and kissed me all over the face until I had lipstick smeared all over my face. Then she loaded the camera and took a picture of me. After the photo developed, I asked for the camera so that I might take a picture of her, but she aimed it at herself and took another one of herself first. "Kilroy was here!" she said.

She handed me the camera and the second photo of herself. In the second photo was a pair of eyes and a nose that looked to be peering over a wall. Then I took a photo of her as she tried to look sexy; she didn't have to try very hard.

After that photo developed itself, she kissed me hard on the mouth, her tongue coiling around mine like a snake around a jungle vine. Oh God, how she kissed! I took her by the hand and led her to the elevator, where we made out, all alone in the elevator until it arrived at my floor. When the elevator opened up, we walked to my room and entered, stripped naked, and fell on the bed, her tattoo of the butterfly soon in my face. The first time, we did it com animal, her standing at the foot of the bed with her back to me. Afterwards, she called her husband on her cell phone to tell him that the roads were bad and she had to work late, then she spent the night. I hoped that the roads would always be bad...

*****

The next morning, we did it one more time before she left. Then I took a photo of her lying naked on her side on the bed, smiling, with one leg crossed over the other and her head propped up by her hand and her elbow. After we got dressed, I went downstairs with her to the entrance, where we kissed in front of the Ville-Marie; she had evidently seen a lot of movies, the way she kissed me. Then she kissed me quickly on the lips twice, waved good-bye with her fingers, and whispered, "I have to go, mon amour, good-bye..."

I stood at the entrance of the Ville-Marie with lipstick still smeared all over my face from the afternoon before, watching her cross the street to the parking lot of the Omni Hotel across from the Ville-Marie. Then I went back upstairs showered and shaved before checking out and driving back to Toronto. I learned from the concierge at the Ville-Marie that I could have parked at the Omni across the street and saved about five dollars; the parking at the Omni was twenty-five dollars per night while it was thirty dollars at the Ville-Marie.

I started parking at the Omni...

*****

We slept together several times that winter, used up at least a couple boxes of twenty-four condoms. We sometimes ate at the café next door first, something light, then took the elevator upstairs. Whenever the rendezvous was on, we entered on our cell phones "45N73W," which is the latitude and longitude of Montréal. Whenever one of us had to cancel, however, we entered something like "Hiroshima, mon amour." The text messages were her idea — very clever, I thought.

She was a very intelligent woman. We had some neat conversations, talking of many things. She believed in God and the saints, but she thought that none of that mattered. "There's lots of Jesuses," she said once, "yours as well as mine. Mine was father to Mary Magdalene's children. But I don't believe that she was a whore, but that they were having marital problems. They were probably married when they were young, you know, around the age of sixteen."

She then told me of a Jesus who left home after he was baptised in the Jordan River. "Mary Magdalene probably thought that he was crazy at first," she said, "so they quarreled. Then Mary followed him all over Judea, pleading with him to come back home. Only he couldn't come back home, because they had lost everything, including his father's carpentry business, and people believed that he was either the Messiah or a heretic. The woman about to be stoned in the Mount of Olives was Mary Magdalene, of course. But the man that she was unfaithful to was Jesus. But he forgave her. They reconciled in the end, probably because both of them realized that he was going to die anyway."

"Did he rise from the dead on the third day?" I asked.

"If you believe," she replied, "that's the fifteenth Station of the Cross. If you don't believe, then there's only fourteen Stations of the Cross. But we all believe, José: some of us just don't want to admit it."

I said that I didn't believe in Jesus, that I was an atheist. She replied, "Even atheists have a Jesus, José. Most people think that Jesus was at least a good man..."

We only had a couple arguments. She objected whenever I bought a bottle of vodka at the dépanneur. "Alcohol becomes a dependency if you're getting drunk all the time, José," she said.

"I have nightmares," I told her. "I have come to dread Carnival because samba music sometimes triggers flashbacks and nightmares."

She listened with sympathy as I told her about being tortured by the police as a child. I also confessed to having committed murder when I was a child as well. Again, she listened without condemning me. "You could have post-traumatic stress," she said gently. "Soldiers who have been to war and rape victims often suffer from it. Maybe kids who have been gang members will suffer from it as well."

Then she confessed her own psychiatric problems. "I suffer from anxiety and depression," she said. "If I didn't take my medication, I might jump off a balcony or drown myself in the Saint Lawrence River because I have impulse disorder as well. But in any case, you don't have to suffer, José. You can't always avoid physical pain, but you can decide not to suffer emotional and mental anguish from it. If we suffer, mon amour, it's because we choose to suffer..."

When I started to cry, she held my head against her naked breasts and comforted me, like a mother, but she couldn't help me: I had to help myself. I realized that she was right, so I decided not to suffer from the nightmares anymore. I started seeing a therapist, who perscribed for me a sleeping pill, when I got back to Toronto. Once I started getting help, my relationship with Donna improved as well.

We had names for each other: she called me her taureau, which means "bull," while I called her a minha mariposa, which means "my moth." It was because of the tattoo above her sex, of course. I didn't know why she called me a bull, though I could guess.

We rented a tripod and a video camera one time; that was my idea. We laughed as we watched ourselves on video. In one scene, she looked at the camera, smiled slyly and said, "Don't try this at home, kids..." Then we did things that you wouldn't want your children to see on the television.

She always insisted that she was a dominatrix, but that only meant that she was in charge, not that she preferred bondage or sadomasochism. With gentle powers of persuasion, she usually got what she wanted. She liked to be on top à la femme supérieure, what she called à la Lilith. She had a strong supple body, from years of swimming and exercise, she said, able to squeeze hard with her buceta. I loved holding her body in my arms! In the end, I loved her shoulders and her breasts best, à la femme supérieure, because men are visually inclined while women have a finer sense of touch. I loved the tattoo of the butterfly just above her buceta as well. Though she had a few stretch marks from childbirth, and a bikini cut from a caesarian, I didn't find them at all unsightly. They gave her body character, I thought. She was still a beautiful, sexy woman. She insisted on only one thing every time we met: my face between her legs for a long time. It wasn't a problem with me, because I liked her taste. We both agreed that a man should be able to make a woman come at least three times. With her, it wasn't a problem making her come. "I've always had good sex," she said, smiling.

We also spent some time in the ville souterraine, Montréal's underground city, eating lunch at one of the many cafés and restaurants by the subway stations under the city. She bought some chocolates at a candy store. In the winter, it seemed like everybody went underground. She wanted to show me her city, so she took me on a grand tour above ground as well. You'd have thought that she'd be afraid to be seen in public with another man beside her husband, but she didn't seem to care. Oh, we were discreet: we didn't make out in doorways like in Rio. But a colleague of her husband and his wife saw us together one afternoon. She merely smiled, introduced me and told them, "He's a friend from South America. I'm showing him the city..."

Then, early in the spring, she broke it off as suddenly as I had initiated the thing by calling her out of the blue. "Our three months are up," she reminded me. Then she explained, "I'll always love you, José, but I want to save my marriage..."

"Does he know?" I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. "He's probably always known," she replied. "But I know what he does as well: I know where he puts his beard..."

But we spent one more night together before it was really over. The last time, we met at a bar on the east side of Saint Lawrence Boulevard, where she showed up about a half hour later and pretended to be a prostitute: a grey man's overcoat, nothing underneath except a black garter belt and some black stockings. She'd dyed her chestnut brown hair blond, and her torso was elaborately painted with henna, front and back, by a professional, with mandalas and swirls. It took about six hours, she said. A little silver chain dangled from her right nipple, which was pierced. Hardly original, the pierced nipple, I thought, but she was original, I soon found out.

While "negotiating" the final terms, she smiled and said, "The price is ten thousand dollars American, monsieur, but I accept any major credit card..."

The last time was the best; we held nothing back — it was even better than in Rio. In the spirit of a girl of joy, she was all submissive, ready to do no matter what I wanted. "It's you who's paying, monsieur," she reminded me, smiling. "However, I can always make suggestions..."

Yes, I always paid for the hotel room, but I didn't want to hurt or degrade her; it was all in fun. So I listened to some suggestions. She smiled and made reverence like a genie from a bottle. She warned me that that she might hurt me, but she only left me exhausted — sweetly exhausted. We did something from the Kama Sutra, where I sat in the middle of the king-sized bed in the lotus position while she sat on me with her legs wrapped around my waist and her arms around my neck. We couldn't thrust, but we talked a lot. Orgasm was achieved through the natural contractions of her buceta sucking and squeezing my pua until I erupted inside her. It was very intense — painfully intense. She, in turn, had multiple orgasms, then dug her heel hard into my back, cried out loud, and seemed to try to climb up my body with her arms. She was incredibly strong. I could barely hold on to her, even with my hands on her shoulders.

She sniffled after we were done. We couldn't break apart right away, we were so exhausted, our heads, nestled on each other's shoulders. So we cuddled in the lotus position for a long time in each other's arms, panting at first, then sighing. Then we kissed and laid down and fell asleep in each other's arms, our noses touching each other. I had never felt so close to anybody before, though she was leaving me.
I wasn't going to see her again.

The next morning, she took a shower and put on her nurse's scrubs in her black hand bag. Then we took the elevator down to the ground floor, hand in hand. I kissed her fingers, often kissing her hands or her fingers, then she gave me a long hug at the entrance, rested her head in the curve of my shoulder a moment, and sighed. Then she gave me a long kiss, smiled slyly and said, "I've been sleeping with the town bull of Rio..."

Then we kissed each other twice on the lips.

It was always good with her at the Ville-Marie, but never like it was in Rio, until the last time. Like a drug addict who gets high for the first time, we were both trying in vain to recapture the euphoria of our first high in Rio, though it was always fun. Only the last time was as memorable as Rio, because we had created a new experience together. We had left Rio behind, I thought. We had Montréal as well as Rio now. We had the Ville-Marie Hotel.

That's part of the madness of being human: you try to recapture what can't be recaptured a second time. You don't want to let go of a memory but live in it like in a womb. I watched her walk up Peel Street north towards the hospital where she worked, becoming a memory, with her garter belt still in my hand. The trees in the park were starting to grow buds. There was a freshness in the air that signaled the coming of spring in the northern hemisphere, and the possibility of new opportunities.

For me, life is learning to love and let go. In the end, I had to let her go. She lived in Montréal with her family while I lived in Toronto with Donna. She is the moth that flutters around in my soul, a minha mariposa. We were both a couple of moths at the Ville-Marie.