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.