Asylum Read online

  PRAISE FOR a s y l u m

  “Alexis is funny, wry, has a great satirical eye….”

  – Windsor Star

  “There is sex, violence, betrayal and the most devious grandmother one could ever hope not to have…. Ottawa itself is a character in Asylum…. It is [Alexis’s] asylum. In both senses of the word.”

  – Ottawa Citizen

  “A Russian doll of a book, thick with layers and twists.”

  – CBC

  “The Great Ottawa Novel has landed.”

  – Toronto Star

  “Constantly surprising, so rich and affecting…. Its imaginative reach is thrilling….”

  – National Post

  “Beautifully crafted characters, as real as anyone you might meet on the street…the story is intricate, many-layered, and thoughtful. An excellent novel.”

  – Halifax Chronicle Herald

  “Some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read in years…. For me a great novel is one that satisfies three criterions: First, it must be a story told well. It must also be written as if every word has just been handed down from style heaven. And lastly, it must have at its centre a truth that skirts the frayed edges of your own philosophy until it weaves its way into the way you look at the world. André Alexis’s Asylum is a great book.”

  – New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal

  BOOKS BY ANDRÉ ALEXIS

  FICTION

  Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa (1994)

  Childhood (1998)

  Asylum (2008)

  PLAYS

  Lambton Kent (1999)

  FOR CHILDREN

  Ingrid and the Wolf (2005)

  Copyright © 2008 by André Alexis

  Cloth edition published 2008

  Emblem edition published 2009

  This ebook edition published 2020

  McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN: 978-0-7710-0670-8

  ebook ISBN: 978-0-7710-0804-7

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between characters portrayed and persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  The epigraph by Ibrahim Ag Alhabib is a lyric from the song “Assouf ” (Longing).

  Words and Music by Ibrahim Ag Alhabib.

  © 2007 EMMA PRODUCTIONS SAS AND EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC.

  All Rights in U.S. and Canada Controlled and Administered by EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC.

  All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission.

  The lyrics on this page are from “Ramona,” written by Mabel Wayne and L. Wolfe Gilbert (EMI Music). The lyrics on this page are from “Perfidia,” by Alberto Domínguez (PEERMUSIC).

  Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders; in the event of an inadvertent omission or error, please notify the publisher.

  Cover images: © Pirates | Dreamstime.com

  Andrew Roberts

  Design: Jennifer Lum

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  a_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  In Homage to Harry Mathews

  What can I do with this endless longing?

  IBRAHIM AG ALHABIB

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Titles

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Book I

  1. A Bitter Aftertaste

  2. Nineteen Eighty-Three

  3. Tahafut at-Tahafut

  4. Franklin Dupuis

  5. In Reinhart’s Studio

  6. Ars Longa Vita Brevis

  7. In Which: Rundstedt

  8. A Proposition and a Letter

  9. A Family Divided

  10. A Fact About Walter Barnes

  11. Saint Michael

  12. September

  13. Mr. Rundstedt in His Glory

  14. What Is Night, Anyway?

  15. A Sense of Purpose and a Cloudy Mind

  16. Eleanor Goes Gentle, More or Less…

  17. Wandering

  18. Norway

  19. A Chapter About Suicide and Death

  Book II

  20. An Evening In

  21. An Evening Out

  22. Mr. Rundstedt and Success

  23. Parallel Lives

  24. Halley’s Comet

  25. February 24, 1986

  26. Stanley Agonistes

  27. Houses and Men

  28. Democracy

  29. Chance

  30. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

  31. What Is It, Paul?

  32. To Damascus

  33. A Change of Heart

  34. Inspiration

  35. Misère et Cordes

  36. A Committee Meeting and a Small Setback

  37. Phantom Morals

  38. Reinhart Abandons MacKenzie Bowell

  Book III

  39. Moving Day

  40. St. Pierre and Mickleson

  41. François’ Scruples

  42. A Troubled Lunch

  43. A Sudden and Unexpected Downfall

  44. Romance

  45. Paul Dylan Eclipsed

  46. Kind Words from Reinhart

  47. Edward Speaks Up

  48. In Which: Rundstedt Leaves the Scene

  49. Two Houses, One Home

  50. A Parting of the Ways

  51. Nineteen Eighty-Nine

  52. The Phantom City

  {1}

  A BITTER AFTERTASTE

  I’ve been living in Italy for fourteen years now, here at Santa Maddalena.

  Santa Maddalena has been good for me, I think. It’s taught me discipline and humility. I wake early in the morning. I go to sleep in the early evening. My day is spent caring for the grounds, churning butter, helping to tend the bees, or in prayer, meditation, and worship. In the evening, I read or I translate text from the German. My fellows are, most of them, pleasant company. There’s little time for long conversation, and no time for idleness, but I do appreciate the amity of thoughtful men. In fact, until recently, I’ve been rather immersed in monastic life.

  I don’t know why exactly my feelings shifted. But one day, I felt such a longing for Ottawa, and for my country, it was as if I’d been in Italy for only a week or two, recently exiled. Was it nostalgia? Yes, I suppose, but it was more than that. Nostalgia, as Fra Philippo says, is a bitter aftertaste that follows the sweetness of leaving the world. I was accustomed to it. Over the years, I’ve felt intense nostalgia, and wondered if I’d been right to leave home at all. This recent feeling, however, was closer to bewilderment or panic. It was like being lost in the woods, anguished at the thought of all I might never see again.

  Why at that moment? Hard to say. Perhaps it had taken fourteen years for Ottawa to catch up with me. Or, again, it may be that, on the point of
losing the last scraps of my old world, I felt a resurgence of the past, the last gasp of home as it expired within me. Whatever the answer, my bewilderment brought with it the most vivid and unpredictable memories. While sweeping my cell, I remembered a kitchen on Cooper Street, its yellowed linoleum tiles. Stooping to pull a weed from the rows of cavallo nero, I imagined myself by the side of the canal looking down into its grey water. And one morning, while praying for a greater capacity to believe, I had a vision of a fire hydrant near the corner of Somerset and Percy.

  At times, Ottawa overcame me, leaving me momentarily helpless. And yet, though my memories were of a variety of details (unusual or banal), faces (well known or not), and houses (familiar or not), they all had one thing in common: most every detail, face, house, etc., was from the time after I left home and before I came to Santa Maddalena. Little came back from my childhood: no homes, schools or schoolmates, and few memories of my parents. Once I realized how bounded my memories were (from finding a place of my own to the decline of the Conservative Party), it felt as if my psyche were trying to tell me something crucial, though, for the life of me, I couldn’t make out what it might be.

  I suppose I could have waited this storm of memory out. I could have drowned my memories in work or prayer, as Fra Philippo advised me to do, but I have chosen instead to meet them head-on, to write them down, faithfully, for as long as it takes. This way, I will make of my predicament, if memory is a predicament, a spiritual exercise. Perhaps, through this discipline, I’ll find something out about myself. So much the better. There may be comfort in self-discovery, as there may be comfort in seeing how much (or how little) of my city remains within me.

  The one thing that troubles me: I wish, above all, to be truthful and, to accomplish that, I may have to invent as much as I remember. There seems no way around it. Much of the context of my last years in Ottawa is now clouded or gone. I can’t recall all the tones of voice, the way the sun or a sudden fragrant breeze distracted from a conversation or influenced a thought, the sound of the city (its specific pitch), the anxiety of life in the capital. But truth is meaningless without context, without an environment. So, in the end, it’s either recall what I can and invent what I can’t or give nothing but detail, detail, fact and detail.

  Although, on second thought, why should I be troubled by invention or even hearsay? For truth’s sake? Yes, of course. But how many times have I stood in front of a Gozzoli or a Pontormo and felt a truth, though all before me was invention? Just the other day, in fact, I stopped at San Marco to admire a panel by Fra Angelico: Christ, victorious, enters Hell to free the righteous trapped in Limbo. It is a wonderful work, of course, but I was struck, as always, by the demons, two of whom hide in an alcove while a third lies crushed beneath the door Christ has knocked down. Evil has been going about its business (chastising sinners, stoking fires, keeping the place foul, etc.) when, out of the blue, a door bursts open and Christ enters to redeem the righteous. The work shows no overt sympathy for the demons, but il Beato Angelico manages to suggest a pathetic daily grind: evil startled in the midst of evil routine. Though there may be no Hell, no demons, no Adam, no Christ, still something true is caught.

  So, to begin…

  In 1983, I was twenty-six and increasingly at odds with my parents. My father would stop me in the hall or come into my room to say

  – The crunch is coming, son. And what are you going to do when it comes? You’ve got to have something to fall back on.

  I understood. “Something to fall back on” meant a profession, but I could not find the right road. None of the professions meant anything to me. Worse, they all seemed the same: doctor, lawyer, accountant, politician…I could not even find a tendency in myself. After a while, I began to blame my parents for my lassitude and indecision, and I resented their concern for me. They wanted me to find work, to do something more than stay in my room and read? Fine. I took work at a bookstore and moved out of my parents’ home.

  It was, at first, exhilarating to live on my own: everything was new and interesting. With a small loan from my father, I rented an apartment on Percy and made my entry into the world. But, paradoxically, I stepped away from it at the same time. From the first moments on my own, there was, along with exhilaration, a vague disappointment. I was not at ease. I did not quite belong in my city. I thought too much. I wondered about every little thing. What was this world to me? What did I want, exactly? What could the people around me tell me about myself? Though I had changed domiciles, I was still adrift. Independence, such as it was, brought no answers.

  Though I didn’t know it, I was already moving towards Santa Maddalena.

  It wasn’t all ambivalence and doubt, however. Among other things, there were the Stanleys, who had been our neighbours when I was young, and, of course, there was the Fortnightly Club. One of the most pleasant memories I have is of a particular meeting of the Fortnightly. I’d been to a number of Fortnightly evenings, evenings at which we (its members) met to discuss philosophy and ideas. At this meeting, we were to discuss the life and work of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas did not interest me at the time (and interests me little, now) but, newly liberated from my parents, I believed I was the kind of man who should be able to discuss Aquinas. I suppose I thought Aquinas obscure, dull, and difficult to read, qualities that afflicted all the “serious” reading I did at the time: from the brief passages of Hegel I managed to digest to the bits of Mallarmé I couldn’t keep down. Reading Aquinas was, to me, a sign that I was “serious,” and I consoled myself with it.

  So, armed with a paperback edition of the Summa Theologiae (abridged) on which there was a portrait of St. Thomas by Carlo Crivelli, I met up with the other members of the Fortnightly Club.

  {2}

  NINETEEN EIGHTY-THREE

  On the last evening of the Conservative leadership convention, the Fortnightly convened in Walter Barnes’ backyard to talk about Aquinas. The subject had been chosen by Walter himself and, as happened when Walter chose the subject, it was a little obscure. Still, for three hours, the conversation was engaging. It began with the Arabic philosophy Aquinas had appropriated (Averroës, Avicenna, and al-Ghazali), touched on an ancient recipe that called for a loaf of bread to be buried for thirty days, and then moved lazily on to other things: viniculture, books, travel, Italy.

  Someone asked someone

  – Have you been to Florence?

  and that prompted a round of collective recollection.

  Walter had been, on several occasions, but he admitted he did not love the city. It was filled with dour people, not at all like Siena, which, though not as blessed culturally, was wonderful and mysterious.

  François Ricard described his and his late wife’s honeymoon in Tuscany. He and Michelle had spent three days in Florence, and they had eaten so much ice cream, the city would always remind him of peaches and pistachio. And, it’s true, the Florentines were mean and petty, but one could forgive a city anything for San Miniato, the only church in which he had felt the presence of the sacred.

  – You speak as if God exists, said Mr. van Leuwen.

  – No, no, even if He doesn’t, said François. The place is holy.

  Mr. van Leuwen smiled. He himself had never seen Florence, but he was an admirer of architecture, and he could understand how the curves and angles of a room might themselves be sacred. Wasn’t it the Lollards who destroyed Catholic churches for that very reason?

  – The Lollards didn’t destroy churches, said Walter, but they hated the smells and bells.

  – There you go, said van Leuwen.

  Then there was me. I was fascinated by Florence. I’d learned Italian and memorized whole passages of Machiavelli’s Istorie Fiorentine. I’d never seen the city and hoped I never would, because I had once dreamed it was the place I would die, but Florence seemed to me the embodiment of an ideal. (As I write these words, years later, some twenty kilometres from Florence, I
no longer believe in the swift and brutal end I had, rather romantically, dreamed for myself.)

  We might have talked about the city the rest of the evening, but Louise Dylan brought the matter to an end. She quietly said

  – What does all this have to do with Thomas Aquinas?

  Not that she was interested in St. Thomas per se, but she was feeling defensive, for Walter’s sake. He’d been kind enough to host the evening. Why shouldn’t we stick to his chosen subject?

  – Well…Aquinas was Italian, said François.

  – So he was, said Walter.

  And we began again to think again about the era when Truth was God and God was Truth.

  A gentle wind ruffled the tablecloth and the paper napkins. Walter’s backyard came briefly to life. On the other side of his picket fence, the cypress trees shook, while the grass, daisies, and trefoil on his lawn moved as if trod by someone just denser than air.

  I’d been invited to join the Fortnightly Club by Henry Wing, a friend of my father. Henry thought it a shame I should waste my education on clerking, and my father agreed. As one of those Trinidadians who could recite pages of Herbert, Homer, or Horace just to demonstrate the superiority of a British education, my father loved the idea of intellectual society. One of his biggest fears was that I should waste my intelligence on frivolities and, to a lesser extent, I feared the same thing. I joined the Fortnightly because I thought it would do me good to talk to men and women who were (or seemed to be) at home with ideas.

  Naturally, things were not as I supposed. I gradually learned that the members of the Fortnightly, thoughtful though they were, were often unreasonable. Walter Barnes, for instance: a mind so filled with amusing details (Hegel’s parenting, the Greek origins of the word paideia, the invention of talcum powder…), it didn’t always have room for the big picture, or for the obvious. Walter was a pleasure to be around. He was a vivid companion and one of the most attractive men I’ve known, but you could not have said that Reason and thought were his strongest suit. Au contraire.