Damselfish. Susan Ouriou

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      Damselfish

       Damselfish

      a novel by

       Susan Ouriou

      Copyright © 2003 Susan Ouriou and XYZ Publishing

      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 the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

       National Library of Canada cataloguing in publication

      Ouriou, Susan

      Damselfish: a novel

      (Tidelines)

      ISBN 1-894852-05-2

      I. Title. II. Series: Tidelines (Montréal, Québec).

      PS8579.U74D35 2003 C813’.6 C2003-941072-2

      PS9579.U74D35 2003

      Legal Deposit: Third quarter 2003

      National Library of Canada

      Bibliothèque nationale du Québec

      XYZ Publishing acknowledges the financial support our publishing program receives from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) of the Department of Canadian Heritage, the ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec, and the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles.

      All the characters in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

      Layout: Édiscript enr.

      Cover design: Zirval Design

      Cover painting: Flying Downstream (detail) by Susana Wald Painting photographed by: Manu Sassoonian

      Set in Bembo 12 on 14.

      Printed and bound in Canada by Métrolitho

      (Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada) in August 2003.

XYZ Publishing1781 Saint Hubert StreetMontreal, Quebec H2L 3Z1Tel: [phone]Fax: [phone]E-mail: [email protected] site: www.xyzedit.qc.ca

Distributed by: Fitzhenry & Whiteside195 Allstate ParkwayMarkham, ON L3R 4T8Customer Service, tel: [phone]Toll free ordering, tel: [phone]Fax: [phone]E-mail: [email protected]

       Katie and Dan, I remember

       For my husband Joël, who needs no words

       I

      The Molson Export slogan played in my head, accompanying the rhythmic slap of the cards I laid down on the table. X says it all. One-two-three, slap. X says it all. Somehow I must have known that solitaire would be a big part of my new life when I brought the Molson Export deck from home.

      I tipped back my bottle of beer – Dos Equis – and dislodged a grain of lime pulp from between my teeth. I liked Mexican beer better. Maybe two X’s say it best.

      For once luck was with me in my game of solitaire. Of the seven cards I’d laid face up to start with, three were aces. Luck doesn’t visit me that often. Now all four aces were out, and the cards they’d been hiding were lining up under them like bottles of beer on a wall. I hadn’t even had to cheat yet. I was still dealing the deck out by threes.

      The woman staring down at me from my new and one-and-only made-in-Mexico painting was proof that luck could change. A woman, naked, seated pretzel-like with a giant bougainvillea, its colour a warm red, sprouting from her crotch. A few days ago I thought I had nothing to paint. A few days ago I thought flowers only grew in the ground. Meeting José had made me see it didn’t have to be that way.

      X says it all. A knock sounded at the door. I glanced up. José? No, he didn’t know where I lived. Somehow, I’d forgotten that detail. Hard to believe, now. I’d promised to drop by at the market school on Monday. I’d make sure he got my address then. Or maybe even earlier.

      I looked down at the deck of cards and back up as another knock sounded. Having someone at the door was a novelty. But so was a winning streak. Since arriving in Mexico City, I’d spent all my nights — well, all my nights but that one — alone in the apartment. I usually sat across from the flimsy curtains at my kitchen table, played solitaire, and watched the passing silhouettes of the hotel guests who shared a landing with me. Every night I fought the growing urge to knock on a door, any door, and join a lone traveller in his bed.

      The apartments were tenements really, the hotel leaned to luxury and cachet. Mexico is like that: the mix of rich, poor, and in-betweens living side by side.

      I kept telling myself one-night stands were not a good idea, but my body kept saying otherwise.

      I should really answer that door.

      I put the deck down, gave it a pat — don’t go anywhere, we’re on a roll — pushed my chair back, strode to the door, and pulled it wide. Then stood open-mouthed.

      My sister. Faith. Here in Mexico. Or could I have been transported back to Montreal? I couldn’t make sense of it — Quebec or Mexico? Sun or snow? Maybe I was losing my mind.

      She laughed at my confusion. “Aren’t you even going to say hi?”

      We hugged, awkwardly. I didn’t remember her being quite so round. I was a hugger, Faith wasn’t. She always rationed me in my hugs: two a year. At Christmas and on my birthday. Was it my birthday then? No, despite the heat this wasn’t July but October. And Christmas was still to come.

      When I was filling out the grant application back home in Montreal, I’d imagined my move here as a chance to live and breathe art away from the distractions of everyday life. I’d imagined sleeping in my studio, rising from my mattress to my canvas, and munching on a burrito with a paintbrush in hand. But the studio wasn’t anywhere near my apartment; it was a metro ride away in Coyoacán. The three other artists who worked there commuted from across Mexico City, too. They were all foreigners — one American, one Frenchman, and a Swiss, another woman — there on artists’ grants like me. The others came mostly on the days when the model sat—the model I’d finally been able to paint. Our government contact talked of galleries to visit, conferences to address, exhibits to prepare, but as soon as he backed out the door his promises were forgotten.

      I’d been keeping my days uselessly busy. I trotted out rusty Spanish to buy art supplies and groceries for my tiny fridge, spent hours and many days returning to offices to line up for a phone hookup and beg for the electricity to be turned on. I walked the streets, stored images, smells, and sounds, but in the studio my work wasn’t going the way I’d imagined it from a continent away. I tried to force myself to transfer the images I was collecting to canvas, without much success — until the bougainvillea lady decided to sprout.

      It had been impossible to paint what I couldn’t understand. My eyes, my ears, my sense of touch were no good to me until I could translate their registers for myself. Everything outside me was opaque, deflecting my gaze right back at me. Almost everything.

      Then again, it wasn’t true that none of the images or sounds of Mexico were registering. It was Papi’s voice, the familiar almost-forgotten tilt of his head from the back in a crowd, in the metro, that I heard and saw at every turn. Back home he’d never appeared to me, not once since the day he left ten years ago. Here, the sightings were torture in one way, but in another, a rush. The thought that he might be