Audi 2008 Annual Report Download - page 130

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Montreal
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me. What is this, I said, puffing myself up, trying to be indignant. She had a lover
and I had someone else and we both knew this humiliating fact without either of
us having to admit it out loud. She was leaving me.
This afternoon I fell asleep on the sofa, the television still on. When I wake
it’s already dinnertime and I’m a little bit confused. I wonder if I’ve done it again,
fallen asleep in public, in a cafe where talk murmurs around me like the river
rolling on beneath a bridge, a cafe where the cardiganed ladies tear off pieces of
croissant and the flaky bits rain down onto pristine white napkins but no, the
couch envelops me. Light hovers around the windows. The sweet smell of my
lunchtime soup, prepared by my daughter, is still strong in the air.
I close my eyes, breathe deeply and open my eyes again. To be back in Montreal is
a strange thing. The other day, I tripped while going up the stairs of the Church
of St. Michael and St. Anthony. When I was a boy growing up in Mile End, I used
to study the disjointed architecture – equal parts rectangle, crescent moon, and
pointing finger – I tried to imagine a way up to the centre of the vast, domical
roof because I wanted to see the city without myself being seen. I tripped and my
right knee bruised against the same steps that used to hoist me up.
In the days when my vision first began to deteriorate, I told myself that the
salinity of tears was the answer to the mess inside. I sat in my bed and thought
of things I hadn’t considered in years, and I let those slivers fall right through
me, Ren rolling away from me when I came to bed. Me leaving a woman in the
middle of the night, stepping out into the rainy darkness of an alien city, rehears-
ing excuses in my head. I remember going blind, a memory as shorn and shaven
as the first time I undid Renny’s blouse, or the last shouting match I had with my
father. Tears contain some sort of painkiller. Would crying for three weeks be the
equivalent of a cleansing fast?
Outside my kitchen, life is rich and fluent. A squirrel runs along my terrace
like a madman, ripping things up. I can hear him but not see him. Once, when I
was a child, I saw a squirrel racing down Clark Street, a croissant between his
teeth, I chased this squirrel until he spiraled up into a tree and hid his fat tail
among the burnished leaves. My grandmother said, Why can’t you leave the world
alone?
It’s not difficult to fool people. I walk much slower now and people think
my knees are giving out. I stopped driving and relied on taxis and when that got