He had always felt, he said, that every person is obliged to do all he can do to stand up to moral depravity, but he also felt, he said, that each of us must take the measure of this obligation and decide how to mount their own opposition, for only that way, he said, by bypassing protocol, can morals be defended. There are things to address first in the human soul, he said, and only afterward can we take the barricades into the streets. However, such an attitude had placed him in a situation in which he could never entirely satisfy anyone, for introversion, he said, like every form of silence, can be read two ways, as support or as reproach, meaning that recently he had been forced to put up with pressures from various quarters and to face down demands that he voice his views in public. His whole life, he said, he had been mounting a poetic of silence, and now they were calling for noisy words, and in the noise, he said, he simply could not find his bearings. Someone had once told him that his country, his former country, he should call it, was a botched experiment, so it was to be expected that the country would blow up at some point, as happens, he said, with badly mixed and highly volatile chemical compounds, where one drop too many was enough to blow up an entire lab. This comment deeply insulted him, he said, because he had never, not even now, felt like a lab rat or a guinea pig; he breathed life in deeply, just as people did anywhere. I told him I understood him, for there were times when I was overwhelmed by the feeling that the country where I was living was nothing more than an experiment — an experiment, I said, for which there were no guarantees of success.
When I said that I wasn’t thinking of Quebec, but of the other parts of the country, the western provinces in particular, which had never conformed to the confederation. And besides, I said, this confederation claimed the equality of its members, while actually it was always asymmetric. The east overshadowed the west, I said, and always they were trying to avoid finding themselves in the middle, and always a supernatural sense for equilibrium was needed to govern such a country, which most politicians, of course, never mustered. Daniel Atijas said he understood me now because if he had been telling my story before, now I was telling his, which only shows, he added, that we can never hope for anything good from history, especially from its repetitions. It’s a lucky thing, I said, that the history of his country cannot repeat itself here in its fullness, that there are variations in the repetition, which are essentially the result of an assortment of differences, including different views on society and the world, different frames of mind, religious beliefs, ethnic prejudices, and so forth. Daniel Atijas was surprised. He even said that he could not believe his ears, and to reinforce this he jiggled each ear, first the right, then the left, with a finger. There’s nothing to be done about it, he said. It has nothing to do with war; all this showed was that I had no idea what war really is, and that I still entertained romantic notions about war, and that he wouldn’t be surprised if, like Heraclitus, I believed that war was the father of all things, the cause and creator of change. Nothing could be further from the truth, said I, least of all the thought that politicians determine when a war begins and how it will go.
Even if Quebec were to secede, he said, that would be no reason for war, but when the first inhabitant of Anglo-Saxon background has to leave his country because of pressure from French nationalists, then, he said, war will be inevitable. And what will go on between the new, independent Quebec government and the First Nations living on Quebec territory? About that, he said, he didn’t even dare think. About that, to be frank, I, too, did not dare think, but I didn’t want to say so. And besides, we had already been sitting there too long, drinking coffee, though, if nothing else, at least we no longer looked as if we were drowning. Daniel Atijas’s face had back its natural complexion and had freed itself of its phantom pallor, while my cheeks, I could see in the mirror that covered the wall behind his back, were flushed with color. We left and stood for a while out in front of the building in the warm rays of the afternoon sun. The fragrance of pines was in the air, a swarm of tiny flies hovered high above us, an elk was dozing on the grass across from us, sounds of a ball thudding against a racket at regular intervals came our way from the tennis courts, someone behind us spoke about the weather forecast, which included rain and possibly sleet, and I suggested to Daniel Atijas that we spend the time, until Ivan Matulić’s grandson arrived, at the Walter Phillips Gallery, where we could avoid, almost entirely, I said, the pressures of external sensation, reducing them to a minimum so we could recover. Daniel Atijas shrugged and came along. At the entrance we found a sign saying there was an installation on exhibit in the gallery of “New Work” by Argentinian ceramics artist Anna Maria Corazón, which very nicely, I said, suited our feeling of revival after a drunken binge.
In the middle of the main room there was a large clay plateau like one of those mesas in Arizona and New Mexico, and in its middle, lit by a powerful beam of light from the ceiling, was a lake filled with real water. The water flowed out in four directions and poured down the rim of the mesa, dividing it into four equal parts. At the bottom the water flowed into a channel surrounding the mesa that, when the circle was nearly complete, became an underground river. Here, I assumed, the water went into a hollow place beneath the mesa, from which it came up again, probably with the help of a pump, and poured back into the lake. Around the mesa, organized in a pattern that I could not divine, there were other island-like structures, filled with a large number of fantastical creatures, plants, and buildings, which a person, I thought, would need five or six months, if not more, to study carefully. We sat in chairs placed by the entrance and gave ourselves over to the burbling of the water. There are people, said Daniel Atijas, who still believe in new worlds, which is, he added, just a little pathetic, though comforting, too, given the times we live in — times in which, for certain, there are no new worlds to be had. I tried to counter this, but benignly, as much as the circumstances allowed, saying what I believed — that every artwork is, in fact, a new world — which would mean, I went on, that new worlds would continue appearing as long as there were people under the sun who created things. Daniel Atijas made no bones about masking the grimace of disgust on his face. Today’s artists, he said, are not much more than motes shed by the original trees, by the colossi that artists used to be.