HIDEKO'S SECRET
IT’S ALWAYS THE same thing. You think you’ve finished, then you have to start all over again. The imaginary producer wants a final scene. Why? The film’s too short. Besides, you don’t end a film with a question, he told me. Who says so? Money. Even imaginary money is irresistible. Where was I, again? Hideko’s secret. What’s her secret? Shame. The shame of loving a woman no one else loves. We start off by seeing her the way everyone else does. She’s ugly. She’s the one who must always sacrifice herself. Her sexuality is buried so deep she’s even stopped masturbating. She couldn’t find her sex if she tried. To masturbate, you need to imagine yourself with someone else, to take him against his will, or make him take you, kiss you, and this is an operation that demands a minimum of self-esteem. She doesn’t have it. Neither does she have any malevolence or ambition. She is a tree waiting to be watered. Nothing sexy about that. She knows nothing about power, and less about seduction. I’m not talking about Hideko, of course, but about the woman she loves. Her secret, her shame. Unlike her, there are those made beautiful by evil — like Lucretia Borgia, who tormented my teenage years. Evil is a strong spice. Hollywood has taught us that truly evil women are those who thirst after power. But first, they must be beautiful — like Fumi. Black hair, eyes like pools, full lips. Fumi doesn’t waste any energy. She will seduce only to get closer to the throne. Otherwise, she uses her mind. Unfortunately, the other girls do the opposite: they wear their ability to seduce down to the nub and keep their intelligence under wraps. The machine grows rusty, and they lose their resources at the very moment they need them most. Fumi is the most careful of them, as hard-working as an ant. Cinema, once again, has shown us the evil heroine’s detailed preparations for the big seduction scene. She unties her hair and it falls freely down her back. A flowing river. Her makeup is subtle; the evil heroine knows just what to do. She appears to pay no attention to her intimate apparel or to the shades of color she applies to her skin, but, in fact, she knows every perfume and every jewel on the market, the poetry of fabrics and the temperature of colors. She dresses elegantly, but without ostentation. The final touch is the makeup she applies to her soul. She becomes resplendent with goodness, and we pray it will be real. No man ever rejects her. A solution from above (the arrival of the angel of purity) always appears at the last minute to save the married man or the virtuous wife. No one ever points out that the femme fatale was already holding her conquest in her arms, and that he or she was already elsewhere, on the island of temptation. The ugly woman whom power tolerates at its side is quite different from this heroine. She plays the same role as the court jester. Sleepless Hideko, wandering down the hallway, comes upon Tomo in her room. The door is half-open because of the heat. Tomo doesn’t know she’s there. Hideko watches her reading Mishima—The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The strange story of a young counterfeit monk who finds himself in the presence of the Golden Pavilion, a marvel of balance and grace. The young monk refuses to share the universe with the Golden Pavilion, and decides to burn it to the ground. Hideko knows the story; it was her mother’s favorite book. Then this strange event occurs: Hideko falls suddenly in love with Tomo. Hideko retreats to her room, clutching her belly. She lies down on the floor and waits for sleep that does not come that night. What’s happening to me? And why me? Did it all start with my mother falling in love with a Mishima novel? Hideko scolds herself: no matter what, she must hide this weakness. Fumi, the black terror, must never know. She must be silenced before she can speak. And don’t imagine that an event like this could escape Fumi’s piercing eyes.
That’s when Hideko swore she would discover Fumi’s secret. If ever Fumi were to unmask her — and she would not hesitate to expose her, Hideko, naked, in plain sight of all — she would reveal Fumi’s secret as she fell. It would be her final act of revenge. But how could she hide her disarray? By replacing the monstrous feelings she had for Tomo with a more normal, acceptable emotion. She concentrated all her attention on Midori. No one would suspect she preferred Tomo to Midori. No one but Takashi. Takashi, a pervert who loved only what was ugly, monstrous, dirty and disgusting — Takashi would have chosen the young monk over the Golden Pavilion. Once, he compared himself to an ashtray. Why not a garbage can, which seems dirtier? You can find anything in a garbage can, even good things, but you can do nothing with ashes. They are the end of matter. Takashi discovered Hideko’s secret one evening when he was smoking on the balcony and the girls were going out clubbing. They were getting into two taxis. He saw Hideko hide behind a tree to avoid getting in next to Midori. Midori can’t stand having Tomo too close to her. Tomo loves her and cares for her, that’s all right, but let her keep her distance. Hideko got into the other taxi, the one Tomo was taking. Just before, she’d tried in vain to change places with Fumi, to be closer to Midori. What tipped Takashi off was that she’d been downstairs long before Fumi; she could easily have had the seat next to Midori. Takashi understood that Hideko was playing a game. She had orchestrated the scene so carefully that she must have had a goaclass="underline" to be next to Tomo. Takashi smiled. Two days later, he confronted Hideko in her room, and she burst into tears and told him everything. Her mother. The Golden Pavilion. Her disgust and attraction for Tomo. She had been fighting all her life, unable to locate the enemy who lurked behind a mask. Her sexual attraction for ugliness. Unformed beings, the rejected, the excluded. They excite her. Takashi took her in his arms and comforted her. That night, he opened up a new universe for her. She was not alone. Millions of people were like that. The fact of being ugly or beautiful has nothing to do with our desires. They are two parallel universes. We see ourselves only in other people’s eyes, despite our best efforts. Takashi explained to her that we risk rejection at the hands of those who are disgusting and ugly, the monsters, as much as with any other group. All the other person has to do is feel our interest — and he can’t not feel it— and he becomes inaccessible. Desire is the distance you must cover between your thirst and the fountain that retreats the more you travel towards it. The night grew cool. Hideko’s body seemed to soften. Her eyes closed. A smile bloomed on her lips. Takashi closed the door softly and returned to his room.
THE PARK
I TRY TO avoid the part of the park where the guys who’ve just come back from cherry picking in B.C. hang out. They all wear the same red, scraggly beard, and stare out from the same pale, irresponsible eyes, and contemplate the same dirty fingernails with a mixture of surprise and pride. Most of them are kids from cushy Montreal suburbs (Saint-Lambert, Repentigny, Beloeil or Brossard) who want to play at migrant worker, a dog-eared copy of a fat Steinbeck novel in their back pockets. Last year they were still reading Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, dreaming of a three-day blow downtown, once they’d assured their mothers they’d be staying with a cousin. Later they’d move on to Kerouac, carry him out to Vancouver in a night train on the Canadian Pacific Line, before launching into Bukowski and pitchers of draft beer. The beginning of a long fall. Theirs isn’t the first generation of misguided kids to hang out in the park — the previous ones shot up on Burroughs and heroin. I even witnessed the days when the boys read Steppenwolf and the girls always had a copy of Gibran’s The Prophet in their bags. This is a literary park, where young people learn how to live through books. I sit down on a bench near the little kiosk that sells flowers and watch the girls in their spring dresses risking their lives to cross the street on the red light — they have every privilege. Which causes a small acceleration in the blood of the male drivers, who are already in heat. This city’s slow striptease begins in April — this isn’t the first cluster of bare-legged girls they’ve seen. The girls kick off their shoes at the first touch of grass, they race with the local dogs, then they end up with those guys who, in monotonous voices, tell endless travel stories that end up giving everyone a headache. With the money they’ve made doing odd jobs out west, they buy dogs to help keep them warm during the winter. A young man is sleeping in a quiet part of the park with a half-dozen pure-bred dogs around him. The problem, apparently, is how to feed them. Those dogs can eat a horse every day. Another guy is leaning against a tree like a pensive warrior. They are like an army camped down for the night. The poet Gaston Miron brushes past, determined, ruminating over the latest poem he wrote, his powerful alligator jaws chewing away. He is going to go see Françoise the bookseller, a friend to starving poets and young novelists who’ve won their first prizes and have already been forgotten. The whole neighborhood is literary, completely different from my old working-class district in the east. One morning I left the factory behind, having decided to take my time in life. I read, I write, I am a flâneur. I hardly know anyone at all, except the Korean who shows up every time I think about him.