Return of the Sphinx by Hugh MacLennan

Author:Hugh MacLennan [MacLennan, H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2009-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

NINE

Twilight had not quite disappeared when Daniel Ainslie parked his second-hand sports car (he had bought it on installment at a bargain price only a week ago) in an over-lived-in district where shadows cast by street lamps filtered through elms onto curving outside-staircases (one or two apartments above, one or two below) and there were one-room shops surviving from a simpler age which sold beer, tobacco, candy, soft drinks, newspapers, comic books, girlie magazines, canned goods and packaged groceries. Families were sitting on the steps of the staircases and on rocking chairs on the platforms of the second stories, some of them with beer or soft drinks, some of them fanning themselves with folded newspapers, most of them talking quietly so that the twilit street seemed to be murmuring. In a puddle of light in front of one of the little stores was a cluster of boys and girls drinking pop and fondling one another. The boys wore jeans and T-shirts and the hair of most of them was long and shaggy. The girls were in hip-and-thigh stretchies of thin material and bright colors so that their lines were as clearly drawn as though they were naked. A girl giggled as Daniel walked past and the expressions on the faces of the boys made him think of calves. “Sexacola and Saturday night,” he muttered to himself as he passed, and added the local slogan of the year, “‘Y a d’la joie!’”

Daniel was intoxicated with the feeling of power and wonder at himself that comes to a very young man who has succeeded suddenly and beyond expectation and believes he is becoming famous. He told himself that it was quite possible that his program would change history. As he walked along he felt omnipotently detached. Everything was falling into its slot in the scheme of things. He also saw women.

On this fantastically hot night the city was a bargain basement of raw sex on display, with thousands of females of all ages in those skin-tight garments that had come into fashion, and he understood the significance of it. Latendresse had explained that in the fin de siècle, in the trance of desperate pleasure before the cataclysm wipes away an old order, there is always a sexual explosion, a Mardi Gras before another of history’s Lenten seasons ushers in the day of retribution and atonement. So it had been in France before the Revolution, in St. Petersburg before the Revolution, in Havana before Castro came down from the hills and took the city. Even some of Daniel’s friends in the movement were part of it. One of them had begun with girls when he was thirteen, his explanation being that he had discovered that his parents were unfaithful to each other so why shouldn’t he do as he pleased? He boasted that he had had fifty-one girls – he had kept a count of them – before he was eighteen and now he wanted something more exciting. Drinking beer in the tavern

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