I let them out earlier than they expected and holed up in the staff lounge where I could get a look at a few faces that were as long as mine, some of them even longer, desperate cases who saw teaching as the source of all their woes. I haven’t reached that point, luckily, I still love my world, but that morning I had a foretaste of what could very well ­happen to me if I became as blasé as they were, and I quaked at the thought.

When I’m very down, which I was as soon as I stepped outside the CEGEP, I go to see a porn film. I’ve never tried to analyze it; all I know is that those films, which are always bad and often totally ridiculous, drag me to the very depths of my depression, pin me there for a few hours as if I were mired in the bed of a muddy lake, allowing me to wallow in self-pity and at the same time laugh at myself, because there’s something very adolescent about my reaction that finally amuses me. And the surroundings fascinate me. The sight of those gentlemen, not all of them old, contrary to popular belief, jerking off under their hats in front of some pretty repulsive bimbos, makes my depression shift; not that I feel superior to them, or more highly evolved, I’m not impervious to suggestive images, but there’s something so desperate and at the same time hilarious about such a straightforward way of getting it off in public, it makes me forget my own troubles.

Which means that in the four corners of Montreal, in movie houses subdivided into four or in magnificent, ­abandoned old theatres, I’ve seen some ineffable productions with incredible titles, the prints so mishandled they were all scratched and faded and, every time, whether it was the one o’clock screening or the last one with a nearly full house, I was surrounded by the same weighty silence, even when the movie was funny, as if the viewers gathered there weren’t listening to the soundtrack but were just waiting until the right moment in the action, or for the bimbo of their dreams, to lower their zippers and let their fantasies carry them far away from wives and everyday problems and the uniform grey of their lives. That muffled silence in movie houses darker than most, scarcely disturbed by a few abrupt, regular little movements and the occasional ­suppressed heavy breathing, always disconcerted me. I feel out of place because what’s happening on the screen ­doesn’t affect me very much, and calm because I usually go there in search of a release I don’t understand but one that’s always been effective.