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After a night of hard drinking and personal crisis, Juliano arrives at the corner of a Toronto intersection. Crossing the street, he embarks on a metaphysical return to the Paris of 1963, and revisits a series of enigmatic sexual moments. This journey blurs the physical lines between present and past, between Toronto and Paris, and ultimately between sexual awakening and abuse. Bellecour uses the naïve perspective of a child’s burgeoning desires to create a powerful metaphor for the immigrant’s ambivalent relationship towards the charm, fascination and brutality of a host culture

A heartbreaking work of sexual candour

By JIM BARTLEY 

Saturday, May 7, 2005 Page D13

Bellecour

By John Calabro

Guernica, 87 pages, $12

Along-time teacher with the Toronto District School Board, John Calabro has, with this brave and heartbreaking debut, given his bosses a timely challenge.

How do you discuss issues of sexual abuse in a classroom of hormone-charged teens without compromising their sexual awakening? Teachers could do worse than to use Calabro's novella to spur debate. Bellecour, the tale of a pubescent boy's ecstasies and agonies during a 1963 Paris heat wave, is a small masterwork of erotic candour and psychological acuity. Aside from its literary value, the book's message to parents and other educators is all but explicit: Innocence and the erotic coexist; making sex unspeakable only prompts the shame and guilt that leaves abuse unspoken.

We open in Toronto on a summer night. A man with bloodied wrists lurches along a decrepit stretch of Queen Street West. Near-delirious, Juliano moves in a swirl of dark visions through the shadowed, trash-strewn streetscape. Turning onto a side street, he watches stupefied as it morphs into Rue Bellecour, the dingy Paris street of his boyhood. Wary but curious, he drifts along the street as in a dream, noting that all is the same yet diminished, sadder, grimier.

Still, some good memories are stirred. He used to hang around watching workers at a garage, men who swore genially and installed tires under the smiling gaze of the Michelin Man -- not the trim figure seen "in Toronto today, but the old, fat one, made chubby by oversized tires for a stomach you would find in Paris of 1963."

Unlatching an iron gate, he enters the courtyard of his childhood apartment block, and with him we fully enter the past. Juliano and his best friend, Abdullah, are victimized by bullies: "Italians are no better than Algerians in this neighbourhood." The two share a bond, broken one terrible day when Juliano betrays his friend in a cowardly act of self-preservation. Abdullah is killed in a traffic accident -- a chance occurrence at the tail end of events set in motion by Juliano. Scarcely deserving it, he's invaded by crushing guilt, and he must bear it alone.

Unreasoning guilt -- stealthy, relentless, tainting human connection -- is Calabro's aching leitmotif, woven impeccably through the fabric of this compact narrative. Certain that he's bad, little Juliano heaps the failings of others -- their neglect and misuse of him -- onto his own staggered conscience. When an older girl in the neighbourhood takes mild sexual liberties with him, he's sure that her withdrawal to older friends is only more proof of his own vileness.

The narrative's pivotal scene presents a complex seduction, at once tender, comic and deliciously carnal -- and an ethical minefield. Then Calabro rapidly guides us to a wrenching climax. Bellecour is a fascinating and deeply considered meditation on the perils and raptures of sex, and the evil done by wrapping it in denial and propriety. The prose can sometimes be a shade too florid -- a quibble. Read the book, recall your own sexual lapses, blunders and perhaps terrors, and consider sharing Calabro's wisdom with your kids.

Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.