Every apartment-dweller has a reserve of crazy neighbor stories. (It’s one of the topics on my mental short list of ready subjects for conversation with strangers at parties: just about everybody can bond over shared territory with the crazy.)  This is mine.

Pete and I have been fortunate thus far: our lives have featured quirky neighbors far more than aggressively obnoxious ones.  But about a year into our stay in Montreal, we gained an exception: Nathalie, who lived in the apartment below us.

Our first encounter with Nathalie came in the form of a bile-filled note slipped under our front door after we’d had some friends over way too late on a weeknight.  (There is simply no such thing as an under-eight-hours game of Diplomacy.)  This, we immediately conceded, was our bad; I don’t know if it was really worth two full pages of handwritten wrath — and a knock on the door would have been faster, not to mention more effective — but I wrote a conciliatory note  back in my best French, she responded calmly, and peace was promptly restored.

After that initial letter, we immediately dialed back social gatherings to Pete’s once-every-other-week D&D group — the ones who cooked me fine dinners, did the dishes, carefully lifted their chairs off the floor so they wouldn’t scrape, and who left promptly by 10 pm.  Unfortunately, in Nathalie’s mind, we’d irrevocably established ourselves as Those Hideous and Irresponsible Children Who Are Deliberately Making My Life a Living Hell.

I have a lot of friends who have suffered through the remainders of their leases as their neighbors played wall-shaking music, held daily house parties, racked up police visits for domestic abuse calls, and/or ran drug labs next door.  What was so disconcerting about Nathalie, however, was that she was convinced — nay, certain — that we were those screaming, stampeding, drug-lab-running hooligans, and nothing could shake her increasingly shrill, self-righteous responses to our imaginary slights.

As the following year progressed, Nathalie called up to our apartment to present herself of the impassioned, wrathful victim of:

• Our appreciably diminishing both her quality of life and ability to sleep because of unbearable “sounds” and “noises” that she could never describe or define, presumably in our never wearing shoes inside the house, always keeping the TV and music at low volumes, and being in bed by 10:30 pm
• Our allegedly wearing wooden clogs in the apartment just to spite her (see, again: never wearing shoes in the house)
• The sound of playing cards being shuffled on our dining room table.  Not the voices or noise of the players, she clarified — just the sound of the cards themselves
• The “particularly intense” noise caused by Pete bouncing his leg up and down while sitting in his chair (not tapping it, just bouncing his knee in place)
• The sound of our mop bucket on our kitchen floor one Sunday afternoon, which brought her to a sudden, rabid lather after we’d mopped the same kitchen floor using the same mop bucket every week for the past two years
• Our friends’ six-month-old kicking his legs around during a diaper change

I’m sure some of this anger was fueled by the fact that, by her own report, she spent a full year wearing her fingers to the bone by banging furiously on our ceiling with the world’s most inaudible broomstick before she was forced to the extreme measure of having to slide a note under our door.  I never actually met Nathalie, but I caught a glimpse of her leaving her apartment from time to time.  She had stringy, tough skin that spoke of hours spent playing tennis on the sunny courts in Parc Saint-Viateur without sunblock, and a body that suggested a diet of red wine, Gauloises, and little else.

One of the concepts that often comes up in undergraduate literature courses is that of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon.  The panopticon — an eighteenth-century concept that Michel Foucault particularly loved, which is probably why you’ve heard of it if you have — is a prison structure which leaves the prisoner always within view of a centralized observation tower, although the prisoner has no way of knowing whether he’s presently being watched.  What’s ingenious about the panopticon is that this environment of constant, supposed surveillance is enough to make the prisoner begin to check or censure his own activity.  After a time, the presence or absence of a guard becomes a moot point — he’s internalized the presence of the omniscient observer, and thereby become his own jailer.

In a movie or a novel, we would have left Nathalie a scathing nastygram in her mailbox before we peeled out of town in our 26-foot moving truck, making her see (through the searing truth of our words) that she’d subjected us to a year of intermittent harassment and patronizing mistrust for no reason at all.  In real life, however, you know that anything you present somebody that irrational is just going to stoke their imaginary fire.  They won’t suddenly realize the error of their ways — they’ll merely interpret it as confirmation of their own righteousness.

And so, despite the constant castigation for crimes we didn’t commit, I can’t help but think that Nathalie actually won.  Five months and one country later, I’ll still cringe guiltily after accidentally scraping a chair across the floor, or pause before chasing the cats around their living room – dining room – office – front hall racetrack circuit before bed.  Whether or not it was her aim, we internalized Nathalie’s constant censure.  And even though we presently live on the ground floor of a two-flat house with nobody underneath, we have, in a sense, become our own jailers.

But I still sometimes find myself wistfully hoping that our banged-up Montreal apartment is being very slowly, very thoroughly, and very loudly renovated.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011 at 10:20 am and is filed under bits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.