It was probably a good thing that the English couldn’t make out what these songs were going on about. There was a song about a man whose hat got blown off by the wind. It blew all the way to New York City. He ended up there selling Christmas trees for a living. There was a song about a lumberjack who went mad. It was a traditional song but Étienne had recorded a new version of it.
“Put on the song about the unhappy piece of tourtière that’s in the fridge and nobody will eat it,” I said as I settled in. I was nervous and my first reflex was to draw his attention away from my belly. There was no better way than to bring up his music.
The waitress came up and served Étienne a beer that he had already ordered. I watched him take the first holy sip. The one that makes you feel the same way as when someone is playing the trumpet in just the right way. It was as if he had been dying to take a piss and had just found a urinal. As he drank, his pupils dilated and the blue of his eyes disappeared.
Étienne put down his glass and looked hard at me, trying to figure out what on earth would be the perfect thing to say at this juncture. He wasn’t an idiot. The man could intuit that I would be hitting him up for some emotions any minute now.
“I’ve been feeling a little bit blue,” I said, getting to the point.
“People can’t even look at me,” Étienne said. “I remind them of the ravages of time. I am everything that they are going to lose. I am the inability of love to last. I had the most beautiful songs in the world—but this is something that you can’t own. I sang them until they just stopped coming one day.”
This was the only way Étienne could give advice: by describing his own hardships. His ability to feel sorry for himself was truly epic.
This was the kind of conversation that we had been having for years. It was fancy talk but nothing specific. Sort of like how fencers swirl their swords all over the place but never actually pierce each other through the heart.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my life,” I insisted. “I don’t know how to go about doing anything. You see that I’m having a baby?”
“I heard,” he said, nodding toward my belly. “I thought a lot about it, too. You don’t have to raise your children, really. They raise themselves. You’re a writer, pour l’amour de dieu!”
It was out of the bag! Wanting to be a writer was the sort of thing you might be reluctant to admit, especially in Québec. Look at our very first great poet, Émile Nelligan, who went mad at twenty trying to write a book of poems about angels. That Étienne knew my secret was surprising to me. But he was good at intuiting what people’s talents were. He was abominable at recognizing their feelings, however.
“You’re too intelligent to be changing diapers. Why don’t you give the child to your mother-in-law to be raised? Don’t feel guilty if you have to do it. It’s for a higher calling.”
I wasn’t sure that I had heard what I thought that I had heard. Étienne seemed to think that he was on some sort of roll. He just continued in the same vein.
“If you have a baby, you’re supposed to be their slave from here on in? They come first? But why? If Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives birth to a sadistic petty thief, then the sadistic member of society is more valuable than the most important philosopher on earth. Rousseau should stop writing in order to worry about his waste-of-space son? No, children don’t come first. A person’s raison d’être must always come first.”
I was insulted. He was basically saying that Nicolas and I had been a waste of time and his talents. I was in an indignant mood that night. I started shifting toward the end of the seat in order to leave.
“I wrote you some notes for a speech,” I said. “I don’t know if you’re interested. You’re probably not interested. You’ve probably already prepared something. You probably already have something that you want to go ahead and say.”
“Show me what you have,” he said seriously, holding out his left hand. With his right, he reached into the inside pocket of his blazer and took out a pair of reading glasses.
“Fantastic, fantastic, my darling,” he said, not even having read it yet. “You stick to this. You’ll go far.”
I looked at Étienne poring over the scrap of paper. All that he valued in me was that I was some sort of artist too. So I decided to forget for a moment that I was a human being. We were just two poets sitting at a diner in the middle of the night, discussing our work. It offered me a respite. Anyways, it was better than going home to be alone in my kitchen, experiencing emotions. It must be nice sometimes to have an all-consuming philosophy that includes not really caring about anyone other than yourself.
CHAPTER 53
Shake That Jar of Bumblebees
I TRIED TO FIND RAPHAËL. I CALLED HIS DOCTOR at the hospital, the one who had given Raphaël the job as an orderly. The doctor had no idea where he was. I called Rosalie’s ex-girlfriend, whom I’d gone to high school with. She said that Raphaël would turn up eventually.
I didn’t even know if I wanted him back. What would happen if I did find him? He would be back in the apartment, installing locks on the doors and wanting to change our name every morning. Our kid would come and say, “There’s a monster under the bed.” And Raphaël would say, “You’re probably right, my son.” And the house would be so full of night lights that it would seem like we were lost in the Milky Way.
Maybe I should have just considered my escape from the country a lucky break. I could be out there taking the damn lion for a walk. Imagine having to scoop that poop?
I had to go on with life regardless of the men in my life. I went the next morning to the university to talk to an adviser. I had never been inside the big building on the other side of the small mountain that is in the middle of the city. I stood in front of it, looking at its sprawling wings. There were hundreds of bicycles locked up outside the building. There were kids of all different races—Asian, black, Arab—hurrying down the hallways with their books and their school bags. The adviser was wearing a brown suit and had her hair swept up into the tidiest bun in the world.
“You were out of school for a while?”
“I had an unstable upbringing. I wasn’t really encouraged to stay in school.”
“Hmm,” she said.
Then she just smiled as if it wasn’t a big deal and we got down to the practicalities of me going to university. She told me that there was a good daycare at the school and there were loans and scholarships that were available to me as a single mother. She made me an appointment with a financial adviser. As she explained these very basic things to me, I realized that there was so much about society at large that I didn’t know anything about.
I asked for an application and took away a huge book with all the courses in the French Literature Department. I didn’t need Étienne to tell me I was a writer. My own sense of who I was had begun to speak up lately, even though it didn’t speak that loudly. I was listening to it as best I could. I was not going to define myself by the traits that men found adorable in me. I was pushing myself to get on with life and to not chicken out. I warned myself not to be afraid of people who lived off of Boulevard Saint-Laurent.
As I read through the great big book of course descriptions on the metro back downtown, I was overwhelmed by excitement.
Jules Verne: Why bad science makes for wonderful fiction. Arthur Rimbaud: Why a sordid teenager is still being read today. Guy de Maupassant: A classic, but still dirty. Molière: Comedy in an age of very big wigs. Colette: A lady in a top hat turns Paris upside down.
A parade of motorcycles passed by me as I waited for the green light outside the school. For a moment, Lord oh Lord, I missed Raphaël.
What sort of strange malevolent plots were the bikers up to? Maybe they were going to terrorize a kid who was selling his ADHD medication at school without giving them a cut. Or perhaps they were trying to get a corner on the bingo market. When they were done, they would head home, where they would go down on some long-haired, underage nymphet.
&nb
sp; I felt the rumble of the motorcycles in my groin. I just wanted to throw my life away. I wanted to get my thighs covered in rose tattoos. I wanted to be making love to Raphaël. I suddenly pictured myself on top, riding him violently as he held my hips in both his hands, lifting me up and then slamming me back down.
They would know where Raphaël was. If I called out to them, they could take me to him. Even if I decided that I didn’t want to get back together with him, I was still worried about him. I thought about going to see Véronique. But I realized that it was useless to ask her advice. She didn’t even know how to talk about what had happened to him when he was a little boy. I felt like getting a bullhorn and going into the middle of the street and stopping the traffic and letting everybody know. If not for him, then for me. I didn’t know how he managed to keep the weight of his secret when the burden of it was crushing me.
One of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows and hanged men.
CHAPTER 54
Such a Pretty Mob
I WAS GETTING READY TO GO AND SEE ÉTIENNE read my speech before a crowd on Avenue du Mont-Royal. I was wearing a blue cotton coat with tiny white flowers on it over a white dress. My outfit was to match the colours of the Québec flag. I was delirious with anticipation. I knew that there were going to be a lot of people showing up. We were very into the collective experience in Montréal. There was nothing that we liked more than a pretty mob. I felt tingly and excited as I hurried down the stairs with a plastic bag hanging from my wrist. This was going to be more interesting than when I had been in the beauty pageant and had flung my hair about. Now there were things at stake.
I took the metro to get there on time. It was jam-packed with people and I loved the feeling that we were all headed to the same spot. I was just a happy sardine in a tin of other sardines.
The square was filled up with people. They stopped the traffic going in all directions. There was a bus that had slowed down, and people climbed on top of the bus to see. People were sitting on top of all the buildings with their legs dangling off the sides. Everyone had blue daisies in the buttonholes of their jackets and behind their ears.
Even if you weren’t for separation, surely you would peep out your window to get a look at these cultural luminaries. Those broke philosophers in their old suits, driven in by their children from their small houses, in which they had been brooding over manifestos for years.
There were some university students talking about Che Guevara. There was something about revolutionary speech that worked when it came out of the mouths of young people. It was untempered and uncensored. A quality that, when there is a group of kids at the back of the bus, can be positively annoying. But when it comes to incendiary rhetoric, it can be quite lovely.
The old man next to me took out his teeth and wrapped them in his handkerchief and tucked them into his breast pocket. Then he began to enjoy a piece of fudge that was shaped like a maple leaf. He was going to enjoy that fudge no matter what damn country he was in.
My heart was beating like crazy. The crowd would be hearing my words soon.
I looked around for where Étienne might be. I saw that there was an artist’s tent, so I figured he must be in there with those guys. People put their hands out to stop me as I was going in, but then they smiled and pointed me toward my father.
Étienne was smoking a cigarette furiously. When he was really anxious, he was able to inhale a cigarette in two drags, which was actually very disconcerting. A woman was trying to pin a carnation onto the lapel of his jacket. He kept swatting her hand out of his face. He kept forgetting what she was doing, and he kept mistaking her hand for a wasp.
I had never seen him look so distracted before a performance. He was looking at the other artists. They were shaking each other’s hands, amazed to see one another after more than a decade. Étienne looked at them as if they were strangers. They had had very different fates than Étienne. They weren’t living off welfare in men’s hotels. Gilles Vigneault was there, and his songs had practically become anthems in Québec.
Étienne was wearing a suit that had seen better days. It seemed almost as if he had slept in it a bunch of times. He had probably pawned the lovely pinstriped suit that he had worn to my wedding. For the first time he looked like he was desperate to fit in. When you are young, you can dress in rags and stand on the table and piss in telephone booths. In a young person, these are the traits of a poet. But if you exhibited any of those behaviours at forty-five, people would think you were a degenerate.
He motioned for me to follow him. We went out the back of the tent and toward the metro. We sat on a bench inside the metro just to be away from the crowd. There was a river of people coming up the elevator from the underground train. We were sitting next to an old woman who was wearing a navy blue dress and a red apron with giant pockets to hold change in. She was selling roses out of big green buckets. We were sort of hidden away by all the fat flowers.
“Should I have had this suit dry cleaned?” Étienne asked me anxiously.
“No, I like it. It looks good. It looks more comfortable now, like you’ve been on tour and have been doing loads of speaking engagements.”
I spit on a napkin and then rubbed off a splotch of something on his sleeve.
“But that’s just it: I haven’t been doing any engagements. These are lovely words, but can I deliver them with any sincerity? You know it’s never just the words. The words have to be delivered with an arrogance. You have to believe in them.”
“You haven’t retired. You’re always delivering speeches at the café.”
“I don’t think that I’ve ever had stage fright in my life—you know that? But I just have some terrible jitters. Do you know that? Feel my hands. For God’s sake! I’m a nervous wreck!”
“Look at me. Remember when you were just a little boy in rubber boots delivering newspapers at five in the morning. And everyone said to you: you are not distinct, you are not unusual, you are not special.”
“Et moi, j’ai répondu: Oui, j’suis unique. Oui, j’suis distinct. Oui, j’suis spécial!”
“You were born to do this. Of course you’re wretched at most things. Everybody knows it. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do this one thing.”
Étienne held on to my wrist. He was listening to my every word. I was telling him what he needed to do in order to win the crowd over. I knew it exactly. The way that he knew exactly what I had to do to make the audience eat me up when I was very young and he’d fix my hair up with a bow or give me a daisy to hold.
“Look what I brought you.”
I reached into the plastic bag dangling from my wrist. I had climbed into the back of the closet in the bedroom at Loulou’s, looking through his old paraphernalia. I had found one of his old top hats. This one was worn out. That was probably why it had been relegated to the back of the closet. The fur was worn away from the side of it, and the top was beaten in. But somehow it was even better this way. I held the battered top hat in my hand for Étienne to see. It was a poem in itself.
When he put it on his head, I held out a tiny pocket mirror for him to take a look at himself.
“I can’t stand mirrors,” Étienne said. “They are always trying to convince me that I am an old man.”
“Well, why don’t you go out there and prove them wrong.”
“Because I’m a handsome young buck, right? In my prime? Wait until they take a look at me. I’ll be like that handsome and fabulous man in that story, who never ages. What was that gentleman’s name … Ah yes, the fabulous Dorian Gray.”
He took a tiny can of breath freshener out of his pocket and sprayed it generously into his mouth. He smiled with his giant teeth. He was quite happy tha
t he still had every one, although the tops were grey. Then he gave me one of his big, wet kisses.
“This is such a lovely speech that you wrote for me, sweetheart. I can always count on you.”
It struck me that I could never, ever say the same thing to him, but I decided to let it go. We walked out together. He went to the stage and I moved back into the audience to watch him. The crowd started whistling as soon as they spotted the top hat on its way. The audience. What a beast. A beast that screams it loves you and then lets you drown, like the sirens that called out to Ulysses’s men from the water. Everyone was so visibly excited that there was an electricity in the air. I couldn’t help but feel charged by it. How could you not give a glorious speech on this day?
“So. I read the papers. Some journalists are going to drag my past out of the closet to say that I don’t have a right to speak out?”
He had a deep voice. His voice was a little bit raw from smoking so much. It gave it a sort of lovely effect now that he was shouting. It made him sound as if he had been weeping and that his voice was ravaged with emotion. He lunged forward when he spoke, as if he was going to grasp someone by the throat. He waved his arms out in front of him as if he was clearing a path through some tall grass.
“Well, go ahead. People have been talking about my past for years. Yes, I have been in prison. Not once, not twice, but three times. I’m broke. I’ve been a womanizer. I’ve been a drinker. I have more than once disturbed the peace.”
The audience was quiet now, looking at Étienne uncomfortably.
“Now, since we are bringing my past out of the closet, let’s go all the way back before those days. Let’s go right back to La Grande Noirceur, the Great Darkness.”
The audience let out a roar.
“My father never went to school. He had fourteen brothers and they were taught what their place was in the world. Good jobs went to the Anglos. Bad jobs went to the Tremblays.”