Isola Robillard is well aware that she talks too much. She’s been called a chatterbox, a blabbermouth, she’s been threatened countless times with being shut up by force, eventually she isolated herself – her son and daughter-in-law in Toronto are terrified at the prospect of her arrival – but she talks and talks, over and over with no end, to herself or to everybody, not because she’s afraid of silence, that would be too easy, she’d just have to leave the house, throw herself into the crowd and listen to the unremitting din of the city; no, the reason lies elsewhere.

Actually, she is afraid of being boring. And every day of her life, since her husband’s death, she turns nasty to avoid being invisible. If only she were unaware of it, if others went into hiding to talk about her neurosis, if they laughed at her behind her back, but no, she knows it, it’s repeated to her non-stop. “Will you keep quiet, Madame Robillard?” (Her butcher who starts to curse every time he sees her come into his shop.) “Will you shut your trap once and for all or I’ll tear your guts out!” (Her brothers and sisters who do everything they can to avoid her, but she always manages to discover where they’re hiding.) She simply can’t help talking. She is convinced that she’ll disappear into the scenery unless she talks, that people will forget she exists, look right through her, go around her with nary a look in her direction, that she’ll always be isolated at the bottom of a hole of silence – Isola the isolated, that thought comes to her twenty times a week – disconnected from everything, crazy from loneliness. The stupid old woman with nothing to say.

She hasn’t ever been fascinating, that, too, she knows. She has no gift for conversation, or very little, she couldn’t care less what goes on outside her immediate world, her family, her own little bits and pieces, her banal problems. Her husband resembled her, they spent decades not needing anyone else, brought up children who soon turned away from them because of their lack of curiosity, while at Ernest’s death – her Ernest, the love of her life, her man – she came up against a wall of silence, all alone in her house with nothing to say. And no one to say it to. Then she started talking nonsense to just about anyone to remind people that she still exists, to avoid being thought dull because she’s too discreet or too shy. Or else … She has long since chosen not to think about it. Maybe madness. In any case, despair.

She is looking at the little girl sitting opposite her now that night has fallen, she knows that she’s pestering the child with her constant chattering, but someone is looking at her, or at least pretending! It’s better than nothing. If she didn’t talk to this little girl she would feel as if she didn’t exist all the way from Winnipeg to Toronto, so almost without catching her breath she says whatever springs to mind about whoever springs to mind, she gets dizzy, she jumps from one subject to another, laughs at jokes that she knows are laboured, she drowns the poor child in a flood of names and anecdotes of no interest to convince herself that she’s still alive, to avoid being in her own eyes the most boring person in Creation.

She is worse than boring, she’s unbearable, but at least someone knows that she exists!