After an adolescence of no interest – teenage acne like every boy his age, ill at ease wherever he went, practically an outsider in his slender body with limbs that were too long and growing too fast, pathologically shy around girls – Gilbert came into his own at eighteen when, without warning, he turned into a magnificent young man who without being forward – that would come later, with experience – had all at once progressed from the belated child he’d been for so long and become an independent and fairly resourceful being.

He had abandoned his studies after high school, intending, or so he claimed, to give back to his grandmother a little of what she’d done for him since the death of Madame Veuve, but actually because he was bored to death at school where he didn’t learn a thing because he didn’t listen. He worked here and there, accepted jobettes that he thought were unworthy of him but that allowed him to put a little bread on the table plus some butter on the bread. He learned the fundamentals of seduction in the arms of married women to whom he delivered groceries and the rudiments of theft in his bosses’ cash registers. Little by little he turned into a likeable bum of whom you weren’t really suspicious: you knew that deep down he wasn’t dangerous, you closed your eyes to his escapades because he was handsome. Or funny. He learned how to be funny when he realized that it could pay.

When his grandmother tried to talk about his future, which was, to say the least, tenuous given how little importance he attached to it, he would answer with a joke or change the subject. At times he would even tell her, with a big sardonic grin, that he was going to devote his future to being carefree and idle. She would give him a slap upside the head as she used to do when he was little and threaten to send him to his room. He would grab her around the waist, difficult because of her corpulence, sweep her into a minute waltz danced around the dining room, and all was forgotten to the accompaniment of laughter and hugs. She wasn’t fooled, but acted as if she was because she loved him.

The point is, Gilbert was afraid of the future. For the simple reason that as he came into his twenties, nothing interested him enough to give him an urge to devote his whole existence to it. Passions, all unattainable because they would have taken years of study that he couldn’t afford and a kind of intelligence that he did not possess, would fascinate him for a while – nuclear medicine, astronomy, microbiology – impossible dreams, very likely chosen because they were inaccessible – but soon enough he resumed his slide into laziness which was not a character trait but a shelter against his helplessness and his indecision in the face of life.

When the first real episodes of his illness occurred – he’d always had a penchant for gloominess and melancholy which he attributed to his overly idle life and wasn’t too concerned – he was terrified and tried to hide them from his grandmother because he didn’t want her to worry. But they recurred more and more often, sometimes with such violence, especially during the downs, that afterwards he had no memory of what had happened, or just a vague one. He would wake up as if from a bad dream, glimpse a few images, fleeting and disagreeable, and ask himself what he’d done, where he’d gone and in particular, how it had ended. Drinking helped a little, soft drugs sometimes a lot – a joint shared with passing friends, for instance, could ease his plunges into depression and his climbs towards summits that were too lofty – but did not prevent actual crises from fermenting inside him and waiting to explode like fountains of poison or dreams of grandeur, and when they did occur, unavoidable, and more powerful than ever, he wanted to die.

That was when the messed-up childhood he’d lived around the Main in the company of his insane mother and, more important, the enveloping and reassuring presence of Greta, his adoptive, loving mother, would come back to him, along with his nostalgia for another time, though he’d chosen to forget it and bury it deep in the folds of his memory, would worm its way into him and he would take off on a sudden impulse, to divert the course of his ever-darker thoughts, in search of his past. A search for a consolation he could take from it for the illness that was making a nightmare of his life and that he didn’t understand at all. During all that time, in the beginning at least, Greta was thinking about him too. Every day. She knew, someone had told her, that he refused to see her again, that he had seen her sin of omission – though it was very naïve, after all she’d only wanted him to consider her as his second mother, not as a man dressed like a woman – as an unforgiveable betrayal, and anyone she asked about him, especially after the death of Madame Veuve, would tell her that he was growing into a troublemaker tied to his grandmother’s apron strings and that probably, like all children who are spoiled rotten, he would do nothing good with his life. When she found out that he’d left school she had been sad, but when the Duchess told her that he was going to take care of his grandmother, to spoil a little during her old age the woman who had sacrificed herself for so long, she’d run all over the Main to tell anyone who would listen that she’d been right, and make no mistake: Gilbert was a good person. If people laughed at her a little, it was with a certain affection because they knew how much she loved Gilbert, the child who had not been born to her, whom she’d partly brought up in conditions that were, to say the least, distinctive, and who had left, cursing her.

Greta used her need to play unappeased mother to look for a second Gilbert. Not to replace him, she knew that no one could do that, but to while away her idle time and to pour her overflowing affection onto someone other than her passing clients. (Jean-le-Décollé, who had trained a good number of the Main’s drag queens, often said that the day when hookers started to have feelings for their clients, it would mean that something was wrong … ). Children dragged around the streets of the red-light district by an insane mother who used them as hostages while she begged for her daily bread were rather rare however, and Greta’s attempts to find a semblance of a successor to the son of Madame Veuve, for whom she had been at first merely the chaperone before she grew too attached to him, were in vain.

Until the day when one Michel Nadeau turned up on St. Catherine Street, having landed the day before from some remote little village which turned out to be Greta’s birthplace as well, a beautiful youth quite obviously terrified by what he’d seen in the Metropolis, which proved to be very different from what he’d imagined. He needed someone to protect him, helpless as the naïve youth was before the traps that would soon be set for him by Maurice’s men if he didn’t watch out.

He’d already been trained, he even wore dresses and wigs with a certain style, but he was a little green and Greta’s pride had been flattered when he admired her right away. And a further quality, he’d soon begun to copy her. She hadn’t stopped him, just as a person lets an overly adoring puppy follow him around to keep him from whining.

And that was how the second Greta was born, by mimicry, by osmosis: the young Marilyn Monroe – Niagara or All About Eve – when the more mature Greta no longer had any hope of resembling the American idol at the end of her career – The Misfits or Some Like It Hot – Shirley Temple when her elder dressed up for a Halloween party as Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? which amounted to pretty well the same thing and always got laughs because the two had made twin costumes and worked out an amusing choreography. Shirley-la-Vieille, Shirley-la-Jeune. They’d become inseparable, ate together at Ben Ash or the Sélect, often did johns à deux, shared an apartment on Sanguinet which was the envy of the other drag queens because it was tastefully decorated and always smelled good.

Their names had come on their own, as if self-evident, and the two had accepted them without protesting. Greta was now called “la vieille" and Michel became her young twin. For a long time, there were whispers that they were a couple, but it wasn’t true; they were more attracted to hairy longshoremen and muscular truck drivers than to someone who resembled them.

And so Gilbert had gradually been erased from the memory of Greta-la-Vieille and as the years passed, became a pleasant but vague memory, a passing weakness, like a great, youthful love that is finally healed and stops causing you pain. She still thought about him often, every day sometimes, but the boy’s face had gradually been erased and, in any case, she thought to herself, he must have changed after all this time, she probably wouldn’t recognize him if he ever showed up on the Main: he was an adult now, and the child who’d been so dear to her had disappeared long ago. And from what was said about him, she doubted that the adult he’d become was worthy of the bright, open, resourceful child she had brought up for someone else and perhaps loved too much.

She was wrong.

Gilbert had found Greta-la-Vieille again in a few minutes and recognized her immediately. It was so easy. He had forgotten how much the Main, which he’d been avoiding for years, was never far away, located as it was at the very heart of the city; it was a dull knife that cut Montréal in two, a wound that never healed, and he learned when he ventured there again that it was unchanging too. He discovered that it was identical to itself, just as he had left it years before: the same hookers, plus some new ones of course, the stock had to be refreshed now and then, even drag queens, with a few additions here and there, like Greta-la-Jeune and Babalu, the same pretentious pimps, the same clients hugging the walls. The nightclubs hadn’t changed and still advertised their eternal novelty acts and their strippers with evocative names – Bosoms or Mama Mia or Lady Lollipop. The places still smelled of stale alcohol, especially beer, steamed hotdogs and fried potatoes – basic foodstuffs of society’s rejects who hung out there. He thought he recognized some corrupt policemen who had plied the streets when he was a child, in the fifties; others, honest ones, who had aged faster because they had to watch out for what was going on behind them if they didn’t want to end up stuffed in a garbage can with a bullet in their foreheads or a knife between their shoulderblades. A gift from Maurice-la-Piasse. Or from their less scrupulous colleagues.

And when Greta showed up at her post, always the same stretch of sidewalk across from the Coconut Inn, accompanied by a kind of fake twin who followed her like a pitiful shadow, the shock was so violent that he thought he would never recover. If the Main was unchangeable, the same was alas not true of its creatures. Greta had not only aged, she’d come undone, she seemed to have shrunk, to have been tamped down, though in the past she’d been so regal, nearly haughty with her clients and always peremptory when expressing her opinions. She had traded her role of healthy, happy little doll, friendly and motherly, for that of an old woman with loose morals who no longer has any illusions and has long since given up on the mere thought of wanting to please. To Gilbert’s great surprise, however, she still had a lot of clients – he thought he recognized some faces, old now too, from the time when he thought the girls were waiting for the bus – and every week, had to turn over a small fortune to Maurice, who was more arrogant and more prosperous than ever when he deigned to grace the sidewalks of the Main with his presence, strolling down St. Lawrence Boulevard with his henchmen.

With time, Gilbert had no doubt simultaneously idealized Greta and darkened her reputation, recalling, as selective memory requires, only her maternal side, her kindness, exaggerating her beauty, her goodness, the better to be affected by the hole created by her inexplicable betrayal, and the better to hate her. The pathetic, shattered creature he’d discovered had nothing to do with the Greta he had known and he’d nearly left the Main for the second time, never to return. But a gesture of hers, a way of lifting a lock of hair that had fallen over her eye, a sad smile directed at her young twin who was trying to make her laugh and who resembled her more than she resembled herself, the way she brought her hand to her heart too, as if she’d just seen a ghost, reawakened for a brief moment the woman he had loved so dearly and he wanted to cross the street and embrace her. But he couldn't. He saw that this broken woman could now offer him no consolation and he decided to stay hidden and watch her live just as he’d done when he was a child.

He started to spy on her, without really knowing why. He would turn up several times a week in front of the Coconut Inn, conceal himself in the doorway of a drygoods store that closed at six o'clock, smoke a joint to ward off loneliness, drink a beer or two, and watch her live her life. People had got used to his being there, the two Gretas waved to him now and then, he assumed that they thought he was some gentle hobo who’d taken up residence at the heart of the Main. Which was nearly true. To kill time he bought a guitar and gradually began to play on his own a few chords that he’d learned during his beatnik period, at El Cortijo on Clark Street in the late 1950s along with Tex Lecor, the house star, or a passing singer-songwriter like the famous chansonnier François Villeneuve. When he sensed a crisis coming on he would go away for a few days, stay inside at his grandmother’s and suffer his hell before going back to watch his former adoptive mother cruise for johns.

The years passed, made up of days that were all the same. He continued to earn a living for himself and his grandmother, as delivery boy or messenger, packing books in a print shop, one winter he even became a short-order cook in a small restaurant on Rachel Street. And when evening came, he watched his adoptive mother earning hers. He loved her but never approached her, and at the height of the evening he played serenades for her that she probably didn’t hear. At times, when he’d drunk too much or his joint was of superior quality, he would stand in his doorway and watch her walk her stretch of sidewalk. He imagined her when she was younger, imagined himself when he was younger, and he dreamed that no time had passed, that she was going to bring him back to his mother at the Coconut Inn, after taking him to Ben Ash for a smoked meat sandwich. He recalled her odour, that of a woman who’s been working hard, her relieved laugh after so many clients, each one more nondescript than the others, and his cheeks were often wet with tears. Never though did he have the courage to cross St. Lawrence Boulevard, not even simply to say hello without revealing who he was. Or, rather, who he had been.

Only once was he close to her. When he got to his post in front of the drygoods store one night, thinking she was with a client, he’d gone into the Montréal Pool Room, next door to the Monument-National, for a hamburger. There was just one seat empty at the counter, next to Greta who was absentmindedly tucking into a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coke. Without the other Greta, who was probably getting it on with a client for real. Gilbert had hesitated, then decided to take the small, round stool next to Greta's, hunching his back and lowering his head. His heart was pounding, he wanted to throw his arms around her and kiss her, after all that was why he’d come back to the Main, wasn’t it? But he’d just muttered his order and waited in silence, cursing himself, hands crossed on the Arborite, head turned towards the front window through which scrolls of grease seemed to be trying to escape. When his burger arrived, he realized that Greta was looking at him very seriously in the mirror that covered the wall opposite the counter, as if wondering where she’d seen him before. He had gripped the handle of his guitar which was beside him and right away she had understood, so he thought anyway, that this was who’d been serenading her and that she was seeing him up close for the first time. She smiled at him, a timid little smile that seemed to be looking for something, he smiled back. Greta’s face had frozen briefly, as if she’d just seen a ghost and he thought he even saw a tear form in her left eye. But it hadn’t lasted. She had shaken her shoulders, paid her bill, told the waiter so long and nodded at Gilbert as she left.

During the eighteen months that Fine Dumas’s establishment had lasted, not once had Gilbert dared to go inside the Boudoir, which was too expensive for him. At first he did the same thing he’d done for the stretch of sidewalk: positioned himself across from the bar, holding his guitar and craned his neck whenever the door opened, trying to see if a costume he glimpsed might belong to Greta. He knew he was being silly, childish even, but he went back night after night. Like all the denizens of the Main, he couldn’t afford to pay the prohibitive price demanded to watch Greta and the other drag queens murder the French and American repertoires, but eventually, reassured about the fate of his adoptive mother who now at least was sheltered from bad weather, and convinced that any contact with her was impossible, he gradually fled the Main where finally he’d found no consolation, on the contrary, to devote a large part of his time to his new friends from Expo 67 – musicians who seemed to think he wasn’t a bad guitar player and who dreamed of producing a show that would be revolutionary in the history of Quebec songs. And that was how he abandoned Greta for the second time, thinking that a second time was final.

What he didn’t know, however, was that she had recognized him too. Right away. The first time he’d appeared on St. Lawrence Boulevard after such a long absence. And that she was waiting for him to decide to approach her. She couldn’t have said how or why – his gait, maybe, his curly hair, his face which was longer but not so different as to be unrecognizable, his eyes, so beautiful, that looked at her in the same way they had in the past, his unique smile – but she’d known right away that it was him, and if she hadn’t run across the street to throw herself in his arms, it was because in her opinion it was up to him to make the first move. He was the one who had taken off, showing no gratitude, who’d refused to see her again, and now he was coming back after so much time had passed, no doubt to ask for forgiveness. She would grant it, and willingly – when he left, it had nearly killed her and she’d thought about him every day since – but he had to make the first move. It was a matter of pride. And her pride was greater than anything.

The night when Gilbert had sat beside her at the Montréal Pool Room, Greta-la-Vieille had thought that the long-awaited moment had finally come, that the reconciliation was going to happen, that forgiveness would be possible. The ceremony would take place there, with the smell of burnt cooking fat, at a stained and sticky counter. She’d imagined herself kissing him on the forehead, playing with his luxuriant hair, indescribably happy to be with him again and to offer him forever love, compassion, warmth. But she’d quickly realized that only a coincidence had brought them together and she’d had to be content to watch him devour his hamburger without interceding. It would have taken just one small move by Gilbert, an outstretched hand, a word, and all would have been forgotten. Instead, nothing had happened and everything had gone on as before.

A silent debate had been going on between them, a cruel game consisting of pride but also of shame, uneasiness, hesitation and a misplaced sense of propriety. That had gone on for years. When Greta went for too long without seeing Gilbert, she imagined the worst and was positive that she’d never see him again, that he had abandoned her yet again, and she was sorry she’d resisted him. When he serenaded her – she knew that it was for her that he played the guitar – her heart melted and the evenings spent pacing the sidewalk seemed not so long. For his part, when Gilbert saw Greta leave with a john who looked sinister or too devious for his liking, he worried about her, every time, and he sighed with relief when she came back, intact yet a little more soiled. He dreamed of saving her of course, of freeing her from the claws of the Main, as the Errol Flynn of the seedy part of town or the John Wayne of the poor, he saw her moving in with his grandmother – even bringing Greta-la-Jeune if necessary – he saw them all living together, himself as a great musician who’d made a fortune from his compositions … But then he would wake up in the doorway of the drygoods store, his hands too cold to play in winter, slippery with sweat in summer, a poor helpless circular madman who never knew when the next episode would strike. When he felt one coming on he would take off like a thief, go into hiding, wait for it to pass and then resume his position, a pathetic soldier of deception and failure.

So they spied on one another surreptitiously, each too bound up in his own pride to feel the need, though it was so powerful, so urgent, for the other: consolation for one, forgiveness for the other.

And when they were together again for real in the home of the midget who’d decided to reunite and reconcile them, each dropped his guard, the barriers of pride collapsed, until what was left was two broken individuals, face to face, who had sewn their own unhappiness and wasted precious time for hollow reasons.

It was not too late for confidences, which came, but it was too late for a genuine reconciliation. Which didn’t happen.