I HATED BEING WOKEN UP BY THE NEWS ON THE clock radio. I always meant to change the station to one that only played music. But I hadn’t gotten around to it, although I had been meaning to do it for three years now. My laziness was astonishing sometimes. I lay there listening to the voice speaking.
“A chansonnier is different from a rock and roll singer because he is also a poet, he is also a philosopher, he is also a medium through which the people are able to voice their own fables, their own fears, their time and zeitgeist. That’s why Étienne Tremblay was so important for the separatist cause.”
I felt watery all of a sudden, as if I had been turned into a puddle on the bed. It took me a few seconds to realize that they were talking about us on the radio. My body always seemed to realize it first.
“Tremblay’s luck changed the day after the 1980 referendum.”
“Yes, that’s true,” another voice said. “While he was in prison, his manager, who was also his on and off girlfriend, took whatever was left of his money. He signed these terrible contracts that a lot of musicians signed in the sixties and seventies that saw them getting nothing for their work. Really just pennies when their songs are played on the radio.”
“What will your documentary tell us that we don’t already know?”
“I’m focusing on the entire Tremblay family. Because for a long time they sort of represented the beauty of Québécois culture—the warmness of it. And we grew up with them. When I watched the documentary as a kid, I wanted to change my last name and go and join their family. Who didn’t want to be raised by Étienne Tremblay? It just seemed so magical. He would sing to you while he scrambled up eggs in the morning.”
I recognized the voice of none other than Hugo Vaillancourt, that documentarian who had followed me down the street the other day.
“Have the Tremblays gotten it together at all? What I mean to say is, do you find this to be an optimistic documentary? Do you think that the family will sort of come out of the funk that they’ve fallen into and see brighter days?”
“Goodness no. No! We are witnessing the downfall of an era. These aren’t the right times for dreamers. The Tremblays as a family were invented by the subconscious of a people prior to the first referendum. They are a direct result of a revolutionary, surrealist, visionary zeitgeist. They are wandering around now like animals whose habitats have been destroyed.”
I switched off the radio and buried my head under a pillow. A cat peeped in the window. It had one white paw. One night it had decided to dip it into the reflection of the moon in a fountain to see what would happen.
The doorbell began buzzing. I didn’t know where Nicolas was and Loulou was too deaf to hear it. I put on a tiny orange kimono that had seen better days and ran to get the door. When I opened it, a little old woman from one of the apartments upstairs was standing there.
“Nouschka, they’re talking about you and your family on Radio-Canada.” She said it in a very concerned way, as if it were something that I really needed to know about, as if she had smelled smoke coming from the apartment.
“Merci, merci, merci, Madame Choquette,” I said.
Then I slammed the door. I didn’t even get down the hallway when somebody else rang the buzzer.
“Go away!” I screamed.
I never thought that Hugo would get any funding for this documentary or that it would actually happen. Occasionally someone would say they were going to write a book or make a film about Étienne, but in the past ten years, nothing had ever come of them.
There was a pounding on the window. I pulled the curtain aside to yell at whoever was there. It was Nicolas. Instead he was ready to yell at me.
“This is so you, baby. You started this with your beauty queen stuff.”
“Oh, so what. So they’re making a documentary. How bad can it be?”
I didn’t regret the pageant because it had brought Raphaël into my store. Everything thrilling in life had its costs.
“They can edit it to make us look like total assholes. They have degrees in how to make everybody look like assholes. They’ll capture us as we really are this time. Mark my words. Mark my words, Nouschka. You do some very embarrassing stuff that you might not want documented.”
Adam’s head suddenly popped into the window frame, next to Nicolas, like someone unwanted trying to make it into a photograph. They were both drinking coffee out of paper cups with silhouettes of bullfighters on them. It was coffee from the Portuguese place and it always made Nicolas completely insane. Coffee from there was like crack for Nicolas.
A kid we knew walked by with a boom box on his shoulder.
“Hey, are they looking for actors?”
“No, it’s a documentary,” Nicolas said, shooing the boy away. “Come on. Don’t be so stupid so early in the morning.”
“I think it’s exciting,” Adam said. “You should require it to be in black and white. It’s always more beautiful that way.”
“It’s hard enough being a goddamn criminal without a documentary crew following you around.”
“I always hear people bitching about that,” I said.
“I know, right?”
We both started laughing. The kid with the boom box met up with someone on a bench. They turned the ghetto blaster way up.
“You think I care whether anybody anywhere knows anything about me? Then you don’t know a thing about me. Look at how little I give a damn!” He started doing his crazy moves. People always gathered around to watch Nicolas dance. He suddenly got all loose and then all stiff. If you wanted to see what joy looked like, you only had to look at Nicolas dancing. He started doing a disco move, reaching his right hand down practically to his left foot and then stretching it back up into the opposite direction to the sky.
“You really shouldn’t let my brother drink espresso,” I told Adam.
“I have learned that the hard way.”
I felt less anxious all of a sudden. The worst of it was over. He had found out and here he was dancing in the street.