AND POOR NICOLAS! WHAT ON EARTH WAS HE UP to every day? I should not have let him out of my sight after the court case. Before when Nicolas was upset, we would talk about nothing and everything until he felt better. We would pace around the block until the sadness got bored and stopped following us. Who was helping him feel better now? Who could replace me? I kept expecting to look outside the window and see Nicolas leading some rag-and-bones orchestra of disadvantaged kids down the street. They would be banging on old laundry buckets and blowing into recorders and kazoos, playing the most sorrowful version of “Alouette” that anyone had ever heard. But Raphaël was a handful and I was working and going to school. And then the real snowfalls began.
There were trucks everywhere trying to make sense of it, all day and night they worked, carting away massive containers of snow to dump into the river. The cars were completely buried under piles of snow. People shovelled them out for hours only to find that they wouldn’t start. The roofs of elementary schools caved in. The statues had piles of snow on their heads, so angels looked like they had fur hats on.
It was hard on old people. Some of them just died. They couldn’t get their rickety grocery carts down the street.
Loulou had been living all by himself for the first time since the thirties.
I had promised to take him to the Friday drop-in clinic. When I entered the apartment, Loulou was wearing a pair of pants that had stains on them and a checkered lumberjack jacket. He had a white scarf with an orange maple leaf knitted into it around his neck. He said he had come in from the cold and didn’t feel like taking his jacket off because it would be so much trouble to put it back on.
The clinic was an old apartment in a building. All the old bedrooms had been turned into consultation rooms. The walls were covered with wood panels and the linoleum had blue snowflakes on it.
There was a poster of a heart on the wall, held up with thumbtacks. There were little names of the parts of the heart with arrows drawn to them: Aorta, Obsession, Right Ventricle, Sentimentality, Pulmonary Artery, Pathos, Pulmonic Valve, Sadness, Romanticism, Delusion, Love, Hatred, Superior Vena Cava.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked Loulou.
“I get dizzy when I stand up. I have the feeling that the whole room is filled with steam and clouds. I’m tired all the time. I’m always crapping my pants on the way back from the grocery store. My toes are blue. When I wake up in the middle of the night, my sheet is drenched with sweat. I’m so depressed I could shoot myself. My right knee doesn’t work.”
Loulou was always trying to impress on Nicolas and me the fact that he was old and that he had serious health issues. But we could never believe it. We were too young. We didn’t really believe in death and there was nothing that anybody could do to change our minds about it. I still didn’t really care about his condition that day. I was preoccupied by my own problems.
“I’ve been feeling confused about life,” I said.
Loulou looked up at the ceiling and sighed deeply.
“I’m not sure if I understand this whole marriage business.”
“You went and got married. Everybody warned you.”
“Can’t you tell me something more than ‘I told you so’?”
“Well, once you marry somebody, you have to get to know them. People are filled with all sorts of strange characteristics. One of the terrible things that happen to people in this lifetime is that we fall in love. There’s no dignity in love. It’s ugly and it’s crazy. You chose to marry somebody with demons. Now you have to deal with all of those demons.”
“Maybe I should just move back home.”
“No one on earth can tell a person to leave their husband or wife. Don’t ask me about that, Nouschka. That’s something between you and God.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
“That doesn’t mean He won’t come strike me down. You’re not a little kid. You have to pay the consequences. When you get to be my age, you look at a kid that’s seven years old and you know it already. You say, ‘This kid is going to have trouble paying his rent his whole life.’”
“And me? What did you see when I was seven years old?”
In these clinics you waited so long that it seemed like a miracle when they finally called your name. We were so flustered. We started looking around us as if we had important documents and briefcases that we couldn’t accidentally leave behind. Loulou was so lost. This was his call for his big audition. It took him so long to shuffle into the room. He moved slowly, turning side to side like a windup toy trying to move in a straight line.
He took his sweater off. He was stuck for a while with the sweater halfway off his head. He looked like a turtle that had pulled its head in. He was wearing a thin gold chain with a tiny cross on it. It was the same chain that he had had since he was a very small boy. It still fit him.
“Raise your arms.”
“There’s a woman upstairs from me who is deliberately running the shower at the same time that I’m taking one, so I can’t take warm showers.”
Like any old person who lived alone, he just wanted to tell the doctor about everything that had happened to him lately. It felt so good to be able to talk to someone that he just didn’t know when to stop. He was like a hungry person eating.
“I’m worried that there’s a Q-tip stuck in my ear and that’s why I can’t hear anything.”
“I examined your ear canal and there’s nothing in there.”
“There are junkies in the neighbourhood. They break into my apartment and steal my heart medication.”
“You can go to the pharmacy for a renewal.”
“I bought a microwave from the neighbour’s son. It doesn’t even work. I put a bag of popcorn in it and I sat in front of it for seven hours, waiting for it to pop.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“I’ve been waking up, lying on the kitchen table.”
“You sleepwalk?”
“I have no idea how I got there.”
I would instinctively try to stop Loulou from talking about something that couldn’t possibly be of any interest to the person he was talking to. It always hurt his feelings, so this time I just decided to let him go on.
The doctor wasn’t responding to anything that Loulou said, no matter how wild it was. The doctor looked as if he was above all the elderly oddballs that came in. They all lived in tiny apartments with mismatched plates. It was his job to keep these people alive, but there didn’t seem to really be a point to their being alive. Loulou had been giving away part of his paycheque for years in order to sit in this cramped room and be looked down on by the doctor. This was our lauded free health-care system that we bragged about to the world.
“She used to be on television, you know.”
This always got people’s attention. The doctor glanced around at us, vaguely interested, but then he lost focus again. He seemed absolutely exhausted and overworked. Anyways, how could he possibly recognize me in a wet fur hat and combat boots with scuffed toes. He was English. He watched American television. They had no idea whatsoever what happened in French Québec.
“Nouschka spoils me. I raised her myself. She had a red raincoat that was so cute. I never knew anything about little girls. I don’t know what on earth you’re supposed to tell a girl to stay out of trouble. She ran around wild. Little boys’ mothers would come and complain that she had been playing doctor with their kids. I thought for sure that she had a career in medicine ahead of her, because she played doctor so much.”
He laughed really loud so that he didn’t have to notice that no one else was laughing at his terrible joke.
There was a knock on the door and the doctor stepped out for a moment to talk to the nurse, making us wait again.
“What was I like when I was seven?” I asked. “You were about to tell me.”
“You were always fretting about Nicolas. When your brother broke his arm, you cried for three days. You were always worried that we were all going to die. You were worried about the neighbours’ cats. Just worry about yourself. You don’t have to worry about the whole world. It doesn’t do it any good.”
That suddenly made me sad. He was right. All that worrying hadn’t done anything for anybody. It certainly wasn’t helping Raphaël. The doctor walked back in, interrupting my melancholy.
“Do my feet look blue to you?” Loulou asked.
The doctor glanced at Loulou’s feet for a split second and then went back to writing on his pad.
“Are you voting Oui ou Non?”
That got his attention. The doctor looked up at the old babbling lunatic, whose Oui vote could put an end to the life he was enjoying. English speakers had an absolute horror of separation, and scores of them had left after the first referendum. Loulou smiled innocently at the doctor.