FOR FRENCH CLASS WE WERE ALL SUPPOSED TO write a book review and then go up in front of everyone and read it out loud. Instead of writing a run-of-the-mill report, I decided to get creative. My story was a retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac. In the original tale, he feeds all these wonderful and romantic lines to his friend to recite to a girl named Roxane, who he has a crush on. In mine, Cyrano comes up with the tackiest and crudest come-ons possible—something that I was an expert on, having grown up on Boulevard Saint-Laurent.
A couple of students in the class who were going to school to get bigger unemployment cheques slept through the tale. But the others laughed and clapped at the end. The girl my age with giant gold hoop earrings almost fell off her chair and started whistling during my reading. After the class, some of the students came up and told me that they had really enjoyed the story. The teacher took my hand and said that I certainly had a way with words, not unlike the original Cyrano. She wanted to know if I planned to continue on to university after I graduated. I told her I did. She was the first person that I had said that to. I liked the sound of it.
I walked home with a skip in my step. Oh okay, so they were only twenty-four people. They were not exactly literary critics or a crowd of refined aficionados. But it was the first audience that I had captivated on my own. They were not Étienne Tremblay fans. I hadn’t written the story to somehow neurotically capture my father’s fickle love. I had written it for myself. I felt very good about it, indeed. It was something that I could get better at. And if you don’t have something to try and get better at when you are twenty years old, you are lost.
I got home. The referendum was back on and it was going to be in the fall. There was an article in the newspaper talking about how there was going to be a rally of Québec artists and poets to speak out for separatism. I saw that Étienne’s name was on the list.
Oh là là! I thought. What would Étienne do? He wouldn’t have anything prepared. I had seen his notebooks in recent years. He was incapable of sustaining a thought for more than a few lines. His brain was like a bucket with holes in the bottom. It would suddenly be filled with brilliance, but that would all quickly leak away. I didn’t want him to make an ass of himself. He had been such a great orator. I didn’t want him to go out with a whimper. Oh, who knows why I cared, but I did.
I took out a pen to jot down some notes. Why did Québec want to separate this time? We were the original descendants of the losers of the war between England and France for Canada. We had been shit upon for generations. But we were proud and we had finally built our own culture in the sixties. We became urbanized, and in apartments we sat up late reading philosophy books. We got rid of the church, but we stuck to our nationalism. Many of us wanted to leave Canada.
In 1980, after the loss of the first referendum, our premier René Lévesque had famously said, “À la prochaine fois.” Then Québec didn’t sign the new constitution that was drafted in 1981. René Lévesque had the Québec flag flown at half mast.
Finally, a few years ago, Québec made some propositions for constitutional amendments. We wanted it in writing that we were distinct, that there was something weird and special about us. Since we didn’t have our own country, at least we could have some sort of other protection. But Canada said no. They scoffed. We had asked for a consolation prize and they had laughed in our faces.
If they didn’t think we were going to react badly, they were mistaken. We were going to react badly, Nicolas Tremblay–style. We were leaving this damn country that went around calling itself the greatest country in the world.
We were packing our bags. There was nothing that they could say now. Now they were trying anything to make us stay. Like a lover who was trying to talk reason into you as you were throwing your clothes into a suitcase, they went from saying soothing, reconciliatory, sweet things to calling you a complete idiot and telling you that you’d regret it for sure. Well it was too late for all that.
We would go off on our own. We just wanted to speak French in peace. We wanted to whisper dirty things to our loved ones in French. There was a certain kind of love that could only be expressed in this way.
There was no difference between the expressions I like you and I love you in French. You could never declare love like that in English.
We loved in a self-destructive, over-the-top way. A way that was popular in sixties experimental theatre and certain Shakespeare plays. We loved like Napoleonic soldiers in Russia, penning beautiful letters while seated on the corpses of our dead horses. We were like drunk detectives who carried around tiny notebooks full of clues and fell for our suspects. We were crazy about the objects of our affection the way that ex-criminals in Pentecostal churches were crazy about Jesus. We went after people who didn’t know we existed, like Captain Ahab did. We loved awkwardly and hopelessly, like a wolf ringing a doorbell while wearing a sheepskin coat that is way too small for him.
How could you explain that in a political platform? I wondered. I began to write a speech for Étienne. The only way that we would win the referendum would be if the speech-makers came out. Only poetry could win the vote.
They didn’t want to hear these words from a young, silly girl, pregnant with her first child. They wanted to hear it from a man with a huge nose and wild hair. Who tossed women aside and went out into the fray. Everybody wanted Cyrano to show his ugly face and scream his beautiful words. We all knew what a revolutionary looked like, the same way that we knew what a lover was supposed to look like. I knew that I was writing this for Étienne to read. I used to be his mouthpiece. Now he’d be mine.